/ SILVANA \  prologue (continued)

“Nimo, you idiot!  You scared him.  We could have grabbed him while he was on his knees.  Now we’ll never find him.”

“I don’t know what you’re fussing about, Khime.  He’ll go home soon enough.  It’s getting dark.  He’s not going to want to stay here much longer.”  Nimo, fourteen and the older of the two brothers by almost two years, looked around and shuddered.  “I certainly don’t.”

“Oh, right.  So we just go back and tell Lord Tawr that his four year old son is lost somewhere in the middle of the wildwood.  But we’re sure he’ll come home soon?”

For a moment Nimo poked distractedly at a hole in a tree with a stick, then he grinned.  “Not quite.  We’ll tell him that Fabiom said he wanted to show us something deep in the woods and then he ran off and left us to find our own way back - that’s why we’re so late.  We’ll be all surprised that he isn’t already home, laughing at us.”

“We might get away with it, if he doesn’t decide to tell Tawr or Vida what really happened,”  Khime snorted.  “He’s such a pathetic little mouse.”

“Yes he is, isn’t he?” Nimo guffawed.  “It was so funny when you put him in that basket and put the lid on it and he couldn’t work out how to open it again.”  He threw his stick at a chaffinch above his head, and missed.  “Maybe we shouldn’t have sent him into that gully to pick strawberries and then pretended to be wild pigs coming to get him though.”

He looked at his brother for a long moment until the two of them doubled up with laughter.

“Oh, yes, we should!” Khime spluttered.  “Whatever Herbis does to us for it, it’ll have been worth it just to have seen the look on Fabiom’s face.”

Fabiom stopped running.  Short, useless breaths were burning his throat while his chest longed for air.  Blood was oozing from his knee where he had tripped over a root and had fallen, hard, onto a stone.  He wanted his mother, but he would not go home, not while Lord Herbis and his two horrid brothers were still there.  

Fabiom had not wanted to play with them.  But when Herbis asked Fabiom’s parents to show him around Deepvale’s silk mills, the two boys offered to look after him while the adults went off.  They promised to take good care of him.

“Watch that he stays in the garden,” Tawr had warned them.  “He’s a terror for going off into the woods on his own. . . .” 

At four, Fabiom was far too young to recognise the look of malicious glee that had passed between the brothers at that moment.

“Ooh, Fabiom.  You mustn’t go into the woods.  A Silvana might see you.  Out she’d come from her tree and swallow you up!” Nimo tried, as soon as the adults were out of hearing.

Fabiom laughed.  “Silvanii don’t swallow people,” he told the older boy disdainfully.

“Her roots and branches would wind around you though, and you’d be trapped, stuck fast in her tree, deep in the woods, where no one could hear you cry for help,”  Khime elaborated.

Fabiom giggled at that.  “Don’t you know anything about the Silvanii?” he asked.  “They won’t hurt you unless you hurt them.  They’re nice.  They sing and they dance.”

“And they take your mind and you go mad, mad, mad!”  Khime looked at the little boy, who was still laughing.  “D’you know where they dance, Fabiom?  Bet you don’t.  Bet you’d be too scared to go there even if you did.”

“No I would not.”  Fabiom smiled innocently.  He would not tell them that he knew exactly where the Silvanii danced.  That was his secret; his and Tawr’s.  Not even his mother knew he had persuaded that information from his father.

Earlier that summer, after days of pleading, Tawr had finally brought him to the Dancing Glade.  Twice since then he had gone there on his own, despite strict instructions about staying in the garden.  It was easy to find, once you knew the way.  So how had he got lost?  All he had to do was follow the stream and he was bound to arrive at the Dancing Glade.  How had he lost the stream?

The unending canopy no longer seemed so friendly.  It really did seem as if it went on and on, that there was nothing else in the world besides.  He sniffed loudly.  Somewhere near here there was a wide grassy glade, encircled by trees, with a stream running through.  It did exist, just as his father’s House existed and Deepvale and all the towns and villages and Holdings beyond existed.  

Standing there, lost in the evening gloom, surrounded by towering trees, he was not entirely sure that was true.