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The black knight sauntered over on his plate-footed monstrosity, jangling with silver tack. The arms he wore had blank patches conspicuously set at the centre of whatever shield, harness, plate he had. There was no symbol anywhere on him that you could place him by. They’d been removed. That was no mercenary’s kit.
“Ho, travellers!” the knight rasped.
Amid the gnarled roots of the oaken woods, the travellers in question started back from their campfire. Two scraped-clean bowls rested on the ground beside the blanket they’d laid out. Supper was done with, and the copper kettle nestled in the coals showed that it was time for tea. The slighter of the two was chipping at the pungent block of tea leaves with his knife, unperturbed.
He wasn’t about to get up for a voice that cracked like that. Alice had already scrambled to her feet, sword belt in hand, but Oz waved her back. He didn’t fancy their chances against this apparition.
“Hi, Sir Knight. What sort of service can we offer?” he asked. Faint sparks danced quietly between them.
“Tell me, have you seen a man, cloaked, whose eyes reflect the cloudless night?”
“That’s no colour that I know of,” Oz said truthfully. Not that he’d rat out the poor guy if he knew.
“Nor I!” Alice jeered. “What kind would it be? Black? The commonest orphan may serve your purpose.”
She stamped her plate-clad foot against the bare earth. Easy, easy, Oz wanted to say, but the best he could do was just grin at her.
“You’ll know him. His hair is shaggy black, it falls over his head,” the black knight said, then muttered, “I don’t know why he leaves it so. Wouldn’t it be so much simpler to cut it? He dresses in all manner of cloaks or coats, badly, since he never gets them fitted unless I—unless he’s ordered.”
One of their horses whickered softly from the tree where it was tethered. When Oz looked, Raven was peering at the new horse with ears pricked forward. Familiar? He shouldn’t be pulling at his lead like that out of curiosity. Rabbit might, but she was happily munching on her nosebag without a care in the world.
Oz marked it down and caught Alice’s eye. It’s okay, he mouthed, and smiled.
The knight was still talking. “A-and he’s young. The same—not much older than you both.”
The short canopy above them still blotted out the moon and stars, making Oz wary of this thing. It didn’t seem entirely natural. At any rate, it didn’t seem to mean him harm.
“What’s your business with this man? We can point him to you, if we find him,” Oz added.
“I’m looking for the man who killed my brother, who I loved.”
“Why?” Alice asked, suspicious.
The black knight shook his head with the ring of mail. “For justice.”
“As it happens, we’re looking for something, too,” Oz said. He ignored Alice’s warning glance. “Why don’t you join in? I’ve got a true map.”
“That’s right,” Alice chimed in. “How will you return? We came by no path you know of.”
Oz noticed her legs tense, ready for a jump, as the black knight swivelled his helm. The light of the fire was barely enough to make out the contours of his plate. He could see nothing of his eyes beyond the slits. Alice’s sight was better, but he doubted even she knew this man’s face.
“None of your business. I don’t intend to die here.”
“She only means you well,” Oz said mildly.
The helm turned on Oz as the knight spurred his horse. It shook its mane, dancing out of Raven’s reach as he put his nose forward, and turned back into the pathless woods.
“I mean to search. If you find him, give him to no one but me,” the knight said.
Alice didn’t sit again until their noise was fully swallowed by the trees. The kettle boiled while she was waiting, giving Oz the time to set up tea for them both to have.
“Arrogant louse,” she muttered. She took the cup Oz handed her and blew on it hard. “He’ll learn when he’s eating horse.”
“Did you see his saddlebags?” Oz asked. He had counted how long the steps took to fade.
“Hm? What of them?”
“It was too dark out for me to see. Did he have room for rations?”
Opening their sack of food again, Oz offered her one of Gil’s biscuits for the occasion. She snatched it out of his hand and stuffed it into her mouth as she was talking.
“Dunno. He had a sword, but no lance. Black scabbard. Smelled…not right.”
“Bad?”
“Mmf.” Alice shook her head. “Not bad.”
She chased the biscuit with a cup full of tea that was still scalding hot in Oz’s mug. He envied Alice her fortitude, much of the time.
“Could he be a chain?” Oz asked. The ghosts that wandered the abyssal forest rarely left without asking for anything, but Alice herself was a special case. He wondered if there might be more.
“He wasn’t hunting,” she said. “They don’t talk like that.”
“You did.”
“I was never born here,” she said. “I know that, now.”
Oz shrugged. Sipping at his own tea, he pulled out a copy of the map he had stowed safe in the bottom of his bags. Rather than the ink blot it was on other charts, the abyss it showed had paths marked through it from Alice’s descriptions and the odd magician’s account. Her memories were scattered through the quadrant nearest old Sablier, where they were camped out tonight. The knight must have come in from the new town, if he was a knight.
Alice might not be alone as she thought she was, when she first rescued him from the haunts. That was a comforting thought.
…
Alice gave Oz another glare to make sure he’d stopped at the stone ring erected around the cottage. He never could be trusted to stay in one place.
The tug she felt from her memories was strongest close to Sablier, she’d found, but a stray thought had pulled the two of them deep into the forest on this journey. It had played around the corners of her sight when she had last been here with Oz, warning her that yet another piece of her undiscovered life was out of reach. With Oz’s ability to see through the traps of the abyss, she had been able to piece together more and more of the life she had, but those memories of her purpose, her origins outside the forest, those remained obscure.
This cottage sent off waves of something, a familiar feeling of a name she wanted to call but couldn’t remember. It wasn’t a memory of a place, she was sure, but of a person. Had they lived here?
Alice left Oz in the safety of the woods that only the clown Xerxes had escaped and pushed open the cottage door. Someone had left it ajar. That said it should be abandoned. What was a house doing here, anyway? Could it be a chain itself? A haunt that lured its victims inside? If it tried to eat her, she was sure she could rake its throat on the way down and slice herself from its belly. No chain stood against her for long.
When Alice stepped inside, through the worn planks, the main room it showed her was strewn with all sorts of books, papers, maps, and other things with squiggles on them. It wasn’t dusty. It smelled fresh. There wasn’t any meat, but someone had been cooking.
She frowned. No living thing could stay here, could it? She loved food, but even she had never needed to eat it. Neither food, nor souls, which sustained the things she had always known to be chains.
The cottage was built up around the body of an old lightning-struck cedar. The blackened branches opened a hole in the canopy while the hollowed trunk formed part of one wall. A spiral stair reached up the trunk to a second level above her head. On the other side of the room, there were the blackened remains of a fire in the stone hearth. A kettle rested on the stones, and cups, and a stack of dirtied wooden dishes. All the while, no one disturbed her.
Until Oz appeared at the door.
“Alice?” he called, and she whipped around, sword drawn. The whelp! The lackey, the empty-headed bird. Hadn’t he been warned to stay outside of the circle?
She supposed the cottage must be just a house, but she was to be obeyed! He was hers.
“Come,” she said, pointing to the stairs before he started talking again. “There’s something here. I can feel it. I’ll go first, then you follow.”
“Okay. Do you know whoever lives here?” he asked.
“No. No one could live here,” she said.
“It doesn’t look abandoned,” Oz said. “Maybe it was built before the abyss took the woods, but someone’s been here recently.”
“Then it’s not living,” Alice ended it.
She dashed up the stairs before he got any other silly ideas. They creaked under the weight of her armour, but the old wood wasn’t rotten. They held her as she burst out on to the upper story.
“Speak your name!” she announced. “And Alice the Great and Merciful will spare you!”
Standing across the top of the stairs, she levelled her sword at the presence that had pulled her all the way from the Rainsworth house at the edge of the woods. It was a boy. Not much older than her. He was wrapped up in a nest of far too many cushions and blankets, beside a bed which was piled with even more of the books. How could a boy that slight lift them up the stairs? She goggled.
The boy might have goggled back. She could not see what lay under the black and bear-like fur that covered his head. At any rate, he didn’t move. He had one thick book open on his lap that she somehow wanted to be read to her. It felt right, that someone would read to her here.
“My name…” the boy said. Alice heard the scampering of feet behind her. Had she been here before? All those years she spent in the forest, and she had no memory of any home here.
“Oh!” Oz said as he came to the top of the stairs. “You’re—Alice, that’s him!”
“What?”
How could Oz know this was someone from her memories? What? Did he share them, now?
“You know, the one the knight told us about.”
Alice shook herself back to her senses. That was right, the knight. Some idiot noble lost here on a stupid quest. But this boy didn’t have the look of a murderer. He had the smell of an honest man.
Light spilled on to them both down the trunk of the chestnut, reaching to the sky above them, while the boy seemed to be reading in shadow.
“I’m supposed to be who, now?” the boy asked. Alice didn’t like his tone.
“There’s a knight hunting you, you know. He claims you killed his beloved brother. He didn’t seem too serious, though,” Oz said over her shoulder. Alice made sure that she was still between him and the boy.
The boy froze, hunching in on himself like a kicked cur. “He should.”
“Should he? I wanted to ask you. You don’t seem like you’d want to kill,” Oz said. Alice nodded her agreement.
“I did,” the boy said.
“Really?”
The boy nodded, not moving from his nest beside the bed.
“Elliot’s a chain because of me. I didn’t know he still remembered. You should leave.”
The wretched, shaggy thing didn’t look so inclined to be a threat. Alice sheathed her sword, but kept on her toes.
“Elliot? Who is that?” she asked, approaching so that Oz could move out of the stairs.
“I think he means the knight,” Oz said.
The two of them crossed the rough terrain between stairs and bed, stepping over even more stacks of books. Alice still wondered where he got his food. Was he eating the paper?
Oz crouched down in front of the boy, sitting down as she stood guard over them. The boy’s face was obscured, but if she could just see, she was sure there was something in his face that might spring her memory. Alice hissed in frustration.
“Show your eyes,” she said. The boy disobeyed immediately, bowing his head so the choppy bangs fell further into his face. What a contrary thing.
“That’s right,” Oz said dreamily. “He said to look at your eyes. Could I see? I didn’t understand what the black knight was talking about, if he was someone you knew. “
He kept his hand balled in his lap on the perch of books he’d had to land on. Alice was going to just shove the boy’s bangs up if he stalled a moment longer.
Luckily, Oz’ pathetic grovelling worked. This boy, the murderer, glanced sourly in her direction and then capitulated. He lifted his own hand to his forehead, still bowed, and showed just one eye to them.
The rush of recollection didn’t come. Alice was left looking into one deep violet eye, of the night sky after sunset had gone but before all light had left. The nagging feeling of her memory was still here, overturning all other thoughts she had.
“They are…I understand why he told us about you,” she heard Oz say. That wasn’t enough. Who cared what flowery language the chain-knight had used for this?
“Your name, murderer,” she said. “What is it?”
“Will you leave, if I tell you?” the boy said. He was getting testy. So was she, and no one had yet defeated Alice!
“I won’t leave with it unknown,” she said. “I am Alice. Reveal yourself to me.”
“I’m Oz,” Oz added. “Sorry. But we’re looking for someone Alice knows, and it might be you.”
The boy’s throat bobbed, and Alice knew just then that he knew her, too.
“I’m Leo,” he said. Nothing happened.
That was it! Alice cut in front of Oz, standing over the boy with the eyes that were, maybe just like the knight said, like a cloudless sky. She grinned, the way that made Gil cower. This boy would not defeat her with his empty name and lies.
“No,” she said. “That’s not your self.”
The boy flinched. His eyes flickered this way, then that, then he whispered something that she didn’t catch. What was he doing? Had he gone mad?
“Alice, I think that’s enough,” Oz said faintly as the boy’s hand started twitching.
“No!” Leo shouted suddenly. “No, I won’t—fine. Shut up.”
“You dare ask Alice the Great for silence?”
“Not you,” Leo said witheringly. He looked up at her, eyes clear. “I’m Leo. I’m the wizard of the woods. That gives me another name. I’m Glen.”
Just as he spoke it, the scene in front of Alice disappeared into bygone times. The cottage’s pillows were unfaded, no longer threadbare, and the bed was hers.
It was more than memory. It was her own being that overthrew her.
Oz caught her.
…
Leo watched the two travellers as they left, willing the past Glens to keep their own counsel for just one hour. The incessant yammering since his instatement as Glen on that night, blood-covered and fleeing the Nightray hordes, had been a greater nuisance than ever Elliot’s family could be. Oswald could fawn over his niece as he saw fit. It took all he had to bite his tongue in front of the girl. Who did she think he was, ordering him around? The last true wizard in this country.
Beneath his own dislike at being ordered so, he knew the reason for his foul mood. They had not dwelled long on Elliot. He was a chain, which seemed to satisfy the others to know, but that Oz had pulled him aside at the last to say that he may be more than a shell of the man that Leo had loved. Did he take him for a fool? Leo had asked Oz just that, only to hear that this Alice girl was a chain that ate and thought, free to venture outside the forest.
The luck of that galled him. Glen’s niece could collect the shards of her life and forge one of her own, but Elliot was doomed to pale undeath, a shadow passing without thought, and he would live in this abyssal wood until the Baskervilles sent some poor wretch to their death ninety years hence.
He leaned against the doorframe of the cottage, deciding. The sky above would be deep blue, but the forest was always dim as night unless the light was fetched from outside, as in the cedar’s empty trunk.
Elliot was still here, then, not claiming souls or dissipating. The chain that had taken him was, at least.
Sighing, he took out a pocket notebook. Flipping through it, he read the notes he’d attached to each sigil. For protection. For wayfinding. For communication. The tomes left by the old Glens taught him more than he’d learned chasing magic in the orphanage, but there was never any pressing need to try them. He couldn’t die. He had to will not to.
Shadows flitted through the trees about him. Blood-sucking bats, butcherbirds, and demons walked the forest without satisfaction. A step outside the stone circle of the cottage would take him among them.
Leo began to feel a pull to join them. He could be a chain himself, for all he knew, bound to this wood as he was. The abyss had taken him. He had ceased to exist. How was that different from the fate that Elliot met?
Hours passed after Alice and Oz were taken into the trees on their search. He tried to hope that they found the memories they sought. It was hard coming. Leo had no more concept of hope, only decision. Still, Leo did not leave the threshold but to fetch a book to read.
He waited until the night was blackest to commit his acts and commit to them.
Leo tore a sigil from the pocket notebook, then tore an open hangnail with his teeth. The blood smeared as he dragged his thumb down the page, still standing in the cottage’s protections.
A sign of summoning.
Old, crippled trees lined the path to the cottage door. They had been trimmed for pots in ages gone by, as old as the shadows in his head, but tiny. They didn’t think to strain past the bonds put on them. Each time they did, they had been cut back. The same might happen to him.
Leo took step after trembling step down the path, outside the circle. Gnarl-branched oaks mixed with grey-leaved willows, none obeying the patterns of nature.
He tucked the paper in his shirt. His heart beat hard against it.
It had already been months since his life outside had ended. He would wait whatever time remained to see if it was truly done.
So Leo stood there. The wizard of the woods watched the chains pass by in procession. Man-things with long tongues shuffled over the roots on four limbs that ended in hands. Birds with eyes at the centre of their feet dipped close to watch him. Giant caterpillars struggled in the gaps between the treeroots.
Each one of them, he watched, until at last the knight approached. He wore no sign, just as Oz had said, but Leo knew the armour that he’d polished as a squire. Nothing under the helmet signified that this was anything other than an abyss-born chain. No face he recognized looked out at him. There was only one plate-clad figure that reined in a black horse.
The knight stopped, sniffed the air, The horse’s nostrils flared. Leo didn’t know if it was a ghost of the same horse he’d fed, or whether it was what Elliot’s last remaining parts had wanted for their steed.
Then the knight’s helmet turned toward him. He felt insubstantial. The knight approached as if he couldn’t see the figure in front of him. Shouldn’t he be able to scent human prey? Or was Leo no longer human?
“Ho, traveller!” the knight said.
That was Elliot’s voice. He heard it in what dreams were his.
Stumbling forward over the pebbled ground, Leo swallowed his bile.
“Don’t call me that!” he shouted back. “Use my name, Elliot.”
All at once the knight went mad. It clawed at its helmet, one foot trying to unhook from the stirrups and, failing, catching in the horse’s girth. It slid sideways around the horse and hit the rocks with a clang. Still on the ground, it tore its helmet off. Elliot’s face was there. His eyes widened as if he’d only just caught sight of him.
Leo stepped forward. “My name,” he said. The Glens were rampaging around what was left of his mind, but he kept his concentration focused. “Say it.”
“You—!” Elliot said. “I remember you! You killed my brother, who I loved.”
Not for the first time, Leo’s heart broke.
“Yes,” he admitted. “Now name me.”
“I’ve searched. I had to find you.” On the ground, Elliot breathed hard in panic as he advanced. “Why?”
“If you are Elliot, you’d know. Liar! You murdered your brother, you left me for dead!”
The black knight struggled against the roots, but Leo whispered a few of the words the Glens had left him and they moved. Woody tendrils circled the knight and held him tight against the ground as Leo knelt down over him.
“You’re here,” the knight breathed.
“I have always been here. You’re in my forest,” Leo snapped. “Who are you?”
“I—I can’t remember.”
“Then there is nothing you can be. You can’t exist here. You can’t stay. Begone. Vanish from these woods.”
“But I can’t!”
“Why?”
The chorus of croaking nightbirds rose around them as Elliot struggled, reaching out for him just to be snapped back by the roots.
“I n-need to—to do j-justice,” Elliot choked. One of the roots wrapped around his neck now, Leo notice, and he pried it off. The rest could tighten still.
“Then do it,” Leo told him. “Go. Leave me.”
Tears leaked out of the knight’s eyes now, empty, unseeing except for, Leo was sure, the sigil pressed up against his chest.
“I’m s-sorry,” the knight said.
“Then do what I say.”
“N-no. I’m sorry. To you. That’s justice. That’s what I need to do,” the knight said through gritted teeth. He clenched his fists, straining against Leo’s overwhelming force. “I need to apologize. To him. Leo.”
The knight’s eyes shone like coloured glass and one arm tore through Leo’s restraints, defying all magic. The hand grabbed the front of Leo’s shirt before he could do aught to stop it, pulling him close as all the while the knight stared blankly, not seeing him. Leo fought to breathe.
“It’s him I loved. I killed my brother,” said the knight.
Then stopped.
The hand at Leo’s throat loosened as the armour, horse, tack all vanished. Elliot sprawled out under him in woollen bedclothes.
“Leo?” he asked. The eyes shone still, but with tears unshed, not unnatural light. The Glens fell silent in their halls.
“You remember, now,” Leo rasped. He undid the root-chains with one hand, massaging his throat with the other.
“I—I’m so sorry.”
Elliot took him in embrace right there on the ground, which Leo met happily for all the sticks and dirt in his hair.
“Elliot,” Leo breathed, “Alive or dead, don’t leave my side again.”
“On my honour and my family’s, I swear it,” he heard Elliot speak into his shoulder.
“Not much honour there,” he answered.
“Then on you,” Elliot said.
As quickly as he’d held him, Elliot pushed him to arm’s length. He captured his glance as any point in a joust as if to say that Leo could not unbalance him for all his efforts.
“On my love, you’ll stay with me,” Leo said. “I’ll seal those terms.”
He raised his own hand to Elliot’s stunned face, clasped, and kissed him.