Most of the company parted ways outside Samarkarantha’s tent, with the tor making a shadow of the sky behind them. Dapple and Caewen, along with the two Forsetti siblings, walked a winding path north for about an hour. Just as the sun was reaching noon, they found themselves standing at the north crossroads, within sight of the wildwoods called Crow Hall. The wind that stirred the treetops had a sullenness to it.
Where the roads met and formed a dirty patch of gravel and dust was the final point where goodbyes must be said and so they were, with a few embraces, and some quiet words, and then they were walking different roads: Caewen and Dapple heading north, the Forsetti brother and sister on the hilly, brown trackway that ran west. They were barely away from the crossroads before Caewen was worrying. She already felt a growing, discomfited urgency to reach her home, family and village as swiftly as possible. As Dapplegrim trotted along, she soon found herself unable to stop thinking about the armies in her vision of the frozen valley, under cold bright stars. It was too easy to imagine the ranks marching south, through the Pass of Many Face, fanning out across the foothills and sheep fields, over her homeland.
For an army, Drossel would be nothing but some minor point of pillaging and ransacking on the southward march, but for Caewen, the village was her family. It was her friends. It was her familiar home. The trees she climbed as a child. And the place of so many hours lost to daydreams too. She’d spent her life wanting to escape the place, especially during the dark years when she was hiding in the cellar from Mannagarm. But now, she wished she might fly back there in an instant, at a blink, with a wish. She coiled a little tighter inside her chest when she thought of what she might find if she arrived too late.
And yet, before she and Dapple were able to head northward at speed, there was one last thing Caewen wanted to see to. About midway past the woods, they broke from the road, turned east and rode under the eaves of the trees, into the shade and filtered sunlight. Above them a hundred curious black eyes noticed them, watchful.
“I don’t really see the point,” muttered Dapplegrim, as they rode through the tall brown and amber bars of the trees, with crows now calling gently, far above. The litter of red and brown and yellow was so dry that it crackled like fire under Dapple’s hooves. “And what if the dark aspect of the goddess turns up again?”
“She won’t. She who is one, who is many, who is three, is done with me for now.”
“You hope,” said Dapplegrim. “Hurm.”
It wasn’t long before they arrived at the decaying little cottage in the heart of the woods. They didn’t need to investigate to know that the old man had met his end. The stink of an unburied corpse hung about in an invisible fog. Caewen slipped off Dapple’s back and covered her mouth with the edge of her cloak. With wary steps she pushed at the door. It creaked on its cracked leather hinges. Inside, the old man sat as his table, his head flopped back and his throat open from ear-to-ear. So, the dark aspect of the goddess had found someone to take up the mantle of assassin and agent, then. Who? Had Sgeirr been carrying an obsidian knife? Caewen had thought so at the maze. But in that case, when would Sgeirr even have had the time to sneak out here, back to the woods? Perhaps the goddess had called her on the first evening? Lured Sgeirr out of the camp on that first night of the moot? Dimly, oddly, a spell leapt into Caewen’s mind. So much magic had gone through her that she didn’t even know what she knew any more. It was weird, and also not a little frightening. There were moments when she didn’t feel herself any more. Such moments as when she discovered all sorts of strange charms and pieces of lore tucked away in the depths of her mind. It was like fat bubbling to the surface in a soup. She was never sure what she would find next.
And so the names came to her: Nightshade. Hemlock. Cat’s Gallows. Bettermost. Damselhood. A fire. The right signs made, the proper passwords for the gates of the dead. She saw in her mind cutting off the head of the dead man, pouring foul brewed liquor into his slack mouth and making the ghost talk to her. Making it answer questions.
She shuddered.
No. Not that way. She would have to be desperate to go that way. And where did that magic even come from? Was it a spell left behind by the frost demon, Jack-in-the-Mist? The Goddess of the Tor? The Faer Folk? There were too many bits and pieces of half-glimpsed truth in her head. She needed to clear some of it out somehow.
Dapplegrim called to her. “What’s taking so long?”
“Nothing. Nothing. I’m done.”
“And the old man is properly dead, I presume. Hur. Hurm.”
“Very much so.”
“And no sign of the obsidian knife.” It was more of a statement than a question.
She shook her head.
“Come on then. Let’s be going. We’ve a King of All Winters to deal with,” she muttered.
He gave out the rippling sort of movement around his shoulders he used for a shrug. “Shouldn’t be much harder to sort out than a dragon, right?”
Now it was Caewen’s turn to sound unconvinced. “Sure. Let’s just hope.”