Darkhenge

The ferocity of the Oak

shook heaven and earth …

the Birch, all eager,

comes late in armor.

“THE BATTLE OF THE TREES”

The third castle was revolving.

Gradually, hour by hour, Chloe had come to understand that it was turning, very slowly, like the earth turns. Not that she could feel it underfoot, but if she stood long enough at the window she could see the twilight colors were slowly wheeling over the tops of the trees.

She wrapped the woolen wrap tighter around her shoulders. In this world, the sky didn’t change. So it had to be the castle that was revolving.

She turned and paced the long dark room, trying to keep warm.

The army of trees was out there, oak and ash and elm. Tall shadowy shapes. This castle had no shutters, so he’d have to think of something else if they attacked. He was probably off somewhere now, making sure all the doors were locked, the drawbridge up.

Good riddance. The way he fussed over her comfort was infuriating.

But how could a building turn?

Her arm still ached. Somehow in the scramble out from the Glass Castle, she’d cut herself, an agonizing sharp slanting cut that had bled and bled. As they’d run through the deep tunnel she’d wondered if she was leaving a trail of blood drops; the thought had given her an idea.

Now, standing in front of the grimy mirror, she rubbed a hole in the dust and smiled at herself. “Clever girl. Snapped twigs, scuffed trail. Leading straight here.”

Behind her the door opened. He came in, carrying a plate of berries and a cup of wine. She groaned and spun around. “I’ve told you. I’m not eating any of that muck.”

The mask of ivy leaves looked at her. His eyes darted away quickly. “You must, Chloe. Please.”

“No chance. I’ve read all the stories. One mouthful and I get to stay in your power for all eternity. Well, you can forget it.”

He sighed, put the plate on the table and went and sat in the ornate chair by the empty fireplace, crossing his ankles. He wore a clean suit of dark velvet clothes, trimmed with silver. She kicked the stone hearth. “You could light that. It’s getting cold.”

And that was strange, because ever since she’d been here the forest had been warm, clammy. Before she could think about it he muttered, “How’s the cut?”

“Bandaged. With some red silk I found. I think it’s stopped bleeding.”

The room was silent. She went back to the window, gazing out. Then she turned and faced him. “Something’s changed.”

“Changed?”

“Someone’s trying to find me, aren’t they?”

He looked alarmed, glancing out behind her at the darkness of the wood. “Who is?”

“I don’t know! I dreamed I saw Rob. I was riding on Callie and I saw him. And then, last time I slept, I woke up because someone was calling me.”

He looked back at the fire, his voice brooding. “That was me. There’s no one out there.”

“There is. I held someone’s hand. I felt it, a cold, narrow grip. I shouted and they heard me.” He was worried. She knew that. So she made her voice strong and light and carefree. “Maybe they came in through that hole you talked about. I sent messengers, you know.”

The mask swiveled. He seemed appalled. “What sort of messengers? That bird?”

“And bats and a snake and moths. Anything.”

He stood up, and she knew he was trying to appear calm. “Look, Chloe, you may as well be resigned. There’s no way out. I have strong places to hide in. Fortress within fortress. There’s no escape from Annwn.” At the door he turned. “Stay in this room. I don’t want you wandering about.”

She smiled spitefully. “Then why not lock me in?”

“You know why!” Exasperated, he looked down at the littered floor. “There aren’t any keys. I don’t understand where they’ve all gone.”

“So I’ll wander where I want and you won’t stop me.”

He turned, and his eyes were dark and steady through the mask. “You have to make me suffer, don’t you, Chloe,” he said quietly.

When he had gone, she stood still, a little chastened. For a moment his voice had set off echoes of another place, a time she was beginning to forget. She mustn’t let herself forget! Panicky, she fumbled for the chair and let herself down into it, pulling her knees up, hugging them tight. Mum, and Dad, and Mac. Callie, and the girls at school. Even Rob. She mustn’t start to forget!

Her hands were shaky, so she pushed them into the pockets of the red dress, and brought out the key.

It was small, and silver.

It was the only key in the castle.

Rob had no idea how long they descended. Leaves smothered him; twigs tugged and snagged, tore at his hair and collar and sleeves. His legs ached; his breath came in gasps, the air thin and tight in his lungs. Small moths and gnats circled; mosquitoes bit; he rubbed sweat from his face with the back of a green-smeared hand.

A little below, climbing unsupported now, Vetch’s dark shape rustled and slipped through foliage. There was no other sound, but Rob knew they were deep in an unimaginably endless forest, that it surrounded them, its rich stink of peaty loam rising up, the mingled unmistakable dampness of fungi and peeling bark and billions of years of leaves.

Then Vetch paused. His voice echoed oddly. “We’ve reached the bottom branches, Rob. There’s quite a jump.”

Leaf-rustle.

Then a thud.

Rob let himself down, gripping the trunk with his filthy hands, ducked under the final oak leaves. Vetch was standing knee deep in leaf mold, looking up at him, barely visible in the murk.

“This time I’ll catch you, Prince.”

“Don’t worry. I’m fine.” He let go and landed painfully in the soft springy mass, picking himself up.

For a moment they looked at each other. Then Rob stared around.

The trees were dense and silent. A stifling, smothering gloom enclosed him. He had a sense of thousands of square miles of forest, and himself and Vetch tiny things in the heart of it, lost forever. All the green canopy above him was a mesh of branches, of many species of tree, some thick trunked, some spindly, some in bud, some dark with coniferous needles. In the darkness they rustled, as if in a slight breeze, but no draft of wind touched his face. The forest of Annwn was airless and strangely calm. It stank of rot and mildew and lichen and moss.

Vetch sat wearily in the leaves, his back against the trunk. He took out the crane-skin bag, slid a small plastic bottle of mineral water from it and drank. Then he held it up to Rob.

Rob didn’t move. “Are we dead?”

“No.”

“In a coma? Like Chloe?”

“Not yet. Up there not even a second will have passed.” Vetch gestured with the bottle; Rob took it and drank. The water was cold and he was surprisingly thirsty.

The poet smiled, wry. “You shouldn’t have come.”

“You wouldn’t have made it down without me.”

“True. I was near death. But that was a second and an eternity ago and far away; we’ve descended into a world that is mine now, and already it’s begun to make me whole again.” He stood. In the dimness his hair seemed darker. Rob gave him back the water and Vetch tossed it into the bag. “Besides,” he said quietly, “there’s no way back. The tree has become one of a million trees, no different. The only way for you now is on, through the caers.”

He ducked under a branch and pushed his way through. Rob followed. None of this is real, he thought carefully. None of it exists. It doesn’t matter where we go, because in a few hours I’ll wake up at home and find none of it ever happened. Maybe not even Chloe’s accident.

Vetch was watching. “Stay close to me. The forest holds a million dangers.” He turned and struggled on.

Reluctant, the trees let them through. They came down a slope to a stand of birch, then pushed through it to a patch of scrub, where the cover thinned to bushes gleaming with white flowers. Their smell was sickly sweet.

Vetch looked up and smiled. “The summer stars.”

Rob recognized them. Very faint, in the purple twilight. Constellations Mac pointed out with the butt of his cigarette on summer nights in the garden with the old telescope. Eridanus, the meandering river. Taurus the Bull, rising late. The Swan. The Girl, Virgo. Brighter than he had ever seen them. Frost-bright, though the wood was warm and mothy.

Vetch turned, listening and breathing. He seemed to be orienting himself; he smelled the air and put a hand on several of the nearest trees. Finally he said, “This way, I think. I don’t know how far in we are. Look for signs that people have moved through here. Any traces of a path.”

Rob scratched a dried leaf from his hair. “People? Do you mean Chloe?”

“Maybe.” Vetch seemed distracted. He was listening; he stopped and looked back, the way they had come. “Did you hear something then?”

Far above, the wind raged. Down here the forest breathed and creaked and rustled around them.

“All sorts of things.”

Uneasy, Vetch waited. Then he turned. “Stay close.”

They made slow progress. Climbing through the tangled wood was like moving through a world that existed only to hinder them; vines caught at their hands, twigs tripped them. In places the ground sank into vast morasses, the surface virulent with algae, the stumps of drowned trees leaning out like the ruined columns of a palace. Sudden gusts of wind would spring up, plucking at Vetch’s coat and Rob’s hair; a cascade of golden leaves would spin and spiral and patter, thick as snowfall. Fooled by the dimness, Rob twice put his foot down into bog; the second time he staggered and yelled, almost overbalancing. Only Vetch’s grip held him; he dragged himself out and crouched, soaked and scared.

Vetch stood over him. “Some power that’s here doesn’t want us to get through. I think Chloe is his prisoner.”

“His?” Rob looked up, alarmed.

“There have always been kings in the Unworld, Rob. Their names echo in tales. Manawydan, Hades, Arawn, Melwas. The King has many names, but always he cannot live alone. He is darkness and death and winter. He comes up to the world and captures a girl. A girl who is young, alive, beautiful. Like your sister.”

“My sister is in a coma in a nursing home,” Rob said stubbornly.

Vetch laughed his soft laugh. “This is that coma. This wood.” Walking on, his voice came back, echoing from the trees. “When you draw, you copy the world, don’t you? You remake it on paper, but it isn’t the same. It’s yours. No one else could have created it just like that. When I make poems, I use the words we all use, but the order and the sound create a new power. This wood is someone’s creation. We stumble through its tendrils, as if we’re crawling through the synapses of his mind.”

“And you think this King’s got Chloe?”

Vetch glanced back. “That’s what we have to find out.”

They walked for what seemed like an hour, maybe longer. Rob had no way of measuring except by his weariness. Then, on the other side of an alder grove, Vetch walked straight into nothing, and slammed back into the mossy turf in astonishment.

Rob helped him up. “Are you all right?”

The poet rubbed the star mark on his bruised forehead. “I think so.” He stepped forward carefully, hands out. Rob saw how his delicate fingers probed the air, found an invisible surface, flattened along it, felt its cracks and blocks.

Stepping back, he looked at an angle. There was a shimmer there, a greenish glint in the gloom. “A wall?” Rob said.

“Caer Wydyr. Glass Castle. The second circle.”

“Second? So how many are there?”

“Seven.” Vetch looked up. Three shadows hung over him. “She’s passed through Royal Caer and this is Glass. The others are Turning Castle, Spiral Castle, Gloomy Castle, the Woven Caer, and the last one, Caer Siddi itself, the Circle of Ice and Fire. Each a fortress, each a level of descent into the mind. At the heart of the seventh is the Chair, the throne of Annwn. Whoever sits in it rules the Unworld.” He stepped back. “We need to find the entrance.”

They groped around the wall, barely able to see where it was. The trees grew close around and were reflected in it, so the forest seemed unbroken. Rob found he was facing himself, dirty and lichen smeared. His face was small and pale and seemed to have grown younger; it scared him, so he tried to think only about Chloe, about her running to him and hugging him.

Between two ash trees Vetch stopped. “Here. This is it.”

They stepped through.

Inside, the castle was cold. The walls were thick and bubbled seams of glass, twisted and fused with palest color, aquamarine and emerald; columns of twisted glass held up shards of the shattered roof.

Vetch scratched the corner of his mouth. “We’re too late. They’re not here.”

The trees had long broken through. They grew in the empty halls, in the vast chambers. Great blocks of glass lay in smashed heaps on the floor; already bramble and bracken were smothering everything. In each room, window shutters had been forced; ragged curtains of foliage hung there now, and a stand of tiny oak saplings had cracked the iridescent paving into tilted slabs and grown a foot high, each with tiny green leaves newly unfurled.

“This damage would have taken years.”

“Not necessarily.” Vetch scrambled toward a staircase at the back. “Let’s go up.”

But the staircase was ruined. A vast elm branch had thrust through the wall; its weight had brought the steps down into a confusion of sharp slivers and jagged edges that Vetch kept back from. “Too dangerous. Chloe isn’t here.”

A breath of warm air.

The faintest chink of sound.

Vetch turned. This time Rob had heard it too. “Someone’s there.” His heart leaped. “It’s Chloe!” He went to run, but the poet’s hand grabbed his sleeve and held it tight.

“No. We’re being followed. I think we have been since we entered the wood.”

“By who?”

Vetch’s eyes were dark and troubled; they glanced at him once. Instead of answering he said, “I’m going to make my way back to the great hall. After a few minutes you come too, but loudly, and talking, as if I’m with you. Understand?”

“Yes, but—”

Vetch’s fingers loosed from his sleeve. “Just do it. And be ready.”

He stepped back. He stepped into the glassy shadows, and at once dissolved into reflections of himself, each shivered and fractured, so that Rob couldn’t see for a moment which one he was, and then they were all gone, and something sinuous and lean slipped past him, a dark fox with wet fur that gleamed.

The fox slunk up the corridor.

Rob let out a slow breath. He closed his eyes and saw darkness, licked his lips and tasted the saltiness of sweat and the icy drips from the roof.

He was cold with fear and disbelief.

Far off, something crashed, as if another shutter had fallen. The sound jerked him out of one terror into another; he strode forward quickly, mumbling, saying anything. “Yes, well, all right, we can’t go back. Did I ever say I wanted to go back? All I want to do is find her. And you have no right to say I don’t!” His voice was rising to anger; he let it. He argued with Vetch, though Vetch wasn’t there, because he could never have said these things if he was. “I love Chloe. She’s a pain and she always wants attention and she should never have written what she did about me but I still love her....”

He stopped. His hand went to his pocket; felt the small stiff outline of her diary. He hadn’t opened it. Was he too afraid to read the rest?

Something crashed ahead.

A gasp, a cry rang out. He turned the corner and raced into the forested hall, tripping over the smashed floor. “Vetch! Vetch?”

A figure was inside the door, behind one of the trees. In the glass walls he saw it loom, break, reform. The figure of a woman, green-stained and worn, her hair coming loose, a stout branch grasped in her hand, and as he watched, she swung it and the fox yelped and gave a great twisting, sideways leap. Wood cracked against glass. The woman screamed in pure fury, whirled to strike again.

“No!” Rob yelled.

She turned, saw him. In seconds, Vetch stood behind her, breathless. He looked shaken, the whiteness back in his face.

Rob stared in disbelief.

“Clare?” he breathed.