And for that I hate her.
“What’re you looking at me that way for?” Alecto said in sudden alarm. The keen-edged athame was suddenly in her hand.
“What?” said Ilna. “Sorry, I wasn’t looking at you at all. I was thinking about a conversation that I’m going to have when I get home. As I expect to do.”
Alecto grinned like a snarling dog. “The guy you’re planning to talk to isn’t going to like it,” she said approvingly. “Or is it a woman?”
“He’s a man,” Ilna said. “And I think you’re wrong.”
She bit down on the dove’s heart. “More fool him, perhaps,” she added. “But I think he’ll be very pleased.”
“Dawn!” whispered Tilphosa. “Oh, Mistress, You’ve blessed us with the return of light!”
Cashel staggered. He was just as glad as Tilphosa to have daylight again, but the change from dusk to sunrise caught him in mid-step. Ousseau muttered in the crook of Cashel’s left arm, but he didn’t wake up.
A waterfall drummed nearby. When he looked for it, Cashel saw edges of white spray through the leaves. That’d be water, which they all needed badly by now.
“Oh!” Tilphosa repeated. She looked at Cashel. Now that there was real light, her face looked almost as gray as it had in the twilit woods they’d come from.
“Ah…?” she said. “Would it be all right to rest now, Cashel?”
He hadn’t realized Tilphosa was so close to being done in. She’d kept plodding along beside him, not saying much but never complaining.
“Sure,” he said. “I’ll be glad to stop myself.”
Cashel turned to look over his shoulder. Hook and Captain Mounix were a stone’s throw behind. They seemed to be managing all right. Anyway, they had enough energy to complain, though they stopped it quick enough when they saw Cashel’s eyes on them.
“We’re stopping?” Mounix croaked. “By the Lady, I can’t go on any farther! Unless”—his expression grew guardedly hopeful—“you want to give me a hand instead of Ousseau. He’s had ease enough, I’d say!”
Cashel squatted expressionlessly and laid Ousseau on the ground. The injured sailor did seem to be doing well. The swelling in his hand and forearm below the bandage was down, and his breathing seemed normal. The touch of cold leaf litter awakened him with a snort.
“You did a good job bandaging Ousseau up,” Cashel said to Tilphosa as he rose. “He was lucky to have you around.”
Tilphosa smiled and laid her fingers on Cashel’s elbow for a moment. “I think we’re doing well,” she said. Her smile tightened as she looked back at Mounix and Hook. She added, “Even them. For what they are.”
The woods back the way the party’d come were still in shadow. The dawn breaking ahead had to do with more than just the time of day.
Cashel shrugged, working stiffness out of his back muscles. He gave his staff a trial spin, mostly to feel the smooth wood shifting among his practiced fingers. It reminded him of home. That was always a good thing; at times like this, the memory of home was one of the best things there could be.
Mounix and Hook had caught up. Ousseau got to his feet and joined them, standing a staff’s length back from Cashel and the girl.
Cashel dipped a ferrule toward where he heard the waterfall. “We’ll head that way and likely camp,” he said. “We need water, and I figure we ought to walk a ways and get a look at what things’re like around here before we bed down.”
“What’s wrong with it?” Hook said, worried rather than belligerent. His eyes moved nervously. “I thought it looked fine.”
“There’s nothing wrong that I know about,” Cashel said patiently. “It’s different, is all, and I thought we best take a look while we’re awake.”
There hadn’t been anything bad even about the woods they’d finally walked out of, but Cashel hadn’t recognized a single one of the trees in the whole long time. Around him now were maples and sourwoods, well leafed out. They were well spread apart, maybe because the clay soil was so stony.
Tilphosa drew herself up like a queen. “Come, Cashel,” she said. “I’m thirsty.”
Her hand on Cashel’s arm, she set off toward the sound of water falling. Cashel, warned by the pressure of her fingers, stepped off when she did. He didn’t know where Tilphosa had picked up her skill, but he guessed she’d be better than fair at driving a yoke of oxen.
Cashel grinned at the thought as they strode along, but as they got closer to the falls the smile left his face because his skin had started to prickle again. Oh, there wasn’t anything dreadful about that; he’d felt it, kind of an itching like when he’d had too much sun, all the way through the woods they’d just left.
It meant wizardry, or anyway it seemed to. Cashel’d gotten used to being without the feeling for the little while he’d been free of it. He didn’t guess he could complain, given the way they’d come to this place. He thought of home again and thought of herding sheep.
“Let me go ahead,” he murmured to Tilphosa, taking the quarterstaff in both hands. The sailors were far enough back that they wouldn’t be getting in his way.
Tilphosa stopped and knelt. She’d been carrying the half-rotted stick ever since she picked it up. She worked at the clay now with the end of it, digging out a stone the size of her foot. It had a fractured edge.
Good girl. A really good girl.
The water draped a sheet of itself over a smooth cliff maybe three times Cashel’s height; it pooled, then drained away to the side. A stand of yellow birches grew on the near side of the pool. Cashel stepped through them, his eyes on the water. Because of how the falls roiled the surface, anything could hide in the pool and not be seen till it wanted to be.
“Hello there,” said a slurred voice behind him.
Cashel spun, the staff crosswise and his right arm cocked to slam the end forward in a blow that’d bend iron. His mouth was open, but he’d managed to avoid—barely—a shout of surprise. He couldn’t see who’d spoken.
“Ooh, he’s quick, too,” said another voice, again from behind. It was a little clearer than the first. “And so—”
Cashel whirled.
“—big!”
The bark of the nearest birch was stained at head height. You could imagine a face there if you tried…and as Cashel watched in amazement, it was more and more a face. The knot that had squirmed during the last word was now a pair of pouting lips.
“Cashel?” Tilphosa shouted. She’d gotten the rock out of the ground. She held it edge first in her right hand as she ran toward the grove. “I’m coming!”
“Oh, my, he’s gorgeous, isn’t he?” called another voice. “Oh, it’s been so long!”
All the trees were changing. It wasn’t fast, nothing you really saw happening. It was more like the water was going down and uncovering the thing that’d been underneath. In place of bark the trunks showed tawny skin and human features.
“Cashel!” Tilphosa said. She put her back to his. “Are they dangerous?”
“Hey, there’s girls in there!” Hook said. He trotted into the grove, holding his sword up beside his ear like he wasn’t sure if he’d need it or not. The other sailors joined him, Ousseau a step before the captain.
The birches laughed, a musical sound but with something catlike about it. Their faces were continuing to form, taking on human roundness instead of being outlines that might have been drawn on bare wood.
“Dangerous?” said the one who’d spoken first. She had high cheekbones and lips now the color of leaves just before they turn brown. “Not to you, girlie. We’re not interested in you.”
“They shouldn’t be interested in her either,” said a face whose eyes slanted upward at the corners the way the eyes of Serians did. She winked at Ousseau. “We’re much nicer than she is, boys. And she’s so skinny!”