place I have ever seen: a village made of skins and bones, branches and stones. There were low hovels roofed with ferns and moss, and others properly thatched with rushes; some had wattle-and-daub walls, and some were made of woven willow withies so that the hut seemed to have been knitted whole out of twigs, and the chinks stuffed with dried grass, giving the place an odd, fuzzy appearance as if it wore a pelt in moulting. If a few of the hovels in the centre of the settlement were larger and constructed of more substantial stuff—split timber and the like—they also had roofs of grassy turf, and wore antlers or skull bones of deer or oxen at the corners and above their hide-covered doorways, which gave them the look of something grown up out of the forest floor.
If a tribe of Greenmen had bodged together a settlement out of bark and brake and cast-off woodland ruck, it would look exactly like this, I thought. Indeed, it was a fit roost for King Raven—just the sort of place the Lord of the Forest might choose.
Nested in a shallow bowl of a glade snugged about by the stout timbers of oak and lime and ash and elm, Cél Craidd was not only protected, but well hidden. The circling arm of the ridge formed a wall of sorts on three sides which rose above the low huts. A fella would have to be standing on the ridgetop and looking down into the bowl of the glade to see it. But this concealment came at a price, and the people there were paying the toll with their lives.
Our arrival was noticed by a few of the small fry, who ran to fetch a welcome party. They were—beneath the soot and dirt and ragged clothes—ordinary children, and not the offspring of a Greenwife. They skittered away with the swift grace of creatures birthed and brought up in the wildwood. Chirping and whooping, they flew to an antler-decked hut in the centre of the settlement, and pounded on the doorpost. In a few moments, there emerged what is possibly the ugliest old woman I ever set eyes to. Mother Mary, but she was a sight, with her skin wrinkled like a dried plum and blackened by years of sitting in the smoke of a cooking fire, and a wiry, wayward grizzled fringe of dark hair—dark where it should have been bleached white by age, she was that old. She hobbled up to look me over, and though her step might have been shambling there was nothing wrong with the eyes in her head. People talk of eyes that pierce flesh and bone for brightness, and I always thought it mere fancy. Not so! She looked me over, and I felt my skin flayed back and my soul laid bare before a gaze keen as a fresh-stropped razor.
“This is Angharad, Banfáith of Britain,” Iwan declared, pride swelling his voice.
At this the old woman bent her head. “I give thee good greeting, friend. Peace and joy be thine this day,” she said in a voice that creaked like a dry bellows. “May thy sojourn here well become thee.”
She spoke in an old-fashioned way that, oddly enough, suited her so well I soon forgot to remark on it at all.
“Peace, Banfáith,” I replied. I’d heard and seen my mother’s folk greeting the old ones from time to time, using a gesture of respect. This I did for her, touching the back of my hand to my forehead and hoping the sight of an ungainly half-Saxon offering this honour would not offend overmuch.
I was rewarded with a broad and cheerful smile that creased her wrinkled face anew, albeit pleasantly enough. “You have the learning, I ween,” she said. “How came you by it?”
“My blesséd mother taught her son the manners of the Cymry,” I replied. “Though it is seldom enough I’ve had the chance to employ them these last many years. I fear my plough has grown rusty from neglect.”
She chuckled at this. “Then we will burnish it up bright as new soon enough,” she said. Turning to Iwan, she said, “How came you to find him?”
“He dropped out of a tree not ten steps from us,” he answered. “Fell onto the road like an overgrown apple.”
“Did he now?” she wondered. To me, she said, “Pray, why would you be hiding in the branches?”
“I saw the sign of a wolf on the road the night before and thought better