LITMIR.BIZ

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sleepily. “Get down from your tree and go in peace.”

      He rolled on his side and seemed to go to sleep, a strange bleached heap huddled on the bank. The only colour about him was the red gash on his wrist, above the hand clutching his staff.

      Ann waited in her tree until his breathing was slow and regular and she was sure he was really asleep. Only then did she go round to the back of the tree and slide down as quietly as she knew how. She got to the path with long tiptoe strides and sprinted away down it, still on tiptoe. And she was still afraid that Mordion might be stealing after her. She looked back so frequently that after fifty yards she ran into a tree.

      She met it with a bruising thump that seemed to shake reality back into place. When she looked forward, she found she could see the houses on the near side of Wood Street. When she looked backwards to check, she could see houses again, beyond the usual sparse trees of Banners Wood. And there was no sign of Mordion among them.

      “Well, that’s that then!” she said. Her knees began to shake.

      

      There were still hailstones under the big grey car, but they were melting as Ann hastened past on her way to the path to Banners Wood. She did not stop for fear Mum or Dad called her back. She admitted that setting out to climb a tree in a tight skirt probably was silly, but that was her own business. Besides, it was so hot. The path was steamy-warm, full of melting hailstones winking like diamonds in the grass. It was a relief to get into the shade of the wood.

      Grass almost never grew on the trampled earth under the trees, but spring had been at work here all the same while Ann had been ill. Shiny green weeds grew at the edges of the trodden parts. Birds yelled in the upper branches and there was a glorious smell in here, part cool and earthy, part distant and sweet like the ghost of honey. The blackthorn thicket near the stream was actually trying to bloom, little white flowers all over the spiny leafless bushes. The path wound through them. Ann wound with the path, pushing through, with her arms up to cover her face. Before long, the path was completely blocked by the bushes, but when she dropped to a crouch, she could see a way through, snaking among the roots.

      She crawled.

      Spines caught her hair. She heard her anorak tear, but it seemed silly to go back, or at least just as spiny. She crawled on towards the light where the bushes ended.

      She reached the light. It was a swimming, milky lightness, fogged with green. It took Ann a second of staring to recognise that the lightness was water. Water stretched to an impossible distance in front of her, in smooth grey-white ripples that vanished into fog. Dark trees beside her bowed over rippled copies of themselves, and there was one yellow-green willow beyond, smudging the lake with lime.

      Ann looked from the foggy distance to the water gently rippling by her knees. Inside her black reflection there were old leaves, black as tea-leaves. The bank where she was kneeling was overgrown with violets, pale blue, white and dark purple, spread everywhere in impossible profusion, like a carpet. The scent made her quite giddy.

      “Impossible,” she said aloud. “I don’t remember a lake?”

      “I don’t either,” said Hume, kneeling under the willow. “It’s new.”

      Hume’s tracksuit was so much the colour of the massed violets that Ann had not seen him before. She had a moment when she was not sure who he was. But his brown shaggy hair, his thin face and the way his cheekbones stuck out, were all quite familiar. Of course he was Hume. It was one of the times when he was about ten years old.

      “What’s making the ripples?” Hume said. “There’s no wind.”

      Hume never stops asking things, Ann thought. She searched out over the wide milky water. There was no way of telling how wide. Her eye stopped with a gentle white welling in the more distant water. She pointed. “There. There’s a spring coming up through the lake.”

      “Where? Oh, I see it,” Hume said, pointing too.

      They were both pointing out across the lake as the fog cleared, dimly. For just an instant, they were pointing to the milky grey silhouette of a castle, far off on a distant shore. Steep roof, pointed turrets and the square teeth of battlements rose beside the graceful round outline of a tower. The chalky shapes of flags flapped lazily from tower and roofs, all without colour. Then the fog rolled in again and hid it all.

      “What was that?” asked Hume.

      “The castle,” said Ann, “where the king lives with his knights and his ladies. The ladies wear beautiful clothes. The knights ride out in armour having adventures and fighting.”

      Hume’s thin face glowed. “I know! The castle is where the real action is. I’m going to tell Mordion I’ve seen it.”

      Hume had this way of knowing things before she told him, Ann thought, gathering a small bunch of the violets. Mum would love them, and there were so many. Sometimes it turned out that Hume had asked Yam, but sometimes, confusingly, Hume said she had told him before. “The castles not the only place where things happen,” she said.

      “Yes, but I want to get there,” Hume said yearningly. “I’d wade out through the lake or try to swim, if I knew I could get there. But I bet it wouldn’t be there when I got across the lake.”

      “It’s enchanted,” said Ann. “You have to be older to get there.”

      “I know,” Hume said irritably. “But then I shall be a knight and kill the dragon.”

      Ann’s private opinion was that Hume would do better being a sorcerer, like Mordion. Hume was good at that. She would have given a great deal, herself, to learn sorcery. “You might not enjoy it at the castle,” she warned him, plucking the best-shaped leaves to arrange round her violets. “If you want to fight, you’d be better off joining Sir Artegal and his outlaws. My dad says Sir Artegal’s a proper knight.”

      “But they’re outlaws,” Hume said, dismissing Sir Artegal. “I’m going to be a lawful knight at the castle. Tell me what they say about the castle in the village.”

      “I don’t know much,” Ann said. She finished arranging her leaves and wrapped a long piece of grass carefully round the stalks of her posy. “I think there are things they don’t want me to hear. They whisper when they talk about the king’s bride. You see, because the king is ill with his wound that won’t heal, some of the others are much too powerful. There’s quarrelling and secrecy and taking sides.”

      “Tell me about the knights,” Hume said inexorably.

      “There’s Sir Bors,” said Ann. “He prays a lot, they say. Nobody likes Sir Fors. But they quite like Sir Bedefer, even if he is hard on his soldiers. They say he’s honest. Sir Harrisoun is the one everyone really hates.”

      Hume considered this, with one tracksuited knee up under his chin, staring into the mist across the rippling lake. “When I’ve killed the dragon, I’ll turn them all out and be the king’s Champion.

      “You have to get there first,” Ann said, beginning to get up.

      Hume sighed. “Sometimes,” he said, “I hate living in an enchanted wood.”

      Ann sighed too. “You don’t know your own luck! I have to be home for lunch. Are you staying here?”

      “For now,” said Hume. “The mist might clear again.”

      Ann left him there, kneeling among the violets looking out into the fog as if that glimpse of the castle had somehow broken his heart. As she crawled through the thornbrake, carefully protecting her bunch

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