At some point Nush passed out. The ivy hadn’t stopped with her wrists and ankles. It had coiled over her entire body, cocooning her. She had struggled and screamed right up to the point the vines slithered across her mouth and covered her eyes. Panic became overwhelming. She was sure she was suffocating, and the vines grew tighter around her body, constricting until the terror was a black and obliterating thing.

  Laughter brought her to. An unpleasant, high-pitched braying.

  ‘Bested by a maiden plucking your plums.’ More braying followed the nasal whine of the words.

  Nush pretended to be unconscious. She peered through slitted eyelids and tried not to flinch at what she saw. A little man stood atop a heavy oaken table, although perhaps he wasn’t a man at all. He reached less than three feet tall, in short grey breaches of rough, fibrous cloth. Over these he wore a brown leather apron. On his feet were pointed shoes with bells on the tips that jangled as he moved. The rest of him was naked, exposing his coal black skin that glistened not with sweat but its own inherent sheen. He was all sinew and corded muscle except for a small pot belly that bulged beneath his apron, and the wrinkled flesh rumpling up near his armpits. Lank and greasy black hair hung around his long, angular face, which had a hook nose, cleft chin, pointed ears, a pair of lips two sizes too big, and beady eyes that shone wetly like a crow’s. Yellow pointed teeth showed when he laughed, and oh how he laughed. Laughed and thrusted forward, as if holding a pair of invisible hips.

  ‘Mighty Herne, God of the wild wood. Lord of the hunt, nymph of fertility, gelded by a comely wench.’ The little coal black man grabbed his crotch, doubling over in mock agony and fell to his side on the tabletop, lost in another whinny of laughter, shoe bells tinkling.

  ‘Enough!’ The word thundered, shaking the room. Dust sprinkled down and the ground quivered as if afraid. ‘We have work to do,’ the voice continued more calmly, and Nush recognised it as belonging to the thing she’d met in the woods; Herne, the little man had called him. She wanted to run but kept very still while she watched and wait for the right moment.

  The little man sighed and sat up. ‘You never could take a joke. Remember that time you turned the Tunstall wife into a snow-white doe because she laughed at the idea of leaving her husband for a naked half-stag man who lived in a tree? 'Tis one of the many reasons we’re in the pickle we are.’ He shook his head and got to his feet, toes jingling.

  Nush secretly securitised her surroundings. She was in a cavernous room. The curved walls were veined with tree roots. Some hung down from the domed ceiling, ending in shaggy, fibrous knots. Lanterns hung on the knots as big as the little man. But they weren’t the only source of light. Candles sputtered, dripping frozen waterfalls of wax that piled around their bases.

  ‘What must be done, Rundleskink?’ Herne said.

  The ground shook again, and more dirt showered down, this time not from Herne’s bellowing but something else. It felt more like an earth tremor.

  Rundleskink, the little man, pondered their predicament with a long finger tapping his oversized lips. ‘So much reckoning, and too much sand, indeed. Enough, moonthread? Yes, possibly, maybe. But the boy and the father are separated. The boy entered the dunes with the daughter of the snow-white doe. Is she a bad omen or good? Can’t say. She is the little chaos engine, like her mother, no? The spice that makes the meal. The pepper in your stew. Nutmeg sprinkled on a wetnurse’s teat. Or maybe a snack for the great wyrm. Hmmm?’

  While he talked, Rundleskink turned the pages of a book as big as he was. The parchment was tanned and frayed at the edges, and its words were written in blacks, greens, and reds, with scribbles in the margins and extra diagrams and illustrations cramped at top and bottom of each page. He ran his fingers over the words, shining black eyes dancing left and right, up and down. Then he was up inspecting a taut luminous silver thread that ran from the blackness at the heart of the roots to the room’s apex. It glistened in almost intangible whips of light swirling slowly around each other, until they turned tighter the closer they came to a wooden spinning wheel set next to the table. Rundleskink jumped down and hopped astride the wheel. He pumped the foot peddle carefully once. The silver yarn grew tauter still. He hooked it with the long nail of his index finger and gentle twanged it. A fine, high note like a harp sang softly. Head cocked to one side, he listened and furrowed his brow, hoping off the spinner.

  ‘Well?’ Herne said, coming over, hands on hips. Thankfully he’d thrown on a robe made from a patchwork of furs, feathers, and leaves, which hunched up around his already massive shoulders.

  Stolen story; please report.

  Rundleskink bent down and picked up a line of sliver thread coiled at the base of the spinner. He rolled it between his thumb and fingers, and then raised it to his fat lips. A pointed grey-blue tongue darted out, licking the twine. He closed his eyes, pouting his lips in and out, studying its taste and wobbling his head side-to-side. With a curt nod, his eyes opened, and he ran the thread through his fingers, following it across the floor of compacted earth and animal skin rugs—all still with their heads and paws attached—over to the side of the chamber where a contraption appeared to be built into or growing out of the wall.

  The silver thread joined a spindle, and the spindle threaded a bobbin, making a neat coil that fed into the machine. That was all Nush could think it must be. The only thing comparable she could think of was from another family holiday to northern Italy, when she was fourteen. She’d been eye rollingly unimpressed by the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Venice had been pretty but smelled like a toilet and was overrun with tourists and their digital cameras and doughy sunburned skin. The one other thing that stuck in her memory was the cathedral in Padua. Off the main nave was a room containing, and there was no way to be arsing-well subtle about this, the exhumed remains of Saint Anthony. At some point, they’d dug up the poor bugger and cut off pieces of his corpse, namely his tongue, vocal cords, a bit of his jaw, and placed them tiny glass vials and domes to arrange them in a religious montage connected with gold leaf filigree.

  At the time, Nush found the whole thing both bewildering and disgusting. She couldn’t shake this... this... well, what was it? A picture didn’t capture it. Neither did a collage or sculpture. Finally, it struck her after dinner that evening with her parents in one of the many piazzas. They’d let her try a sip of red wine. Which was hilarious, because she’d been drunk on cider and cheap vodka half a dozen times by then. And at a party a boy three years older, called Xander Fitzwilliams, had given her a spliff before trying to grope her boobs. He got as far as fumbling with her bra clasp when she was trying to say no and puked all over him instead. Anyway, she’d gone to the bar with her dad to pay, mostly because their waiter was swarthy and chiselled and wore tight black trousers and called her ‘Bella’ all night. He’d made a show of ringing up their bill on this old brass till. Keys clunked like an antique typewriter; numbers jumped up in a glass box on the top, and finally, when all was tallied, the thing let out a triumphant metallic ting. There was a click, the seashell rustle of change, and a concluding clunk as the drawer flung open. And it hit her: Saint Anthony’s picture was a machine. A god machine gathering up and focusing all that belief and all those prayers. Nush was also struck by how grown-up an idea that was, only to have it killed, along with her teenage libido, when the waiter produced a huge glass jar crammed with lollipops for her to choose from.

  Rundleskink’s machine was a fungal growth fanning up the wall, a bricolage of peculiar objects. Copper piping. Fragments of stained-glass windows shining. The keys from a church organ, set below a brass barometer. Clockwork mechanisms and wires running between analog and digital clocks of a dozen shapes and sizes and as many different times. An assortment of valves, cranks, and levers formed the machine’s connective ligaments. Like bulging eyes, glass tubes and globes stuck out of the mechanism imprisoning fluttering butterflies, bees, and what Nush first thought were fireflies, until she glimpsed the outline of miniature humanoid legs and arms in the ethereal glowing dots. Near the top an orrery of coloured glass marbles orbited a fortune teller’s crystal ball, which swirled with grey vapours. The wheel of a steamboat was set in the centre of the machine, next to the cream box of an ancient Apple Macintosh computer, its greyscale screen flickering. Below that the keyboard of a BBC computer sat, white letters all but worn clean off the black and red keys. The little man climbed up onto a stool to reach the keyboard. He inspected the Macintosh’s screen and tutted.

  ‘We cannot rewrite the starlight,’ he said tapping the keys of the computer with spidery fingers.

  Herne joined the little man at the machine. ‘Sing another song, wrydsmith.’

  Rundleskink shrugged. ‘I didn’t say we can’t bend and reflect, yet one can only twist the light so much and for so long. Killing the mothers was a necessary but costly step. The moon twine is stronger for it, yet it carries a peculiar tang.’

  ‘How else were we to bring the sons of Alaric home?’ Herne said reaching to tap one of the glass valves.

  The little man sprang to his feet on the stool and swatted Herne’s hand away, squawking. ‘Argh, oaf!’

  Herne bristled and all the roots hanging down and running through the walls tensed, sending down more dust. It irritated Nush’s nose and she had to fight down a sneeze.

  ‘You, see?’ Rundleskink said, pointing up to the ceiling, his beady black eyes staring down the stag-headed goliath. Herne set a haughty face and folded his arms. ‘Yes, we brought them home. But did you ever wonder why they weren’t brought back together sooner? No, of course you didn’t. Too busy seeding every other quim in the forest as though it’s your final Spring.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean you’ll rut anything with or sap or a teat.’

  Herne waved him off dismissively. ‘No, not that. What do you mean final Spring?’

  ‘Agh, by the she bear’s blood! We spoke of this. The magic is coming to its end. Our abode is shrinking each moontide. I have lengthened our time by drawing on the magic imbued in their forgotten things. However, our world is built on the pact with the Lorimers. It was our finest glamour, but a contract can only be resigned in blood so many times before the parchment is wet with death and worn through with sacrifice.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I know this. And the Lorimers have returned to make good on the contract and renew the magic. They are separated,’ Herne said with a nonchalant shrug. ‘The greater the risk, the greater the spell will be. All will be well when the boy reaches the sea.’

  Rundleskink sighed and turned back to his machine. ‘No, my lord of the green world, vassal of Jack in the Green,’ he said, turning a valve a degree or two and slumping in front of the computer screen. ‘Even if boy is successful—and things have been set against us more than usual this time—we will be in our final seasons. The magic is over and not for this world. Sugnar will escape and we will...’ A tear fell down the little man’s black cheek.

  Their backs were to Nush, engrossed in their machine and its calculations. She opened her eyes fully and turned her head, seeing several portals leading from the room. The nearest was a short dash across animal skin rugs. As she made the decision to flee, getting her hands primed underneath her, she noticed Herne and Rundleskink weren’t talking anymore. She turned her head. Both were looking right at her.

  ‘Bollocks!’ she said, and pushed herself from the ground and ran for the exit.