'Eh, eh, not so fast.' He made a placating gesture with his hands. 'What is it you want to know?'
She told him.
'You're a nosy cow, you know that? From the minute you arrived, you've been poking that snout of yours into places that don't concern you — and trust me, lady, the dead here don't concern you.'
'That's where our opinions differ, because Clytie is my business, Gurdo, and if you think I'm making life miserable for you now, imagine what it will be like if you don't tell me the truth, the whole truth and no lies by omission, either.'
'I'm not surprised you've got a pain in the neck, you're bloody contagious,' he retorted, but the puff had gone out of him. And, as they crossed a glade ringed by fruit trees and nuts, where a goldfinch trilled from the top of a conifer and a family of blue tits squabbled for grubs, Gurdo described how Pod had found Clytie laid out on the grass next to the stream.
The night of the spring equinox had passed in much the same way as the night Claudia herself had just passed, he explained, pausing as he relived the memory. Gorse had decked the dais and its brilliant yellow was the colour of the novices' robes. As usual, a bonfire had been lit to celebrate the balance between darkness and light, good and evil, cold and warmth, and, just like midsummer, flames from the fire were carried in bowls by the novices for Fearn to pass over her sacred gorse to purify it.
But there was one significant difference. As King of the Forest, the oak took the shortest night of the year, and with his wood turned night into day with a massive bonfire that would burn right through until noon, when fifty blazing arrows from its dying flames would be fired into the sun's zenith. On the dawn of the spring equinox, however, the fire was extinguished, signalling the end of the revelries, and instead of sleeping in huddles round the field, the weary celebrants would be wending their way home.
'Just like Pod was,' Gurdo said grimly. 'Me, I'd hung back to take a platter of beef back — what? You want me to starve, just because I'm not as tall as you, Lofty Legs?'
'You're a hoarder and a miser, and you'll never starve, you little green monster. I'll bet those ox bones were white by the time you picked them clean.'
'Can I help it if I hate waste? The point is, by the time I reached the cave, my lad was a wreck. White, shuddering, he was in a right old state and I can't say I blame him. There was more blood on that rock than you've seen in an abattoir, and what with the kid laid out in her nightdress with kohl round her eyes and rouge on her cheeks and her skin the colour of-' Gurdo shook his head. 'I don't know what colour. I've never seen that shade before in my life — here, are you all right?'
'I'm-' Deep breath. 'Fine.' And again. Breathe. Now once more, and concentrate on the child, not your mother — 'What did you do next?'
'What any decent self-respecting person would do,' he snapped back. 'I washed the rock clean, and I tell you that wasn't easy. The gore had congealed, it stank to high heaven, look are you sure you're all right? Maybe the beef tonight was a bit off?'
Claudia clenched her fists until her nails bit deep into the palms of her hands.
'Yes,' she said. 'The beef. That was it.' She squared her shoulders and lifted her chin. 'So what did you do after you washed the' — she almost said evidence — 'blood away?'
'Sent Pod to break the bad news to Beth.' He tugged at his ponytail. 'Well, I could hardly leave him with her in the state he was in, could I? And someone had to stay with the poor cow.'
A hot sticky breeze began to play with the leaves, but Claudia didn't notice. 'How well did you know her?'
'Clytie?' His lip curled. 'As well as anyone knew that selfrighteous little prig, I suppose.'
Memories of her mother's waxy corpse faded. 'You didn't like her?'
'Did anyone?' he asked, clomping through a gap in the trees.
'I don't know… I assumed… Gurdo, the girl was twelve years old, for heaven's sake! How can anyone not like a child?'
'Listen, lady, there's no law that says a person has to reach a certain age before becoming a pain in the arse.'
'Which Clytie was?'
'Here, if you want to go around bad-mouthing the dead, you go right ahead, but me, I like to show some respect- Holy Dis, what the bloody hell's that?'
Beneath the bole of an oak, a young man was clutching something bloodied and limp to his breast as he rocked back and forth on his knees.
It took a moment before Claudia realized that the young man was Pod.
And that the mangled mess in his arms was a woman.
Sarra.
Eighteen
Eyes that were normally blue had rolled upwards to white.
Skin that was normally fair was now grey.
Green grass and white roses ran red with blood…
The pair faltered, but only for a moment. Because even as Claudia's horrified eyes met Gurdo's, the same thought passed through their minds. Pod had been first on the scene at Clytie's murder, now he was first on the scene at Sarra's. Neither Claudia nor Gurdo believed in coincidence.
'Take him to the cave,' she hissed. 'A preparation of hemlock should do the trick.' God knew, the stuff grew rampant enough in these parts. 'You do know the dosage?' she added sharply, remembering the trug brimming with hellebores, hedge hyssop and monkshood that she'd seen over his arm, each a deadly poison in its own right.
'If you're asking, will I make it too strong so it does a Socrates on him, save your breath,' Gurdo retorted, 'I want my boy calm, not bloody paralysed. I'll use black hellebores. They'll put him in a deep sleep.'
But the sting to his words belied the fear in his eyes. This time it was the Guardian of the Spring who was looking for miracles.
'Stay with him while I tell Beth,' he said, and Croesus almighty, it was taking every ounce of their combined strength to prise Pod off the corpse.
'I'll go,' Claudia insisted, as they finally dragged him away. 'If ever a boy needed his father, Gurdo, it's now.'
That was a lie. As savage and shocking as this murder was, Claudia was more concerned with Beth's reaction when confronted with this second tragedy.
'Just make sure the pair of you are gone by the time I get back,' she called over her shoulder.
Gurdo nodded grimly, gratitude showing despite the rigid jaw and blenched skin, but his gratitude was misplaced. This wasn't just about Pod's potential shunning. All right, if even one sniff of his relationship with Sarra got back to the Hundred-Handed, he'd be banished on the instant and that the girl was dead — murdered — counted for nothing. He'd breached sacred rules against which there was no appeal, but Claudia wasn't doing this for Pod or for Gurdo. She was doing this for Sarra, and Clytie before her…
Me mother? No more than wind at the door. Pod's words flooded back as she raced down the path to the Field of Celebration. Seven summers old, I was, there or abouts, and what with me having no memories of me own Why no memories, though, that was the worry. Ducking the overhanging willows as she ran, she recalled numerous cases where death had visited a child's life so violently that the very horror of it had wiped clean memories of the event.
That little girl they found wandering the Capitol, for example. Her entire family had been butchered by a next-door neighbour acting on the orders of Almighty Jupiter himself, who'd told him these people were fiends in human form and that only by chopping off their heads would mortal man be free of demons. Mother, father, grandmother, eight-year-old son, six-year-old daughter and baby still in its crib were all slaughtered, except for the four-year-old, who'd been playing under the bed when the monster broke in. In his axe-wielding frenzy, he'd not noticed the child and though she escaped with her life and the memory of that terror had been blissfully erased, the girl had nevertheless grown up troubled and difficult, striking out at nothing, hurting relatives and friends for no reason. In the end, and aged only sixteen, she took her own life. But then tragedy always rolls on and on.