Finishing her prayer, Iwa knelt back on her haunches and peered around her. She was far from the river and the well-trod paths. This was a dark place, a tiny clearing with only an outcrop of crouch grass and monkshood to mark it. She’d stumbled over it by accident a few summers ago, as she’d tried to follow the hunters deep into the forest.
At least that had been easy. All she had to do was follow the brook until she stumbled on a familiar path but, still, she was far from the beaten tracks of the women. She doubted even old Katchka knew about this place.
Surely no woyak would stray this far into the forest? Yet she moved slowly, her tread cautious and her steps guarded as she made her way across the path, the dead heads of the henbane quivering in the tiny reed basket.
Behind her, the track twisted into the forest, leading down to the river and the hollows where the henbane grew in larger clumps. She looked down at the basket and the tiny bunch of sprigs at the bottom, hardly enough to hurry a man into the spirit world, even one as badly wounded as Yaroslav. I should never have left him. She tried to gulp down the tears as she began along the path.
Now she was scared, her movements slow as her feet slipped across hard earth. Almost subconsciously she glanced at the trees and a narrow half-beaten track that spiralled away into the deeper parts of the forest.
Here the ground petered out into a wet boggy morass, scattered with the prints of lynx and boar. Shivering, Iwa drew back and made the sign of protection. All was quiet, nothing prowled the undergrowth. The boars and lynxes must be far away, which was lucky because, in these narrow confines, they’d make short work of her.
She should have run, made for the safety of the cave and Jarel’s spear, but her legs wouldn’t let her. She’d come this way once before. Not that there had been any sign of the prints then. This must have been an ill-used path. Not even the animals want to come here that often. With a final backwards glance, she stepped of the track and onto the muddied path, her breath shivering in her throat.
All at once she had the sense of something evil. An eerie malevolent scent caught the breeze and rustled disquietingly through the bracken as her feet trembled in the mud. At least the tracks meant that there were no pools of deep mud ready to suck her down. With the bracken so close she doubted that she’d ever manage to get out. If only it hadn’t rained for the last few days on the way to the river camp. The tracks didn’t look particularly fresh and already she walked with her ankles deep in the mire.
Then she came to a small clearing and stopped dead, her feet weary and sticky with the scents of earth and damp grass. Even now, after all this time, she could make out the rough cut of the path as it coiled around the rotting stump of some long-felled oak.
No. The thought came to her unbidden and unwanted. I can’t just let Yaroslav die, you can’t ask that of me, nobody can. She stopped and watched the sun glint from a line of snow that ran along the branches of a hawthorn. And, as the fading light glinted, a plan began to form at the back of her mind. Without another thought she began down the track, but she didn’t go to the river. The ground was sodden against her toes as she pressed past the rotting stump of the oak and on, deep into the forest.
Finally she paused, her hand shivering over a rock. Behind her the sun was ready to set, the shadows drawn deep into the undergrowth. Keeping to the track had been far harder than she’d first envisaged, and more than once she had to double back on herself, picking up the trail more by instinct than by memory.
A gust of wind stirred the leaves and she made a sign to ward off evil. If she started back now she could still make the river by nightfall. But she’d marked this place well. Even now, as her finger moved uncertainly across the rock, she could still make out her sign scraped thin upon the stone and, in the hollows, there were the bones of the toad she’d sacrificed to the Leszy of this place.
Yet, as she moved past the rock a shiver ran over her. She hadn’t been able to find the berries a second time, though she’d carved the bison grass rune into a tree that marked the track. The path which now greeted her was as it always had been. Even now she could trace her steps along its course. She’d come across the glade and the tiny stream that led down to the bush where the berries grew in thick purple clumps, but when she’d tried to find them a second time she found that she couldn’t, as if one of the Leszy had guided her steps and, no matter how much she tried, it wouldn’t let her find the place again.
If only I could find the berries somewhere else. They’d cured Godek’s old hound, but she couldn’t shake the feeling of evil that lurked about these trees, a sense of dread which cut deep into her marrow. Even now she found it difficult to go forward,
