Unnatural Issue Read Online Free

appeared occasionally at the kitchen door. And so long as when Robin came around with a warning that this or that sort of game needed some resting, you didn’t set snares or drop a line in the places he warned you off of.
    The fact that none of the servants had ever seen Robin himself appear at the Manor, not even to collect the yearly wages he should have been getting, never seemed to occur to any of them.
    Although what certainly did persist in the minds of one and all was that Robin, known to have been Susanne’s playfellow for years, had grown into as fine a young man as she was a young woman, and that one of these days they would certainly get themselves married. The Gamekeeper—like a few other servants—held the same peculiar status that Susanne did. Gamekeepers were considered not quite gentry but a good bit above a mere servant. As such, well, so far as the Whitestone servants were concerned, there was no harm in such a match.
    This was useful for Susanne, as Robin was a fellow known to have a hard fist and a strong right arm and the will to use both at need. This kept anyone else from “making advances,” which was exactly as Susanne preferred it. Not that she considered herself above the other young men she saw from time to time, but it would have been very difficult, if not impossible, to find someone suitable who was another mage of any sort around here. For all their unconscious connection with the land and the things in it, most of the folk hereabouts were as thick as a brick when it came to magic. And those few that weren’t, well, most of them were already paired up, and the rest were too old or too young for her.
    And she could not imagine marrying someone who was not a mage. It would just be too difficult to try to explain the inexplicable to him, and as for hiding what she did . . . her head swam at the very notion. Perhaps, if she married a monied fellow—but a simple country lad? “You can’t keep secrets in a cottage” was the old saying, and a true one.
    So it was very convenient for people to assume that she and Robin were stepping out together. Even if the notion was so absurd as to send them both into gales of laughter in private. A Daughter of Eve? Wed to a High Lord of the Fae? Hilarious.
    For Robin was not Robin Keeper. He was Robin Goodfellow, the Great Puck himself, as old as Old England, and a true Force of Nature.
    “The coven did good work last night,” he said, dangling his arm into the water and tickling an unwary fish into a trance. “There’s trouble in the Big World, though.”
    By this, he meant trouble outside the boundaries of England, not just outside of Whitestone Manor. She frowned. “I know very little about that . . .” she said, hesitantly. The papers that found their way to the Manor were inclined to sensationalize things like anarchist attacks and bombings, then gloat about how civilized Britain would never suffer from any such nonsense. Politics on the Continent was all a confused muddle to her, and wars and conflicts farther away than that were less real than fairy tales. At least in her world, fairy tales had some basis in reality, and the creatures in them were things she saw daily. She had never seen a Zulu or a Hindu or an Arab or even a German. There were some folk who turned up for the fairs that were alleged to be French and Italian, and there were always Gypsies coming through, but for the rest? If you told her that Russians had two heads, so long as you believed it yourself, she would be inclined to take your word for it.
    “Lots of little pothers that are going to explode into something big and ugly,” Robin replied, pulling his arm out of the water. “People here think they shan’t be involved, but they will be; matters are too tangled up for them not to be. And the Dark Powers have their hand in it all, as well, which will make it all the worse.”
    “How bad? How much worse?” she asked, hesitantly.
    Robin shook his head. “Can’t tell.