The room that Caewen was shown to was pleasant enough. The elderly ladies fussed and gossiped amongst themselves, seemingly unaware of their guest’s discomfort.
Caewen kept protesting tiredness, and eventually, she was left alone. Somewhat to her surprise, the door sported a heavy bolt of flaky black iron on the inside. Caewen slid it shut tight, feeling it grind and squeak as she did so. It seemed secure, though Caewen was quite certain that if Matty Nutch wanted to enter the room in the middle of the night, a locked door, secure or not, would make no difference. She decided to push a heavy chest up against the door too. She felt both silly and sensible as she heaved the lumbering chest across the floor, sliding it on a small rug to muffle the noise. But when it was in place, she had to admit that she did feel better.
This done, Caewen made herself ready for sleep. It was a very nice bed. Ornately carven with more of those small dragonets in polished wooden coils, laid heavily with a soft feather mattress and softer quilt.
A small, shadowy head poked from the satchel, where she had hung it by the strap over the end of a chair. “Tsck. So you plan to sleep tonight?”
A yawn snatched her first word away. She worked her lips around it, and managed to say, “I’m not sure I’ve much choice. Will you keep watch?”
“I”m not sure I’ve much choice,” replied Fetch. After a pause, he said, “You know, I can feel your other self. She hasn’t gone very far away–or maybe she has come back again? We should be careful on the road.”
“Aren’t we always?”
“No.”
“You’re as bad as Dapple.” She blinked away tiredness. “I wonder how he is doing? Him and Ode should be close to Brae now. I hope they didn’t have any trouble.”
Fetch leapt down from his perch and stalked a little circle on the floor, like a restless ferret made of shadows and soft darkness. “Your Dapplegrim tends to find trouble where none is looking for him.”
“That’s a bit unfair. He’s much more sensible than I am, for one.”
“Tssch. But he’s not very sensible, or else he would not have ended up as your travelling companion. Would he?”
“And what does that make you, Fetch?”
A small, performative sigh crept from the long thin shadow. “Doubly foolish, I suppose. Tsk.”
“But you will watch tonight?”
He nodded.
Caewen smiled, rolled over and immediately found herself struggling against exhaustion and a sense of being dragged down into sleep and dream. She tried to think over her plans for tomorrow, but her thoughts were fractured and flimsy. They tattered away and the hollow, warm blackness of sleep took her.
###
For awhile Fetch watched her. He counted her breaths, noticing as they slowed and slowed.
When he was sure she was deeply asleep, he turned about where he stood and stretched and shrugged off some of the cramped feeling of being bundled up inside a little bag all day.
He leapt to the windowsill.
The rainclouds had mostly scudded off westward now. Mottled moonlight stained the grey and silver night-world. Noises of nocturnal creatures came subtly to his ears. Small scritchings of mice. The sound of a spider weaving its web. The soft noise of an owl turning its head. Farther off, Fetch could hear foxes and badgers too. And fainter–very faint–a noise not unlike chanting, rising and falling, in ritual intonations.
There was no hint of the magician or his ashen hounds. Either the man and his bound demons were far away, or he had hidden the creatures so well that Fetch could not detect them. He took a risk on the former, and slid sideways through a tiny fraction of a gap between window and frame. On the other side, Fetch breathed deep of the dark, cold air. He felt the moonlight fall and press against his skin like a gentle rush of delight. His small whiskers knew the wafting drifting currents.
All was silent. All was still.
Those who had been left behind, either too elderly or too young to make the trek over benighted fields to the wedding shrine, were all quite still. Sleep had settled in the village.
Fetch whisked off into the darkness. He considered dancing in and out of the dreams of the left-behind sleepers, the old ladies and the mothers with their babes, but he did not expect to find anything of interest there. And he had other business.
Into the night he jumped, bounding and creeping, whispering over grassy moonlit expanses, dodging under looming trees, so full of night-shadow they seemed to have been twisted out of huge slabs of raw, featureless wrought iron. He crossed the nearby fields and sheep folds in this way, coming at last to a place where trees stood thicker and more dense.
He spoke to the darkness. “Come out, my friends.” There was a stirring of noise in the underbrush. Dry leaves scrunching underfoot. “Hurry and listen. We have much to speak of, and there are still others I must speak to before the dawn is risen.”
A face emerged from darkness, round and wild, all shaggy with unkempt hair. Its eyes stared, unblinking. A voice spoke from unlovely lips. “Speak, shadowling. Speak. We will listen.”