They rode together on Dapplegrim’s back, the boy behind and Caewen in the front, with Fleat gliding along beside them. Every hour or so, he would circle back, sailing out of sight, only to return some time later. After the third or fourth of his sorties back, he returned with as dark a look in his eyes as an owl could manage. In a puff of feathers he landed behind the boy, perching precariously while getting a firm hold on the boy’s shoulders. He had become a child again, small, wiry-thin and naked. Those owlish eyes of his blinked. Brown and black-grey feathers drifted away behind them, like dead ash from a wind-torn fire. “Riders,” said Fleat in his rasp of a half-owl voice. “I can see scouts and outriders behind us. And behind them, a cloud of dust, as if kicked up by many horsemen.”
“Are they gaining?” yelled Caewen, turning her head.
“No and they don’t need to. They’re tracking this great lumbering horse. They’ll catch you eventually.”
“This great lumbering horse,” snarled Dapplegrim, “cannot help his being rather large and heavy. I can run swift, but I can’t go without leaving hoof-marks in the soil. I’m not actually made of faery-flesh.”
Fleat shrugged. “I’m not saying nothing except they’re following. And there’s a whole lot of them.”
“We can’t fight half an army,” whispered Caewen. “Not on our own.” She looked back at Fleat then.
He gave a small nod and seemed to understand. “I can try, but you didn’t leave me people on very good terms now, did you? I can’t say as I think they’ll be jumping out of their feathers to help.”
“But you can ask?”
“I can ask,” said Fleat. He smiled a small, thin-lipped smile, then jumped backwards off Dapplegrim’s rump. He was an owl before he came close to hitingt the ground. Beating his wings slowly, powerfully, he did a sort of corkscrew of a whirl upwards. Then, he pushed his wings against the air and shot forward. Not long after, he vanished amongst the hazes of distance, a mere smudge of darkness against cloudy skies. The grey fading light that swallowed Fleat was the sort of pre-evening glow that promised storms. Sooner or later.
The land, which had been largely flat fields, grew into low, rolling mounds. These small hilltops made good vantages, and more than one upheld some old ruin or a crumbling tower. Once, they passed a few Sorthe militia huddled in their cloaks around a smokey fire. The men were surprised by the speed and approach of Dapplegrim. They jumped up. They yelled and waved spears. One loosed an arrow, but he missed.
It didn’t take long for the landscape to grow steadily more hilly. Scrubby patches of blackberry and tall, rustling reed-flaxes clung to the shallow defiles. Dapplegrim often had to go up and over a ridge, exposing them to anyone with eyes for a half-dozen leagues in any direction.
At the crest of just one such hilltop, Caewen spoke, suddenly. “What’s that?”
Something white and shimmering stood atop a nearby hill. It looked perhaps like a person made of sunlit fog, or a magical fire built from morning light.
Dapplegrim paused in his headlong run. Mucky dirt and dead grass scraped and churned where his hooves dug downward. He squinted into the distance. “A person? A woman. She has a faer-ish look to her.”
Caewen’s face grew serious. “I wonder–?”
“Well, hurm. Only one way to find out.” Dapplegrim changed his course and took himself upon a new path, over the wet-soaked sod, making directly for the hill with the phantom woman.