Page 20 of Lion's Share
That was okay; neither was I.
Ben had been quiet during that exchange, but once we were outside, he said, “I still hope you were right about things calming down.”
“So am I,” I said. “But I suppose it’s still a good idea to see what’s happening in the forest.”
As it turned out, not very much…at least, at first. All was quiet as we moved through the dusky woods, and I definitely didn’t see any signs of new vandalism.
But then….
“More carvings,” Ben murmured, and inclined his head toward a large coast redwood to our right. I hadn’t even been looking in that direction because somewhere in my mind, I’d thought the carvings would only be appearing in the clearings where the portal had popped up.
Obviously, I was wrong.
This time, there wasn’t a single letter, but a series of five of them placed vertically partway up the trunk.
“What does it say?” I asked. I knew that Ben had memorized all the letters weeks earlier, but putting them together into something coherent was an entirely different kind of challenge.
He frowned. “It says ‘garda.’”
Okay, that seemed way too easy. “You mean, like, ‘guard,’ guard?”
“It sure looks that way,” he replied, and now the frown was gone, replaced by something that looked almost like amusement. “I mean, assuming that the ancient Irish version of the word isn’t too different from the modern one.”
“You speak Irish?” I said, impressed by this latest facet of what sometimes seemed like a bottomless fount of knowledge.
A flash of white teeth as he grinned at me. “No,” he said easily, “but I’ve seen it in Irish dramas. The cops have it written across the back of their jackets.”
Well, now I felt stupid. I supposed I could have been excused for not picking up that little factoid along the way, since I hadn’t watched a lot of television over the past ten years, being way too buried in my college work to surface to watch much more than a snippet of the local news from time to time.
Guard. So what was that supposed to mean? Had the black-clad man written it there to call me out specifically, as a sort of guardian of the forest?
Or maybe I was misreading the whole situation. After all, as a college friend of mine had liked to pithily point out from time to time, it wasn’t always about me.
Ben was looking away from the tree now, his gaze scanning our surroundings…including the earth at our feet.
“More ATV tracks,” he said, and pointed downward.
Sure enough, a set of tracks moved away from us and deeper into the forest, moving roughly northeast.
“Should we follow them?” I asked.
“I’m not sure that’s such a good idea,” he replied at once. “Not without knowing a whole lot more about this guy and what he’s really up to. But at least now we’ve found that he seems to be working in a lot of different places and not just in the clearings.”
What that meant for us, I wasn’t sure. Before, it had seemed as if we could avoid the guy if we stayed away from the clearings, but now that he appeared to be doing his art projects wherever he felt like it, I wasn’t sure what we should do.
I must have looked about as dispirited as I felt, because Ben came over and took my hand, then gave it a reassuring squeeze.
“We’ll get this figured out,” he said. “For now, though, it’s probably better if we get back. Our guy doesn’t seem to be anywhere around, but we also don’t want him to know that we’re trying to track his movements.”
Fair point. Also, a slight drizzle had begun to fall, not enough to get us soaking wet but definitely enough to make me wish I was inside with a cup of hot chocolate instead of out wandering around in the wilderness in the dark and the rain.
“Okay,” I replied. “Let’s head for home.”
Ben nodded, and we turned around and made our way back to the trailhead. As we went, I kept looking from side to side, trying to see if I could locate any more Ogham letters carved into the trees, but I couldn’t find anything. That single coast redwood with “garda” scratched into the trunk seemed to have been the only one on this particular path.
The drizzle continued the whole way, so by the time we got to my house, we were pretty thoroughly damp.
“Want to come inside and dry off?” I asked, eyeing the way Ben’s hair was lying flat against his head rather than in its usual thick waves.
