It was a busy year for us after the first few, inactive months. A month into autumn another warden disappeared, spreading a nasty taste of fear through the forest. It occurred to me for the first time that Kendra’s disappearance hadn’t been an isolated incident, and that if other wardens could disappear, then Akiva could, too.
The disturbances alone weren’t what made the year busy, however. Some way into winter, Akiva began receiving midnight guests: mysterious figures that were crabbed and oddly shaped beneath their winter furs. Sometimes I was allowed out of my room to fetch and carry or be stared and prodded at, but other nights Akiva shut and locked my door; at times with a word of explanation, more often without. It seemed as if the days were too short to hold all the necessary tasks, and it was often late into the night by the time I was tucked in bed, reading the little red book I had discovered in the library. Since I could by now raise a reasonably proficient witchlight, this was not the eye-straining task it would once have been, and the only thing that really troubled me was the lack of sleep. I didn’t dare to read the book at any other time: I had learnt by now that it was not a very nice little book, and I very much doubted that Akiva would be happy to find me reading it. The author seemed to enjoy his subject with a macabre blood lust that reminded me of Cassandra, and there were many pages that I skipped over with a grimace of disgust and a hope never to meet the author in the dark of deep forest. It appalled me to learn that a simple curse was one of the easiest forms of magic to perform, easier even than my pitiful little witchlight. The curses in the book ranged from the simplest spoken curses to more elaborate, webbed constructs that required several speaking parts, each at its own time. The methods for breaking each curse were different, and it was borne in on me that I might not be able to help Bastian until I knew which kind of curse had been pronounced on him. The thing that worried me the most was the fact that curses were not meant to be broken. The author of the book expended much time and much relish explaining this, and it occurred to me for the first time that I had been uncommonly fortunate to have broken the first part of Bastian’s curse at all.
All in all I found myself sickened with the little red book, and one night halfway through winter I threw it down on my bed with a grimace of distaste.
Akiva had been relentless that day, sending me into the forest for fresh supplies of hardy winter herbs that I’d picked only the day before, and with my other duties unabated I was too tired to have the patience to sift through the bad in the book just to find the good.
Yet for all my weariness I didn’t seem to be able to sleep: so instead, I crawled out of bed and went to the window, wrapping myself in a warm shawl as I went. Ever since the dragon fever I hadn’t needed shoes even in the dead of winter, but the cold still seemed to seep into my back and neck. My witchlight hung above me, glinting a reflection in the window, below which I could see my face, pale and more serious than usual. Through the bedroom door I heard the faint clink of Akiva’s tea mug being set down on the little table beside her chair, so I quit the window seat and padded out into the fire-warmed room, glad to know I wasn’t alone in my insomnia.
When I wandered into the warm circle of orange light there was a cup of tea waiting for me. Akiva smirked at me and said: “Can’t sleep either, eh? You can help me shuck these toktok pods.”
I settled down beside her chair and reached a hand into the bowl for one of the brown, hairy pods. Only Akiva would think of turning a few sleepless hours into work, but I was too pleasantly warm to really object. The toktok pods were tough and wiry, and the task of shucking them involved cracking them open slightly, flicking the kernel out with one finger, and then snatching the finger away to avoid being nipped when the pod sprang shut again. Sometimes it was hard to tell if a pod had been harvested yet. It was a task that required some concentration to avoid bruised fingers, and with my mind fuddled by the warmth of the fire and the hotness of tea in my belly, I began to find myself more often with nipped fingers than toktok kernels.
I wasn’t aware that I’d fallen asleep until I woke up, curled around the half-shucked bowl of toktok pods. A murmur of voices rose and fell in the background, and I opened my eyes sleepily, aware that though one of the voices was Akiva’s, the other voices were unknown and strange. Bright colours danced blurrily in the kitchen beside Akiva’s grey form, and I blinked again to clear the clouds of sleep from my eyes. Voices spoke, quick and foreign, and my vision cleared enough to see what the midnight visitors looked like. They were small, quick and colourful; little brown men with long, fat, oddly stiff rolls of hair protruding from bright, baggy caps that were sprinkled with snow. Two of them had threaded beads and pebbles into their round, matted tresses, and tied the bunch in a huge, stiff knot beneath their caps, but the third wore his loose and threaded with feathers. They all smelled rather peculiar, just like Bastian had at first: evidently they hadn’t bathed in some time. They were crowded around the kitchen table as Akiva cut a small portion of something that looked like cheese. Their small brown faces were sharp and acquisitive, and one even went so far as to lick his full brown lips longingly. The one with feathers in his hair had his fingers curled around the edge of the tabletop, his nose twitching and sniffing just above table level, and his fingers flexed in a way that suggested, had it been anyone but Akiva, he would have snatched up the hunk of cheese and made off with it.
I watched them through my lashes, and a small smile curled my lips. My recent reading told me that they were gnomes, little folk who spent their days in perpetual summer forest, barefoot and chasing leaves. I had longed to meet them since I first learned of their existence, but I didn’t dare move for fear that Akiva would send me away if she knew I’d woken. I watched through my lashes until business was concluded and the visitors gone, then allowed Akiva to shake me properly awake and shoo me off to bed.
A peremptory rap on my door woke me early the next morning. I tumbled out of bed, bright-eyed and bubbling with leftover excitement, and opened the door to a grim-faced Akiva.
“David’s missing,” she said shortly, and flung her hood around my shoulders. I looked up at her familiar, worn face hungrily, suddenly afraid that one day she might not come home either. David was the fourth warden to inexplicably disappear, and the third this year.
“You should have your hood,” I said, my chin mulish.
Akiva slapped my hands away from the strings when I tried to untie them, and my chin was no match for her. “Don’t be silly, Rose. I have more than one way of slipping through wardships.”
Though her voice was harsh, she patted my head briefly, and it occurred to me that Akiva – Akiva! – was worried. She took herself off, her front apron pocket bulging slightly with bits and pieces of miscellany from around the house, and I watch her go with a chin tilted higher when I realised that my eyes were suspiciously wet.
The paths remained for only a few moments after Akiva left. Then they silently melted into the snow, and the cold forest closed in on me, bringing an air of deep silence to the cottage. I went about my chores in that silence, followed by the two green deer, who had gone very wide-eyed and were inclined to follow me even into the house, scattering icicles from their thick winter coats. The snow hadn’t bothered them at all, but they seemed to be able to taste the unease in the air. They would crowd close at my heels, treading on each other’s delicate hoofs, and then leap away in fright whenever their hides touched. It irritated me but I bore with it: it would have been cruel to shout at them when they were so frightened. Even the salamander stayed close, curled about my neck with its natural heat toned down to a more tolerable warmth. The closeness made me realise how much I missed Bastian: the instinctive feeling of certainty when he stood by my side, and the warmth of his furry body when I leaned into his flank.
I ran around the boundaries as fast as I could that night, feeling the wind cold at my back and the vastness of the forest in its pathlessness. Now that I was used to deep forest the lack of paths didn’t confuse me, but their absence was a constant nagging loss in the back of my mind. They were like old, familiar signposts that had become so much a part of the scenery that they were not noticed until they fell down and left a hole in the familiarity of the road.
When I returned at last to the safety of home, Akiva was at her workbench, looking very busy and irritable. Her workbench was overflowing with mixed leafy and dry ingredients, some of which were familiar, but most of which were not, spilling out between the peach branches. She was frowning and crushing something in her biggest mortar, jabbing short and sharp with the pestle, but when she saw me her face brightened.
“There you are! Quick, child: find a feather – blue if possible – and get me a small pebble.”
A tingle of excitement sparkled in my stomach. “Did you find David?”
“Yes. But I need an ingredient, and I need bargaining chips for some little friends of mine.”
“Is it the gnomes?”
Akiva looked exasperated. “I might have known! Feather, rock, and then explanations!”
I ran off in great glee. A weight seemed to have lifted from my shoulders knowing that David was safe, and I had wanted badly to meet the gnomes for myself.
There was a deeply blue-black feather on my windowsill that I had been saving to make a pen of. I snatched it up without a pang and darted out into the garden to find a pebble. The salamander followed me out, mischievously charring the doorframe as it went, and since I knew that it was very capable of walking through the house without burning chunks out of the floor, I concluded that this was the salamander’s way of protesting my neglect of it over the last month or two. Perhaps I shouldn’t have encouraged it to hang about my neck this morning. I had been so busy learning, and Akiva teaching, that we had had little time to spare for petting or talking to it. It had become more and more sullen as the days passed.
Akiva glared at it and the singing smell stopped, but when we were out of her sight the door mat burst into tiny, exuberant flames. Its humour much improved, it sidled off sideways into the blackberry bushes. I let it go and gazed about me with my hands on my hips.
To my left the salamander gave off a faint, pearly glow that made the bush around it luminesce. I could see faintly around me, but I didn’t have to see to know that there were hundreds of pebbles in the garden. Speckled and plain pebbles, black brown and white pebbles. None that I could picture in the eager grasp of that colourful little man, while he cooed over it in pleasure. It had to be something special for a gnome.
I opened up my sight to the full glowing glory of the forest lines. The salamander’s bush was a node of pulsing energy and there was a misty patch of green where the two deer were sleeping. The rest of the garden looked just as it had always looked: lively, with its patches of colour and variety, but without anything to interest a gnome. I searched again, this time following each thread until it met with another. Then I saw it, almost hidden within the glowing pearl that was the salamander: a smaller, more moonlike luminescence. It was the very thing I was looking for: smooth, oval, and milky white, glowing with moonshine.
“Aha!” I said aloud, and gleefully burrowed into the blackberry patch in search of the salamander. Some minutes later; hot, dusty and rather badly scratched, I realised that Akiva’s garden beds, like everything else in the forest, were bigger inside than out. I scowled into the depths of the berry patch, and gathered the forest lines in both hands, pulling the section of blackberry determinedly toward myself. Dark branches rushed toward me, and I flinched but went on pulling. In a moment the salamander winked into sight, looking startled and slightly offended. For an instant we stared at each other, then the salamander uncurled and took itself off further into the bushes, leaving the pebble to me. In the waning of the salamander’s white heat the luminescence of the pebble faded and it became a simple white stone. I held it for some time, unsure, but when I closed my eyes I could still see the moonlight in it amidst the glitter of forest lines. I tucked it into my apron pocket where it made a small, oddly heavy bulge, and backed out of the bushes.
“Show me,” Akiva demanded, as soon as I stepped into the house. I held out the feather and rock for her inspection, and she nodded briefly with what seemed to be relief. “Very good. Now listen carefully, child. There’s an old, banded tree stump in deep forest not far from the creek: you’ll know it when you see it. Take the feather and the pebble, and find it.”
I nodded, biting my lips to stop the questions that were bubbling on the tip of my tongue. I had a feeling that if I spoke out of turn again, Akiva would box my ears.
“Put the calling cards on the top of the stump and turn once, clockwise,” she said. “Touch one thread for each pole of the compass, and call out the name of the gnome you want at each one. Call for Hari, or Marj if Hari doesn’t come. Repeat that back to me.”
I did so, at high speed and in one breath, prancing on the balls of my feet. Akiva gave me a Look.
“I need a distilment of fine-graded blueroot: do not under any circumstances allow the gnome to take the pebble or feather until you’ve seen that it’s true blueroot. They are very polite and very sly, and if they can take the payment without giving the items, they will do so. True blueroot will be unmistakable: there’s no blue like it. Don’t bring me back anything else.”
The tree stump wasn’t where it ought to have been. I knew the spot well enough: it was a wide, grassy glade just past the rock where I washed the clothes, clear and sunny in the daylight but now cool and mysterious by moonlight. The glade was still there, white and pure in winter, but the stump was not. I glared at the empty space that should have been filled with tree stump. Akiva needed the blueroot now, and I didn’t appreciate the forest playing its little tricks off on me. So I drew in the power of the wardship, figuratively stepping on Akiva’s toes a little, and pulled the stump to myself just as I had done to the bushes in the garden. It came reluctantly, and I had the feeling that the forest had wanted to play. I ignored its injured consciousness and drew the stump back to the glade firmly, the forest sulky but willing enough to help once it understood that I wouldn’t put up with the nonsense tonight. I put the things out on the stump just as Akiva had told me to do, sweeping the snow away first, and called Hari to me.
Dizzy from the spinning, I didn’t at first notice the small brown hand with its creeping fingers. When I did, I slapped one hand over the feather and stone, nipping his questing fingers along with them.
“Ah, pretty leddy, pretty leddy; you is too quick fo’ me!” said a little lopsided voice, disarmingly. It was my favourite gnome from the night before, the one with feathers threaded through his dreadlocks. Insensibly, my fingers lost their tight grip on the feather and stone, and I realised in mingled fascination and indignation that I could be very easily beguiled into giving Hari the items out of hand. I put out my chin and stared at him, searching for the enchantment that he had spun, cobweb-like, around himself. It took only a moment to find it: it was bound up in his voice.
“Cleva, cleva leddy,” he crooned, and even knowing about the enchantment, I still felt the pull of his voice.
“You stop that!” I told him, but he only grinned up at me and held up a gold coin between thumb and forefinger.
“For the beautiful leddy I have gold.”
“No gold,” I said firmly, feeling the added bargaining edge to his colourful voice. “I want blueroot, and only blueroot.”
“Ah, blueroot. Verra, verra valu-able,” Hari said, his voice weaving up and down, and his eyes crafty. “Not for these few, liddle tings.”
I shrugged, and held the moonstone up to the moonlight as he had done with the coin, between thumb and forefinger. A shaft of moonlight beamed palely down and the stone was transformed into the glowing pearly orb that I had first seen, its glow reflecting smoothly on Hari’s face and the small white teeth that showed through parted lips. In the shadow it cast, the feather seemed to be a pinion; dark, midnight blue and strong.
Hari’s fingers twitched involuntarily. He swallowed, and pulled a vial from inside his shapeless, striped shirt, his eyes still on the moonstone.
I examined the deep blue liquid through clear glass, my hand still firmly curled around the items. I scowled at him. “That isn’t blueroot.”
He grinned, unoffended. “How did the pretty leddy know?”
“I want real blueroot,” I said, pulling my hand out of reach of his clinging fingers. I had been fairly certain that Hari’s first offer would be a false one, and I wanted to make sure that this time he would give me the real thing for fear of my pretended knowledge.
Hari tossed another vial to me, this one crystal instead of glass, and I found that I was holding true blueroot, with no uncertainty about it. Akiva was right, there wasn’t any blue like it. Not sea, nor sky: not even sapphire.
I passed my two items to Hari, who said cheerfully: “We do business again, yes,” and disappeared with his treasure clutched to his chest. I ran home to Akiva, breathless with triumph and excitement, and presented my bottle. She didn’t thank me, but her nod was approving and that was satisfaction enough.
We walked out by the main path. When I asked Akiva about it, she said softly: “The less we travel in deep forest for the time being, the better. The attacker has shown an alarming knowledge of deep forest, and I can only assume he or she is watching us all. I believe David will remain safer if people think he’s dead. When we’re in the forest speak softly or not at all about our business.”
I nodded soberly and kept my mouth closed for the rest of the journey. Somehow I wasn’t really surprised when Akiva turned in at my mother’s gate and opened the door without preamble. Mother was the sensible choice if Akiva wanted to be discreet.
Mother was washing indoors, a thing I had never seen her do before, but when I saw the bloodied water and the watered-down stains on her apron, I understood it.
“No change,” Mother said, and I thought Akiva looked relieved rather than otherwise. “Gwen’s watching him.”
“I’ll bring Rose’s things around later,” Akiva said. Mother nodded, and I realised a little indignantly that I was expected to remain with David. “Come, Rose; I need your help.”
David was in Father’s study, laid on the bed from our guest room and wedged snugly between the big old writing desk and grandma’s sewing cabinet. Father’s room was a good choice: the guest room faced the road, whereas Father’s study backed onto the open hills, with windows that were shielded by three large evergreens. It would be difficult for anyone to catch sight of David there.
Close to, I could see that David wasn’t as young as my dream had led me to believe. In sleep or coma his face was relaxed and untroubled, but there were creases about his eyes and a deepness to the line of his cheeks that suggested he was perhaps only a few years younger than Mother. The serenity of his face puzzled me: somehow I’d expected terror or pain to be etched into his features. The attack, while bloody, must have been very sudden and short. I wondered if he’d seen it coming, and the first doubts as to the attacker being Cassandra filtered slowly into my subconscious. I felt uneasily that Cassandra would have played with her victims before finishing them, and it left me with the frightening knowledge that the choice was now between the remaining six wardens, all of whom had appeared perfectly sane and reasonable. Somehow I’d been more comfortable thinking that of course it must be Cassandra.
“Poor boy,” Mother said compassionately. She stood in the doorway drying her hands on her apron and adding to the bloodstains on it.
“Margot, take his head if you please,” said Akiva. “Rose, his hands. Hold them fast.”
Mother sat on the bed at David’s head, smoothing back the long strands of hair that were beginning to curl, her hands competent and gentle. I took a firm hold on his wrists and leaned my weight a little forward, ready to apply pressure if need be.
Akiva uncorked her small vial of potion and said: “Steady now,” as she tilted the bottle over David’s mouth. Black liquid flowed smoothly out, a little more quickly than honey but by no means as quickly as hot tea, and David spasmed as it hit his tongue. Mother’s hands, which had been gently stroking his brow, fastened with vice-like strength around his head, and I had to lean all my weight on David’s wrists to prevent his thrashing from knocking the bottle out of Akiva’s hands. He struggled, but we held him tight until every last drop of the black liquid was swallowed and Akiva nodded at us to step back. David’s eyes had opened during the struggle, and now he stared at the ceiling with huge black irises that were horrible in their sightlessness, insensible to the world.
Akiva straightened with a groan and restored the empty bottle to her satchel.
“That’s all I can do for now. Rose, you’ll remain here until he wakes: I have some forest business that can’t be delayed. You will need to draw wards every night while he sleeps.”
Mother’s eyes flew to me, startled, but I only nodded.
Akiva said: “Well, Margot; what could I do when she was stumbling over every mythic in the forest? Not to mention Cassandra. She’s safer knowing these things.”
Mother looked rather grim. “Very well, but I wish to know more of Cassandra. And of Bastian. Rose is young and heedless, and the young man doesn’t sound like the kind of person I would wish her to know.”
“We will talk downstairs,” said Akiva, nodding.
The stairs were wood, and through the faint lines running in them, I heard snatches of conversation.
Akiva said: “I’ve scared him off for the time being, but I can’t protect Rose from him forever. He has some claim on her.”
“Because she helped him? I think not.”
“He has one chance,” Akiva said softly; and despite the sternness with which she treated him, she sounded as if she felt sorry for Bastian. “And he has waited a very long time: Cassandra’s vendetta has spanned some decades.”
Their voices faded away as they moved into the stone-paved kitchen, and I wrinkled my nose in annoyance. Bastian, I had always been certain, was hiding several things from me: it was annoying to find that both Mother and Akiva were doing so also.
David didn’t recover consciousness that week. He lay silent and barely breathing, his eyes still black-irised and staring uselessly at the ceiling until Mother closed them. I walked a boundary around the house and gardens each night, feeling an odd sort of power drawing in around the house, and was charmed to realise that here at least, I would always be warden. It was like my own, small version of the forest.
Akiva returned in due course with my trunk, and I found that she had packed a great many books in with my clothes, all of which I was adjured to read. I went through them eagerly that night, picking out the interesting ones and putting aside the more ordinary ones for later. Gwendolen tripped in blithely as I was sorting through them by David’s bedside, looking unusually studious with a fat little book in her own hand. She looked over my books and wrinkled her nose fastidiously.
“Oh, how boring, Rose! What a dull life you must have with Akiva!”
I gave her a scornful look, and snatched at her own volume. “What’s this, Gwen? Going in for a course of serious study?”
Gwendolen tried to snatch it back, flushing, but I held it out of reach.
“Rose! Give it back!”
“Shush!” I adjured her, looking pointedly at David. Gwendolen shushed, but looked pleadingly at me, so I took pity on her and tossed it back.
“Does Mother know you’re reading The Black Knight?”
Gwen put her nose in the air. “There is nothing remotely improper in it,” she informed me coldly. “It is only a romance.”
And in spite of my teasing, she read it aloud to David during the day. Fortunately, David’s haggard good looks had appealed to her sense of the romantic, and she was happy to take her turn watching him when Mother and I didn’t have the time to spare.
Akiva came by every few days, hobbling in to poke David’s shoulder and then grunt in annoyance when he didn’t wake. She twice forced more of the blueroot potion down his throat and returned at last, at the beginning of the new week, with two huge black crow feathers.
“This has gone on quite long enough,” she told the unresponsive David. “Your stubbornness will be your undoing, young man.”
She set the feathers alight with a click of her fingers, and held the grossly smoking things beneath David’s nose. He coughed and weakly protested with meaningless mumbles, but his irises shrank almost immediately until the grey of his eyes could be seen once more.
“That’s better,” Akiva said approvingly. “Wake up, man!”
David groaned and coughed again, wrackingly. “Go away, you evil old woman. Stop haunting my sleep.”
Gwendolen and I snickered into our hands, and even Mother fought a smile as Akiva glared at David.
“Show some gratitude, David McAvee! Sit up and tell me what happened to you.”
The grey eyes studied her warily. “I don’t know who you are. Have you kidnapped me?”
Akiva’s eyebrows snapped together, and she sat back on her heels. “Hm, I didn’t expect this. Do you remember who you are?”
“I was looking for someone,” David said jerkily. “I don’t– remember.”
I watched in horrified fascination as a tear slid down his cheek, following the deep line in his cheek.
Mother said sharply: “That’s enough. Out, all of you!”
Even Akiva did as she was told, and we left Mother alone with David. Gwendolen looked distinctly tearful on David’s behalf, but Akiva’s back was stiff with annoyance as she marched down the stairs ahead of us. I left Gwendolen hovering uselessly in the kitchen and followed Akiva out into the garden, where she was glaring with ferocity into the bright winter morning.
“Do you think he was looking for Kendra?” I asked her warily, quite prepared to be told to go away.
But Akiva only sighed. “I very much suspect so: I found him outside the forest entirely. He may have confronted someone.”
“And so the kidnapper had to kill him,” I finished darkly, forgetting for a moment that this wasn’t an adventure story.
“Whoever it was didn’t try to kill him: the forest would have intervened even that far out.”
“If it was a warden,” I added helpfully.
She looked at me sharply then nodded. “If it was a warden. There was a curse crawling all over David when I found him, a nasty slippery thing that was very well put together. If it’s not a warden, it’s a very strong, logical magic user.”
“What was the curse supposed to do?”
“I don’t know.” Akiva looked as if she were annoyed with herself. “I had to dismantle it before I could find out what it was meant to do. However, whoever cursed David doesn’t know that we have him safe, and I would like to keep it that way until we know a little more; or at least until his memory comes back.”
“I’ve drawn wards every night,” I said quietly, feeling sobered.
“Good, good,” Akiva murmured distractedly. She was not looking at me: she was looking to her left, where the forest stretched out, bleak and barren with the winter. “Continue to do so. Run along now.”
I did as I was told and went back into the house. By late morning Akiva had vanished into the forest and I found myself still at home with Mother and Gwendolen, almost as if nothing had ever changed.
We told people that David was Father’s brother, addled from the northern wars. Everyone was kind and understanding, and he was drawn into our circle easily. Thankfully there were no dancing parties at that time of year, and I could spend most nights sitting before the fire with Mother and David while Gwen sewed frocks for the coming spring and dreamed of conquests with a bewitching smile on her cherry lips.
David continued all winter without recovering his memory. I played chess with him of an evening, and sometimes with Gilbert, who turned up with startling regularity along with Gwendolen’s hangers-on. I found myself glad of his company, and when David was disinclined to talk to anyone but Mother, Gilbert and I would quite often walk along the borders of the forest. I missed the sound and the feel of the forest, but more especially of deep forest. As we walked I could always feel the pull of it, yearning and somehow frightened. There was an uneasiness to the air that made me more worried for Akiva and the remaining wardens than ever before.
Mostly we talked of Gilbert’s farm, the harvest and his plans for the spring planting. Gilbert was eager and knowledgeable on the subject, and I could tell that he loved the farm very much. I didn’t know why exactly he chose me to confide in, but I found the subject interesting enough to ask questions, and Gilbert seemed to enjoy answering them. Sometimes we talked playfully about the supposed monster in the forest and how we would free him from his enchantment. This subject I found more interesting but of no practical value, since Gilbert had no better idea than I of how to break Bastian’s curse. I kept niggling at the idea, however, and it became something of a joke between the two of us, something to laugh at when we didn’t feel like talking seriously.
When spring came with youthful spurts of green in even the most deadened tree branches, Akiva came to fetch me once more. David was doing well by then, though he was still without his memory, and another warden had disappeared. The thought in both of our minds was that Akiva could also disappear at any moment, and it seemed to me that she had come to fetch me because she wanted to have the wardship taken care of if she weren’t there to look after it.
“Has the council found out anything yet?” I asked, as we walked through a sweet smelling patch of pines on our way home.
“The council is rather thin on the ground at the moment,” said Akiva, rather grimly. “Gwydion and Mara are still searching, but the other wardens are keeping to their wardships as much as possible. The forest is suffering.”
I nodded silently, because I had felt as much. “Did you find anything?”
“Perhaps.” Akiva was short. “I have no doubt that it’s one of the wardens. What I don’t know is who, why, or how.”
“That’s a lot we don’t know,” I said dissatisfiedly. I had been so busy looking after David and trying to find out how to break Bastian’s curse that I hadn’t had a spare thought for finding the rogue warden. I think that in some subconscious way, I had assumed that Akiva would make it all right: that no one could stay hidden from her shrewd grey eyes for long. It hadn’t occurred to me that there might be something that was too big for even Akiva to fix. But today I felt the truth of it keenly, just as I had felt keenly Akiva’s danger for the first time those few months ago. The forest didn’t seem so welcoming as it once had.