When had my breathing become so unsteady? I hadn't been running, but so many shocks tossed into my path one after the next made me dizzy. Ahead, the stripling began tapping out a pattern on the drum as if it were a protective shield.
'Peace to you,' I said, in the greeting of the countryside, which I'd read about in Daniel Hassi Barahal's journals. 'Do you have peace, friend?'
The old man chuckled. 'I have peace, thanks to my mother who raised me. And you?'
'And me, I am fine, thanks to-ah-my power as a woman.' Although at the moment it was difficult to know what power that could be. 'And the people of your household, they also?'
'There is no trouble. And your people?'
This could go on for a while, and the night was advancing, and I was standing in one place rather than putting miles between me and those who wanted to kill me. Despite knowing there were certain forms, I could not bring myself to lie about 'my people' even for the sake of courtesy, so I chanced rudeness. 'Forgive my hasty words, but we are out late on an ill-omened night. I am called Catherine. Have you a name to share?'
'In my house, I am called Father,' replied the old man with a grin that made me smile. 'As for a stranger met on the road, you may call me Mamadi.'
The tall man spoke with more impatience. 'In my house, I am called Duvai. We are hunters, going home much later than we meant to. Hallows Night is no night to wander the forest.'
At least they weren't answering questions with questions!
A howl rose, but neither reacted; I wasn't sure they heard. Maybe the sound had reached me on a wind blowing between the worlds, although the branches here did not stir.
'Best to keep moving,' said the old man, setting off after the taper, now almost out of sight among the trees, and the faint patter of the drummer. The tall man nodded at me politely and followed his elder.
As they walked away, I wondered what horn had summoned the eru and the coachman. Who were their masters? The cold sank deeper and the night grew darker. There was a taste on the air that truly frightened me; the breath of wolves warmed my neck. I sheathed my sword and followed, wishing my fur cloak was a spirit mantle in truth, if it would keep me warmer. They did not slow their pace or offer any comment as we trekked at a brisk stride through the forest, catching up with the others. The charms and amulets woven onto their clothing clattered quietly.
Once again there rose on the wind a howl, and this time the hunters reacted; they spoke bantering words between their party, joking, it seemed, at the expense of the nervous stripling. They spoke a manner of half-breed language that took some part from the common bastard Latin known throughout the north but that was otherwise a tartan of Celtic and Mande. I could not specifically understand them, and certainly could not speak in their way, but I could follow parts of it, because I heard similar dialects spoken between pupils at the academy. It seemed this was the lad's first expedition into the bush, shepherded by experienced men, and because he had survived it under their supervision, naturally they were teasing him.
I said to the tall man's back, 'When you say you hunted in the bush, do you mean you actually crossed into the spirit world, went hunting, and came back? I thought no mortal men could do that.'
'Flowers plucked carelessly soon wither,' he said in the common speech.
'I beg pardon if my words seem carelessly chosen, like thoughtlessly plucked flowers,' I replied, 'but on a night like this, and in such circumstances as we have met, you can surely understand why I would ask.'
'I take you for city bred, by your clothing and your manner. Hunters walked into the bush long before others did. Even before djeliw or blacksmiths. Long before there were cold mages. What was never known to those who have not learned history can be excused.'
At the mention of cold mages, I thought his tone shaded toward ice. 'If you're from nearby,' I continued, still probing, 'then your people are surely bound to a mage House, for there is such a House close by here, is there not?'
My not-so-innocuous query evidently offended him, because he lengthened his stride, and although I am tall, I had to hasten to keep up. On any other night, I would have forged forward on my own, but no one raised in the north leaves their home after dark on Hallows Night. No one. Not even the scholars who tut-tutted as with their intellectual scalpels they dissected the unsophisticated folk beliefs of ignorant villagers.
Woodland gave way to stretches of pasture and columns of orchard to the stubble of hayfields and strips of plowed fields that had been harvested weeks ago. We plunged into a grove of black pine and halted at the base of a tree whose girth proclaimed it a venerable giant. Its trunk was hung all over with animal horns. The tall man waved at me to step back as, by the light of the wavering taper, they made a half circle and sang more than spoke words while the old man took his knife and nicked the shoulder of the dead beast they carried. Blood trickled sluggishly to dribble at the base of one of the trees. A pressure as of an invisible hand or a flavor as of quivering life or a smell and sound made my head ache. Then it was gone, and wind breathed through the trees. I shuddered and was glad to see them start forward again, for there was power here I did not understand, and I did not want to be too close to it.
A howl rose again, and for the first time I understood it was not the voice of wolves but of some other hunter entirely, something far more dangerous. I quickened my steps until I walked practically on the heels of the tall man, but he deigned not to notice me.
We crossed out of the pine grove. As we walked along the shore of a pond skinned with ice, the stripling fell back to walk alongside me.
'Duvai thinks you're a spirit woman who followed us out of the bush,' he confided, 'but if that's so, then you would be beautiful and you wouldn't be shivering andlook so tired.'
'My thanks,' I said with as much sarcasm as I could muster in my tired and unbeautiful state, but then I laughed, because I was accustomed to lads of just this age at the academy. While it was only the bold ones who talked this way with the older pupils, I was pretty sure they all thought the same dreadfully tiresome things.
'My apologies,' he muttered, chin dipping; most likely he was blushing. 'But Mamadi says you have human blood, like us.'
I knew how to fence. I took a chance at a counterstrike. 'So this is your first trip into the bush? Do the hunters of your village often cross into the spirit world?'
'Oh, no!' The young who are male can never resist showing off their knowledge, no doubt because they possess so little. 'The veil between the worlds thins in the days leading up to Hallows Night. A very powerful and clever hunter will know where to find the crossroads that lie between the worlds. Even for him it will be a very dangerous crossing-'
He realized he had said too much. With a grunt meant, perhaps, to be some manner of excuse for breaking off the conversation so abruptly, he loped forward to the front of the procession to put as much distance between him and me as he could. The old man chuckled, although I'd thought him too far away to hear.
The lake ended in reed-choked shallows netted with ice. As we made our way down a fenced slope next to a stream, I realized I had seen this place before. A village spread across the
hollow below. The walls and houses of its compounds looked much like the interior of a beehive, many-celled and complex. Two stockades ringed the village. The outer separated the village from the fields, and the inner separated the residential houses from the ring of gardens, work sheds, and other shelters. Torches marked the gates of each stockade. I had seen this village from the carriage when we passed; it was the only place in all that long journey Andevai had shown any sort of interest in. We were close to the toll road, although I could discern no trace of it in the darkness. Maybe I should have run, but it was night and it was breathtakingly cold, and besides all that, the air breathed its own warning of danger. Alone on Hallows Night, with no fire and nothing more than the clothes I wore and my sword, how could I hope to survive? The hunt rides.
Outside the stockade, our party was greeted by a group of young men and women putting the finishing touches on a heap of debris-wood, dry dead leaves, desiccated undergrowth- piled just beyond the entry gate. We passed through the open gate to the outer stockade. Inside, on a path leading between gardens, the men conferred in low voices and then the party split up. The old man and the other four adult men with the beast headed off to a shelter where coals glowed in a damped-down hearth fire. Duvai gestured to me, and with the stripling almost bouncing in his excitement, we headed for the inner gate. Two young men armed with spears and longbows-no muskets, of course, in territory beholden to a House-stood at the inner gate.
'Peace to you. How are you all?' I asked the guards as we came up.
'Well. We are well thanks to the mother who raised us,' they mumbled, glancing at the tall man as if for
