them.'
'We need arms,' somebody answered.
'Belike, but we need men to wield them, too,' the hen-seller replied. 'You were in the fields, and saw them not: a brace of proper rogues, ready for aught. We'd have given the ghosts our own blood had we broiled ourselves with them, I tell you.'
As the peasants withdrew, the argument got too low-voiced for Gerin to follow. The peasant who'd sold him the chicken was right; he and Van would have sold their lives dear. Even so, he was nothing but glad the farmers or robbers or whatever they reckoned themselves to be hadn't found him and his comrade. No matter how dearly you sold your life, you could never buy it back.
The Fox drew back down the path toward his camp. He didn't think the locals would come out again, and he proved right. When Math had traveled a little more than halfway from the horizon to the meridian, he woke Van and told him what had passed.
'Expected as much,' the outlander answered, setting his crimsoncrested helm on his head and adjusting the cheekpieces. 'They had that look to 'em, so they did. Not likely they'll be back, not so late in the night.'
'No.' Gerin got out of armor as Van donned it. 'Wouldn't do to count on that, though.'
'Hardly.' Van's rumbling chuckle had next to no breath behind it. 'Tell you something else, Captain: on the way home, we make sure we roll through this place around noontime, so we're none too close to it the night before or the night after.'
'Can't argue with you.' Gerin yawned enormously. 'Haven't the wit to argue with anything right now. I just want to sleep. If I get killed while you're on watch, I'll never forgive you.'
'Nor have the chance, either,' Van said, chuckling again. Gerin crawled under the blanket, conceding him the last word.
He awoke unmurdered the next morning to the savory smell of toasting sausage. Van had built the fire up from embers and was improvising breakfast. The flames sputtered and hissed as grease dripped down into them. Gerin accepted a sharp stick with a length of hard sausage impaled on it, burned the roof of his mouth when he tried to take a bite while it was still too hot to eat, swore, and then did manage to get the meat down.
Van finished before he did, and harnessed the horses while he was getting into his cuirass and greaves. A jay perched on a branch of a spruce seedling screeched at the outlander all the while. He pointed at it. 'You'd best be quiet-some lands I've been through, the folk reckon songbirds good eating.' As if it understood him, the jay shut up.
'Elabonians eat songbirds now and again,' Gerin said. 'We catch ' em with nets, usually, not with bow and arrow.'
'Aye, that makes sense,' Van said. 'They're so small and swift, you'd need to be a dead shot to hit 'em, and you'd waste a slew of arrows.' He fastened a last strap. 'Come along, Captain. Let's be off.'
The forest deepened and took on a new aspect as they rolled on toward Ikos. Perhaps, Gerin thought, taking on an old aspect was a better way of describing it. Elabonian traders and explorers, back in the days before Ros the Fierce brought the northlands under imperial control, described them as almost unbroken forest from the High Kirs to the Niffet and all the way west to the Orynian Ocean.
Around the Sibyl's shrine at Ikos, that ancient forest survived undisturbed. Some of the gnarled oaks and deep green pines might have been saplings when the men round what would become the City of Elabon were still unlettered barbarians. Some of them might have been saplings before the Kizzuwatnans in their river valleys scratched the world's first letters onto clay tablets and set them in an oven to bake.
Maybe the shaggy beards of moss hanging from many of those trees helped muffle sound, or maybe some lingering power clung to the forest: some of the trees that grew there, at any rate, Gerin had never seen outside these confines. Whatever the reason, the woods were eerily still. Even the squeak and rattle of the wagon's ungreased axles seemed diminished. Far above the roadway, branches from either side interlaced, cutting off a good part of the daylight and turning the rest cool and green and shifting.
'If we could drive the wagon under the sea, it might look like this,' Gerin said.
'Maybe so.' Van kept craning his neck, looking up, down, all around. 'I don't like this place-and I don't think it likes people, either. It wishes we weren't here, and so do I.'
'I'd argue with you, if only I thought you were wrong.' Gerin kept not quite hearing things pacing alongside the road as if tracking the wagon, not quite seeing them no matter how quickly he turned his head toward what he hadn't quite heard.
Van mused, 'I wonder what would happen if, come a dry summer, some lord sent his peasants in here with axes and torches.'
Gerin wondered if the forest and the things that dwelt in it understood Elabonian. He feared they did, for all at once the cover of branches over the road grew thicker and lower, while most of those branches suddenly seemed full of thorns. The very roadway narrowed, with trees-many of them full of thorns, too-crowding close, as if ready to reach out and seize the intruders. Once or twice he was sure he saw eyes staring balefully at him from behind the leaves, but he never got a glimpse of the creatures to which they were attached.
Nervously, he said, 'You were just joking there, weren't you, my friend?'
'What? Oh, aye.' Van was more than bold enough against any human foe, but how could even the boldest man fight a forest? Eyeing the growing number of encroaching branches, he went on, 'All this lovely greenery? In truth, it would be a dreadful shame to peel even one leaf off its stem.'
For a long moment, nothing happened. But just when Gerin was about to grab for his sword and start slashing away at the aroused trees and bushes, everything returned to the way it had been. The sun played through breaks in the overhead canopy, the road widened out again, and the trees went back to being just trees. Whatever had been moving along with the wagon went away, or at least became altogether silent.
'Whew!' Van muttered under his breath. 'Place must have decided I was just joking after all-which I was, of course.' He added that last in a much louder voice.
'Of course you were,' Gerin agreed heartily. Then his voice fell: 'All the same, we'll spend tonight in one of the lodgings round Ikos, not in this wood. That will further prove we mean no harm to the powers here.'
Van's eyes met his. The two men shared one thought: It will also keep anything in the forest that's still angry from coming down on us. The words hung unspoken in the air. Gerin didn't want to give any of those possibly angry things ideas they didn't have already.
The sun was low in the west behind Gerin and Van when they topped a rise and looked down into the valley wherein nested Biton's gleaming white marble shrine and, leading down from within it, the rift in the earth that led to the Sibyl's chamber.
'Last time we came this way, we camped in the woods,' Van said. ' As you say, though, better to pay the scot at one of the inns down there tonight.' A little town had grown up in front of the Sibyl's shrine, catering to those who came to it seeking oracular guidance.
'Aye, you're right.' Gerin sighed. He didn't like silver going without good cause. Come to that, he wasn't overfond of paying silver even with good cause. But he did not want to spend a night in these uncanny woods; they were liable to shelter worse things than ghosts. He twitched the reins and urged the horses forward.
When he'd visited Ikos before, the town in front of the shrine had been packed with Elabonians from both the northlands and south of the High Kirs, Sithonians, Kizzuwatnans, Trokmoi, Shanda nomads, and other folk as well. A big reason Gerin had preferred to camp in the woods then was that all the inns had bulged at the seams.
Now, as the wagon rolled into town, he found the dirt streets all but empty. Several of the inns had closed; a couple of them, by their dilapidated look, had been empty for years. The innkeepers who survived all rushed from their establishments and fell on him and Van with glad cries. Gerin hardly needed to haggle with them; they bid against one another until he got his lodging, supper, and a promise of breakfast for half what he'd expected to pay.
The taproom in the inn was all but deserted. Apart from Gerin and Van, only a couple of locals sat at the tables, drinking ale and telling stories they'd probably all heard a thousand times. The innkeeper brought ale and drinking jacks to his new guests. 'And what would your pleasure for supper be?' he asked, bowing as low as if the Fox had been Hildor III, Emperor of Elabon.
