Next morning, the boy rose, washed himself from a rain barrel outside, then stood and surveyed the landscape to the south. From this distance, there were no signs that an army had moved by in the night. He wondered if it had all been a dream, but when he asked Dapple, the horse-thing confirmed what they had seen, in his snorting, huffing way. He suggested that Caewen should know about it, but not to frighten her. The three of them were safe enough at the cottage, for now.
Caewen was a little recovered, but still pale and didn’t seem to want to move from bed.
So, the boy searched around the cottage, found some oats and nuts and flaxseeds, and made a sort of mixed porridge over the embers of the fire
Caewen must have smelled the stream coming from the pot, and it drew her attention. She sat up in bed, rather wearily, and said, “Is that porridge?”
“Yes. Do you want some?”
“Thank you, yes.”
The boy watched her as he heaped porridge into a wooden bowl. She kept acting as if she were unnaturally cold, wrapping bedclothes around her shoulders, over her knees and up to her chin. Now and then, she was beset by waves of uncontrolled shivers. The boy brought her the hot porridge and some tea he’d boiled up alongside. Even as Caewen sat trembling with a spoon in hand, she looked at a puddle of light that was admitted by the one small glazed window in the room, then said in a rather distant voice, “We will need to be on the road again today. We need to find out about this prince and his spell.”
“That can wait until after you’ve eaten. There’s no rush. Dapplegrim said to tell you, some soldiers passed in the night but there’s no sign of them now. They missed the house, or maybe they think the false seeress is guarding the place and saw no reason to stop here.”
She stirred at the word ‘soldiers’ and shot a glance to her sword where it was resting in its scabbard against the wall. “Good. Yes. Keep an eye out for them in case any return. I do need to rest. Just a little.” He handed her the tea and she said, “Thank you, child.”
After breakfast Caewen slept for a good few hours. The boy took himself outside, and sat with Dappelgrim in the cool, bright sun on the porch. Caewen emerged only as the sun was nearing noon, still looking tousled and still-sleepy around the edges. Nonetheless, she was dressed and armed, and insisted she was ready to press on. The boy didn’t feel it was his place to gainsay her. He looked at Dapplegrim, but the horse said nothing. It seemed he was ready to accept that if she wanted to move on, then she was not going to be talked out of it.
They ate a sparse noontime meal in near silence, then gathered up everything of use they could find and carry from the cottage. Once packed and ready, they cut a path away over the scrubby landscape sometime in the early afternoon. The boy wondered aloud if they should set fire to the place, in case there were dangerous things in it still, but Caewen shook her head.
It was Dapplegrim who answered. “The smoke would attract eyes from a long way off, hurm. Better to leave it for sparrows and mice, the odd fox or family of badgers.”
They cut downhill through the tussock and mountain briars, in and out of gullies, all the while trying to keep their feet out of the boggy streamlets that ran from the mountain.
At one point they wandered into a strange dell, full of squat, gnarled trees that the boy didn’t recognise. The arrangement of the trunks didn’t look natural to him, and there was a quietness in the air that seemed unnatural too. They walked softly, until Dapplegrim said, “Look, there.”
One of the trees had white objects dotting its trunk. It took the boy a moment to realise these were skulls, and that someone had cut niches into the wood for each head. They had been placed so long ago that the wood had grown around them–puckering up, and enfolding them tightly into the bark and wood.
“These are funerary trees,” said Caewen.
“I don’t like their smell.” Dapplegrim snorted to himself. “This wood has been feed on too much ash and burnt offering. That sort of thing can give a tree a taste for the dead. Let’s go.”
“Yes,” agreed Caewen.
They hurried on, moving out of the unpleasant grove as quickly and quietly as possible.
On the other side, the vegetation opened up, and turned to tussocks and heather, small scraggly thorn trees, sprays of brilliant moor-daisies and weird, fleshy sundews.
When they reached the road the soldiers had walked down during the night, it appeared to be deserted. But the signs of recent tramping of feet and hoof-churned dirt remained an obvious warning.
Not wanting to meet anyone, they crossed the open road quickly and moved up the far hillside into an area of low scrub, then picked a path parallel to the road, a little north, a little eastward, now moving carefully and watchfully. They were nearing lands watched by enemies now. And yet, the scrub and woods did seem peaceful. Scrub-wrens and wood-swallows darted in and out of the bushes and scrabbly trees. Otherwise there was no sign of movement. In one weedy clearing full of dith’n flower and mintwort, a flock of brandtails, with their bright red rumps flew past, peeping madly. They were pretty birds, the boy thought. He’d never seen so many of them before. They liked wild, deserted places.
The three of them threaded through the landscape, and moved steadily uphill until they found a break in the tree-line along a ridge. There was a great lump of rock here, a big, smooth boulder thirty paces across. The shadows of a few thin trees played on its fringes, but out on the brow of the rock the air was sunlit. Small skinks wearing copper and green scales darted off and hid, the moment that Dapplegrim slapped a hoof onto the stone.
They all walked out onto the promontory, Caewen and Dapplegrim first, then the boy trailing. He was tired.
“What’s that?” he said pointing.
The northern view was one of a valley between two great mountain ranges. The high, cloudswept mountains were grey and blue with distance, and the land between them was a patchwork of greys and greens. At a distance where the road became nothing more than a dirty brown ribbon, two huge pillars stood. They were black and strangely shaped, and they stood flanking the road, like the posts of some huge but functionless gate. South and west of the black gatestones, arose a small foothill-spire of rock and there seemed to be movement and fires about its base.
“Those are the southern boundary markers of Sorthe,” said Caewen. “And that, over there…” –she was pointing at the rocky footspur– “…that is the ruined fortress of Thalle. I can’t make out much of what is happening, but there seems to be activity. Are those cookfires?”
Dapplegrim could evidently see better than both his companions put together. “Yes. There are humanfolk and boggarts in camps about the base of the fortress. Labourers are dragging stones up the roadways, and there are wooden cranes being built too. It looks as if the Four Princes of Sorthe have decided to reoccupy their old southern stronghold.”
“That cannot bode well.” Caewen considered this. “And there is far too much activity on the road. Troops and goods marching up and down.” She looked northeast, at the towering peaks. “We’ll have to keep cutting through the pathless glens, and then perhaps rejoin the road on the far side of the boundary stones? Assuming the road is safer there? If not, we’ll just keep moving in secret until we find ourselves that town… what was it?”
“Baght Town,” said the boy. “That’s what the shade said. Find Baght Town and then track east to find the prince of the white warths. At a pool… what did she say? Of ghosts and voices? Or something like that?”
She smiled. “You’ve a good memory.”
He felt embarrassed. He wasn’t used to people saying anything nice about him. It had always been rather the opposite in his life. He mumbled, “Thanks,” and ducked his head.
They moved off the big granite knuckle, and cut further away from the road, and uphill, until they were passing through the foothills of the mountain range that curved around the eastward side of the valley, eventually forming part of the vale mouth to the north of them. Caewen called them the Toweradges, but gave them a few other names in older languages too, though all the boy caught was Gol Tierreth and Torendel thur Gaurel, among the half-dozen or so she mentioned. Those two struck the boy as pretty to hear and say, and he said so.
“Those are both names in the old languages of the Elidearr Fane,” replied Caewen. “They do have a pleasant lilt to them, I suppose. There were once Fane castles here, though that was years and years ago.”