Nettle Blackthorn and the Three Wicked Sisters (20 page)

“
I need to talk to your Aunt.”

Nettle’s brows furrowed,
Jazz’s mum?
“Aunt Mae?”

“
No,” Fred shook his head. “Aunt Thistle.”

Nettle
blinked, utterly astonished. “Mum’s sister?” She remembered meeting
her Aunt only a few times at the cottage when she was a child. She
had a vague impression of long blonde hair, knotted and
twisted.

“
I let Willoughby go on purpose. He was your Aunt’s. I’d hoped
by now he’d have flown back with a message from her.” He glanced at
Nettle. The colour of her eyes were an inky black in the candle’s
flickering flame.

Why
is Dad so worried? Hang on, what did he say about
Willoughby?
He belongs to her… He let Willoughby go on purpose…
“Dad, does Aunt
Thistle live in the Wilds?”

“
Yes.” But he didn’t elaborate further.

“
Oh.” She supposed she’d never really thought of her mother’s
family coming from the Wilds as well. “Do others, like us, live in
the Wilds?”

“
Not many, but a few.”

Nettle could
tell by his tone, he was worried. “Has something happened to Aunt
Thistle?”

“
I don’t know,” he said quietly. “I hope not.”

Bram leaned
forward, his golden brows quirking curiously. “What’s so important,
why do you need to talk to her?”

Nettle eyed
her father keenly. He looked like he was on the verge of saying
something further. But in the end, he returned her gaze and said
nothing.

Fred almost said aloud,
“Because you’re turning
13.
” But
caught himself in time. For a long moment he was silent, watching
his daughter study him.
How could he explain all of this to her?
He wasn’t equipped
to. He never had been the kind of person who was good with words.
Carving wood was what he was good at. He ran his fingernails
against his thigh, back and forth, agitated. Briar was supposed to
be the one sitting beside her, telling her everything was going to
be alright. This was a mess. A worrying, uneasy, sticky,
mess.

He finally
broke the silence with a sunny smile and a light-hearted tone he
didn’t feel. “Come on you lot, it’s late and everyone’s tired. Off
to bed.” He rose and ushered them out of the kitchen. The cousins
reluctantly left for bed and Fred took vigil on the porch with only
the fireflies and his troubled thoughts to keep him company.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

The
Copse

It was late the next morning and Nettle was on a kind-of
fieldtrip with her father. He had walked her about the house,
pointing out all the things to help keep the pesky faerie at bay if
they discovered any more intruders - in every room he’d filled a
wicker basket full of iron in the form of fire-pokers, horse shoes,
old-fashioned irons and frying pans, while a string of bells and
rowan twigs bound with pungent rosemary hung in the living room
above the front door - and now they were making their way back from
the stream that surrounded the property and shielded the cottage
from
faerie-sight
, Fred had explained.

It had been a
long night for her father, and yet again, no contact from Aunt
Thistle. He’d fallen asleep only a few hours before dawn when he
couldn’t keep his eyes open any longer. The aroma of black coffee
and hot buttered toast had awoken him as Nettle approached with
breakfast mid-morning. They’d made another pot to take with them in
travel mugs on what she’d thought of as her educational tour.

A cracking noise startled Nettle. Of course, just about
every noise she heard this morning made her jump or spin around in
fright, her heart racing.
What was that? Where?
She scanned the Forgotten Wilds and
the dark depths within. She couldn’t help the goose-bumps
prickling, or the way her heartbeat skittered. After yesterday’s
revelation, the trees seemed more misshapen and black and sinister;
every noise, every breath of wind, every flittering shadow, had her
on edge.

“
Just a squirrel,” said her Dad with a lopsided grin and a
wink. “Come on, relax.” And he nudged her with a shoulder. She
frowned at him, it was easy for him to say, not so easy for her to
do. She’d lain awake for hours last night, mulling over what her
father had revealed, with more and more questions buzzing around
her head like a thick blanket of flies. So while they’d been
out-and-about Nettle asked about the Thicket, which is what she had
come to call the wall of thorns. “Well,” she said, trying to pry
apart the knot of questions. “Jazz said it blocked the path through
the Wilds.”

He nodded, taking a sip of coffee. “It’s always been there,
a great wall of thorns, completely surrounding the Forgotten Wilds.
Nothing can get through, and I think more importantly,
nothing…
almost nothing
,” he corrected, “Can get out.”

Nettle looked askance at him.
Almost nothing…
that piece of information was a
little disquieting. “What’s beyond the Thicket?”

Fred shrugged, looking over his shoulder and into the
Wilds. “I don’t really know for sure.” Nettle shrewdly narrowed her
eyes, watching him glance away.
He does know what’s behind the Thicket but
for some reason isn’t willing to say. Whatever it is, it can’t be
good.
He
looked back at her, and added, “I’ve never been beyond the
Thicket.” She could tell her father was being honest about
that.

They had
walked halfway down the drive. Crisp dead leaves crunched beneath
Nettle’s muddied boots. While her father carried on talking, she
kept half an ear out for odd sounds. She still wasn’t comfortable
with this strange new world she found herself in.

“
Your grandfather shared tales with me and your Aunt Mae of
life beyond the Thicket. I don’t know how much is true, they were
much like faerie tales-”

“
Except round here, faerie tales are true,” interrupted Nettle
wryly.

He gave a grim
grin. “True enough. We grew up on tales of goblins and ysar, Good
Folk and Kin-Folk and faerie. Squabbles amongst families, sisters
cursed into sows, queens eating pies made of fattened naughty
children, all of that sort of thing.”

Those stories
sounded a lot darker than the Hans Christian Andersen tales she
grew up on. On their journey to the forked stream earlier that
morning, her father had explained about life outside the Thicket,
inhabited by mainly faerie – spriggans, pixies, treenawts, sylphs,
imps and brownies - more bothersome than dangerous, and more like
the faerie of Hans Christian Andersen. Nothing too bad, just
childish pranks and lessons learnt. But Good Folk and Kin-Folk were
new to her. “Good Folk? Isn’t that another word for faerie?”

“
Not in this case. Good Folk are people like us who live
within the Forgotten Wilds. This cottage was never originally
within the Wilds but over the centuries it’s been swallowed up like
many others.”

Nettle tucked
a lock of black hair behind an ear, a grin spreading across her
face. It felt good to belong and to be named. “So we’re Good Folk
then?”

He shook his
head as if he half-agreed with her, but not wholly. Yet did not
explain himself.

“
And Kin-Folk?” she asked her smile fading, wondering why he
hadn’t agreed.

He
pushed his glasses back to the bridge of his nose. “Your
grandfather explained them to be witches and warlocks. The
creatures not quite faerie and those above.”

Nettle rolled
a mouthful of coffee around in her mouth, savouring the warmth and
burnt richness before swallowing. “Above? Like Royalty? Do you mean
the goblins and ysar?” Her Dad hadn’t gone into who the goblins and
ysar were.

“
Exactly.” Fred said jabbing a finger in the air like an
excited professor in mid-lecture. “They consider themselves the
nobility of the Forgotten Wilds.”

Nettle
remembered something he’d said last night. Her hawkish nose
crinkled thoughtfully, “Didn’t you say something like, they had
more power than anyone should rightfully own?”

“
Magic.” He simply stated. “Well, to you and I, it’s magic. To
them it’s just another sensory ability, as natural as
breathing.”

“Magic…”
Nettle breathed in awe, her mind spinning through the tales
she had read as a child, of wishes granted and children flying
through the air. “What kind of magic?”

“
Depends on their bloodline. The magic varies. Some wield
influence, and can make you believe whatever they want; some hold
power over the elements, such as fire, water, air and earth; and a
very few have true abilities of a very powerful and potentially
dangerous kind.”

“
Have you ever met one of them?” She glanced at her father and
tensed. He was worrying his bottom lip with his teeth.

“
A ysar?” Her father shook his head slowly, taking a long sip
of coffee. “No.” His voice caught as he said it.

Nettle’s brow furrowed, and she gave him a prickly
stare,
he’s
lying. He has met one of them
.

Her father
changed the subject, passing his travel mug from hand to hand,
picking up his pace. “When I was a little older than you, I did
something a little foolish by attempting to circumnavigate the
Thicket.”

Nettle’s eyebrows quickly rose and her eyes sparkled as the
idea of adventuring within the Wilds took hold, supplanting his
dishonesty.
If Dad could do it, surely I can too.
Fred turned back with a hard
look as if he’d heard her thoughts. “Don’t get any ideas,” he said,
knowing her only too well. Nettle gave a good natured pout. “I
didn’t get very far before getting myself into a sticky situation.”
He shuddered. “I’d stopped to pick some mushrooms when a
grenick-vine grabbed hold of me.”

Nettle cocked
her head to the side, “Grenick-vine?”

“
Similar to ivy, but it has little prickles up its stems and
has a thirst for blood.”

Nettle looked
upward at the rampant ivy choking an ash tree and pulled her jacket
around her more snugly. Traipsing around in the Wilds was soon
losing its appeal.

“
Luckily, your grandfather was nearby and rescued me before I
was bound as tight as a mummy and sucked just as dry.”

A raucous
belch interrupted the serenity. Fred gave a rankled twitch and
heaved a sigh.

Nettle’s long
dark hair whipped around as she glanced about herself. “What was
that?” Her heart had started pounding erratically again.

“
Who, is more appropriate.” Fred grinned at Nettle’s perplexed
expression. “Come along,” he urged, and his stride got longer and
quicker. “You may as well meet them.”

They had reached the front yard of the cottage and left the
driveway behind. Nettle felt a little safer being back on their
property, with the Wilds kept a comfortable distance away by the
rickety picket fence. While she followed her father, Nettle’s
thoughts shuffling through their conversations on the Wilds and its
inhabitants and why her father hadn’t answered truthfully. Just how
did her grandfather know so much about the Thicket? And that’s when
Nettle began to wonder that perhaps her father hadn’t been
referring to
his
father, perhaps he’d been talking about Briar’s.

Fred led her
to one of the boulders that he’d wrangled into place, into a circle
about the properties perimeter. Every one of them had sprouted
black brambles, their height now well over Nettle’s head. The
branches had grown gnarly with sharply curled thorns and had
twisted together, reaching for its neighbours, but not as yet
intertwining.

Her father
stopped in front of the boulder she’d seen him having difficulty
wrangling into place. It sat in the earth like a half buried
walnut, and was a wrinkled russet colour. With its masses of
branches sprouting on top, it reminded Nettle of those little troll
pencils, except on a gigantic scale.

“
This, is Burban,” her father introduced.

Burban blinked, opening large tawny eyes, and yawned,
“
Ahh-hmm
. What do you want, waking me like?”

Nettle leapt backwards into her father, almost yelping. The
hairs on the nape of her neck bristled. She knew her father had
said they could talk, but it was another thing to be faced with a
talking boulder. Or really, was an
enormous seed
perhaps a more accurate
description?

Fred steadied
her as Burban smacked his lips together, and then seeing them both
before him, scowled. “I was enjoying a nice stroll while you lot
were gone.” His voice was low and gravelly. “Don’t know why you
bothered to come back. Another three years and I’d have disappeared
into the yonder.”

“
It can talk…” whispered Nettle.

“
This one’s smart. I like her,” said Burban sarcastically.
“Course we can talk, girl. How else are we going to warn you of
intruders?”

Nettle turned
to her father, her face pale. “It can talk…” she repeated.

Fred winked at her, squeezing her shoulders comfortingly.
“Yes, they
can
talk.” And she knew by the way he said it, he meant
they
sure-can-talk.
He nodded toward either side of Burban, the
boulders awakening. “This is Krinsky, Dodkan, Winger.” He leaned in
to whisper in her ear, “Can’t remember the rest of their names, but
don’t let on, else we’ll never hear the end of it."