The Devil’s Highway

In the midst of the wood there was a brook the colour of rust. He meant to try his luck there. He had a few hazelnuts in his pack but hoped it would be enough to break the ice and use the flowing water as bait.

He had not been long at setting new snares, the nettle string unspooled between his fingers, when he heard the snapping of branches. His first thought was to reach for his bow, but it took only a breath to gauge the size of what broke the quiet.

He strained to hear voices and knew from their cadence that these were his people. Footfalls cracked twigs, crunched in snow, and he watched through a veil of alders the familiar shapes of his brother and Barocunas and their cousin Lugh.

Barocunas was first, leaning his bulk into the undergrowth to fray a passage. Lugh, his ginger mane dusted with snow, appeared intent on explaining something which Judoc bent sideways to hear.

Andagin crossed the brook at a single bound. The noise startled the others, for as he skipped towards them, anticipating his cousin’s wrestling embrace and a brotherly hand on his shoulder, he saw the young men stiffen.

‘I am laying traps. I caught a hare.’

Lugh waved, not to greet him but to urge him back. Andagin faltered as Barocunas lumbered towards him.

‘Are you spying on us?’

Andagin held out the cordage and knife. Barocunas inspected the objects as if unsure what to make of them.

‘You must not follow us.’

‘I was not.’

‘We are just walking.’ This did not account for the cold reception so Barocunas spoke again. Words seemed to cost him. ‘We have things to do.’

‘What things?’

‘Our own.’

‘Can I speak to Judoc?’

‘No.’

‘He is needed at home.’

Barocunas rested a heavy hand on the boy’s skull. ‘Go back to the heath. Lay your traps there. Stay away from the trees.’

Andagin watched his brother and the others walk away, into the fastness of the snowbound wood.

The cold was a mask on his face that made his tears sting. He hated himself for his weakness.

He waited until the trees and the hill had swallowed Judoc, Lugh and Barocunas.

Defiance and indecision churned within him. He felt them settle.

The hare would slow him down so he stowed it in the fork of a pollarded birch and covered it with dead bracken. The squirrel he broke and folded into his pack so that it would not snag.

The oak wood closed over his head like a wave.

It was easy to read the signs of their passage. One of the boys must have been swinging a stick, for the ruined lace of old bracken lay on either side of the milled snow. He listened out for voices, moving at a half run to make up lost ground. Then he faltered – for a line of unfamiliar prints joined those he was following.

He crouched to study these prints that came from the south, where the forest began. He discerned the feet of a man and the paws of a dog: a large one to judge from its pads. He spanned the place where the trajectories met, and wondered if this confluence of paths indicated a meeting or a pursuit.

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