“We’ll get there,” Cashel said, as they fell into step together. “Wherever there is, I mean.”
Tilphosa turned to look at him as they walked. “Where do you want it to be, Cashel?” she asked. “What are you looking for?”
He shrugged as he popped another berry into his mouth. “Well, the way home,” he said, his words a little slurred at the beginning. “I’ll get there. I’ve always had a good sense of direction.”
He smiled broadly at Tilphosa. “But I guess I’ll see you safe to your Prince Thalemos, first, mistress,” he added. “We’ll find the place you want to be, never fear.”
“The place I want to be,” Tilphosa repeated without emphasis. Her eyes were on the ground. When she looked up again her expression was hard. Her voice rang as she said, “Cashel, I can’t trust Metra. I’m not even sure I can trust…”
Her face worked like she’d bitten something sour—or something worse than that. She continued firmly, “I’m not even sure I can trust the Mistress. What if we reach Prince Thalemos and find he’s in league with the Archai? They aren’t friends to human beings, whatever Metra seems to think!”
Cashel shrugged again. “I guess things’ll work out,” he said. He didn’t know what else to say. This was the sort of conversation that other people liked to have but he’d never seen much use for.
“Do things always work out for you, Master Cashel?” the girl said. “Because I haven’t been so lucky myself!”
He’d finished the berries, so he had both hands free again. He wiped his left palm on his tunic and let his fingers find their places on the smooth hickory of his quarterstaff.
“Things pretty much work out, yes, mistress,” Cashel said. He started the staff in a slow spin off to his left side to keep it clear of Tilphosa. “Maybe not at first, but after a while I generally find a way.”
Tilphosa made a sound, a funny kind of whoop. He looked over in concern, but she waved her left hand at him for reassurance. She was laughing, he guessed, though it still bothered him because he didn’t see why.
“It’s all right, Cashel,” Tilphosa said through her laughter. “I’ll just trust things to work out, you see? So long as I’m with you, I’ll trust things to work out.”
Maybe because Tilphosa had asked if the blueberries had been planted, Cashel began noticing signs of cultivation immediately as they resumed their way eastward. There was nothing overt, no stone walls nor grain growing from plowed furrows, but a mixture of tulips and periwinkles wandered like a stream of red and blue across the landscape in a fashion that Cashel couldn’t imagine without cultivation. The boxwoods beyond them, though not trimmed into a hedge, still grew too tightly for nature.
“Cashel—” the girl said. Then, frowning, she went on, “No, I guess not. I thought I saw somebody behind those little trees, but there isn’t room to hide.”
Cashel looked. “They’re pears, it looks to me,” he said. The trees were off to the right of the course he’d been setting, but there was no reason not to bend a trifle in that direction. He angled toward them, stepping behind Tilphosa.
“Pear trees that small?” she asked. She fell in with him again, this time on his other side. He noticed her hand rested on the dagger hilt.
The trees were no taller than his shoulder, but they were perfectly formed and full of ripe fruit. The soil had been lightly turned and composted around each one in a circle that would just contain the branches, about where the rootlets would reach. There was somebody here who knew trees, no doubt about that, and who used what he knew.
“I haven’t seen them like this before,” Cashel said, “but the fruit’s full-sized. Here—the juice’ll be good till we find a stream to drink from.”
He twisted a pear from its branch and handed it to Tilphosa. As he did so, he caught movement out of the corner of his eye. He jerked his head around quickly, but even so he saw only a motion rather than a shape.
“Cashel, what was it?” Tilphosa said, her voice clear. She’d drawn her dagger.
“I don’t know,” he said, frowning. “It ran into the hollies there. I don’t guess it could’ve been bigger than a rabbit and slip through them like that, but it seemed…”
He picked a pear for himself without looking down at the tree. “Well, anyway…” he said. “Let’s keep on going. I’d like to find water, and chances are there’ll be a path or something we can follow.”
Cashel looked about them and frowned. He wiped his fingers clean of sticky pear juice on his tunic before he took the quarterstaff in both hands again.
“I don’t think there’s a tree or bush I can see that people aren’t caring for,” he said as he considered the landscape. “There must be quite a village close around here. I’ve seen more wildness in the palace gardens in Valles.”
“It doesn’t look like a garden to me,” Tilphosa said, frowning as well. She wasn’t so much arguing as making a comment.
“It’s a different sort of taking care,” Cashel explained. “It’s doing the things the plants want, do you see? Feeding the roots and trimming off dead limbs, but not making things look like people want in a garden.”
He cleared his throat. “Let’s keep going,” he said. “I mean, if you—”
“Yes, of course,” Tilphosa said, stepping off briskly. She didn’t put her dagger away, though Cashel didn’t feel anything hostile in the setting. He’d have been hard put to imagine a more peaceful place.
The ground rose slightly; as soon as they came over the rounded crest they saw the village. It was laid out in a circle, more huts than Cashel could have counted on his fingers twice over. They looked like straw beehives, though they were woven of leaves instead of proper straw thatching.
“Have you seen any grass since we woke up this morning?” Cashel asked.
“I don’t remember,” Tilphosa said. “Does it matter?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “I haven’t seen any myself—nor any grain or reeds either. It’s just…well, different from what I’m used to.”
He cleared his throat. “That’s probably why it bothers me,” he said. That was true enough: “different” generally meant “bad” to a peasant, whether it was the weather or the way a neighbor offered to pay you for the work you’d done for him last season.
There weren’t any animals bigger than bugs in this place either. Not except for the folks who’d built the huts, and he hadn’t seen them yet except for maybe a flash in the pear orchard.
He and Tilphosa walked toward the village. There was no sound of people and no woodsmoke either, which was surprising too. Smoke always lingers, especially since Cashel hadn’t been around a fire in some days and his nostrils were primed to notice it.
The huts were side by side, as close together as rooms in a city. Houses in Barca’s Hamlet weren’t big, but there even the poorest people had more space between them and their neighbors than the way these folks lived. There were no windows. The doorways were small—even for the size of the huts—and faced the empty courtyard in the center.
Cashel walked around the curve of the village. The only passage into the courtyard was on the eastern side.
“Is anybody here?” Tilphosa asked. She held her elbows close to her sides as she looked about herself, like she was worried that she’d bump something nasty if she wasn’t careful.
Cashel frowned, then let his face smooth. Tilphosa wasn’t asking a fool question: she was saying that the silence worried her and that she’d like Cashel to say it was all right…which it was, as far as he could tell.
“Somewhere close, I’d guess,” he said. He pointed to the drying racks fixed to the back of the huts. They held fruits and vegetables of all sorts, though he didn’t see any meat. “Some of those apple slices haven’t been cut more than an hour.”
Cashel eased through the alley into the courtyard, brushing the hut to either side though he moved sideways. He held his staff high, to clear the domed roofs and just possibly so he could swing it if he needed to.