Chapter Ten

“Six days she has lain like this. So still. No sign that she feels any pain.”

Curlew’s father spoke the words quietly and revealed little emotion, yet Curlew felt the storm inside him, so intense he could virtually taste it.

Since his arrival at their hermitage early this morning, Gareth had looked at him but once—all his attention remained fastened on the woman who lay like an effigy on a coffin.

Now he whispered, “Is she not beautiful?”

She was. Curlew firmly believed his mother, Linnet Champion, to be the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Now she lay stretched on the pallet his parents had once shared, her eyes closed, her face serene, and her hair flowing about her like a brown veil. Her hands, which Curlew had all his life seen moving, ever moving in compassionate deeds—healing the sick, uplifting her children, or giving a loving caress in passing to the man who stood beside him—were at last still, folded on her breast. Curlew thought that hit him hardest of all, made this impossibility seem real.

He looked from her to his father. What must he be feeling? These two had always been connected so deeply they often did not even need to speak words aloud. Ma had always said with a radiant smile that their hearts spoke together instead.

How long could his father last without that, without her? Already he looked honed, his tall, slender body whittled down somehow, and his handsome face drawn. Aye, and his hair still made a smooth, shining cap on his head—more silver than gold now, true. But the look in his gray eyes, so like Curlew’s own, made Curlew ache.

’Twas not fair. This man had given his life in service to the people of Sherwood, to his family, to the magic of the forest itself. He did not deserve this blow.

Curlew said, hushed, “You cannot reach her, Pa?”

“I cannot. Lark and Falcon could not, though they formed a circle and drew down enough power to fell these trees, so I thought.” Gareth glanced at the great beeches, oaks, and ash trees that surrounded them like sentinels before his gaze quickly returned to his wife. “They said she is there but distant—held from us.”

“Held by whom?”

Gareth gave a grim smile. “Sherwood. Safe, but kept.”

Sherwood gives. Sherwood takes much. How many times had Curlew heard those words in his youth? He sometimes thought he had been weaned on them.

Gareth tipped his shining head as if listening to something. Curlew was not sure he believed in angels—were they not a construct of the Church, like hellfire and eternal punishment? But if they did exist, he thought they must look like his father at that moment—otherworldly, righteous, and strong.

Gareth said almost lightly, “You know, I have seen Falcon weep more than once over the years—when your aunt Lark gave birth to that stillborn babe, when we lost so many to the cold that harsh winter, even when a beloved tree came down. Falcon has a loving heart. Do you know, lad, how many times I have seen your aunt Lark weep? Yet they sat together and wept like terrified children when they could not pull her back for you, for me.”

Emotion clutched at Curlew’s heart, so tight it ached. If the other two thirds of the circle could not rescue her, what could? Only the love of this man beside him.

But he would have already tried, and tried again.

“Pa,” he whispered around the pain that possessed him, “what does this mean? What, for the guardianship of Sherwood?”

Gareth shook his head. “I do not know. Lark and Falcon do not seem to know. Both have prayed on it. A day and a night they stayed here, praying. As I say, they raised a fearsome magic. It was not enough.”

“She still lives.” Curlew asserted it like a demand. But for how long?

“Aye, there is that. So long as she lives—even thus—the circle and the protection stand. I keep thinking she might just awaken in her beauty, as she has done every morning, in my arms.”

The pain that held Curlew’s heart increased. All his life had he wished for a great love like that his parents shared, in total devotion to one another. This, then, was a glimpse of the other side of it, devastation beyond imagining.

He said, though he did not want to, because he must, “Six days, you say—she will need food, water. What of that?”

“No food has passed her lips. I have dribbled water between them. I cannot tell if she swallows it. But you know what the water of Sherwood is.”

Curlew did. It had healing properties, magical ones. Yet could a few drops sustain a woman and keep her alive?

And if she died...

Curlew swiftly shut that thought away. He would not entertain it, would not contemplate it. For her death would mean that of this man beside him, and of the triad, as well. All personal grief aside, he and Heron were not ready to take their places.

His father’s voice interrupted the dire thoughts. “I wondered if you would try.”

“Eh?”

Gareth reached out and grasped Curlew’s hand. “Son, you were conceived here in the magic of this place. Even before your birth we were told you would be the most important person ever born in Sherwood. Perhaps you are the one who can catch hold of her and call her back.”

Tears blurred Curlew’s vision. Aye, such tales had been told of him before his birth. But what had come of them? He had grown well and strong, yet with nothing extraordinary about him save the ability to hit a target with great precision, an uncanny sense of the forest, and a penchant for mischief that often caused more trouble than otherwise. It was Heron who possessed all the important gifts, the talents, the otherworldly grandeur.

Curlew came to this armed with only love. And much as he might adore his mother, if love alone could call her back she would have answered that of this man beside him. Yet he would try, of course he would try. He nodded.

He lowered himself to the ground beside his mother, reached out, and took her hands in his. Aye, he loved his mother’s hands, quick and gentle, that never so much as once struck one of her children in anger. How fortunate they had been to have such a woman for mother! He would gladly lay his life down now for her and his father.

He bowed his head over his mother’s hands, closed his eyes and began to pray. He called upon the things he loved best—the trees that arched above him like a living roof, the water that carried always promise and memory, the deep loam, and the light, the eternal light. He felt something come alive in him, take hold, and flare bright. His heart opened like a new shoot in spring.

“Mother?”

Never had he called her that she had not answered. Her soft voice and reassuring touch when evil dreams found him in the night, as they sometimes did, leaving him convinced he lay wounded and bleeding in the forest, struck to the heart. And the time when the boar caught him and he could not get up the tree fast enough, when everyone thought he would lose his leg. When he lay parched with fever his tenth winter—always, always she came.

Could she fail to answer him now?

What ties lay deep, twined and tangled, between a mother and her son? He hauled deliberately on them now and located her essence—a mere spark of radiance.

Gladness uplifted him. Aye, she was here, not gone from them yet. But so far, so very far away.

Come back to us. I need you, all of us do. Father needs you.

No response. Her flame burned very low but steady, not affected by a breath of wind. Curlew focused himself and reached for her still more intentionally.

He saw what she saw: green leaves dancing overhead, dawning, birds darting through the light in bright shards of color. Flames on a winter hearth, throwing warmth, safety, and comfort. The flash of silver in his father’s eyes and the smile Gareth Champion kept for her alone. Himself as a child, lying in her arms, the future in his eyes.

Blessed child.

She was not alone where her spirit lay. Others gathered round her, some he knew and some he did not. A few he had met, in spirit form, on his own journeys through Sherwood—the great man wearing the sheepskin who, he knew, was his grandfather Sparrow, now deceased, and the woman as ever at his side—she who had Aunt Lark’s golden eyes—his grandmother, Wren. And a man with a thick, tawny mane, one with a bristling, brown beard, another with a lion’s head of hair.

They all looked to him. He felt rather than heard their message: You cannot linger here. You are needed. Your time approaches.

Send her back with me, he appealed to them. We cannot go on without her. He cannot.

Remind him he is never truly apart from her, not here in Sherwood.

Please.

Go and play your part, Lord of Sherwood. Uphold the circle.

I cannot. We cannot. We are missing the third of our number.

She comes.

She comes.

She comes!

They thrust him away from them, out of that deep and silent place back into the light of the autumn morning. It rushed in upon him with its scents of damp earth and dying leaves, the much-loved essence of Sherwood itself. His mother’s hands were still clutched in his, and she still lay like a carved effigy of herself.

He turned his head and met the gaze of the man who crouched beside him. “I could not bring her, Pa. She is not alone. A host of other spirits hold her. They said to remind you she is here with you always.”

His father bent his head and wept like a man heartbroken.

“Aye,” Curlew whispered, “it is little enough comfort now.”