A man’s far-off voice sounded resonant and clear from someplace ahead of us. “Hurry up! I’ve been smelling you for the past hour.” The man laughed. “You smell like Lutigan’s asshole! Stay on the left side of the path. That’s important!”
I shouted, “Who are you? And how do we know that walking on the left won’t kill us all?”
The man laughed again, so amused that I almost wanted to laugh with him. “If you’re cowed by a stretch of moist dirt, then you should go home. You’re not brave enough to eat snakes with me.”
I didn’t call him a lousy son of a bitch or anything like that. Instead, I examined everything around us, starting with the tree limbs. Less than a minute later, I found it, a small, complicated nest of strings woven into tree branches twenty feet above us. I hissed at Halla, pointed up, and mouthed the word, “Hex.”
Most regular people talked about hexes and witches quite a bit. Sorcerers were mere rumor to them, but they likely knew a few witches, and popular thinking had witches running around hexing people and animals and just about anything they chose.
The notion that witches hexed things was crap. Witches were folks who understood a lot about how things worked and learned a great number of practical things. They performed magic that was tied into the world, less powerful than sorcery. No witch could burn a sailing ship to ash within a few minutes. On the other hand, witches didn’t rely on the gods for power. At times, I thought of them with great envy.
The people who made hexes called themselves “hexers.” They claimed it was a simple and dignified term. I thought it was damned unimaginative, but they didn’t ask me. They relied on inborn ability, craftsmanship, and death—specifically, pulling the guts out of creatures such as rabbits and roosters.
Some people think that sounds awful, but not me. Compared to the things I’ve done to gain magical power, disemboweling a little bunny rabbit is wholesome.
A hex was a complex object, like a puzzle or a drawing built to create a certain effect. A hex scratched onto a stove could make food taste better. A different hex hidden in a cupboard could make every person who walked past stub their toe. Those were simple hexes.
More complicated hexes might give people nightmares, keep a baby from crying, or blind a person for a while. If this snake-cooking fellow had woven the hex above us so he could listen through it, that was a mighty crafty hex.
The man shouted, “Have you drowned? If not, you can come on and share a meal with me, or you can go back the way you came.” The voice laughed. “Or you can sit yourselves down right there and suck swamp grass. I don’t recommend that. Leeches hide among the grass blades.”
Halla scratched her chin. “I like snake.”
I followed her down the left side of the path.
FOURTEEN
The path sank underwater twice in the next ten minutes, but it resurfaced before we wandered off it and drowned. I counted three hexes aimed at the right side of the path, and I might have overlooked some. Along the way, the smells of woodsmoke and cooking meat began weaving into the mushy scent of swamp rot.
We stumbled onto a sunlit mound of semidry earth, big enough for a whitewashed cottage, two small, red outbuildings, and a chicken coop. A fire and a clay oven stood in the center of it all, while tight stacks of crates snugged up against the outbuilding walls. It might all have been picked up from a prosperous town and dropped there.
A rangy, graying man taller than Halla beamed as he ambled toward us. He wiped his hands with a white rag and then stuffed it into his leather apron. A shaggy brown hound trotted along behind him. The only weapon I saw was a tall bow leaning against the cottage, although the man held a long smith’s hammer.
“Welcome to the Button! I’m Peck.” He laughed as he stopped a polite distance from us.
Bea pushed past me. “Has anybody brought some stolen children through here?”
Halla and I both stared at her.
She waved us away with one hand. “Why spend an hour standing around with Bib claiming some ridiculous name and trying to find things out but not ask questions? Let’s get on with it.”
Peck chuckled. “This sort of thing is what made me decide to be a hermit. That and the amphibians. Sorry, I didn’t see any stolen children. Please stay for supper with me before you keep on chasing them, though.”
I glanced at Halla, and she gave me a tiny nod. I made a face and shook my head in response.
Turning to Peck, I said, “That is a kind offer, but I prefer not to eat snakes off a hexed plate.” I waved and walked straight past him. “We’ll go on our way and leave your supper uninterrupted.”
Whistler muttered, “The bacon I’m carrying around has almost putrefied.”
Peck caught up and fell in beside me as I walked. “I understand, and it seems like forever since I met anyone who knew anything about hexes. Stay, and we can discuss learned matters. You can lay your food straight onto the bare table if you like.”
I snorted. “If you’re so anxious for companionship, why do you live in the middle of a damn swamp?”
“Are you yourself a hexer?” Peck asked, ignoring my question. “Or perhaps a sorcerer?”
“No, I carve wooden legs for a living.” I jerked my thumb back at the others. “But all of my friends here are sorcerers.”
Halla gazed across me at Peck as we walked past the cottage. “We are not concerned with your hexes. But the snake smells good. Bib . . .” She stared at me and then at the manacles on my wrists.
Peck nodded at the manacles. “I wanted to ask you the story of those, I admit, but I didn’t want to come
