Lavondyss (Mythago Cycle) Read Online Free PDF Page A

grave shroud.
    ‘What does it want?’ someone murmured, and as if brought back to life by the sound of the words the stag turned, leapt over the fence and vanished into the gathering darkness, away towards Ryhope Wood, across the two streams.
    Tallis’s mother picked up the fragment of antler and later wrapped it in a strip of the infant’s white christening robe, tied tight with two pieces of blue ribbon. She locked it away in a box where she kept all her treasures. Tallis was named Broken Boy’s Fancy and was toasted as such well into the night.
    When she was ten months old her grandfather sat her on his knee and whispered to her. ‘I’m telling her all the stories I know,’ he had said to Tallis’s mother.
    ‘She can’t understand a word,’ Margaret Keeton replied. ‘You should wait until she’s older.’
    That made the old man angry. ‘I
can’t
wait until she’s older!’ he stated bluntly, and returned to the business of whispering in the infant’s ear.
    Owen Keeton died before Tallis had become aware of him. He had walked out across the fields one Christmas night and died, huddled and snow covered, at the base of an old oak. His eyes had been open and there had been a look of gentle rapture on his frozen features. Tallis remembered him in later years only in the family story of her name, and in the photograph that was framed by her small bed. And of course in the volume of folk stories and legendary tales which he had left for her. It was an exquisite book, finely printed and richly illustrated in full colour. There was an inscription to Tallis on the title page, and also a long letter from him, written in themargins of the chapter on Arthur, words conceived one winter in a desperate attempt to communicate across the years.
    She did not read that letter with any real understanding until she was twelve years old, but one word caught her eye early on, a strange word – ‘mythago’ – which her grandfather had linked by pen to Arthur’s name in the text.
    The Keetons’ farm was a wonderful place for a child to grow up in. The house stood at the centre of a large garden in which there were orchards, machine sheds, greenhouses, apple sheds and woodsheds, and wild places hidden behind high walls, where everything grew in abundance and in chaos. At the back of the house, facing open land, there was a wide lawn and a kitchen garden, fenced off from the fields by wire designed to keep out sheep and stray deer … all except the bigger harts, it seemed.
    From that garden the land seemed endless. Every field was bordered by trees. Even the distant skyline showed the tangled stands of old forest that had survived for centuries, and into which the deer fled for protection in the season of the hunt.
    The Keetons had owned Stretley Farm for only two generations, but already they felt a part of the land, tied to the community of Shadoxhurst.
    Tallis’s father, James Keeton, was an unsophisticated and kindly man. He controlled the farm as best he could, but spent most of his time running a small solicitor’s business in Gloucester. Margaret Keeton – whom Tallis would always think of as ‘severe but strikingly beautiful’, after the first description of her mother she ever overheard – was active in the local community, and concentrated on managing the orchards.
    The main running of the small farm was left to EdwardGaunt, who tended the garden and greenhouses too. Visitors always thought of Gaunt (he himself preferred the bare name) as the ‘gardener’, but he was far more than that. He lived in a cottage close to the Keeton house and – after the war – owned much of the livestock on the farm. He was paid in many ways, and the best way – he always said – was from the sale of cider made from Keeton apples.
    Tallis was very fond of Mr Gaunt, and in her early childhood spent many hours with him, helping in the greenhouses, or about the garden, listening to his stories, his songs, telling him stories of