Soon enough the thick grasses grew thinner. Tussock became more common than grass. In the low lying areas shallow meres appeared, mirror-like and starkly blue, reflecting the sky above.
In one sheltered declivity, she discovered hundreds of brown butterflies with burnt orange flashes of colour inside their wings, dancing over the tussocky patches. There were no signs of farming, though she did notice long furrows where peat had been cut sometime in the past. The boulders she passed, lying about the place, these bore carving marks from a long age in the past. One or two of the old carvings might have been people with crowns of antlers on their heads–but they were so crude and so weatherworn, it was hard to be sure.
Still, there were no signs of human life, and still she followed Fetch’s instructions, hissing and snarling out of the bag at her side. Ahead of her, a dark olive-green and black smudge of canopy appeared. The path turned and went that way, towards the woods. Gradually, the trees grew nearer.
When Caewen reached the scrubby woods, she saw a sight that would stay with her in her memory for years and years.
“Oh, it’s the little puckle-dragons. Look.”
“Tsssch. Can’t look. Sunlight. Keep walking. The drakes infest the wood. You might as well be cooing over a mob of scruffy foxes.” Fetch was still clearly unhappy.
But she did pause and look at them. These were her first wild puckle-dragons–and they were beautiful. They shot about the canopy like brilliant-hued meteors of colour, chirruping and singing, in a way not very unlike birds. The creatures avoided Caewen, and after she had her fill gazing at them, she ignored them too, wondering only briefly at their beauty, tucking away the image in her memory, and pressing on uphill.
She still had a robber-knight to find and she did not want to be up in these wilds after dark.
The trees gave way. Caewen entered that rockier landscape: the same she had seen from a distance below. By now, it was past noon and she had to wonder if she might need to make camp on the way back.
That seemed unpromising. What if the Old King came out again? Fetch would flee in a moment, but what would she do? Or would the storm-thing even notice her, or care?
Something to think about, but she would worry about it later.
The strip of rocky landscape proved to be weird and strange. Massive granite boulders littered the landscape, many of them bigger than houses, some bigger than fortresses. They were weather-smoothed and full of rifts and water-cuttings, so that moving through them was like moving through a maze. She often found herself forced to pick a way around the rocks, or climb over them onto vast flat surfaces spotted with small water-filled holes in the rock, or weave in and out of fallen slabs. From a distance, many of the boulders looked like elbows or heads or noses or rumps sticking up out of the earth, and she could see how stories about giants in the earth might have started. They certainly looked like vast beings, turned to stone as a punishment for crimes long forgotten.
It was also clear to her why no tracker had been able to find the path. Now and then she did see a footprint in the crumbly dry soil between rocks, but so much of the path led over bare rock that a person would need to find the trail first, and then use hounds. How the man got his horse up and down was a mystery to her. Maybe he secretly stabled it somewhere with an accomplice in the farmed lands? Or maybe there was another easier way that Fetch had not discovered?
Indeed, the path was so twisted and concealed that there was no warning when Caewen rounded a big stone and found herself looking at a ruined keep atop a hill. It was an ancient design, much-repaired, roofless, and perched improbably on an outcrop over a deep ravine. The approach was up an exposed slope. Archers would pick any attacker off with ease.
Caewen crouched and watched the keep for a time. Minutes passed. Shadows cast by tussocks swayed in the very light breeze. She saw no movement and no sign of guards. If she were lucky, the knight and his men might have gotten so used to their safe seclusion that they were lazy about keeping watch. She moved stealthily from rock to rock, from shadow to shadow, and flattened herself against a cliff wherever there was no other cover to hand.
Looking more closely at the approach she spied two standing stones, both of them decorated with bloody deer skins. Flies were buzzing around both of them. The smell of sickly rot was just discernible even at the distance. It struck her that if these men were only setting up the skins to frighten the farmers and villagers, then they probably wouldn’t have a need to decorate stones so close to home.
“Well,” she said to herself softly. “H’m…”
To the westward of the fortress a straggle of trees clung to the cliff. It looked to Caewen as if she might be able to climb up that way. But just as she was about to move, Fetch spoke. “Do you feel that?”
“No. What?”
“Tsch. Tssss… I don’t know for certain, for certain, but there’s a pall of magic here. Someone has worked a sorcery. Recently, too.”
“But you said nothing about sorceries or magery last night?”
He stirred within the bag. “I didn’t feel any, but I didn’t stick my nose into the ruin. And by the time I found my way here, the presence was starting to grow and brood above me. I was rather distracted and busy, once it started to pay attention to me. Tssssss. I might have missed it, if there’s a magician here.”
Caewen pondered this. “So we have a robber-knight who never did anything rebellious in his life, but then he revolts without warning, and without any apparent hope of success. There is an old power dwelling up here in the hills and it wanders all over the valley. The Old King. Storms. Stones dressed with bloody deer skins. Antlers. Jagged. Like lightning. Does any of this mean anything to you?”
“Old, bleak magic,” hissed Fetch. “That’s all. There are powers in the earth, in the sky, in the rivers and the waters wild. Folk used to worship them as gods, tssch, and maybe some of them were gods, or something akin to gods. But the thing that dwells here–it’s a terrible, old, awful god if it’s a god at all. I do not like this place, Caewen, o’ my mistress, Caewen. Tsssch. I do not.”
“Let’s not announce ourselves then. I’m going to climb up that slope. There are trees and roots. Should be easy. I can reach the top without being seen.”
“Tsch. And then?”
“Swordplay and death, I suppose. We’ll attempt to take the Lord Rawn alive for trial. The others? Drive them off, if possible. Kill them, if we must. Whatever must be done. It’s all just justice in the end, isn’t it?”
“You sound like a judge. Tsch.”
She did not answer, but shrugged.
Caewen followed a path around the base of the bluff, carefully avoiding any line of sight from above. In the sunlit glow of the western flank of stone, she was able to find enough cracks and ridges, roots, branches and tough shrubs to make for a slow but safe climb up the rock face. Once she had gone a little ways, she reached the concealment of several massive old mountain ashes that clung to thin soil with tight roots. In several places she found herself able to get a good view, west and north and sometimes even to the east and south, when she moved a little bit around the rocks and peered that way. In all directions was a wilderness of hills and rocks. Everything was sunlit, dusky-glowing and golden in the afternoon light. It was quietly beautiful really. To the south-east she noted a tall, conical hill, which dominated the landscape in that direction and was about a day’s walk off. It had a jagged top and Caewen wondered if there were ruins atop it as well. There was nothing else of note in the landscape. No smoke fires. No signs of men encamped. If there were brigands about, they must be up in the fortress.
Finally, Caewen was close enough to the top that one last scramble would put her over the lip of a stone battlement.
But, again, here she paused.
Her newfound focus of mind brought with it a greater abundance of caution than she had ever made use of in the past.
If she was going to get herself into a fight, she needed to recover from the climb. So, she allowed herself to rest properly. Eventually, above her head, she noticed a soft chirruping noise. Caewen craned her head back and saw that one of the bright-coloured puckle-dragons was looking down at her from the branches, all autumnal in its scales of red and ochre. It puffed out its throat in a beard of spines and made a roaring squawk at her, showing off the crimson and yellow innards of its mouth and throat as it did. There was a halo of rough twigs in a nearby crook.
“I’m not after your nest, nor your young,” said Caewen softly. “Shoo. Go away.”
It squawked angrily, and did not make a move to leave. But neither did it make a move to attack or come closer. That was good at least. The creature was larger than a dog, and just big enough to be at least a little threatening. A pack of them together might be really frightening.
When she felt recovered, Caewen stood, eliciting another angry squabble from the dragonet. She stole away from the tree to avoid aggravating it further. From ledge-to-ledge she stepped, and with a single bound, sword in hand, she vaulted over a low battlement and onto a wide open stone flat. She was in clear view of the doorway into the keep. It was large, open and unguarded.
“Oh, I do not like this,” said Caewen.