Read Lavondyss (Mythago Cycle) for Free Online

meaningless. It might have been wind in the branches, or the bracken, but it had a disturbing human quality; a voice for sure.
    She turned round, where she sat, and peered into the bushes. She saw a shape moving quickly away and rose to her feet to follow it, trying to discern some form. She was half aware that the figure was small and seemed to have a hood over its head. It was walking swiftly towards the denser wood that led to Ryhope itself; it moved among the trees like a shadow, like cloud shadow, distinct, then indistinct, finally gone completely.
    Tallis abandoned the chase, but not before she had noticed with satisfaction that the ferns close to the river bank were trampled down. It could have been the spoor of a deer, but she knew with certainty that she had been pursuing no animal.
    By returning along the Wyndbrook, to her stepping stones, she could make her way across Knowe Field up to her camp on Barrow Hill. But as she reached the crossing place of the wide beck she hesitated, feeling cold and frightened. The trees were thinner here. Ahead of her was the rise of land, reaching up to a bare ridge, sharp against the blue sky; to the right, marked by a thin track, was the knoll of Barrow Hill, its summit thrown up into irregular grassy humps.
    She had crossed Wyndbrook many times; she had walked that tract, that field, many times. But now she hesitated. The windvoice was gusting in her consciousness, that eerie whispering. She stared at Barrow Hill. It was its common name; it had been known as Barrow Hillfor centuries. But it was not the
right
name, and Tallis felt a strong sense of dread that if she stepped on to that familiar turf she would be stepping somewhere that was now forbidden to her.
    Clutching her book beneath her arm she crouched down and brushed her hand through the cold water of the brook.
    The name came to her as suddenly as the dread she had earlier felt. It was Morndun Ridge. The name thrilled her; it had a dark sound to it, a storm-wind sound. With the name a fleeting sequence of other images: the sound of wind gusting through hides, stretched on wooden frames; the creak of a heavy cart; the swirl of smoke from a high fire; the smell of fresh earth being thrown up from a long trench; a figure, tall and dark, standing, dwarfed by a tree whose branches had been cut from the trunk.
    Morndun. The word sounded like
Mourendoon
. It was an old place, and an old name, and a dark memory.
    Tallis rose to her feet again and began to step forward, out on to the stepping stones. But the water seemed to mock her and she drew back. She knew at once what was the cause of her concern. Although she knew the secret name of Barrow Hill, she hadn’t yet named the stream. And she couldn’t cross the stream without naming it or she would be trapped.
    She ran back to her house, confused and frightened by the game she had started to play. She would have to learn
everything
about the land around the house. She had not known, until now, that every field, every tree, every stream had a secret name, and that such names would only come with time. Before she had found those names she would be a prisoner; and to defy the land, to cross a field without knowing its true name, would be to trap her on the other side.
    Her parents, not unnaturally, considered the game tobe ‘more silly nonsense’, but after all, if the game stopped her going too far from home, who were they to complain?
    During the course of that year, Tallis managed to transform the land around her house, pushing back the borders week by week. Each season she was able to go a little further from the house, further into her childish, dreamlike realm.
    She soon found a route back to Morndun Ridge – Wyndbrook’s secret name was Hunter’s Brook – and the animal enclosure which was her favoured hide-out.
    Now only a single field remained between her own realm and the dense tangle of dangerous woodland on the Ryhope estate which had so fascinated her brother,