Chapter 1: In defense of trees

Chapter 1

It was only with his eyes closed that Liam found he could separate the sounds of the surrounding forest from the rumble of the wagon on which he rode. A bird screeched, its wings flapping rapidly as the wagon’s presence startled it into flight.. The leaves high above fluttered like a flock of doves, the boughs on which they rested creaked alarmingly. Somewhere in the distance he could detect the faint murmuring of a running water. The two men driving the wagon carried on the conversation they had been enjoying since the journey started, in hushed tones. Bertram, the taller of the two, was obviously the leader from the way he ordered his associate around. In addition, he and his clothes were spotlessly clean and his dark curly hair freshly brushed. His companion by comparison, wore a gravy-spotted shirt, had grime under his fingernails and in a ring around his neck. Liam's mother always said that water to wash with, fell free from the skies.

The previous evening he, like everyone else in the tavern, had looked up when two strangers entered the tap room and strode over to speak to the tavern keeper. After a brief exchange the men had approached his table and sat down on the empty bench opposite. It took a few moments for them to explain why they were there. They said they were tree farmers from Novindus, the capital, searching for specimen trees from which to gather seed. The tavern keeper had told them that he knew the king’s private forest, the Imperial Hunt, an ancient woodland that was almost as big as the duchy in which the tavern stood, like the back of his hand. Did Liam know of any large trees in the forest they asked? They had to be taller than a house and wide enough so that two men with arms stretched could not encircle them. Those were the sort of trees they wanted to grow in Novindus. Liam assured them that he knew where such trees grew. When asked quietly how he knew the lie of the king’s forest so well, he gave them the truth. His father had returned from the wars with a licence to hunt small game from the margins of that domain. He had often taken Liam with him when he went out. Rabbits, ptarmigan and guinea fowl had all found their way onto the table of their small cottage when he was alive. Liam didn’t mention the fact that his father was now dead, nor that he and his mother were reduced to scratching a living from the patch of dirt behind their dwelling, and from whatever field work he could find. When the men offered to pay a gold crown for a look at one of those trees, Liam had quickly agreed to show them. It wasn’t everyday he was offered a crown for a few hours work. With winter coming on and the work in the fields drying up, they needed every coin they could gather if they didn’t want to end up living on cabbages and roots all winter, plus whatever he could catch in the lanes using his father’s old traps.

Feeling the wagon stop in its tracks, Liam sat up and looked around for the reason. The previous evening he had warned the men that the best trees could be found an hour’s journey to the east. On meeting them that morning at their camp on the outskirts of the village, he had been surprised at their insistence in taking their long-bed wagon with them. After giving them instructions on which track to follow, he had lain down in the back expecting an hour’s respite before reaching the place he had in mind. They had only been on the road for barely half of that time. Why had they stopped? The sight of two more long wagons and ten burley men waiting by the side of the road had the hackles on the back of his neck standing on end. What was going on? No one needed this many men to collect a few seeds.

The tallest of the men, the one called Bertram, jumped down from the driver’s seat and walked forward. Greeting the thick-set, one-eyed ruffian who stepped forward by clasping him by the forearm and patting him on the back, he regarded the crowd that quickly surrounded him with a cold smile. This isn’t right Liam told himself and would have slipped off the back of the wagon and disappeared into the trees, if the man on the driving seat hadn’t twisted around and stared at him, resting his hand meaningfully on his dagger, as if daring him to make a move.

“This lad knows where we can find the trees we want,” Bertram was telling the one-eyed thug as they both approached the rear of the wagon.

The newcomer was dressed much like the others. A travel-stained shirt was worn beneath an every-day brown leather jerkin. Over a pair of blue, faded, canvas trousers, glimpses could be seen of a wide, leather belt. To complete the outfit, the man’s trouser were tucked into worn but serviceable boots. It was the same type of clothes worn by every other working man in the duchy.

“How close can we get with the wagons?” the newcomer growled, his stained teeth visible beneath the ugly sneer.

Liam drew back involuntarily, the man’s breath smelt like something had crawled under his tongue and died there

“Be nice to the boy,” Bertram insisted with a cold smile, his hand resting companionably on the other man’s shoulder. “He’s a good lad. If rumours are true he lives by his wits, with a little bit of poaching on the side. He’s our sort of fellow. He’ll give us no trouble, will you boy?”

Liam shook his head. He didn’t want the sort of trouble these men were offering.

“How close can the wagons get to the trees?” Bertram repeated, his eyes narrowing and any pretence at friendliness gone.

“Fifty paces,” Liam told them, feeling the naked threat in the way they looked at him like a knife at his throat. “Perhaps less,” he added, disgusted by the way his voice shook.

“Good lad,” Bertram replied with a wink and ominous tap on his arm.

Liam knew they didn’t trust him, but he vowed he wouldn’t give them a single reason to earn that distrust, at least not until he had to. He had learned that much from his father.

“Sit up front,” Bertram told him, as if he could read his mind, pointing to the driver’s perch. “Next to me, so we can talk as we ride.”

Bertram’s companion snickered as they swapped places.


With the other wagons following close behind, the men either walking or riding in their vehicles, they continued on.

“You’re not looking for seeds are you,” he told rather than asked the man at his side.

“There’s no fooling a clever lad like you, is there?” Bertram answered, not bothering to hide the sarcasm.

“These wagons,” Liam added, trying to draw out of him what he had in mind. “They are long, much longer than normal. In fact they are long enough to carry...whole trees.”

Bertram chuckled, this time with real pleasure.

“So you do have a brain after all lad. And there I was thinking you had nothing but farm dirt between those ears. Do you have a problem with us cutting down a few trees.”

It was the way he placed the emphasis on the word “problem,” an emphasis that warned of dire consequences that warned Liam to watch what he said.

“No, not at all,” he replied, perhaps a little too quickly, because Bertram gave him a long hard look before turning his attention back to the horses. “But is a few trees worth the risk of the wardens finding out? The penalty for taking anything from the forest without the king’s permission is death.”

“When was the last time you saw a warden?”

Liam had to think about that. “Two months ago, up by the ferry at Broughton.”

“Exactly,” Bertram responded. “And when you sneak around the woods at night,” he added with a sneer. “Do you spot any wardens, even when you are busy pulling the necks of those rabbits you’d trapped? Rabbits, which, if a warden had found you, would have meant the gallows?”

Liam looked down at his hands to hide the terror he suddenly felt. He had been so careful, or so he’d thought, but this man knew everything. How?
The rest of the journey continued in silence. As they neared the ford over the river Tallay, Liam pointed to a small track heading through the undergrowth and into the woods.
“Over there,” he told the driver.
“Hide the wagons,” Bertram ordered the men behind them as he dismounted and followed Liam into the forest.

Checking for likely hiding places in the undergrowth on either side of the track, Liam led the way. He counted eighty five paces before they came upon a small, dark glade where a huge tree in the centre cut out all available light.

“Well…” said Bertram in amazement as he stared upwards. “That is …huge. Are there any more like this around here?”

The tree before them rose up as straight as an arrow, its grey trunk crinkled and serrated, until it disappeared high above their heads into a broad leafy canopy.

Liam nodded. “Yes,” he said with more eagerness than he actually felt. “There are three more over there,” he said pointing west of their position, “and another five further upstream.”

Bertram nodded and with hands on hips surveyed the monster he had come to fell.

“Are you with us boy?” he asked softly without looking at him.

Liam knew his future hung by a thread. Bertram had what he wanted. Now he knew where the trees were, Liam was no longer needed.

“How much are the others getting?” he asked, trying to play along and gesturing towards the road with his chin.

“Two crowns to get the trees into the wagons,” Bertram admitted. “Then one more to escort them to their final destination.”

Liam pretended to think about this.

“All right,” he finally said. “What about two crowns for finding you ten trees just like this one? "While I'd love to earn that extra crown, I’m sorry but I can’t go with you. Mother needs me at home.”

It was the coldness in the glance turned towards him that convinced Liam he had just asked for too much.

“Err, two crowns and I do accompany you,” he offered, feeling the sweat trickling down his spine.

Bertram smiled a slow predatory smile. “Good lad,” he whispered.

Liam breathed a silent sigh of relief when Bertram turned away and went back to examining the tree. That look, the one that promised him eight inches of sharpened steel through his innards if he dared to step out of line, had him deciding that he needed to make a break for it as soon as he dared. He could run rings around the farmers in the village, but Bertram was no fool. He acted as if he could see straight through him.

“Maccla,” Bertram called out to the one-eyed thug as he strode flat-footed into the glade with a huge axe over one shoulder. “The boy will show you where the others are. We’ll take nine this trip, three per wagon. I want them all at least eighteen paces long. You go with the boy and mark them up. Keep an eye on him,” Bertram warned his axe-carrying accomplice. “We don’t want him running off to his mummy and alerting the wardens along the way, do we?”

“Don’t worry,” Maccla replied, fondly running his thumb along the edge of his axe. “Betty and me will take care of him. Betty loves flying through the air to come crashing down and cleaving a spine in two!”

The grin he shared as he lifted up his axe to mime a back-breaking swing, revealed discoloured, broken stumps where teeth should have been, imbedded in red, swollen gums. The sight of such rampant decay made Liam feel sick.

Leading the way to through the forest, looking for more large trees, he was constantly reminded that Maccla was right behind him by the nudges he gave him in the back with the axe he carried. Liam couldn’t see how he could possibly get away with Maccla watching his every move. Luckily, although it was late summer, the undergrowth was still thick on the ground, offering excellent cover should he get the chance to run. The three trees he had mentioned earlier were easily found but he had an inordinate amount of trouble finding the ones next to the river. After several fruitless searches up and down their side of the riverbank, with Maccla growling at him in annoyance, they stumbled across a completely different group, with four magnificent specimens, between the river and the track.

“That’s eight,” Maccla announced, leaning against a trunk and watching him tying red ribbon’s around the trees they intended to fell. “Now you only need to find us one more. Perhaps you just need a little, tender encouragement from my Betty here,” he suggested, running a thumb along the axe’s sharp edge and baring his rotting teeth.

Liam looked away quickly. “We can try over there,” he said pointing to a barely discernable game trail.

Before Maccla could object, Liam took off. A moment later he was pushing aside some low branches when he came face to face with ..a warden.

The man stood across the trail with a cocked bow in his hands, wearing the green jacket and blue felt cowl of the Hunt Wardens. Eyes glittered from the shadowy depths deep inside the cowl. Behind, Liam could hear Maccla blundering through forest after him. Seeing his chance, he dropped to the ground and rolled sideways into the surrounding undergrowth. Not waiting to see who would win the resulting clash between arrow and axe, he scrambled onto his hands and knees, crawling swiftly, forcing a passage through the vines, brambles and suckers. He heard a brief scuffle, but concentrated on keeping low and moving through the undergrowth without making a noise or shaking the fronds of the plants he was hiding beneath. At last he came upon the track leading back to the road. He waited there for a while. catching his breath.

The forest was massive. It was a world of its own. His father had warned him many times not to go too far into the Hunt, that deep within its boundaries were bogs and caves into which the unwary could fall and never be seen again. He knew from experience that it was easy to get disorientated inside teh woods, with similar-looking trees on every side. Without a well-marked trial to follow, it was easy get lost and end up going in circles.

He’d expected to hear shouts of dismay by now and to see Bertram and his crew fleeing the woods with the warden in pursuit, but the track was eerily empty of life. What he did hear however was laughter, from several sources. He was a fool to go back he told himself, carefully crawling through the reed-like vegetation running next to the track. When he reached the clearing, he got down onot his belly and peered through the stalks. His heart almost stopped.

Close by, Maccla lay face down in the dirt, his eyes wide open, his mouth closed. He looked very dead. Tied with red ribbons to one of the smaller trees on the edge of the clearing was the warden. Dark blood soaked the top of his green jacket, a rent across the shoulder showed where Betty had bitten deep. Laughter came from the men who were lined up taking turns throwing axes at their helpless victim. There were two weapons already impaled in the tree; a small one that had nicked the warden’s thigh, while another was lodged in the bark of the tree hand’s width above his head.

The man at the head of the queue hefted a huge axe, one that was twice the size of Braccla’s, over his shoulder before hurling it at the defenceless man tied to the tree. To the derision of his comrades, his weapon fell woefully short, disappearing into the leaf litter around the roots. Liam shuddered at the savage cruelty being enacted in front of him. That could have been his fate, and it still could if he didn’t get out of sight he told himself. Edging backwards into the reeds, fully intending to get out of there before he was spotted, a deathly silence from the glade stopped him mid-wriggle. A couple of disbelieving curses drew him back to the edge of the reeds. He bite down an exclamation when he say what had the others staring in such rapt silence. The next axe had caught the warden across the top of the head, neatly slicing away part of his scalp and forcing back the hooded part of the cowl, exposing his face and hair.

“He’s a damn albino,” someone remarked and Liam could see what he meant.

The warden’s skin was deathly pale beneath the cowl. The hair that was still attached to his head, was straight and long, and chalk white. Blood poured down his cheek, the deep red lines in sharp contrast to the alabaster skin. The warden struggled against his bonds, his teeth gritted against the pain.

“And look at this,” Bertram added with a thin smile as he stepped forward and with a sharp upward movement, sliced off the man’s ear.

The warden gave a deep grunt, his hands flexed and clenched in his bindings as a river of crimson flowed down his neck and into the cowl. Liam took one look at the pointed earlobe that Bertram held up for all to see and decided he had seen enough.


Carefully worming his way backwards, he ignored the laughter and taunts coming from the glade but his imagination filled in the horrors that those brutes would visit on the defenceless warden before they finally put him out of his misery and killed him. It didn't take him long before he had gotten far enough away from Bertram and his men that he thought he could chance standing up and making a bolt for it. Pushing himself up onto his knees, he was peering through a thicket of brambles when a pair of legs walked in front of the brambles and stood there, waiting. Liam froze. A twig snapped behind him. He spun around to find dark form looming over him, a short sword held in his gloved fist. The green jacket and blue cowl were instantly recognisable, it was another warden.

“They’re killing him,” he spat out pointing back towards the glade. “You’ve got to go and help him!”

The warden nodded, his face hidden deep within the shadows of his cowl. Before Liam could say anything else, the man brought up his weapon and light exploded across Liam's eyes. He tumbled face first into the darkness that reached up to claim him.

Some time later Liam crawled out from beneath a grinding headache. Lifting his aching head he squinted at sky. It looked to be late afternoon by the position of the sun. It took a few moments for the pain to subside enough for him to remember what had happened, to recall Bertram's treatment of the captured warden. Holding his head in his hands he pushed himself up into a sitting position and looking around, found himself in one of the wagons. There was no one else around. The surrounding woodlands were eerily quiet. Slowly and carefully, mindful of his throbbing head, he climbed over the side and using the wheel spokes as steps, made it to the safely to ground. He was standing next to one of two wagons left on the road, both with their shafts resting in the dirt but with the horses and traces gone. Walking gingerly over to the other vehicle he noticed that a section of the wheels were dark, as if they’d been standing in water. Needing help to stay upright while he bent down to examine the stain, he grabbed hold of the side of the vehicle only to pull his hand back when he encountered something wet and sticky. He stared at his blood-daubed fingers in disbelief. Peering over the side, he found the inside of the vehicle was covered in puddles and streaks of congealing blood.

Once again he cast about, anxiously wondering if whoever had done this was still there, watching him, but nothing moved in the shadows, no voices could be heard over the soft rustling of the breeze in the tree tops. Feeling foolish, turned his attention to reading the signs in the grass and dirt, just as his father had taught him all those years ago.

Next to the track, he noticed a narrow swathe of grass and small saplings had been bent over, showing that a something heavy had been dragged OUT of the wood. The wagon he had woken up in was facing towards the ford, the same way it had been when he had dismounted it that morning. The vehicle covered in blood was facing the other way, away from the ford, and it’s wheels were dark, as if they had been standing in water. Liam stumbled down the road and after a few moments came upon the stone-lined ford that made up the Tallay river crossing. There he found the third wagon, its shafts almost hidden by the long grass in which it stood, resting next to the road on the opposite bank.

Liam waded across the ford with his heart in his mouth, dreading what he would find inside the abandoned vehicle. There was less blood, but disturbingly, nestled in the gap between two boards, he found a broken, discoloured tooth. Standing with his hands on the top of the one of the wheels, he tried pull all the signs he’d seen together, to assemble a picture in his head of what had happened.

Bertram and his thugs had been torturing the warden they’d captured, when at least two more of the Hunt’s protectors had arrived. There had to be at least two, because he’d seen one man’s legs while the other had crept up behind him and knocked him out. If they had had gone to save their captured comrade, there could have been deaths, theirs or some of Bertram’s men. It looked as if the unlucky ones had been dragged out of the forest, dumped into the wagons and disposed of. He hadn’t seen any signs of freshly dug graves, so what was the quickest way of getting rid of a body he asked himself. Of course he realised standing up and staring at the calf-high water that rushed over the stones of the ford. Bertram would have thrown them into the river. The water would carry the bodies downstream, where they would be washed up on a bank to become someone else’s problem. The only thing wrong with that version of events was that he, Liam, was still alive. Bertram wouldn’t have dragged him out of the woods and thrown him in the wagon. He’d have cut his throat where he lay and left him there to rot, of that he was certain.

The idea that the wardens might have be behind everything he’d seen, sent a a shiver through his body that threatened to bring him to his knees. They couldn’t have killed Bertram and all his men and dumped their bodies in the river he told himself. That would have been a massacre, not justice. They were supposed to be the living embodiment of the king’s law, like the Knight Sherriff at Lampton. Anyone caught breaking the law was supposed to be brought before the duke’s magistrates and tried, not executed at the scene of the crime. Even murderers were given a fair hearing before been taken off to the gallows and hung.

Stumbling back across the ford and staggering the few paces along the roadway, he stopped next to the track that he had led Bertram down that morning. Staring at the thin line of dirt running from the road and quickly disappearing behind a curtain of leaves and branches, he desperately wanted to follow it and ease his curiosity. However, the gathering conviction that the wardens had indeed slaughtered Bertram and his men, held him back.

He had walked these woods since he was a child and had never once had he seen a warden in the woods themselves. Outside, they were easily recognisable as they strode through the town in their distinctive uniforms, rarely stopping to talk, always eager to be on their way, and yet three of them had appeared at the exact spot Bertram and his men had entered the woods, within an hour of them doing so. Bertram had been wrong about the wardens, and it cost him his life. It was a lesson that Liam needed to learn before it was too late for him too.

Turning away he began the long walk back home, noting as he did so that he had less than an hour of daylight left. Along the way he knew he would pass several stone markers engraved with the warning that the forest belong to the king and that no man may partake of its bounty without his express permission, on pain of death. Like his neighbours, Liam had been filching mushrooms, small game, firewood, herb and acorns from the woods near his home, for as long as he could remember, but no more. It wasn’t just the blood in the wagons that was telling him the woods were too dangerous to go back into. It wasn’t the fact that the wardens had found Bertram and his men so quickly, it was both of these combined with the savagery of their response and the vision that Liam couldn’t quite clear from his head. The next time he saw a warden striding through the streets, the townspeople automatically making way for the king’s emissary, he would know, as the other did not, what walked hidden in shadows amongst them. The warden tied to the tree, the one Bertram had made the mistake of trying to kill, wasn’t a man, it wasn’t even human. From the tales told by minstrels in the tavern and from a picture in a book his father had brought back from the war, Liam knew that it belonged to a race that was one of the most hated that had ever walked the earth. According to legend they had been perverse, spiteful, savage, blood-sucking monsters who were all eradicated centuries ago. He wouldn’t be going back into the Hunt, not even if a map showing where treasure was buried should fall into his hands. The wardens might have spared his life, but the creature tied to that tree hadn't been human, of that he was certain. It had been an elf!

4540