He didn’t run. Didn’t dodge.

  He walked. Silently. Straight through the racecourse.

  None of the illusions touched him. A curtain of fireflies parted for him. A burst of rainbow mist swerved mid-air, as though repelled, and the path curved to avoid him without altering its shape. It was as if the enchantments recognised something older. Something not to be interfered with.

  I watched, unmoving, the fizz in my hand forgotten.

  “Do you see him?” I asked Charity, who was waving a striped flag and calling encouragement to a child in a flying cloak.

  “See who?” she replied, without turning.

  “That man—there.” I pointed. My voice felt thick.

  She looked, blinking. “Where?”

  “He’s right th—” But he wasn’t.

  The mummer had disappeared.

  Gone. No pop. No flash. The ground bare, the air still, as though he’d been nothing more than a trick of the eye.

  Charity frowned. “Are you alright, boss?”

  I forced a smile. “Yes. Probably … festival fatigue.”

  She nodded, distracted by someone tripping over an illusory mushroom. “You need some sugar,” she said. “There’s a stand doing marzipan acorns near the willow glade.”

  I murmured agreement, but I didn’t move.

  Because I wasn’t tired. I wasn’t imagining things. I had seen him. A mummer. Silent, ancient, utterly unfazed by modern magick.

  And something about the way the course bent around him—

  In reverence.

  As though he belonged here and we were the trespassers.

  ***

  Later, as the laughter from the illusion race faded into the background and sunlight glazed the festival in a honeyed calm, I discovered Gwyn near the herb garden, watching the breeze tangle the flags above a tea tent. She stood tall and motionless, her cane exchanged for a parasol that now rested close to her side, her gaze fixed not on the crowds but on the distant tree line, where Speckled Wood leaned close, listening in on the day’s secrets.

  “You saw him, didn’t you?” she said, before I could speak.

  I didn’t pretend not to understand. “Yes. A mummer. He walked right through the illusion race. The enchantments parted for him.”

  Gwyn exhaled softly, her lips barely moving. “They always do.”

  I stepped closer, lowering my voice. “What are they, really? The Movement of Mute Medieval Mummers. They don’t speak. They don’t age. They come and go without warning.”

  “They are watchers,” she said. “And sometimes—wards. Old ones.”

  “Wards?” I echoed.

  “You must have come across the term at school, Alfhild, even if your magick does not always pass muster. Wards? Spells or enchantments placed in a certain way to guard or contain or even stabilise a specific place, object or magickal energy.”

  “They’re placed on land? Like the land around Whittle Inn?”

  “Or in buildings, or even inside objects. A ward will shield things from harm or intrusion.”

  “Are they active?” I asked. “Will a ward respond if … I don’t know … if the place or object is threatened in some way?”

  “They may do. Wards can be passive or active. Some wards sit passively, suppressing or deflecting energy. Others activate in response to a threat.”

  “I see.”

  “Intention is everything—”

  “Of course—”

  “A ward can repel dark magick, suppress dangerous forces, prevent spirits from entering or simply mark a sacred boundary.”

  “And these wards are old,” I said, remembering the runes we’d uncovered.

  “Extremely. Not medieval, despite the name. Deep and old and long-lasting. Crafted long ago, possibly by our forgotten ancestors or magickal communities. These are woven into the land itself.”

  “So are these ones protective?”

  She didn’t answer at first. Instead, she plucked a strand of floating herb-rope from the air and wrapped it around her fingers like a thought she didn’t want escaping. “They observe thresholds. Places of convergence. Sometimes they appear at the edge of significant magick, before it turns.”

  “Before it turns?”

  Her eyes met mine then. As green as my own, sharp as frost. “Something is testing the boundaries, Alfhild. Not only the wards that have been drawn for the festival. The old ones. The deep ones.”

  I felt a chill creep down the back of my neck, despite the warmth of the afternoon. “Is it Dorn?”

  Gwyn didn’t flinch. “Possibly. Or something deeper, older. Not a name. A presence. A call that entities like Dorn respond to.”

  I thought of the talking wine barrel. Of the cherry spiral on the floor. Of the poltergeists. The dogs too scared to approach the Heart Tree. The names whispered on a breath that wasn’t wind.

  “Why won’t you tell me what you suspect?” I asked.

  She turned from me then, looking again towards Speckled Wood. “Because you already know, my dear. Somewhere inside.”

  A silence fell between us, heavier than the hum of magick in the air.

  Before I could press further, she lifted her parasol and started to float.

  Not away, exactly.

  But around something I couldn’t see.

  A circle not drawn, but deeply felt.

  And I was left in the middle of it, with a question I didn’t want the answer to forming uneasily at the back of my mind. What was the Verdancy Festival really for?

  I stayed by the herb circle after Gwyn left, the air still threaded with the ghost of something unsaid.

  All around me, the festival carried on as though nothing had changed. The illusionists packed away their props with laughter; a choir of enchanted frogs belted out madrigals by a lily pond; children scampered past me with wand-shaped rock candy and painted faces. The wind teased at the bunting, curling it around tent poles as it stirred up the mingled aromas of herbs, sweets and the green-crushed scent of walked-on grass.

  But under it—through it—something pulsed.

  Something deep.

  It wasn’t malevolent. Not exactly. But it wasn’t benign either. It was watching. And waiting. And it had been here longer than the marquees and market stalls, longer than me. Longer even than Whittle Inn. Possibly longer than the village itself.

  And I couldn’t shake the thought—no, the certainty—that Wizard Shadowmender knew.

  That this festival had always been meant to become something else.

  And maybe, just maybe, that was why he’d brought it here.

  To us.

  To me.

  Chapter Ten

  Wizard Shadowmender had hidden himself away in the clearing, deep in Speckled Wood, out of sight of the Heart Tree and far from the thinning festival lights, where the shade grew cooler and the hush ran deep. The trees here, around the circle, leaned in close together, their trunks furrowed like old foreheads, bark studded with moss and shadow.

  He didn’t notice me at first. Bent over beside a shallow dip in the earth, he had rolled the sleeves of his emerald-green and smoky-grey robes to the elbow, revealing arms marked with ink and age. With a twig—no wand—he was sketching shapes into the dark and crumbly forest floor: interlocking spirals, angular runes and intersecting circles with slashes. Glyphs. Not decorative, but functional.

  I cleared my throat to announce myself.

  “Alfhild,” he said without looking up. “Watch your step. The ground here remembers things.”

  I stepped closer anyway, my old boots sinking slightly into the spongey moss. “What are you drawing?”

  He paused, holding the twig aloft as if measuring the air. “Not drawing. Mapping. The ley lines have shifted again.”

  I sank down beside him, frowning at the marks. “How can they shift? I thought they were fixed. Like rivers under the land.”

  “They are,” he said. “But rivers flood. They meander. They dry up and reroute. This …” He tapped a spiral with his fingertip. “This shouldn’t be here. Not unless something’s pushing.”

  “Pushing from where?”

  The elderly wizard looked up at me then. His eyes were as green as wet leaves and twice as unreadable. “From beneath. From between. From before. Take your pick.”

  I didn’t like the way he said that. “Grandmama thinks the festival is stirring something.”

  “She’s right, of course.” He breathed out, a kind of sigh. “The festival is a magnifier. Colour, sound, emotion, energy, magick—all cranked up to eleven.”

  I glanced down at the glyphs again. “And what do you think is trying to crawl through?”

  He leaned back on his heels and looked through the trees, seeking something, I didn’t know what. “Hmm. Nothing new or alien, Alfhild. Old things. They’re watching and waiting, judging whether the door’s open far enough yet.”

  “And are we holding it open?”

  “Not holding,” he said. “Inviting it to.”

  Shadowmender straightened slowly, brushing his hands clean on his robes, though the earth left faded smudges behind. He turned from the glyphs and began walking. I followed without needing to be told. The path he took wasn’t one of the marked trails, but an older one, veined into the landscape like a scar—nearly overgrown, but still there if you knew how to see it.

  “They’ve begun to appear again,” he said as we walked. “At the fringes. In the spaces between merriment and memory.”

  I didn’t need to ask who. I already knew. “The mummers,” I said.

  He nodded once. “The Movement of Mute Medieval Mummers. A title given to them long after they first emerged. No-one knows what they were originally called.”

  “They were guests recently,” I told him. “At the inn. Withdrawn and polite, but unnerving. I thought they were some old theatre troupe. Like the Devonshire Fellows.”

  “Many believe they’re performers,” Shadowmender said. “Echoes of an ancient masquerade. But you’d be mistaken to think them harmless.”

  My hair stood on end. “Gwyn called them wards.”

  “She’s not wrong.” He paused beside an old yew tree, laying a hand against its bark. “But wards don’t always protect, Alfhild. Some restrain. Some punish. Some … remind.”

  “Remind?”

  “Of boundaries. Of old bargains. Of consequences when those bargains are broken.” His hand lingered on the bark, fingers moving lightly across unseen grooves. “They appear at moments of threshold—when places shift. When something is about to become something else. They’re drawn to convergence. And they don’t come to bless it.”

  I swallowed. “So what do they do?”

  He looked at me, his expression calm but utterly without comfort.

  “They arrive where thresholds fray,” he said. “And when they do, it means something is already unravelling.”

  The peace was shattered by a high-pitched trill carried on the breeze, rapidly followed by a jarring chord struck on what might once have been a lute. Then another voice joined—off-key, nasal, full of theatrical misery. The sound was unmistakable: the spectral chorus of the Devonshire Fellows, ghost minstrels of increasingly questionable taste and unpredictable talent.

  “Holy starfish,” I grumbled. “Did I summon them or something?”

  Shadowmender closed his eyes briefly, as though asking the trees for strength. I didn’t blame him.

  They came out of the woods like a processional gone horribly awry—six translucent figures dressed in faded Tudor garb, their instruments flickering between the corporeal and the utterly nonsensical. Luppitt Smeatharpe led the troupe, his ever-present lute slung low and a crooked feather tucked into his floppy, semi-transparent flat hat.

  “Oh no,” I groaned. “Not now.”

  Too late, they were upon us.

  Luppitt beamed at us both. “A tune for the warded woods, my lady and good sir!” he trilled. “A ditty for the doom-bent day!”

  “Absolutely not,” I said.

  He wasn’t listening.

  The Fellows broke into song, their voices overlapping and undercutting one another in tangled harmonies:

  The Twice-Born Tree with silver breath,

  Shall blink an eye and summon death.

  A feather falls, the black bird calls,

  And silence walks through verdant halls …

  “Is this meant to be helpful?” I asked sharply.

  “We’re always helpful, my lady,” Luppitt replied, winking. “In our own way.”

  Shadowmender said nothing. He watched them with the measured stillness of a man trying to decide whether to exorcise or ignore.

  Another of the Fellows—Stephen Arcott, the shorter one with the ruined crumhorn—spoke up. “We saw your glyphs, wizard. Pretty patterns. Pretty, pretty traps.”

  “They’re not traps,” Shadowmender said evenly. “They’re safeguards.”

  “Oh-ho!” crowed William Wait, young and handsome and full of sparkle. “He says safeguards! Like the last time! Like the stone teeth and the bladed roots! Like the rumours that curdle the milk!”

  “I’m not repeating the cycle,” Shadowmender said. “Not unless I must.”

  Luppitt danced a few steps forward. “But the Crow Man’s hand has already dipped in the ink. And the ink runs wild, dear wizard. ’Tis already written.”

  My blood went cold. “The Crow Man?” What could Luppitt possibly know about all these odd goings-on?

  The gang of bards turned to me as one.

  “The Crow Man knows the tune,” sang Luppitt.

  “He wrote it long before you danced.” That was William.

  “He’s pecking at the stitches.” Stephen Arcott.

  “He’s licking the lullaby from the bark.” John Bond. What he said made no sense whatsoever!

  “He’s waiting in the silence you don’t hear yet,” Will’s brother Robert added.

  “Enough,” Shadowmender snapped—not loud, but final. The ghosts faltered.

  Luppitt bowed. “As you say, Your Eminence of the Oak.” Then to me, with a grin too wide, “But we’ll be watching, my lady. We always are. Especially when the tree dreams.”

  With that, they vanished—not with drama, not with song, but like breath fading from glass.

  I turned to Wizard Shadowmender. “What’s the Twice-Born Tree?”

  He didn’t answer, only glanced at the Heart Tree with the sort of look that suggested, Ask her. Which, knowing my luck, would mean a riddle I couldn’t solve without a team of cryptographers.

  ***

  I couldn’t stop thinking about the song.

  The rhythm of it wormed into my bones, into the soles of my feet, echoing with every step back towards the inn. Even Shadowmender’s presence at my side did nothing to ease it. He spoke little after the minstrel ghosts had disappeared—just murmured something about needing to consult his maps and vanished inside the inn with his robes trailing behind him.

  I didn’t follow him.

  Instead, I followed a pull I couldn’t name, like a loose stitch drawing tight. Back past the herb garden, past the bee-burdened lavender, back towards the festivities.

  To the Heart Tree.

  Its gold-veined trunk glistened in the gloaming, bark switching colour with the deepening dusk. The branches stretched wide and still, unmoved by the breeze, as if the tree no longer existed entirely in this world. Or perhaps it never had.

  I stood beneath it, head tipped back, throat tight.

  A murmur pulsed in the roots—not sound exactly, but presence. Old and watching. Not hostile, not friendly. Simply … awake.

  “You’re not just a tree, are you?” I whispered.

  I didn’t expect an answer.

  I got one anyway.

  A breeze stirred the leaves. The rustling shaped itself, briefly, into something intelligible:

  She sees.

  Then silence again.

  I waited, but nothing else was forthcoming.

  Eventually, I turned for the inn. It was time for the evening dinner service.

  ***

  I didn’t sleep well that night.

  When I finally drifted into uneasy slumber, I fell into dreams like cold water: shocking, immediate, impossible to claw out of.

  I was standing beneath the Heart Tree again, but this time the sky above was wrong—black, but not starless. Pulsing. A sickly, purple-tinted horizon that flickered like distant lightning behind gauze. Whittle Inn was gone, the land bare. Only the tree remained.

  It shivered.

  Then long, vertical strips of golden bark peeled back like petals.

  And there, in the centre of the trunk, was a single, huge eye.

  Not human. Not animal.

  Timeless.

  Watching.

  And … bleeding.

  Gold sap oozed from the corners of the eye, threading down the bark in branching veins. As it dripped to the ground, the soil hissed, and a scent of scorched rosemary filled the air.

  Words drifted out of nowhere. Not from the tree. Not from anywhere around me. But … from within me.

  The eye sees. The feather falls.

  The words pressed behind my ribs, squeezing the breath from me.

  I tried to run. My feet didn’t move.

  I tried to scream. My voice failed.

  Only the tree moved—watching, bleeding, blinking.

  And then I woke, my body tangled in sweat-drenched sheets, the ghost of gold sap clinging to my fingertips.

  I sat up, heart hammering.

  Outside, the wind stirred—just once.

  Like a breath.

  Like a warning.

  A shiver crept along my spine. The kind that isn’t quite cold, but stemming from a primeval fear. Something had shifted.

  Beside me, Silvan breathed softly, oblivious.

  I eased the quilt aside and padded to the window, careful not to wake him.

  The festival site lay still.

  Too still.

  As if the whole place was holding its breath.

  Then I saw him.

  A figure, gliding between the rows of tents with a grace that wasn’t human. His robes flowed like stitched bark and storm clouds, and his face—if he had one—was hidden deep within the cowl.

  A mummer.

  He made no sound. Didn’t hesitate. He simply moved.

 

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