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The howling wind dragged clouds across the sky while Alwyn and Emrys left the Matauc longhouse behind. Emrys pulled his cloak tightly around him, bottles clanking together, but Alwyn yawned stretching his bare arms wide, unaware or uncaring. It made Emrys smile to see his big indominatable cousin unbothered by the cold, the changing weather. Oblivious to it, even.
Alwyn said, “Where to, Birdie?”
Emrys opened his mouth to speak when the wind picked up and filled his mouth, causing him to gasp at the cold and then cough.
Alwyn shoved the bottle of mead into his chest. Smiling down at Emrys, his large body shielding him from the wind, he said nothing. Only offered his presence.
Emrys took the bottle and drank. “Thanks.” He handed it back and Alwyn pulled long from it as well, sighing with pleasure. Turning, he walked towards that single tree atop the barrow that Emrys had so recently come from.
They walked and the wind whipped past them promising an early winter, a cold one, a long one. Alwyn handed Emrys the bottle and Emrys drank and handed it back and Alwyn drank and so they spent an hour beneath a featureless grey sky warming themselves with mead while they climbed the barrow and descended the otherside, ranging away from their cousins, from family and friends, and into the wide wilds of Matauc land.
To the north, the Chalon Forest stretched to the edge of the world.
But there was no edge of the world, as Emrys had learnt in the books he’d harvested from any traveler passing through. When first Emrys read of the earth as a sphere revolving round the sun, which was only one star of many, he’d felt the world slipping from beneath his feet. The solid foundation of his life revealing itself to be bog and those explanations and divinations of the druids little more than thick murky water drowning him.
His mother’s face.
He could not explain that. Could not explain what lived within the Chalon Forest or the monstrous tales that sometimes returned with hunting parties. In all his rangings, he’d never found anything but elk and wolves, squirrels and owls, rabbits and foxes and anything else one might expect from any other forest in the world.
His mother’s face.
He could not deny that.
The wind slackened its unrelenting slapping and the curtain of clouds ripped and tore, revealing stretches of stars. Constellations that were fixed in the sky, not malleable to the whims of druids, to the fates and desires of humanity scuttling across the skin of the earth. He’d seen them mapped, the stars, and found them to hold true.
Alwyn put the bottle to his lips and leaned back, draining it. Belching, he tossed it away into the high grass of the moors. “Moons’ll be out tonight, I reckon.” He turned to Emrys with a broad smile and clapped his hands, rubbed them together. “Bit chilly, yeah?”
Emrys pulled another bottle from his cloak and handed it to Alwyn.
Alwyn laughed. “That’ll do, like.” Uncorking it, he took another sip and handed it back to Emrys. “Where to now?”
Emrys shrugged, drank deeply from the mead. Without the bracing cold, the taste became clearer. Dry and sharp with only the faintest hint of apples. “Not the best,” he said.
“Well, not so much about the taste at a certain point of the night.”
Emrys smiled and walked past Alwyn. As the clouds parted the moons made themselves known and shined upon the vast stretches of moors.
We are forged by the land.
The phrase rose in Emrys from Hurty’s treatise Soil and Man. The rapid changing weather of his home made for a mercurial people. Emrys felt his life surrounded by flashing tempers, quick laughter, and easy offense that rarely simmered into long grudges.
In some ways, it made much of this easier.
They would not resent his leaving and he would not be here for their raging.
Alwyn came up beside him and took his hand and they walked like that, hand in hand, for a time. Emrys turned to him but Alwyn only smiled at the broad emptiness of the landscape.
Changeable as the weather but steady as the earth. Except for Alwyn who had an unceasing pleasantness to him. An optimism and joviality that Emrys envied. Could he have been so, he never would have sought for answers in books or stories of the world far beyond this land. Wouldn’t have even heard of Morrigan University or the wondrous discoveries made there.
He’d be content to his place with the clan and this land.
A shadow son.
Saoirse’s cold stare flashed before him and he shivered, pulling his hand from Alwyn and his cloak tight.
Alwyn handed him the bottle and he drank. The warmth of it sloshed through him as his thoughts ranged and cycled.
He looked to the north, to the Chalon Forest, and shivered again.
Alwyn said, “Think it’s all true?”
“What?”
“Monsters and such, like.”
Emrys wiped at his nose. “Yeah.”
“Seen any?”
“Just tonight.”
Alwyn’s eyes went wide. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Alwyn nodded and accepted that rather than press him further and onward they walked through the night now shining bright with moonlight. All three moons full. Would have been a good night to leave.
Emrys took another pull from the bottle and handed it to Alwyn who said, “Hear that?”
“Wind,” Emrys said without considering. His mother’s monstrous face rose before him and then her deathly face and the two sloshed and slurred into one another and he wondered if the monster had taken her body from the barrow and if there were a whole flock of these strange creatures feasting on their dead ancestors.
Alwyn stopped and stared north. “You don’t hear that?”
Emrys sniffed, annoyed now. “Just the night. Full of terrors and all that, yeah?”
Alwyn put his big hand on his shoulder. “Think there’s trouble.” He reached for his hip but found nothing and then reached for his back but found nothing there either. “You bring a weapon?”
Emrys laughed. “To fight the wind?”
Alwyn took a long pull from the bottle, corked it, and then hurried north. Emrys called after him but Alwyn kept on, ignoring him. Emrys sighed and waited for Alwyn to turn and come back but then Alwyn broke into a run, sprinting down the hill towards the forest.
Emrys cursed and followed after. He heard it then. What he had taken for more wind was the wailing of someone.
Alwyn shouted and screamed and leapt high into the air as he ran, stretching his arms wide. Only then did Emrys see the huge beast that seemed to materialize out of the brush. Its great head turned to them. A large and terrible face, its mouth opened wide like a hole in the night, but its eyes shined bright, reflecting the light of the moons. And then it turned and lumbered away in a stooped, almost human fashion.
Emrys slowed to a walk as he watched it leave. Long, dark arms hung from broad shoulders, its fists beating into the earth like a second pair of feet as it went. Its short bandy legs swung along, like it ran on its hands rather than its feet. Shaggy greyish green fur and a crown of antlers branching from its large skull. Though the moons shined and Emrys stared unblinkingly as it went, it seemed to dissolve before his sight. Like the night opened to swallow it.
And then it was gone.
His heart raced and his breath came shallow. He tracked with his eyes where it ran to the line of trees in the distance. A wall of trees. Of darkness. The unknowable world so near at hand. A magic brewing right here, in the land he’d been born to.
He swallowed and stepped towards it. Drawn to that uncanny, unbelievable world.
“Emrys,” Alwyn called to him, panic touching his voice. He so rarely called him by name. Always Birdie or Emy. Never Emrys.
And Emrys turned to his cousin holding someone in his arms. The night shifted. Emrys felt it like oil splashing over his skin. Like he woke only now that the beast had disappeared. But he had not been dreaming. He turned back to the trees but Alwyn called his name once more and Emrys went to him.
She thrashed in Alwyn’s arms and screamed. Alwyn held her tight, shushing her. “S’all right,” he said. “You’re all right.”
But she only screamed and twisted in his arms. Finding space to get her arms between them, she pushed away from Alwyn and slapped at him, clawing at his face. Alwyn winced away, loosening his grip on her.
Without a cloak or overcoat, her thin dress torn and dirty, her hair full of grass and clumps of dirt, she kicked Alwyn and he let he go entirely. She staggered away, stumbling over the uneven ground. Falling, she clawed away from them, screaming.
Emrys stood motionless. It all seemed so far away. He didn’t know what to do or how to help. But Alwyn slowly followed her. He didn’t speak this time nor did he reach for her. Only keeping close.
She pushed herself back to her barefeet and slipped once more. Alwyn crouched down and stretched out his hand. “You’re all right, lass.”
She looked up at him, her eyes wide and full of terror. Gritting her teeth and clutching the dirt, Emrys thought she was going to strike him again, but she reached for him, her hand shaking. Gently, Alwyn took it and helped her to her feet.
Standing there in her barefeet, her thin and torn dress, her black hair tangled and knotted, and that expression of wild terror and sorrow. Emrys sucked in a breath.
His mother’s face, not the monster or the dead version, but the one he’d once known, that he thought he’d forgotten, flashed before him. Painted in moonlight, shivering in cold, her expression broke to relief and she collapsed into Alwyn’s waiting embrace, clutching him as she wept openmouthed into his chest.
Alwyn held her tight, his face pressed into the top of her head. He said, “Your cloak, Emrys.”
“Right.” Emrys unfastened his cloak and covered her. The bite of the night held him tight and he couldn’t breath freely. Couldn’t help but smell the sweat and tears and dirt.
And then more voices. A word repeated. A name.
“Rhian!”
Emrys cleared his throat and called back, “She’s here!”
The calling stopped and the heavy beat of feet on the earth followed while Alwyn and Emrys and the girl Rhian waited.
The girl kept crying, clinging to Alwyn, even as he spoke to her softly like she was a wounded animal.
Emrys remembered Alwyn and Aeronwen’s dog gasping for breath, its entrails spilled out, and its eyes fading. He didn’t remember what happened to the dog or even its name anymore, but he knew Alwyn would know. Alwyn held his dog’s head in his lap and spoke gently to it as it died. They were only boys. Even then, despite having witnessed his mother’s death, Emrys thought they were too young for death. Too young for all of this sorrow hollowing them.
Two figures raced down from the hill while a third hung back, bow drawn. All three wore hoods obscuring their faces. The one in the lead unsheathed a sword and raised it with one hand towards Alwyn. “Unhand her.” The voice of a woman.
Alwyn didn’t raise his eyes to meet her, only loosened his grip on the girl and let his arms fall to his sides, but she clung to him, weeping.
“Rhian,” the woman said. “Come on.”
“She’s terrified,” Emrys said.
“Can see that,” the woman said.
The companion on her left said, “What you do to her, aye?” With both hands, she raised her sword and pointed it at Emrys. “Thought you’d have a bit of fun with a girl out here on the moors!”
Emrys only stared at her.
“Was a beast,” Alwyn said while the girl cried against his chest. “Great terrible thing.”
The one with her sword pointed at Alwyn snorted. “I’m sure of the beast, aye.”
Emrys said, “What was she doing out?”
The sword pointed at him came closer. Close enough to stab out and cut his throat. “You took her.”
“No,” Alwyn said. His voice tired. “We found her like this.”
Her sister lowered her sword and grabbed Rhian by the wrist, yanking her away from Alwyn. The girl screamed and tried to wrench herself free while Alwyn took a step backwards.
She dropped her sword as she struggled with her sister. “Rhian! Stop it. It’s me, Rhian. You’re okay now. You’re all right.” She wrapped her arms fiercely round her sister and held her tight while the girl thrashed and wailed.
The sword remained close to Emrys but he could not see beneath her hood. Silhouetted by the moons, the light catching the blade. Her voice came sharp but low. “What you do to her?”
Emrys took a breath. How stupid, to die here. To die for this girl. To die on the moors where his body would be lost, forgotten. Nameless, kinless, none would even bother to look for him.
Alwyn said, “Told you. Was a beast.”
The girl got a hand free of her sister and punched her in the throat before sprinting away from all of them. Running towards the trees.
Her sisters chased and Alwyn hurried after them.
“Al!” Emrys grabbed after him but Alwyn slipped from his grasp and kept going.
Emrys sighed and ran too.
North.
Towards the trees. To Chalon Forest.