The stream delved deep and rocky as it plunged through the woodlands. It was soon cascading over cataracts and rushing little waterfalls. Above the banks, tangled grey-barked oaks and black pines draped their thick curtains of leaves over the soil, whilst mosses and ferns grew in abundance atop the round river boulders. In a few places, there were small cliffs that were emerald-green and dripping with layers of liverworts. The air grew cooler and damper, and soon everything smelled richly of old forest litter and river mud. The thin trail continued to skirt the stream’s course. After passing through the place of the horse skulls, the trail did seem to grow a little more plain, more like a footpath, flatter and more open. There was certainly a sense that someone or something passed along the trackway at somewhat regular intervals.
Dapplegrim sniffed the ground a couple times, but only screwed up his skullish face and said, “Odd smell.” He was reluctant to elaborate further, even when Caewen asked him pointedly what he meant. All he said was, “Hurm. I don’t really know what I mean. Only that there’s an odd smell here. I don’t often catch a scent of something I’ve never smelled before. That’s all.”
They were about an hour into the forest when the stream narrowed, and two huge, soft-edged prominences arose on either side, pinching together the stream’s passage like a great thumb and finger made of the earth and ferns. Ahead, the stream passed underneath something that appeared to be perhaps some form of natural arch or rock-hole. As they drew nearer, it soon became obvious that the passage was not natural after all. It was a cyclopean structure of carven and raised stone: a massive dolmen gate made of two uprights, topped by a lintel crusted with moss. It all gleamed with damp. The boy looked up and down the stone. He wondered if this was the place they were meant to find Athairdrost. But there were no carvings on it. And there was no pool nearby. He very clearly had a sense that they were looking for a pool and carvings.
“I think we’re on an old processional way,” said Caewen, breaking the silence. “Wherever this stream leads, people used to walk the path. Worshippers, I guess?” She cast a look around them. “And maybe they still walk this way?” Glancing back, over her shoulder, and along the bare dirt track, she added, “But what were they worshipping?”
Meanwhile Dapplegrim was snuffing at the ground with his big nostrils. “There’s fresher scent here… and strange… there’s a smell of humanfolk–I think–but also of other things. I don’t know what else to call it… things… it’s unfamiliar. Smells rocky and cold.” A great in-draught of air. “But also something ashy mixed in. Burnt.” He looked around. “How very strange.”
The path took them under the the dolmen gate, alongside the stream. The boy felt a prickling up and down his flesh as they walked into the cool darkness cast by those stones. And stranger still, the air seemed to be somehow more blue-tinted on the far side of the rocks. He had a definite sensation of having passed a threshold. The air, the ground, the shadows: they all looked and felt deeper and colder. Even the trees gathered a gaunt and otherworldly look around themselves. Distances seemed distorted too. As he looked off into the forest, the boy started to get a dizzying feeling that the trees were growing in patterns. It was as if they were dancing in endless interlocking circles, but each ring was so interwoven with its neighbours that it was impossible to tell quite where one circle began and another ended.
It was clear that none of them were enjoying the air here.
Fleat was even starting to shake. He looked around, worried. “Feels like the sort of place an old night-power would live,” he said at last. “I do not like this, no I do not.”
They pushed farther beyond the gate.
The path that ran beside the brook grew damper and muddier. Caewen stopped to study the ground as they walked, and before long she got down on one knee and stared closely at a span of wet earth and tromped-down grass. The boy looked over her shoulder. Even he could see the footprint. It was human-shaped, but huge. Much, much bigger than any human foot by two or three times at least. Wetness was oozing up out of the mud. The print was recent.
“Is Athairdrost a giant?” said Caewen.
The boy shook his head. “No,” he said. “He’s a man. All the four Princes of Sorthe are just men. Sorcerous men maybe, but just men.”
“Hmmmmm,” rumbled Dapplegrim.
Caewen narrowed her vision. Her voice was questioning. “Fleat? I wonder, could you change your form and scout ahead for us?”
Fleat nodded, slid off his cloak and tunic, and after a twisting moment of weird shapes, stomach-churning movement and sprouting feathers, he was in the shape of a huge owl. The boy didn’t think he would ever get used to that. The skin-turning. It was too strange to think of one person inhabiting two bodies. Were skin-turners in a state of being finely balanced? Nearly an owl? Nearly a Hobbe boy? Just waiting to tip one way, and then the other? Could such a person be tipped entirely into owl or boy forever? He wondered these things as he watched the broad brown-black shape flap its way into the air, and then glide silently off among the boles trees. Fleat was so quiet and stealthy that in seconds it was no longer possible to tell where he was in the gloom.
They waited beside the stream. Dapplegrim flared his nostrils and snorted anxiously. Caewen kept running a finger along the hilt of her sword. The boy couldn’t help but feel nervous too.
After a tense minute, Fleat returned. He turned into a mass of feather and skin and flesh whilst still in the air, and then landed, excited, as a cloud of feathers spewed off his skin. The naked boy in the settling cloud of feathers jumped from one foot to the other. “There’s a great man in the woods. A giant, or somewhat alike it. Methinks it’s one of the strange wizard-giants. Them that we told you about back in our oak-nest ravine. He’s hurt bad. I think he’s dying.”
“What hurt him?” said Caewen.
“Yes?” chimed in Dapplegrim. He looked this way and that into the twists of branches and shadows. “That’s what I want to know. And is it still about?”
“I don’t know. There’s no sign of nothing else about. He’s burnt, and got scorches up and down his flesh, so maybe that smell of something burning you caught was him?”
“The ashy smell,” said Dapplegrim. “There’s something quite unnatural and dangerous in these woods.” After he pause he added, “besides us, I mean.”
Fleat seemed less disturbed by all this, and more excited. “The giant’s no doubt a foul creature. Him or something like him tried to kill three of us Hobbe folk, remember? Whatever hurt the giant, can’t be thoroughly evil, the ways that I see it.”
“We don’t know that,” said the boy. “The giant might have been confused.”
The others looked at him
“How do you mean?” said Caewen.
“Well, think about it… I mean, we don’t know if the giant is a servant of Old Night and Chaos, do we? We don’t know what side he might be on. Not really. All we know is that there have been these strange giant-folk in the land, and one of them cast a spell that unchanged some skin-turners, and made them from owl into Hobbe.” He looked apologetically at the owl-eyed boy. “But Fleat’s folk used to be servants of the Nightsome Lady. And the Hobs-Houlard haven’t exactly been open to visitors lately have they? They haven’t told the world that they’re no longer night-servants. So, what if these giants think the Hobs-Houlard are still night-worshipers? What if the giant who put a spell on the hob-owls thought the owls were spies? It’d be possible, wouldn’t it? I mean, more than possible maybe. I don’t know if we should be so sure these giant folk are bad creatures… That’s all I’m saying.”
Fleat rolled his eyes and folded his wiry arms across his chest. “If you think it’s not evil to be shifted forcibly into a shape that does not have wings–and mark this, this happens when a fellow is way up in the air–then you haven’t thought the matter through. It’s terrifying, is what it is. It’s not the sort of thing a goodly sort of wizard does. Is it?”
A bit embarrassed, the boy conceded that was at least true. “It doesn’t sound friendly, no.”
Caewen showed him a smile. “You’re growing bolder in your opinions, child.”
He hunched his shoulders.
“No,” she said, “don’t look like that. It’s a good thing. It’s a part of growing up.” Another smile followed. “Still,” she mused, “whether an enemy or friend, we cannot pass the thing without at least getting a look at it. We should do that much. Show us the way, Fleat, if you will?”
He nodded as he pulled on his clothing. He then took off along path into the woods. “It’s on the beaten way. We’ll find him soon enough.”
They followed, winding among the old great trees and through stands of wet bracken, until a deep and rhythmic wheezing became audible. Someone nearby was breathing heavily. It sounded like a constricted whistle of air passing through a wounded windpipe.