by The village of Silvessen turned out to be a ragged cluster of wattle-and-daub dwellings of considerable antiquity. Not a one of them had been built later than the fourteenth century, I’d have wagered. They were also in states of advanced disrepair.
We wandered down the central street, once a path of packed earth and stones, now a swath of soggy mud. Empty windows gaped in begrimed facades; thatched roofs sprouted holes where the dried rushes or straw had weathered away. Some buildings had lost their roofs altogether, their thick wooden beams exposed to the wind and rain.
‘All things considered,’ Jay said, looking around, ‘more of this is left than I’d expect.’
I saw his point. Half-ruined they may be, but if these houses were at least seven-hundred years old, and they’d been abandoned for centuries, they ought to have been rubble by now. Wattle and daub isn’t the sturdiest of building materials, even if it’s shored up with oak.
‘Em,’ I said, ‘are you getting anything?’
Emellana’s able to sense the traces of past magick, a skill popular with field archaeologists the world over. I suppose I am too, now, but not in the same way, and Em is still much better at it. She’s had practice. Years and years of practice.
‘Some preservation enchantments were in place,’ she answered, standing with one broad hand palm-flat against the whitewashed wall of a tumbledown cottage. ‘Long gone now, of course, but they would have kept these houses in decent repair for some time.’
‘Until the magick died,’ murmured Indira. Usually so self-possessed, she seemed unusually affected by the ruin around us, her eyes huge and sad in a face drawn in thought.
‘I wonder what happened,’ I mused. ‘And what kinds of people lived here.’ We didn’t know much about Silvessen, except that it had been a magickal Dell, with a settlement, once. The proportions of the buildings suggested a taller race of being had lived here; even Emellana wouldn’t have had to stoop all that much to fit through the doors. But beyond that, we knew nothing.
Emellana shook her head. ‘That I cannot tell.’
Neither could I, at least not by way of a cursory exploration. I’d need time and energy to go much deeper, and I didn’t have those things available just then.
‘It doesn’t look like anybody’s still around, anyway,’ Jay said. We’d reached the end of the main street, and unbroken moor stretched out before us, rain-lashed grasses and wind-ruffled heath and not much else.
‘In that case, I suppose we can proceed,’ I said, tentatively. I was waiting for Zareen’s verdict. She’d remained quiet throughout the whole of our exploration of Silvessen Village, but she was tense, alert; ready for something. Searching for something?
‘Wait,’ she said, softly. She was standing close to the walls of the last house on the street, looking up at the gaping remains of thatch. She didn’t elaborate, but nobody wanted to disturb her by enquiring, so silence fell.
The wind whistled as it surged down the village street, and something rattled somewhere.
I shivered.
‘I think…’ said Zareen. ‘I think there is another house.’
‘In the village? We passed some side streets, we could check—’
Zareen cut me off. ‘No. Not here. It’s, um.’ She closed her eyes. When she opened them again, they were turning darker, blackening by the moment. ‘That way.’ She pointed.
Jay and Indira exchanged a glance. ‘That’s the direction of the forest I saw,’ Indira said, and Jay nodded.
‘And in that forest, there is a house…’ Zareen’s voice had a strange, sing-song quality to it that I really didn’t like.
We all stared at her, but she said nothing else. When she looked at me, she hardly seemed to be seeing me.
The whites of her eyes were turning black.
‘Okay, Zar.’ I walked forward, slowly, until I stood about two feet in front of her, and stopped. ‘Zar, that’s great information, thank you, but you need to come back now.’
She blinked, and blinked again. Then her eyes focused on me, and the blackness receded a little. ‘Ves. Right.’ She shook herself. Her ready grin was nowhere in evidence. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve got any more halva, have you?’
Silently, I removed another plastic box from my bag and handed it over. ‘That’s the last of it.’
She took it, and devoured half of the contents on the spot. The familiar food seemed to ground her a little more, and the whites of her eyes came back. ‘Thanks,’ she said to me, and then she took off, walking fast, in the direction she’d pointed in. The same direction Indira had indicated. The place where the dark forest lay. Waiting.
I was suddenly, fervently grateful that Milady had sent Zareen with us, but of course it was no coincidence. Milady had a feel for these things. She’d proved that time and again.
***
‘So that weird feeling I was having,’ said Zareen, a little later. ‘It’s getting worse.’
We had crossed the rolling heath of Silvessen and plunged in under the trees, and I for one was having all kinds of regrets about it.
Picture the spookiest forest your imagination can come up with. Gnarled old oak and ash trees, twisted and black. A canopy so thick and dense as to block all light, shrouding the woodland in gloom. A heavy, eerie silence, broken only by your own, increasingly tentative footfalls.
Silvessen Forest had it all going on. As we delved ever deeper into the woods, we instinctively gathered closer together into a protective knot. Nobody even needed Zareen’s unique powers to detect the threatening atmosphere; it was palpable.
Worse, we were having no trouble making headway, despite the closely growing trees and dense bramble thickets. A pathway wound a meandering route deeper into the wood, a path that had no business being there; the Dell was deserted. Who had been around to use it, all these hundreds of years?
‘All right, I’ll be the one to say it out loud,’ I finally said, albeit in a half-whisper. ‘This smells like a trap.’
‘No question,’ Jay agreed.
‘But laid by whom?’ answered Emellana, and her tone was more intrigued than concerned.
She had a point. Half of me might be filled with foreboding, but the other was growing increasingly curious. Who lingered still in Silvessen Dell, and why? What were they doing in an isolated house in the depths of the creepiest forest known to man or beast?
And what did they want with us, that they had laid out a trail leading right to their door?
We trudged through wet, half-frosted earth and dead leaves for nearly half an hour, as best I could judge. Then, at last, the canopy opened up and we emerged into a wide clearing.
The house was waiting.
