The Winter King (26 page)

… and saw, as soon as she was close enough to make it out, that the intricately knotted rope which she used to secure the door hung in a loose loop from the door latch.

Instantly she stepped back, leaping into the shelter of the trees and crouching down behind a thicket of brambles. Who was inside? Was it – hope flared swiftly – was it Jehan?

Just as quickly, disappointment followed: if it was Jehan, where was his horse? Where was Auban, that patient, comfortable, chestnut horse? And Jehan, she knew in an instinctive flash, would have been looking out for her. Would have sensed, in all likelihood, that she was near, and come out to greet her. Open his arms to her. Hold her tight and kiss her, with all the passion built up by absence.

Stop thinking about Jehan
, she ordered herself.

Cautiously she emerged once more into the clearing. She looked round for a weapon; it was foolhardy, surely, to approach an unidentified stranger unarmed. She had a light, beautifully crafted sword that Jehan had made for her, and she knew exactly where it was. She pictured it, hidden beneath the straw-filled mattress on her sleeping platform. Inside the hut.

It was no use lamenting the fact. She bent down and picked up a length of wood, checking it was sound. Weighing it in her hands, she felt her confidence creep back.

She walked stealthily back to the door of the hut.

She raised the latch, carefully, making no sound.

She edged the door open, just a tiny amount, and peered through the gap.

She suppressed a gasp. Then, a wide grin spreading across her face, she flung the door wide and hurried inside.

The old woman crouched by the fire that glowed in the hearth, rosy-cheeked from the warmth, well wrapped-up in one of the woolly blankets from Meggie’s bed. She returned the grin, eyes crinkling.

She said, with an edge of laughter in her voice, ‘Knew you’d be along, sooner or later.’

Meggie knelt down on the floor and took Lilas in her arms.

‘How did you find it?’

The first swift spate of questions –
Are you all right? Are you eating? Have you been keeping warm enough?
– were out of the way, and Lilas had reassured Meggie on every one. Now the next, equally important, queries could begin, first of which was how Lilas had managed to discover the hut.

‘I was drawn here,’ Lilas said, lowering her voice to a dramatic whisper. ‘There’s some power hereabouts, and it led me to your little hideaway.’

‘A power,’ Meggie breathed. Imagining some great, glowing light drawing Lilas on through the hidden ways of the forest, she said, ‘This power must have felt your need, and—’

Lilas leaned over and dug her in the ribs. ‘I’m teasing you, girl. I just stumbled on it, and recognized it as a good place.’

‘Oh.’

Lilas said, ‘Magic doesn’t really work that way – leastways, not in my experience.’ She must have noticed Meggie’s disappointment. ‘That’s not to say there isn’t power here,’ she added gently. ‘There is.’ Fixing her eyes on Meggie’s, she murmured, ‘Not yours, I sense, although you’re well on your way.’

‘My mother lived here,’ Meggie said. ‘And, before her, my grandmother. They say she was one of the Great Ones.’ She wondered if Lilas knew what that meant.

She need not have worried. Lilas was nodding, accepting the statement as readily as if Meggie had just commented on the weather. ‘What was her name? Your grandmother, I mean.’

‘The Outworlders knew her as Mag Hobson. To the forest people, she was Meggie.’

‘Your mother named you after her,’ Lilas observed. ‘Wise of her.’ She nodded again, making a strange little gesture of reverence towards the hearth. ‘She was indeed a Great One, and no mistake.’

‘You’ve heard of her?’

Lilas grinned. ‘Course I have. Didn’t I tell you I have forest blood?’

‘Yes, you did,’ Meggie muttered. Discovering the old woman in her hut was proving not to be so strange, after all. People like Lilas – like Meggie – would readily feel its benign power and be drawn to it.

Meggie pulled her thoughts back to the moment. ‘Why did you flee from the Hawkenlye infirmary?’ she asked, although she felt she already knew. ‘Did something – or some
one
– scare you?’

‘Scare doesn’t begin to describe it,’ Lilas said with a shudder. ‘I heard the commotion outside, in that big, open space inside the gates, and that puffed-up lord shouting his mouth off, and then he made that poor, feeble, lily-livered sap of a monk speak up like that, and I guessed it wouldn’t be long afore they came looking for me. I’d escaped the buggers once!’ she exclaimed. ‘Apparently, some grim-looking feller came to Hamhurst to fetch me away to that hawk-faced, bolt-eyed lord—’

‘Nicholas Fitzwalter, do you mean?’

‘Aye, him. Anyway, when his man came to fetch me, I wasn’t there, see, because the village elders had got in a flap about me and my visions, and they’d decided, in their wisdom, to pack me off to Hawkenlye and get me out of the way.’ Her indignation threatened to choke her.

‘I’m sure they were thinking of your welfare,’ Meggie said. ‘The abbey nuns are very good at looking after people.’

‘That’s as maybe,’ Lilas said with a sniff. ‘But you can’t tell me the villagers weren’t also concerned for their own safety. It was dangerous, see, for all of them, to have an old crone spouting bad things about the king. Outsiders might have thought they all agreed with me.’

‘They probably did,’ Meggie murmured.

‘Didn’t have the guts to say so, though, did they?’ Lilas countered.

There did not seem much point in pursuing it. ‘So, when you were in the infirmary, you realized you had to get away?’ she prompted. ‘Before Fitzwalter’s man came to find you?’

‘Aye, I did,’ Lilas said grimly. ‘There’s that little door at the far end of the ward, which opens on to the forecourt, and I’d been peeping out to see what was going on. I guessed he’d come in that way since it was nearest. So I crept out through the main door, at the opposite end, and made my way out through the little gate that opens on to the valley behind the abbey. That looked a bit open for my needs, and besides, I could see lots of monks and other folk milling around. Besides, in the other direction was the forest. Knew I’d be safe there.’

‘And you found my hut,’ Meggie said. She took Lilas’s thin old hand, squeezing it. ‘I’m so glad you did.’

It was all very well to be warm and, with any luck, safe, Meggie reflected the next morning. With the stream running past close by, she and Lilas would not go thirsty. Food, however, threatened to be more of a challenge and, for the first time since her early childhood, Meggie was thrown back on her own ingenuity. There were root vegetables out in the plot in front of the hut, and late autumn in the forest provided berries and a few last fungi, in addition to the stores of chestnuts and hazelnuts that Meggie had already set aside. For the solid base without which a meal did not keep hunger away for long, however, she was going to have to remember all that her mother had taught her, and go foraging.

Leaving Lilas pulling and preparing roots, Meggie set off on to the hidden network of animal tracks deep within the forest. She had spent the previous evening fashioning a couple of traps out of withies, and, from the hook in the corner of the hut where it had hung since Joanna had last put it there, she took down her mother’s catapult. The leather sling had been stiff and dry, and Lilas had sat patiently rubbing animal fat into it until it had regained its flexibility. Whether Meggie would be any good with it remained to be seen. Geoffroi had, on rare occasions, allowed her to have a go with his, but the smallest target she had ever managed to hit was a tree.

After a long time of quietly wandering the tracks, studying the pattern of animal prints, eventually she set her traps. If they failed, she would resort to snares, although it would be with reluctance. It was one thing to imprison a creature in a cage supplied with bait and then dispatch it swiftly by wringing its neck; quite another to send it wild with panic and pain because it could not free itself from the ever-tightening loop of the snare.

Her first attempts with the catapult were risible. Then, with the images of both her mother and her brother in mind, she made herself relax and tried to copy the way they did it. She began to improve.

Back at the hut, Lilas greeted her with the cheerful news that the food was ready. The vegetable and chestnut stew was good, except there wasn’t enough of it.

It was too soon to go and check the traps, so Meggie made herself relax. It was warm by the fire and, leaning back on a straw-filled sack covered with a sheepskin, she was very comfortable. She had started out early that morning, and walked many miles in the course of her foraging. Presently her eyelids began to droop, and soon she was asleep.

In the dream, she is walking with Lilas in a remote part of the forest that she does not recognize. Lilas is humming softly: a repetitive, hypnotic series of notes that seems to penetrate Meggie’s mind, weaving its way deep inside and twining itself with her thoughts and her memories. She is aware – although she does not know how she knows – that this trance is like nothing she has experienced before.

She sees her mother, long dark hair streaked widely with grey. Her mother gives her a smile so full of love that Meggie hears herself sob. Joanna wears a bear’s claw mounted in silver on a thong around her neck. Oh, Meggie remembers that claw! Her mother is speaking, very quietly:
There are portals in the world that you have not even dreamt of, my daughter
. Meggie stretches out a hand, as if to take hold of her mother, and Joanna melts away.

Now the vision is changing. There is a man, and there is danger. A long and very thin blade is held up to the light of a candle: it has a wicked point and both edges have been honed to razor sharpness. It is a killing weapon.

Horrified, Meggie watches as a hand raises the knife. It plunges up in a tight arc, energy concentrated in its point. There is a terrible sound as it finds its target.

Meggie cries aloud. From somewhere very close, Lilas hushes her.

‘Go on,’ a voice murmurs. Lilas’s?

A funeral procession, and a coffin draped in brilliantly coloured cloth is borne aloft. Then, in a swift succession of images, violence, fighting, bloody death. And a fleet of ships sailing with deadly intent coming towards the shore, an army poised to disembark …

‘No!’ Meggie cries. She feels hot, then very cold, so that she begins to shiver. She is lost, lost, deep within an imaginary forest in her own mind, and she cries out in fear.

Meggie opened her eyes. Lilas was bending over her, holding both her hands between her own, chafing them. ‘Are you back, child?’ she demanded anxiously. ‘Have you returned?’

Meggie looked up at her. ‘I think so,’ she said cautiously. But the trance images were still far too vivid, and she was not really sure which world she was in.

‘I’m sorry,’ Lilas said. ‘I took you too deep. I was curious, see, because I knew you had the ability to come with me.’ She made a grimace. ‘Should have asked you first, though, shouldn’t I?’

‘Yes,’ Meggie said shortly. Reality was hardening around her, and the fear was slowly ebbing away. ‘Did you put something in the stew?’ she demanded, staring hard at Lilas.

‘Didn’t need to,’ she replied. ‘You were sleepy already, so I took the opportunity and sent you off.’

Meggie remembered the soft humming. ‘Remind me,’ she said neutrally, ‘never again to let myself fall asleep while you’re still awake.’

Lilas chuckled. Then, anxiety returning, she said, ‘Sure you’re all right?’

‘Quite sure.’ Meggie risked getting to her feet. So far, so good.

‘Did you … er, did you see anything?’ Lilas asked, with an attempt at nonchalance that didn’t fool Meggie for a moment.

But Meggie was not ready to talk about it. She grabbed her grey cloak, swinging it round her shoulders and drawing up the hood. She picked up the sword that Jehan had made for her. She sensed – although it could have been an after-effect of the visions – that danger was near. The blade was light, and not very long, but it was extremely sharp. ‘I’m going to check the traps,’ she said. Then she hurried outside and, before Lilas could say a word, firmly closed the door.

One of her traps held a plump partridge. Bending down, she murmured softly to the bird, then, taking hold of it in firm hands, swiftly wrung its neck. She stowed it in the leather bag she carried over her shoulder.

She was in the forest to the south of the abbey, heading back towards the hut, when she heard it: close at hand, although out of sight, someone was whistling.

Meggie slipped into the shadow of a bramble thicket. The day was drawing to its close, and she was pretty sure she could not be seen. She breathed a prayer of thankfulness that she had not come across this intruder, whoever he – or she – was, any nearer to the hut: she was still some miles away. The hut’s location would remain secret.

She edged forward, parting two strands of entangled bramble so that she could look out.

He was sitting in a small glade, formed where a tree had come crashing down to create an almost perfect circle of light amid the dense forest. He was half turned away from her, leaning back against the trunk of a winter-bare birch tree, and he looked utterly contented.

Even from where she stood, Meggie could make out enough details of his appearance to see that he was no peasant or forest dweller. He wore tunic and hose in shades of greenish-brown, but the sombre colours, she guessed, had been carefully chosen not for cheapness but so as not to advertise the huntsman’s presence, for the quality of the garments was sumptuous. He wore a pair of boots in soft, supple leather, and a heavy cloak warmly lined with fur. Stealthily she removed the bag from her shoulder and pushed it deep into the undergrowth: lords out hunting did not take kindly to people helping themselves to game.

She watched him. He wore heavy leather gauntlets, on which she thought she saw the dull gleam of blood: yes, he was indeed a hunter, and he had clearly done well. She wondered what had happened to the kill – no doubt, she thought, the deer, or perhaps the boar, had been carted away by the minions dancing attendance. Men of high status didn’t have to drag their own meat home.