Page 49

“The veil is thin up there. Don’t fall through.” The flower twirled between smirking lips. “Small chance of that, though.”

“Why do you say that?” asked Fairhrim.

“You lot are never able to cross,” said the child, with a cavalier gesture towards Osric and Fairhrim. (This was said as though Osric and Fairhrim were Like, which they were decidedly not.)

“You can’t even see,” continued the child. “You look and you behold nothing.”

Having made this impressive, vaguely insulting pronouncement, the child pushed herself off the stile and skipped down the path.

“Wait!” called Fairhrim.

But the child was gone. Grass danced in the wind where she had stepped.

Osric had little patience for enigmatic children who disappeared mysteriously. He was going to throttle answers out of the little twit. “Let’s go after her and—”

“No,” interjected Fairhrim. “Whatever you were about to say, don’t say it out loud.”

“Was that a Hedgewitch?”

“A newling, perhaps.” Fairhrim looked serious. “If it was, you won’t find her.”

Osric took the statement as a challenge. It vexed him that the childhad appeared before them so silently and disappeared so easily. Even the best Fyren shadow-walkers couldn’t pull off that sort of feat. He wanted an Explanation.

He had done three jobs that day and was running rather low on seith, but he nevertheless pulled off his glove and awoke his tacn. He felt about in the shadows in the direction where the child had vanished. First he pushed his seith out fifty feet, and found nothing, and then a hundred feet, and found nothing, and then he flooded it out past two hundred feet (his Cost made itself known; his right eye went blurry)—and he found still nothing. The child was gone.

Fairhrim, who had been watching his investigation in haughty silence, said, “I told you.”

“I believe I’d like to learn more about Hedgewitches,” said Osric. Which was as close as he would come to admitting that Fairhrim had been right.

“Good luck,” said Fairhrim. “There’s a reason you think all they’re good for is wading about in ditches.”

“What do you mean?”

“They’re safer if everyone believes they’re useless. No one bothers them. At one point in our history, they were relentlessly persecuted. They’ve never forgotten.”

“And how do you know so much about them?”

“I knew one once.” Fairhrim touched her neck, and for a moment she looked wistful—sad, even—and then her face closed again.

Osric turned his attention back to the stile. There wasn’t a single bent blade of grass, or a single disturbed pebble, where the girl had been kicking her feet. Of the flower she’d been chewing on, a leaf and a single petal remained.

“Harebell,” said Fairhrim, observing the petal. “Also known as fairy thimble.”

“You say that as though it’s significant.”

“There are claims about its properties. Undocumented, of course—”Fairhrim interrupted herself with a double take at Osric. “Your eye. It’s gone white.”

“My Cost.”

Fairhrim, who had briefly looked concerned, said, “Ah,” and regained her impassivity.

She continued up the footpath. Osric found himself breaking a sweat as they climbed. The crickets began to chirp again, and turned their attention to the shape of Fairhrim’s bun (“Frizzy turnip”) and Osric’s body odour (“Chimney and armpit”).

The commentary faded as Osric and Fairhrim climbed. Which was good, because Osric wanted to laugh, but he didn’t want to laugh with Fairhrim, because that would be chummy, and they weren’t chums.

He stole a glance at her. Her lips were pressed together harder than usual, and twitched when one of the crickets called him a mithering wanker.

They reached the top of the Downs.