“Pretty sure.”
“So long as you go in armed with knowledge. She can’t hurt you unless you give her the chance.”
The girl with the checkered scarf nodded. “Just in case, could I- do you have a weapon I could borrow? I know it’s more valuable and permanent than food, but…”
“I have a number of weapons. Metal? I assume you’re still worried about them?”
“Not unworried. They’re impatient, not exactly the type to wait all this time, lurking outside and attack me in broad daylight. But one of them did promise to come after me, so…”
“Any preference in terms of what you’d want to wield?”
Bigger and sharper the better, the girl thought.
Then she reconsidered.
“My implement is a knife. I’ll take something in that vein, if that’s okay.”
Sandra walked over to a bookshelf. She withdrew a case and opened it. Three knives sat within. She placed the knife on the arm of the armchair.
The girl picked it up. A stiletto, long and narrow, with a sheath. “You sure?”
“As with my childhood clothes, it’s one of those things that’s been around for some time. I have no particular attachment to it, and I’m happier it’s seeing use. You’ll find Mara’s place due west, after the buildings give way to forest. Stick to the hardest path.”
“Cool,” the girl said. She paused. “I won’t say thank you. That’s sort of useless. You helped me out. I’ll… I’ll try to thank you with deed, not word.”
“I appreciate that.”
The girl nodded, then opened the front door, took a good three steps back from the force of the wind and snow, then plunged into the elements.
■
Take the hardest path.
Story of my freaking life.
The hardest path, as it turned out, meant not walking down the path people and their dogs had carved into the woods. It meant going uphill, through snow that soaked her jeans in an instant.
Pushing through the thickest growths of branches, rather than walk around.
Maybe Sandra was nice to me just so she could get me to buy this crummy advice and laugh to her creepy children of the corn family about sending me off to stumble through deep woods.
Even as she mulled over the idea, entertaining the surprisingly infuriating mental image of Sandra and her ferret-troll both laughing with one hand over their mouths, she had a sense that this was a bit too troublesome.
There was always an easier option. Always a seemingly valid route around that outcropping of stone with a tree growing out of it.
Was this a spell of sorts? A way of turning ignorant people away, keeping one patch of wilderness in a reasonable walking distance from town away from prying eyes?
Or, given that Mara had been around for a while, was it by design?
Had Mara planted and cultivated trees or moved stones to generate this effect? A simple, steady, relentless building of this discouraging barrier over the years?
The girl in the checkered scarf pressed on. She told herself that the resistance the branches gave to her pushing hands was another design. Branches left scratches on her hands and face. One copse of trees tried three times to scrape her hairband away from her head, then snagged on the button-hole of her jacket. Not actually moving, but simply happening to catch her clothing.
She couldn’t see any rune or trick, but maybe it was a harder thing to see. Maybe the tree had been planted in the middle of a rune, so it manifested certain snatching, scratching qualities as it grew.
Maybe every tree this deep in the woods was like a full-sized bonsai tree, guided by Mara’s hand.
There were probably a lot of really cool things one could do when they were effectively immortal and largely removed from everyday human concerns and habits.
The cottage, as it turned out, looked fairly normal, if old fashioned. Over one rock, and there it was. Squat, probably no more than four rooms, all wooden logs, planks, and stones with a coarse looking mortar. A fire somewhere within gave the thick, dusty glass a faint orange-yellow tint. Thick smoke rose from the chimney at one side.
It wasn’t made of gingerbread, at least.
“This was probably a really bad idea,” she told herself.
Her voice didn’t help to reassure herself as much as she might have hoped.
A vague sense of danger made her double check where she placed her feet, every place where there was a gap in the branches. No traps, no dolls or totems, no apparent runes or anything of the sort.
No options left, she knocked on the door.
She heard metal scraping on stone. It reminded her of the goblin with the tools. A shiver ran up her spine.
The door opened.
Not Mara.
A child, maybe twelve, aboriginal, with a chain shackled to her wrist.
The child didn’t meet her eyes. Her shoulders were drawn in, eyes fixed on her feet.
“I’m looking for Mara?”
“Crone Mara doesn’t like the white people,” the child said, in an accented voice. “I do not like the white people.”
“I’ve always cared less than most people do when it comes to being liked,” the girl in the checkered scarf said. “I’m interested in dealing. Negotiations.”
“Then come in and wait. Crone Mara will speak to you very soon.”
Again, that vague sense of danger, a trap. The metaphorical lion’s den. “I have safe passage? You can give me permission to enter?”
“Yes.”
She’d halfway expected the interior to be a demesne, but there was no guarantee that Crone Mara would hold to any recent traditions. The notion of the demesne had come over from Europe with the settlers. Crone Mara predated them.
No, the interior was cramped. Warm, with thick walls and no leaks, but cramped, with a floor of stones that fit together like jigsaw pieces, grooves worn along the most traveled paths. She suspected it predated the log and wood construction of the walls themselves.
The two bedrooms to the one side had no doors, only a bed and just enough space to stand between bed and wall. Shelves above the bed held clothes.
It was all so utilitarian. Only that which was absolutely necessary was within the building. Of those necessities, the kitchen stood out as the largest room in the small building. Containers held food, reeking of meat, and a fire burned under a large pot of stew filled with large chunks of vegetables.
There was only one nod to anything resembling entertainment. All around the uppermost edge of the kitchen, high enough up that one would need to stand on a table or box to reach, were dolls. Crude, made of raw materials, features made misshapen by the damage done to leather and woven grass by age. There was no organization. The very oldest stood beside more recent creations. The newest dolls were crafted of reed and hide. The oldest had started to come apart, hide degrading, reeds long since eaten away, revealing slivers of bone within.