Harvest Read Free Page A

Stavemeister of Brum.
    The female was Katherine, human-born. When she first came into the Hyddenworld folk thought she was the Shield Maiden, the vengeful warrior of the Universe, come to punish mortal kind for its
many wrongs against the Earth. They were wrong but not far wrong. It had been the wyrd of she and Jack to meet and fall in love. The result of their union was an extraordinary but disturbing child
named Judith. It was she who was the Shield Maiden, born less than four months before, which was why Katherine looked drawn and tired.
    But where was Judith now?
    The answer was a tale any hydden would want to hear if Katherine could be persuaded to tell it. As it was, what had happened to their daughter had been in its way so shocking, so far beyond the
normality of things, that she had said nothing about it since the beginning of August despite the attempts of both Jack and Stort to get her to unburden herself.
    Now she was tired and wan, not her former self at all. It was for that reason that Jack had brought them into a village, in the hope that some company at harvest-time would lift her spirits.
    The tallest and oldest was Bedwyn Stort, scholar and scrivener, traveller and inventor, loved far and wide for his courage in helping others before himself. He was held in awe because it was now
known that more than any other it was his responsibility to fulfil a quest set in motion fifteen hundred years before by Beornamund the CraftLord.
    If Stort and his friends succeeded, then all might be well across the Earth again. If he failed, then mortalkind faced extinction.
    No wonder folk in Cleeve and thereabout wanted to hear one of them speak.
    In fact they might have left when they were told that the Fyrd had come calling but when they heard they had been sent on a wild goose chase to the south they decided to stay.
    ‘It means it’ll be safe to go to Abbey Mortaine,’ said Stort, ‘if only we can find an easy way to get there. It can’t be more than ten miles off but we’re too
tired to head back up into the hills in the dark.’
    They had hoped to reach the Abbey some days before but, as so often on their trek from White Horse Hill since the start of the month, the Fyrd had got in the way. It was Stort’s job to
route-find, Jack’s to act as defender of them both, with Katherine a stout fighter too and normally a stable presence.
    They did not use the visitors’ site but returned to higher ground, overlooking the village. Jack felt they were more secure, for it gave them a view of things. As he had expected,
Katherine was reluctant to join the festivities, though they could see the bonfire and hear the singing and the harvest dance.
    It was a welcome and unusual sight, for as their name suggests hydden normally stay out of sight.
    They had got their name millennia before, in the days when regular communication with humans was coming to an end. Though these two strands of mortal kind came from a common ancestor, time and
inclination had made them separate.
    Humans are giants by another name. To the hydden they are aggressive, acquisitive, clumsy and fearsome. More than that, as their numbers grew, they displaced their hydden cousins who, at only
three feet high, could not easily resist them. It proved easier to learn to make themselves scarce, to seem as the fox does, or the deer, or the plump fish in a stream: nearly invisible.
    It was then that the hydden became known as such, the word ‘hydden’ meaning just what it looks like in the old language.
    Gradually the humans began to forget them and learnt, without knowing it,
not
to see them. The hydden became a memory that turned to a myth and story of little folk told in many ways in
many lands. Folk who were magical and fey, or malign and mischievous. Until the time came when no humans knew them at all and most believed that the little folk were make-believe.
    It was an outcome that protected the hydden from human aggression, which ran amok in the