Plum Duff Read online

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  Standalone

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  Not Far From the Tree

  Till Human Voices Wake Us

  The Connoisseur

  In the Realms of Gold: Five Tales of Ysthar

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  Watch for more at Victoria Goddard’s site.

  PLUM DUFF

  VICTORIA GODDARD

  UNDERHILL BOOKS

  Copyright © 2021 by Victoria Goddard

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  About the Author

  CHAPTER ONE

  On the northern approach to Ragnor barony along the old imperial highway, you cross a fine stone bridge over the Temby, a tributary of the River Rag, and almost immediately enter the dark and dim fastness of the Arguty Forest.

  An ancient woodland of that sort seems wilder, at least to a country boy such as myself, than the true unpeopled wilderness of the mountains. The Arguty Forest is not merely thickly wooded: it is dark.

  In Ragnor barony and those lands around, you once could reach Astandalas the Golden and still can reach Fairyland through the Woods Noirell in the south. There, if you stray off the path, you might find yourself caught in a faery circle or lost in the woods between the worlds.

  In the Arguty Forest, you are much more likely to find yourself in a pit trap, caught by any of a variety of gangs of highwaymen, tumbling into the Magarran Strid, or visited by a hermit saint.

  Or perhaps that’s just me.

  On our way back from collecting books, sundries, and my best friend Mr. Dart’s niece Jullanar Maebh from Orio City, we had given a lift to a highwayman dressed as the Hunter in Green—to ignore, at least for the moment, all the other events that happened between collecting said books, sundries, and niece, and actually arriving at the edge of Ragnor barony.

  (There had been two deaths, a resurrection, and a unicorn. Amongst other things.)

  I had discovered during the past week that the ostensible Hunter in Green was actually the Honourable Roald Ragnor, Baron Ragnor’s son and general aristocratic layabout. I had yet to determine the point of his masquerade.

  Whatever his purpose, he bade us halt the coach just inside the woods so he could go on his solitary way.

  “As you wish,” Mr. Dart said; he was sitting with his back to the driver, and he rapped smartly on the dividing shutter to inform the coachman of our plans.

  Mr. Fancy, my grandmother’s coachman, had taken a fancy to Mr. Dart when he’d picked us up after our precipitous escape from Orio City’s infamous prison. If I’d tried to persuade him to stop at the edge of the forest he would have been most sarcastic in manner. He merely tipped his hat to Mr. Dart and muttered something that could be taken as polite.

  The enormous falarode groaned under the weight of all the books, Winterturn supplies, and passengers as it slowed to a ponderous halt. Thankfully, the old highway was well-laid stone underneath a scattering of dead leaves and dirty slush. I regarded the slush thoughtfully. On the other side of the Crosslains there had been a blizzard, which had trapped us in the country house of the eccentric and somewhat murderous Master Boring and forced us to go quite around rather than over the pass between Lind and south Fiellan. On that side of the mountains they held that snow before the Lady’s Day—the winter solstice—was bad luck.

  On our side we said it was sign of a good winter. Good, for us meaning a season of a fair snowfall that stayed and protected all the overwintering crops and nourished the ground. The solstice was not even a week away now, and it appeared the snow had begun to settle. There were ample signs that the coming winter would be a hard one politically, so I was cautiously hopeful that the weather would prove less catastrophic.

  A little before we reached the unremarkable path where the Hunter in Green had requested we deposit him, the coach slid to a halt in a sudden wild whinnying on the part of the six horses drawing it.

  We jerked and swayed with the abrupt cessation of movement. Jullanar Maebh, who was sitting next to Mr. Dart opposite the Hunter in Green, shivered and drew her shawl closer about her shoulders. Hope, my friend from Morrowlea and the most recent addition to our party, was sitting next to me, and she put her hand on my knee for balance.

  “Why are we stopping, Jemis?” she asked softly.

  “I don’t know,” I admitted cheerfully. “Shall we go see?”

  The Hunter in Green scoffed. “I’ll go see. You stay here.”

  Jullanar Maebh, who had not been entirely pleased with any of us, and certainly not the addition of a man pretending to be the Lady’s Hunter, scoffed in turn, more loudly and sincerely. The Hunter swung his masked face around, his entire bearing suggesting amusement; Jullanar Maebh merely said, “We await your report, sir.”

  He actually laughed before swinging himself out of the carriage in a blast of chill air. I took my hands out of my pockets and wished I’d thought to buy a pair of good gloves when in Orio City. Theoretically I had three pairs on order in Ragnor Bella, but there was no telling whether I would return to find one, two, or all of them ready for the winter.

  From outside came a jumble of words, the Hunter’s strange accent—a mimicry, I now knew, of the Solaaran accent of Zunidh—and robust timbre rumbling through the horses’s continuing noises. Mr. Fancy’s voice raised up sharply, followed by another man, whose voice was so fruity and rich we all turned with one accord to tilt our heads in curiosity.

  Even Ballory the unicorn foal left off her drowsy communion with Mr. Dart’s side and the remaining three kittens to prick her ears forward and listen. The Hunter had left the carriage door ajar, letting in both a draught and their voices.

  “Ballory, no,” Mr. Dart said, half a moment too late—the unicorn had scrambled to its feet, unceremoniously dumping the kittens, and clattered out through the gap. I reached down to collect the kittens, knocking my head against Mr. Dart as he made to stand.

  We both tumbled backwards into our seats. Jullanar Maebh made another savage scoffing noise and Hope said, “Oh dear, are you all right?”

  “Yes, thank you,” I
said, even as Mr. Dart nodded hastily, said something that might have been, “Just fine,” and clambered out.

  The carriage was intended for ten, but Mr. Dart’s valet Cartwright and the coachman had rearranged the seating to permit the inclusion of large quantity of books and other items I’d acquired in Orio City.

  We had been expecting Jullanar Maebh and her mother, so they had left enough space for four passengers; the addition of the Hunter in Green, who was a large man, had been something of a squeeze. With him gone, however, and the ladies’ feet and skirts drawn back, Mr. Dart was able to exit without having to do more than duck his head.

  I glanced at the two women and then, when they both shrugged, followed suit. Hope had mentioned she’d not slept well the night before, and Jullanar Maebh had contracted a cold at some point along our journey, and was quietly sniffling into a handkerchief.

  Outside the carriage it had started again to snow, a fine sifting powder that could likely keep up all day. It washed out the forest around us and eliminated shadows, so we and the carriage seemed to stand in a ghostly wood: all tall oaks, their bark darkened by humidity, their rusty leaves rattling above us.

  Roald Ragnor stood foursquare, his costume a viridian mass bright against the black carriage. Mr. Dart was in deep grey, as if he’d strayed out of the woods himself. Mr. Fancy and Mr. Cartwright were in heavy black greatcoats, Mr. Cartwright’s almost as rusty as the oak leaves with age and wear.

  Ballory stood out against the snow as if she were formed of pure moonlight. She was rubbing her nub of a horn against the knee of the man who had stopped the coach.

  A soft wisp thumped over my foot; I looked down to see the orange kitten had made its way out and was now trotting unconcernedly across to join Ballory in fawning over the man’s feet and twining around his legs.

  The grey kitten sat at the top of the carriage steps and mewed imperiously until I picked it up and pet it. The tabby had claimed Hope’s lap and was purring audibly.

  The man before us, caressing the unicorn’s ears with an expression almost as wondering as the rest of us sported, was undoubtedly the Wild Saint of the Arguty Forest.

  I had grown up—Mr. Dart and the Honourable Roald Ragnor and I had all grown up—hearing stories of the Wild Saint. He asked for nothing, people said: he received all gladly, and gave what he received even more gladly still.

  He had been an ordinary enough monk in his youth, my father had said, belonging to the order whose chapter house was in Temby in middle Fiellan. Like so many, the order had become corrupt and worldly, seeking their own aggrandizement over their spiritual duties.

  The monk who became the Wild Saint had been travelling, my mother had told me, between Fiellan and Lind, through the passes in the Farry March, when he had a vision of the Lady.

  She had told him to mend his ways for the good of his own soul, and when he asked the goddess how he might, she laid upon him the instruction that he needed to learn what a gift the world was; that he should seek for nothing, but receive with joy what was given, and give with abundance in his turn.

  He had, so everyone said, wandered in the mountains for many days until he found himself in a glade deep in the heart of the Arguty Forest, not far from the Magarran Strid or the caves where they found the tippermongeramy.

  There he came to a wild crossroads.

  The wild crossroads, in fact.

  Crossroads are a matter of great superstition and deep lore in my part of the world. Long before the Astandalan Empire came with its roads and its binding magics, we held that crossroads were places of fear and wonder: places where the dead might walk, or the Dark Kings come calling.

  Places where you might meet the Lady; or find a path opening to another world, or the Lands Beyond.

  At a crossroads you might find grace or disaster, adventure or any form of a change of direction.

  Most of the crossroads in southern Fiellan had long since been anchored into the Schooled magic of Astandalas, the old tracks covered over with the great slabs of stone and linking chains of the wizard-engineers of the empire. The crossroads were still marked by standing stones, and the superstitions lingered, but it had been said—it had been believed—that much of the old, deep magic of Alinor before the coming of the Empire was gone.

  The Fall of the Empire had made it clear that that magic was only quiescent, bound by the Schooled wizards. When their bindings broke, that terrible day when the lights went out, our crossroads … woke.

  But never mind that.

  Of the three baronies that comprised Southern Fiellan—Temby, Yllem, and Ragnor—Ragnor was the most isolated and the most … shall we say, traditional.

  It was the one where the cult to the Dark Kings had progressed to the point of sacrificing people. Or at least attempting to do so; I owed my life to Mr. Dart twice over on that account.

  Only the fact that the imperial highway to Astandalas cut through the middle of the barony, on its way to the passage between worlds on the other side of the Woods Noirell, meant that we were not entirely backwards. We had had travellers passing us by, everyone from half the armies of Astandalas to the Red Company themselves.

  Few of them made the two-mile detour to visit Ragnor Bella itself, unless they’d mistaken their stages and instead of stopping at the Horned Man Inn just north of the Arguty Forest and then the Bee at the Border in St-Noire, they found themselves needing a rest-halt in between. Even then the Green Dragon was closer to the road, if in those days nearly as obviously dangerous and wild as at present.

  Nowadays, the highway leads nowhere. It stops unceremoniously in a field, the circular arch that once marked the passage a haunted relic. The Woods Noirell (my mother’s legacy to me) are as full as twisting and convoluted magic as they ever were, and the Good Neighbours press ever closer. But the Bee at the Border has shut up more than half of its great wings, as no travellers come there now.

  And the Arguty Forest, that deep and dark forest full of mortal dangers, is wilder and darker and deeper than ever it was during the days of the Empire. Even in Imperial days the forest was not safe. The highway was patrolled by companies of soldiers, because no one could ever plumb every cave and every gorge and every millennium-oak’s canopy.

  The places where trails cross in the Arguty Forest were never caught and bound by Imperial wizards. I had read, in a class on History of Magic at university, that most Schooled wizards intensely disliked the forest precisely because it was so alien to them and their magic.

  There is, deep in the forest, a crossroads where two ancient roads meet. It is called, by traditional immemorial, the Savage Crux.

  The roads are so ancient no one now knew who had made them. They are not paved, not bound in chains of iron and magic and stone, but their tracks scar and shape the landscape.

  The east-west path is said to have been made by giants, long and long ago when the world was young. The eastern terminus is in the Farry March, up in the long narrow valley between Fiellan and Lind, where a huge monolith, fifty feet high, stands on the brow of a hill, marking no one knows what. To the west, on the other side of the valley of the River Rag, is the Gap of the Gorbelow Hills, which was said to have been broken by giants.

  The Giants’ Road is still visible, if one stands on certain heights in the barony, as a raised dyke running across the valley. There is a ford across the Rag where that line crosses it, requiring a portage for any boats that might want to go downriver from Ragnor Bella, and a huge tumbled pile of stones that people call the Giant’s Castle occupies the entire pinch of the valley floor between the river and the trees: that is why the highway had to go straight through the Arguty Forest.

  If the Giants’ Road seems to run across the general line of the valley, the north-south track that crosses it at the Savage Crux defies common human or animal practice entirely. It runs along a clear line that does not quite follow any magnetic compass direction, ignoring cliffs and mountains, gorges and waterfalls, bogs and sinkholes and all the other mass of mi
scellaneous terrain that is tumbled across the foothills of the Crosslains.

  This route—it is hardly a path; no one has ever actually been able to follow it, certainly not on horseback or even on foot—is called the Lady’s Way. It is said that it was made by Sir Peregrine, the Lady’s first Champion, when he chased the Good Neighbours out of Fiellan. He rode his unicorn companion along the route, harrying those whose steeds were made of wind and shadow when the Wild Hunt came hunting in the mortal countries.

  I looked at the six Ghiandor horses drawing my grandmother’s falarode, which had a certain viridian sheen to their flanks and which could travel far faster and longer than any truly mortal horse of my knowledge; and then I looked at Ballory, barely larger than a cat, more real than anything else in that shadowless light of a snowy day, and I wondered.

  There had been a fair amount of time, driving up the length of the Crosslains to the northern pass and then back down through Fiellan again, to think about what it meant for my friend, Mr. Peregrine Dart, to find and befriend a unicorn.

  He stood there, auburn-bearded and dressed as befit a young gentleman not so lately up from university, in grey and sober plum, and nothing but the unicorn now gamboling at his feet suggesting anything was odd. No magic was apparent around him; even his stone arm was hidden in its sling.

  Facing Mr. Dart, the Wild Saint wore brown leggings and a long green woollen habit over it, and over that a great cloak made apparently of mink pelts. He held a long wooden staff in his hand, which he was leaning on as if it were a walking aid but which I thought was actually a hefty quarterstaff—if the nicks and flattened spots where it had clearly hit things heavily were any indication—and his hood was down, showing him both fully bearded and with the sort of baldness that looks like a tonsure. His hair and beard were both rich brown; his skin was ruddy and tanned rather than naturally dark.