The dream was strange.
In it, he dreamed that he was standing beside a dead tree, overlooking a village in the valley below. It wasn’t anything like the lands he knew: the houses were strangely shaped and the earth was sere, pebbly and harsh, encircled everywhere by hard, cold hills. He dreamed that he could see also a rotted and ruined longhouse perched upon the ridge to his left.
In the shadows of the tree, a deeper and darker shadow stirred. “Tsssch,” said the shadow. It curled around like a hunting mink made of darkness.
“This is a dream,” said the boy to himself, doing his best to summon some reassurance. “Nothing but a figment.” In the next moment of thought he reflected on how strange it was that he knew this to be definitely a dream. That was peculiar for him. More usually, he would wake from dreams and nightmares deep in the grips of their encompassing realities. He was sure of that.
“Tsssch,” said the shadow-thing again. “And who is to say it is your dream, and not, tssssch, tsch, tsk, a remembrance of a dream of a half-dead man?”
The boy experienced a brief flash of something grey-skinned and shrieking in the cold sleet of a rocky place. But then it was gone.
“I suppose,” said the boy, confused, and afraid a little. “Who are you? A nightmare?”
“No. Tsssch. Only a walker in the dreamer’s minds. I’m looking for someone. You’ve the scent of her about you. Or, not the scent exactly. The dream-made miasma of thought.” The thing shook its head, like an itchy cat. “It’s a little difficult to explain. Tsch. It is a lady I look for, search for, hunt. A lady of swords and charms. Caewen. She might have a big ugly cretin with her that is pretending to be a horse. It wouldn’t be fooling anyone though. Tsssch. Not even itself.”
The boy had enough of his wits about him to realise that he shouldn’t be answering questions put to him by strange shadows that claim to walk through dreams.
“And what if I did know her? What is it to you?”
“Ahhhh, tssssch, tssss, but you have already told me what I need to know. I just needed to look around your mind’s place a little. A glimpse here. A sniff there. I’ll find her nearby I think. Tsssch. I must only wait, patiently.” It twisted around and stared with eyes like deepest night. “Do not worry yourself. You’ll not remember a mote of this conversation.” A smile of shadowy teeth against a shadowy maw.
The dream drifted away, or was it that the boy drifted away from the dream? Other flickering, brain-fevered images shot across his mind as he was drawn away, upwards, seemingly ever upwards… into hot-blooded, poison-blooded deliriums of sight and noise. The memory of the talking shadow was soon fragmentary, and then it was engulfed within the other more vivid fever dreamings of the poison.
-oOo-
The boy woke. He did his best to look around, though was unable to lift his head more than an inch. They were camped somewhere far away from the trees and cliffs that he last remembered. Instead of dark and scraggly pines, there grew low scrubby bushes of a greyish hue, with waxy leaves. A campfire spat and gave out sparkling embers into the sky. Above, in the night’s heavens, no clouds hung or sped. And yet the stars were so bright and flushed with light that they almost seemed to be fogs of light to the boy.
He struggled to move–and found he couldn’t–feeling weak everywhere and painful in the joints of his elbows and knees. He took a few moments to breath and feel out his surrounds. He appeared to be wrapped warmly in blankets, though he could still sense the coldness of the air seeping right through them and into his skin and meat. Even with that heavy thickness of wrappings his skin shivered against itchy wool. He then let his thoughts run over his body, and found that where the small black arrow had struck him in the thigh there was a powerful throbbing, as if he’d been stung by a huge wasp over and over in the same place.
Not quite comprehending, he tried to take in more clearly where they were now. The stars seemed so blindingly bright and the mountains all looked so dark.
He craned his head to look about. Caewen was kneeling nearby, her face ashen and her hair dank and loose, and pulled away from the tidy knot she more usually wore. There stood an extinguished candle beside her, discarded on the ground, and beside that a small clay mannikin: a person-shaped thing roughly sculpted and rudely stuck with moss for hair. As the boy looked at it, he noticed a scorch mark on the thing’s chest as if the candle had been held there a moment earlier. The patch of black soot spread weirdly as he watched; rapidly, it consumed the entire mannikin. The boy felt a panic he couldn’t explain. He felt a choking in his breath. It was as if the blackness of soot were moving through his body, through his blood–and he wanted to sit up and scream but he couldn’t. Then, a moment later, a wave of nausea hit him, bowling his mind back into his skull. He sunk deep, deep back into the oblivion of the unthinking. He heard only dimly a voice say, “Will he live?” and Caewen replying, “Yes. The poison is out of his blood. Don’t touch the doll. It’ll crumble on its own accord. It’s dangerous to touch until then.”
He faded in and out of awareness for a time.
In an out of dreams.
He thought he was visited by a slinking shadow-thing in his dreams.
He dreamed that it watched him.
Be he didn’t understand what it was, or what it wanted.
Sometimes he chased it, or even threw stones and rocks at it. But it slipped away like a disturbance of darkness across a still forest pond.
Finally, after a long-seeming age, he grew gradually able to think.
And finally, he awoke once more.
The fire was burning in front of him, smoky and heaped with old twisted bits of stump and powdery wet wood. The air smelled thickly of the soggy smoke. As the boy tried to speak, he found his mouth was dry and he was only able to croak, “Water, please. Water.”
He felt the coldness and the wetness on his lips first, and only then saw that Fleat was holding a leathern bowl up to his mouth and pouring water–drip by trickle–past his chapped lips, and onto his waxy-feeling tongue. “What happened?”
Fleat looked equal-parts angry and embarrassed. “There was a faction of my folk who didn’t want to let you go freely. They were afraidsy. They thought you too much a risk, they did. Too much a chance of someone else finding out about us and our valley. I thought–that is, I wasn’t part of the talkings council–but I was told the great old owl had decided against them dealing deathly with you… and that was the end of that. Indeeds, indeeds. Or it ought have been the end of that. Some of them decided to act on their own, if I gather me acorns aright. The arrows were poisoned. We Hobbes are good with poison and arrows. Even them of our cousins who live in the south, and tend farms, and have never known the magic of the night, even them folks are clever with a poison dart. You’re lucky to be alive. It was the lady, Caewen, and her magic. You wouldn’t be sucking breath or drink right now, but she worked a life charm on you.”
“What?” said the boy, confused, increasingly alarmed. “What did she do?”
“Listen up. I said it already. A life charm. She gave up a bit of her life to keep your flame flickering.” He sniffed. “At least, far as I understand it. I’m no magician, no, no.” He refilled the bowl from a waterskin and offered the boy more of it. He took it greedily, while Fleat continued to talk: “Course she was joking about how she would prob-as-not only lose the bit of life at the end that isn’t much worth living anyway–strange joke–I’ve never seen no one work a life-magic before. Your horsey friend, Dapple-me-grim–he was right angry, but he let her do it. There was no other way to save you, I think. Most people with that power and skill are too selfish, or too afraid, to do such a thing. Wizards and witchingfolks do not give their life away frivolously.” He shook his head and maybe, the boy thought, there was even a sadness there. It was hard for him to be sure, but there did seem to be something else going on under the surface of the words.
The fuzzy, hazy feeling in his head was gradually being replaced by a painful tiredness. “Oh,” he said meekly, and though he tried to fight the sleep, it soon overwhelmed him. He fell back into sleep wondering what drug or herb Fleat must have put in the water.