It would not have taken much calling by the moon or anything else to make me run away, Vansen thought. But somehow I do not think this girl’s brother has gone to the city to make his fortune.
Late afternoon, with the sun falling fast, Vansen decided to make camp. The road had led them through the low, sparsely covered hills all day, but they were about to pass through a patch of forested ground. The stand of trees before them was not a place he wanted to wander in the growing dark.
“Look!” shouted one of the men. “A deer—a buck!”
“We’ll have fresh meat,” another cried.
Ferras Vansen looked up to see the creature standing just inside the shadows at the edge of the trees, half a hundred steps away. It was large and healthy, with an impressive spread of antler, but seemed otherwise quite ordinary Still, something about the way it looked at them, even as a few of the men were nocking arrows, made him uneasy.
“Don’t shoot,” he said One of the soldiers raised his bow and aimed. “Don’t!” At Vansen’s shout, even though it had been looking straight at them, the stag for the first time seemed to understand its peril It turned and with two long leaps vanished into the cover of the trees.
“I could have had him,” snarled the bowman, the old campaigner Southstead whose grumbling ways had been the reason Vansen brought him instead of leaving him home to gossip and spread dissatisfaction among the rest of the guardsmen.
“We do not know what is natural here and what is not.” Ferras was careful to keep anger out of his voice. “You saw the flowers. You have seen the empty houses. We have enough to eat in our packs and saddlebags to keep us alive. Kill nothing that does not threaten you—do you all hear me?”
“What,” demanded Southstead, “do you think it might be another girl, magicked into a deer?” He turned to the other guards with a loud, angry laugh. “He’s already got one—that’s just greedy, that is.”
Vansen realized that the man was frightened by this journey through lands grown strange. As are we all, he told himself, but that makes such talk all the more dangerous. “If you think you know better than me how to lead this company, Mickael Southstead, then say so to me, not to them.”
Southstead’s smile faltered. He licked his lips. “I meant only a jest, sir.” “Well, then Let us leave it at that and make camp. Jests will be more welcome over a fire.”
When the flames were rising and the girl Willow was warming her hands, Collum Dyer made his way to Vansen s side. “You’ll have to keep an eye on our Micka, Captain,” he said quietly. “Too many years of too much wine has curdled his heart and brains, but I had not thought him so far gone as to mock his captain. He never would have dared it in Murray’s day.”
“He’ll still do well enough if there’s something to do.” Vansen frowned. “Raemon Beck, come here.”
The young merchant, who had spent most of the journey like a man caught in a nightmare from which he couldn’t awaken, slowly made his way toward Vansen and Dyer.
“Are you an honorable man, Beck?”
He looked at Ferras Vansen in surprise. “Why, yes, I am.” “Yes, Captain,” grunted Dyer.
Vansen raised his hand it didn’t matter. “Good. Then I want you to be the girl’s companion. She will ride with you. Trying to get sense from her is like sifting a thousandweight of chaff for every grain of wheat, anyway, and you may recognize better than I can if she says something useful.”
“Me?”
“Because you are the only one here who has been through something like what I believe she has seen and heard and felt.” Ferras looked over to where the men were gathering more deadfall for the fire. “Also, to be frank, it is better if the men are angry with you than angry with me.”
Beck did not look too pleased at this, but Collum Dyer was standing right beside him, cleaning his dirty fingernails with a very long dagger, so he only scowled and said, “But I am a married man!”
“Then treat her as you would want your wife treated if she were found wandering ill and confused beside the road. And if she says anything that you think might be useful, anything at all, tell me at once.”
“Useful how?"
Vansen sighed. “In keeping us alive, for one thing.”
He and Dyer watched as a chastened Beck walked back to the fire and sat himself down beside the near-child Willow. “Do you think we’re in such danger, Captain?” asked Dyer.
“Truly.”
“Because of a few flowers and a daft girl?”
“Perhaps not. But I’d rather come home with everyone safe and be laughed at for being too cautious—wouldn’t you?"
The night passed without incident, and by midmorning the road had led them so deep into the trees that they could no longer see the dreary hills or the looming Shadowline. At first that seemed a blessing, but as the day wore on and the sun, glimpsed only for brief moments through chinks in the canopy, passed the peak of the sky and began to slide into the west, Vansen found himself wondering whether they would have to spend the night surrounded by forest, which was not a comfortable thought. As they took their midday meal of roadbread and cheese, he called Raemon Beck to his side again.
“There is nothing to tell,” Beck said sullenly. “I have never heard so much prattling about pigs and goats in my entire life. If we were to come upon her father’s farm now, I think I might put a torch to it myself.”
“That is not what I wished to ask you. These woods—when you were riding through them, how long did it take you? On the way out toward Settland, I mean.” He tried a kind smile. “I doubt you were paying much notice to such things on your ride back.”
Beck’s look was almost amused, but it didn’t hide his misery. “We went through no forest like this on the way out.” “What do you mean? You traveled on the Settland Road, did you not?”
The merchant’s nephew looked pale, weary. “Don’t you understand, Captain? Everything has changed. Everything. I remember scarcely half these places from my journey.”
“What nonsense is that? It was only a week or two ago. You must have passed through this wood. A road is not a river—it doesn’t flood its banks and find a new channel.”
Beck only shrugged. “Then I must have forgotten this wood, Captain Vansen.”
The afternoon wore on. The cleared space where the road passed through the trees was quiet and gloomy, but there were signs of life—a few deer, squirrels, a pair of silvery foxes that passed through a clearing beside them like midday moonlight before vanishing into a thicket, and a raven that for a while seemed to keep pace with them, fluttering from branch to branch, cocking its head to examine them with bright yellow eyes. Then, one of the men on foot who could no longer stand the raven’s persistence and silence chased it away with a stone Vansen did not have the heart to scold him.
At last, as the sharp shadows of leaves and branches on the road began to blur into a more general murkiness, he decided that they could not go on any longer in the hope of outlasting the forest. It would be dark within an hour. He bade the company stop and set camp at the edge of the trees, beside the road.
He was kneeling in front of the first gathering of kindling, trying to strike a light from his recalcitrant flint, when one of the youngest guardsmen came racing toward them along the edge of the forest.
“Captain! Captain!” he shouted. “There is someone on the road ahead.” Vansen stood. “Armed? Could you tell? How many?”
The young soldier shook his head, wide-eyed. “Just one—an old man, I think. And he was walking away from us. I saw him! He had a staff and wore a cloak with the hood up.”