Read Forbidden Forest for Free Online

said lightly.
    Freda straightened and looked him straight in the face.
    â€œThey come in from the hill,” she said at last. “At night.”
    John felt a prickle, and a chill.
    â€œTo watch us?” he asked at last.
    Freda smiled. She laughed and bent back to her work.
    John was sure she had forgotten, but much later, as they raked the pulled weeds into a mound, she said, “There’s not a thing we do that the elves would want to look at. But even so—they know everything.”
    Was it a trick of his mind, or was she telling him something more?
    Sang the woodcock, You’re in danger, John, yes you are .

Chapter 7
    â€œLike children, but not.” That was how Hilda had described elves she had seen as a little girl, in the field near the hamlet of Bodeton Percy.
    Hilda had caught a fever after sitting in the pillory outside Bootham Bar in York, and she died shriven and forgiven by the priest for her trade in hanged men’s knuckles. But the treatment of an elf frecht —an elf friend—was hard in most cities, and John had been happy to take to the road after Hilda’s death. John, too, would have faced punishment someday. Only hunger had forced him to leap onto a passing cheese man’s cart one warm noon, carve a slice from a great golden wheel, and run off into the hedges. That was his first, negligible act of thievery. And it was far from his last.
    Day by day John had found that the drunken chamberlain and the road-weary traveling clerk did not notice the slits in their purses until long afterward, much less remember the tall youth jostling them in the market.
    John rarely let himself imagine finding a red-cheeked wife, bedding down with her on long wintry nights, and living cozily in a cottage. But John suffocated every such hope in his breast. He knew that a criminal’s life ended with a trudge up a ladder, a bowed head, and a hangman’s yellow-rope noose.
    The following afternoon, after an early supper of pottage and brown bread, and a pitcher of thick brown ale, John followed Tom into the shadows. He felt a tug at his sleeve, and turned to see Freda.
    She waited until Tom was well out of earshot. Then she pressed an amulet into John’s hand.
    The amulet was a heavy base metal crudely smithed in the shape of a cross. John shook it and something sealed inside its hollow core made a rattling whisper.
    â€œThe finger of a man who killed his master,” she said. “Hanged and quartered, all without a murmur.” A good death was much admired, and the relics of a penitent criminal were considered powerful magic.
    â€œGood Freda, I doubt that I need such great protection.”
    Smelling of yeast and sweat, she put her lips to his ear, and kissed it, just as Hilda used to.
    â€œWhat did our sweet Freda give you?” asked Tom Dee.
    John showed him the amulet, then returned it to safekeeping around his neck.
    â€œDo you admire our lord and master?” asked Tom.
    â€œHe must be cunning,” said John, after giving the question some thought.
    A stone wall ran across the hill, and a flock of sheep, each beast with its head to the turf, grazed in the distant mist. Some stewards had burned out villages for the grazing land, and John could see the dark stumps of cottage walls. Wool was a more profitable crop than barley or peas, and only a few shepherds were required to work a flock.
    â€œHe unsnared me from a mantrap a year ago last Candlemas,” said Tom Dee. “I tried to live by poaching venison, and now I serve him as he desires.”
    â€œYou must feel grateful to him,” said John.
    Tom did not respond for a while, the two men approaching a disused wellhead, the watering place timbered over, a flat, grassless place in the field.
    At last he said, “Our Lord Roger has no warmth like other men.”
    â€œBut he is kind to you,” said John, feeling embarrassed as he spoke for his own lack of worldliness.
    â€œAnd he