“I know the fairies have come out of the north again after all these years. I know they have besieged the city there.”
“You make it sound so ordinary, Brother Pilgrimer!” The merchant shook his head and had one of his servants bring him more ale. He generously had another cup poured for Theron as well, then looked over to Theron’s silent, hooded client and raised his eyebrows, questioning.
“He might take some. He is a strange one, though, so he may turn it down.”
“No matter.” The merchant had his servant pour another cup and take it to the hooded man’s youthful servant. The boy’s master accepted it without comment but did not even turn to acknowledge the kindness. “No matter,” the merchant repeated, but he sounded a little nettled.
“Tell me what you mean, sir,” Theron asked. “I’ve had so little good intelligence of what is ahead. Have you seen the fairies? What are they like? Do they threaten honest travelers?”
“Some say they eat honest travelers,” the merchant said with a hard smile. “But I’ve met no one who claims it’s happened to anyone they know. Not so with the bandits. Not only have I met those myself, I’ve met others who could not make compact with them and were robbed and beaten for their troubles. Some lost companions. The outlaws in this lonely place are desperate and cruel.”
“Oh, Holy Three preserve us!” said Theron in fright. “How can we avoid these people? Is there any way to get around them?”
“The cleverest thing to do is to turn around and go back to Oscastle or whence you came,” the merchant said sternly. “If you cannot do that, you must choose between the bandits and the fairies. The bandits haunt the roads. If you would avoid them, you must take the forest track through the Northern Whitewood, and then… well, who knows what you may find?”
“Have you seen these fairies?” Theron asked again. “What do they look like? Are they fierce?”
The merchant shook his head. “I have stayed upon the road, so I have seen little out of the ordinary. But I have seen enough. Riders on the hillside by evening, dressed in the old, old way, with armor that gleamed like moonlight. A flock of women speeding across the grass at midnight, in a place no woman would dare show herself, let alone run naked. Yes, I’ve seen some strange things, Pilgrimer, and heard others that I had no wish to see at all. And the dreams that come to a man these days when he travels in the north… ! Night after night I have woken in a sweat, sometimes crying out so that my helpers hurried to my side, thinking me deathly ill or stung by a serpent. There are voices that echo in the hills and in the forest deeps, and shadows that move when there seems no light to throw them ...”
“Enough!” said Theron, shuddering. “No more tales, thank you. I have scarcely the courage to stay here all tonight, let alone to go forward.”
“It is not all terrible,” the merchant said suddenly. He stared into the flickering fire. “There is… sometimes… a kind of beauty in things I’ve seen… or almost seen ...”
But Theron had no urge to discover such strange, unhomely kinds of beauty, and began to think about when the time might come to turn back.
The boy, Theron had finally learned, was named Lorgan. It was a Connordic name, although the boy said he had lived in Oscastle all his life until now.
“How did you come to be traveling with the stranger, lad?” Theron asked one night over the stewpot. In comparison to the night the merchant had joined them, this was much thinner fare indeed, closer to porridge than a stew, since there had only been enough dried fish to flavor things, but it was warm and the fire was bright and that meant something when you were half a day off the South Road in the lonely woods.
“Told you. He asked me.” The boy scooped out some more stew with the crust of hard bread.
“What about your ma and da? Didn’t they mind, you going off?”
“Dead.”
“What happened?”
Lorgan looked up at him in puzzlement as if it was some kind of strange, foreign custom to ask a child about his parents. “Fever took ’em.”
Getting answers was like trying to lift a bucket with a feather. “And what happened to you? Where did you live?”
The boy shrugged.
“And then he ...” Theron nodded his head toward the hooded man, who as usual was sitting by himself away from the others, his head down on his knees as though he slept, although from here Theron could hear him mumbling, “… he paid you to go with him? To help him?”
The boy shrugged again. “Said he needed eyes and ears. And someone to talk loud for him, because his throat’s so sore hurt.”
“What happened to him? Did he tell you?” The stranger was so miserly with showing even an inch of skin that Theron still half-feared he might be a leper, for all his reassurances.
“He was dead. He told me so.” Lorgan scoured the last of the stew from the pot and sucked his fingers, restless as an animal, ready to move now that he had fed.
“He can’t have been dead and be alive now. That doesn’t happen. Nobody comes back from being dead except the Orphan. Nobody can do it.”
“The gods can do it,” the boy said, licking his lips and chin for anything he might have missed.
“You’re not trying to tell me he’s a god, are you?”
“No. But they could have made him alive, couldn’t they? The gods can do what they please.” The boy shrugged one last time, then went off to throw rocks at trees until the last of the light was gone. The conversation was clearly over. Theron had to admit to himself that he couldn’t prove the child wrong—the gods, it was said, could certainly do anything they wanted. It was just that helping mortal men didn’t seem to be something they wanted much.
It was just across the border into Southmarch, in the Vale of Aulas where the forests grew so thick on either side of the road that the sun only appeared just before noon and vanished shortly thereafter, Theron Pilgrimer saw real fairies for the first time. It was not quite dark, and he was walking back toward the camp with wet boots on his feet and his arms full of mallow roots he had dug up at the edge of the stream when he saw something moving across the forest track before him. In some way, the figures seemed quite ordinary, so much so that for a heartbeat or two Theron did not even wonder why a procession of men dressed in black would be walking slowly across a deer path deep in the Northern Whitewood. Then he saw that these men were as small as children, barely half his own size, and the hairs on his arms and the back of his neck rose. They were dressed in black cloaks and odd, wide-brimmed hats, and just behind them, crossing the path as he stared, came a wagon drawn by two black-and-white-spotted boars—a coffin-wagon bearing a single, unlovely wooden box. As the pigs snuffled at the ground, the wagon rolled to a stop, and the driver, dressed in black like the others, turned to look at Theron. The little man’s face was pale and round and too large for his body. It was all Theron could do to hold his urine. He felt certain that if the little men made the slightest move toward him, he would faint dead away, but the driver only stared at him incuriously for a moment, then shook the reins and urged his grunting steeds forward. Within moments, the funeral procession, if that was what it was, had vanished into the forest.
Theron was still shaking when he got back to camp.
The guards who accompanied the lord protector and Tinwright on their mysterious errand out of the residence were big, hard-faced men wearing the Tollys’ Boar and Spears—Hendon’s personal soldiers. Even more disturbing to Matt Tinwright was that Tolly was clearly leading this little procession back to the place where Okros had died, the Eddon family vault near the Erivor Chapel.