Twixt Firelight and Water by Juliet Marillier Read Free Book Online

reached the edge of the forest at dusk. I had seen plenty of forests in my time, back home in Xixón and in other parts of the world on one voyage or another. Hot, damp forests full of bright birds and howling creatures. Cold, crisp, empty forests where snow bent the boughs of fir and spruce, and bears lay in winter dreams. This was less forest than blanket of darkness, lying over hill and valley in mysterious, shadowy silence. I decided to camp overnight and go on by daylight. It wasn’t just the brooding quiet of the place, the sense of its being somewhere out of ordinary time and space. There were guard posts to north and south, well-manned even at this hour. Likely the whole forest was ringed by them. I didn’t suppose those guards would put an arrow through me first and ask questions later. But they might well try to apprehend me. I hadn’t decided yet how I would introduce myself to my father’s long-lost family, but I knew I didn’t intend to walk into their hall with a spear shoved in my back and some man at arms announcing that he’d caught me spying.
     
    It was a cold night. I made no fire, but slept rolled in my blanket. Soon after dawn I packed up and set out into the forest. Somewhere in these woods there was a lake, a big one. Beside the lake was a keep, and in that keep lived the family of Sevenwaters, my father’s kin.
     
    Father had warned me about the paths through this forest, both directly, when he knew I was coming here, and indirectly, through the stories he’d told over the years. I’d never been sure whether to believe the implication that eldritch folk made their homes here alongside the human ones. In the tales there were two other races of people in Erin, both of them ancient. Understanding between the various groups was quite unusual in other parts of the land, but at Sevenwaters they all lived more or less side by side. When a person told tales about cows with wings and giant serpents that spewed up precious stones, it did lead one to assume that he was given to flights of the imagination. On the other hand, Father was the most practical of men, whether removing a thorn from the foot of a dog or talking over trade matters with Fernando and me. Besides, there was one especially uncanny story in his past that I had come to believe must be true, the one about him and his brothers being turned into swans. So perhaps he was right about the paths through the Sevenwaters forest changing of their own accord from one day to the next. It was to keep out strangers, he had explained. Many was the traveller who had gone astray somewhere in this tangle of pathways, only to come to light years later as a little pile of bleached bones. But I would be all right; I would find the way. I was family. For me the paths would lead where they should.
     
    I considered this as I headed further into the dense and murky woods. It was all right in theory. The difficulty lay in the fact that I looked nothing like Father. Since stepping off the Sofia in Dublin I had seen no woman, and few men, as tall as I was; I had seen nobody, male or female, with skin as dark as mine. My features were not those of an Irishwoman. I took after my mother’s side of the family. How would these uncanny forces — supposing they did exist — pick me out as my father’s daughter when all the outward signs suggested I was as out of place here as an olive in a bowl of grapes? It was supposed to be less than one day’s walk from the forest’s edge to the keep of Sevenwaters, depending on where one started. Since I was heading for a lake, I’d find a stream and follow its course. I’d watch out for markers — rock formations, notable trees, ponds, clearings — and with luck I would reach my destination before nightfall.
     
    It was a pleasant enough walk, for the main part. The woods were not as empty as they’d seemed in that odd dusk light, but full of birds and other creatures about their daily business. I saw no uncanny folk,