'Of course. He lives here.'
'And I don't.' Ever the alien. There was a part of him that would always be the boy from the farm. He knew that. It was why he was not out hunting with the men. His heart was not entirely in it.
She kissed the side of his neck as he watched the kestrel stoop for the kill.
'These Brothers. They don't fit in here either,' he said.
'I think they are from your world. Not spawned by the same time, perhaps, but breathers of your air. Ringbone could probably tell you more than I.'
'Ringbone and his people are full of myths and tales. To hear him you would think they were descended from princes or warrior kings. They're savages, Cat.'
She teased his beard. 'And what does that make us, then?'
'Strangers. Foreigners. You have no more of a home here than I do.'
'This is my home—here at your side. If I am content with that, why cannot you be?'
He stared at her helplessly, watched her flush.
'This damned woman you think is here,' she said. 'Is that still in your head?'
'Mirkady thought she was here.'
'Mirkady would try to tell a fox how to fly. Not everything he says has truth in it. He has not your welfare at heart all the time, or anyone's. That is the way of his folk.'
'Your folk,' he said with a smile, but she did not return it.
'If this kinswoman of yours is truly here, Michael, then she is lost, gone for ever. This land does not go out of its way to provide happy endings. Death is all you will find if you take this quest of yours seriously.'
'I love you, Cat.'
She was silent, startled. On her face pleasure and annoyance fought for mastery until she laughed, a loud, ringing sound. 'You fool.' And she kissed him until his lips felt bruised.
'I want you to take me to the Castle of the Horseman.'
She was instantly sober again, and angry.
'Are you deaf? Do you not listen to anything I say? It is impossible, Michael.'
'Nevertheless,' he said doggedly.
'You're afraid. I can smell the fear off you.'
It was his turn to be silent.
'What demon is at your shoulder making you do this? Is it the only reason you came here with me?'
'No, Cat, of course not.' He did not tell her that one of the reasons he had come was because she had made it sound like some kind of medieval wonderland, not the harsh, brutal world it was.
Restless, they both began walking in the same moment, scuffing through the remnants of last year's leaves as though they were strolling through a park. They climbed upwards from their hill, up the slope that was the southern side of the valley, and by unspoken consent did not stop until they were at the top looking out from the encroaching trees on to the heavily vegetated coomb below with the odd glitter here and there of the river at its heart, and the almost vertical ribbons of woodsmoke from the camp rising out of the depths of the trees.
Michael tripped over something, kicking it out of a burial of leaves and earth. He bent and tore it free in curiosity. It was a human femur, shreds of cartilage and flesh clinging to it. He threw it down in disgust. Death and decay everywhere. Violent death—the bone was snapped off at one end. He footed it away. Cat stared, then switched into her wood mode and began sniffing and prowling round the thickets at the lip of the slope.
'Cat, come on. We should be getting back.'
'Wait a moment.'
He joined her as she scrabbled and snapped her way through a riot of dead branches and the crusts of lifeless ivy.
'What is it?'
'I smell something.'
And then he did too: a faint miasma on the spring air. The stink of corruption, old but perceptible.
They broke through to a small open space where the ground was almost bare and the branches arced so thick overhead that they were at once enveloped in a half-light and had to blink and squint to let their eyes adjust.
An old, old oak, so old it was only a stump, a shell black with rot but tough as an ancient molar. It was shaggy with sap-sucking ivy and wrapped about with dog rose. Around its roots the broad, hanging leaves of nightshade swayed at the intrusion. The smell of rot and decay became overpowering and Michael buried his nose in his sleeve, though Cat remained unaffected.
There were bones on the ground. Some gleamed white, others were green and grey with clinging tissue. A skull grinned at them from under a mat of black hair, and a skeletal hand lay like some great petrified spider. Long thigh bones had been split for the marrow and vertebrae were scattered like jagged stones. The place looked like a cross between a desecrated burial ground and the site of a cannibalistic feast.
'Michael. Here.'
He followed Cat deeper into the surrounding brake. Here was a taller tree, a beech, bearing a few coppery leaves that had outlasted winter. It was even darker here, the trees a wall around them, a dark roof above. They might have been in a church for the silence and the dimness.
A man had been crucified on the wide beech bole.