Runemarks

was good for him, and for the first time she’d seen that his dark gray hair was touched with white. His yearly journeys to World’s End were taking their toll, and after seven such reckless pilgrimages, who knew when the net might fall?

The runes had given her little by way of reassurance.

Maddy had her own set of fortune stones, made from river pebbles from the Strond, each painted with a different rune. Casting them upon the ground and studying the patterns into which they fell, she discovered, was sometimes a means of divining the future-though One-Eye had warned her that runes are not always simple to read or futures always set in stone.

Even so, a combination of Raedo, the Journeyman-

– with Thuris, Thor’s rune, and Naudr, the Binder, had filled her with misgivings.

One-Eye’s runemark. A thorny path? And the third rune-the Binder, the rune of constraint. Was he a prisoner somewhere? Or could that final rune be Death?

And so when Mrs. Scattergood had said he was there-there at last, nearly two weeks late-a great relief and a greater joy had swept her up, and now she ran toward Red Horse Hill, where she knew he would be waiting for her as he always waited for her, every year-as she hoped he would every year, forever.

5

But Maddy had reckoned without Adam Scattergood. The landlady’s son rarely troubled her when she was working-it was dark in the cellar, and the thought of what she might be doing there unsettled him-but he sometimes lurked around the tap, awaiting an opportunity to comment or to jeer. He had pricked up his ears at the commotion in the kitchen-wisely keeping his distance from any danger of work to be done-but when he saw Maddy leaving through the kitchen door, his eyes gleamed and he determined to investigate.

Adam was two years older than Maddy, somewhat taller, with limp brown hair and a discontented mouth. Bored, sulky, and doted upon by his mother, already a parson’s prentice and a favorite of the bishop, he was half feared and half envied by the other children, and he was always causing mischief. Maddy thought he was worse than the goblins, because at least the goblins were funny as well as being annoying, whereas Adam’s tricks were only ugly and stupid.

He tied firecrackers to dogs’ tails, swung on new saplings to make them break, taunted beggars, stole washing from clotheslines and trampled it in the mud- although he was careful to ensure that someone else always got the blame. In short, Adam was a sneak and a spoiler, and seeing Maddy heading for the Hill, he wondered what business she might have there and made up his mind to spoil that too.

Keeping hidden, he followed her, staying low to the bushes that lined the path until they reached the lower slopes of the Hill, where he crept quietly up on the blind side and was in a moment lost to sight.

Maddy did not see or hear him. She ran up the Hill, almost stumbling in her impatience, until she caught sight of the familiar tall figure sitting among the fallen stones beneath the flank of the Red Horse.

“One-Eye!” she called.

He was just as she had seen him last, with his back to the stone, his pipe in his mouth, his pack on the grass beside him. As always, he greeted Maddy with a casual nod, as if he had been away for an afternoon and not a twelvemonth.

“So. What’s new in Malbry?” he said.

Maddy looked at him in some indignation. “Is that all you have to say? You’re two weeks late, I’ve been worried sick, and all you can say is What’s new in Malbry? as if anything important was ever going to happen here…”

One-Eye shrugged. “I was delayed.”

“Delayed? How?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

Maddy gave a reluctant grin. “You and your news. I suppose it never occurs to you that I might worry. I mean, it’s only World’s End you’re coming from-and you never bring me news from there. Doesn’t anything ever happen in World’s End?”

One-Eye nodded. “World’s End is an eventful place.”

“And yet here you are again.”

“Aye.”

Maddy sighed and sat down next to him on the sweet grass. “Well, the big news here is…I’m out of a job.” And, smiling as she remembered Mrs. Scattergood’s face, she told the tale of that morning’s work, of the sleeping goblin trapped in the cellar and how in her clumsy haste she had summoned half of World Below in trying to capture him.

One-Eye listened to the tale in silence.

“And, Laws, you should have heard the noise she made! I could hear it all the way from Little Bear Wood-honestly, I thought she was going to burst-”

Laughing, she turned to One-Eye and found him watching her with no amusement at all, but with a rather grim expression. “What exactly did you do?” he said. “This is important, Maddy. Tell me everything you remember.”

Maddy stopped laughing and set herself to the task of recalling precisely what had happened in the cellar. She repeated her conversation with the goblin (at mention of the goblins’ captain she thought One-Eye stiffened but could not be sure), went over every rune she had used, then tried to explain what had happened next.

“Well-first of all I cast Thuris,” she said. “And then I just…pointed at the hole and sort of…shouted at it-”

“What did you say?” asked One-Eye quickly.

But Maddy was feeling anxious by now. “What’s wrong?” she said. “Did I do something wrong?”

“Just tell me, Maddy. What did you say?”

“Well, nothing, that was it. Just noise. Not even a cantrip. It happened so fast-I can’t remember-” She broke off, alarmed. “What’s wrong?” she repeated. “What did I do?”

“Nothing,” he said in a heavy voice. “I knew it was only a matter of time.”

“What was?” she said.

But now the Outlander was silent, looking out at the Horse with its mane of long grass illuminated in the morning sun. Finally he began to speak. “Maddy,” he said, “you’re growing up.”

“I suppose so.” Maddy frowned. She hoped this wasn’t going to turn out to be a lecture, like the ones she sometimes got from well-meaning ladies of the village about growing into womanhood.

One-Eye went on. “Most especially, your powers have grown. You were strong to begin with, but now your skills are coming to life. Of course, you’re not in control of them yet, but that’s to be expected. You’ll learn.”

It was a lecture, Maddy thought. Perhaps not quite as embarrassing as the womanhood talk, but-

One-Eye continued. “Glam, as you know, may lie sleeping for years. Just as this Hill has lain sleeping for years. I’ve always suspected that when one awoke, the other would not be far behind.”

He stopped to fill his pipe, and his fingers shook a little as he pressed the smoke weed into the bowl. A string of geese passed overhead, V-shaped, toward the Hindarfell. Maddy watched them and felt a sudden chill against her skin. Summer was gone, and falltime would soon give way to winter. For some reason, the thought almost brought tears to her eyes.

“This Hill of yours,” said One-Eye at last. “For a long time it lay so quiet that I thought perhaps I’d misread the signs and that it was-as I’d first suspected-just another nicely made barrow from the Elder Days. There have been so many other hills, you see-and springs, and stone circles, and menhirs and caves and wells-that showed the same signs and came to nothing in the end. But when I found you-and with that runemark-” He broke off abruptly and signaled her to listen. “Did you hear that?”

Maddy shook her head.

“I thought I heard-” Something like bees, One-Eye thought. A hive of bees trapped underground. Something bursting to escape…

Briefly Maddy considered asking him what he meant by with that runemark. But it was the first time she had ever seen her old friend so nervous and so ill at ease, and she knew it was best to give him time.

He looked out again over Red Horse Hill and at the rampant Horse in the morning sun. Such a beautiful thing, the Outlander thought. Such a beautiful thing to be so deadly.

“Beats me how any of you can live in Malbry,” he said, “with what’s hidden under here.”

“D’you mean-the treasure?” breathed Maddy, who had never quite given up on the tales of buried gold under the Hill.

One-Eye gave his wistful smile.

“So it’s really there?”

“It’s there,” he said. “It’s been buried there for five hundred years, awaiting its chance to escape. Without you I might have turned my back on it and never thought of it again. But with you, I thought I might have a chance. And you were so young, so very young. With time, who knew what skills you might develop? Who knew, with that rune, what you might one day become?”

Maddy listened, eyes wide.