“Tobias,” Silver said, sitting up, more serious as he perceived that Tobias really meant it, “Greenhollow has been your home much longer than it has been mine. I cannot perceive any reason you should ever leave.” He brushed his hand over the swell of Tobias’s bare arm. “Not now.”
“She’s not young,” Tobias said, “your mother. It’s a dangerous business she’s in. And she pays me a wage.”
“My mother is immortal,” said Silver, “probably. I would wager on her over a hurricane. And she has been managing her dangerous business alone without the slightest difficulty since I was five years old. Tobias, she doesn’t need you. Ask her as much—she’ll say the same—and for heaven’s sake, my dear, don’t think of money—”
He took a handful of Tobias’s shaggy hair to claim him for a kiss. Tobias allowed it; was smiling a little into it. He almost always let Silver have his way. And why should he leave, anyway? To run Mrs Silver’s errands? To carry her luggage? If he wanted to hunt monsters, let him do it here, in the wood, Silver’s wood. Here was the heart of Silver’s domain; here the glade where the aspen trees grew, here the earth which had covered him. Silver could perhaps follow Tobias wherever he went, so long as the Wood had been there once; but the prospect of that much time spent in his mother’s company—not that it wasn’t convenient that she liked Tobias, but must Tobias also like her?
Silver woke with the birdsong, well before Tobias did. Tobias had confided that it was strange to him being able to sleep through the dawn. It was bloody strange for Silver not being able to sleep through it. After a lifetime of regarding the sun as a cruel tyrant attempting to prevent him from reading as late as he wanted to at night and sleeping as late as he wanted to in the morning, his newmade body suddenly found the first light of morning irresistible.
He brushed his hair and tied it back, and laughed at the scatter of leaf-mould left on his comb. Somehow it kept being surprising, the way the Wood was woven all through him. Then he threw on the tweed jacket Tobias had left on the back of a chair and went out for a walk through the dewdropped wildland under the glow of the morning sky.
He took himself down to the aspen glade, there to politely greet the four queen dryads in whom, obscurely, he felt his dominion over the Wood resided. They swayed and rustled in the breeze, their leaves shimmering between green and gold; fat fluffy catkins were shaking off their first thick drifts of pollen. Silver sneezed, more out of habit than because he really needed to. As he ambled back towards his house, he felt Bramble in the trees about him. “Good morning!” he said.
She faded into view for a moment among the bracken. Spring had given her a crown of white blossom. She was frowning. Silver on impulse kissed his hand to her.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I won’t let him leave.”
Now
“Where are we?” said Maud.
“The Hallow Wood,” said Silver, and at the same time Tobias said, “The wood, miss.”
They exchanged glances. The wind whispered in the trees around them with a sound like the sighing of an ocean.
“We’re nowhere near Greenhollow,” objected Maud.
“If you read my monograph,” Silver retorted, “then you should know that the Hallow Wood is considerably larger—and older—than any individual fragment.”
“Your monograph was a great many words used to say hardly anything—”
“For God’s sake, Miss Lindhurst, is this the time?”
“Don’t patronise me!”
Tobias’s hand came down heavy and solid on Silver’s shoulder before he could say the several unpleasant things that occurred to him. “Seems to me it’s my fault,” he said quietly, “if it’s anyone’s, miss; but we know our business, Mr Silver and I. There’s nothing to fear.”
“I’m not afraid!” Maud said.
Tobias went over to her. He wordlessly took the pack she carried and hoisted it onto his own shoulders without effort. Supplies for one woman, to go between three of them, one Tobias’s size. Silver probably didn’t need food to stay alive, but he did not relish the thought of finding out.
“As Mr Finch says,” he said, “there’s nothing to fear.” Time was soft here, blurring the landscape at the edges of his vision; Silver was working hard to keep it soft, since he had a dreadful feeling that if he let the two mortals slip back into their proper place in the order of things, they would promptly be drowned under the black ocean which had claimed this place. He had wandered far, first in curiosity and then in a maudlin half-desire to get lost and never come back, but this piece of the Wood was like nothing else he had ever felt. The trees stood straight and strong, old beech and elm. An odd half-light that came from no sun penetrated their canopy and dappled the forest floor. They were green with the foliage of an unending summer that had endured, suspended between one instant and the next, for millennia. Nothing else alive was here. Silver knew it as assuredly as he knew that he had five fingers on each hand.
He swallowed down his terror and his awe. “It’s going to be a rather stiff walk, I’m afraid,” he said. “And mostly uphill. But we should be back in Rothport soon enough.” He hoped.
Tobias set the pack a little firmer across his back and nodded.
“No,” said Maud. “I’m not going back. Give me back my things.” She pulled the revolver out of her pocket but did not point it at either of them—not yet. “I’m going to Fairyland, with you or without you,” she said. “The road is—”
She stopped.
Silver didn’t say anything. The sense he’d had on the Rothport cliff of something bent double in the air was gone. This place was still and empty and devoid of all paths.
“No,” said Maud. “No! I was so close!”
She gestured wildly with the hand that had the revolver in it. Silver winced. Tobias took several silent steps back from her. “Now, miss,” he said, soft and firm, just as he might have spoken to calm an enraged dryad. “Listen—”
No dryad, Maud.
“You!” she spat. “If you hadn’t interfered—again!” She pointed the revolver at Tobias. Her expression was wild but her hand was damnably steady. Silver’s heart lurched in alarm. He opened his five-fingered human hands and spoke. He said, unthinkingly, a word in a language he had never learned. He called.
And something came.
It was something living, something wild, something old. It came charging out of the trees in a headlong rush. Silver got a glimpse of hairy flank and a strong scent of rank flesh, and thought: A goat? It dashed between Maud and Tobias, knocking them apart and knocking Maud flat on her back. The revolver fell out of her hand and she let out a startled cry. The beast turned, sending up sprays of dry earth around its hooves, and charged with heavy tread back towards the prone girl; it would trample her to death, and Silver could only stare, thinking at once, She meant to kill and I did not mean to kill—
But the goat-beast never reached Maud again. Tobias, swift as the wind and immovable as a rock, had planted himself in its path. The beast charged towards him and bounced off his strong shoulder, braced hard against it. He let out an oof but did not budge.