Free The Firehills by Steve Alten Page B

Don’t take it too hard—she’s upset and frantic with worry.
I’ll go and speak to her soon, see if we can come up with a plan. You go up
to your room, and try to get some rest.”
    Charly nodded, wiped her nose on her sleeve, and headed
for the stairs.

    ‡

    Sam scrambled to his feet, ready to run. He was on a
grassy slope, dotted here and there with scrub. A featureless sweep of grass
stretched before him up to a clear blue sky. He walked up the slope a short
way, but the turf was unmarked, featureless, apart from a scatter of dry sheep
dung. It seemed unlikely that elves or fairies were going to burst out of the
ground.
    He turned around, and his eyes widened. The ground dropped
away steeply, the scrub growing thicker toward the foot of the slope and
merging into the fringes of woodland. A woodland that rolled away in all
directions, a dense green rug thrown across the landscape, fading to the palest
blue haze on the distant horizon. Here and there, a faint plume of smoke rose
from a clearing, marking a hidden farm or village. But otherwise the trees had
dominion, an ancient forest like nothing Sam had ever seen. Well, he thought to himself, no
sign of Hastings.
    One of the plumes of smoke was close, no more than an
hour’s walk, Sam guessed. With no better plan, he descended the slope,
scrambled over a rough hurdle fence, and set off into the trees.
    From his view on the hillside, Sam had been expecting some
sort of primeval wildwood, a tangle of thorns and brambles, but the forest was
surprisingly open. Many of the trees had been cut at the base and left to
regrow, craggy old stumps of hazel and hornbeam sprouting crops of tall,
straight shoots, leaves fluttering like flags in the breeze. Here and there, a
mighty oak or ash had been left to grow tall, great timber trees standing like
pillars with their crowns in the sunlight.
    Sam soon picked up a rough path that meandered between low
banks studded with wildflowers. It was bluebell time, and the ground to either
side of the path glowed beneath a blue haze. The air was heavy with the perfume
of a million nodding blooms.
    As he walked, he became more than usually aware of the
presence that always seemed to lurk behind his mind, peering through his eyes.
The spirit of the Green Man within him recognized this place. It was the world
where he had been born, the ancient wildwood where he had grown and flourished
before humans, spurred on by the whispers of the Malifex, had destroyed it. The
spirit seemed to push forward, until Sam felt as if someone were standing very
close behind him, so close that if he turned and looked, they would be eye to
eye. He heard, or felt, a chuckle—a deep current of mirth running through his
head. Beneath the laughter was something wild, primeval, the music of pipes and the distant sound of horns. Sam
broke into a run, flickering through the shafts of light that pierced the high
canopy. The fierce happiness of the Green Man swept over him, and he began to
shift from one shape to another for the simple joy of it. He was a hare once
more, a wolf, a polecat arcing through the long grass like a coiled spring.
    Once he heard a snorting and rustling and feared that the
Sidhe had returned. But it was only a herd of pigs, rooting beneath the oaks.
They were leaner and hairier than the fat, pink animals Sam was used to, with a
halfwild look to them. They ignored Sam, seeing only a young stag, and he moved
on.
    He passed a fallen tree, a giant of the canopy that had
succumbed to gales or rot and had crashed down into the undergrowth. Its roots
had taken with them a huge disk of earth, which stood now vertical, leaving
behind a circular crater. The rain had filled it, and the creatures of the
forest were busy claiming this new pond as their own. Yellow irises flowered
around the edge, and kingcups, and the blue needles of damselflies darted
through the rushes. In a grassy clearing, Sam stopped before an area trampled
to mud by deer and assumed his