The headman’s daughter, standing among a cluster of whispering women, saw Anna and broke away from the others to meet her.
“Mistress Anna, if you will, can you go with my husband to West Hall? He is taking ten men.”
“If the Forlangers walk the road, ten men will attract their attention. Give me your brother as escort, and we’ll go through the forest. He knows the woods as well as I do. No Forlanger will see us.”
“But alone, Mistress? My brother is no help in a skirmish. He will just run away and hide, but hiding did not save him then and will not now.”
“He is braver than you think. Anyway, we cannot fight the Forlangers with swords and spears. If we have our wits, then that is our weapon against them.”
THE COOL AUTUMN night air did not bite, but summer was irrevocably gone. Because it had rained the day before the leaves slipped instead of crackled underfoot, making it a quiet passage. With a clear sky and the moon’s merciful light a bounty laid over the world, they did not bother with a lantern. Both she and young Uwe knew the nearby animal trails well enough that the full moon gave them all the light they needed to follow familiar ground. She kept her eye open for night-blooming woundheal, at its strongest here at the end of the year and especially under a full moon, but saw none of its pale blossoms.
Uwe slipped in and out of shadow ahead of her. The young man was light on his feet and very shy. He glanced back now and again to make sure she was on the right track, for there were places in the wood where a person might fall into harm’s way and never know until it was too late to climb out.
That was the way of the world: usually the worst was already on you before you knew your throat had been opened and you were bleeding out. So her husband’s death had come, its end determined before she had even known he was injured.
Ahead, Uwe halted, a hand raised in warning. Anna stopped, careful with her feet as she felt a branch bend beneath her shoe, shifting carefully so as to make no noise.
Men’s voices shattered the silence with shouts and a ringing clash of weapons. Sound carried oddly at night, seeming both near at hand and yet impossibly distant. Uwe merely shrugged and began walking again. This trail swung away from the main road and around the back of Witch’s Hill to the back pastures of West Hall’s cultivated lands. No one liked to go this way. As they neared the haunted clearing that sheltered Dead Man’s Oak, Anna listened for the hooves of the Hanging Woman. All she heard were the last dying shrieks of a skirmish away north, then nothing at all except for the wind rattling branches and the chirp of a night-sparrow in a nearby tree.
Maybe the Hanging Woman walked elsewhere this night.
As they entered the big clearing with the oak, Uwe slowed his steps until he was walking beside her, keeping her between him and the ancient tree. An old reddened scar like a ring around his neck marked him as one of the few who had survived an encounter with the Hanging Woman. The meeting had changed him, for no one could meet the Hanging Woman and not be changed.
Uwe grabbed Anna’s arm, fingers a vice of fear.
A body lay propped against the oak’s gnarled trunk.
Uwe shrank back into the brush, but Anna knew better. You never retreated from what could not be changed. What was the point? If the Hanging Woman came, you could not hide from her.
Anyway, a sword rested on the ground at the body’s feet, and the Hanging Woman always took weapons for she was a scavenger of lives. As Anna moved into the clearing, she crumbled a bit of dried lavender in her outstretched hand, letting its dust sweeten her steps, taking no more than three steps at a time, pausing between to whisper the old prayer that the old woman of the wood had taught her. “Moonlight make a shade of me, daylight make me whole.”
So she came to the oak untouched. Its trunk was as wide as her cottage, and its bark wrinkled and knobby. The huge branches of the oak draped like arms waiting to crush her if she did one wrong thing.
The body was that of a soldier. He was alive, unconscious and bleeding, and at first glance, seeing an officer’s sash bunched up across his chest, she thought he was a wounded Forlanger. She hefted her walking stick to bash in his head before he woke.
But then the light changed, shifting through the branches to illuminate his face clearly: an older man, dark hair sifted with white. A face she knew and would never forget, although she had only seen him once in her life, on the day ten years ago when the market hall had been dedicated and given over to the village.
She would never forget the crookedly healed nose taken during one of his first victories, the scar on his cheek, the metal brace he wore on his left leg. She knelt cautiously and eased the bloody glove off his left hand: yes, his left little finger was missing, as it said in the song—He was last to get on the boat and yet all the Forlanger wolf got of him was his smallest finger.
The wounded soldier was General Olivar.
Struck down and somehow abandoned or lost by his own men.
She was so stunned that she sat with a grunt and pressed both hands to her belly, panting softly as she tried to gather her scattering thoughts. Ten years had aged him, as it had aged her: ten years ago her eldest child Mari had been a mischievous girl always singing some silly song, her eldest son had still been alive for that was before the shivering sickness had taken the boy, and her two youngest not yet even born.
A hoof fall sounded, gentle as mist, and then another.
So the Hanging Woman announced her coming.
She looked up. At the edge of the clearing Uwe cowered under an evergreen bitterberry shrub, crouching with arms wrapped around knees. All she could see of him was his face like a frightened baby moon. Moonlight collected in the open space as magic into a bowl.
The hoof-falls touched as lightly as the light itself.
Shadows tangled, stretching and winding, coming into life.
The Hanging Woman’s noose took shape as a rope of darkness coiling across the grass.
The old oak had a cleft, and in its hollow many years ago an old cunning woman well versed in herbcraft and mystery had lived for several winters. That was the old woman of the wood, the witch for whom the hill was named, although there had been another cunning woman before her according to the stories told to Anna by her grandmother when she was a child.
Anna glanced once more toward Uwe. He had not moved, trusting to the bitterberry’s prickly scent to shield him. Rising, she grasped General Olivar by the armpits and dragged his limp weight halfway around the tree, whispering the chant of protection she had learned from the old woman: “Leaf and branch and grass and vine. Let me be like them, what the eye sees but does not notice.”
Just in time she hauled him in through the cleft, into the dusty dry shelter of the tree’s heart. The smell of smoke still lingered. He gasped softly, and his eyes opened.
“My sword,” he said in a hoarse whisper, as if he already knew what she was about.
She had to risk it. The sword would betray their presence. The narrow cleft had been barely wide enough to admit the general’s shoulders. She squeezed back through it now and to her horror heard the creaks of men shifting on saddles and the thump of many ordinary horses rather than the eight-legged steed ridden by the Hanging Woman. Pulling her bridal shawl up over her head gave her cover, of a sort, as she glided around the base of the tree. Four riders emerged into the clearing from the path that led, through thickets, to West Hall. They were too far away yet to see the ground clearly but if she moved again they would see her, so she did not run but instead placed herself to stand squarely over the fallen sword, letting her skirt cover it.
Their pale tunics and dark sashes marked them as Forlangers, a fine lord and three of his retainers to look at them all agleam in their pride. But the moonlight showed their hidden faces: a wolf and his gaunt and ugly brethren, hard of heart and bitter of blood.