“This is the graveyard,” Cael needlessly tells them, pointing at some raised earth with crosses sticking out of it.
The tumulus is about 100 meters across with a low rise mason-style stone wall separating it from the living. Its mute greenery is peppered by white crosses, gray stones, and a single mausoleum in the back of all of it. (The above-ground-grave looks more like a gazebo than a tomb, but Jarl doesn’t say anything.) To the right, there’s a bent wire fence that’s seen better days; and is, in fact, guarded by a line of large rocks before it, about half the height of the burial mound’s stone wall. (Jarl figures it’s to deter the children.)
A few meters ahead, the road forks to a T and a gravel path bends around the back of the graveyard.
Cael leads them through a hidden path that goes straight.
~
The King’s Graveyard disappears immediately, its tear shaped body blocked by various coniferous trees.
The tear shaped greens form a long line that seems to be situated right along the path they need to take.
Cael probably could have left them to their own devices, here, with that simple instruction.
But, Jarl’s glad he didn’t; because anyone who’d choose to live way out here…
(Well, actually, HE lives way out in a bungalow in the middle of the woods…)
(Jarl supposes he just doesn’t like the idea that Manus might be right.)
(He once said that witches in the woods are like magical priests.)
(But that can’t be true, can it? Jarl and Gina… can’t be…?)
~
There are no footprints leaning them through the snowy scenery but Cael’s.
Jarl thinks this is odd as, surely, the witch woman they’re about to see can’t just… survive out here, all alone, without ever heading out to get food or water or whatever else a person can’t just HAVE at their house forever.
Then again, Jarl realizes, she IS a witch.
And Manus has proven to him many times over the years how magic is all people like them ever need.
~
They reach what, for all intents and purposes, looks like a wall of trees after a few minutes.
They’re all coniferous, just like the ones lining the pathway, with a few other winter hardy shrubs mixed in. The wall they form is dense and difficult to see through, making Cael’s steps frighteningly hard to follow when he fearlessly walks straight into the steadfast evergreens. (Huh… Evergreen… like Áesta…)
Then their own evergreen daemon steps in surely after the Boathand.
And then the trees close around them.
~
“W-what…?”
Jarl blinks, hackles raised, as a member of their party seems to be taken from them—HIS daemon is taken from HIM. Beside him, Manus is calm and relaxed, not at all perturbed by this alarming turn of events…
Jarl wants to strangle him.
“It’s a ward.” Manus moves forward and, as fearlessly as Cael and Áesta had just stepped through them, waves his hand around—no, IN—the branches of the conifers before them.
They don’t react to him.
“Lady Gina probably uses them to protect and hide herself from dangerous people or things.” Smiling calmly, Manus follows after his hand and steps until he’s standing in the branches Jarl realizes AREN’T REALLY THERE. “It’s completely safe to just walk through them: they won’t hurt you unless you intend to hurt her.”
The smile slips for a moment as Manus seems to consider something; Jarl holds his breath.
“Or hurt her friends; like Áesta.”
~
Magic is a very strange thing, Jarl decides.
Between the angry decay and then flourishing happiness Áesta seems to be able to exhibit with all plants, Manus’ honestly terrifying capabilities with wind and snow and ice (especially when he’s angry or protective), the literal drug trip that is travelling through the Axis Mundi with Oak and the other Trees, and now this… foresty fence Gina Wittle O’ has going… The branches don’t feel anything like branches feel. They’re feathery, almost airy, and touch him everywhere—even to the roots of his hair and nailbeds—without touching him at all.
It’s like he’s being taste-tested, breathed in or scented, inspected and ASSESSED before he’s even at the door.
It’s… like being judged by God…
(But she’s NOT—)
~
The others are waiting for him on the other side of the forest fence.
Manus is smiling at him from beside Áesta. The two of them
seem to be more patient and understanding than Cael who’s already a meter ahead,
and gaining, as he proceeds forward to the witch’s wooden where. The place, itself,
seems right out of an old fairy-tale: red-purple trunks held together by
seemingly nothing build up a large hut of a home with irregularly shaped
windows of multicolored glass and various sizes; there’s a wooden porch, surprisingly
normal, with gnarly fencing and a staircase made of trunk slabs; however,
the walkway to the stairs is made of yellow stone (Jarl thinks it might
actually be fool’s gold) irregularly shaped as the windows peering at them from
the face of the witch’s where; like the wood walls, the roof is made of red-purple
trunks held together by nothing but sheer will; the slop of the roof is odd—there’s
a distinct dip to it that can’t be good for runoff—but the snow piled on top of
it looks manageable and somehow not at risk of sagging the structure or
bringing the whole thing down on top of anyone’s head; shocks of bright blue
vines climb the walls and roof (most prominently on the right by the evening
sun), leading Jarl to suspect that whatever was used to make this place… might
not be at all of this world.
Cael nods cheerfully when he arrives at the red-purple door.
A sigil of some sort—Jarl thinks Manus would call it an array—glows brightly on the wooden barricade before the door swings open to reveal an older (but not as old as she SHOULD look if she’s a GRANDMOTHER) woman with hair as gray as Manus’ done up in a lazy bun, a woolen shawl (probably made from local sheep) draped over her narrow shoulders, a rich but worn reddish purple dress wrapped about her thin body, and silver pince nez balancing on her nose but doing nothing to hide the shrewdness of her unique purple eyes: “‘Ere about Jasey, are ya?”
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