TEN

Everyone knew that it was the three thousand, two hundred and eleventh year of Maatkare Hatshepsu’s reign because most countries had adopted Egypt’s count of years as a common reference. Even Yue, whose dragons had Answered as long ago as Egypt’s gods, still found it handy when dealing with other realms. Eluned was less certain exactly how long it was since Egypt’s Pharaoh had become stone, but could always rely on her brother’s memory.

“One million, five hundred and one thousand little sphinxes?” Griff said, as they followed Dem Makepeace back into the Hall.

“Shabti are usually shaped like people,” Dem Makepeace said, pausing before the open doors leading into the grove. “Not that I’ve heard of any recent attacks by miniature stone armies.”

“Better as spies,” Eleri said, and they all looked out into the grove. The hall felt very large and empty and exposed with the inner doors wide open and the trees full of shadows—and folies. Somehow, Eluned could not find the thought of them reassuring.

“There are advantages to the guardians of this place knowing you three properly,” Dem Makepeace said, perhaps catching their hesitation. “Unless you consider yourself an enemy of Cernunnos, there’s no particular danger, though you will not stray from my side, nor will you tell anyone what you witness or have discussed this night.”

“No,” Eluned agreed, echoing Eleri and Griff. Too much was bound up with their investigation to risk blabbing.

“No,” Aunt Arianne said, a beat later. She was frowning.

Dem Makepeace stepped beneath the trees, and Eluned didn’t allow herself to hang back, trailing him to the gate. It seemed to float at the end of the path, golden coils and silver fruit glimmering in pitch. Could the quick polish it had received that afternoon have made even that dusky red metal so reflective? Could star and distant gas light reach so far?

The key was a metal circle Eluned hadn’t even noticed Dem Makepeace carrying. She only caught the movement as he pushed it into the space between the twin amasens’ jaws, turning it easily. After a click the gate swung inward, and a cool breeze swept past them, setting all the leaves of the usually sheltered trees whispering, and bringing a crisp hint of pine with a darker note of loam.

Eluned shivered, took a deep breath, and found herself more excited than afraid. It did not make sense, for that breeze to stream from one end of this high walled space. And it was not sensible for her to eagerly follow the vampire who had nearly killed her aunt. Yet she did, impatient when he paused to close the gate behind them.

The trees here crowded close, making it necessary to weave and duck beneath low-hanging branches. Eluned kept a sharp eye on Dem Makepeace’s white tunic, vivid through the gloom. Though it no longer stood out so clearly, and the trees…

“How?”

“Different time of day?”

Dem Makepeace glanced up at a sky the bleached and fading blue it had been before dinner. Ahead a trace of a stone path cut through widely-spaced trees and the tumbled remnants of ancient buildings. Birds called, the evening chorus in full throat to emphasise the quiet they’d left.

“Days in the Great Forest run long,” Dem Makepeace said. “The nights can last for years, if you’ve offended.”

Aunt Arianne, contemplating a vine-decked coil of stone almost her own height, shifted shielding leaves to reveal the carved head of another amasen, only a few flecks of faded gilding remaining on the horns.

“When you spoke of Cernunnos responding to petitioners for the key, you meant directly, didn’t you? Cernunnos. Responding.”

“Of course.”

“How disconcerting.” For once Aunt Arianne sounded as if she meant it. She looked like she was thinking hard.

“What are, what were all these buildings for?” Griff asked, as upright and alert as a pointer hound that had sighted its quarry. Impressive that he did not race off to explore among the tumbled drystone walls, but perhaps the squirrels leaping from pillar to pillar, or the sheer volume of the birdsong held him at bay.

“Hurlstone,” the vampire replied. “Village and temple. Before London.”

Not fully understanding, knowing only that her throat was full and tight, Eluned took two steps off the remnant path, then managed to stop herself, obedient to her agreement to stay close. But it made her ache to do it.

“Who’s that?” Griff asked sharply, looking past Eluned, and she turned, searching.

Beyond a knee-high wall and a stream framed by willow and drooping spruce, a girl stood shoulders back, face raised, arms hanging loose. Twilight was not a good time to pray, but so long as there was light in the sky you could hope to catch Sulis’ ear.

Instead of answering, Dem Makepeace changed direction, stepping over the wall and then crossing the stream on a tumble of stones that had once been a pillar.

“He serious?” Eleri murmured, as they followed. “Don’t just go meet Cernunnos.”

The gods—the grander ones like Cernunnos—rarely came to the living world. Their presence was too great a strain. But humans did not simply go visiting the Otherworlds either, except of course when their souls went to the gods who held their allegiance.

Eluned, unspeakably excited by something that should make her flinch, couldn’t make her voice work, but Griff muttered: “Don’t just walk out of London either. I think that must be a statue.”

He was right. Even when Dem Makepeace stopped right in front of her, the girl didn’t move, and now that Eluned could see her feet it was obvious: she stood held in place by a little pile of stones, grass growing thickly through it.

Aunt Arianne, voice muted, said: “The one who made you?”

“Good guess,” Dem Makepeace said, not looking back at them. With great ceremony he knelt, settled down to rest on his heels, and then put both hands to his chest and bowed, so low he was folded down completely.

Caught between shock and fascination, Eluned stared from him to a statue that seemed embarrassingly naked now that she knew that this had been a real person. A vampire in rept. The stone was a waxy pale grey, and the books said it would feel like hard soap beneath the fingers. Despite standing outside exposed, no details were eroded, and Eluned could clearly make out the edges of fingernails, of eyelids. No hair, because that was the one part of a vampire that was not preserved, but if she were taller and had brown frizz to tease into three triangles, she’d look a lot like Melly Ktai.

“Why isn’t she wrapped up?” Griff asked, curious. “And underneath a pyramid?”

Dem Makepeace stood, fortunately showing no hint of offence.

“Bindings aren’t necessary. They’re a carry-over of the preservations performed on those not stone. And she preferred the sight of an eternal sky to whatever assistance her ba might gain using a pyramid to gain strength before moving on.”

Egyptians had three lives. The first much the same as everyone else, and then a second where their bodies were maintained like houses, something to rest in after nights outside the world as invisible bird-people called ba. That was the complete opposite of Prytennia, where everything was done to ensure that your body didn’t tie you in place. But then, while Prytennians wanted to quickly move on to Annwn to be judged fit for a happy new life among Arawn’s islands, Egyptians needed to grow in strength as ba, because the journey to their Otherworld was very dangerous. And some, the strongest among them, might choose to fly not to their Field of Rushes, but outside the worlds altogether, transcending mortality to become stars.

The Egyptian way didn’t seem so bad if the house you spent your days in was a statue in a forest.

“Looks young,” Eleri murmured.

“She was barely older than you when she was raised.” Dem Makepeace smoothed his shendy, glanced at the fading sky, and started down a different path out of the clearing.

Curious to know the girl’s name, Eluned followed, and was immediately caught once again by her surroundings. So many plants, both familiar and strange, the scents changing with every touch of breeze. At the top of a small rise stood a stony pavilion lacking only a roof, and commanding a view over the surrounding forest to steal all attention.

Trees were no surprise, but the tower was, a sliver of shining silver far to their right. And white-capped mountains swallowed the opposite horizon, surely higher than any Prytennian peak. Clouds hid the tallest of them, teasing the eye with hints of something regularly shaped and monumental. And below that an ocean of trees, rising and falling with the hidden curves of the landscape, a mosaic of greens endlessly varied.

The Great Forest. An Otherworld. They truly were in an Otherworld.

Noticing she was behind, Eluned hurried to catch Dem Makepeace as he rejoined the path marked by statues of amasen. Words, an unspeakable urgency, blocked her throat, and at a point before the path left the ruins and curved away into thickly-set trees she threw sense to the wind and said: “Wait!”

The vampire who had not quite killed her aunt stopped obediently, and Eluned, who was not shy even if she was not easily social, found herself stammering in the face of limited patience.

“C-could I come back here?” she asked. “Just to…to look at it?”

For a long and painful moment he simply gazed at her blankly, as if she had said she wanted the moon. “You’d have to ask Cernunnos that,” he said finally. “Though I would imagine your aunt has a few firm opinions about doing so.”

“What consequences?” Aunt Arianne asked, ignoring the barbed smile he offered her. “Beyond allegiance given?”

“For asking? Likely nothing. For coming here?” He left off being provoking to consider the question seriously. “The Great Forest is not the Horned King’s alone, and I am far from the only one able to enter it. Hurlstone itself holds no dangers, and if you’re accepted by the Deep Grove’s guardians you’d have protection against anything that might stray by, short of a god. But this is one of the greatest of the Otherworlds, and to treat it as a plaything would be to invite being played with.”

Despite his almost indifferent tone, Eluned felt censured and drew breath to protest, to explain. But the struck-gong feeling overwhelming her seemed impossible to put into words, and she subsided in unfamiliar confusion.

Aunt Arianne said coolly: “If something is so important to a person that they would stand before a god—truly before a god—and ask for it, the reason is unlikely to be trivial.” She smiled at Eluned then, both serious and wry. “Not that I wish you to fling yourself into dangerous situations heedlessly. While Dem Makepeace’s description did rather make Hurlstone sound safer than London, I trust you to spare my nerves any outright idiocy.”

“Stray gods,” Eleri added, not discouraging but clearly dubious, and Griff said: “Will you really ask?”

“I don’t know,” Eluned admitted.

“Any other requests?” Dem Makepeace said, his tone entirely obliging, but not even Griff believed it, and so they silently followed the vampire beneath the trees.

With the sky only visible through breaks in the foliage, it immediately became almost too dark to keep track of the path, and Aunt Arianne moved to stand between them so that she could guide them around occasional hazards. The birdsong dropped away, and the wind rose, uncomfortably cold, stirring up the scent of leaf mold.

Through the velvety pitch, blobs of light provided dim beacons, and as they approached the first Eluned saw that it was another stone amasen, with a soft white light leaking from between its coils. The forest outside that gentle glow seemed even darker, and she could no longer see patches of pale sky above. But the wind had dropped and she could hear.

Griff pressed back against Eluned’s side, and she squeezed his shoulder and told herself that the tok tok tok was likely a bird, and the rustling no doubt a badger or squirrels, and that was most certainly the call of a fox and not someone crying out. It did not help at all to glance at Aunt Arianne’s face when they reached the next amasen, and see her gazing out into the forest with wide eyes. Beneath these trees, perhaps it was better not to be able to see in the dark.

Even if she came only in the daylight, and kept to Hurlstone, would she be simply courting danger, and wholly unequal to it? More to the point, could she really ask permission of Cernunnos to come here? The Horned King might bring bountiful harvests and healthy babies, but it was only through carefully maintained treaties that the lands within his dominion were not swallowed by forest. And to offend against Cernunnos in any woodland was to risk drawing the attention of his hunt.

They had passed the last of the glowing amasen, but Dem Makepeace still walked unhesitatingly toward a bluer patch of darkness up ahead, which became a clearing, a bowl of soughing grass fringed by trees. Beneath a depthless sea of stars stood a tiny hill, crowned by the Oak.

Sprawling boughs embraced forest and sky, reaching so far they hung beyond the slopes of the hill. The trunk was wider than ten men embracing, gnarled but solid. And every bit of it could be clearly seen because countless balls of glass, flickering softly, hung by slender chains from the branches.

“We will kneel at the foot of the hill,” Dem Makepeace said, continuing forward without break. “Wednesday will go up alone and kneel on the stone at the crest.”

“Who’s—?” Griff began, then stopped when Eluned squeezed his shoulder. It was obvious Dem Makepeace meant their aunt, but this wasn’t the time to ask why. Griff knew that, of course, but walking through a place where he could hear so many animals and not see them had been far from easy for him. Dem Makepeace had talked about this as if it was such a simple thing, but Eluned had never been so daunted, and Aunt Arianne surely was as well, though she did not falter when they reached the bottom of the hill and Dem Makepeace gestured for her to go past him.

The grass was high and seed heads tickled when Eluned knelt. One of the hanging glass globes was only a little way above them, and as a mote of light detached itself she saw that the light came from glowing white moths clinging to the outside, feeding on tiny flowers within.

There were fewer globes around the trunk, and Eluned could see very little of Aunt Arianne after she knelt past the top of the slope. The breeze had dropped, and the loudest sound was the clothy flutter of wings, and Griff’s breathing, growing ever harsher.

Eleri leaned down to Griff’s ear, and Eluned couldn’t hear her words, but guessed them even before Griff repeated: “Tennings Together.” The old reassurance, one they’d turned to more than ever this summer. Alone they each had their vulnerable points, but as their own minor trifold they covered each other’s weaknesses.

This, though, was a greater test for Griff than they could have anticipated. Even Eluned, wildly excited, had to fight with uncertainty. Could she do it? Ask Cernunnos himself for leave to visit his forest? For something so simple and selfish as wanting, longing, to look at it properly? Aunt Arianne had been careful to point out that a request like that would mean a tie of allegiance, a permanent bond. That wasn’t a small thing, even if Cernunnos wasn’t known as a harsh god.

And when should she ask? What if Cernunnos came and went and Eluned had not had a chance to speak? But if Cernunnos came down to them, would Griff be able to stand it?

Dem Makepeace, on the far side of Griff and Eleri, leaned forward so that he could see Griff’s whitely set face, then said: “Sleep.”

Griff closed his eyes, and his breathing slowed, but there was no other sign that he’d obeyed. He didn’t even slump sideways. This was a power all vampires had, to put someone into a trance. They did it so they could feed without causing pain—or protest. Father had once explained that Prytennian traditional dress, with the high collars and cuffs criss-crossed with laces, had originally been designed with the idea of preventing vampires from biting you without you knowing.

It didn’t seem that was what Dem Makepeace wanted, though, since he simply straightened again. Eluned discovered why he’d thought it necessary when a tiny scraping sound behind them was all the warning she had before the amasen arrived.

Enormous snakes. Enormous snakes with curling golden horns. The first came from Eluned’s right, rearing up to look at her. Thicker than a man’s leg, and a pale cream in colour, with a very black tongue that flickered an inch from Eluned’s nose. She let her breath out in shock, but also in wonder, for its fluted head and dark eyes were beautiful.

But it was an act of will to stay still as another slid between her and Griff, and she felt the weight and warmth of it brushing past. It looped around her brother and nuzzled his hair, and Eluned reminded herself desperately that the amasen were signs of great good fortune, that they brought bountiful harvests and drove away pests, and would shed their golden horns and leave them as gifts for those particularly favoured, and that a dozen of them, in shades of green and brown and cream, surely meant that the Tenning family would be lucky for years to come if only they could get through the next few minutes without screaming.

Dem Makepeace, barely visible among the coils, scratched one between its horns, and it closed its eyes and tilted its head like a dog whose most particular itch had been attended. Greatly daring, Eluned copied the gesture, and found the patch between the horns was soft and velvety. The cream amasen leaned into her touch until a pale green fellow pushed it out of the way, and then she had four of them competing to be petted, and Eleri was cautiously taking on two, and they exchanged a glance that clearly said: “We must never tell Griff about this.”

Aunt Arianne was coming down the slope, herded by a particularly large green and tan amasen, and with a much smaller creamy-pale one wrapped around her throat like a too-tight scarf. When she reached the bottom all but that small one slid away, and as they moved the air seemed to pulse. All the moths sprang into the air, and beat chaotically upward, taking most of the light away.

“Watch,” Dem Makepeace said, again leaning to address Griff, though Eluned’s eyes had not yet adjusted enough to see Griff’s reaction. He did not move, at least, and his breathing remained steady, but under starlight alone, Eluned could only make out broad shadows. The shape of Dem Makepeace as he straightened. The outline of Aunt Arianne as she knelt to Eluned’s right. Antlers.

The Horned King could be man or hart, and at first Eluned could not decide which of these followed Aunt Arianne down from beneath the Oak, was only certain of the antlers, wide and many-pointed. Two silver torcs hung glimmering from the tines, swaying with the motion of the god’s approach. The air shuddered with every step.

The hart form, a stag at the height of his strength. He walked directly up to Eleri, and dropped his great branched head to examine the automaton sitting on the ground in front of her, snorted like a thunderclap, and then was lowering over Eluned, inside her head.

That was the only way to describe it. Cernunnos sorted through her thoughts, her feelings, her self, examining the request to visit his kingdom, shaking aside petty words to lay bare the loss, the fury, the sense of being broken, that had weighed on Eluned ever since Aunt Arianne had told them Mother and Father had died. How a part of her she’d thought central had curled up and vanished, and Hurlstone was so full of all the things she usually loved that it filled her with the belief that the missing part would come back.

The Horned King threw back his heavy head, the twin torcs ringing, and shattered the air with his cry—the stag’s harsh bellow accompanied by a genuine thunderclap out of a clear sky. The sound pounded the ears, so close to a literal blow that Eluned almost didn’t feel a tinier hurt, but she looked down to see the small amasen, a pale rope sliding toward Dem Makepeace. The flesh between Eluned’s left thumb and forefinger throbbed.

When she raised her head, Cernunnos was gone, and they were just a line of people kneeling at the base of a hill topped with a tree, and as in a dream Eluned followed along as Dem Makepeace told them it was time to go, and led them silent along the path, pausing only to prop the automaton on a stone pillar, guarded by the small amasen, before they returned to Forest House.

The warmer air brought Eluned back to herself, and she gasped and looked confusedly at a pale sky candy-striped by dawn. Then Aunt Arianne held her right hand next to Eluned’s left so they could compare matching snake bites. And, as they raised those hands toward the ornate gate Dem Makepeace had closed, glimmering on the ghostly edge of tangibility, discover keys.

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