Free The Dark Is Rising by Susan Cooper

I’d kept hold of your hands, and not broken the circle —”
    Merriman said curtly: “Yes.” Then he relented a little. “But it was their doing, Will, not yours. They seized you, through your impatience and your hope. They love to twist good emotion to accomplish ill.”
    Will stood hunched with his hands in his pockets, staring at the ground. Behind his mind a chant went sneering through his head:
you have lost the Lady, you have lost the Lady
. Unhappiness was thick in his throat; he swallowed; he could not speak. A breeze blew through the trees, and sprayed snow-crystals into his face.
    â€œWill,” Merriman said. “I was angry. Forgive me. Whether you had broken the Three or not, things would have been the same. The doors are our great gateway into Time, and you will know more about the uses of them before long. But this time you could not have opened them, nor I, nor perhaps any of the circle. For the force that was pushing against them was the full midwinter power of the Dark, which none but the Lady can overcome alone — and even she, only at great cost. Take heart; at the proper time, she will return.”
    He pulled at the high collar of his cloak, and it became a hood that he drew over his head. With the white hair hidden he was a dark figure suddenly, tall and inscrutable. “Come,” he said, and led Will through the deep snow, among great beeches and oaks bare of leaves. At length they paused, in a clearing.
    â€œDo you know where you are?” Merriman said.
    Will stared round at the smooth snowbanks, the rearing trees. “Of course I don’t,” he said. “How could I?”
    â€œYet before the winter is three-quarters done,” Merriman said, “you will be creeping into this dell to look at the snowdrops that grow everywhere between the trees. And then in the spring you will be back to stare at the daffodils. Every day for a week, to judge from last year.”
    Will gaped at him. “You mean the Manor?” he said. “The Manor grounds?”
    In his own century, Huntercombe Manor was the great house of the village. The house itself could not be seen from the road, but its grounds lay along the side of Huntercombe Lane opposite the Stantons’ house, and stretched a long way in each direction, edged alternately by tall wrought-iron railings and ancient brick walls. A Miss Greythorne owned it, as her family had for centuries, but Willdid not know her well; he seldom saw her or her Manor, which he remembered vaguely as a mass of tall brick gables and Tudor chimneys. The flowers that Merriman had spoken of were private landmarks in his year. For as long as he could remember, he had slipped through the Manor railings at the end of winter to stand in this one magical clearing and gaze at the gentle winter-banishing snowdrops, and later the golden daffodil-glow of spring. He did not know who had planted the flowers; he had never seen anyone visiting them. He was not even sure whether anyone else knew they were there. The image of them glowed now in his mind.
    But rearing questions very soon chased it out. “Merriman? Do you mean this clearing is here hundreds of years before I first saw it? And the great hall, is it a Manor before the Manor, out of centuries ago? And the forest all round us, that I came through when I saw the smith and the Rider — it stretches everywhere, does it all belong to —”
    Merriman looked down at him and laughed, a gay laugh, suddenly without the heaviness that had been over them both.
    â€œLet me show you something else,” he said, and he drew Will further through the trees, away from the clearing, until there was an end to the sequence of trunks and mounds of snow. And before him Will saw not the morning’s narrow track that he had been expecting, winding its way through an endless forest of ancient crowding trees — but the familiar twentieth-century line of Huntercombe