“What’s this all been for, anyhow? All this splittin’ up and mixin’ up the trail?” Willum asked.
“Confusion,” said Nettie. “That’s what Bear said he wanted. He’s been real strange lately, but he was clear on that. He wanted us to spread as much confusion as possible.”
Across the valley, Precious Wind, Oldwife, and Xulai had traveled well inside the tree line while keeping the Wilderbrook road more or less in sight to their left. Precious Wind rode first, leading the mule, with Xulai and Oldwife behind her. They didn’t hurry. The forest was an old one with little undergrowth to hamper the horses. The ground was deep in dried needles and old leaves; the tall conifers and vast oaks shut out most of the light. The only young trees grew where ancient trees had fallen, heaving up their roots to leave wide, soft patches of disturbed soil, now exposed to the sun and sprung with sapling groves.
They heard birds but seldom saw them. They both heard and saw many scurrying fluff-tailed tree rats, flicking around trunks and chattering at them from branches above piled middens of dismembered cones. Some middens were yards deep around the trunks of old trees, testaments to untold generations of cone eaters who had lived and died in those particular trees.
It was a gloomy place, or would have been, Xulai thought, without the sunlit valley to their left. The nearness of light made it feel almost cozy, like an alcove in a great church, a natural chimney corner, the kind of place to which one could retreat peaceably without being disturbed. Since they had separated from their fellows a little after noon, there would be some hours of travel before they made camp, and Xulai resolved to enjoy them. During the journey, she had not ridden Flaxen at all, for Bear had not wanted her out of reach of her protectors. Even at Woldsgard, she had not ridden for several weeks before they left. Now she resolved to let Flaxen do all the work of following while she herself thought of nothing but the fragrance of the forest, the clean crispness of the air, the gleefulness of the little rivulets that chuckled their way down the mountain toward the Wilderbrook.
After a time they heard the creaking of wheels and saw the others approaching on the road below. Precious Wind clucked to her horse and they walked a bit faster, keeping up with the wagons but going no nearer them. They saw only one habitation during the afternoon, evidently a cooper’s house, for his cooperage lay all about the dwelling: piles of split oak, sheds stacked with hoops and staves and the round cut tops and bottoms of barrels. Smoke from the untended forge drifted into the air among stacks of finished kegs. Of the cooper himself, they saw no sign, though Xulai thought she heard tuneless, possibly drunken singing coming from the house.
When evening came, the wagons pulled off the far side of the road onto a grassy flat and the men made camp near Wilderbrook itself. Precious Wind took her group farther into the forest, found a fallen tree with a hollow beneath it, and set up a camp of her own before starting a seemingly purposeless wander among the trees, muttering to herself.
“What are you looking for?” Xulai wanted to know.
“A place to tether these animals where they can lie down if they want to, but where they can’t be seen from the sky . . .”
“From the sky?”
“Did Xu-i-lok never speak to you of watchers in the sky?”
Xulai stood with her mouth open. Yes, the princess had done that. “She had me put mirror on the windowsills . . .”
“I know, but we can’t attach mirrors to the horses, even if we had mirrors, which we don’t.”
“Then we need to make the horses seem to be something else,” Xulai said in an imperious voice, totally unlike her own. “Tie them, and I’ll take care of it.”
Precious Wind was moved to laughter that reached no farther than her throat. No matter how ridiculous the words had sounded, laughing at that particular voice was utterly impossible. Instead, she moved the animals into a copse of closely set trees, tied them loosely, and provided them with some of the hay and oats the mule had carried before moving away and standing, like a puppet waiting for someone to twitch her strings. It was not a role Precious Wind enjoyed or was accustomed to.
Xulai left the campsite and went into the copse to speak to the horses in earnest tones.
“What did you tell them?” breathed Precious Wind when Xulai returned to her.
“I told them they did not want to be horses, because there’s a monster in the woods that eats horses. The monster doesn’t bother deer, so they think they are deer, three does and a fawn.”
“Deer. Why not rabbits?”
“Night eyes in the sky probably eat rabbits,” Xulai replied in the imperious, unfamiliar voice. “Better a hunter not be tempted down.”
“What if they whinny?”
“Don’t be silly,” Xulai said sharply, haughtily. “Deer don’t whinny.”
Wordlessly, Precious Wind led the way back to the campsite. “No fire,” she murmured. “We might hide the light of it, but not the smell of it.” She waited momentarily for Xulai to say something like “Nonsense, of course we can hide it,” but no such words came. Perhaps, Precious Wind thought, one might find it easier to convince horses they were deer than to convince firewood it wasn’t burning.
They ate cold sandwiches and apples. Precious Wind announced her intention of going into the woods to keep watch.
“Up a tree?” asked Xulai.
“Possibly.”
“Remember what you said about watchers from the sky. In Altamont, that night of the wolves, there were hunting birds in the sky. Wherever you climb, do it a considerable distance
