The Herald of Autumn (Echoes of the Untold Age Book 1) Page 4

  My brow furrowed. I needed to be careful here.

  Such a tale could be useful, Jillian. Could make a greater boon twice-fair. While I couldn’t Tell myself stories—for any who did was certainly damned, a fool, or human-born—I could easily ride along on Jillian’s words. Whereas the Old Man and I had sparred, Jillian and I could sing together.

  If I had time.

  The fetch circled the tree, huffing its great, hollow, terrible breath. Still, it could not reach me for the spruce itself confounded the creature.

  Jillian began with no seeming concern.

  It was the greatest storm in two-hundred years. The sky-folke had gone to war with the hidden people, such a great confrontation that the very forest could fall in its wake.

  Her words echoed in my mind, a secret history of the wood that none but her knew.

  Thunder raged against mountain, yet neither one gave way. Rain attempted to wash away stone but to no avail. Finally, the sky-folke struck upon a secret plan. They would use rune and guile to craft a new weapon to burn the forest to ash and stone.

  Her words shaped the world that drifted around us in the mist and darkness of night. The fetch still circled methodically, trying to reach me, an impossible task. I slid ’round and ’round the trunk while the spruce shifted her boughs between us.

  Yet the hidden ones, the forest-dwellers, had many friends, and one of them was the tiny sprite, Noeme, whom we shelter and keep. She came to us, whispering the diabolical plans of the sky-folke, and we were afraid. We realized that one of us would have to stand out, would have to step forward and protect us all. From the entire wood, among the ancient oaks and the lithe elms, I was chosen. All that stood there honored my strength. I went three days and nights without tasting the wind, fasting from sun and water. I spoke with dryad and nymph, and all bore their secrets to me. When my mind grew clear, I stood forth, ready to die for my people.

  Her Telling rang true now. I felt it, cool wind on my skin. The sky-folke laughed—

  The sky-folke laughed when they saw me, so young and small. They knew their weapon would destroy me, and they sought to make me into an example, to weave fear among the hidden-people. They drew back their fearsome arms. With thunder riding the wind, they hurled their sky-fire.

  I saw it all; clear as the moon at night.

  Lightning tore through the air, tore into me. My body was rent in the limb you now hold. It burned me.

  I felt Jillian’s grin, almost feral in wild victory. Elation coursed through me. She had been strong—

  Yet I was strong. The voice of the First Mother flowed through me. I had fasted from wind and sun and rain until my mind was pristine. I caught and held their sky-fire.

  Right here she stopped in the long pause that all Tellings require. Lost to the world, I drifted on her whispered words. My fears of the scrabbling fetch and Old Man Coyote became wisps, less substantial than her story.

  Her Telling was all that mattered.

  I held the fire all this time, Tommy. Held it so it would never—

  Never be used against her people again. Held it here, waiting, until one day—

  —until one day I knew someone would come, someone with a need.

  I felt it in my hand. The sharp branch held lightning, held sky-fire. She couldn’t have known—

  I didn’t know when someone would come or what their need would be, but I held it here, a secret behind my heart. I held it for you, these long years, so you could place rest to yon fell shadow.

  Almost as if on cue, the thing roared again. I grinned at the empty, unknowing face of the fetch. In my hand, the spear felt light, its tip glowing, dropping small sparks to the ground. Mad glee tore through me, fear banished to the far corner of my heart. I could scarcely feel where the creature had rent me open.

  Wind sang through the old spruce.

  The hunt was on.

  6

  I wefted my way through the old spruce boughs, ever staying just beyond the emaciated reach of the shamble-man. It drew slow, wet breaths as it stalked me, relentless. Hunger poured from its eyes like madness and ichor.

  The sky thundered. A single drop of autumn rain fell.

  Safe in the spruce, I led the thing ’round the tree until the shrouded moon cast over my shoulder.

  Behind me loomed the same mud-slicked hill we had both slid down before. This time, however, I knew that hill and knew where it would try to tarry me. Casting a smile at the shadowed monster, I hurled myself backward, out of the spruce’s bower.

  Two quick leaps placed me partway up the hill.

  The fetch had whispered its nature to me as we danced around the old spruce. Devoid of anything beyond feckless hunger, its most obvious flaw made my task simpler. If it possessed the slightest bit of cunning, it could have reached me, working its way through the spruce bower. Its relentless hunger had not paid off without a mind to guide it.

  The naked corpse shambled along in the dirt, but the twisted thing within him was all that was real. The creature hung in my dreaming eye, a splinter in my mind. I could see its horror, like a faint echo, over and around this poor man.

  Patient and merciless, it keened at me again with that dim, mindless hunger.

  So I stood on that yellowed hill, the cloud-cast moon tracing pale fingers across my nakedness like a lover. The fetch canted its head at me and then did the only thing it knew, the only thing it could possibly do. With a steady, inevitable lope, it worked its way around the tree and made straight for me. No thought, no premeditation.

  Seven strides away.

  At four strides, I could hear its wet, hungry breath.

  At three, I could smell fetid darkness, the rotting of everything wholesome and fair.

  It reached for me when it was two strides away, its long, double-jointed arms all angles and talons.

  With its near foot coming down, right into the center of the mud-slick, I dropped low and spun. The blunt end of my spear whipped around me, sailing directly for its other, stable knee. Quicker than quick I connected, snapping the knee to the side. I struck just as the near foot came down into the mud. The all-too-human bone shattered with a loud crack. The thing fell straight down into the sludge.

  It did not scream but just heaved that wet, rattling breath. Its head slowly turned toward me, those vacant eyes still cascading with darkness and flame. Its right arm snaked forward, all sharp, ravenous fury.

  I dove out of its reach, ending in a crouch.

  My golden eyes met its hollow gaze, faint in the clouded moonlight.

  With inexorable determination, it began to drag itself forward, panting.

  I had guessed that it would not stop, would never stop. If I wished, I could easily be off and away. It would take hours, maybe days for the thing to catch me with a shattered knee. That, however, was out of the question.

  The Old Man had called me right. “So, later, when yeh’re all wild and free, all rearin’ to hunt what ails the world....” Such righteousness formed part of autumn, part of what I was. This thing had no place in our world, never had. Its existence encompassed a miasma of darkened dreams. What had once been a man now formed one of the world’s sorrows.

  My purpose was to hunt it.

  A thought crept forward in my mind, like some great sleeping thing, troubled. Is this why Old Man Coyote had beckoned me here? I shook it away. That didn’t matter just now.

  It wriggled up the hill, dragging itself with those bent arms and its one good leg. The mud-slick yet slowed it, but the creature showed no dismay. Its purpose had not changed. It remained utterly implacable.

  For one mortal-born or lacking the sight, what happened next must have seemed cruel, almost savage. If Molly strolled over the rise, she would see me take a running start and leap toward an old, crippled man. She would watch, no doubt with horror, as I plunged my primitive spear into the old man’s head.

  The truth was far more complex.

  The creature attempted to strike at me even as I came down upon it.


  I bore the spear down with all my weight, feeling the heat and fury of the sky-fire trapped within. As the spear thrust through its open mouth, it pierced the back of the abomination’s throat. Suddenly, blazing fury flashed across the night, seen only by my dreaming eye.

  The spear burst through the back of the dead man’s head. The lightning born of Telling and ancient storms burned its way through the shadowed monster. Its keening howl rose into a rending scream as I bore down on the spear, twisting through the back of the dead man’s skull.

  Then, silence.

  The twisted creature faded from the shadows behind my mind. The dead man’s eyes twitched. I stepped back with a start, my heart pounding.

  But I’d thought...

  He had been dead.

  I tried to wrest the spear free. On the third yank, the spear pulled loose, and the man’s head sank back.

  Spiders born of nightmare erupted from the fatal wound as well as the corpse’s mouth, nose, and eyes. Tiny, twisted things, malformed and broken, swarmed over him. They had made the eyes twitch. The things gnawed their way through his flesh, pouring out onto the ground.

  I stood, horrified, transfixed.

  This thing had not been a fetch; it was nothing born of my kind.

  I stumbled backward as the corpse continued to twitch and writhe. It brimmed with the abominations. The leaves rustled as they skittered away from the body.

  Toward me.

  My spear was spent. Regardless, it would have been useless against the swarm of tiny creatures.

  I leapt back to the top of the hill and then peered down into the hollow. The moon still played go-seek, hiding within the thick clouds. Rain hung in the air but refused to fall.

  I listened close to the ground, expecting to catch the rustling as they came for me.

  Nothing.

  The moon shone for an instant. My hunter’s eyes could see the ground again. The body had stopped twitching, and the corpse appeared empty.

  I saw nothing else, no sign of the twisted, many-legged horrors, as if they had never been there at all.

  I crept down the hill, listening. Nothing but wind and distant thunder.

  Now, the corpse certainly was dead. I prodded its flesh with a stick, shocked to see bits crumble away, little more than dust.

  Relief.

  Unlike a fetch, this pile of motes would call no attention to itself after the rain.

  I hated that this blasphemous thing had died so close to one of Jillian’s trees. I walked over to the spruce, reaching out with my whispering heart.

  Are you still there? I slew the creature. It—I felt for her, remembering her petulance, the feel of her grin, her constant teasing…

  Nothing.

  She was gone.

  I don’t know how much you still hear, Jillian. Simply know your boon was well made.

  I sighed as the wind rustled the spruce’s massive boughs.

  I was alone again.

  Like almost all of my kind, Jillian slept longer and longer, lying deep in a strange torpor, the true cause of which we might never know. Fewer and fewer of us awoke in these shadowed times. Our greatest seers had no explanation, not even guesses at the cause. We spoke in guarded whispers of a day when we would never again awaken.

  We were waning. We had been waning for so long. I fought hard to remember the world that was and who we had been. Jillian, Garret Oak-bones, Rimewing Marta, even Poor Wil Nightingale. I missed them all.

  And Hraefn. I missed Hraefn the most.

  May we meet on far shores, Jillian.

  I rested my hand on her spruce. The phrase meant so many things: a wish to live while one could, a wish to taste life. It held a hope that if we slept here, perhaps we would awaken elsewhere, in a land not overtaken with slaughtered faith and rotten imaginings.

  The Untold Age drew nigh.

  I waited for a moment, silently begging to feel her still here, any small whisper of her. The deepest places within me yearned for any touchstone with my kind.

  With home.

  “On far shores, Tommy.” I spoke the response to the familiar phrase aloud, just so I could hear it. My breath trailed mist in the dampening night.

  “May we meet and dwell there ever after.”

  7

  By the time I found where the creature had first attacked me, the mist turned to drizzle. In near total darkness, lit only by the flashes of lightning, I cast about in the small clearing for that particularly well-made fetish.

  Here.

  I reached for it, plucking the leather from the muddy earth. It was so small. Ordinary. I turned the pouch over in my hand, feeling the siren’s call of home and safety still spinning forth from it. It hit me right behind my heart after feeling Jillian slip away into sleep.

  I had been fooling myself.

  When I first found it, I wondered who had crafted such a glam-filled trinket, a natural response. I was no longer used to thinking of others of my kind. With no spider-filled corpse lumbering in my steps, the truth became obvious. Only the Old Man could have crafted a Dreaming such as this. As my kindred slept, no others as strong as he or I would be anywhere near.

  It was crafted just for me, designed to strike the weakest point of my heart.

  The Old Man had placed this strange little talis out here for a reason. He must not want me to be in this part of the wood.

  I had to find him.

  Judging by the cloud-covered sky, I still had a few hours before the sun came up.

  When the moon peeked through the mist and damp, I noted my steps remained where I had scuffed the forest floor upon entering the clearing. The rain hadn’t washed everything away yet, but it would soon. I found where I had run between the trees and where the creature had chased me. While we had fought, I had become turned around, but if I had kept on in the same direction—

  This way.

  I sprinted through the chilly rain, still feeling the forest shudder around me with gleanings of red-leaved autumn. My breath came in ragged bursts of mist after ten minutes; after twenty, I stopped in confusion.

  Whatever the Old Man was protecting, it wouldn’t be so far from his talis. I backtracked my steps slowly, peering in every direction.

  It was so cunningly hidden that I almost missed it again.

  Perhaps a hunting lodge from a century ago, the building rotted where it sat, with the roof caved in at three different places. The dilapidated porch sagged. The door hung askew on one hinge, open.

  But as I got closer, woven Dreamings began murmuring. I crept toward the place, relaxing my eyes into the sight. If something were here…

  “Boy, do yeh not own any pants?”

  I whirled at his voice, coming up from behind me.

  I hadn’t heard him, hadn’t even felt him approach. He was simply upon me.

  That was terrifying.

  He chuckled. “’Course yeh don’t, I know that. Yeh surprise me, ’tis all. I ’spected yeh to spend yer night coyin’ yer way into the bed of some sweet doe.” Old Man Coyote stopped while mirth crept into his eyes, looking at my wet, naked form. He was trying not to laugh. “Do I need killin’ that bad, son? Couldn’t take time to get some clothes like proper folk?” Steel and ice shone in his grin.

  “You beckoned me here, Old Man. You used my Name, called it to the four gates of the world. I have right to anger.” I paused.

  He nodded at me thoughtfully.

  “I did at that, Tommy. It was rude. I’m shocked my own self. Would yeh accept my hospitality? Say, till sunup?”

  I glanced wordlessly at the sky. He could claim the sun hadn’t come up at all if it kept raining like this. Still, hospitality meant something.

  “Your Oath then? No harm or intent to harm?”

  He looked at me, narrow-eyed. “I may-could do. You don’t exactly look like much of a hard case, just now, all wet and nekkid.”

  I just glared at him, saying nothing.

  Lightning flashed as he spoke.

  “Fine
then. Tommy Maple, to you I Oath.” He sunk some of his secret power, his Telling, into the words. They rung in my ears, echoed off the stones and trees. “Until the sun does rise, on autumn’s first day, I oath not to hurt or harm, nor to lie to thee or thine.” The last three words were sarcastic, phrased as the fey would. “Not lest yeh come ’gainst me or intend me harm, or seek any manner of wickedness on me.”

  Thunder punctuated his Oath.

  I was certain that the rumbling sky was a coincidence. Still, his words rang with power and ancient pacts. Since our people had first met when the Norse crossed the sea, there had been Oaths and promises. This was a long tradition with much honour and custom.

  Of course, our wars had traditions just as long. The First People and the Fey Kith ever found ourselves at odds. The First Wars were terrifying things of dreams, glamours, and moon-spun spells. Though steeped in blood and death, the mortals had created better alliances with one another than we had.

  “I accept.” I met his gaze, tracing my own Telling into the words. “I accept your hospitality and honour it. I will give all respect due from one who is a guest.”

  He grinned. “Splendid, Tommy. Just splendid.”

  I knew then that he had me somehow, by something said or unsaid. I went back over his words, looking for a double meaning. He walked closer, toward the building. With the next bolt of lightning, I saw an old musket under his long coat and rabbits slung over his back. He walked past me and stepped up onto the rickety porch, pulling the door shut. He mumbled something, then pulled the door again, swinging it the opposite direction.

  It swung oddly, somehow cantways to the rest of the lodge, and opened on somewhere else entirely. From what I could see, the interior of the lodge was richly decorated, hanging with trophies and furs. A roaring fire cheerily blazed from within.

  “After you.” He was all smiles now.