Black Feathers by Joseph D'Lacey Page A

carries them to the sea. It overflows from the sewers. All over the country there are emergency shelters for those who’ve been made homeless by the weather. Here in Hamblaen House we’re still safe. For now.
     
    Mr Keeper’s roundhouse is a single circular room. They sit on sheepskins laid over a floor of woven rushes. At the centre, an iron stove like a fat cauldron with a flat top glows orange, giving off enough heat to make Megan’s forehead prickle. She unwraps the woollen blanket from around herself and lets it fall to the reed matting. Opposite the front door, a small area of the roundhouse is partitioned by blankets hung across twine. This, she guesses, is where he must sleep.
    A kettle on the stove top exhales a constant, forceful jet of steam. Beside it stands a small tool of some kind, the tiny handle of which pokes straight up from the hot plate. The chimney rises in a series of crooked black joints, straight out through the domed roof.
    A heady confusion of scents fills the hot, dark space.
    A hovel, she thinks. That’s what it is.
    Megan can’t define all the smells. There’s pine-laced wood smoke, of course, which escapes from several imperfections in the stove’s chimney pipe, not to mention the burning baccy. She detects dozens of dried herbs, particularly sage. But there are fresher, more bitter scents too, like those that might rise from poisonous berries pounded to pulp.
    Mr Keeper has gestured for her to sit and handed her a clay bowl of hot water, sieved from a charred-looking teapot on the stovetop. He flicked the catchings of the sieve to his right without looking and that is where the single wind-eye of the roundhouse is located. She hears the tiny patter of something landing outside. Drinking the hot brew now she tastes mint and fennel – she’s smelled this on him before and it comforts her just a little. She is too nervous to speak.
    As if picking up on her thoughts, Mr Keeper breaks the silence.
    “It doesn’t do to make a lot of noise and fuss in the morning. It takes an old man like me quite a while to get started. I like to do it slowly.”
    He looks over at her for the first time and in the dim glow of wood fire and tallow candles his face is defined only by its cracks. The half light does strange things to her perception and she sees in his face two centuries of age in one moment, and the freshness of a six-year-old boy in the next. He places his empty tea bowl to his right on the matting and turns towards her. His eyes, not cruel but intense to the point of terror, skewer her.
    “I don’t have to tell you that there’s no going back, do I, little thing?”
    Her stomach jittering, she says:
    “No.”
    “Good. That’s very good. I knew from the moment I met you that you’d understand how these things work. I have great faith in you, little thing. Great faith…”
    He trails off, his eyes looking towards the stove.
    “And that’s why I want you to know that I would never hurt you for any reason.”
    “Yes. Of course.” She’s confused now. And suddenly frightened. “But why–”
    He holds up his palm.
    “Any pain this path holds for you is not of my making, little thing. It is in the nature of the path itself. I tell you this because you must trust me as your guide. Trust me always. Can you do that? Can you do it no matter what befalls you?”
    In her panic Megan can’t think. What is he asking of her?
    “You knew this would not be an easy thing. You knew it would not be a game. You’ve been visited by the Crowman, little thing. Nothing will ever be the same for you. Nothing can ever be as it was. But I swear to you that I will guide you in the best way I can and with as much care as I am able. The path is not without pain, but neither is the path of life itself. I only need to know if I can rely on you to trust me.”
    She watches his face and sees uncertainty there for the first time. Here he is, this very tall, very old man. A man with grooves so deep in his