Runemarks Read online

  Keeping hidden, he followed her, staying low to the bushes that lined the path until they reached the lower slopes of the Hill, where he crept quietly up on the blind side and was in a moment lost to sight.

  Maddy did not see or hear him. She ran up the Hill, almost stumbling in her impatience, until she caught sight of the familiar tall figure sitting among the fallen stones beneath the flank of the Red Horse.

  “One-Eye!” she called.

  He was just as she had seen him last, with his back to the stone, his pipe in his mouth, his pack on the grass beside him. As always, he greeted Maddy with a casual nod, as if he had been away for an afternoon and not a twelvemonth.

  “So. What’s new in Malbry?” he said.

  Maddy looked at him in some indignation. “Is that all you have to say? You’re two weeks late, I’ve been worried sick, and all you can say is What’s new in Malbry? as if anything important was ever going to happen here…”

  One-Eye shrugged. “I was delayed.”

  “Delayed? How?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  Maddy gave a reluctant grin. “You and your news. I suppose it never occurs to you that I might worry. I mean, it’s only World’s End you’re coming from—and you never bring me news from there. Doesn’t anything ever happen in World’s End?”

  One-Eye nodded. “World’s End is an eventful place.”

  “And yet here you are again.”

  “Aye.”

  Maddy sighed and sat down next to him on the sweet grass. “Well, the big news here is…I’m out of a job.” And, smiling as she remembered Mrs. Scattergood’s face, she told the tale of that morning’s work, of the sleeping goblin trapped in the cellar and how in her clumsy haste she had summoned half of World Below in trying to capture him.

  One-Eye listened to the tale in silence.

  “And, Laws, you should have heard the noise she made! I could hear it all the way from Little Bear Wood—honestly, I thought she was going to burst—”

  Laughing, she turned to One-Eye and found him watching her with no amusement at all, but with a rather grim expression. “What exactly did you do?” he said. “This is important, Maddy. Tell me everything you remember.”

  Maddy stopped laughing and set herself to the task of recalling precisely what had happened in the cellar. She repeated her conversation with the goblin (at mention of the goblins’ captain she thought One-Eye stiffened but could not be sure), went over every rune she had used, then tried to explain what had happened next.

  “Well—first of all I cast Thuris,” she said. “And then I just…pointed at the hole and sort of…shouted at it—”

  “What did you say?” asked One-Eye quickly.

  But Maddy was feeling anxious by now. “What’s wrong?” she said. “Did I do something wrong?”

  “Just tell me, Maddy. What did you say?”

  “Well, nothing, that was it. Just noise. Not even a cantrip. It happened so fast—I can’t remember—” She broke off, alarmed. “What’s wrong?” she repeated. “What did I do?”

  “Nothing,” he said in a heavy voice. “I knew it was only a matter of time.”

  “What was?” she said.

  But now the Outlander was silent, looking out at the Horse with its mane of long grass illuminated in the morning sun. Finally he began to speak. “Maddy,” he said, “you’re growing up.”

  “I suppose so.” Maddy frowned. She hoped this wasn’t going to turn out to be a lecture, like the ones she sometimes got from well-meaning ladies of the village about growing into womanhood.

  One-Eye went on. “Most especially, your powers have grown. You were strong to begin with, but now your skills are coming to life. Of course, you’re not in control of them yet, but that’s to be expected. You’ll learn.”

  It was a lecture, Maddy thought. Perhaps not quite as embarrassing as the womanhood talk, but—

  One-Eye continued. “Glam, as you know, may lie sleeping for years. Just as this Hill has lain sleeping for years. I’ve always suspected that when one awoke, the other would not be far behind.”

  He stopped to fill his pipe, and his fingers shook a little as he pressed the smoke weed into the bowl. A string of geese passed overhead, V-shaped, toward the Hindarfell. Maddy watched them and felt a sudden chill against her skin. Summer was gone, and falltime would soon give way to winter. For some reason, the thought almost brought tears to her eyes.

  “This Hill of yours,” said One-Eye at last. “For a long time it lay so quiet that I thought perhaps I’d misread the signs and that it was—as I’d first suspected—just another nicely made barrow from the Elder Days. There have been so many other hills, you see—and springs, and stone circles, and menhirs and caves and wells—that showed the same signs and came to nothing in the end. But when I found you—and with that runemark—” He broke off abruptly and signaled her to listen. “Did you hear that?”

  Maddy shook her head.

  “I thought I heard—” Something like bees, One-Eye thought. A hive of bees trapped underground. Something bursting to escape…

  Briefly Maddy considered asking him what he meant by with that runemark. But it was the first time she had ever seen her old friend so nervous and so ill at ease, and she knew it was best to give him time.

  He looked out again over Red Horse Hill and at the rampant Horse in the morning sun. Such a beautiful thing, the Outlander thought. Such a beautiful thing to be so deadly.

  “Beats me how any of you can live in Malbry,” he said, “with what’s hidden under here.”

  “D’you mean—the treasure?” breathed Maddy, who had never quite given up on the tales of buried gold under the Hill.

  One-Eye gave his wistful smile.

  “So it’s really there?”

  “It’s there,” he said. “It’s been buried there for five hundred years, awaiting its chance to escape. Without you I might have turned my back on it and never thought of it again. But with you, I thought I might have a chance. And you were so young, so very young. With time, who knew what skills you might develop? Who knew, with that rune, what you might one day become?”

  Maddy listened, eyes wide.

  “And so,” he said, “I tutored you. I taught you everything I knew and kept a careful watch on you, knowing that the stronger you became, the more likely it was that you might accidentally disturb what lay sleeping under the Hill.”

  “Do you mean the goblins?” said Maddy.

  Slowly One-Eye shook his head. “The goblins—and their captain—have known about you since the day you were born. But until now they had no reason to fear your skills. Count on this morning’s escapade to change all that.”

  “What do you mean?” said Maddy anxiously.

  “I mean that captain of theirs is no fool, and if he suspects we’re after the—treasure—”

  “You mean the goblins might find the gold?”

  One-Eye made an impatient noise. “Gold?” he said. “That old wives’ tale?”

  “But you said there was treasure under the Hill.”

  “Aye,” he said, “and so there is. A treasure of the Elder Age. But no gold, Maddy; not an ingot, not a nugget, not even a nickel penny.”

  “Then what sort of treasure is it?” she said.

  He paused. “They call it the Whisperer.”

  “And what is it?” Maddy said.

  “I can’t tell you that. Later, perhaps, when we have it safe.”

  “But you know what it is, don’t you?”

  One-Eye kept his calm with some difficulty. “Maddy,” he said, “this isn’t the time. This—treasure—may turn out to be as dangerous as it is valuable. Even speaking of it has its risks. And in many ways it might be safer for it to have stayed sleeping and forgotten.” He lit his pipe, using the fire rune Kaen and a clever little flick of the fingers. “But now it’s awake, for good or ill, and the greater danger would be if someone else were to find it—to find it and put it to use.”

  “What kind of someon
e?” Maddy said.

  He looked at her. “Our kind, of course.”

  Now Maddy’s heart was beating faster than one of her father’s hammers. “Our kind?” she said. “There are others like me? You know them?”

  He nodded.

  “How many?” she said.

  “Does it matter?”

  “It does to me,” said Maddy fiercely. There were others, and One-Eye had never mentioned them. Who were they? Where were they? And if he’d known of their existence all this time, then—

  “Maddy,” he said, “I know it’s hard. But you have to trust me. You have to believe me when I tell you that whatever I may have hidden from you, however I may have misled you at times—”

  “You lied to me,” Maddy said.

  “I lied to you to keep you safe,” One-Eye told her patiently. “Wolves of different packs do not hunt together. And sometimes they even hunt each other.”

  She turned to him, her eyes burning. “Why?” she demanded. “What is the Whisperer? Why is it so important to you? And how do you know so much about it, anyway?”

  “Patience,” said One-Eye. “The Whisperer first. Afterward I promise I’ll answer all your questions. But now—please—we have work to do. The Hill has not been opened for hundreds of years. There will be defenses to keep us out. Runes to find. Workings to break. Here…you’ll need this.” He pulled a familiar object out of his pack and handed it to Maddy.

  “What’s this?” said Maddy.

  “It’s a shovel,” he said. “Because magic, like leadership, is one-tenth genius and nine-tenths spadework. You’ll need to clear the outline of the Horse to a depth of maybe four or five inches. It may take some time.”

  Maddy gave him a suspicious look. “I notice there’s only one shovel,” she said.

  “Genius doesn’t need a shovel,” said One-Eye in a dry voice, and sat down on the grass to finish his pipe.

  It was a long, laborious task. The Horse measured two hundred feet from nose to tail, and centuries of weather, abuse, and neglect had taken their toll on some of the finer work. But the clay of the Hill was dense and hard, and the shape of the Horse had been made to last, with wards and runemarks embedded at intervals to ensure that the outline would not be lost. There would be nine of them, One-Eye guessed, one for each of the Nine Worlds, and they would need to find all of them before they were able to gain entry.

  It was One-Eye who discovered the first, scratched on a river stone and buried beneath the Horse’s tail.

  “Madr, the Middle World. The Folk. A good start,” he said, touching the rune to make it shine. He whispered a cantrip—

  Madr er moldar auki

  —and at once, a place at the Horse’s head lit up with a corresponding gleam, and almost at once under the turf, Maddy found the rune ýr.

  “ýr. World Below. The Fundament. Things will move faster now.”

  They did: ýr lit the way to Raedo, the Outlands, tucked underneath the Horse’s belly, then Logr—the One Sea—in the Horse’s mouth—

  —then, for each of its legs, Bjarkán, for the world of Dream, Naudr, for the Underworld—

  —Hagall, for Netherworld, and Kaen, for Chaos or World Beyond—

  —and finally, right in the middle of the Eye itself, the rune of the Sky Citadel—

  —Ós, the Æsir, brightest of all, like the central star in the constellation of Thiazi, the Hunter, which hangs over the Seven Sleepers on clear winter nights.

  Ós. The Æsir. The Firmament. Maddy looked at the rune in silence. This was the moment of which she had dreamed, and yet now that she was so close, she felt a curious reluctance to proceed. It angered her a little, and yet she was conscious of a tiny part of her that wanted above all to step away from the threshold and walk back to Malbry and the safety of its familiar cleft.

  One-Eye must have sensed it; he gave a little smile and put his hand on Maddy’s shoulder. “Not afraid, are you, girl?”

  “No. Are you?”

  “A little,” he said. “It’s been so long…” He took out his pipe, relit it, and drew in a mouthful of sweet smoke. “Foul habit,” he said. “Picked it up from the Tunnel People on one of my trips. Master smiths, you know, but terrible hygiene. I think the smoke helps them disguise the smell.”

  Maddy touched the final rune. It flared opal colors like the winter sun. She spoke the cantrip:

  Ós byth ordfruma…

  The Hill opened with a sliding crash, and where the Eye had been there was now a narrow, raw-sided tunnel sliding downward into the earth.

  6

  Five hundred years ago, around the dawn of the New Age, there had been few strongholds more secure than the castle on Red Horse Hill. Built on a steep mound overlooking the valley, it commanded the entire plain, and its cannon were forever pointed at the Hindarfell pass, which was the only possible place along the Seven Sleepers ridge from which an enemy could attack.

  In fact, it was a mystery to the people of Malbry how the castle had fallen at all, unless it was by plague or treachery, because from the broken stone circle, you could see all the way to Fettlefields to the north and, to the south, to Forge’s Post, at the foot of the mountains.

  The road was wide open, barely shielded by gorse and sparse scrubland, and the sides of the Hill itself were too steep for men in armor to climb.

  But Adam Scattergood wore no armor, the cannon had long since been melted down, and it had been fully five hundred years since a lookout had stood on Red Horse Hill. As a result, he had managed to climb the Hill unseen, and, crawling through the rabbit-tail grass to the lee of the Horse, he hid behind a fallen stone to listen to what the witch girl and the one-eyed scallyman were saying.

  Adam had never trusted Maddy. Imaginative people made him nervous, and the world they inhabited—a strange, dark world where Adam Scattergood was neither noticed nor wanted—made him feel very uneasy indeed. But what he wouldn’t admit to himself was that Maddy frightened him. That would have been too ridiculous. She was a bad-blood, wasn’t she? No one would ever want her, not with that ruinmark on her hand. She would never amount to anything.

  Adam Scattergood (Laws be praised) was a handsome boy with a brilliant future. He was already a parson’s prentice; with luck (and with his mother’s savings) he might even be sent to World’s End to study in the Universal City. In short, he was one of Malbry’s finest—and yet here he was, spying on the girl and her Outlander friend, like a sneak without any friends of his own. It annoyed him to think this, and he crept a little closer to the base of the stone, straining his ears for something secret, something important, something with which he could taunt her later.

  When he heard the part about the treasure under the Hill, he grinned. There was a rich vein of mockery in that. Goblin Girl, he’d say. Found any gold yet? Buy yourself a new dress, Goblin Girl? Get yourself a Faërie ring?

  The thought was so appealing that he almost left his hiding place there and then, but he was alone, and suddenly the girl and the Outlander didn’t seem as funny as when Adam was with his friends. In fact, they looked almost dangerous, and Adam felt glad he was safely out of sight behind the big stone.

  When he heard about the Whisperer, he was doubly glad he’d hidden away. Adam wanted nothing to do with any relic of the Elder Age, however valuable—in any case, it was probably cursed or possessed by a demon. And when it came to opening the Hill, Adam could have hugged himself with glee, for although he had a lively terror of anything uncanny, it was clear that this time, Maddy and her one-eyed friend had overstepped the mark.

  Opening the Hill to World Below! Nat Parson would have strong words to say about that. Even Matt Law, who had no love for the parson, would have to admit that this time Maddy had gone too far. There could be no ignoring such a blatant violation of laws laid down in the Good Book.

  This could mean the end of the witch girl once and for all. The people of Malbry had long tolerated her peculiarities for her father’s sake, but such conjuring was a serious crime, and the m
oment Nat Parson found out (as Adam fully intended that he should), Maddy might be Examined, or even Cleansed.

  Adam had never seen an actual Cleansing. Such things didn’t happen much outside World’s End—but civilization was marching on, as the parson was wont to say, and it could only be a matter of time before the Order established an outpost within reach of Malbry. It couldn’t happen too early for Adam. An end to magic; the Hill dug out, its demons burned, and Order restored to the valley of the Strond…

  But as time passed and nothing happened, Adam grew sleepy behind his rock. He began to doze, and when at last Maddy drew open the Horse’s Eye, he was jolted awake with a gasp of astonishment. One-Eye looked up, his fingers crooked, and Adam was suddenly sure the Outlander could see right through the ancient granite of the fallen stone to where he was hiding.

  A great terror gripped him, and he flattened himself even more closely to the ground, half expecting to hear heavy footsteps coming toward him across the Hill.

  Nothing happened.

  Adam relaxed a little, and as the seconds passed, his natural arrogance began to return. Of course he hadn’t been seen. It was just this place, he told himself—this Hill, with its ghosts and noises—that had unnerved him. He wasn’t afraid of a one-eyed scally. And he certainly wasn’t afraid of a little girl.

  What was she doing, anyway? Maddy seemed to be lifting her hand; from his position, Adam could just see her shadow on the grass. He couldn’t have guessed she was using Bjarkán—but now she too could see the boy hunched against the fallen stone, his face a blur of fear and malice.

  Maddy needed no workings to know what her enemy was doing there. In that second she understood it all. She saw in his colors how he had followed her, how he had spied on her and One-Eye, and how he meant to run back to the village with his stolen knowledge and spoil everything, as he always spoiled everything.