The old road to Eastreach. The forests near Oakhurst. Two days’ journey east of Crownhaven.
“No servants,” said Greaves.
He stood on a barrel at the Academy gate, in the first grey light, cup in hand, looking down at sixty-four students standing before him with bundles and bags and, in a few cases, very large chests.
“No horses. No carriages. No porters. Everyone carries what they need, and whoever takes more than they can carry will learn on the way what they don’t need.” His gaze wandered to a count’s son from the south, beside whom stood a brass-bound chest that probably weighed more than Milo. “You have until the first bell to repack, Lord Ashbury. After that the chest goes back to your room, and you go with what you’ve got in your pockets.”
The count’s son opened his mouth. Greaves took a sip.
The count’s son shut his mouth again.
Ren had only his bundle. The coat, the dwarven sword on his back, a blanket, a waterskin, bread and dried meat for three days, a knife, flint and tinder, although he needed neither. And right at the bottom, wrapped in a cloth, the rag with Nora’s forge grease. It was still half full.
Beside him stood Milo, trying to close a pack from which things were bulging on every side.
“What’s in there?”
“Important things.”
“Milo.”
“A second blanket. In case the first one gets wet. A third blanket, in case both get wet. A book about edible mushrooms. A book about inedible mushrooms, so I can compare. Two hats.”
“Two hats?”
“What if one blows away?” Milo looked at him as if it were obvious. “I’m wind, Ren. Things are always blowing away on me.”
Nora came from the other side of the gate, a narrow, tight bundle on her back that looked as if someone had packed it with a ruler. She cast a single glance at Milo’s pack.
“One hat.” She counted on her fingers. “One blanket. One book.”
“But –”
“One book.”
Milo sighed deeply, as if a child had been taken from him, and began to unpack.
Ren looked out over the crowd.
Emilia Winterhall stood alone at the edge, beside a pillar, a grey bundle over her shoulder no bigger than his. She wore no silk. She wore a plain dark-blue riding cloak, sturdy boots and leather gloves, and her white hair was braided into a plait and tucked under her hood. She looked like a forester’s daughter.
Except for the way she stood. That always gave her away.
She noticed him looking. For a moment they looked at each other, across the whole court. Then she pulled her hood lower and looked elsewhere.
For two days they walked east.
The old road to Eastreach was broad and paved, at least at first, and then narrower and muddier, and on the second day no more than a track with two deep wheel ruts and grass growing between them. Fields lay on either side, then pastures, then the first copses, then real forests, dark and old, with trees standing so close that the light turned green between them.
Ren knew this road.
Not this stretch. But he had walked it, a few weeks ago, with Milo and Owen and a caravan full of wool, only in the other direction. And before that, seven years ago, he had travelled it in a carriage with drawn curtains, in the opposite direction, on the way to Crownhaven, to a name day, with a father who had explained the constellations to him on the journey.
He did not often look at the road. He looked at the trees.
The groups did not walk together. Greaves had sent them off at intervals, one after another, with a quarter of an hour between, and group seven was somewhere in the middle. Ahead of them, sometimes visible beyond a bend, walked group six, with Bea, who sang so loudly that Milo grimaced every time. Behind them group eight, with Julian Thorne, who complained about everything, but with so much pleasure that it did not sound like complaining.
Cedric was in group twelve. Far behind. Ren had studied the list closely.
Emilia walked in front.
She had not asked. She had not put it to a vote. On the first morning, when the four of them had faced each other for the first time at the gate, she had simply taken the map Greaves gave each group and set off. Milo had looked at Ren. Ren had shrugged. Nora had rolled her eyes.
They had followed her.
On the first evening, by a stream, as they made camp, Nora had said: “We could have taken the path over the hill. It would have been shorter.”
“The hill was pasture.” Emilia had not looked up. She had spread out her blanket, neat and straight. “Pasture has fences. Fences have farmers. Farmers have dogs. I had no wish to argue right of way with a farm dog.”
Nora had thought about that. Then she had nodded. Once. And after that she had sat down at the fire with her back to Emilia and not said another word, which in Nora’s case, as Ren knew by now, was almost a sign of respect.
Milo had tried to light the fire. Three times. With flint and tinder, because he was wind and not fire, and because he refused to ask Ren.
On the fourth attempt Emilia had said: “Harlow. Please.”
Ren had held out his hand. A small yellow flame had leapt from his fingers into the kindling, and it had caught at once.
“Thank you,” Emilia had said.
It was the first time she had thanked him for anything. He had not known what to say to that. So he had said nothing.
Oakhurst was a village at the edge of the forest, with a mill, an inn called The Green Stag and perhaps forty houses. Greaves and Mistress Mabry had set up a camp on the meadow behind the mill, with three large tents and a fire, and when all sixteen groups had arrived on the evening of the second day, Greaves climbed onto a barrel again.
This time he had no cup.
“Behind me lies the Forest of Oakhurst.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “It’s big. It’s old. It runs five days’ march east from here, to the hills of Eastreach, and there are no roads in it, no villages and no inns.” He held up a map. “Every group has this map. Three stones are marked on it. Old boundary stones, from the time when dukes still quarrelled here over who owned the forest. At each stone there’s a box. In each box there are tokens. You take one. One. Whoever takes two will regret it.”
A few people laughed. Greaves waited until they stopped.
“You have five days. On the evening of the fifth day you’re back here, with three tokens, or you’re not. You hunt what you want to eat. You find water where you find it. You sleep where you lie down. You quarrel as much as you like, as long as you don’t kill each other.” He looked out over their heads. “Mistress Mabry and I will patrol the edge of the forest with the guards. Anyone in trouble shoots a spark into the sky. A red fire, a white wind, whatever you’ve got. We’ll come.”
Then he hesitated.
It was only a brief hesitation. A breath. But Ren had heard Greaves speak often enough by now to know that he never hesitated.
“And one more thing.” Greaves spoke more slowly. “The miller here told me this afternoon that they’ve been missing sheep this spring. Three farmers at the edge of the forest. Twelve sheep, two calves and an ox. They say it’s wolves.”
A murmur went through the crowd. Not frightened. Amused, rather. Wolves. They were mages. They were the best of three hundred. What was a wolf?
“An ox,” Greaves repeated. He did not look amused. “Wolves don’t take oxen while there are still sheep. So stay together. Never all sleep at the same time. And if you see tracks you don’t like, you don’t go and look. You go away.”
He stepped down from the barrel.
“Tomorrow at sunrise. Group one first.”
On the first day in the forest they found the first stone.
It was not hard. Emilia read the map as if she had been reading maps all her life, and perhaps she had. Nora found water, a little stream she heard long before the others did, because, as she said, she felt the earth under her feet and the earth told her where it was damp. Milo climbed a tree to see over the crowns, and sent a gust through the leaves to blow the way ahead clear, and once nearly fell down, and laughed.
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And Ren read the forest.
He did not do it on purpose. He did it because Owen had taught him, for seven winters, in the woods around Fernwick, where there were orcs and wolves and sometimes worse. Here a broken twig, at knee height, fresh: a deer. There, in the mud by the stream, the tracks of a badger. A fox’s earth under a root. Scratch marks on a beech, high up, where a bear had rubbed its back, a year ago or more.
“How do you know all that?” asked Milo, when Ren showed him the scratch marks.
“My uncle was a hunter.”
“I thought he was a soldier.”
Emilia walked in front and said nothing. But Ren saw her turn her head a little whenever he spoke. She was listening.
They found the stone in the afternoon. It stood in a small clearing, grey and crooked and overgrown with moss, so old that you could hardly read the marks on it any more. Beside it, under a piece of tarred linen, stood a box. In it lay sixteen brass tokens, each as big as a thumbnail, stamped with a one.
Four were already gone.
“We’re fifth,” Nora observed.
“We’re fifth here.” Emilia took a token and put it in her pocket. “That doesn’t mean we’ll be fifth at the end.”
On the second day they found the deer.
It was Milo who smelled it first. He stopped in the middle of the path, his nose in the air like a dog’s, and said: “Can you smell that?”
They could smell it. Sweet and heavy and wrong.
The deer lay in a hollow beneath an old oak, or what was left of it did. It had not been a small deer. A stag, a young one, with antlers that had just begun to grow. It lay on its side, and something had torn its belly open with a single stroke, from the chest to the hind legs. The ribs stood open like the timbers of a boat. Most of what had been inside was gone.
Milo turned away. Nora stayed where she was, arms folded, but her face was white beneath the soot she never quite got off.
Emilia stepped closer.
So did Ren.
“Wolves,” said Emilia. She said it calmly, but she said it the way you say a word you want to believe. “Greaves said there are wolves.”
Ren did not answer. He knelt beside the carcass. He looked at the wound. He looked at the ground.
Then he looked at the print in the mud, an arm’s length from the stag’s hind leg.
He laid his hand in it. Flat, fingers spread.
His hand fitted into it twice.
“Harlow?”
Ren stood up. He wiped his hand on his breeches. He looked around, slowly, in every direction, the way Owen had taught him to when you had found something you did not understand. First the trees. Then the shadows between the trees. Then the places where the shadows were too thick.
Nothing. Only the forest. A woodpecker, somewhere far off. The wind rushing in the crowns.
“It’s a wolf.” He only said it after a long pause. “A big one.”
“How big?”
He looked at her. She stood beside the carcass, one hand on her belt, and her eyes were very calm and very alert.
“Big enough to take an ox,” he said, “while there are still sheep.”
Emilia looked at the print. Then at him.
“We go on.” Her voice brooked no argument. “North, round the hollow. To the second stone. And tonight we keep watch in pairs.”
No one argued.
They did not find the second stone that day.
They made camp in a small dip between three large boulders that Nora had chosen because, as she said, you could only attack boulders from one side. Ren made the fire. Milo cooked, or tried to, a soup of dried meat and the mushrooms from his book, which he had brought after all, and Nora ate two spoonfuls of it and said she would rather starve.
Then Emilia set the watches.
“Callan and Fairweather until midnight. Harlow and I after.”
Milo opened his mouth. Nora stepped discreetly on his foot. Milo shut his mouth again.
At midnight Nora woke him with a hand on his shoulder.
“Nothing,” she whispered. “Only owls. And Milo, talking.”
“In his sleep?”
“Awake. The whole time. About mushrooms.”
She dropped onto her blanket and was asleep before Ren had fully sat up.
Emilia was already sitting by the fire. She had pushed back her hood, and her plait lay over her shoulder, white in the red light of the embers. She had drawn up her knees and wrapped her arms around them and was looking into the flames.
Ren sat down opposite her. With his back to the rock. Facing the trees.
For a while neither of them said anything.
The forest was full of sounds. The cracking of branches. The rustling of small animals in the leaves. An owl, somewhere above them, giving the same call again and again, two notes, one high and one low. Milo, mumbling something in his sleep that sounded like chanterelle.
“You are always looking around,” Emilia said suddenly.
Ren looked at her.
“At the market. At the Touchstone. In the circle. Now.” She did not look up from the flames. “You always sit with your back to the wall. You always walk so that you can see the way out. Callan has noticed it too. She says you are like a watchdog.”
“I know. She told me.”
“Why?”
He thought about what to answer. A lie would have been easy. There are orcs in Fernwick. You get used to it. That was even true.
“Because once I didn’t look,” he said instead. “And someone died.”
He did not know why he said it. He had never told anyone. Not even Owen, who knew anyway.
Emilia raised her head and looked at him. For a long time. The fire was reflected in her eyes, red and gold in the grey-blue.
“Who?”
“My mother.”
She was silent. She did not ask further. And Ren was more grateful to her for that than he could have said.
“Mine is alive.” It came after a while, quietly. “She mostly stands at the window. All through my childhood she stood at the window when I came into the room, looking out. I never found out at what.” She rested her chin on her knees. “Sometimes I think she sees nothing at all. She only stands there so she doesn’t have to look at me.”
Ren said nothing.
“That was unbecoming.” Emilia straightened up with a jerk, as if she had caught herself at something. “Forget I said it.”
“Already forgotten.”
“Don’t lie.” New chapters come out on g.com first.
“You say that a lot.”
“You lie a lot.”
He looked at her. She looked back. And then, quite suddenly, she laughed. Not loudly. A short, surprised laugh that escaped her before she could stop it, and that she hid at once behind her hand.
It was the first time he had heard her laugh.
Not in seven years. The first time ever. At the fountain back then she had not laughed. At the fountain she had looked angry, and then proud, and then, when he held out his hand, she had said she needed no help.
“You really are strange, Harlow,” she said behind her hand.
“People tell me that a lot.”
Later, when the fire had burned down and Ren was laying a new branch on it, he saw that she was holding something in her hands.
She was turning it between her fingers without looking, the way you turn something you have owned for a very long time and whose shape you know by heart. A little thing of wood, no longer than her finger. Painted, once. The paint was worn away in many places.
Ren saw it, and the world stood still.
A horseman. A little wooden horseman on a horse that had lost a hind leg and stood on three legs. The rider wore a black cloak. And on his shield, tiny, painted with a brush that could only have had three hairs, a silver bird.
A raven.
He had broken the horse himself. At six. He had struck it against the mantelpiece, in a great battle against the dragons who lived in the library, and had cried when the leg broke off, and his mother had said a knight was still a knight on three legs. After that it had been his favourite knight. He had called him Sir Threelegs.
He had left him with the whole regiment on the windowsill of his room in the west tower, on the morning they set out for Crownhaven. Because he had believed he would be home again in a week.
“What is that?”
He heard his own voice. It sounded strange. Too calm. Far too calm.
Emilia looked at her hand as if she had forgotten she was holding something.
“Nothing.” She closed her fingers around it. Then she opened them again, slowly. “A toy. I found it. At Ravenhold, in my room, in an old chest. On the first evening, when we moved in.”
“Ravenhold.”
“We live there. For seven years now.” She did not look at him. “It was the traitor’s castle. The king gave it to my father, after that night. My room was his son’s room.”
Ren could not breathe.
He sat there, by the fire, his back to the rock, and listened to Emilia Winterhall telling him about his room. About the west tower. About the chest under the window. About a boy who was dead, drowned in the Calder, with a toy he had left behind there.
“He had a whole regiment.” Her voice had grown quiet. “Wooden soldiers. Brightly painted. With banners. I packed them all away again, because they didn’t belong to me. All but this one.” She turned the little horseman in the light of the embers. “I don’t know why. He only has three legs. He’s the ugliest of them all.”
“Maybe that’s why.”
She looked up. He did not know what was in his face. He hoped the fire was too dark for it to be seen.
“Maybe.” She drew the word out.
She looked at him a moment longer. Then she put the horseman in the little pouch at her belt, with the needles and the thread, and pulled her hood over her head.
“I saw him once,” she said, and her voice came now from the shadow of the hood. “The boy. The traitor’s son. At a feast, in Crownhaven, when I was ten. I didn’t think of it again for years. And then I found this horseman, and since then I sometimes think of it.”
Ren was silent.
“He was rude.” Something that was almost a smile lay in her voice. “And he helped me, even though I said I didn’t need help.”
The fire crackled.
“He’s dead.” Emilia looked into the embers. “Everyone says he’s dead.”
“Yes,” said Ren. “Everyone says so.”
He did not know how long they were silent after that.
He sat there staring into the embers, and in his head there was a rushing like a river, and he thought of nothing and of everything. Of a chest under a window. Of a horseman on three legs. Of a ten-year-old girl on a frozen fountain who had slept in his room for seven years and carried his toy in her pouch, among needles and thread, and did not know why.
And of her father. Who had given the order. Whose men had come up the stairs.
The owl above them had stopped calling.
Ren raised his head.
It had gone quiet. Not the quiet of a night in the forest. A different quiet. The quiet that comes when everything alive holds its breath at once. No more rustling in the leaves. No cracking. No call. Not even the wind moved through the crowns any more.
Emilia had noticed it too. She had not moved, but he saw her hand go to her belt, to the short knife she carried there.
“Harlow,” she whispered.
“I know.”
He stood up. Slowly. His hand went over his shoulder to the hilt of the dwarven sword. In his chest the fire stirred. And beneath it, deeper, under the leather bracer, under the scars, the other thing.
It crackled. Quietly. Like a dog waking and pricking up its ears.
Then came the sound.
It came from far away, from the east, from the depths of the forest, and it was so deep that at first Ren did not hear it but felt it, in his chest, in his bones, in the ground beneath his feet. A howl. But not a howl as Ren knew it, not the long, mournful howling of the wolves in the winters around Fernwick, which he had heard so often that he could fall asleep to it.
This howl was different. Deeper. Rougher. It broke in the middle, as if the throat it came from were wounded or too big for itself, and at the end it was no longer a howl but something that sounded like a roar.
It lasted a long time.
Then it was over.
Behind him Milo started up from sleep with a stifled sound. Nora was already on her knees, both hands flat on the ground.
“What was that?” Milo whispered. “Ren? What was that?”
Ren did not answer.
He stood at the edge of the firelight, sword half drawn, looking east. Into the darkness between the trees.
Beside him stood Emilia. She had drawn the knife, and around her left hand the air was beginning to glitter, cold and white, like the first frost.
“It’s far away.” Nora’s hands still lay on the ground. Her voice was very calm. “I can’t feel it. Not yet.”
“Not yet,” Emilia repeated.
No one slept again that night.
And when the first grey light seeped through the trees, they found, not a hundred paces from their camp, at the edge of the dip between the boulders, fresh tracks in the mud.
Big enough that Ren could lay his hand in them twice.
They led once round the camp in a circle.
And then east again.