“So what do you propose, Finn? ” Briony asked. “You sound as though you have a plan.”
“Not only does she have better manners than the rest of you,” the large man said, “she has more wit as well. But I suppose it would be hard not to,” he added, glaring at Hewney and Makewell. “In any case, a few miles north of here is a small road which turns east off the highway. It looks like nothing much more than a farmer’s track—in fact that is what it is for the first few miles. But after a while it joins another, larger road—nothing as large as what we’ve been on, but still, a proper road, not just a track—and passes through the edge of the forest. On the far side is a Soterian abbey, so that we will probably only have to spend one night in the woods, then will be welcomed, warmed, and fed in the abbey the next day.”
“Through the edge of the Black River Forest?” said Dowan Birch. It was the first time the giant had spoken.
“Yes,” said the playwright. “Of course.”
“I did not know it stretched so far west, that we could reach it in a day or less.” His long face was troubled. “It is not a good place, Finn. It is full of… of bad things.”
“What is he talking about?” demanded Pedder Makewell. “What sort of bad things? Wolves? Bears?”
But Dowan only shook his head and would not say more.
“We will be in it scarely a night,” said Finn. “We are nearly a dozen and we have weapons and fire. We even have food, so we do not need to forage. We will stay together and all will be well—and more than well. Come, do you really want to chance our luck with the king’s soldiers?”
Several of the others tried to get Birch to explain what he feared, but the big man would not be drawn. At last, for lack of a better plan, they all agreed.
They reached the fork in the road before the next morning’s sun was high in the sky. A few other travelers shared the road with them, mostly local folk, and they all watched with surprised curiosity as the Makewell troop left the main road for the bumpy forest track.
For several days they had been passing through wilder and wilder country, but now it was suddenly ten times as apparent. The great expanse of the Royal Highway had meant that it passed mostly through open areas, and even when it didn’t the very size of it meant the trees on either side were widely separated and offered little impediment to the sun. As soon as they turned east onto Finn’s track the oaks and hornbeams suddenly seemed to shoulder in on either side like curious folk coming to see what strangers had entered their lands. Suddenly the sun that had been their companion for most of the journey was absent for long stretches. Gone were the occasional sounds of farmers calling to other travelers on the road, or summoning their straying sheep or cows back from some high place. Other than the noise of the wagon’s wheels, the wind in the treetops, and the occasional muted trills of birdsong, the players’ new route was all but silent.
Also, it turned out that Finn had not been entirely correct: the farmer’s track, which is what it had looked to be when they left the main road, in places came to seem something much more chancy, more like a track for animals than people, so that the wagon often became stuck and required much work before it could be shifted and set rolling again. They had barely reached the outskirts of the forest when the hidden sun began to dip behind the western horizon and shadows stretched out across the world.
“I don’t like it here,” Briony said to Dowan Birch, who walked beside her. Because of the bad road and the absence of other travelers she and the giant had left the wagon and were walking behind it like everyone else, ready to push it out of the next ditch.
The place reminded her of something she could barely remember, her lost days after Shaso died and Effir dan-Mozan’s house burned down. Something about the way the shadows moved, the way the uneven light made the trees themselves seem to be turning slowly after she passed, felt secretive, even malicious. Because of it, she had pulled out the talisman Lisiya had given her and had been wearing it for hours.
Dowan shrugged. He looked even more gloomy than Briony. “I do not like it myself, but Finn is right. What else can we do?”
“Why did you say… that there were bad things here?” she asked.
“I don’t know, Highness. Things I heard when I was small.” He looked hurt by her smothered laugh. “I was small once, you know.”
“It wasn’t just that,” she said. “It was that, and… and… and you called me ‘Highness.’ I mean, look at you!”
He frowned, but wasn’t entirely displeased. “I s’pose there’s different kinds of highness, then.”
“Did you grow up somewhere near here? I thought you were born in Southmarch.”
He shook his narrow head. “Closer to Silverside. But we had many travelers coming from the country to the market in Firstford, which was over the river. My father used to shoe their horses, if they had them.”
“How did you come to Southmarch, then?”
“Mar and Dar took the fever. They died. I went to my uncle, but he was a strange man. Heard voices. Said I was made wrong—I was getting big, then. That the gods took my parents because… I don’t remember, truly, but he said it was my fault.”
“That’s terrible!”
Another shrug. “He was the one who wasn’t right. His head, you see? The gods gave him nightmares, even in the daytime. But I had to run away or I would have killed him. I traveled with some cattle drovers up to Southmarch and I liked it there. People didn’t stare so much.” He colored, then looked up. “Can I ask something, Highness?”
“Certainly.”
“I know we’re going to Southmarch. But what are you going to do when we get there? If those Tollys still have the crown, you see? And if the fairies are still there. What will any of us do?”
“I don’t know,” she told him. That was the truth.
Just before dark they stopped and made camp. The players shared the meal with a great deal of boisterous noise, as though nobody wanted to listen too carefully to the sounds of the forest night around them, but what was more unusual was that they did not stay up late. Briony, squeezed in between the warm, reassuring bulks of Dowan and Finn Teodoros, rolled herself tightly in her cloak and clutched Lisiya’s amulet to her breast.
A few times, as she floated in the river of dream, she thought she could hear the demigoddess’ voice, faint and beseeching, as though Lisiya of the Silver Glade were being pulled away in another direction. Once she thought she saw her: the old woman stood by herself on a barren hilltop, waving at her. At first Briony thought the demigoddess was trying to get her attention, but then she realized that what Lisiya was trying to tell her was “Go away! Go away!”
She woke, shivering, in the nearly pitch-dark of midnight, with only the faintest light from the campfire embers to show her where she was. Her eyes were wet, but she could not remember anything in her dreams that should have made her cry.
It could not have been much after the middle of the day, when the sun should have been at its highest and brightest, that the world began to grow dark. A superstitious panic ran through the troop until Nevin Hewney pointed out what the rest of them should have realized immediately.
“It’s a storm,” he said. “Clouds covering the sun.”
Despite the thickness of the trees around them, the forest did not seem like a place in which they wanted to weather a bad storm. Makewell’s Men and their royal charge did their best to hurry ahead, hoping to reach the abbey, or at least high, dry ground before true darkness fell. The road was wider here, crisscrossed by some other forest tracks, which made Briony feel hopeful for the first time in hours. Surely they must be nearing a place where people lived!