The Two Torcs
Authors: Debbie Viguie
Also by Debbie Viguié and James R. Tuck
Witchstones and Children’s Tears
Bitter Ashes Swirling to Earth
Also Available from Titan Books
Robin Hood: Mark of the Black Arrow
Robin Hood: Sovereign’s War
(August 2017)
ROBIN HOOD: DEMON’S BANE
THE TWO TORCS
Print edition ISBN: 9781783294381
Electronic edition ISBN: 9781783294398
Published by Titan Books
A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd
144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP
First edition: August 2016
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This is a work of fiction. Names, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2016 by Debbie Viguié and James R. Tuck. All Rights Reserved. Visit our website:
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No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
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To Ann Liotta, my oldest friend, I would battle demons with you any day.
–DV
Always to the Missus.
–JRT
The world had gone white.
Everything lay under a rime of hard frost, sheeted over with ice, slick and deadly, waiting to take down man and beast alike.
Even the heart of vast Sherwood lay locked in the grip of winter, only the mighty oaks stood unbent beneath a frozen burden. Limbs were bare against the dull sky, bushes and undergrowth pressed down by the weight of snow. The deer had stopped moving, stopped digging for food long gone. They retreated to hidden hollow and sad shelter, hunger-staved sides and jutting ribs shaking as they huddled together for what meager warmth they could make.
He stalked carefully, moving with barely a ripple through the low groaning of the trees. Stopping on a ridge he stood, looking down over a deep hollow in the earth. Even in the numb of the cold he could feel the life that shivered around him. His spirit felt larger than his body, as attuned to the mighty forest as the sun is attuned to the sky. He had come to hunt, to take a life to sustain others. His goal for the day was to see red spilled on white, to breathe the steam as his prey cooled. He had prepared to offer the life to God, a sacrifice of necessity.
But something was different.
He was transfixed, his body thrumming inside to the vibrations of the earth beneath the ancient wood.
Movement caught his eye, pulling him from the white.
A badger, skin loose from winter’s privation, shuffled up the hill toward him, low to the ground on stubby, curved legs.
Another movement broke the white. A covey of three foxes trotted from the other side of the valley, angling toward him, their lush fur brushing small icicles off shrubs with a soft tinkling sound. Foxes were hunters like him—they could move silently, creeping like shadows without a sign that they passed by, but these bounded like domesticated puppies.
A flurry of snow fell beside him. He looked to the source and found the limbs of the oak and ash above him crowded with small creatures. There were squirrels, rabbits, and dozens of birds from small sparrows to raptors the size of his chest. Over the ridge trundled a bear, shaggy and stumble-footed from hibernation cut short, but massive and mighty with claws the length of his palm.
His hand flew to the quiver on his back, fingers closing on the shaft of an arrow.
The black arrow.
His skin tingled and grew tight. Small muscles along his body began to twitch, and his mouth tasted like the morning smelled after a hard rain.
* * *
Once, when he was younger, first running through Sherwood, he’d been too inexperienced to read the signs of an oncoming storm through the canopy of the forest giants. Unaware until the forest turned black and water began to shower him, he was caught in a thunderstorm. At first he stayed in the wood, enjoying the warm summer rain that fell in runs and splashes through the branches and leaves of the trees, the power of the storm muted far above. Then he continued on to the edge of a field, one of the interior pockets of open sky and low grass.
From under the canopy of a massive oak he looked out at a sky as gray and solid as the blacksmith’s anvil. The expanse split with blasts of lightning so fierce they tore the clouds apart with white light. The rain in the opening pummeled the grass, flattening it and covering it with inches of water that fell too fast to be absorbed by the thirsty earth. Hail pounded down into the miniature lake, sent water flying back up, and he was reminded of the story of God’s almighty wrath against the Egyptians.
He didn’t know who the Egyptians were, but watching the storm, he could understand the concept of God’s wrath, terrible and beautiful at the same time.
The thunder that followed each lightning strike rolled against the full front of his body and he felt it in the marrow of his bones. Suddenly his teeth hurt in the back of his mouth and every hair on his pre-teen body stood on end. He began to move backwards, back into the forest, feeling as if the eye of the wrathful God had turned upon him.
Lightning struck the oak beside which he’d been standing.
The blast of it knocked him flat, his eyes scrubbed of the ability to see, and his ears closed with the concussion of the strike. He didn’t remember losing consciousness, but in what felt like an instant he opened his eyes. His muscles wouldn’t stop twitching under his skin, and the back of his mouth had that peculiar taste in it.
It felt like lightning had struck
him
.
* * *
It felt the same way now.
But different.
Similar.
Familiar.
He could sense the animals around him, one and all—not just see, but
sense
with all of his body. Each heart, from the ones the size of acorns to the mighty boulder of blood-pumping muscle inside the bear. Every one of them beat in time with his.
One by one, the creatures stopped in a ring on the hill below him, all of them looking up at him. Predator stood beside prey, the white steam of their breaths collecting and combining to make a ring of fog.
His hand fell away from the arrow, not pulling it from the quiver, but the connection remained.
He turned to his left and found the King of the Forest there.
The stag towered over him, looking into the distance, crown of antler threatening to tangle in the branches. The mantle of fur over the stag’s back glistened with hoarfrost, glittering in even the low winter sun, as if he were not just the King of Sherwood but also the Lord of Winter itself. As if he were an elemental, a primordial guardian of the wood.
He was close enough to lay his hand on its flank.
The animal turned its head, staring at him with an implacable eye the color of midnight. He fell into that eye, his spirit—the one that had felt so large just moments ago—tumbling like a child taking its first steps. He was overwhelmed. His nostrils filled with the musk of the forest, the pungency of life that made his head swim. The stag’s heartbeat thundered through him, bouncing the bottoms of his boots on the hard snow beneath them.
Then the thunder calmed and settled, less the roar of the waterfall and more the rush of the river. Beyond the circle of lives below him on the hill, he could feel all the life in Sherwood. It pressed his skin, insistent as it penetrated him with the unknowable mystery of Creation itself.
Unable to withstand even another minute he turned and walked back down the ridge, the feeling fading with each step, yet etched in his memory.
“I hate this cursed place.”
Will turned in his saddle to face the speaker. Doing so meant he had to adjust the rapier strapped to his hip, tugging the hilt back to clear the sheathed blade from the quilted cloak he had wrapped around him, but he hated talking to someone without looking at them.
Even if he despised that someone.
“Do you hate it because you think it cursed,” Will asked, “or do you think it cursed because of your hatred for it?”
The merchant on his own horse didn’t look over. Between scarf and cap, his eyes zigged and zagged in their sockets, trying to take in every limb on every tree that arched overhead. He was a soft man, not fat, but cushioned by a life of comfort and ease without work. The type of man who eagerly exercised someone else’s power. Always an underling, an overseer, a lapdog but not a lackey.
He snarled, and it made the soft flesh of his face jiggle.
“You watch that sharp tongue of yours, Will Scarlet, else it gets cut out of your head. You know as well as I do that Sherwood is haunted.” He closed one eye and spat on the ground, an old ward against evil, then crossed himself. “And worse,” he added.
Will looked at the canopy above them. Interwoven branches of oak, hawthorn, and ash screened against the weak winter sunlight, diffusing it into a verdant haze that darkened the closer to the ground it fell. Off the road the forest became near night, twilighting away to pockets of pure dark.
