After a week of travel by foot, Caewen was growing suspicious of her shadow.
Not the shadow gliding beside her, stretched against grassy slope or dirt-trod path. That shadow was as soft and reassuring as it ever had been, a fellow traveller, the two of them alone on the road. No, rather, she was increasingly concerned about her other shadow. The one she kept in a large leathern purse at her belt. The one that hissed and tsscked, and peeped out in daylight, and went wandering in the night.
That shadow kept urgently advising her to turn farther north and always take a path that circumvented the broader and plainer roads that lay along the coastal ways. She was keenly aware that the great bleak lake of Asthe lapped shores not very far away. It would make for a painful delay to pick a path around that unpleasant shoreline. And to the south, market towns like Arlich could have provided a soft bed for a night, and provisions for a dwindling food sack.
It seemed at the least foolish, and at the worst potentially disastrous to wander so far north.
But always, Fetch returned from his nightly forays with troubling news. “There are soldiers with winter’s banners already along the southern roads.”–“The fisher-villages are already overrun”–“War chariots out of Goathland are passing westward”
And so on.
And every night, Caewen would consult the bowl under starlight, and the piece of fractured antler would tink against the rim. Always it pointed south-east. The more they circled northways, the more the desperately the spell-strung bowl tapped a southwards chime. They were venturing off-course, and Caewen had no idea if the reasons that the shadow gave were true.
The problem with the fetch–with all demons and spirits of its ilk–was that they were scrupulously truthful, but with careful, clever wordings that might as well have been outright lies.
More than once they had to hide as the gloomy-winged shapes of draigs drifted on cold, hard breezes above: scouting or hunting. Three times now she’d had to dash away from the path and conceal herself in brambles and thickets, to allow a band of scarle to pass by. She listened to their strange half-snarl, half-muttered words, and watched them lumber, and smelled their wet-dog smells. If this was a safer path, freer of soldiers from the north, then the south ought to have been aflame with razed hamlets and burned towns. But at night, she saw little evidence of this–seeing from one vantage or another, just the usual smeared scatter of firelight and windowlight from far and flung settlements, out as far as the sea’s salt-dark shores.
Finally, after having to dodge yet another column of fighting scarle coming down from the mountains, Caewen lost patience. She opened the satchel and looked hard at the squirming darkness within. Two eyes, glossier, but no less dark than the darkness, blinked back at her.
“If I didn’t know better, I’d half suspect you were leading me into a trap.”
“Tsssch. No. Noooo. I would not do any such thing. You are my warmth and my life’s blood. My breath and my chord, feeding life and protection. What reason would I have to hurt you?”
“Hurt?” She frowned. “Well, perhaps not. But mislead? Confuse? Perhaps you don’t want me to find the other fragment of the spell, for your own reasons? Perhaps you are afraid of what might happen? Or worried that I might be hurt, or killed? I can think of reasons.”
“No, no. Trrssssa, tssscha. None of that. Nothing like that.”
Caewen didn’t want to get into a loud argument with a demon living in her purse, but she also noted that Fetch did not explicitly deny that he was misleading her. He simply stated that her suggested reasonings were wrong. The exchange made her even more concerned that perhaps she was being gulled with truthful lies.
She snapped the bag shut with a sudden jerk of her fingers, and felt a scowl come over her face. She looked at the sky. There were clouds rolling in, and behind them, a bank of storm-heads so grey and thick that they looked luminously solid. She felt the pressure of a growing chill wind on her face. There was nothing for it. Either she would have to simply ignore her shadow, and risk the possibility that he was speaking the truth–and perhaps discover the southern coastal roads were indeed overrun with soldiers–or she had to press on and trust.
She chose the later, but with a heavy discomfit in her chest.
“I wonder if I ever shall see home again?” She murmured as she stepped out from behind a screen of leaves and looked carefully up and down the trackway for any sign of boggarts or other soldiers of the north. “I wonder if I shall see familiar faces again?” There were some–and one in particular–who were relying on her return. A nasty little knot of regret and fear settled in her chest. She had wandered a long way from her original path. Her reasons for first leaving home were now so distant, they felt barely real.
But there was nothing else for it.
Onward she must go, and so it was onward that she trudged.