Shadow of the Wolf (26 page)

M
arian wriggled into the crawlspace that connected with the main cavern of her cell. She found the correct spot and she lay there in the dark and the damp. She waited and waited and finally it came: a ray of sunlight that found its way down a narrow shaft all the way from the surface. She closed her eyes and felt the sun on her face and she daydreamed she was back at Titan’s Lake, lying next to Robin on the bank, her wet skin tingling in the summer breeze.

She lost herself so thoroughly in this memory that she didn’t hear the basket descending into the oubliette. She didn’t even hear the footsteps moving around her cavern-cell. The first she knew of the visitor was a noise that sounded eerily familiar.

Someone making lolling noises with their tongue.

La, la, la.

Marian opened her eyes. She squeezed herself deeper into the tunnel.

La, la, la.

It couldn’t be, could it?

The lolling moved closer. And then came a singsong voice. ‘Come out, come out, wherever you are. I’ll seek you near, I’ll seek you far.’

A head thrust into the crawlspace. Wasp-orange hair flamed in the shaft of light. Mad eyes rolled and bulged at her. Scarred cheeks twisted into a wild grin. ‘There you are!’

Marian didn’t hesitate. From beneath her cote she pulled the blade she had fashioned from bone. She stabbed. The bone struck metal – Edric Krul had a steel plate sealed across one half of his skull. She struck at his eyes. This time she drew blood. Edric gasped and his head twisted back out of the tunnel. For a moment there was silence. Then a long manic laugh.

‘If you won’t allow me to come in, I’ll wait here for you to come out,’ Edric said. ‘What is waiting to me, after all? Let me tell you of the trials I’ve known, Marian Delbosque, and then you will see what waiting is to me.’

He laughed again, this time quietly, and when he spoke again it was like whispering a secret. ‘The wildling – this phantom outlaw – he thought he had killed me. He left me for the dogs. But death doesn’t want me. The paralysis wore off – I climbed a tree. I waited up there for days, listening to the dogs eat the corpses of my men. The wildling had injured my hand and it was turning green. I had to remove what was left – I sawed it away with my sword – I seared the flesh with a lantern flame to stem the blood. A lesser man would have lost his mind. But in spite of all, I endured.’

His head burst once more into the crawlspace. One eye was half-closed and bleeding. Marian stabbed at the other. He scuttled back out. A moment passed before he continued whispering his story.

‘Finally the dogs went away. But little did I know my waiting had just begun. For weeks I wandered lost in the wildwood, often thinking I could see my escape, just beyond that next ridge, but reaching it only to find an endless sea of trees. Day and night I stumbled on. I was dead on my feet – there were
times I truly did believe I had died and this forest was my hell. But I kept fighting through the thorns and wading through the bogs and finally I arrived! Where? At the waterhole, where else? Back where I’d started! A weaker man would have lain down then, having gone so long without food. But I said to Bul and Oxman: “Do you suppose I fear starvation, after all I’ve seen? Do you imagine mere hunger holds sway over me?” My men had nothing to say, but they offered up their flesh, what remained of it. What? Did you imagine I would baulk at such a meal? Surely you understand by now that death must not have me, no matter what price to be paid.’

Once more Edric Krul invaded the crawlspace, but this time it was his arm that came thrusting in. At the end of his arm was not a hand but a double-pointed claw – a cooper’s grapnel hook – its base forged shut around the stump of his wrist.

The claw thrashed and flailed, grazing her skin. She pushed herself even harder into the wall.

The clawing stopped and the arm scraped out of sight.

‘You will have to emerge, sooner or later,’ Edric said. ‘I have come to understand your purpose. You must help me cleanse the world of the wildling.’

He chuckled to himself, then put his face close to the crawlspace and continued to whisper his story.

‘Finally the wildwood admitted defeat. It released me. But even then my waiting was not done. By now I was frozen to my blood and fevered to my bones. I stumbled across a hermit’s shack. The old man took me in, gave me shelter and what succour he could. But all winter I was forced to wait in that sickbed, never strong enough to stand. The old man had barely enough food for one, let alone for both. In the end he too gave up his flesh, when he saw it was the only way I would endure. And so I began to see how the world is ordered. I
started to understand that the rest of you – each and every one – you have all been placed here to serve—’

He fell silent. Marian knew why. Dreadful sounds were seeping up from somewhere below the cavern. Today it was a buzzing, like a thousand wasp wings, together with a rough slithering of tails, and a wet crunching, like children stomping snails. Beneath it all was that half-whimper, half-laugh. The noises grew louder; Marian couldn’t help thinking the thing down there was rising, moving nearer.

Edric cleared his throat before he spoke, and for the first time he sounded relatively sane. ‘I don’t need to wait here. I can return whenever I choose. I have other preparations to make. You will still be here, ready to fulfil your purpose, when the time comes.’

Marian listened to the pulleys creak as Edric Krul left. The sun had moved on; the shaft of light had gone. She lay there in the total darkness, shivering in the cold, her mind full of monsters.

T
he soldier hung upside down, his cloak trailing to the ground. He laughed, and he kept laughing until it became a choking sort of sob.

‘You’re dead,’ he hissed into Robin’s face. ‘One freak against the whole Sheriff’s Guard! We’ll skin you to the bone.’

Robin tipped his head. This one was interesting. He had not been brave; he had been the first of his cadre to run. But now, captured and alone, his fear had bubbled over into a raving kind of courage.

‘Whoever you are, whatever you want, you don’t stand a chance,’ the ranger said. ‘I’ll kill you myself! I’ll crush you with my own bare hands.’ For the third time he pulled himself up and tried to free his ankle from the noose. He gave up and fell back. The rope creaked on its branch.

Bending young trees to the ground, Robin had built catapult snares – larger versions of the ones he used to hunt for food. When this soldier had run he had blundered into one of the traps.

‘Marian Delbosque,’ Robin said. ‘Tell me where he’s keeping her.’

‘Ah ha, ha-ha-ha. So that’s it. A girl. The monster and the princess in the tower. That old one. Ah ha-ha-ha.’

‘Where is she?’

‘What are you going to do, fight the Sheriff for her? Maybe you’re the king of this place. Out there is his world. He’s set up garrisons all along the forest edge. Hundreds of us! You step out there, you’re dead.’

‘Tell me what you know.’

‘Ah ha. Ah ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha.’

Robin turned and walked away, leaving the soldier hanging there, laughing to himself.

A snake slithered. The girl with the fox-red hair. ‘Three gifts I have. The first is for you. Where is it hidden? I’ll give you a clue.’

‘Leave me alone. I know what I need to do. You and I are finished.’

‘Finished? No, no, no. We’ve merely begun. Here’s the next stage; so much to be done. We’ve planted the seed; now it must grow. Come, no more talk; let the deed show.’

Robin was walking away, following the course of a stream.

The vixen-girl sprang alongside. ‘You defeated the wolf, took only the skin. The rest of the spoils are more … interesting. Three gifts I have, buried beneath. Which would you take: the shadow, the blood, the teeth?’

Robin drew his bow and aimed at the girl. She just laughed.

‘Look, he’s come far, his aim is so true. He could be so much more, if only he knew.’

There was another slither in the leaves and the girl was gone. Robin told himself to forget her, he knew what he had to do next. He needed answers, and he wasn’t going to get those here. Which meant he had to go out there. He couldn’t put it off any longer.

Robin stopped at the threshold, where forest ended and open country began. Ahead he could smell a wildflower bank, warming in the sun. He felt for the vibrations in the web of green – above him a squirrel leaping, causing a jay to call in alarm, sending its mate into the air. Tracing these patterns and shapes, detecting the threads that weave within and beneath the visible world. His forest-mind seeping into the roots and the burrows – and then outwards, pushing at the edge of the forest and beyond.

He finds with relief these abilities are no longer confined to the wildwood: his awareness trickles across the boundary, running through the rootlets and the water channels, nosing amid the bluebells. His awareness widens, like waves on a lake, tunnelling through the topsoil with the beetles, mining with a badger’s claws, warring in the bushes with the sparrows.

The creatures’ senses become his own: a weasel explores a warren and Robin knows this black world through its whiskers. He picks up the chemical messages passed between ants, and he traces their labyrinth. There is a moment when all this is overwhelming in its complexity, but he breathes deeply and allows the pieces to settle and a kind of clarity is restored. He takes flight with a hobby hawk, pursuing a dragonfly; he prowls through the reeds with a fox, stalking a lamb.

And there – what he has been hoping to find – a man-made den. It smells of cold stone and old blood and it warbles with human noise. Robin examines closer, knowing this building through the swifts that nest in its roof, the rats in its rafters. It is a church, but it has been claimed by the Sherriff’s Guard: it has been fortified, a lookout post in the bell tower, arrow loops punched through the stained glass.

Pulling all his senses towards the centre, concentrating on the garrison, Robin sat back against a tree. He stayed there, motionless, while the day cooled in the evening, and dew
dampened the ground and night came and a frost settled. He wrapped the wolf pelt close and still he waited, observing.

He learned there were twelve soldiers in this garrison church. During daylight hours other people came and went: a baker and an alewife arrived from a nearby market town; a forester delivered firewood. Once a messenger visited and another time a weapons trader.

The night deepened. Robin stood, gripping his bow. He waited a heartbeat longer at the boundary. He stepped out of the forest. Immediately he felt exposed and vulnerable. But he didn’t pause; he ran down the bank in a half-crouch, weaving between a copse of trees, a hillock, a hedgerow. He slipped down the final slope and into the graveyard, tucking himself between two sepulchres.

He strung his bow and listened to the two sentries rounding the church. He wanted to find his answers without further bloodshed, but he admitted now it was impossible. These sentries would have to die, quickly and quietly, before they could raise the alarm.

Part of him was horrified.
This ambush is cowardly. They should be allowed a fighting chance.

Another part of him, nervous to be out of the forest, just wanted this over, by whatever means necessary.
It can’t be helped. Marian needs you. Think of her suffering, not these men.

The sentries were approaching the graveyard, fifty paces from Robin’s hiding place. Forty. The
clomp
of their nailed boots, the clink of swords at their belts.

Thirty paces. Twenty. Ten.

In one movement Robin stood, planted his feet, drew, let loose. The first soldier fell, his lantern smashing against stone. The second man gasped and reached for his war horn, raising it towards his lips. A second arrow appeared at Robin’s bow and the string drew and snapped back and the arrow whistled
through the night. It stapled the horn to the man’s face.

This second ranger was making a low moan. Robin unsheathed his knife and ended the man’s suffering. He moved to the nave door and used the hilt of his knife to knock five times: two short taps, followed by three long, the way he had heard the sentries knock.

His plan was vague – he knew only that he needed to find the garrison commander. Such a senior ranger must know where Marian was being held. He would tell Robin everything he needed to know, and then it could begin …

But how would he reach the commander, surrounded by guards? It was only at that moment, standing there waiting for the door to open, that Robin realized how stupid he had been. He had come here in desperation, without any real strategy, or any true chance of success. How could he fight ten men, out here, with only the darkness for cover?

He crept away from the door. It was not too late to bolt for the forest. But even as he took his first step he heard a shuffling noise inside the church, and then a faint voice struggling through oak. ‘We heard a crash. Is all clear? What’s the watchword?’

As the porter spoke, Robin heard other noises from behind the door: the shuffling of feet; the
clink
of something steel being carefully lifted from stone; a man being shaken by the shoulder. The sounds of men trying not to make a sound.

He pushed himself against the wall, curling himself into a ball, his mind screaming
escape
. But where? He was caught in the open. How could he disappear in this place?

A crash where the nave door flew open. Soldiers pouring out.

No choice left but to run – Robin sprinting away from the garrison, up into the churchyard, slipping between gravestones.

‘After them! Nets. Bolas. Take them alive.’

Something clattering off a headstone. Robin running.

‘Where are they? There! With me.’

Robin’s head down, racing up towards Winter Forest, his heart thumping, feeling again like that blind boy who first ran from men in nailed boots. Slipping through a hedgerow and sprinting for the treeline. The ground rumbling under hooves – at least five horsemen giving chase.

The forest was only a hundred paces away. But Robin wasn’t going to make it. The mounted rangers were too close.

Still Robin ran. And he realized he shouldn’t be running. In the shock he had forgotten everything Cernunnos had taught him. These soldiers didn’t know their quarry – they appeared to think it was an entire bandit horde out here in the night – and they were thrilled by the chase, and dazzled by the flaming torches they were waving. All of which made them more than half blind.

Robin fell on his stomach and lay still.

In the wide open …

But perfectly still …

The hooves thundering …

The horsemen galloped past, the closest trampling just wide of Robin.

He got up and went back to the hedgerow and crawled into the undergrowth, feeling frightened and small. That ranger had been right: the wildwood was Robin’s place of power. Out here, in the Sheriff’s world, his new strength was not enough.

Something slipped into the hedgerow beside him. The girl with the fox-red hair. She didn’t say a word, but he knew she was smiling.

Three gifts I have, buried beneath. Which would you take: the shadow, the blood, the teeth?

He listened to the soldiers at the forest edge, charging up and down, shouting at one another. Finally they rode back to the church.

He left the hedgerow and slouched up the hill and slipped gratefully into the wildwood. And the vixen-girl was following behind and still she said nothing, only smiled.