Frieda's Tale

Chapter 3

“They’re very good workers,” Hoban observed, three days later. “But they’re not very willing.”

Frieda shrugged. Hoban hadn’t asked too many — or indeed any—questions when the seven lads had turned up to work, the day after Frieda had turned them into frogs. Ivanovo had put together a face-saving story about the lads volunteering to work, and Hoban had apparently accepted it without bothering to wonder why the village had sent the strong backs it could ill afford to lose. Frieda hadn’t bothered to say anything about it. She didn’t know how she felt about the whole affair, let alone how her boyfriend would react if he knew the truth. It was odd to feel ashamed of something she couldn’t help, but… she was ashamed. Would he have even looked twice at her if he’d known where she’d come from?

“They’ll do,” she said, tartly.

It was hard to care about the village losing the lads for a few weeks. She suspected most of the female villagers would be quietly pleased, even if it was a possible death sentence. The harvest had to be gathered, the crops picked and hidden before the taxmen descended like a horde of locusts to take everything they could find.

“When they’re done, they can go back to their lives.”

Hoban gave her an odd look. Frieda scowled to herself. It had been a mistake to return home. She could have stayed away and kept thinking that, perhaps, her family missed her, that her parents regretted sending her away. Instead… she felt dead and cold, her soul twisting in dull pain… it was funny, she reflected, how she would almost have preferred to have their hatred than their attempt to use her, as tiny as it had been. Why should she help a family that had sold her to an uncertain fate? Why would she?

She put the thought aside as she surveyed the ruined village. It was odd to think her father had hailed from the burnt or rotten buildings in front of her, the remnants of an ancient community steadfastly refusing to rot into the ground and give birth to new life. The stories had never been clear on precisely what had happened to the village, although there’d been no shortage of rumours. Everyone agreed there’d been a firestorm, and the village had been scorched clean of life, but beyond that…? There were whispered stories of monsters striding out of the darkness, of shadowy creatures and evil sorcerers burning the land to ash… she shook her head. No witnesses had lived to tell the tale. It might remain a mystery, one of many casting a long shadow over the Cairngorms. She quietly accepted she might never know the truth.

Emily would never be satisfied with a mystery, Frieda thought. She’d be trying to unpick it until she found an answer.

A shiver ran down her spine as she raised her eyes and looked towards the dig. The workers were grumbling — she knew they were muttering to themselves, even though they kept their faces under tight control — and doing as little as they could get away with, but the mystery ruins were slowly being exposed. Frieda shivered, again, as she looked at the thing. It was still hard to even look at it, as if her eyes refused to accept it was there. The sight made her think of something Emily had once told her, a story about five blind men who’d touched an elephant. Every time she looked, she saw something different yet part of a greater whole. She couldn’t figure out how the pieces went together…

She shivered, a third time. The thing didn’t feel human. Hoban had told her of ancient tomes and ruined castles and weird things on the wrong side of the Craggy Mountains, but the artefact in front of her was different. She could feel it, no matter how she tried to turn away and hide. Her head ached just looking in its general direction. The artefact was playing games with her perception. It was both immensely huge and infinitively tiny, so big it dwarfed her and yet so small she thought she could pick it up and put it in her pocket. She wanted to tell the louts to bury the artefact, then declare the entire region permanently barred to human settlement. And yet, she knew she couldn’t. The diggers would never agree.

Hoban took her arm. “Are you alright?”

Frieda flinched, then cursed herself. “Yeah,” she managed. Couldn’t he sense it? The artefact was fundamentally wrong. “I just feel a little dizzy.”

“There’s water in the tents,” Hoban said. “We could go there…”

“Maybe later,” Frieda said. She knew he didn’t want water. He wanted to make love… she wondered, wryly, what his team would make of him slipping off to make love to her before dismissing the thought. She’d grown up in a world where she’d been uneasily aware of her parents having sex — there’d been no privacy for anyone, not in the wretched shacks — and she’d never liked it. “I think…”

She glanced up as she saw a man picking his way towards them. Her teeth clenched in a flash of sudden instinctive hatred. Sir Wheaton — the knighthood was probably assumed, along with the name — was King Harold’s enforcer. King Harold. Frieda tried not to snort in disgust, although it wasn’t easy. The king had an entire string of grandiose titles, but his realm was smaller than the average city state… her lips twitched, remembering the vast lands King Randor of Cursed Memory had bequeathed Emily. She could lose half her holdings, and half again, and she’d still have far more lands than the local monarch. She supposed that was why he’d given himself so many titles. It disguised the fact he was little more than a local bully-boy.

“My Lord,” Sir Wheaton said. He was making a very clear attempt to present himself as a sophisticate and failing miserably, like a young girl who’d learnt her social etiquette from books rather than her elders. “I trust everything is in order?”

Hoban nodded, curtly. He didn’t like Sir Wheaton either. The man had arrived to serve as the liaison between the diggers and the monarch, but he’d spent most of his time prowling the region rather than staying still. Frieda was sure he was preying on the villagers, which showed a certain lack of common sense. He’d hardly be the first person to vanish in the forests, his body lost forever. And yet… she grimaced. She didn’t want to think about it.

“I’ll see you later,” Frieda said, suddenly unable to bear the exchange any longer. “Have fun.”

She turned and walked away, making a wide circuit around the ruined buildings. Dark and twisted magic hung around them, shadowy impressions of the disaster that had overwhelmed the villagers before they could feel. The diggers were used to traces of old magics — Hoban had told her stories of excavating an entire city, one buried by a long-ago disaster that might have been caused by magic — and yet, none of them felt comfortable enough to actually live in the ruined buildings. She didn’t blame them. The dark magic had effectively preserved them as a monument, somehow leaving the ruins suspended in a single moment of time. It was just… unnatural. She knew what happened to other wooden buildings, if they weren’t constantly tended and repaired. They practically melted away, returning to the soil as nature reclaimed them. Here… there weren’t even any rodents, or insects, or birds flitting through the trees.

The air cleared suddenly as Frieda crossed the boundary line, the sunlight suddenly brighter and more welcoming. She took a long breath, looking down the road to the village before shaking her head and turning away. She hadn’t realised how oppressive the air had become, around the dig, until she’d stepped out of the site… she scowled, wondering if she should ask Hoban to teleport her back to Whitehall. Archaeology was like going to war, she decided as she started to walk through the trees. Long hours — or days or weeks or months — of boredom, followed by brief moments of screaming terror. Or so Sergeant Miles had told the class. Frieda had never been to war.

She felt better, somehow, as she made her way through the trees, keeping a wary eye out for trouble. In the old days, it had been dangerous for young girls to wander too far from their homes. It wasn’t uncommon for neighbouring villagers to kidnap young women for marriage, and everyone would pretend it was just normal… Frieda’s stomach churned, remembering all the horror stories she’d heard. She hadn’t needed outsiders to threaten her, not when she’d been a young girl. Her fellow villagers had been quite bad enough. She smiled coldly, banishing the fears as she heard something moving up ahead. If it was a local lout with dreams of capturing a bride, he was in for a very nasty shock.

The trees parted, revealing an old woman. Frieda blinked in surprise. The woman was genuinely old, not merely middle-aged and worn down by constant labour. Her skin was chestnut brown, darkened by a life in the woods, and her eyes were strangely avian, giving her a slightly disconcerting appearance. Frieda knew demihumans and yet… the old woman was just odd. She leaned on a staff Frieda was entirely sure she didn’t need. And she had magic, a faint aura of power that surrounded her like a shroud. A hedge witch…

“Well met,” Frieda managed. There’d been a hedge witch living nearby, from an old and probably unreliable memory, but no one talked about the old woman even though everyone had known about her. Frieda had been too young to slip up to her hovel — everyone knew where it was, even though they claimed otherwise — before she’d been sold to a passing magician. “I greet you.”

“Child of the Cairngorms,” the old woman said. “I greet you.”

Frieda nodded, eying her warily. Magicians tended to look down on hedge witches, regarding them as low-power magicians at best and outright frauds at worst. And yet, they could be very dangerous. Some bathed in the wild magic, others… Emily had told her of a hedge witch who’d embraced necromancy, the power driving her mad as she sought to change the world. Her eyes narrowed. That hadn’t been too far from here, had it? If she hadn’t known it was impossible, she would have wondered if it had been that battle that had left the village in ruins. But this had taken place well before Emily’s arrival and Frieda’s own birth.

“You are welcome in this place,” the old woman continued. “You may call me Granny.”

“Granny,” Frieda repeated. Hedge witches tended to be careful about names, either for fear of the Other Folk or — more likely — to conceal their family ties. Granny was old enough to have outlived her parents and siblings and it was quite possible the rest of her family had chosen to pretend she didn’t exist. “I’m sorry if I’ve walked into your land.”

She braced herself, expecting everything from a tongue lashing to a blow from the staff to a nasty — and warped— hex. Emily had met a hedge witch with a very nasty attitude to trespassers and, from what little she’d said afterwards, had come very close to losing her freedom if not her life. Hedge witches could be nasty, if they had wild magic. Their spells could be difficult to handle, even for a trained magician…

“You are not the first person to come looking for me,” Granny said. “And you are welcome in this place. I mean you no harm.”

“I didn’t come looking for you,” Frieda said, as Granny motioned her to follow. “I was exploring.”

Granny laughed. “That’s what they all say,” she said. “Every last one of them. They insist they didn’t mean to come here, even as” —the trees suddenly parted, revealing a cave hidden within a rocky mound— “they stumble into my lair. I give them bark tea and wait, listening to their excuses as they dance around their questions and their requests until they finally tell me what they want. They all seem surprised when I tell them I’ve heard it all before.”

Frieda frowned. “Everything?”

“Oh, yes.” Granny was suddenly serious, motioning for Frieda to sit on a log while she brought out two steaming mugs. “I was expecting to see you earlier, truth be told. It was clear you had the gift. The threadlines of fate insisted we’d cross paths.”

“You knew about me?” Frieda was startled. She hadn’t shown any magic, as far as she knew, until the passing sorcerer had noticed her. And purchased her. “You knew…”

“And I did nothing,” Granny said. There was no apology in her voice. “Destiny had you in his clutches.”

“I’m not staying,” Frieda said, firmly. “When this summer is over, I’ll be going home, and I won’t be coming back.”

Granny raised her eyebrows. “Going home?”

“This isn’t my home,” Frieda said. The raw anger surprised her. “My parents and siblings kicked and beat me. The villages…”

She shuddered, feeling sick. It would be easy, so easy, to raise a firestorm of her own and burn the village to the ground. It would be easy… she wondered, as she took a sip of the bark tea, if that was what had happened to the destroyed village. Her father had never talked about his brother, suggesting he’d been a magician… he’d certainly never been seen again. Frieda wondered at it for a moment, then dismissed the thought. It didn’t matter. The village wasn’t hers any longer.

“I understand,” Granny said. Her eyes were surprisingly gentle. Frieda believed her and yet… “Better than you might expect.”

Frieda scowled at her. Hedge witches enjoyed a certain amount of freedom, for all they were shunned publicly. Sir Wheaton would never dare visit the cave, for fear of spending the rest of his days croaking on a lily pad. Or worse. The villagers might mutter darkly whenever they saw the witch, but they wouldn’t get in her way or bar others from going to see her as long as they kept it quiet. The hypocrisy bugged her. Everyone knew everyone else did it.

“You may have a role to play here,” Granny mused. Her voice faded, as if her mind was a long way away. “The threadlines are still tangled around you.”

“No.” Frieda shook her head. It was impossible to predict the future, certainly in any great detail. And yet… if it was impossible, why was it illegal? She’d heard of noblewomen being executed for trying to predict when the king would die… why insist on the death penalty, if they were wasting their time? It was something to discuss with Emily, when they saw each other again. “I make my own future.”

Granny smiled. “They all say that, young lady.”

“Really.” Frieda finished her drink, grimacing slightly at the taste. It had been a long time since she’d drunk bark tea and she’d forgotten how sour it could be, if one wasn’t used to the flavour. She didn’t want to know what Granny had put in the water, before bringing it to the boil and leaving it to simmer. “If you don’t mind, I think I’ll be on my way.”

“They disturbed something very dangerous,” Granny said, her tone so serious Frieda found herself unable to look away. “Something best left buried under the ground, away from human eyes. You’ve felt it, haven’t you? The sense that the thing you found should be left firmly alone.”

Frieda’s eyes hardened. “Do you know what it is?”

“No,” Granny said. “But I do know it’s dangerous. Your friends aren’t the only people to have gone missing over the last few months. They can feel it, down in the village. They’re closing their doors at night, praying to all the old gods that whatever’s been unleashed doesn’t come for them. You need to warn your friends. It has to be buried again, and quickly.”

“I can try,” Frieda said. “What do you know about it? Why was it even found?”

“The ground shifted, from what I was told,” Granny said. “It was spat out. Or, perhaps, it grew out of the earth and thrust itself into the light. And now it is poisoning the land. I can feel it, a poisonous needle thrust into the earth.”

Frieda shivered. “Did it destroy the village, so long ago?”

“It might.” Granny shrugged, her voice suddenly urgent. “Tell your friends. Tell them to bury it beneath the soil and forget they ever saw it. And quickly.”

“I can try,” Frieda repeated. She doubted the diggers would listen, even Hoban. It was hardly their first dangerous dig. She even understood their attitude. The artefact might be dangerous to the unwary, but they… they were trained and experienced archaeologists who knew to be careful. They might not realise they’d run into something they couldn’t handle until it was far too late. “But…”

She stood, brushing down her tunic. They might not have run into something they couldn’t handle. Hoban would certainly think so, she was sure, and she hoped to all the gods he was right. And yet, all her instincts were screaming Granny was right. The artefact really was dangerous. They’d be safer playing catch with a necromancer.

“You will be welcome, if you come back here,” Granny said. “Until then…”

Frieda nodded, recognising the dismissal. “I’ll do my best,” she promised. Hoban would give her a fair hearing, at least. He’d certainly never dismissed her because of an accident of birth. “And we’ll see.”

But she feared, even as she spoke, that the diggers wouldn’t listen.