Watching it all the while, Moon leaned forward, reaching for the drum.
The owl bated thunderously and stretched its beak wide. “Oo-wheed,” it cried at her. “Yarrooh. Yarrooh.”
Moon’s blood fell cold from under her face. The owl swooped off its branch quick and straight as a dropped stone. Its talons closed on the lashings of the drum. The great wings beat once, twice, and the bird was gone into the rushing dark.
Moon fell to her knees, gasping for breath. The voice of the owl was still caught in her ears, echoing, echoing another voice. Weed. Yarrow. Yarrow.
Tears poured burning down her face. “Oh, my weed, my stalk of yarrow,” she repeated, whispering. “Come back!” she screamed into the night. She got no answer but the wind. She pressed her empty hands to her face and cried herself to sleep.
With morning, the Seawood crowded around her as it had before, full of singing birds and softness, traitorous and unashamed. In one thing, at least, its spirit marched with hers. The light under the trees was gray, and she heard the patter of rain in the branches above. Moon stirred the cold ashes of her fire and waited for her heart to thaw. She would go on to Great Hark, and beyond if she had to. There might yet be some hope. And if there wasn’t, there might at least be a reckoning.
All day the path led downward, and she walked until her thighs burned and her stomach gnawed itself from hunger. The rain came down harder, showering her ignominiously when the wind shook the branches. She meant to leave the Seawood before she slept again, if it meant walking all night. But the trees began to thin around her late in the day, and shortly after she saw a bare rise ahead of her. She mounted it and looked down.
The valley was full of low mist, eddying slowly in the rain. Rising out of it was the largest town Moon had ever seen. It was walled in stone and gated with oak and iron, and roofed in prosperous slate and tile. Pennons flew from every wall tower, their colors darkened with rain and stolen away by the gray light. At the heart of the town was a tall, white, red-roofed building, cornered with round towers like the wall.
The boy was right about this, too. She could never find news of one person in such a place, unless that person was the king or the queen. Moon drooped under a fresh lashing of rain.
But why not? Alder Owl had set off to find the prince. Why wouldn’t she have gone to the palace and stated her business, and searched on from there? And why shouldn’t Moon do the same?
She flapped a sheet of water off her cloak and plunged down the trail. She had another hour’s walk before she would reach the gates, and she wanted to be inside by sundown.
The wall loomed over her at last, oppressively high, dark and shining with rain. She found the huge double gates open, and the press of wagons and horses and pedestrians in and out of them daunting. No one seemed to take any notice when she joined the stream and passed through, and though she looked and looked, she couldn’t see anyone who appeared to be any more official than anyone else. Everyone, in fact, looked busy and important. So this is city life, Moon thought, and stepped out of the flow of traffic for a better look around.
Without her bird’s-eye view, she knew she wouldn’t find the palace except by chance. So she asked directions of a woman and a man unloading a cart full of baled hay.
They looked at her and blinked, as if they were too weary to think; they were at least as wet as Moon was, and seemed to have less hope of finding what they were looking for. Their expressions of surprise were so similar that Moon wondered if they were blood relations, and indeed, their eyes were much alike, green-gray as sage. The man wore a dusty brown jacket worn through at one elbow; the woman had a long, tattered black shawl pulled up over her white hair.
“Round the wall that way,” said the man at last, “until you come to a broad street all laid with brick. Follow that uphill until you see it.”
“Thank you.” Moon eyed the hay cart, which was nearly full. Work was ointment for the heart. Alder Owl had said so. “Would you like some help? I could get in the cart and throw bales down.”
“Oh, no,” said the woman. “It’s all right.”
Moon shook her head. “You sound like my neighbors. With them, it would be fifteen minutes before we argued each other to a standstill. I’m going to start throwing hay instead.” At that, she scrambled into the cart and hoisted a bale. When she turned to pass it to the man and woman, she found them looking at each other, before the man came to take the hay from her.
It was hot, wet, prickly work, but it didn’t take long. When the cart was empty, they exchanged thanks and Moon set off again for the palace. On the way, she watched the sun’s eye close behind the line of the hills.
The brick-paved street ran in long curves like an old riverbed. She couldn’t see the palace until she’d tramped up the last turning and found the high white walls before her, and another gate. This one was carved and painted with a flock of rising birds, and closed.
Two men stood at the gate, one on each side. They were young and tall and broad-shouldered, and Moon recognized them as being of a type that made village girls stammer. They stood very straight, and wore green capes and coats with what Moon thought was an excessive quantity of gold trim. She stepped up to the nearest.
“Pardon me,” she said, “I’d like to speak to the king and queen.”
The guard blinked even more thoroughly than the couple with the hay cart had. With good reason, Moon realized; now she was not only travel-stained and sodden, but dusted with hay as well. She sighed, which seemed to increase the young man’s confusion.
“I’ll start nearer the beginning,” she told him. “I came looking for my teacher, who set off at the end of last autumn to look for the prince. Do you remember a witch, named Alder Owl, from a village two weeks east of here? I think she might have come to the palace to see the king and queen about it.”
The guard smiled. Moon thought she wouldn’t feel too scornful of a girl who stammered in his presence. “I suppose I could have a message taken to Their Majesties,” he said at last. “Someone in the palace may have met your teacher. Hi, Rush!” he called to the guard on the other side of the gate. “This woman is looking for her teacher, a witch who set out to find the prince. Who would she ask, then?”
Rush sauntered over, his cape swinging. He raised his eyebrows at Moon. “Every witch in Hark End has gone hunting the prince at one time or another. How would anyone remember one out of the lot?”
Moon drew herself up very straight, and found she was nearly as tall as he was. She raised only one eyebrow, which she’d always found effective with Fell. “I’m sorry your memory isn’t all you might like it to be. Would it help if I pointed out that this witch remains unaccounted for?”
“There aren’t any of those. They all came back, cap in hand and dung on their shoes, saying, ‘Beg pardon, Lord,’ and ‘Perishing sorry, Lady.’ You could buy and sell the gaggle of them with the brass on my scabbard.”
“You,” Moon told him sternly, “are of very little use.”
“More use than anyone who’s sought him so far. If they’d only set my unit to it …”
She looked into his hard young face. “You loved him, didn’t you?”
His mouth pinched closed, and the hurt in his eyes made him seem for a moment as young as Fell. It held a glass up to her own pain. “Everyone did. He was—is the land’s own heart.”
“My teacher is like that to me. Please, may I speak with someone?”
The polite guard was looking from one to the other of them, alarmed. Rush turned to him and frowned. “Take her to—merry heavens, I don’t know. Try the steward. He fancies he knows everything.”
And so the Gate of Birds opened to Moon Very Thin. She followed the polite guard across a paved courtyard held in the wide, high arms of the palace, colonnaded all around and carved with the likenesses of animals and flowers. On every column a torch burned in its iron bracket, hissing in the rain, and lit the courtyard like a stage. It was very beautiful, if a little grim.