Firethorn by Sarah Micklem Read Free Book Online

shaken. “I must go to the Kingswood today. Will you come with me?”
    Halm made the sign to turn bad luck away. “Why must you go there? Knock on Mischief’s door, he’s sure to bid you welcome.” Like Na, like most of the village folk, she thought the forest was full of menace, and not just from the kingsmen. Those who thought otherwise were not inclined to speak of it.
    I said I would go, and gladly. “We’ll be back tomorrow,” Az told Halm, and she gave me a basket to carry loaded with barley and a flask of goat’s milk.
    We followed the river toward its source in the mountains. The path climbed gently at first, then steeply, and I matched my pace to Az’s. She panted as she climbed under the hot Sun, so I forbore to ask her questions until we stopped to rest in a field of blooming flax. Swallows darted over the field, the undersides of their wings catching the blue of the flowers.
    â€œWhat did you see, Az? What does the omen say?”
    To my surprise, Az began to cry. “The crows told me I’ll have but one son left in my croft by wintertime, for one will fly and one will marry. We’ll be begging the woodward for the king post to raise a new roof soon. Ah—change is hard for an old woman! Even good news comes like a thief.”
    â€œYou think Maken will marry? Who will he marry?” It was a question I pondered often at the time.
    Az shrugged her humped shoulders. “The crow flew right over the village with the straw, and there’s no telling where he came down. Plenty of women in his path. I worry more for Fleetfoot. I fear he might not live to grow a beard.” She rubbed tears from her face with both hands. “Come, we have a ways to go.”
    There is a path the fallow deer use when they come down from the woods to nibble on the heavy heads of ripening grain. We followed it through the wall of brambles, out of the Sun and into the shadows under the trees, and then Az left the path and led me deep into the forest to the great oak, Heart of the Wood.
    I knew where she was leading me, of course; every step was familiar. Yet I wondered at how I could have forgotten—or put out of my mind—the sense of presence that fills the Kingswood. I had been a creature of the wood, one among many, so enfolded in that vast life that I’d lost myself there for a time; now I was touched by awe and dread, like any trespasser who strays too far within those precincts.
    Az did not seem afraid. She had me put the basket with the barley and goat’s milk in a crotch of the great oak high above her head. Then she began a low chant, standing between two roots as thick as a man’s thigh, rocking back and forth. I sat on the ground nearby, and after a while I fell into a shadow dream with my eyes wide open. Before me a green veil stirred in the wind, woven in a shifting pattern of leaf and branch, light and shadows. I looked at it sideways and caught a glimpse of a black horse galloping, its rider cloaked in a green flame. But soon I became aware of other shadows crowding close, at the edge of vision. I felt we had a multitude around us, and it raised the hair on my nape.
    Az was still murmuring, rocking. She wept again.
    Late in the afternoon she came out of her trance. She cut a green branch with a fine spray of leaves from Heart of the Wood, giving thanks as she did so, and led me away, sure of her steps even without a path. We climbed a steep slope and then descended into a ravine between two long ridges, where one of the streams that feed our river had cut deep into the rock. The shale walls of the gorge were covered with ferns, sprigs of twinflower, and brilliant green mosses lush from seeping waters. The stream was shallow, swift, and cold. We scrambled on slippery rocks and clung to roots and saplings. Az’s breathing was harsh and her limbs trembled. I begged her to stop and take some food, for I’d gathered mushrooms and