Fearsome Dreamer (10 page)

After a moment, White took it, and pulled him back.

They came out into the study, inches from the spot they had, moments before, been standing in together. Areline clapped her hands, her eyes shining in delight.

‘I think I'm going to like this one,' said Wren to Areline, putting his arm around White's shoulders. ‘You won't
believe
what he just did.'

White felt a pang of happiness deep in his belly.

He would be all right here.

The sun shimmered and winked at her as she walked through the village. It bounced off a piece of glass in the dust and tickled her eyes. Or maybe it was a glass fairy, trying to catch her attention.

She let that fancy unwind for a moment more, before letting it go reluctantly.

All fantasy had to end sometime.

It hadn't been so in her childhood. She'd grown up on a farm, where hard graft and good food was supposed to give you all the satisfaction you needed. They hadn't cared much for the child Rue's insistence on chasing sprites through the long grass, or coming back from the stream and swearing she'd seen tiny freshwater mermaids, or her tendency to sit still and go blank for hours at a time while she was supposed to be sweeping out the kitchen.

A city family might have worried about her mental state and sent her to doctors under a cloud of shushing secretive privacy. The farmer had neither time nor money enough to care about that sort of thing, so learned to let her alone about it, then shout at her when she hadn't done her chores.

It didn't make any difference.

The gods knew she didn't
like
to get into trouble. Just if the alternative was never dreaming and so never getting shouted at, she'd take the dream and the consequences every time. She knew that it wasn't quite daydreaming, what she did. It felt too thick and cloying for that.

When she was older, she stopped seeing mermaids, and sprites, and tree boggarts. But she still had the memories of them. She knew that either they'd been real, and she just couldn't see them any more, or that she'd made them real for herself, and then forgotten the trick of it. That loss of magic pained her deeply, more than she could allow herself to think about.

They first started talking about witch's touch when she was twelve.

It began as a silly thing. One of the farmhands had liked to tease her. He was brown and muscled and she hated him with all her heart, because when he teased others joined in, and their laughter was as humiliating as the time when she'd been slapped around the legs as a child for being back home three hours late from crab-picking at the rock pools.

‘You had me worried to DEATH!' screamed the farmer's wife as she'd done it.

Every time that stupid boy made a joke at her expense, that slapping flashed like a burn on her mind, and she felt herself grow hot. So she said what she said out of nothing more than pure wrath.

‘It don't matter
anyway
,' she had said. ‘It don't matter a bit what you ever say to me, cos tomorrow you'll be pra'tically dead.'

‘Oooh,' the boy whistled. ‘You heard that, din't you all? You heard, she's going to kill me. Best be on alert, then!'

General laughter. Rue wanted to scream.

‘I didn't SAY that,' she shouted. ‘I said you'd be pra'tically dead, not that I'd kill you. Why should I lift a finger when you're gonna be all lumpy and bloated like a rotted old fish? And serve you right!'

The laughter swelled, and she'd got up, meaning to storm out the room in a graceful, icy sweep. But her feet had got tangled in the forest of chair legs, and she'd stumbled to a crowd of hooting, and the whole thing was a mess.

Of course, the next day, when the boy was bitten by a snake while collecting hay and swelled up like a balloon from the poison, things took a bit of a different turn.

She couldn't say exactly how or why she'd said what she'd said, you see. She just felt that it sounded right when it fell out of her mouth. She had the image right there, as if she'd dreamed about it not long ago and still had a ghost of it in the back of her head.

And it couldn't exactly have been her fault. Only fate had taken the boy to that particular field at that part of the day when he could have been any number of other places, with Rue in the house with the women all day and nowhere near him. Fate had made him step on the snake's hidden tail, a tail placed just so in order to cause everything that followed.

Things changed after that.

People treated her funny, and kids pointed and wouldn't talk to her any more, and sometimes the farmer's wife would come home after selling cheese and meat out at the town, sigh loudly, and complain that two people had come up to her and asked if Rue could tell their futures for them.

She couldn't, she didn't think. It wasn't like she normally walked around looking at people and just knowing what they'd be doing the next day. It had just happened that once, and she had no idea how to do it again.

It wasn't too long before they heard a hedgewitch was looking for an apprentice. She hadn't been at all sure about going for something like that, but what she did very firmly know was that farm work wasn't for her. It was hard to tell who was the more relieved when Fernie chose her – the farm or Rue.

She looked up to find that she'd reached the oak meadow at the back of the village. As she came down the last of the cobbleway, she saw a few figures crowded around Old Stumpy in the middle of the grass.

Old Stumpy was a famous meeting place for the young of the village. Struck by lightning not three seasons before in a particularly tempestuous autumn, it had been discovered in the aftermath, lying across most of the meadow like a corpse in a tangle of enormous, broken limbs. It had taken most of the day to clear the meadow and chop the rest of the tree down to its present three-foot-high trunk. No one lived close enough to have heard its death above the more general noise of the storm that had caused it – everyone with sense had barricaded themselves in for the night and sealed every nook and cranny of every door and window as best they could against the fury outside. It had been a mainstay of the oak meadow since before Chester, the eldest inhabitant of the village, could recall, and he reckoned it was about seven or eight hundred years old when he'd been a child. Back in its more magnificent days, it had been known by the nobler name of Baron. In its death it had been changed to the wildly witty Old Stumpy, and though it now existed in reduced circumstances, it still served the same important purpose in keeping the village alive, namely by facilitating the meeting, romancing and procreating of its inhabitants.

Rue stopped short. The unmistakeable outline of Pake was amongst the small knot of people there. She felt a blush creep up her neck. It wouldn't do to go near enough so he could shout something at her, and have them all join in like a pack of barking dogs. She'd rejected him in front of his friends. Rue knew enough about men to know that they took that kind of thing badly.

And she cared enough about appearances to hesitate, and more than she would admit, for she liked to put on an air of careless apathy around people of her own age. It had earned her a reputation for arrogance, which she professed to enjoy. It had also made her lonely, without really realising it.

She struck out a path towards the edge of the wood – far enough away from his group for them not to bother with her; close enough so that she didn't look scared of them.

She heard their voices tail away as she got halfway through the meadow.

I'm not going to look at you.

She felt her shoulders hunch under their stares, and flattened them down.

A few seconds and she'd be clear.

I'm not looking.

And there was the tree line, and there was safety. She slowed, relaxing.

Then she heard a voice behind her, clear on the air, say, ‘She ain't very pretty, is she?'

She passed into shadow, her feet crunching on dry nut husks, and the trees crowded around, solid in their comfort.

It had stung. It had. But it didn't matter. None of them mattered. She kicked a pine cone out of the way with a vicious little flick of her foot, and immediately felt like a petulant child.

She was an outsider here, her home having been another village a way down the coast. Some said Fernie had had a whole county's worth of girls to choose from when she went looking for an apprentice. And Rue knew what being an outsider meant in places like this. It was almost three years since she'd first arrived, but it still wasn't enough to integrate her with anyone her own age here. She hadn't been to the village school; she hadn't grown up with them. And she was apprentice to the hedgewitch.

She knew what was said about hedgewitches. They kept to themselves. Never mixed with the common folk. They fancied themselves special because of what they did. They were arrogant. Weird. Bad-tempered. She understood the reasons why. Fernie had explained that being able to birth babies and help the sick and know how to do things that other people couldn't gave you power. And power always made everyone twitchy.

Rue passed a patch of deep yellow flowers nestled underneath a craggy tree. Just Butter flowers; no good for herbing, but nice in soup and salad. She'd have been tempted to pick some for tea if they hadn't been sat underneath a Pestler tree. Fernie always said Pestlers were mean. Probably make the flowers taste bitter just to get you back for taking what was theirs. You never picked the plants or broke the branches of a Pestler tree. She'd always made fun of Fern when she started talking like that, saying they were all living things and had characters of their own. In the privacy of her own head, though, she thought it sounded mysterious and right. Pestlers always made her nervous when she walked past them.

Pake's face flashed through her head, earnest and coy.

Maybe she should have said yes to him. Things would have got a lot easier for her around here if she had, that was for sure. Pake was no pack leader, but he was well liked.

But he's not what you want.

Her experiences with boys so far had been less than satisfactory. They did nothing to dampen the dreams she sometimes had, which she kept locked in her mind and only revisited on her own, when she felt ugly, or boring.

In Rue's dreams, when men touched her (not always a specific man, merely a presence), it was electrifying, almost frightening. It was being possessed, and giving up everything, and not being afraid to do that. It was being gripped by a man who could properly see her, see all the things she hid from the world, could guess the pieces of herself that no one else could guess. If she could find a man like that, he would rule her. But she hadn't yet, because no man had yet passed the tests she set them. Because they were ordinary, and she knew that. Ordinary people couldn't measure up, and she was beginning to wonder if the whole world was just ordinary, made up of people just like the ones she'd met in her life so far, people that would never measure up.

And what was the point, she thought, of settling for that?

She came to her favourite clearing. It was packed with blood herb, which Fernie had that morning directed her to gather. She could stay here a while, just to relax, and still bring back enough to satisfy her mistress a little later.

Rue liked the feel of dry summer soil on her skin. Sitting in the clearing, protected from the worst of the prickling heat by the cool, silent trees that stood sentry duty around her, she traced patterns with her fingertips and felt herself slip away on the gentle wave of bird hoots from above.

Things were better like this. Simple. Sometimes she thought it would be best to live in a forest and have the world fade away, doing what it liked in her absence. Sometimes it seemed such a stupid, impractical idea; other times it was the only thing that sustained her.

She unravelled a stuffed champig left over from last night's supper, peeling it delicately, laying the greased pieces in her mouth and sucking until the vegetable's juices ran down her throat. She let her gaze wander around the clearing, thinking of nothing much and enjoying it. After the last of the cold champig had wormed pleasantly down her throat, a comfortable lethargy started to seep through her.

Fernie wasn't expecting her back for another hour or more. She could probably lie down. Just for a moment.

She stretched out on the grass, spots of sunlight dappling her skin. It was warm, and hazy, and gentle. She closed her eyes.

And then opened them.

Oh gods, the light had changed. It was no longer cool and yellow green, but a foreboding shade of dusk. Panic charged her and she sat up, wondering how long sleep had overtaken her.

It took a moment, but then realisation sank into her, relief and apprehension rolled up together. It was a dream.

More than that, it was another one of
those
dreams; it had to be.

She stood in an unfamiliar landscape. It was a street, she supposed. Buildings lined each side of it, sat close together, uniform and seamless. The ground under her feet was smooth and grey. The stone, if that's what it was, that made up the walls of the buildings surrounding her, was grey. She looked up at the sky. It was clouded, she decided, though it looked too neat, like it wasn't made up of clouds at all but simply painted a mottled off-white colour. It felt like a place that didn't quite exist, as if it was waiting for its final injection of life.

She lingered for a while, hesitant to move. There didn't seem to be anywhere to go to. Everything was bare, and still, as if the whole world were contained in a glass jar. She was outside of the proper world where everything existed, in a strange nothing place where no one liked to come.

It's the skeleton
.

This place is dead and this is its skeleton.

But then something flickered at the edge of her sight.

It came, slowly and slowly, moving around the far corner of a building, antlers first.

It was almost a person.

The antlers grew naturally out of its forehead, a set of graceful, twisting bones. It had hair, pushed back and hanging long behind its ears. It was hard to tell whether it was male or female. Its face was angular and sharp with huge doe eyes.

Walking beside it was a boy with a tail and tufty cat ears. He had a button nose and the sweetest face, an unreal kind of sweetness.

Sprites. They must be sprites.