The Lord of Dark Vale

This story was originally published on the webzine Dred Tales in January 2008. Dred Tales has ceased publication and so I have posted this story on this blog for you to read.

The Lord of Dark Vale

            The hunter looked down from the ramparts of the castle. Mist rose upon the water meadow.  It was time.  Twilight made the land as grey as the stone upon which he stood, and he strained his eyes to catch the first telltale movement down amidst the rushes.

            "There!" He pointed, his gloved hand outstretched to show the path.

            Lord Farne leaned on the moss-covered battlements and stared at the landscape below.  "Do you see her?"  Farne said, his voice as dark and broken as the mountain ranges that rose above the horizon. 

            "Aye," the Hunter breathed softly, almost reverentially, as the blonde hair caught his eye and the girl ran across the meadow to the woodland along its border.

           The two men watched until she disappeared beneath the branches of the trees.

            Farne, as if a spell had been broken, slapped his hand against the stone before him and snarled.

            "Once every three weeks I see her.  And for the last year I have sent men to capture her.  Men on foot, men on horseback and men with dogs but every time she evades them."

            "What does she do in the wood?"  The Hunter continued to scan for her below.

            "Steals from me, what else?"  The Hunter could hear the frustration in Lord Farne's voice. "I own all you can see.  Every tree, every bush, every rock, every blade of grass and all the fruit and seed and animals that live upon the land or beneath it."

            The Hunter turned his head slowly.  His stare was cold and hard; eyes glistened as if edged with ice within the shadow of his hood.  Lord Farne felt a chill that almost made him take a pace back.  Instead he turned to the view over the ramparts.

            "She must have been coming here for years," Farne said, his voice quieter.  "It's only recently, as she has grown taller, that I have seen her above the mist even though she tries to stay beneath it."

            The Hunter ignored Farne in a manner that bordered upon insulting.  Turning away from the ramparts he looked down into the castle quadrangle.  A wagon and its driver waited patiently.

            "Ferif!" the Hunter called down to the driver.  "Withdraw the covers and set them free."

            Farne stood at the Hunter's side as Ferif the hunchback slid awkwardly into the bed of the wagon and pulled back the heavy, waterproof sheets.  The hunter felt Farne flinch at the first sharp screech that filled the quadrangle.  Two of the nobleman's guards came running at the sound.  A washer girl dropped her basket and sank to the ground in a faint.

            Below, in the wagon, but still contained by the thick iron bars of their cages, were a pair of olive-skinned dragons.  Ferif scuttled quickly to one side, pulling at the bolts that kept the cage doors closed.  The dragons seemed to take a moment to notice their route to freedom.  Farne waved his guards back.  The hunter smiled quietly as Farne took a cautious step away from the drop into the quadrangle. 

The dragons burst out of their imprisonment and leapt skywards.  They scented their master and wheeled swiftly round the battlements.  Their high screams split the evening air.  The dragons swooped low; Lord Farne ducked instinctively, and then straightened in embarrassment as the dragons passed by.  The bodies of the dragons were perhaps twice the length of a man, thick around the middle and tapering to a tail of perhaps six feet.  Their eyes glowed amber in narrow skulls held by necks the length of a man's step and topped by short, bony horns.  As they circled round again the Hunter waved the pair down to the woodland below,

            "A human child," he shouted,  "a female.  Seek her."

            The two dragons rose, twisting towards the sky before spreading the full breadth of their bat wings and sweeping down onto the dark wood.

            "Dragons," Farne managed to keep his voice level, as if dragons were an every day occurrence in his homeland.

            "Divarian dragons," the Hunter said.  "Much smaller than their Carnish cousins, and much easier to train."

            "How long have you owned them?"

The hunter watched the pair in silence for a moment.  He did not often get such a point of view.  They were quartering the land just like any hunting creature would, but in a fraction of the time.

            "A man does not own dragons," the Hunter said.  "A man may keep them, a man may feed them, but a man will never own them.  The dragons suffer me for the rewards they get.  One day they will fly and not return."

            "And then?"

            "And then I travel east again to find another pair of hatchlings."

            Against the winter skeleton of the wood, the dragons' movements were little more than shadows.  Silent now, necks extended as they scented the air, the two creatures had settled into a rhythm of flight that expended the least energy for the most gain.  The Hunter allowed a few more moments to watch them in flight.

            "I shall go to the wood now," he said.  "And return with the girl."

            "I hope that is the case."

            The Hunter chose to ignore unspoken threat as he took the stone steps down to ground level.

            There was a time, when he was little more than a youth, that the Hunter had had a name.  Those days were long gone, lost in the maelstrom of his memory.  Years of living from town to town had broken any kind of connection with a place called home, and decades of tracking and killing his quarry had stripped him of any semblance of humanity.  He sought only the rewards of a successful hunt.  This reward, handed out by the Lord of a bleak and hostile estate in the northern hills of Cambrice, amounted to five thousand ducals; enough to see him through the winter and much of the spring and summer beyond.

            The Hunter strode passed two castle guards, their eyes staying fixed on the mud and stone pathway he trod.  He smiled.  People feared him.  Even the rich and powerful like Lord Farne, who in truth was nothing more than a minor lord of a forgotten region in a godforsaken land.  Ferif hustled behind him, the bag of chains destined for the child's legs clattering against his hunchback.  The Hunter watched his dragons rise as one towards the rain pregnant clouds.

            "And so the hunt ends," he whispered, almost disappointed that the child would be so easy to find.

            He'd trained his dragons well.   In the wild they would now be screeching their joy, freezing the blood of their prey.  The Hunter did not want that.  He wanted his quarry to be unaware she had been found.  So the dragons circled, and the hunter smiled, and Ferif reached for the manacles and chains to pass to his master.

            "Wait here," the Hunter said, slinging the chains across his shoulder and stepping beneath the blackened arms of the first tree. He glanced again to where the dragons circled and took his bearing upon them.

            The woodland closed in around him, dark and damp.  The winter chill clung to the ground and soaked through his leather boots.  Dead leaves carpeted bare earth, making his progress silent as the trees pressed together.  Twisted branches snagged at his cape and hood like the fingers of beggars.  The wet chill of decay stroked his lungs.  A funereal stillness filled the woodland.  At any moment he expected to see mausoleums and gravestones.  Branches hung lower, forcing him to stoop, and the Hunter wondered what would bring a child to this place.  He did not doubt Lord Farne's words, but for the first time he pondered their real meaning.

            What was it Lord Farne had said?  For a year he had sent men and dogs to find the child.  They had never found her, or at least never caught her, but Farne had not told him what happened to the huntsmen.  Did they return from this place?  A chill ran down the Hunter's spine as if a bead of dew had found passage within his cloak.  He stopped, looking round, and all he saw was a tangle of low slung brushwood that formed a barrier to left and to right.  He could not see the path he had taken to his place; it was as if the trees had closed behind him.  The Hunter turned his face up, peering at the grey sky that filtered through the upper branches.  He felt trapped, as if he were a fish in a net, forced to swim onwards to whatever fate awaited.

            Tightening his grip on the chains, the Hunter moved forward, the only direction he could take.  Moss and lichen grew thick upon rotten wood, and fungi hung--pale, bloated clouds of morbid growth.  The woodland was an empty, soulless place.  The Hunter doubted it ever heard birdsong even at the height of summer.  Whatever was here, that drew the child, it was nothing material.  Lord Farne may well own this place, but it was worthless, and the Hunter walked on only because he had no way back.

            It was another hundred paces before he came to the clearing.  The canopy lifted above him, and the air was marginally cleaner in his throat.  His spirit lifted a little until he saw what stood in the centre of the clearing.  It was an oak tree.   In another place, at another time, that is what it would have remained.  But here, at the centre of dark woodland, the oak tree held a sinister, brooding menace.  The tree's bole was squat and twisted, the branches a close-knit tangle that resembled a nest of snakes.  The Hunter felt his skin crawl, as if something unseen and unknown touched and examined him.  The oak was the centre, the heart, of this woodland, and the Hunter sensed this was where the girl came.

            A heartbeat later he saw her.  The girl stepped out of a cleft in the trunk of the oak, where a long forgotten lightning strike had torn a deep, charcoal gash.  She was dressed in leather sandals, dark spun leggings and a woollen jersey of pale cream.  Her hair fell to the small of her back.  The girl was, in the Hunter's estimation, eleven or twelve summers old.  He shifted the chains in his grasp and the movement of the links as they ran together brought her eyes around to him.

            She smiled.

            The Hunter held his breath, waiting for her to turn and run.

            She continued to smile, and in her eyes the Hunter saw she had been expecting him.  He felt doubt, a strange emotion that stroked his heart with the delicate brush of a butterfly's wings.  He remained in place, at the edge of the clearing, and felt the weight of the oak press upon him.

            The girl approached.

            "Has he sent just you this time?"

            "Who?"   The Hunter forced the word out though his dry throat.

            "My father," the girl said, almost sadly.  "Lord Farne."

            Her grey eyes studied him closely.  The Hunter felt a tremor in his legs.  He had to force his hands to the manacles and chains off his shoulder.

            "You haven't answered my question," she said.  "Have you come alone?"

            The Hunter made a gesture to the sky, where the clouds still showed grey and heavy through the open canopy of the clearing.  His dragons were circling silently in silhouette.  The girl gasped.

            'Dragons!' she clapped her hands together, her delighted smile lit up her face.  She danced from foot to foot in excitement.  'I've never seen a real dragon.'

            She was a child now; gone was any of the menace that the Hunter had sensed.  He shook himself, banishing the thoughts that had filled his mind during his journey through the woodland.

            "Your father is Lord Farne?" the Hunter asked, almost as an aside, as he opened the manacle.

            "Yes."  She still looked up in wonder.  "Can you call one down closer?"

            The Hunter gauged the distance to her.  She would move quickly when she sensed the danger.  He had no doubt that was how she had evaded the previous hunting parties.  To keep her distracted, he looked up and called out.

            'Fee, to my side!'

            One dragon separated from the airborne dance, spiralling down, growing larger with each heartbeat.  The girl sighed.

            "Beautiful," she whispered.

            The Hunter leapt three paces and clamped the manacle around her left forearm.  The metalwork was charmed, that had cost him a fortune from a mage in the southern wastelands, and the iron flowed with cold swiftness until it bound tightly to her bones.

            "No!"  The girl's cry made the air around them jump in fright, a sudden gust that shook the trees and their branches, sending dew shimmering down like rain.  The girl sprawled back onto the ground, pulling the Hunter forwards.  Above them Fee cried out in delight at the sight of her master and angled her dive in towards the clearing.

            The Hunter stood, wrapped the chain around his forearm, and hooked one of the links to a sprung loop on his belt.  She couldn't escape now, even though she tried, scrabbling for purchase on the wet soil.  The Hunter heard the fluted rush of Fee's wings as she swooped closer - then another, uncertain sound that merged the rustle of branches with the crackle of bones.  He looked up.  The treetops were moving.  The Hunter's breath caught cold and desolate in his throat.  Whip thin branches flicked out at Fee, some striking her flanks, others wrapping themselves about her wings, body and tail.

            Fee cried out in pain and fear.  Her left wing folded back, caught by six fingers of wood, jarring her flight to a standstill.  The dragon's neck turned and Fee spat a gob of fire at the branches that held her.  The flame cut the wood, and the dragon fell to the ground with a bone shaking thump.  She lay in shock, blood showing through the tears in her scales. Remnants of branches still clung to her body.

            The air around him rippled with ice.   He drew his knife without thought, the long blade dull in the grey light.   He stepped towards his dragon and came to a sudden halt.  The chain behind him was taut, pulling at his waist and digging into the flesh of his arm.  He yanked hard and was rewarded by the biting pain of metalwork grating against bone.  The Hunter turned and looked at the girl.  She was half-standing half-leaning, resisting his pulls.  For a moment he couldn't understand how.

            Then he saw.

From her ankles grew tendrils that sank into the earth and anchored her like roots.  As he watched, the tendrils grew darker and wider, strengthening her union with the soil.  She was watching him with a serious expression.  The Hunter realised he had not taken a breath for several heartbeats.  He filled his lungs with damp air and released the chain.  It slid to the ground with a drawn out rattle that almost matched the thump of his heart.

The Hunter's eyes were drawn back to Fee as his dragon floundered upon the soil.  Dragon's were not true land animals, and here in the wood, with her one wing still half trapped, she thrashed clumsily.  The Hunter knew he must help her, but  he was stopped by another sound: a deep, mournful groan that reminded him of an old mill wheel turning for the first time in months.  The Hunter's knees weakened.  The oak tree was moving.  Soil ruptured as thick roots ripped free of the ground, the bole turned, the deep rent of the lightning strike became a gaping maw.  Above, the thick tangle of branches shook free and became a multitude of arms that struck powerfully at Fee.  The dragon was driven into the earth, broken and bloodied by the branches that rose and fell again to splinter a narrow skull and fracture vertebrae and ribs into matchwood.

The Hunter saw the light fade from Fee's eyes.  She was dead.   The forest around him shifted and rustled.  Whole trees uprooted and moved as one towards him.  The oak, finished with Fee, shuffled round on a tangle of roots as if in search of him.  The Hunter turned to face the girl.

"What is this place?" he asked as the living woodland pressed close.

"My home."  Her skin had a darkening hue.  It thickened, as bark does upon a sapling that grows to a tree.

"What are you?" A touch, the breath of something ancient upon his neck, made him shiver.

"The daughter of my parents."

The Hunter didn't resist as the first of the branches wrapped around his lower body.  The grip upon him tightened, squeezing his flesh and crushing the breath from him.

"Tell me."

Thorns stabbed and tore at his flesh as the girl spoke.  She told him of her mother, a daughter of the forest, a dryad caught by Lord Farne and raped at the base of the oak tree.  She told him that the woodland cursed Farne even as she was conceived.  She told him how the forest fed upon the ancient soil beneath it, gaining strength for the day it would move upon Lord Farne's castle and grind the walls to dust.  The trees shuffled close on earth-clogged roots, blotting out the last remaining daylight.

            Branches entwined to form a living cage that grasped his head.  He saw shadows form on the bark of the trees, the tortured faces of men trapped within the tissue of the wood; the hunters Farne had sent before him.  The Hunter knew that their fate was his.  A hard finger of wood prised open his teeth. 

            The Hunter spiraled upward into the air as the branches hefted him skyward.   In the distance, he saw the castle, its battlements arrayed like the teeth of a skull, etched against the ash grey sky.  And there, on the rampart, he could make out a shape: the haunted, hunted figure of Farne, Lord of Dark Vale.

Before the Hunter could curse Lord Farne, a branch grew down his throat and choked his final scream.


The End

Copyright: Neil Carstairs 2008