Rose couldn’t say that she was mistreated in any way. The servants who brought their rich meals were polite, sometimes even chatty. One of them, an elderly woman with jet hair shot through with white, fell quickly in love with Linden, brought him extra treats and wanted to cuddle him every time she saw him. The guards that accompanied them at a few yards’ distance as they walked around the gardens in the cool afternoons were always friendly: one rushed in to pick Linden up when he tripped over a rock, set him gently on his feet and moved back into his place. On the two occasions she’d tried to escape – the first a desperate but simple run-for-it near the bottom gate of the garden, the second a slip-out-the-door-the-servant-had-left-open, doomed to failure as it was the middle of the day – the guards were firm but kind as they returned them to their hut: ‘Sorry, my lady. King Tolan requires you here.’
When she asked, or demanded, or cried, or cajoled to get them to summon Tolan to speak with him, they simply said, ‘The king will be along as soon as he can.’
So Rose began to sew. She had the shirt made within the first week, its hems and pleats neatly finished with fine, small stitches. There was enough time on her hands that she didn’t need to rush. In the second week she started the embroidery, and this would take many hours and had to be perfect. She had to get it exactly right.
Still, Tolan didn’t come. At first Rose thought she would go mad from the uncertainty, but she reassured herself that Tolan was too smart to cause her or Linden physical harm. Tolan was a strategist. She had no doubt he was using the time to find out everything that could be known about her, so he could use her in some ploy to make Bluebell or Wengest or maybe even Heath and the tribes do his will.
The black-haired woman, Olgrid, brought them breakfast one morning – porridge with honeycomb – and fussed over Linden while Rose ate. She watched as Linden showed the serving woman his maps and she cooed and told him what a very clever lad he was. Linden did not smile, but Rose could tell he was proud by the way he held his neck very straight.
‘You must be proud, my lady,’ the serving woman said. ‘He doesn’t say much but he remembers everything. This map of the garden is perfectly accurate.’
Rose put aside her bowl and came over. He leaned over it before she could see it, which she had learned was his way of saying it wasn’t for her to view.
‘Oh, show your mama. She’ll be so proud.’
‘He knows how proud I am of him. He doesn’t need to draw maps for me to be proud of him.’ Rose touched Linden’s dark curls, pleased to share the love of her remarkable boy with somebody else. ‘This map must be for you.’
‘Well, then,’ the serving woman said, her chest puffing up, sure that she’d won Linden’s heart as much as he’d won hers. ‘I feel very special to have a map drawn for me.’
Linden handed Olgrid the map and pointed at a place on it. Rose watched as comprehension dawned on her face.
‘Oh. Is that a picture of … why that design is precisely the one on the key to my linen chest.’ She turned to Rose. ‘I’ve been looking for it for days.’
‘You’ll find it exactly where he’s drawn it on the map.’ Rose sighed, wishing that Linden could keep his talent hidden. Because he was small and silent, people would always override his will with theirs.
‘Really?’
Rose nodded. ‘Go on. See if it’s there. I can brush the rugs this morning.’
‘Thank you, my lady.’ Olgrid curtseyed and hurried off, giving Linden’s face one last affectionate squeeze.
‘You like her?’ Rose asked Linden, once they were alone.
He looked up with a slight tilt of his head, one corner of his mouth turned up in a smile. That was a yes.
‘Then I like her too,’ Rose said. She turned to the hearth, the bundle of wood Olgrid had brought in, and sat on the floor to get the fire started. When the flames had caught beyond the kindling, she turned and her heart stopped.
Linden stood by their bed, his little hand bunching on the shirt she was embroidering. He had a puzzled look on his face.
‘Linden, don’t touch that!’ she called, scrambling to her feet and nearly tripping over her own ankle. She was across the room in a half-moment, snatching the shirt from him and turning his hand over to inspect it. His skin was clear and white. But if he had been naïve enough to try the shirt on …
It was her own stupid fault. She had the shirt hung over the stool next to the bed. Linden had never shown interest in her sewing, so she’d not even considered he might pick it up. ‘We mustn’t touch this, you understand? It’s a special present for somebody.’
He gave a little nod of understanding and wandered off back to the table to finish his porridge. She wondered about that expression on his face as he touched the shirt. Curiosity? Or something else?
She carefully folded it away and hid it under her pillow, where he wouldn’t see it and be tempted to pick it up again.
The following morning dawned more miserable than the rainy night before. They started another day in captivity, and hours grew long and formless, and Rose was anxious to keep the boredom at bay. She dressed and got Linden dressed. The day was chilly so she pulled one of the wooden chairs over by the fire to keep embroidering. Needle through cloth, drawing the thread. Over and over, in the patterns so well known to every noble woman. A sense of purpose kept her from falling into frustrated despair. Once again, here she was with no control over her life. Linden sat on the bed, adding to a map she was not allowed to see, a look of unshakeable focus on his brow.
Then, mid-morning, the door opened without warning and King Tolan stood there.
Rose put aside her sewing and climbed to her feet. Mustering all the dignity her royal upbringing had given her, she said, ‘Why are you keeping us prisoners? I insist that you let us go.’
Tolan didn’t answer her question. He closed the door behind him and pulled out a chair, then sat on it with his elbows on his knees and his chin resting on his clasped hands. He nodded towards Linden and said, ‘Your son is most beloved of Olgrid. She used to be my children’s nurse, you know.’ He gazed up at Rose, who returned his gaze defiantly.
‘Hey there, lad,’ Tolan said, addressing Linden, who did not look up. ‘Did you know that all of Tweoning is riddled with caves and tunnels? My sisters and I used to play among them, but they always wanted to pretty up the chambers with tapestries and so on. A game of toy horses is so much more authentic in the dirt.’ Now he stood and slowly walked over to where Linden sat, drawing.
Rose did not like the way he hung over her son. It made her skin prickle. His pale eyes were sharply focussed. He placed his big hand on Linden’s maps. Linden sat very still while Tolan shuffled through them.
‘Look at me, boy,’ he said.
Rose, fearful for her son’s safety, said, ‘Linden, look at King Tolan please.’
Linden lifted his head, but would not meet Tolan’s eyes.
‘Would you draw me a map?’ Tolan asked.
Only then did something shift in Linden’s gaze. Rose saw it. Almost as though some understanding had passed across his mind.
Tolan turned to Rose. ‘Olgrid says his maps help people find things.’
‘That was nonsense, I –’
‘Rose, stop.’ He spread his hands. ‘How long does it usually take for him to draw one of these maps?’
Rose answered grudgingly, ‘Sometimes an hour. Sometimes a day. Sometimes he can pore over them for weeks, obsessing over the details.’
‘Well, you weren’t going anywhere.’
‘I beg your pardon, my lord. We must be allowed to be on our way. If my sister –’
‘I didn’t want to be the one to say it, Rose, but your sister is nobody.’
‘She is the queen of Ælmesse,’ Rose protested.
‘She is the queen of a field in Ælmesse by all accounts, though how long she will hold that is not to be known.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Blicstowe has fallen to the Crow King.’
Anger flared in her chest. ‘What a ridiculous thing to say. Do you expect me to believe it?’
‘And from there, raiders will no doubt ravage all of the towns of Ælmesse until they surrender, and then they will take Bradsey, because Renward is a weak king who cannot hold the tribes together, and then the entire west of Thyrsland will belong to the ice-men. Bluebell will be able to do nothing because even though she has seven hundred soldiers, the raiders will make it their business to be seven hundred places at once. I would be unsurprised if the Crow King forced the Ælmessean home guard to fight on his behalf by threatening to butcher their children. Such is the way of the raiders.’
Rose shook her head through the whole speech, wild with frustration. ‘You cannot make me stay by telling me lies, Tolan.’
‘You don’t have to believe it. I suppose it makes no difference to you. One of your other sisters is queen of Ælmesse now, and at least she is a trimartyr. There will be no place for the old gods any more. It will be a different world and I’ll need a strong alliance with Wengest.’ Here he paused and let the words sink in. ‘Though I imagine if conversion is on the raiders’ minds, we will be safe and Lyteldyke will be next to fall.’
While Rose refused to believe any of the made-up nonsense about Bluebell losing Blicstowe, his words about Wengest were clearly meant to goad her. ‘And does Wengest know I am here?’
Alertness flickered onto Linden’s face at mention of that name.
‘No,’ he said firmly. ‘Though he was here two days ago on his way to Ælmesse.’
Rose’s guts clenched.
‘But I didn’t tell him I have you. I merely said that you were seen on the road … with a boy who looked precisely like him.’
The arches of Rose’s feet felt hollow, as though she were standing on the edge of a precipice. Of course Tolan had noticed. He was blazingly sharp-witted.
‘You can imagine how very keen he is to find this boy.’ Tolan glanced at Linden. ‘But I am keen to find something myself, so I won’t be calling him back here any time soon.’
‘You want my son to draw you a treasure map? Is that it?’ How she hated Linden being used against his will. ‘And on these terms you will keep my secrets from Wengest?’
Tolan gazed at her with those pale eyes, and she was surprised to see compassion in them. ‘Yes, all of that is true and I admit it. But, Rose, I assure you none of what I said about Blicstowe is a lie. Thyrsland is at war. You are much safer here. My decision to keep you suits us both.’
Rose experienced the first glimmer of fear that the story about Blicstowe’s fall was true; a moth fluttering dully against her ribcage.
‘I’ll send some more paper and pens and ink over for your lad. What a remarkable boy he is. You must be very proud of him.’
Rose didn’t answer. Tolan ruffled Linden’s curls, and Linden didn’t seem to mind. He was too busy drawing.
It was Rowan’s night to cook. She and Heath took it in turns now, though he often reluctantly and half-heartedly. She had been to training with Heath every day, and had started to learn battle strategy. She was only half-good with a sword or spear herself, and as an archer she usually started at the side of the war hedge then fell back in behind. Yesterday, Heath let her practise leading from the rear, calling out the orders until her voice was hoarse. It was a small army – forty men and two women – nimble and fast. She ran them and herself ragged, and had slept leaden-limbed that night, dreaming battle formations in her head. Now, she appreciated the mindlessness of mixing and rolling out oatcakes.
She was adding the first to the pan when Heath came in and removed his cloak, closing the door on the thickening twilight.
‘Any word from … anywhere?’ Rowan asked. A messenger had come that afternoon as they were leaving training. They were so remote up here and news from the south was always welcome.
‘Wengest isn’t coming,’ Heath said, leaning back and stretching out his neck and shoulders. ‘He diverted direct to Æcstede, under the terms of their treaty with Ælmesse.’
‘We should send to Mama to come home.’
‘Not now. The roads are dangerous. She’s safer tucked away with Yldra. Also, Renward sent word that he wants to take the tribes to Blicstowe to help get it back. He won’t go without us; his army is too small.’
‘Will we go?’
But Heath was already shaking his head. ‘The tribes have not sent the soldiers we asked for, and asking them to fight for Ælmesse is doomed. You think Niamma the Bold cares about Blicstowe?’
Rowan remembered Niamma’s words to her. Take the horns. Do what you must. She didn’t say what she wanted to say: ‘I can make Niamma care about Blicstowe.’
Heath sat at his regular bench by the fire and eased off his shoes, spreading his toes towards the flames. ‘That food smells goods.’
‘Oatcakes with lemon and sage,’ she said, flipping one over with a wooden spoon. ‘Do you want me to hunt a rabbit for you to roast tomorrow? We haven’t had meat in four days.’
He was about to answer when a frantic knocking at the door interrupted. Heath frowned and, barefoot, walked to the door to open it.
Rowan recognised Llyran, one of the soldiers she trained with most days. He was tall, with close-cropped ginger hair. His face was white with fear.
‘My boy!’ he gasped.
‘Your?’
‘My boy, Irtex. He’s gone.’
Heath turned back inside and went to the fire to put his shoes on. Rowan joined Llyran at the door.
‘How old is he?’
‘Three. I sent him outside to fetch some parsley. That was an hour ago.’
Heath called over his shoulder, ‘He’s probably wandered off. We’ll call up a few other men and see if we can find him.’
‘Try not to worry,’ Rowan said.
‘He never wanders off. He’s a timid boy,’ Llyran said, then dropped his voice. ‘It grows dark. He’s frightened of the dark.’
‘He will hear our voices calling and not be so afraid.’
‘I sent him out. He didn’t want to go. I spoke to him sharply.’
Heath brushed past Llyran, but Rowan grasped the man’s shoulder. ‘He will be fine.’
The wind had risen, shivering in the branches and causing leaves to flutter and scuff across the ground. Armed with torches, sixteen volunteers from the village paired off and took a different area to search, under Heath’s command. Rowan and Heath formed a pair, and headed down the slope to the sacred grove. The paths were muddy after two days of drizzle, and Rowan’s left foot sank ankle deep on one poorly placed step, filling her shoe with squelching cold.
‘Damn it,’ she said.
‘I don’t think the boy could have got this far,’ Heath said, frowning. ‘We’d see his tracks.’
‘Llyran will feel better if he knows we looked.’
They called the child’s name as they wound into the sacred wood on the spiralling path. The trees were heavy with damp, and the wind loosened cold drips that fell in Rowan’s hair. No child answered. The only sounds were the scuttling feet of animals in retreat.
Half an hour passed with nothing but Irtex’s name on their lips, then Heath stopped and sat on a rock to remove a stone from his shoe.
‘Could you ask Connacht where he is?’ he said, slapping his shoe on the rock beside him. His voice sounded almost too light, and Rowan knew this wasn’t the real question he wanted to ask. He wanted to know how often she contacted the ghost of her grandfather.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Since the day I held the crossings open, I have not been able to contact him. Perhaps he slipped away behind a crossing.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The crossings are not physical. There are no mechanical gates that open and close. The borders between here and there, now and then, are slippery, dissolving in and out of each other. Things move between like sunlight through water.’
Heath pulled his shoe back on and tightened the laces. ‘Sunlight through water?’
‘All the time moving, forming and re-forming. Connacht will likely be back, but for now I have no sense that he is near.’
‘So young Irtex hasn’t slipped through a crossing, has he?’
Rowan firmly shook her head. ‘I would have felt it. I feel them all. Tickling against my ribs like the feet of insects.’ She shuddered. ‘But I have felt nothing this evening.’
Heath stood and led them off again, but now Rowan’s anxiety had returned, like a cold lump in her stomach. She had assumed, along with everyone, that little Irtex had simply run off because he didn’t want to collect parsley. But now she remembered the old woman who had been hanging around her window. A swirl of vague fear, remembering the dark, hidden thing she had felt emerging from the crossings, right before she had slammed them shut.
‘Heath,’ she said, hurrying to catch up with him, ‘there was an old woman in a black cloak trying to open my window a few nights ago. Do you think she might have lured the child away?’
‘What old woman? Someone from the village?’
‘I don’t know. She looked familiar …’ At least, Rowan felt there was something familiar about her.
She saw Heath frown in the flickering light of the torch Rowan held. ‘Let’s keep calling for him a little longer then head back. We are so far from town here that we might not hear if somebody else finds him.’
They wound all the way to the centre of the sacred grove, where the druids’ great stone altar stood, then back out on quicker feet. The drizzle had started again, and it sizzled in the torch’s flame.
On the way back up the hill, they met another pair of searchers, who told them the boy still had not been found.
‘Let us gather in the village square then,’ Heath said. ‘We need to decide what to do.’
Rowan trudged up the hill behind Heath, and then the drizzle turned to cold, cold rain. Heath fell back and slid his arm through hers. ‘Go home,’ he said. ‘Be warm, eat and sleep well.’
‘I’d like to help.’
‘There’s no point in both of us being out in the rain. This may take all night. The child may be – perhaps he has had an accident. I will gather a group of five or six, and we will hunt until we find him.’
Rowan nodded, water dripping off her nose. ‘Very well.’
She returned home, to dry clothes, cold oatcakes and a quiet house. The rain grew heavier and the wind rose and gusted over the roof, and she was grateful to have been spared the night-time search in these conditions.
When she finally climbed into bed and fell asleep, she was plagued by dark dreams about old hands bent like claws.
She woke in the grainy light before dawn to shouting from outside. Somebody was crying: a man, sobbing like a child, calling, ‘No! No!’
Rowan threw back the blankets, quickly pinned on a dress and ran barefoot out of the house to the village square. A crowd had gathered around the impossibly small, impossibly still body of a child. All her limbs grew leaden with sorrow. She hurried to Heath’s side, where he stood over the boy and Llyran, who had thrown himself across the little body. A small crowd had gathered. Llyran’s wife was there too, white and frozen with shock, a howling toddler in her arms. Rowan could see the boy’s lips were blue, and red strangulation marks stood out on his neck.
‘He was still warm,’ Heath said to her in a low voice. ‘Whoever did it had him all night.’
‘From twilight to twilight,’ somebody nearby said. ‘Taken in the gloaming and killed in the gloaming.’
‘My daughter saw an old woman lurking near the edge of town yesterday evening.’
Panicked voices, more people waking and coming from their homes, speculation, fear, and amid it all Llyran crying over his dead child.
A hag in the gloaming. Rowan knew the stories. Snowy used to tell them to keep her afraid and inside at night. The old woman who hunts children in the twilight, stealing their spirits to keep herself young. A creature that attaches itself to the first person it sees when it slides out of the dark underwood.
And she remembered the feeling of a bad thing escaping the wood, the hag outside her window, the prickle of recognition. Rowan knew, without a doubt, that this was her problem to solve.