Dapplegrim was waiting for them, much as they had left him. He looked irritated as he stamped a hoof, snorted and said, “Well you took you time. I was worried.”
“Whyever would you be?” said Caewen. Although she made a teasing pretence of her own annoyance, there was an unsuppressed note humour in her voice, along with a small smile on her lips. It was obvious enough that they were both glad to be reunited.
“Why?” He shook his head. His eyes rolled. “Why? Hur. Because how am I going to save your skin, again, if you go climbing up rocks and things? I thought you would have learned not to climb up cliffs the last time I ended up stuck down on the ground, while you clambered about doing who knows what. That’s why.”
She replied, laughing. “I’ll make a note of that then. Though, things worked out alright last time, didn’t they? And today too. I’m afraid we’ll have no help from the folk of this place, but we’ll have no hinderance either. Best we were going.”
“Yes,” said Dapplegrim.
Caewen paused to give him a quizzical look. “You know, you did seem happy enough when we started the climb?”
“That was before all those owls came down to look at me. It was a good dozen of them, one after another. Hur. Hurm.”
“You didn’t like the way they looked at you?”
“It was altogether too assessing, if you know what I mean? Hurm. And I asked how you were doing, but there was no reply. Just silence, and staring, big orange eyes. Then they came and they went. They went and they came. I started to feel like I was a creature in some king’s menagerie. Hurm.” He seemed to be calming a little. “I’m glad you’re safe though. I really was beginning to worry.”
“You know,” said the boy, “I don’t think they can answer in owl-form. Maybe that was all it was? Didn’t you notice that Fleat had to turn himself back into a child to ask us what we were doing in the gorse-tangles?”
“That is true,” added Caewen. “And they might have simply been curious. You are a curious beast, after all.”
Dapplegrim snorted.
“Still,” said Caewen, more drawn in her tone and more considering. “I am starting to feel that we are making a lot of excuses for strange behaviour on the part of our owlish hosts. I would like to be gone from this place, and swiftly. It does all feel a bit askance, somehow.”
They saddled Dapplegrim and climbed onto his back to leave. The ride out of the valley was quiet enough, and uneventful. If the Hobs Houlard had been curious about Dapplegrim, they seemed to have sated that wondering itch. Not a one of them glided by overhead. The boy kept checking over his shoulder, until he spied an owl with a brownish-and-fawn colour that he thought might be the same as Fleat’s. The owl swooped away from the great house in the tree branches. It beat its wings two slow times, and drifted off westward, to wheel up above the cliffs and vanish. Assuming the owl had indeed been Fleat, the boy guessed that he would meet them on the other side of the cliffs once they were a little distance from the secret vale. Presumably, Fleat would not want to draw the attention of his elders by joining them too soon. The boy experienced a little bubble of happiness that the Hob was going to defy the decree of the great old owl and help them. If nothing else, it would be nice to have someone along for the journey that was more his age. Talking to Fleat had been–well–it had been very much like talking to a friend. The boy had never really had much in the way of good, solid friends. It was something he’d always longed for, but had never been able to find in his own small village where everyone either disliked him because of his father, or looked down on him for the same reason.
Caewen’s voice fractured his thoughts: “The way out. Best we both get down now.”
Dapplegrim only snorted. He still seemed grumpy.
Thinking these thoughts, and others besides, he slipped down from the saddle. Once Caewen had swung herself down, they began to make their way into the tunnel.
At the outer door of the tunnel, a hob with a spear stood waiting. He whistled three odd and off-cadence notes. The door opened seemingly of its own accord, just as it had before.
They emerged from the cool shadows of the narrow way into scratchy pines, and then out into the paleness of a cooling dusk’s light. Before them, the familiar landscape of scrubby trees and tangled wilderness crept off down hills westward, going down to the wide valley they had been walking through only a day ago. Far off and faint, the Great Grey Mountain stood like an edifice hewn from stone by a godlike hand. There lay strange shadows and streaks of light upon it, cast by the setting sun. It was weird to think that they had only recently been walking those slopes. So far away and so wreathed in gathering darkness now.
With barely a glance or a word to each other, Caewen and the boy remounted the saddle and the three travellers turned north. They hunched up against the cold wind that chased down and along the valley walls, whistling out of the mountains and peaks. After a while, they left behind the bulk of the old shaggy pines and began to pick a way among looming limestone outcrops and dense flourishes of low vegetation. The boy presumed this was the landscape of little cover that the old great owl had warned them about. He looked up at the first stars of evening, as he rocked in the saddle. Pale blue Hrim-the-Frostkissed was out already, casting her clear light into the grey sky of evening. Onward they crept, under the night’s new stars–slowly for a time–quiet, listening to the silence and to the birdsongs that pipped now and then from the cliffs and the trees.
“If none of us mind travelling by night for an hour or two longer, I think we should,” said Caewen, suddenly, disturbing the stillness.
They were soon passing below the steep cliffs of the Shaelfell mountains. They slipped into small copses whenever they could find them. Caewen and Dapplegrim were clearly worried about being spied, either from above or afar. As they entered one such place, where the path was overhung with particularly thick and woven branches, something swift and sharp shot out at them from the canopy. It missed Dapplegrim’s head by a bare flicker of an inch. A second of the darts was better aimed, and Dapplegrim roared and bucked as the barb struck his hindquarter. More of the black darts shot at them. The boy ducked, while Caewen drew her sword and yelled in anger. When the boy caught a glimpse of one of their attackers, his breath snatched in his throat. He felt a sudden realisation: they had been betrayed. A rough Hob face with angry, hard glinting eyes stared at him from the foliage. The Hob loosed another of those short, black arrows from a small bow. There were at least half-a-dozen more of the archers in the trees too. They all had that rough look of the huntsman Hob that had been talking angrily to the old grey owl in the meeting.
Caewen must have thought they had been mistaken for Sorthelanders to start with, because she yelled, “Friends! Friends!” before a barb thudded into her armoured sark, and she yelled at Dapplegrim, “Run! Now!” But he was only able to stumble forward at a lurch. The arrow seemed to have done something to him. Was it poisoned? His hind right leg was flopping uselessly as if all the tendons had been cut.