The Shadow Companion - Laura Anne Gilman [23]
“I left a trail as I rode,” he said, pointing to the scraps of cloth on the forest’s floor. He had torn off random bits of his shirt and dropped them as he rode. “The forest might be able to open and close at will—or at someone else’s will. But I thought it might not be able to find, or move, something of mine.”
“Huh? Not bad,” Newt said grudgingly, all the more so for the approving glance Ailis sent to Gerard.
The ride was less difficult than Gerard remembered, as though the forest didn’t mind him coming back. That unnerved him until he caught Ailis making an open-and-shut motion with her hands, and saw that her mouth was moving. She seemed to be forming silent words that compelled the plant life to back off, just a little.
“See?” he said to Newt, indicating her actions. “Magic can be useful.”
“So long as Sir Matthias isn’t here to see it, you mean.” Newt’s voice was scornful.
Gerard blushed angrily at the realization that Ailis had clearly been sharing confidences with Newt. It stung.
The stable boy moved his horse closer to Ailis, bending slightly so that he could speak to her in a low tone. “Is whatever it was still following us?”
Ailis nodded, not breaking her chant.
“I’m going to drop back and see if I can spot it,” Newt said, then swung down from his saddle without halting his horse and handed the reins over to Gerard, who tied them to his own saddle without comment.
When he was a child, before his mother died and he went to live full-time with the dogs in the kennel, Newt used to play hunter-in-the-green, stalking small animals until he could get close enough to touch them. Working with dogs taught him a different style of hunting, but he never let those early skills fade entirely.
If Ailis felt something following them, something was following them. A tension built inside Newt. This skulking, silent thing…He would find out what it was.
“Eeeeessssshhhhhhhh.”
The sound came from behind him. Newt turned, still moving slowly, expecting to see something. But there was only the twisting of leaves that he reasoned to be the track of something passing—or it might have been a breeze, a fox, or an innocent bird. Not everything in the forest was suspicious. In fact, very little he had seen so far was out of the ordinary, for all the stories surrounding it.
“Eeeeessssshhhhhhhh.” Then there was silence.
Letting out a sigh, Newt moved on as quietly as was humanly possible under the branches, just behind and to the left of the three horses ahead of him. The sense that there was something watching him kicked in again, just a prickle between his shoulders. The more he tried to ignore it, the more it grew, until Newt was almost crying with the need to reach behind him and strike out at something, anything, to make the feeling end.
“Oh, dear God,” he heard Ailis cry from up ahead, and gratefully abandoned his fruitless hunt in order to rejoin his friends.
They had slipped out of their saddles as well, leaving the horses hobbled near a large rock. Lying on the ground, nearly concealed by the grass, Ailis and Gerard were staring down at the village where Gerard had left the knights.
They were still there, exactly as he had described. But their armor and jerkins were gone, and the four men were down to their smallclothes and boots, shivering under the spider-spun bonds.
“Their clothing, the armor…it’s dissolving?” Ailis asked in a hushed whisper.
“Poison,” Newt said in a grim tone. “It’s something caustic, like lye, to burn off the shell of something they want…to eat.” He finished his sentence slowly, reluctantly.
“Thanks for telling us that,” Gerard said sarcastically. “So, was there anything actually following us?”
Newt wasn’t offended by the squire’s tone, for once; he wouldn’t have wanted to know that, either. “Yes, I’m pretty sure there was. But it’s not showing itself. And we have