They had a few bright, chilly days to build that stable. I heard their hammering echo across the fields as I wandered toward the autumn wood. There was not much left alive in the wood; things were withering, dying back, withdrawing beneath the ground to wait through the winter. Among great masses of dead leaves, tumblings of brown vines, hillocks of stark brambles picked clean of their berries by the birds, branches torn down by the fierce winds, abandoned nests swaying on leafless boughs, a rare color caught my eyes: the burning green of holly, or the strange flowers of the witch hazel, their thin yellow petals curling like clusters of wood shavings on stripped, bare branches. I picked a few for Laurel, and found some rosehips for my teas. I did not go near Lynn Hall. I drifted, I felt, in Corbet’s tangled wood, where light did not reveal the truth, and every path led into shadow.
He had told me where I was lost, but he had not told me how to find my way out of the wood. My thoughts roamed as I roamed, through the tales I had been told, through memories of Corbet, his riddling eyes and unexpected pleas, emerging out of dreams or casual conversations, for me to untangle paths for both of us. But I was afraid of the wood in which he was lost, and he knew it. I did not want to think of it, which is why, I realized finally, I did not want to see him. He did not come to the house during those days; perhaps he did not dare see Laurel. Perhaps he thought if he hewed enough, hammered enough, he could drive the sound of her voice out of his mind, he could build a wall against her eyes. She did not see him either. She kept the house spotless and sat with Perrin every evening. Only occasionally did she linger at a window to gaze at the distant wood which, with all its bare trees, still hid Lynn Hall within its heart.
I could not stop thinking, though I avoided thoughts that led down the most dangerous paths. I chose an easier way. I went back to the villagers to find the needle in the haystack: who had been in the wood to find Nial Lynn’s body, who had heard his dying words.
“‘Sorrow and trouble and bitterness will hound you and yours and the children of yours . . .’” Shave Turl’s ancient great-aunt Anis said as I poured her a cup of blackberry tea. She had yellow-white hair and softly crumpled skin that draped itself in graceful folds over her bones. She had raised six children and buried four more in her long life. She moved stiffly now, and recognized voices instead of faces, but she was not infirm, and she liked her tea hot, strong and richly laced with cream. I sat with her in her quiet house; Shave, who lived with her to keep her company, had felt a chill in his bones and went back to his bed after checking to see if anyone interesting had come in to visit his aunt. He seemed inclined to linger, but when I offered to make him a tea to cure his chill, he took himself and his bones away. “That boy,” Anis said, breaking off in the middle of the curse. “They’re too delicate, these days. It’s like soil, I think; one planting saps energy from the next.”
It was a kindly way of looking at Shave, who once stayed in bed for a week while he lost a toenail he had stubbed on a harrow. I poured my tea and tried to ignore my own restless feet fidgeting in their boots. Outside Anis’ thick window panes the distorted sky hung low and dove’s wing-grey; the intermittent rains felt icy, and the wind had a sharp, testy mutter to it.
I said, turning her back in time, “How could you remember that curse all these years?”
“How could I forget it?” she asked with a certain, skewed reasoning.
“Other people remember different curses.”
“It’s as they remember.”
“Did you see Nial Lynn die?”
She sipped tea almost as pale as cream. Her eyes seemed the same cloudy pale; she saw faces, she said, as blurs of shadow, though things farther away became, like memory, more detailed.
“I had a houseful then, and it was winter. That meant water boiling for laundry in one pot, soup simmering in another, bread rising, children everywhere underfoot, the littlest trying to walk, and apt to fall in the fire or out the door in a moment.” She sipped tea. “Not,” she said calmly, “that I would have stepped in to rescue him if I had seen it. He came here, sometimes.”
“Nial?” I asked, startled.
“No. Young Tearle. Some years after his mother died and we ran free as rabbits that summer night to spy on Lynn Hall. I married young and already had my hands full, with my own and others’ children come to visit them. Tearle would walk in, just come in like a wild thing out of the cold at odd times. He never said much. He would just sit and watch the others running and shrieking and laughing, watch me sewing, or cooking, or trying to catch one of them to bathe. I’d look up and there he’d be, like a ghost in the shadows, watching the children. He was much older than they, but young enough still to miss what he’d never had. They’d say his name, but they never teased him or bothered him. I’d go back to work, and look up again, and he’d be gone.” She paused; entranced, I did not even blink. The lines on her face rearranged themselves, her thin mouth all but disappearing before she spoke again. “Once or twice I’d see bruises on him. He wouldn’t let me touch them; he would not admit they were there. Once he ate a piece of plum cake I handed him. He ate it so slowly, crumb by crumb, as if he marvelled at every taste. Once he reached out and caught the baby when she tripped over her feet. Once she came and put her face on his legs and went to sleep. He watched her, not moving, until she woke again.
“And then he came.”
“Nial,” I guessed, as fine seams and wrinkles knotted.
“He came in without knocking, bade me good morning with a smile, and walked to where Tearle sat in a corner. He put his hand down, as if to help the boy up off the floor, and then — I don’t know — Tearle started to stand, and was sitting again, his eyes closed, his head rolling limp against the wall, as if he had fallen asleep. Nial spoke his name, not sharply, and he struggled up, looking dazed. He stumbled a little, walking past me. I didn’t see a mark on him. But something happened. He left without speaking. He never came again.”
She lifted her cup delicately with both hands and drank. Neither of us spoke. The wind shrieked suddenly under the eaves and she started as at a child’s voice.
“I never saw him much after that; I only heard the tales of him running wild with the wildest of ours. And then Nial cursed him and died and he ran away.”
“Who heard the curse?” I asked. “Who saw Nial murdered?”
She was silent again, gazing at the clouds in her tea, watching a face form in them. She blinked; it swirled away. “I don’t know that anyone saw it. Til Travers brought the news, though. He was broad as an oak, and burly, a great bullock of a young man, who would walk through a blizzard and not feel it, and not lose his way. He had a bird’s sense of direction. He had taken a sleigh with provisions from the inn for the hall, a standing order every twelve days. I knew because my Nysa liked to ride with him, and I always fretted in bad weather. But she had sent him off into the storm that day. They had a quarrel, and she was red-eyed and scowling, and watching for him to come back anyway.
“And he came. He had Nial Lynn slung on top of his provisions, covered with sacks and two inches of snow. Nysa saw the blood on the sacks and rushed out into the snow to Til. He said there was blood on the marble floor, and Tearle Lynn had disappeared. He said something else, and then the children were wailing and Nysa was crying again, and Nial was sliding out from under the sacks, so I sent him with Til to the apothecary, who would know what to do if there was any life left in him.” She paused; her eyes, pale as they were, fixed on her cup, reminded me of ravens’ eyes.
“Did Til hear the curse?”
“He didn’t say.” She blinked and sat back in her chair. “What he said was that Tearle Lynn had vanished —”
“Yes —”
“But his horse was in the stable and there were no tracks anywhere in the snow except Til’s. They searched, later. The snow lay unbroken all around the hall, except for Til’s sleigh. Tearle Lynn had turned himself into a bird and flown . . .”
I stared at her, bewildered. “Maybe,” I said finally, “he ran away before the snow fell. Maybe Nial Lynn’s heart gave out and he struck his head, falling. Maybe Tearle never killed him at all.”
“We asked all those things,” she said. “They searched all over the house, the woods. They found no secrets, no hidden doors or passages. But no one could explain the bruises around Nial Lynn’s throat, or the table on its side, or the wine bottle smashed against the far wall. Nial Lynn had been murdered, and Tearle Lynn had killed him and had run. But out of what door and down what road no one could say.”
I was silent. My hands were clenched under the table; I could feel my nails trying to hold thoughts still, but they ripped loose anyway, clamored like a flock of frightened birds.
He had opened a door and fled down a tangled path into the wood . . .
His son could not find the way back.
I shuddered, hearing the true curse that Nial Lynn had laid upon his son: I bequeath all to the wood.
And the wood had taken all.
I finished my tea and stood up. Corbet built his walls and his stable, roofed his rooms, spoke of clearing fields and finding water, but he lived among us as if each action might make him human, as if each wish, spoken, might make itself true. But it was little more than his father had done, sitting in Anis’ house, watching, pretending that he belonged in that safe world, among those laughing, squabbling children, that the opening door would not lead him back to the cold and empty shadow world that claimed him.
“I must go,” I said to Anis, but where, I did not know. I kissed her cheek; she drew a deep breath as I straightened.
“I can smell the wind and wood on you,” she said, “as if you lived in them.”
I opened the door and glimpsed, in the wild wind and sky, perhaps in her words, the next turn of the tangled path we walked.