‘Upon the Father,’ Cade said. ‘I know not.’
Barrion swore and dragged Cade beside him as he lurched on, towards the heart of the village. He called others to his side, a captain rousing men to war.
Cade did not struggle; his mind was too addled. Had she crossed the boundary already? Was he and every other orphan in the village already doomed? How could she be so callous? Again, that awful logic reminded him. She had terrified him in the past with talk of the Lands Beyond, yet intrigued him with her theories that nothing at all would happen should anyone leave the Cradle. The warnings of the Matriarchs were but an empty custom, she insisted.
She had told Cade of things that she had read in the ancient scriptures, things that men like Barrion would call blasphemy, grounds for murder, even. She had been vague in detail, but seemed to suggest that the cult of the Horned Father was but a fragment of a truth greater and more glorious than any of their people might realise. Cade knew her certainty had been absolute; as absolute as her fear of those who hated her.
But what if she was wrong? No one knew what punishment the Horned Father might visit upon His children for their disobedience. Tavern scholars spoke of harvests crumbling to ash or a winter that would freeze them to death in their homes. Others spoke of ghost stories heard as children, of spirits known as the Nothings. Then men would discreetly make the sign of the Horn-Star and talk would progress to other matters.
Barrion hauled him into the village square amid a throng of other villagers, dragging him up to the huge table erected upon the steps of the Cloven Altar. Here the Matriarchs, honoured brides of the Horned Father, should have been sat feasting. Instead, Mother Alder stood alone, already addressing a fearful crowd. She wore only her green shift, still looking tall and proud, though shockingly plain and vulnerable without her veil of leaves and horned crown. The crowd had gathered bows and muskets. Torches had been lit, fogging the evening air with the angry stink of smoke and hot resin.
Barrion thrust Cade into the arms of another man with orders to hold him tight. Cade felt strong hands gripping his jacket as he watched Barrion shoulder through the crowd, unsling his hunting bow and kneel as he presented it to Mother Alder. Ice wriggled down Cade’s spine as he heard Barrion speak.
‘In the name of the Horned Father, for the safety of the Cradle and its orphans,’ he said. ‘Mother, bless this, my humble weapon, for a witch may only be killed by an instrument thus sanctified.’
Cade cried out, jostled by the crowd. ‘She’s not a witch!’
‘Whatever she is,’ said Barrion, still staring up at Mother Alder. ‘She means to cross the boundary and bring the Horned Father’s wrath upon us all.’
Mother Alder looked weary. ‘You don’t know that, Barrion. None of you know that.’
‘She has stolen food and water from the stores,’ someone cried.
‘And clothes from our porch,’ yelled another.
Another was angrier still. ‘She flirts with blasphemy before our children, and she has done so for too long.’
The men roared their approval, but Mother Alder did not wilt before the blast, though her handsome face darkened with a private sorrow.
‘Mother, quickly,’ Barrion said. ‘She may have passed the stones already.’
Cade cried out as Mother Alder raised her hand.
‘Make it swift,’ she told Barrion, then made the sign of the Horn-Star over his bow, then over the lowered heads of the assembled. The men received her grim sanction with admirable humility. For they were to murder one of their own, an orphan of the Cradle.
‘But where are we to start looking?’ one of them hissed.
‘Fear not,’ another replied. ‘Cade here is the finest tracker in the Cradle.’
The man’s words trailed off. Cade had already sidled from the crowd and he imagined his captor’s astonishment at the sight of the vacant jacket in his hand. He felt a glint of satisfaction and shivered as he scurried away down a darkened lane.
Cade found her trail heading upstream. Blades of grass were broken, torn by the passage of stiff shoes, the kind worn by one who meant to travel far. He wet his parched mouth with a scoop of chill water then stooped to examine the ground. The emerald moon blazed green, full ripe tonight. Cade felt comforted by the presence of that great shining apple still dangling above his benighted world.
The grass had not been pressed beneath any great weight. The shorter, stiffer reeds had already sprung back in place. Abi had passed through here less than an hour ago, ploughing this subtle furrow through the pasture as she hurried uphill. The stream wriggled for a quarter-league up the mountainside, a green snake glittering in the moonlight as it passed a dense line of trees that Cade knew all too well. A good long run lay ahead of him – longer still for Abi, a scribe from the cloisters unused to traversing the wild. But Cade could see no figure moving along the glimmering waters ahead, no tell-tale shadow creeping about the distant banks.
Glowing green faun lights swarmed in bunches along the stream. As a boy, Cade had believed the old stories that told how these insects were actually spirits, servants of the Father, sent to guide wanderers to a safe destination. But he knew he would receive no such guidance tonight. Cold fear soaked him at the thought of Abi reaching the boundary before him.
He sprang up the trail, settling into a bounding run, his hunting axes clacking at his hip. This was all his fault. Abi could be in danger, as could every orphan in the village. His sheltered world faced an apocalypse of his making. May oak and earth forgive him. Fool that he was for showing her this route. Madman that he was for allowing her to approach the boundary and giving Abi her first glimpse of the Lands Beyond. That forbidden vista was the preserve of no one in the Cradle but the Matriarchs and master rangers such as Barrion.
His pace slowed as he reached the foothills, his breath laboured as he fought his way up their steep banks. His last visit to these pastures had been during a happier time, when the goldlace and bloodthistles bloomed. Cade had been helping re-thatch the sheds when Mother Alder had condemned Abi to the goat pens for the rest of the season. Cade had helped her carry dung barrows to the fields, a favour that quickly became habit.
She appreciated his assistance and he was fascinated by her seemingly endless capacity for talk. She spoke at first of her duties under the Matriarchs, who dwelt in stony chambers in the high reaches of the village. She had been taught to understand the ancient runes, then progressed to tedious copywork, salvaging with her quill the history of the Horned Throne from countless crumbling scrolls. But oh, how she devoured those endless lines of information. It was for her like opening a door into a new world, a world beyond her dungeon cloisters. She asked much about Cade’s exploits as a hunter and he obliged her with casually audacious tales of stalking dangerous beasts among the treacherous margins of the Cradle. How he relished the look of fascination in those inquisitive brown eyes.
They had discussed philosophy in the privacy of the empty fields, shovelling pellets of dung along the furrows as they debated what might lie beyond the stars. She had been punished with her current duties for her ceaseless questioning of Mother Alder, whose every answer, whose every angry demand for silence, served only to inspire more questions.
‘We orphans are told our parents are dead, but did we not have other family to care for us in the Lands Beyond? Who dictated such a tradition? Who are the founders of our custom? The Horned Father? Or someone else? If we are never to leave the Cradle, then is this all our lives are to be?’ Abi’s questions troubled Cade, though her curiosity was infectious. Her passion enthralled him as much as it terrified him.
‘The truth is bliss,’ she once told him. ‘Not ignorance.’ Those words had struck him hard, made him ashamed of his comforts, of his fears. He was no sheep in thrall to the shepherd, but a man. And he became determined to prove that. He yearned to inspire her.
Cade paused for breath atop a steep rock and looked back at the village. How quickly might Barrion follow his trail? What might he and his followers do to Cade when he eventually caught up with him? Cade skipped on, from rock to rock, bounding like a billy goat, away from the gushing stream until he reached the shelf of trees. He hauled himself onto the ledge and a wall of pines stood before him.
He pounded sparks from his flint to set ablaze a stout torch from his belt. Was she waiting for him by the stones on the other side of the trees, too afraid to cross the boundary? Could he reach her in time? If so, what would he do? Talk sense into her? If she refused to listen, would he have to stop her? The thought of harming her, even for her own good, set his belly churning.
He entered the trees, his crackling torchlight washing over the ground, revealing a shifted pebble, tufts of moss smeared underfoot. The smell of pine smothered him, a carpet of dead needles flesh-soft beneath his feet. He pinched a tassel of hair from a splintered branch. The strands were long and milky-yellow, plucked from the roots. Abi had battled her way through these branches, determined. Perhaps she lay injured nearby. If he was lucky. Perhaps she was dead, her carcass sprawled and wolf-ravaged, awaiting his discovery. He felt a sickening glimmer of hope.
The pines eventually released him onto a grassy mountain ledge dominated by a single towering stone. It was coffin-narrow, flat as a headstone. Beyond lay a sea of hills and fields, ghostly green beneath the moon.
Cade stood alone, his torch whooshing in his hand as he spun around in search of Abi. He sobbed her name.
Nothing.
The air here seemed to tremble with a gravelly hum that haunted the edge of Cade’s hearing. He felt a slight but dizzying pressure in his head, like palms pressed hard upon his ears. Two more stones stood glowering a short distance away, either side of the stone before him. Countless more stood beyond those, Cade knew, erected centuries ago along the mountains of the Cradle, forming a ring that surrounded the sacred valley.
The boundary stones watched as Cade probed the grass. Abi’s trail passed between the standing rocks, continued down the grassy slope and vanished into the Lands Beyond. Those black clouds Cade had seen to the north that afternoon were now advancing, a sarcophagus lid moving to shut out the moonlight.
Cade felt weightless with panic as he comprehended the unavoidable truth that lay pressed into the grass before him. The boundary had been crossed. An orphan had left the Cradle. Catastrophe would follow. His torch fell dead to the ground and he dropped before the stone, pressing his hands in entreaty upon the lichen-splattered rock.
‘Forgive her, Father! This is my sin, not hers. Punish me and spare the others, I beg you. It was I who caused this. It was I who inspired this blasphemy.’
