Wildwood (31 page)

Slowly Michael managed to crawl out from under the steaming chestnut bulk. He was clutching his hand to his side as he sat up, and blood was seeping out into the white wool of his jumper like a scarlet poppy blooming. There was blood on one of Bull Peter’s horns, sticky and glistening, blood all the way down to the base. Michael tried to get to his feet but sat back down with a bump, staring around wildly. He looked down at his hand and made a little noise of disbelief. Finally he looked over at me. It was only then that he noticed that I was holding the grimoire.

‘Avril?’

Bull Peter spasmed, a groan issuing from his lips. Michael lifted the gun again and pulled the trigger in a single reflex motion, but the hammer fell on an empty chamber with a snap. Michael’s chest was heaving as he scrabbled away across the bare earth, but he needn’t have worried, the changeling did not move again.

When he looked up at me his eyes were bright, his voice razor-edged. ‘Give me the book, Avril.’

‘Avril,’ groaned Ash, ‘run. Run!’

I didn’t do either. I took a step backwards, towards the Green Man’s oak. The look of panic that shot across the faces of the two magicians was identical. Michael pointed the gun at Ash but his wrist was trembling and his heart was not in the bluff.

‘You’re out of bullets,’ I croaked. My heart was trying to climb out of my throat.

‘Avril, for God’s sake, run!’

‘Avril, listen to me.’ Michael heaved himself onto his knees, jamming his hand against the seeping hole beneath his ribs as
hard
as he could. A little blood spilt out from his lower lip. ‘Give me the book. I will give you anything you want if I have the book. Anything. You have no idea what it makes possible.’

‘Don’t listen to him.’

‘I can save the rainforests, Avril. Would you like that? I can make the Amazon a no-go area for loggers and trappers. I can save the redwoods and the Taiga and the orang-utans in Borneo. I can sink every whaling vessel on the planet in its harbour. I can turn back global warming, for God’s sake! Isn’t that worth it?’

I stared at him, tears running down my cheeks. I could feel the split in the ancient trunk yawning at my back like a slavering mouth. I could feel the guilt of Bull Peter’s death clawing at my belly. I could feel my instinctive longing to believe Michael; to believe that I mattered to him, that he could be honourable, that there was more to him than power and charm and good looks. I wanted to believe that he deserved what I felt for him – feelings that were in their own way as elemental and irreducible as were my feelings for Ash.

‘Just give me the book, Avril. We can do it together.’

‘Yes,’ I said sadly, ‘and all I’d have to do is trust you.’

Turning, I flung the grimoire into gaping fissure, down into the dark. There was just time enough for me to hear both men scream ‘
No!
’ in unison before the tree exploded.

The blast engulfed us. For the briefest moment I felt shards of wood and splinters of corroded bronze punching through my flesh, and then I was suspended in a place where the power of the Green Man roared through me like a tide, invading every orifice, boiling the flesh from my bones. I lost my body altogether, swept away in the flood of atavistic memory. I was a bee swarm, a hundred thousand butterflies rising on crumpled wings made of soul silk, a blizzard of dust motes caught in the sunlight and turned to gold. I was a swan maiden tumbling
in
a gale over a black loch; I was Pan ravishing the moon; I was Culhwch in wild pursuit of the boar Twrch Trwyth; I was Meroudys returning joyfully to the arms of King Orfeo; I was Black Annis cutting the throats of children with my famine knife. They rode through me, all of them, a host of fallen angels, a wild hunt.

Then the storm dropped me. When I finally returned to my self I was on hands and knees on the woodland floor and I was facing, where once there’d been a huge dead oak stump, a shallow crater scooped from the raw earth. The light was no longer gold. The sun must have risen above the mist and the stripped trunks of the ruined yews, blasted clean of foliage, stood out black against the grey vapour. It was chilly.

I ran my hand down my torso, seeking blood. There were no wounds though my clothes were in tatters, no protruding splinters, not so much as a scratch on me. I felt shaky but unhurt.

Looking around me the first thing I saw was Ash, who’d been thrown back against a tree and lay with head and one shoulder shoved up against the base, the rest of his body buried in rotted leaf litter and torn up moss. I crawled over to him and nearly knelt on his hand, limp in the dirt. When I picked it up there were shreds of a silk scarf still knotted around his wrist. Then his fingers closed around mine and he reached up with his other arm to touch me, and in a moment we were clinging together and he’d taken my face in his hands and kissed me. I wrapped my arms round him and we hugged the breath out of one another, frantic with relief that we were both still alive. When I pulled away it was to examine his arm. The bandage and tourniquet had worked loose, but there was only a crust of dried blood on his arm and no hole. ‘You’re OK?’

‘Yes. You? You’re sure?’

Further round the clearing something stirred. I turned just
in
time to see Michael rise unsteadily to his feet. His clothes were shredded too. He lifted the unravelled edge of the jumper to check the skin on his left side; the puncture wound had disappeared. It was only then that I noticed that so had the body of my poor Bull Peter. I knelt up straighter, my heart thumping. Michael blinked, let the piece of fabric drop from his fingers and met my gaze. I think it was at this moment that Ash really remembered; his hands moved from my arms to close about my wrists. For a moment there was dead silence.

‘Avril …’ said Ash, painfully.

‘Do you have any idea what you’ve done?’ demanded Michael.

I pulled out of Ash’s grasp and stood.

‘You’ve let them out.’ Michael’s voice was jagged with emotion he was trying to keep under control. ‘All the dreams and the nightmares of an island that’s been sleeping for sixteen hundred years: you went and let them out, Avril.
Why
?’

I heard it all in that word: the anger; the fear; the awe. I set my jaw. ‘Because I had a choice.’

They both stared. Then Michael took a pace towards me and Ash scrambled to his feet, moving to my side. There wasn’t any real call for it; I knew that I’d no need to fear Michael any more. But I liked the feel of his hand on my shoulder. Right at that moment it seemed to be the only thing connecting me to the earth.

‘Too late, Deverick,’ said Ash. ‘Too late for that.’

Michael’s eyes flashed but he halted.

‘This isn’t your wood,’ Ash added. ‘And not your world any more either, I think. Things are going to be tough for you.’

‘I’ll adapt,’ Michael growled. His gaze dismissed Ash and returned hotly to me. ‘That was your decision, was it? Well, let’s hope you can live with the consequences, Avril.’

I couldn’t answer.

‘And you’d better hope you picked the right man.’ For a moment something bleaker than anger burnt in his eyes. ‘That he can keep you safe long enough for you to learn how to handle your wonderful new world.’

‘She’ll learn.’ Ash took my hand and turned it over, displaying my palm on his, his long fingers haloing mine. ‘Can’t you feel it? She was there. Ground zero. She’s part of it now.’

‘What’s going to happen?’ I asked, looking from one to the other.

‘Oh, don’t you know?’ Michael asked.

I turned to Ash. His expression was hardly kinder than Michael’s but he held his peace.

‘Don’t bother asking him,’ Michael rasped. ‘He doesn’t actually know. And I don’t either. You’ve gone and changed everything, Avril.
Everything
. The world isn’t going to be the same from now on. Nor are we.’

‘I know that.’ I had to whisper because of the lump in my throat. Somewhere in the woods the first blackbird had started to sing, already forgetting the oppressive presence of the Green Man and the explosive resurgence of legend, living in the now.

Michael shook his head and turned away, too overcome to find words. He ran his hands through his hair. I watched Ash lift my fingers to his lips and it seemed to me that he was not only giving reassurance but seeking it too. I laid my head against his shoulder, trying to soothe my hammering heart, grateful for the arm he slipped around me. Beyond the soft everyday sounds of the wood there were others I could hear, others less familiar. Singing as if of a distant choir, and the winding of a hunting horn, and – in the distance – the beat of impossibly mighty wings.

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Black Lace ebooks contain sexual fantasies.
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First published in 2008 by
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Copyright © Janine Ashbless 2008

The right of Janine Ashbless to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

The poem that Ash quotes from in Chapter 6 is ‘Lights Out’ by Edward Thomas (1878–1917)

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental
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