The draig-rider was gone by morning light. Where he had winged off to, they could not tell. But he was nowhere in sight at least.
They tracked carefully north and west for the next two days. For a time they moved only through wilderness and met no troubles, not even feral boggarts out of the hills. The clouds were being scrubbed away by strong cold northerlies that blew all day and night, until a hard blue sky was revealed. Fleat, noting the change in weather said, “Stars is shining, moon is breet; Boggard woant cum oot toneet,” though added, “old rhymes from south of the mountains. This far north, thems scarle-boggarties will come out on any night.”
On the next morning, when the boy went to fetch water from a stream he walked suddenly upon two creatures, like small people, about knee-heigh in size and greyish in colour, like fungus. Their clothing was a leafy green and their eyes were a dark green too, like wet river stones. They seemed to have been dancing together in a circle. Practically the moment the boy burst upon them, they looked at him, sneered sourly and darted off into the scrub. The boy searched but could find no trace of their even having been traipsing on the mossy ground. There were no footprints, nor even small scuffs on the delicate mossy soil-crust. When he reported this back at camp, Caewen asked him several questions, and finally asked, “Were they solid seeming or did light pass through them? Would you say they were flesh or did they seem to have bodies more like a… how can I describe it… a congealed cloud?”
“More like flesh, I’d have said. They seemed real enough. Nothing was shining through them.”
“Hm. Well. The Faer-Folk can look real enough in their way. They don’t have flesh in the manner that you or I understand it–but–they certainly can look solid.”
Dapplegrim shook his head. “Your little men don’t sound like anything Faerye. They’re some small race of night-people probably.”
“I could scout about by wing?” suggested Fleat.
“No.” Caewen shook her head. “I don’t think so. This far north, the land is full of strange creatures and strange people. They probably want nothing to do with us anyway. They might just be some distant cousins of the dwarghe or awfs.” She shook her head. “Or some nameless creature breed by the Night-Goddess long ago, forgotten and allowed to escape and run loose. And if that makes them ill or good, it makes them no more ill or good than any of us–hopefully they’ve no more interest in us than would the badgers and rocks.” She considered this for a moment and shrugged. “And even if they are spies it hardly matters. By the time they can tell anyone about us, we’ll be gone, like shadows. Their spying won’t do the hunters much good.”
Dapplegrim looked up at that. “You know, we haven’t seen the white ghaists in some time. Are they still following us, or are they up to some other mischief?”
They all looked at each other and shrugged as if to say–who knows? It was a worry though. Where had the warth-ladies gone and why had they vanished so completely?
They had no answers. After a meagre breakfast they pushed on through the wilderness.
They never did find out anything about the little fungus-grey people. They seemingly vanished into the woods as completely as a morning mist.
As a day and another day passed, the boy learned more and more letters and runes and words in his dreams each night. Slowly, very gradually in fact, he did start to recall his dreams: he dreamed of a marbled hall, warm with a fire-pit in the corner, rugs of gold and fur, a window giving out onto a crisp blue sky in which strange white birds with long wings circled. After a few nights, he started to recall a person too. A glimpse of a hand. An old, pleasant face, lined with the wisdom of years. This person resolved over time into a being who inhabited the boy’s dreamscape: a ghostly tutor who now lived in his dreams. After another night of slow progress, the old man–who seemed to be as nameless as the child–grew terse, and his calm wisdom seemed to wear a little thin. After a particularly hopeless session with the petroglyphs of the dead kingdom of Ghorth-ar-Anost, the night-tutor fell to frustration. In a moment of exasperation, he said, in his slow, sonorous voice, “This is taking so very, very long.”
“I’m sorry,” replied the boy. He was taken aback. Until now, he hadn’t actually ascribed any real emotions or sense of identity to the tutor at all. To the boy, this tutor had been something like a mirage. It was disconcerting to suddenly realise that the figment in his mind, might actually have a mind all of its own. It stung too. The boy didn’t want to be stupid, but he couldn’t help but feel that he must be if he was slowing down even a supernatural teacher. “I’m not quick, but I’ll try harder,” he added.
“Oh, it’s not that,” answered the old man whose voice sounded like the covers of books being opened and pages rustling. “You’re bright enough. I could teach you all I know in a night if you had a name and were not wearing that dried eel-flesh about your neck. It makes you… hard to grasp… difficult to hold onto. My charms slide past you. If I were not an exceptional and rare old object of power, I could not work magic upon you at all. Here: you don’t think you could give yourself a name do you? It would make things a jolly lot easier.”
“I don’t know if it’s so easy as that. Name-taking, I mean.”
“No,” he sighed. “No. I suppose it is not. Well then… back to the lessons…”
Despite the tutor’s misgivings, from the boy’s perspective the teaching was so successful that he was beginning to forget that the others didn’t have any idea about his newfound talents. He hadn’t told them yet. Once, on the trail, he stopped at an ancient lichen-crusted rocked that had the elaborate old runes of the dwarghe on it. He was reading what was written there–just a dull list of names and deeds–when Fleat chanced to look at him and say, “No one can read those letters any longer. A lost script. So far as I’ve-a-heard, anyway. There were dwarghe kingdoms carven out of the stone all over the north faces of these mountains once, but they were brought to ruin by old wars, just so as the fane-folk.”
“Oh,” said the boy, suddenly self-conscious. “Is that so?”
“Yah,” said Fleat with a casual flick of his eyes at the stone. “Wonder what it says?”
“Um. Nothing interesting. You know–I expect.”