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  I could not formulate words for what I felt. I could feel my face burning with embarrassment, and looked down to my hands, interlaced on my lap in some parody of a maiden’s deportment. “I am sorry, sir,” I said at last. “I don’t wish to disappoint you.”

  He slumped, the disappointment with this response all-too-evident, then smiled crookedly at me. “I can see that. Try not to throw yourself into death-defying situations without thinking them through a little first, eh?”

  “I’ll do my best,” I promised, breathing more easily at this familiar instruction. What long conversations we’d had so far had mostly centered around my tendency to embroil myself in danger. I was aware that it would have been hard to accept counsels of prudence from anyone other than him.

  “Here,” he said, reaching into the deep pocket of his coat and drawing out a small knife in a sheath. “I have something for you.”

  I felt something relax in me, knowing that we were moving on from the quicksand. Albeit I did not quite understand why the conversation had felt so dangerous in the first place.

  Chapter Three

  We Borrow the Falarode

  MY PREVIOUS EXPEDITIONS had been leaving Ragnor Bella to go to Morrowlea and leaving Morrowlea to come home via a tour of most of the kingdom. Morrowlea was one of the Three Sisters—or the Three Rivals, if one preferred that name for the three greatest universities of Alinor—but unlike Stoneybridge (Mr. Dart’s alma mater) or Tara (the Honourable Rag’s), Morrowlea was known for its radical politics and a policy of equality for all its students.

  I had, therefore, not been required to bring more than myself and what I needed for the actual journey to South Erlingale. Mr. Dart, preparing at the same time to go to Stoneybridge, had required two trunks and numerous other containers; I did not like to think what the Honourable Rag, then (since I had not yet been acknowledged by my grandmother as heir to the Imperial Marquisate of the Woods Noirell) highest ranking young man in the barony, had decided it was necessary to bring with him to Tara.

  Leaving Morrowlea heart-broken and ill for a walking tour with Hal and Marcan, I had taken with me a rucksack containing numerous handkerchiefs, my few changes of clothing, a notebook, and a copy of On Being Incarcerated in Orio Prison I had not been able to bear looking at the whole length of the trip.

  Getting ready to go to Orio City to fetch the mysterious Mrs. and Miss Darts, as many interesting books as I could acquire for the princely sum of five hundred bees, and a quantity of other items large and small, I filled that same rucksack with the spare elements of my winter-weight outfit, a smaller quantity of handkerchiefs than I’d ever left home with before, a fresh notebook, and, finally, that same copy of On Being Incarcerated in Orio Prison.

  I had hated the poem—on which I had written my final paper for my degree—all summer as a reminder of what I had lost in the spring. Now that I knew I had, in fact, not totally failed my degree, I was inclined to return to the poem and see if I could tease out a more coherent paper than the one I had written while falling apart physically, mentally, and emotionally from an overabundance of wireweed. And it had to be said that I revelled in the idea of being able to see Orio Prison with my own eyes.

  At least from a distance. I had had a brief experience of being incarcerated myself, in Yellton Gaol, and had no interest in comparing and contrasting rural gaols with the most infamous prison in the world.

  Most of my earthly belongings packed by Thursday noon, after my father left to meet again with the lawyers, I went for a run.

  WHEN I HAD FIRST RETURNED to Ragnor Bella at the end of September I had tried my best to keep my head down and be as unremarkable as possible. Unfortunately, there is a totally unfounded but nevertheless strongly held belief that nothing of interest ever happens in Ragnor Bella except for matters to do with the Greenwings. As the last—or so it was believed—of the family name, therefore, my life was a matter of considerable interest to the good gossips of the barony.

  I arrived to find that everyone thought I had missed my stepfather’s funeral on purpose, and opinions devolved from there until they did an abrupt volte-face with the arrival of a dragon, my subsequent acclamation as Viscount St-Noire, the unexpected reclamation of my father’s reputation from being arraigned as the Traitor of Loe, and his even more unexpected return to life.

  On my initial return I had thought I could not bear any more comments and had therefore tried not to go running. By the end of my first month back so much else had happened that my going running was merely the least of my eccentricities. I tried not to feel too cynical about the fact that a title and a prospective fortune made of unfashionable and peculiar habits acceptable eccentricities, but it nevertheless annoyed me.

  It was getting late in the season for running, anyhow, I thought, as I loped down the old Astandalan highway towards the Woods Noirell. The Tillarny limes in the Woods had ceased flowering and now stood arrayed with stiff petticoats of dim gold leaves, pale gold bracts, and small round nutlets. The famous bees of the Woods had gone into their winter quarters, forming softly vibrating balls of warmth around their queens.

  I stayed on the road once I passed through the Sun Gate and entered the Woods proper. There were strange magics in the Woods, and on a misty day Fairyland felt especially close. I couldn’t pretend I had never wanted to cross that Border and see what adventures I might find in the Kingdom between the Worlds, but after the autumn’s excitement that seemed a bit too much adventure. It was not even a fortnight since I had nearly been sacrificed to the Dark Kings, after all.

  I cast a jaundiced eye at the silent, gold-carpeted woods on either side of me, half-expecting a supernaturally wise fox or a mysteriously beautiful woman to appear. In the stories the Good Neighbours were more usually active in the spring. I could but hope.

  I reached the village without anything odd happening, which was a first in my experiences of the Woods Noirell. The villagers were busy preparing their homes for the coming winter, and though they greeted me as I passed, no one stopped to chat. I didn’t much mind, as all I intended was to go up to the castle and find out whether my grandmother had decided about the coach. She kept changing her mind, sending a succession of amused villagers to town with notes for me, all filled with dire mutterings about the fates and the fey and the shortening of the year.

  As I cut across the village green I was hailed by Mr. White, the innkeeper. I stopped, immediately glad to put off seeing my grandmother a little longer, and shook my head inwardly at my foolishness. The recovery from the curse with which I’d been afflicted seemed to be causing me to have widely swinging emotions.

  “Mr. Greenwing,” the innkeeper said, nodding his head.

  “Mr. White.” I bowed back politely, making him grin. I liked the innkeeper a great deal, though I had yet to spend much time with him. He kept laughing at my deliberate refusal to act the ‘grand gentleman’ (much to my grandmother’s annoyance), but seemed to have no problem whatsoever in treating me as an equal. He was not local by birth, I knew, but rather one of those travellers who had passed through St-Noire back in the days when it was on the road to Astandalas. He had fallen in love with the innkeeper’s daughter, and stayed to learn to run the inn, and that was all I knew about him so far.

  “Was there something else you’ve thought of that you’d like me to get?” I asked, presuming this was what was on his mind. He was the de facto leader of the village, and had been the one most concerned with getting sufficient staples for the winter.

  Mr. White nodded slowly, his eyes on the mist-cloaked buildings across the green from us. He sighed after a moment. “It’s probably too long of a shot ...”

  “I’ll do my best,” I said recklessly, meaning it. “I don’t mind having an odd mission in Orio City.” I rather liked the idea of exploring the city by means of searching out the various items requested, in fact.

  He smiled. “It’s not you, lad. You know I’m not from here?”

  “People say you came along the road from Astandalas and fell in love with the innkeeper’s daughter.”

  “Aye. I’m not from Astandalas, though.”

  “No?”

  “I had a cousin there, in the Imperial Service. He was the one who wanted to come here, to go to a cheese festival in Yrchester.”

  He snorted at the memory; I chuckled at the thought of the surprising intricacies of fate. Presumably the cousin in the Imperial Service had not expected to introduce his cousin to the love of his life because of going on a holiday to the Yrchester Blue Cheese Festival.

  “Where are you from?” I asked curiously, looking at him again. He was dressed in ordinary clothing—breeches, waistcoat, shirt, coat, neckerchief—his colouring an equally common mid-brown. His features were not pure Shaian, but that was common enough across Northwest Oriole and, I presumed, the rest of the old Empire. There were only a few families of pure Shaian lineage outside of the Upper Ten Thousand. Mine certainly was mostly pre-Imperial Alinorel, even on my mother’s side.

  “Zunidh,” he said, startling me out of my thoughts. I was fairly certain I’d never met anyone from that world before.

  Although, I thought a moment later, then again I’d known Mr. White for over a month and obviously he’d always been from there.

  “Oh! Is there something from—from home you’d like me to see if I can get for you? I don’t think anyone’s trading there any more ... not since the Fall.”

  “I expect not,” he said grimly. “It’s more that I have hopes there might have been some letters. It’s a long shot, as I said. Probably nothing’s come through, even if anyone survived back home. I just thought that given that we were under the curse so long, there might have been letters gotten stuck somewhere ...”

  “I’ll ask at the post offices in Yrchester and in Orio City,” I replied promptly.

  “Thank you, lad.”

  “It will be my pleasure.”

  “Don’t spend too long about it,” he warned. “It’s just that I would regret not trying at all, and I can’t go myself at the moment.”

  “I’ll send the supplies as soon as possible,” I promised, and took my leave to find that, indeed, Mr. Fancy the coachman was to accompany us on our expedition to Orio City, along with the six black horses and the ancient falarode.

  “Ain’t nobody going to catch us,” he said smugly, surveying the contraption. He’d obviously spent some time over the past fortnight working on it, as all the leather components were oiled, the metal polished, and the wood freshly painted. All black, of course, with the exception of one singular white bee in the centre of the crest. Bees were in general an emblem of the Imperial family—hence their presence on our coinage—but some ancestor of mine had been granted the use of the symbol along with the Marquisate itself. At some point I would have to find out the rest of that story.

  “Excellent,” I said, becoming aware that Mr. Fancy expected a response. “It looks very well, Mr. Fancy. Shall we race back to town?”

  He laughed indulgently. “You afoot, and me with my six Ghiandor horses? Nah, thanks. I’ve to collect the rest of the supplies. I’ll meet you at the White Cross at sunset.”

  I sighed. “Very good, Mr. Fancy.” He touched his cap with one gnarled hand; I gave him a half-bow (for Viscount St-Noire my grandmother might insist I be, but I was not going to let go all of my radical politics for her), and lifted my feet back into a steady run.

  I was working on getting over my dislike of the White Cross. Now that I knew for a fact my father had not been buried under it at midnight with a stake through his heart—the appropriate burial practice for a traitor and a suicide—there was no longer any reason for me to feel disgust at that particular crossroads, but I did. Perhaps the fact that I had been abducted from there for nefarious purposes had something to do with it. Or that someone, we still did not know who, had buried there the bones of a bull, a stag, and a boar in false semblance of my father’s corpse.

  Why we had to leave at sunset I was still unclear on. Mr. Dart had wanted to leave as soon as possible, which I was in favour of, but when we had acquired use of the falarode Mr. Fancy had insisted we ought to leave at sunset. I had argued for dawn, but Mr. Dart had, surprisingly, backed up the coachman. When I confronted my friend in private later he had had no reason beyond an inkling, he said, that Mr. Fancy knew whereof he spoke.

  Mr. Dart was concealing a gift of wild magic that was starting to spill out into daily life. He had already saved my life twice with it, most notably by preventing me from being entirely washed away by the Magarran Strid in full flood. When he stood there, every inch a young gentleman of means and property, his eyes were bright blue and guileless, and I had said, “This is your journey, Mr. Dart.”

  When magic moved in him his eyes flashed other colours. As far as I knew no one other than Hal (who had been the one to first identify the magic) had noticed this, but then again, there were an awful lot of things about Ragnor Bella that no one mentioned out loud.

  “’TIS A VERY PRETTY STICK,” Mr. Dart said, settling himself in the seat next to me and indicating the potted Tillarny lime sapling I was bracing between my leg and the side wall of the carriage. “Is it a requirement of the coach, the coachman, or the Marchioness?”

  “It’s a birthday present for Hal. Since we will be passing not too far from the turn to Fillering Pool ...”

  “Somehow this simple journey to fetch my relations has become a convoluted plot for you to do errands for half the barony. I am glad that at least one is for yourself.”

  “I trust I am not entirely selfless.”

  He laughed and knocked on the front wall of the carriage with easy familiarity. I heard Mr. Fancy cry, “Ho and away, my beauties!”, quite as if he truly did inhabit a fairy ballad. With a groaning protest the antique falarode was off.

  I sat back, contemplating what I might expect of my life if it were actually a fairy ballad in the process of composition. It could hardly be much more bizarre and adventuresome than the past six months had already proved.

  “What of Mr. Cartwright?” I asked, belatedly realizing Mr. Dart’s valet was nowhere to be seen.

  “He felt self-conscious that you had no one to attend you that he might gossip with.”

  I glared half-heartedly at him. He grinned. “No, though you might want to think of it along the way. He’s ridden ahead to have a day or two at home. We’ll catch him up on the other side of Yrchester.”

  He paused. I wondered whether Mr. Dart had wanted him out of the way, and, if so, why.

  “I presume,” he went on, fiddling a little with the tassel on his boot, “that you will not entirely object to assisting me? Cartwright has not seen his mother these past nine months, you see, and she’s not getting younger.”

  I glanced at the stone arm that Mr. Dart had received protecting me from ensorcelment. “Gladly,” I replied, hesitated myself in turn, and then deliberately turned my attention out the window at the rapidly darkening woods. I had decided to see how long Mr. Dart could take an insistent lack of questioning before he cracked.

  We were naturally waylaid by highwaymen long before.

  Chapter Four

  Adventures in the Forest

  IT WAS DONE IN THE classic manner.

  The distinctive whistle of a crossbow shot sounded out in front of the carriage, a cry of “Stand! Stand and deliver!” boomed forth, and, as I saw when I looked out the window past Mr. Dart, there was visible at the edge of the woods a carefully posed silhouette of swirling dark cloak, an exuberantly feathered black hat, and a mask.

  Mr. Dart and I both looked out the window and then back at each other. Mr. Fancy had reined in the horses but otherwise seemed calmly awaiting instructions or further developments.

  “Well?” said Mr. Dart, raising an eyebrow at me.

  “I don’t know every highwayman in the Arguty Forest,” I replied, flushing at the almost immediate niggling sense that the silhouette was familiar.

  Mr. Dart, obviously noticing this, grinned and indicated I should switch seats with him. Outside we could hear Mr. Fancy expostulating and the highwayman replying, both in nearly impenetrable accents—

  Accent, I thought, things clicking into place.

  “It’s the Hunter in the Green,” I said out loud, remembering an instant too late that Mr. Dart was far more religious than I. His eyes started to shine and he stopped in the process of sliding over.

  “Get off,” I said, pushing him into a seat—any seat. “Come, Mr. Dart, I told you of the Forest camp where Ben and Jack and I spent the night—”

  Outside Mr. Fancy’s voice rose up, saying something about geese, or possibly a geas. The Hunter in the Green laughed, quite as if he had not just held up the coach.

  “This is foolish,” I muttered, and at Mr. Dart’s enthusiastic nod I opened the carriage door so I could participate in what was going on.

  Given that I already knew someone had a crossbow and that the Hunter in Green had a perfectly fine band of fellow outlaws hidden away in a cavernous hideout somewhere in the Arguty Forest, this was not particularly sensible. Then again that is never anyone’s first adjective of choice when describing me.

  “Good evening,” I said, affecting nonchalance. I felt I was improving rapidly, given all the practice I’d had of late.

  The Hunter in the Green and Mr. Fancy both swung around to look at me, though neither dropped their weapon. The Hunter had both hands on a long quarterstaff, Mr. Fancy a crossbow.

  I paused as that registered and took a moment to analyze the situation. My father, although impressed (he said) with my spontaneous responses to dangerous situations, had also spent a considerable portion of our limited time together in the past twelve days impressing upon me the need to think before I acted. The importance he attached to this lesson—and the fact that acting without thinking had not ended up with me dead only because of the Hunter in Green’s timely warning and Mr. Dart’s wild magic—had led me to trying hard to put it into practice.