The Bristling Wood - Katharine Kerr [22]
“Maddyn! Oh, by the gods!” His voice was a frightened hiss. “It’s long past Samaen.”
One of the others yelped sharply, like a kicked hound. The group pulled their horses to an abrupt halt, just as Maddyn felt the Wildfolk rushing about him in panic, lifting and trembling the edges of his cloak and hood.
“Now, here, Maddo lad, don’t harm us. I used to be a friend of yours. It was only my lord’s orders that ever made us lift a sword against you. May peace be yours in the Otherlands.”
As Selyn began edging his nervous horse backward, the truth hit Maddyn: Selyn, who thought he was dead with all the rest of Brynoic’s warband, could only assume that he was seeing Maddyn’s spirit. The thought made him laugh aloud. It was the perfect thing to do; the entire squad began edging their horses backward, but they never took their terrified eyes off Maddyn’s face. Such profound attention was more than any bard could resist. Maddyn tossed his head back and howled, a long eerie note, sending his trained voice as far and high as he could. A rider shrieked, and the sound broke the squad.
“Spirits!” Selyn screamed. “Save yourselves.”
With a giggle of pure, delighted malice, the Wildfolk threw themselves forward among the horses. In the moonlight Maddyn could see them: a thickening in the air like frost crystals, little faces, little hands, fingers that began pinching every horse and rider they could reach. The horses kicked and plunged; the riders yelled, slapping at their mounts with their reins as they desperately tried to turn them. When Maddyn howled a second time, the horses lurched sideways and charged for the road at a gallop with their riders clinging to their necks. Maddyn sat in his saddle and sobbed with laughter until the Wildfolk returned. In a companionable crowd, he rode back the hill, whose legend had just grown a good bit larger. As he led his horse into the stable, Nevyn came running to meet him.
“What’s all this about danger?”
“All over now, good sir, but it’s a pretty tale. I think I’ll make a song about it.”
First, though, he simply told the tale to Nevyn over a tankard of mulled ale, and the old man laughed his dry chuckle that always sounded rusty from long disuse.
“The battlefield where your warband fell is only about five miles from here, certainly close enough for a haunt. One thing, though, if they ride back in the morning, they’ll see the hoofprints of your horse.” Nevyn looked at a spot close to his right knee. “Do us a favor, will you? Take some of the lads and go out to the field. Do you remember the tracks Maddyn’s horse made? … You do? Splendid! Sweep those away like a good lad, but leave all the other tracks where they are. We’ll have a good jest on those nasty men.”
Maddyn could feel that the crowd was gone, except for a tiny blue sprite. All at once, he saw her clearly, perched on his knee and sucking her finger while she stared up at him with alarmingly vacant green eyes. When she smiled, she revealed a mouth full of needle-sharp, bright blue teeth.
“Oho!” Nevyn said. “You see her, don’t you?”
“I do, at that. Will I go on seeing the Wildfolk after I leave here?”
“I’d imagine so, but I don’t truly know. I haven’t come across a puzzle like you before, lad.”
Maddyn had the ungrateful thought that if he were a puzzle, then Nevyn was the greatest riddle in the world.
The next afternoon, Nevyn rode down to the village to hear the gossip and brought back the tale of Maddyn’s meeting with the squad in its new and doubtless permanent form. Lord Romyl’s men had foolishly ridden by Brin Toraedic in moonlight, when every lackwit knows you should avoid the hill like poison during the full moon. There, sure enough, they’d seen the ghosts of Lord Brynoic’s entire warband, charging across the meadow just as they had during the last battle. Yet in the morning, when the riders came back to look, they found the hoofprints of only their own horses.
“‘And what did they think they’d find?’ the tavernman says to me,” Nevyn said with a dry laugh. “Everyone