He certainly hoped that Ishta was over her anger by the time the snows came; being cooped up in the house for days at a time was bad enough even when the whole family was getting along. Huddling around the hearth with an angry girl, ready to find fault at every opportunity, would be utterly miserable.
Chapter Four
The cold autumn rain and wind had swept most of the trees bare, and had covered the sodden ground beneath their branches in a slick brown mat of fallen leaves. A month and a sixnight had passed since Garander’s return from Varag, and he and Ishta had reached a state of silent truce. She had tacitly acknowledged his apology, but was not yet ready to forgive him completely. She spoke to him only when necessary, telling him nothing unless he specifically asked.
For his part, he did not try to force the issue. He spoke to her as he always had, but made no complaint and took no offense if she said as little as possible in reply. He did not spy on her, or follow her around, or make any attempt to supervise her; he was her brother, not her parent. It was pure accident that he happened to be coming around the corner of the barn just as she slipped into the woods.
“Oh, death,” he muttered to himself.
He wasn’t really surprised. After all, Ishta had been sneaking off into the woods for years, even when she was getting along with everyone; when she was angry with her family, she had all the more reason to disobey. She was probably hoping to find more Northern sorcery.
He didn’t think she had seen him; she had been looking into the woods, not back toward the barn. He hesitated, trying to decide what to do. If he did nothing, just let her go, and something went wrong, if she got lost or hurt, he would be responsible and their father would be furious. The odds were that she would be fine, but the risk was more than he wanted to take.
But if he tried to stop her, that would undo all the peacemaking he had managed since he got home from Varag.
Besides, he was curious. Where was she going in such damp, dismal weather? He stuck the shears he had been carrying in his belt, and turned to follow his sister into the gloom of the forest.
The wet leaves underfoot were slippery and required caution, but they did not rustle or crunch like dry leaves; even though he was just a farmer, untrained in any sort of wilderness skills, he was able to move almost silently through the woods. He was also able to follow Ishta’s trail readily, by seeing where her feet had flattened the leaves.
She was not wandering randomly; she was walking in a straight line, or as near to a straight line as was possible among the trees, into the forest. Garander thought she clearly knew where she was going. That worried him, though he could not say why. He quickened his pace, and before long he spotted Ishta’s green jacket moving through the woods ahead of him.
She didn’t look back, didn’t see him; all her attention seemed to be focused forward. Then she raised an arm and called, “Hai!” For a moment Garander thought she had spotted him, but she had still not turned her head, or slowed her own steps. Then he saw movement ahead of her, something dark and quick, and he stopped walking, slipping quickly behind a tree and peering out to see what his sister was up to.
Then there was a man there, standing in front of Ishta. Garander had not quite seen him arrive, but he was definitely there.
Garander did not recognize him. He was still fifty yards away, but even at that distance Garander was fairly certain this man was a stranger. He did not dress or move like anyone Garander had ever seen before.
He was tall and slender, and dressed entirely in black. His tunic was cut tight and short; if he had followed tradition and set the length for life at the distance from shoulder to knee when he was twelve, this man had clearly been a small child, but made up for it later. His black leather breeches were also cut tight, and tucked into his boot-tops.
That was unusual, but the really strange part, the part that immediately let Garander know that something out of the ordinary was happening, was that he wore a round black helmet that gleamed like glass even in the shadowy woods. It covered his head from just above his eyebrows to the nape of his neck, hiding both ears. Garander had never seen anything remotely like it.
The stranger wore a pack on his back, held in place by wide straps over both shoulders rather than the more usual single shoulder-strap; these in turn connected to the widest belt Garander had ever seen, and the belt and both straps were adorned with various pouches and other attachments. There were several other unfamiliar objects slung here and there, protruding from his harness; they looked like tools of some sort, but Garander could not identify a single one of them with any degree of certainty.
And all of this equipage was black. Some was drab, some was glossy, but all was black.
The man’s skin, on the other hand, was unusually pale, and his beard a lighter shade of brown than Garander had ever seen on a human face. Garander was unable to judge his age, except that he was a grown man and not yet going gray.
“Ishta,” the stranger said. Then he looked directly at Garander and said, speaking loudly but with a thick, unfamiliar accent, “Did you know someone followed you?”
“What?” Ishta turned, staring into woods behind her. Garander did not think she had spotted him, but there was no point in pretending any further-the stranger was obviously not going to be fooled. Garander stepped out from behind the tree and moved a few steps toward Ishta and the stranger, to make conversation easier, but stopped when he was still several yards away so as not to seem threatening.
“Hello, Ishta,” he said. “Would you like to introduce me to your friend?”
“Garander?” Ishta said, shocked. “You spied on me?”
“I followed you,” Garander said. “I don’t think it was spying, exactly.”
“You were spying on me!”
Garander sighed. “Fine, I was spying on you. Are you going to introduce me, or not?” As he spoke he was keeping a careful eye on the stranger-and the stranger, he saw, was watching him just as warily. He had not, however, reached for a weapon, and almost certainly some of those mysterious tools were weapons; that was encouraging. It was still suspicious for a grown man to be meeting a girl of eleven in the woods without her family’s knowledge or permission, though.
Ishta glared at him for a moment, then said, “Fine. Garander, this is my friend Tesk. Tesk, this is my brother Garander.”
“I am pleased to meet you,” the stranger said. Garander had never before heard anyone pronounce simple Ethsharitic so strangely.
“Yes,” Garander said, rather than making a polite response that would be a lie. “Tesk, is it?”
The stranger smiled. “Ishta calls me Tesk. My real name is Tezhiskar Deralt aya Shatra Ad’n Chitir Shess Chitir.”
Garander listened to this jumble of meaningless syllables and said, “Tesk it is, then.”
“Yes,” the stranger said. “Gorandaar?”
“Garander,” Garander corrected him.
“Garander. Yes.”
“Why are you here?” Garander asked.
The stranger glanced at Ishta. “Here? Where do you mean?”
“In these woods. What are you doing here? Who are you?”
“I live here.”
Garander looked around for a house, or shed, or lean-to, or tent, or even just a hole in the ground or a hollow tree. He saw none. “Where?” he asked.
“Anywhere,” Tesk replied. “I do not have a shelter. I sleep in any tree that is handy.”
“In a tree?”
“Yes.”
“Any tree?” Garandar was trying to make sense of this bizarre claim.
The stranger did something with his shoulders. “One that is strong enough to hold me, with branches to climb,” he replied. “That one, for example.” He pointed to a nearby oak.