Free The Wolf in the Attic by Paul Kearney Page B

own, for I have been quite turned around by events, and I cannot even tell if I am facing back towards Oxford, or into the heart of Wytham Great Wood.
    ‘Time a girlie like you was warm in bed,’ Queenie goes on. ‘The deep wood is no place for your like. Not tonight.’ More sharply, she says; ‘Luca, see her home. All the way, mind’
    ‘Aw, Ma!’
    ‘Do as you’re bid. She don’t know which way she’s turned. I seen rabbits in a trap with more sense.’
    ‘I can find my own way home,’ I say, stung by her words.
    ‘Not this night, you won’t, girl. The moon is up, and the snow is deep, and will be deeper yet before morn.’ Queenie turns to Luca.
    ‘This is no place for such as her. And if she’s missed, then there’ll be questions asked, and things kicked up that are better left buried. You see her to her doorstep, and no mischief on the way neither. You hear me boy?’
    Luca nods sullenly.
    ‘Then be off, the pair of you, and keep the moon at your backs, and move quick and quiet.’
    ‘I know what to do,’ Luca says, and he jerks his hand at me.
    ‘Come on then, you. Time’s a passing.’
    I stand up, and the girl Jaelle rises with me. ‘You be careful now dearie,’ she murmurs, and her dark eyes take the light of the fire and seem to shine with it, and her grin is very white and not altogether pleasant.
    I turn to go, and the rest of them around the fire all watch, and say nothing.
    ‘What are you doing out here?’ I ask Queenie on an impulse. ‘Out in the cold and the dark?’
    ‘We’m living life as we see fit to do it, dearie,’ she replies. ‘We’ve been this way since your folk was young, and the Christ-man was unborn, and the world was wide and full o’ marvels. This is what we is, and like as not this is how we’ll die.’
    There is a murmur around the fire at her words, like the Amen at the end of a prayer. I stumble out of the firelight after that, baffled, and I am glad to be going but sorry to be leaving, all at the same time.
    I look back once, and Queenie is still watching me as I go, standing as still as a stone. I think I see her shake her head.
    But there is nothing to do except follow Luca’s back as the moonlight takes back the night, and down the hill we go amid the black and silent trees, and the frozen snow crunches under my feet like burnt toast.
     
     
    L UCA GOES VERY fast, and it seems that he glides by every grasping briar, and even his footsteps seem quieter than mine. Soon I am gasping, unable to keep up with that easy lope, and I have to beg him to slow down.
    He looks at me as I stand panting before him, his face in darkness. ‘Girl, you came to the wrong shop tonight,’ he says.
    We continue more slowly, always downhill, and through gaps in the trees I can see the lights of Oxford, but they seem far away, and the wood is dense and still and in the more open spaces the snow is deeper yet, still falling in skeins across the moonlight.
    ‘My name is Anna,’ I say to him, annoyed. No-one bothered to ask back at the fire, which seems strange, not to mention impolite. And Luca does not reply, but keeps walking, his head turning from side to side, up and down, as alert and searching as a deer.
    ‘Don’t you want to know where I live?’
    ‘I knows where you live,’ he says carelessly. I am dumbfounded.
    ‘How –’
    ‘I followed you home last time, on the Meadow. I saw you meet up with the big man outside the pub. I watched you all the way, girlie.’
    ‘My name is Anna!’
    ‘All right, then. Anna, watch where you put your feet. You make more noise than a lame cow.’
    I have no response to that, but am outraged. I would much rather be called a guttersnipe. Luca’s deft sureness in the woods is infuriating. I have always thought of myself as quick and agile, but he makes me feel like a clumsy toddler.
    But there is clearly no point in talking, and I do my best to tread more carefully. Luca is following no path but his own, and so quiet is he that