III. Hodde
Janet was dying and he’d known it instinctively. He could hear the rattling of her breath from across the channel.
He sliced open the night and stepped through. In the narrow gate, the imagined slavering Yvag warriors failed to materialize; the elven weren’t expecting him, did not so much as notice him any longer. Of course they didn’t. Probably they thought him dead, long dead; it had been forever since he’d handed Ainsley Rimor of Alwich over to the Lusks and brought back Innes. After that, Thomas Lindsay Rimor de Ercildoun vanished, rightly and truly dead, a living corpse of no concern to anyone, neither elven nor human, because no one alive other than Filib Lusk remembered him (and Filib was long dead now, too); they remembered only Thomas of the ballads, recalled only whimsical sayings that he’d never uttered, while they smeared and coated him with the daub and mortar of “True Thomas,” obscuring the true Thomas, the Tàm of Janet’s devotion, the father of Morven—identities long-buried and him nothing but a fading ghost of them, safe from prying elven eyes so long as he lurked in the shadows of this hut, so deep in the forest of Barnsdale that hardly five people knew of him, almost never encountered him. Those five surely counted him mad, which was such an easy disguise, for he was mad, wasn’t he, living forever in the past where he crossed from Ercildoun to Fontevraud in two terrified strides, and his Janet hovered between life and death, her brown eyes full of love but mostly pain.
He’d had to let her go, couldn’t find a way to rescue her another time. She’d whispered to him that she would meet him in Heaven. But he knew now that he would never reach there. Heaven was as far from him today as it had been as he watched the light go out of her eyes. He used to see her eyes so clearly. Now they were just shiny spots in the darkness; he was remembering the memory of them, and soon all of her would be gone.
He rolled into a ball on the sack of leaves that was his bed, gnawed on his beard, and ducked his head to hide from his own memories—except, someone was pushing at his door. Had the Yvag found him finally? Did it matter anymore if they did? Who was left to protect?
Outside the door, a voice groaned like some awful ghost and then called softly, “Woodwose? Woodwose. Tell me you’re about.” He squatted there in the dirt and stared as if the words were in some other language than his own. Memories fluttered around the periphery of his awareness. Then came a sigh and, “Please! Oh, dear Christ, I haven’t much time.”
The desperation of it banished the last of the past world where his wife lived on, his daughter, too—where he dwelled.
He uncurled, lay flat. He was in the hut he’d built, a monk’s beehive hut that led most who encountered him to assume he himself must be an ancient monk; his mattress was a wool bag stuffed with leaves; he remembered filling it. He glanced around. There wasn’t much to see.
Most of his belongings lay in a single chest that had once held Janet’s weavings, themselves eaten by moths and so no different than his tattered recollections.
“Please,” came the appeal once more from outside the door.
Why hadn’t whoever it was already opened the door? Ah, but he’d thrown the wooden bolt, locking the physical world out. He couldn’t recall doing it but knew he did it quite often. Besides, there was no one else, not even the ghost of Waldroup, who had never yet returned to tease or torment him. Someone was leaning against his door and soughing. Finally, he returned fully to the here-and-now.
To become again the nameless Woodwose, mad denizen of the forest, he had only to grizzle his long black hair and beard, both grown out so long that he seemed made of hair, and thin his body, making it seem ancient and decrepit. His clothing was hardly more than half-rotted linen braies, but needed no glamouring for a mad hermit. He stood up, spent another moment gathering his wits, then pushed open the creaking door.
Into his arms fell Robert Hodde.
Thomas gently lay the body down on the woolen bedding, ignoring the bow that clattered down as Hodde’s fingers released it. Hodde’s hands were covered with blood, and clutching at something balled up and pressed against him, itself drenched and dark.
“What’s happened to you?” asked Thomas. His voice grated and creaked like the rusty iron hinges of his door. When was the last time he’d spoken a word to anyone? He sounded like—like when Nicnevin had robbed him of speech for weeks or months at a time. But Hodde was answering and he was missing it all. A prelate—Hodde’s little trio had been engaged in a robbery. Then he was telling of a sword that could leap through the air. It was what had done for him, he said—the dance of that sword blade right through his side. Thomas carefully unlaced his short green cotehardie to see the wound. Indeed it was long, thin, and terrible, the gift from a sword blade thrusted straight through him. The magic sword seemed to be real.
Robbery gone awry was always the likely outcome for an outlaw such as Hodde, though all of his band pretended otherwise. And as outlaws went, Hodde had always showed some small kindness to Thomas, as if understanding instinctively the depth of his loss, the core of his madness, though Thomas had never told him of Janet and Morven.
Hodde hardly seemed to notice the investigation into his wound. “Little John saved me, Woodwose. Pulled . . . pulled me aside.”
Thomas chewed some more on his beard. What sort of sword could fly across distance?
Hodde looked at nothing as he babbled out his story. “’Twas John saw through the prelate’s disguise.”
“His disguise?”
“Aye, in pauper’s sackcloth, like some . . . penitent. But underneath, oh, jewels.” His eyes shone excitedly, remembering. “An’ spun gold thread. Here. See?” He pushed the blood-drenched bundle at Thomas, then lay his head back and rested.
Unfolded, the wadded material proved to be a long maniple covered in a motif of gold crosses; crushed up inside that was a rope cincture decorated with set stones, jewels. It had been white before Hodde’s blood soaked it. At first glance the quality of the polished gems looked impressive. Certainly it hadn’t belonged to any poor wandering mendicant, of that Hodde was right.
He set down the cincture and examined the maniple more closely. There was something hard in the middle of it. He ran his fingers and thumbs along it until he’d defined the hard round spot. Straightened and turned it over.
On the backside of the maniple, which indeed looked like spun gold, there was a hidden pocket with a small slit at the top. Thomas pushed up with his thumbs, forcing the object toward the opening. Whatever he expected—a larger jewel, a papal seal of some sort—it wasn’t the large ördstone that popped out, and for one instant he didn’t comprehend what he’d found. The tiny blue gems flickered at him. Whispers of machine intelligence tickled his brain.
He flung it across the hut. It struck the wall and bounced on the packed dirt of the floor.
No, no, no, no, not Yvags here. For the love of God, hadn’t he left them far enough behind, left his war with them behind in order to live, to have a life with Janet and Morven?
Hodde had raised his head at the noise but sank back.
But he’d had that life, hadn’t he, the years he was still clinging to. Janet was . . .
No, that life was over. Janet was dust, Morven, too, and him the mad monk of the woods north of the Shirewood because he had kept himself from returning to Ercildoun and all the confrontations he would certainly have had with them.
He glared at the black twinkling stone. He wanted to smash it, but also remembered the power that could unleash.
The unattuned hum of the thing still echoed faintly in his head, like a hornet trapped under a cup. Was it calling out to his own sleeping ördstone where it lay wrapped up and hidden in the chest in the corner? Over time this awful thing was sure to burrow into his mind the way Waldroup’s collection of such stones had once invaded him. He must be rid of it. Even now it might somehow be seeking its owner, nearby Yvags. They wouldn’t hear it . . . unless they’d followed Hodde. And what would he do if they had?
With effort Thomas swept away the clouds of the past. The flickering stone couldn’t be destroyed, and if it had signaled others, he must be ready.
An old tunic and shirt lay draped across the wooden chest of his meager belongings. He leaned over and grabbed the striped linen tunic, balled that up and pressed it to Hodde’s wound. “Push with this,” he said. “To stop the bleeding.” He had to guide Hodde’s hands around it.
What should he do? Who else was coming?
Gently, he asked, “Hodde, where is the prelate now?”
Robert Hodde opened one sunken eye and grinned again, showing that he still had most of his teeth. “You’re not half so mad as tha let on, are ye, Woodwose?” Then he said, “Oak tree, split trunk, King’s Way.” He reached up and grabbed Thomas’s arm. “Killed him, us, and like candle he just melted.” He let go, dropped his arm.
A skinwalker. In possession of this stone . . . What else could he be? Fear leaked into his stratagem. “He melted.”
“Doubt me?”
“How can I doubt a man who walked across the Shirewood all the way here? Why did you do that? Why come here?”
He spoke now without opening his eyes. “Much is dead, Little John run off for ’is life. Anybody else’d strip me naked, steal everything ah ’ave.”
“No, we’ll get you . . . a poultice, something.”
“Yer daft. You go now—Great Limewood a Barnsdale. Tha remember Great Limewood. I showed it tha. ’Ole in it as big as th’ead, at second split. All mah treasure. I’ve family in Nottingham. Tanners all. You carry mah takings. Find Little John if them knights haven’t killed him—”
He sucked in his breath. “Knights? You mentioned no knights.”
“’Twas them two as wielded swords. Dressed for a crusade. I know it’s mad.”
Not mad. Yvag knights, of course. No crossbows now—new weapons to brandish. “You rest here and push on that.” The wadded tunic was already saturated, and Hodde’s color deathly gray. “No one will find you. I need to go have myself a gander at this prelate.”
Hodde opened his eyes. “Nah,” he insisted. “Great Linden—I mean, limewood. Swear.”
“Yes, I’ll see to it, I promise.”
“Good man,” he murmured.
Thomas found his shoes tossed beside the wood chest. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d worn hose and shoes. Years it must be. No surprise then how stiff the leather was. He grabbed the linen shirt.
He picked up Hodde’s bow now and studied it: well-crafted, but smaller than a warbow. He laid it down next to the outlaw. “In case you need it,” he whispered. Hodde gave no indication he heard.
Outside the door, he paused to put on the shirt. It was ragged but hung over his braies at least. Hodde might have led the knights right to his door, but there was no one visible in the woods, no black-armored creatures approaching.
He’d resided here for decades, long enough that he’d likely encountered most every outlaw who made these forests their home, and probably half of whom had been captured and hanged by shire reeves or the Keepers of Sherwood Forest in the time he’d lived here. They all knew him for the reclusive mad monk, just a part of the woods, and left him alone. He wasn’t on the King’s preserve and posed no threat. They might also have thought him supernatural, given that he sometimes made his hut disappear altogether, throwing off the appearance of a thick cluster of vines. Most of the outlaws avoided him. But not Hodde.
Now, however, he was venturing out into their world, where he might not so easily explain himself—certainly the mad old Woodwose didn’t belong out here. In that moment he exhaled, releasing the glamour. His long hair and beard turned dark again, and beneath the loose shirt his body remolded, lean and hard. He would look perhaps like another down-on-his luck outlaw. At least, unarmed, he could not easily be accused of poaching nor of slaying a prelate. And that was another good reason for leaving the bow behind.
He gave the nearby abbey a wide berth, unable now to recall its name. There must be a good half dozen abbeys and priories scattered through what he thought of as “the Shirewood”—what Hodde called Sherwood. Abbeys and priories were places he’d avoided in particular upon arriving—every abbey was Fontevraud, every priory Wariville. He was quit of such places forever; all they represented to him was loss, death, anguish.
He tracked through the wetlands along the River Poulter, heading toward a vast expanse of birch and oak. By now he would be well inside that wood.
Three roe deer paused in their foraging to watch him, then bounded away into the deeper shadows. He watched them vanish before he walked on.
He found the great split oak beside the King’s Great Way, and if there’d been any doubt, Hodde’s quarterstaff was leaned against it. He took the staff and walked out onto the wide pathway beyond it. Just as Hodde had described, two bodies lay there. The nearest was that of Much, the poor son of a miller and as harmless an outlaw as he could imagine, which this encounter with true evil certainly proved. That ushered him to the other body, though “body” was hardly the word for it. A dressed skeleton lying in a pool of stinking stew. With the staff he nudged it over. He knew what this meant. It brought up from the darkness of his past the death of Baldie, drowned and then inhabited, only to liquefy upon his second demise . . . the first time Thomas had encountered what the Yvags called a conveyance.
From the evidence of the miter and crozier lying near, this one had been a bishop—a skinwalker bishop in the company of two Yvag knights. Not so ancient a habitation as to rot and crumble away; he’d only been occupied for a few years, then.
Careful to avoid the “soup,” Thomas squatted and tugged at the sackcloth robe, which rolled the body halfway over. There about its neck hung a gold cross. Hodde in his panic or haste had missed this. Thomas took it now, then stood away and breathed the clear air.
No sign of Little John or any knights, although it was easy enough to discern where they had run. In pursuit of him the Yvags had abandoned their bishop. Had that been in haste or had his usefulness ended the moment he was struck down? It seemed that what he carried was of more importance to them. Yet, if it was so important, why carry it through the forest when they simply could have opened two gates and jumped from point to point?
He wondered then: Was it possible that inhabited skinwalkers couldn’t pass through their green-fire gates that way? Certainly, they stood on hand for the collection of teinds, but did any of them actually pass through the portals themselves? Then he remembered Alderman Stroud stepping through the ring at Old Melrose after Thomas’s brother, Onchu, had been walked through it. Hadn’t Stroud sealed himself up on the far side of the ring, or had that been an illusion? Thomas had run into it at full tilt and been blasted through time. His memory was jumbled. What if Stroud had not actually left, had simply stepped behind the fire? The other times he’d observed them the knights and the Queen of Ailfion had returned through the portal, but the skinwalkers all went back to their assumed lives. What if Stroud had stepped through simply to draw him out?
He set the matter aside—something for another time. Right now, before the knights returned, he must be gone. It would be injudicious to be found anywhere near here. They would kill him whether armed or not, not even aware of who he was.
Of that he had no doubt whatsoever.