It was getting towards evening now. The day had been bright, the clouds sun-smeared, the air crisp and cool and full of the last rays of fading autumnal half-warmth. The dark green leaves of oaks were all gone: long since blown away to form their crisp, dry flaky heaps on the ground. Only a few spots of yellow still dotted elm and beech, willow, poplar and hazel. Each leaf was a fluttering spark of colour in an otherwise drab greyness. And yet, oddly, she noticed the occasional pale yellow-white butterfly pass her by on the cold air, hopelessly seeking flowers. They were quite worn and tattered along the edges of their wings, so that it almost looked as if their wings were made of tattered hides. She didn’t know the name of the land she passed through, but it seemed to be a place of natural wonders. Before very long, she encountered something even stranger than the tatter-winged butterflies–an unfamiliar species of huge green dragonfly. They were as long as her forearm. The massive insects ruled the air alongside what ponds and marshy places she passed, darting and skimming for prey. She paused more than once to watch them. No cold snap had killed their late summer reigns, it seemed. They dashed about as if they might have been miniature dragons in iridescent coats, over water as black as icy tar all spotted with yellow leaves.
The chill wind tugged at her hair and she walked on.
On the third day after leaving Cag-Mag, Caewen had found herself walking alone on a drear country high road that mostly struck a path eastwards. Whenever she stopped to check the bowl of inky water, it kept pointing in the same direction. So, onwards she trudged. By late afternoon of the third day, she had not seen a person in hours. The few farmers and cottagers she had chanced to pass that morning had quickly vanished at the first glimpse of her. Although there was–as yet–no tramp of armoured boots on the road, there was a hushed watchfulness of people waiting for something terrible. The people knew, or guessed, that violence was coming and they were already as flighty as hares and planning their escape.
Well, good then, she thought. She had no desire to see anyone surprised by wandering troops of bored, angry soldiers. Not like some of the villages she had passed through earlier in her journey. If there had been anything left alive that wasn’t a crow or a rat, she couldn’t have named it.
The thought made her close her eyes and hug her cloak tighter about her shoulders.
Looking left and right, she saw another of the stones.
There had been quite a few, these last few miles. Standing stones and old cromlechs were a common enough sight across the northern lands, but they were especially frequent hereabouts. She had passed already half-a-dozen clusters of tall, thin standing stones. They were always arranged in groups, each stone about as tall as a man, and often arranged in tight circles so that they looked conspiratorial, even in the fine, clear light. She was doing her best to forget the last few days. The chase by boggarts. The bloodied remains in the villages. Cag-Mag in her fire-lit, gloom-littered cave. The shadows taking her away. And the other thing that had happened. That was what she was trying to forget most of all.
She caught herself looking down and seeing that there was no shadow on the ground beside her. No companion to walk with her. The thought entered her mind. Herself. Her other self. The other one. The shadow.
She thought about ‘it’ without meaning to or wanting to–the part of her that had decided to get up from the ground, turn from shadow to flesh, walk to the door, and go out into the cold night air with him. The man in the chalk and ebony. The man with the long silvery hair and the beautiful, delicate face… and the eyes like illuminated puddles of moon-upon-water. She did her best not to think about it… but… and yet… think about it she did. Thoughts had run around and around in her head. Distracting. Worrying. Sometimes even verging on fantasising. Herself. Here. Now. Breathing. Thinking. The half that had been left behind–the flesh and blood part–that half couldn’t deny that going with the cold poet-king had its appeal.
She was lucky perhaps that only her shadow had decided to go with him. Who knows what might have happened otherwise. The thought, as usual, gave her a slight shiver that was awful and at the same time, somehow frighteningly enticing.
Until now, Caewen had been paying rather scant attention to the standing stones that dotted the fields and woodlands on either side of the road. She had assumed them to be abandoned relics of a forgotten religion until she noticed the stone with the flowers. The flash of colour caught her eye: red and gold in a heaped mass, and so she left the road and swished through the long, damp grass to take a look.
The stone was alone, which was somewhat unusual in itself, but it was otherwise much like the others she had passed… except that all about its base were heaps of a thick, frilly gold flower and a velvety red flower. She did not recognise either bloom, and could only guess that they were taken from some sheltered glade that still caught some of the sun’s warmth in the turning season. Perhaps that was the secret of why the butterflies were not all dead of starvation. She wondered if perhaps children might have left the yellow and red pile. Then she saw the rust-brown blood smears on the stone. She reached out to touch the stone, but started and stepped back when a voice came at her from the satchel at her side: “Tssssch. Don’t. No, no, don’t. These stones belong to something that thinks it owns this place. I can feel it, slumbering… dreaming. Tssch. Best not to wake it.”
“I see,” although in truth, she did not.
It certainly looked as if there had been blood stains on the stone… and there were also streaks, very much as if someone had scrubbed the stone to remove most of the blood. So, perhaps the flowers were left as some sort of cleansing ritual, after blood had been cleaned away. But why was there blood in the first place?
“Do you know what kingdoms lie this way, Fetch?”
“No. Why should I? Tssch. Never come this way in all my existence.”
“I suppose you wouldn’t have. What’s that?” She had spotted something else. Not very far away there was a greasy smudge of black. She walked over to it more gingerly. It was the remnants of a fire, but it did not look like a campfire. It looked more like a small pyre that had been allowed to burn down. At first there seemed to be nothing left of whatever had been burned. She tapped a boot toe into the ash and turned over a fragment of a deer antler. “Well that’s odd,” she said.
“Tsk. I’ve seen odder.”
“Like what?”
“Like once, I saw this young woman go kicking her foot into the remains of something that was clearly a bit of leftover ritual fire, and she was all alone and there were probably crazed hill-folk watching her from the bushes, and it felt very much as if she did not care for her life at all. Tssch. Like that.”
She looked around. Darkening woods. A road that stretched muddily in both directions. A few rotund sheep on a hillside, far enough away to look vaguely like grass-eating maggots. All was stillness. All was silence.
“We should keep moving,” she said.
“Tsh. You should, yes.”
She crossed the grass, leaving another wet, rank trail where she walked, and returned to the road, turning again eastward.
She drew her blue-and-green cloak tighter around her shoulders and ran a thumb up and down the length of her sword’s hilt. The shiver of the old sorcery weft within made her skin prick. And not for the first time, she wished that she hadn’t parted ways with her friends. But what had to be done, simply had to be done. Someone had to go south and bring warning of what was marching out of the north. So it was that Dapplegrim and Ode had gone that way. She would walk on her own road, find the Old Great Spell, and perhaps then… do what? Bring some semblance of peace to the world?
Perhaps.
Or perhaps it would all come to ash and cinders.
Who could say. She could not. At the very least, she could but try her best and see.