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<title>Spellbinder - Chapter 12</title>
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<h1>12</h1><p>Corriwen Redthorn had no idea where she was going, no sense of direction in the dark. All she knew was that she had to keep moving from the clamour behind and put as much distance between themselves and the angry men who could still be heard far behind them as the horses galloped in the moonless night.</p>
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<p>Connor held tight to the mane and she kept his horse close. By luck more than anything else his feet had found the stirrups and he was managing to stay astride it. The rest of them stampeded alongside.</p>
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<p>They breasted a hill and the open fields beyond gave them a clearway and they went down it in a cavalcade, leading the riderless horses.</p>
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<p>Connor found his voice.</p>
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<p>"I like this," he cried. "Never went so fast in the whole of my life. When I'm rich, I'm going to get one of these."</p>
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<p>Corriwen laughed, more out of relief than anything else.</p>
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<p>"Just try to stay on. And try to stay alive."</p>
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<p>"I'll give both a fair shot," he shouted, breathless.</p>
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<p>When the sun came up, unseen behind the clouds, they slowed to a canter and then dismounted by a stream to let the horses drink. Connor threw himself on the grass and dipped his head in the water.</p>
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<p>"That's definitely the way to travel," he said when he came up, dripping. "These rich folk have all the fun, so they do."</p>
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<p>Corriwen scanned the area. The fields here were damp with rain and she could see crops that had been flattened by hail or wind, and burned by frost. The land looked bleak and impoverished.</p>
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<p>"Where now?" Connor asked, as if expecting Corriwen to take the lead.</p>
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<p>"You tell me. It's your country."</p>
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<p>"I was never more than twenty miles away from the farm in all my life. I could be in a foreign land for all I know."</p>
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<p>"That makes two of us." Corriwen rummaged in a saddlebag and found a bag of dried meat and some apples. She and the boy shared them for breakfast while the horses cropped the grass, then together, they led their mounts to a hillock that gave a view down a broad valley to a town crowded beside a river.</p>
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<p>"I think that's the way," she said, uncertainly. "You think we could sneak in?"</p>
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<p>"Why not? Nobody ever noticed me before."</p>
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<p>"What about the horses?"</p>
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<p>"We could sell them. Or eat them."</p>
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<p>"I don't eat horse, not if I can help it. And we'll just draw attention if we go in with this troop."</p>
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<p>Without a pause, she cut the beast's bit, then dismounted and unhitched the saddle. Connor did the same, and when the leathers slid to the ground, he bent quickly and came up with a short sword that had been hidden in a saddle-scabbard.</p>
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<p>"Finders keepers," he said. He drew a rag out of his little bag and wrapped the blade in it.</p>
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<p>"Can't be seen with a sword. They're not allowed for the likes of me. But I'll take it anyhow, because they'll hunt us for sure, high and low."</p>
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<p>"Well, I've got used to that."</p>
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<p>"But this time, if they catch us, they'll hang us."</p>
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<p>Corriwen remembered what the men had said round the fire in the night. She wasn't quite sure just what would happen if they were caught, but she didn't want to find out. She shook her head.</p>
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<p>"There's something strange going on. I listened to them last night. This Dermott wants me. They've been looking for me all along and I don't know why, unless my friends have been caught."</p>
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<p>"They'd give you away?" He asked. "Some friends!"</p>
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<p>"They'd never give me away, not ever," she retorted sharply. "But they might not have realised they were giving me away. I don't know what this is all about, and I'd like to keep it that way for now. This Dermott doesn't seem like somebody we want to meet."</p>
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<p>"That's for sure. He's the worst. And that Black Fainn, his spellbinder, he's purely evil, so they say."</p>
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<p>They skirted the edge of the town and found a coppice where they could shelter from the rising wind and the cold rain that was beginning to fall. Connor used a flint to start a fire and they huddled beside the heat, gnawing on the dried meat, deciding on their next move. The wind picked up, sending little flurries of brown leaves circling about them, and making the fire flare.</p>
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<p>"The whole land feels wrong," Dermott said. "I haven't seen the moon and stars in I don't know how long, and the birds don't know when to nest."</p>
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<p>"I could have picked a better gate," Corriwen muttered, but when he asked her what she meant by that, she just shook her head. The less anybody knew, the better.</p>
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<p>The wind moaned through the trees, a low, desolate sound, and Corriwen wished her friends were with her here and now. Connor, despite his bad leg, seemed a sturdy enough boy, but he wasn't the same as Jack and Kerry. Her heart ached for their company.</p>
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<p>A hand on her shoulder startled her out of her memories.</p>
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<p>"Did you hear something?" He was scanning the thick trees around them.</p>
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<p>"Naught but the wind."</p>
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<p>One of the horses whinnied and stamped its hooves.</p>
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<p>Connor cocked his head, closed his eyes. After a moment he held a hand up. "There. I heard it again. He fumbled beside the fire, found a good-sized stone.</p>
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<p>"Maybe a rabbit, if we've still got luck."</p>
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<p>After the dried meat, Corriwen sincerely hoped they still had luck.</p>
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<p>Something small scampered through the leaves. Connor got to his haunches, ready to throw. Then something squeaked. It was more a high-pitched whistle than a squeak. From the far side of the fire, something else rustled and another whistle answered.</p>
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<p>"Don't sound like a rabbit," Connor whispered.</p>
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<p>A small brown shape undulated up through the leaves. Two brilliant black eyes regarded her.</p>
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<p>It whistled. Small and serpentine it squirmed out. It had a fierce, triangular head and at first she thought it was an adder.</p>
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<p>"Weasel." Connor sounded disappointed. Another whistle sang out and another lithe little animal burrowed up on the other side of the fire, then another and another. A ring of fierce little eyes glared at them.</p>
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<p>"Never seen them hunt in a troop," he said. "Nasty little beasts. They kill for the love of it. I saw one kill a whole fowl-coop and take only the one bird to eat."</p>
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<p>He raised the stone, threw it hard and accurate, straight at the first weasel. It whirled in the blink of an eye and was gone into the undergrowth before the stone even hit the ground. The rest of them seemed to wink out of existence as they too spun for cover.</p>
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<p>Corriwen shivered. The way the little beasts had glared at her was strange, somehow threatening, as if they knew who she was.</p>
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<p>The freed horses, scattered around the coppice, skittered and stamped again. One of them neighed loudly and kicked at the ground, then they were all bucking and prancing before the whole string ran in a circle and stampeded through the trees in panic.</p>
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<p>"Can't sell them now," Connor said. The words were barely out of his mouth when they heard the rustling sound again, this time louder than before, and her knives were suddenly in her hands.</p>
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<p>"What is it?"</p>
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<p>She shook her head, silently. Out in the crowded trees, something was moving, and fast. She got to her feet and Connor did the same, and they stood, almost back-to-back as around them the crunch and crumple of dead leaves waxed even louder, as if something big was approaching.</p>
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<p>Corriwen saw it first, a motion that was as puzzling as it was unnerving. Not twenty yards away, the very leaves and twigs themselves were moving. A hump of them seemed to be rippling in zig-zag lines as if something as big as a badger were racing underneath the fallen litter. As soon as she saw it, another line began, arrowing straight towards them across the little clearing. A third snaked its way round the bole of a tree, keeping to the dense patches of leaves. It was like watching moles scutter through dry brown earth, but these things were moving faster than any moles, and they were bigger too. Connor bent and snatched up a heavier stone.</p>
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<p>All around them, the hiss and crackle of dry twigs and leaves became a muted roar. Corriwen tensed as the motion suddenly stopped. Around them, several heaps of leaves, each a yard high had piled up. They trembled slightly as if whatever was underneath was breathing fast.</p>
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<p>"I don't like this," Connor said. Mentally she agreed wholeheartedly. She held her breath, wondering what was about to happen and then, without warning, the mounds of leaves exploded upwards in little whirling tornadoes, scattering twigs and acorns and beech mast into the air. They spun with strange ferocity and she could feel a new turbulence in the air as the piles whirled in inverted pyramids, faster and faster until they were just a blur, narrowing as they grew until she could almost make out solid shapes.</p>
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<p>"Evil magic," Connor said. "There must be a curse on this place."</p>
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<p>The spinning shapes, moaning in their own wind, drew leaves and branches, burrs and bark towards them, solidifying all the time until, abruptly, they all stopped.</p>
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<p>Before them stood a semi-circle of man-shaped figures, thin as spindles, each made entirely of the detritus of the forest floor, shaggy with pine-needles and fir-cones. Twiggy fingers sprouted from dead-bark arms. Shiny chestnuts gleamed in pits where eyes might have been. Jagged rose-thorns lined wide gapes that could have been mouths.</p>
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<p>Corriwen felt a cold shudder ripple up and down her spine.</p>
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<p>The first creature, taller than either of them, raised a knotted hand and pointed a stick finger. The others took a step forward. She could hear them breathing, dead and dry as worm-eaten wood. They crackled and creaked as they moved, man-shapes made of leaves and twigs and dry moss, and somehow as virulent in strange dead motion as if they had been ferocious beasts.</p>
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<p>Chestnut and acorn eyes glinted. Connor eased the sword from its rag, the first sword he had ever hefted in his life. It felt good in his hand. The figures rattled and rustled towards them, one slow step at a time.</p>
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<p>"Do we run, or fight?"</p>
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<p>"How do you fight dead wood?"</p>
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<p>"I don't know," Connor whispered back. "But we'll find out. Whatever's made these things, it's bad magic."</p>
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<p>He steadied himself on his good leg. The nearest leaf creature was only feet away. It smelt of mould and toadstools. A big beetle crawled from one socket to another. The thing paused, a hellish scarecrow bound together by some unnatural force.</p>
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<p>It shot out an arm and gripped Corriwen's left wrist. Fingers of dead wood squeezed with shocking force, twisting her hand open. The long knife fell to the ground. Without a pause she pivoted and slashed at the arm with the other knife. It cut cleanly through. For a second she expected blood to spout, but the twiggy hand simply spun away and disintegrated in a brown explosion before whirling back to become a hand again.</p>
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<p>The others closed in. Connor leapt forward and stabbed his blade through what should have been the chest of the second apparition. It went straight through and out the back with just a dry hiss of sound. He pulled back and the thing still kept coming. Corriwen picked up her knife and slashed again, severing the tumbleweed head. The leaves spun in a lazy circle and reformed where they had been before. Exactly as they had been before.</p>
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<p>"We can't beat them," Connor said. She heard the tone of bewildered horror.</p>
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<p>The things closed in.</p>
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<p>Corriwen stepped back, stooped to the fire and came up again with a burning branch in her hand. She took three paces forward and thrust the flames right inside the leaf-creature. It caught alight in an instant, the dry twigs and damp chestnuts making a strange singing noise as they burned fast. In seconds, the thing was a pillar of fire. It staggered, left and right, barged into its neighbour which immediately burst into flame.</p>
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<p>She thought she could hear a sere hiss of pain, but she didn't stop, Turning in a half circle, she lashed the branch through the rest of them, setting all of them alight. They scattered, shedding leaves and burning twigs, spinning like fiery tops as they stumbled through the bracken and thorns, trailing flame with them, and setting fire to the undergrowth.</p>
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<p>"We'd better move," Connor said. A dog-rose went up in a crackle of heat and shared its fire with a dead ivy coiled up a pine tree. Flames raced up the trunk to turn the waxy needles into an incandescent sheet and then, in the space of a dozen breaths, the whole coppice was an inferno.</p>
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<p>"Come on!" he tugged her arm as flames licked about her feet. The leaf-creatures were nothing but spinning flickers of light now, their hissing drowned out by the mounting roar of the brush fire that was quickly turning into a forest blaze.</p>
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<p>She let him pull her away and they ran from the scorching heat that seemed to chase them every step of the way until they came to the edge of the trees and clear air.</p>
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<p>Far down the field, where a road wound its way towards the town, a crowd of people had stopped and were pointing up to the roaring fire which was sweeping through the coppice.</p>
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<p>Corriwen and Connor ran down the hill and away.</p>
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<p class='break'>* * *</p>
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<p>In Wolfen Castle Fainn the Pict gasped as rivers of fire seared through him. He pulled back his sleeve, stretching a long thin arm out. The hairs were singed and an acrid smell rose up from skin that was already beginning to blister.</p>
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<p>Something had touched him. Again.</p>
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<p>He crossed the room to a big stone jug and plunged his arm inside. The water hissed and bubbled as it drew the fire out of him and then he grabbed his staff and in five long strides he threw open the door and made his way up the winding stone stairway, trailing that faint smell of burning with him.</p>
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<p>Dermott the Wolf was in the banqueting hall, gnawing on a wide platter of pig ribs, washing them down with fine ale.</p>
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<p>"What news, Spellbinder?"</p>
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<p>Fainn said nothing. He showed Dermott the skin on his arm where the weasels had scampered. Now they were puckered and twisted.</p>
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<p>"You should put a poultice on that," Dermott advised.</p>
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<p>Fainn gave him a cold smile. He held his arm still. Already the blisters were subsiding, as if whatever was inside him could not even be scarred by fire.</p>
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<p>"I have seen…<em>her."</em></p>
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<p>"What?"</p>
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<p>"I have seen her! The warrior woman. I have looked in her eyes."</p>
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<p>Dermott stopped, a rib half-way to his open mouth.</p>
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<p>"You saw her? Where?"</p>
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<p>"In the east. Half way to the Mourning Mountains."</p>
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<p>Dermot got to his feet. He drew a greasy forearm across his mouth.</p>
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<p>"Have her brought to me. Find her. Take her!"</p>
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<p>His face was thunderous. His wolf-cloak bristled as if charged with his anger.</p>
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<p>"Captain!" He roared. "Captain of the guard. Fifty men. A hundred. Fast horses. Spare mounts. Hurry. Hurry, damn you all."</p>
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<p>People scurried. Horses clattered. Armour clanked. The drawbridge went swinging down and the line of horsemen sped across it in a rumbling cavalcade. Hungry people along the road watched them gallop past.</p>
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<p>And they silently prayed for whoever Dermott was hunting.</p>
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<p> </p>
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