The uphill trackway grew steeper, narrower and more twisting. What had been something of a wide and well-worn path soon devolved into a pinched sheep trail, complete with glistening little bunches of black droppings, like faintly unpleasant berries. Far off, the small white specks of sheep were just barely visible. The animals seemed to be keeping well clear of the wizards. Probably, for good reason. Sorcerer or witch, or not, most folks wouldn’t be averse to a bit of mutton for dinner. She watched the sheep graze and meander, slowly. Presumably, the creatures had the run of the grassy slopes for years on end, between moots. She wondered what the flocks and their shepherds made of the noise, racket and crowds that descended on this windswept hill every seven years. Then, she thought about whether the three-fold goddess of the tor was happy to keep sheep for her company for seven years at a span. Perhaps that was why the goddess took ghosts into herself? The dull, simple loneliness of the long time between moots? The many voices would make for a sort of company, at least.
Onward then. Upward. They climbed.
More and more, the wind rose in strength and the air grew colder. As they tramped on, an unexpected noise rose around them. A few scant lilts of song touched the air. Skylarks. Caewen looked around, hunting for them before spotted a few dark shapes against the clouds. They seemed to be the only birds out on the slopes. Not far off, one of the skylarks was playing on the air; chirping its high-pitched beats and ripples of song; bobbing and jolting; a half-hovering mockery in the sky. When Caewen and Dapplegrim’s progression took them nearer, the little drab bird flew to the ground, and made a long, raucous sound. It started to run off, dragging a wing.
Caewen paused to watch it go.
“Don’t be tricked,” said Dapplegrim.
“I’m not.” Caewen looked around, then up at the cloud-soaked sky. “Isn’t it the wrong season for nests?”
“Hur. Maybe it’s just getting in practise for spring?”
“Nothing seems quite right here, does it?” Another glance up, at the sky. The light of the morning was rendering the clouds into scalloped monuments of water-grey and dusk-black. “All the magic, perhaps?”
“Maybe,” agreed Dapplegrim. “Or possibly just a confused bird.”
“H’m. Funny that songbirds should be acting funny though, isn’t it?”
“You’ve a suspicious mind,” said Dapple with a snort.
“I suppose I do.”
They continued along the narrow twist of bare dirt. The foot-worn earth turned grittier. It made a crunching noise against Caewen’s farm-boot hobnails. Although the rising wind was bringing with it a vicious new coldness, at least it was blowing off some of Quinnya’s storm clouds. Dapplegrim swished his ears forward and raised his head. “You hear that? Hurm. We’re close.”
She did. She gave him a silent nod.
From uphill, came sounds of speechmaking, muffled by distance. When they had climbed high enough to make out the shapes of people, Caewen paused to take in the scene. A vast number of witches, wizards, magians and sorcerers were milling about–most standing, some sitting–all were wrapped in cloaks, or buried under heavy fur blankets against the wind. Up on a high curve of banked turf three chairs had been carved into the natural limestone of the landscape, all dashed with whorls and carven scrawls. A magician sat in each of these huge, rain-dulled, time-smoothed thrones. Caewen recognised Fafmuir with a start. He was a senior magician. She knew that he sat on the Broadtable. So it shouldn’t have surprised her to find him here, presiding over the moot. But for an uneasy, not quite definable reason, she hadn’t expected to see him here. His presence unnerved her. To his left sat a woman dressed in the green-amber-yellow of a thousand wet emeralds and autumn leaves. To her left was a stiff-backed man in a cloak of depthless black, the cloth struck with stars that burned and ghost-flickered of their own accord. He looked as if he was wearing fabric made of midnight sky. And all three–to be plain about it–looked rather bored.
Fafmuir yawned.
Nearer to Caewen and Dapple, a tall, quite lanky man was standing in view of everyone, positioned atop a very large, very old looking stump of a dead tree. He was gesticulating and speaking at the crowd. The massive shorn-off stump stood a short distance downhill from the stone chairs. Anyone in those chairs–or ranged about the slope for that matter–would have a good view of the stump-top. No doubt that was the point of the arrangement.
The two of them picked up their pace again, closing on the crowd.
The closer they got, the more of the speaker’s features grew to be visible: a bobbing bulge in the throat, protuberant neck, stubble up and down his throat from a bad job of shaving, a nose like a prow of a boat. There did not seem to be anything particularly remarkable about him. Just another speaker at the moot.
Caewen cast a quick look around. They were very near the peak of the tor here. If the weather had been clear, she might have been able to see all the way to the Snowy Mountains in the north and the Bernoth Town in the south. When alive, the tree must have been visible for miles and miles around. The stump alone was so large that there were actual steps carved into it to allow easy ascent. She wondered why it had been cut down, and when, and who would fell such a majestic thing?
The speaker, meanwhile, droned on and on, in heavily accented altongue. Caewen had to concentrate to understand anything that he was saying. It seemed to be a petition about some border dispute or another. Something involving a rival house of magicians. He finished. Caewen waited and watched. A murmured discussion seeped through the crowd, and some people moved about, going from one knot of conferrers to another. Finally, a vote was called, and black iron pots were passed around the place. Anyone who wanted to vote–and this was not everyone, as it turned out–dropped a thin piece of what appeared to be copper into a passing pot. Presumably, each slip had a vote scratched into it. Caewen could see some of the magician’s busily scratching at their palms, pointed stylus scritching away against metal.
“You!”
The voice made Caewen jump. Dapplegrim snorted out a laugh. “Now, you’re in trouble.”
“You are late,” stated Quinnya, almost to the point of a yell as she stomped towards them. Her grey wooly hair was still in a frizz, and her black dress and white tassels of torn fabric all swayed as she strode. “Maybe,” said Quinnya, “You have missed your chance to speak? Eh?”
“Only I haven’t,” replied Caewen, with more certainty than she felt.
Quinnya eyed her intently for a moment, before conceding. “No. That is correct, you haven’t. The moot allows all to speak. Regardless of their lack of manners, or disregard for punctuality.”
Feeling nervous under Quinnya’s glare, Caewen tried to shift the subject. “Have you any idea who sent the birds?”
She shrugged and shook her head. “I am querying the matter. Some magician of the night, probably.”
“Given the nature of the birds, you think”
“Yes. But the magic had a darksome aspect to it too. A taste of darkness, if you will.”
Caewen looked over at the crowd, and wondered who might be speaking next. “Can a person mask their magic? Couldn’t it be someone else pretending to be a night magician?”
“Possible,” said Quinnya. “But unlikely beyond all chances of the winds. You’d need to be a magician of utmost power. It isn’t a highly plausible conjecture.”
“Who’s speaking next?” said Caewen, now trying to twist the conversation away from the general sense of unease and to more mundane things.
“You are.”
“What?”
“You are late, so you speak when you arrive. Those are the rules, and if you refuse you really will miss your chance to speak.”
“Oh. Alright.”
Quinnya smiled, treacle sweet. “Up you go then. I’ll announce you.” Quinnya herself did not climb the stairs. She hitched her skirt hem and walked around to the base of the stump, stepping up onto one of the larger root buttresses. “Now hear, now hear,” she called out. “A proclaimant presents for the moot of the wizards, the witches, magians too, warlocks, and all other workers of the unseen arts. Hark careful, for the words may not be heard again for another seven year hence. All listen. All harken, yeay!” The litany of words had a ceremonial cadence, as if Quinnya had spoken that exact set of phrases a thousand times. No doubt, thought Caewen, she had.
Caewen mounted the steps. As she put one foot ahead of the other, a sickening pit opened in her gut. She realised that she had come to the moment of talking. The moment of fulfilling her promise to the dying Tamsin. And she found herself, now, here, in the moment, without any clear idea what she actually needed to say to convince anyone of anything.
Oh dear, she thought, as she looked out for the first time at the sea of expectant, bored, uninterested faces. She tried her best not to shake. Oh dear.