The Circle of Stone (Darkest Age) (7 page)

Elspeth had seen where he was looking. ‘He told me that little chain came from his father,’ she whispered to him. ‘It’s all he has left.’ And her eyes darkened with pain.

They moved off not long after sunrise, heading into the path of burned trees. Some still had branches attached at crazy angles; others had been stripped bare by the fire and stood like the spears of a ghostly army. Many others had fallen. The ground was covered in ash, rising in clouds around their feet at every step, and a haze hung in the air above them, blotting out the sky: there was no colour but grey. Elspeth kept close to the little boy, and Cathbar and Cluaran were talking in low voices. For the first time in days, Edmund found himself walking beside Eolande. The Fay woman paid him no attention, but to his astonishment he saw that her normally expressionless face
was full of sorrow. From time to time she held out a hand to one of the trees, touching its bark with the light caress of a mother afraid to wake a sleeping child.

‘Are they . . . will any of them grow back?’ he asked her, but Eolande just looked at him vaguely, as if his voice were no more than a bird-call.

The damage to the trees grew worse as they walked on. Soon, the stripped trunks became stubs no more than man-high; then low stumps, their tops smeared with white ash. Around their feet the ash was now ankle-deep. At the front of the party, Cluaran and Cathbar stopped.

‘This was no fire set by bandits, although they may have taken advantage of those that managed to escape,’ Cluaran said, pointing.

It was a hundred paces ahead of them, but clearly visible through the stumps: a great circle of blackness. The ash had piled like snow around its edges, drifting downwards into the pit with each breath of wind. It was wider than the black hole they had seen in Grufweld’s forest, and there were no stumps around it: the place had been a clearing when the fire hit it. The sad heaps of ashes within the circle gave way to charred wooden beams at the edge: this had once been a settlement.

Elspeth had come up beside him and stopped, her eyes wide with horror. Beside her, Wulf scuffed with his feet in the ash as if it were snow. Elspeth reached down to touch something among the blackened debris at the circle’s edge – then recoiled and turned away, grabbing at the child as she did so.

‘Come away, Wulf,’ she said, and her voice shook.

Edmund fought back sickness as he looked down. The thing Elspeth had seen was a charred human bone.

‘It’s still hot,’ Cathbar muttered. From the drifting ash around the pit, wisps of smoke rose into the cold air. ‘
He
did this; no question of it.’

Elspeth was standing at the edge of the clearing with her back to them, her shoulders shaking as she gripped the boy’s hand. Eolande stood beside them, rigid and stony-faced.

‘How many . . . ?’ Edmund could not get the words out. ‘How many people would have been here?’

‘Twenty, maybe,’ Cluaran said softly. ‘There’s space for a dozen huts, I’d say.’ He turned away. ‘It would have been quick,’ he muttered.

‘He must have come down as a fireball, and then . . .’ Cathbar looked around. ‘Where did he go then?’

No path had been smashed through the trees. The black, levelled stumps stretched around them in all directions, giving way to taller trunks in the far distance.

‘Edmund?’ Cluaran called – but Edmund was already searching: casting his mind around for any sign; any flicker of life. Nothing. Apart from themselves, it seemed that the whole forest was dead. He cast further, finding only a few small creatures hiding in deep burrows or fled into water. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘There’s nobody.’

Elspeth had come over to him again, the child trailing behind her. ‘We should look for Wulf’s parents,’ she said. She
bent down to the boy. ‘Wulf,’ she said, ‘can you remember anything about where your family was when the fire started?’

The boy thought. ‘There was a river,’ he said.

Edmund cast his eyes back to the creatures that had been looking at the water: a small bird, perching nervously on a clump of reeds; a vole or water rat, submerged to the nose, watching the bubbles and flecks of white ash as they floated past its whiskers. He opened his eyes.

‘It’s this way,’ he said.

They found a stream-bed first, dried to a channel of cracked mud. Further along the mud became sticky, interspersed with a few damp pebbles, but they had not yet reached water when they came to the remains.

There were two heaps of ash, at the stream’s edge, one of them covering a blackened end of wood that had recognisably been a plank. Edmund froze, as he spotted several teeth littering the ash piles. He also noticed that the ground was speckled with streaks and blobs of dull colour.

‘Metal,’ said Cluaran, kneeling to look at the blobs closely. ‘This might have been a brooch or ring: brass, with a blue stone. That long one could have been a knife: cheap ware, to have melted so easily.’ He stepped back. ‘They must have been here to trade with the forest dwellers,’ he said, ‘and the fire caught them before they could reach the river.’

Wulf was staring at the little heaps in silence. These must have been his father’s wares, Edmund thought, and wondered
at the child’s calmness. Elspeth moved close to Wulf as if trying to comfort him, but the boy did not move or cry: he seemed not to understand.

The trees at the stream’s edge were burned stubs as far as they could see. As they made their way along the channel again, every fallen trunk in the distance filled Edmund with dread – but they made no more sickening discoveries.

The mud in the stream-bed became sluggish liquid, then a trickle of water. The endless ash beneath their feet began to mix itself with brown earth . . . and then Cluaran stopped with an audible breath of relief, and Edmund followed his gaze upwards to see undamaged branches, already in bud, at the top of a blackened trunk. At the same moment, he heard the distant noise of water flowing over stone.

He found himself almost running as they followed the sound. And then it was ahead of them: a real river, not wide but deep; the trees on the far bank untouched by the fire.

It was Eolande who reached the water first. She had been walking at the back, so silently that Edmund had forgotten her, but at the sight of the river she gave a cry – the first sound they had heard from her in days – and rushed to kneel at the bank. She dipped her hands in the water and threw a shower of gleaming drops over her head and face. Edmund saw now that she was covered with a white film of ash – all of them were. Cluaran put a dusty hand on his mother’s shoulder.

‘Let’s follow it till we’re clear of this damnable ash; then we can all wash.’ The river-water made trails like tears down Eolande’s cheeks, but she looked up at him almost with a smile.

Edmund walked with Elspeth and Wulf along the river, under trees still in bud. Everyone’s spirits had lifted with the return of life around them.

They reached a bend where the river widened with a shallow beach on the outside bank, and gratefully stopped to wash. Wulf showed an unexpected modesty, wriggling away and blushing when Elspeth tried to help him take off his overshirt.

‘You’re a girl!’ he protested.

In the end, Elspeth and Eolande moved a little upriver to wash, and Edmund stayed with Wulf, along with Cluaran and Cathbar. The boy undressed readily enough once Elspeth had gone, but he wanted no help, and still seemed to avoid the others’ gaze. Glancing at him as they knelt at the water’s edge, Edmund was shocked to see a livid slash across the boy’s chest – a recently healed scar, dark red against his pale skin.

‘How did you do that?’ he blurted out. The boy ducked his head and covered his chest with his thin arms, and Edmund fell silent, rather abashed at having pried. But he could not help looking at Wulf with a new curiosity. Tough and self-possessed as he seemed to be, the child had clearly not had an easy life. Had an animal gored him?

They scrubbed the ash from their hair and skin, shivering in the cold, and jumped up and down on the bank to warm
themselves, banging their dusty clothes on tree trunks before putting them back on. With the grime removed, the boy looked less of a waif: still painfully thin, but strong and wiry, with a pale, freckled face and sharp blue eyes. His hair was drying out to a light red-gold, though it was still wild, and his clothes were beggarly. The rags around Wulf’s feet had been holding together the remains of shoes so thin that the leather was ripped under both soles. His overshirt, though wool, was so coarsely woven that the wind could blow through it: Edmund draped his own fur cloak over the boy’s shoulders, ashamed that he had not thought to do it before. Even the necklet that the boy so treasured was a cheap thing, made of iron, probably, and so short that it was more like a collar. But when Edmund touched the chain as he was fastening his cloak about Wulf’s neck, the boy squirmed away.

Wulf came back to let Edmund finish fixing the cloak; his pleasure in the well-made garment was obvious. When Elspeth and Eolande rejoined them, he was showing it off to Cathbar, lifting his feet carefully to keep its hem clear of the ground.

Elspeth looked at Edmund with shining eyes, putting a protective arm round the little boy.

‘That was good of you,’ she said.

They agreed to spend the night by the river, and head back to the road at daybreak and travel south again, towards Varde, where the other forest fire had been reported. It wasn’t much of a lead but it was all they had and they desperately needed
to pick up Loki’s trail again. ‘The goatherd on the road spoke of unrest and fighting in the south, too,’ Cluaran said, ‘and I’ll wager that’s a sign of Loki. It was always his way to set men against one another.’

The air was clear, and the low sun dazzled Edmund. The budding branches, and the blue sky above, put all of them in good spirits: even Eolande spoke a little.

Just before they reached the road, a change in the wind brought them a familiar, choking smell, and all conversation died.

Some freak gust had brought the forest fire to the very edge of the road. Suddenly they were walking through bare, blackened trunks again, and when they emerged on to the trodden dirt of the track, a gust of ash came out with them.

At the road’s edge, someone had set up a marker, carved out of wood so blackened that at first sight Edmund mistook it for a burned stump. It was large, almost Wulf’s height, and following the child as he ran to inspect it, Edmund saw that a design had been crudely carved into it and rubbed with something white – ash maybe – to make it stand out.

‘It’s a shrine, I think,’ Elspeth said. ‘Can you tell who it shows?’

‘Can’t you?’ Edmund asked, surprised. ‘It’s Christians who set up roadside shrines, isn’t it?’ His mother’s people marked sacred sites: springs, or ancient trees. He could not imagine any place less holy than the desolation they had just left.

‘We wouldn’t use burned wood!’ Elspeth’s tone was shocked. ‘And this is no saint’s picture.’

Edmund peered closer. ‘It must be a local god,’ he said. It was horribly appropriate here, he thought. The crude image showed a man’s head, narrow-eyed and grinning. Lines shot out all around the head, like a stylised image of the sun’s rays. And the hair and beard were shown as rows of sharp points, like teeth, or horns.

Or like flames.

Aagard shifted uncomfortably in his seat, watching the woman’s face across the carved wooden table.

‘They’re pursuing an enemy they cannot see, and with no certainty that they can fight him,’ he finished. ‘I’m sorry to bring such ill news.’

Branwen, Queen of Sussex, shook her head.

‘Not so ill,’ she said. ‘You tell me my son is alive and unhurt, when I’d feared he was dead.’ She gave him a wan smile. ‘I know my debt to you, Master Aagard. Beotrich told me it was you who saved Edmund when his ship was wrecked. Now you’ve restored him to me again.’

Aagard marvelled at the queen’s composure. He had written to her before, to give her the terrible news that her son had been taken by the dragon, but this was the first time he had seen her. With her brown hair and eyes she looked very little like her pale son; only in her quiet manner, and a certain cast of her head, was there a resemblance.

‘But you’ve not come here just to give me news of Edmund, have you?’ she said. ‘Welcome though it is.’

‘No,’ Aagard admitted. ‘King Beotrich is sending emissaries to all the kingdoms on this island.’ He drew a deep breath. ‘To warn you to prepare for war.’

Branwen listened as he told her the news they had received several days ago: tales of armed men rampaging through Daneland and Saxony, burning all in their path.

‘Beotrich sent scouts to Saxony to check the truth of the rumours. They met a stream of vagrants, many of them women and children, all driven from their homes. These people told the same story: bands of men had fallen on their villages without warning, destroying all that they found. They would arrive in a troop, the villagers said, and attack without any order given. Some said they sang as they marched towards them, and laughed as they killed.’

The queen’s eyes were wide with horror. ‘Armies of madmen . . .’ she whispered.

‘Armies driven by Loki,’ Aagard said. ‘In the time he has been free of his prison, he has spread his poison far and wide by being in many places at once. He draws men to him, and binds them with their own desires, to do his will. That was how he nearly escaped, a hundred years ago.’

‘And how he enslaved my brother,’ Branwen said softly. ‘Beotrich told me of that, as well.’ She blinked away tears. ‘And you think he’s sending an army here?’

‘I’m sure of it,’ he told her. ‘We know that some of these
men have reached the port towns and taken their ships. Already, we hear of attacks on the northern coast.’

‘But why here, when Loki was bound in the Snowlands?’

‘I cannot see into his mind,’ Aagard said. ‘But I can guess the shape of his thoughts. He knows that these kingdoms joined forces against him a hundred years ago, and that we still oppose him. He seeks revenge on us all.’

Branwen rose to her feet. ‘Then we must band together again to defeat him,’ she declared. ‘My husband, Heored, is in the north with most of his men, aiding his cousin of Northumbria against marauders from Gwynedd, a long-held enemy. I’ll send word to him of the growing threat. I know he’ll return as soon as he hears from me, and join our strength to yours.’