The next morning she filled her
pack with food and clothing, tinderbox and medicines, and put the
little ash drum, Alder Owl’s drum, on top of it all. She put on her
stoutest boots and her felted wool cloak. She smothered the fire on
the hearth, fastened all the shutters, and left a note for Tansy
Broadwater, asking her to look after the house.
At last she shouldered her pack and
tramped down the path, through the gate, down the hill, and into
the woods.
Moon had traveled before, with
Alder Owl. She knew how to find her way, and how to build a good
fire and cook over it; she’d slept in the open and stayed at inns
and farmhouses. Those things were the same alone. She had no reason
to feel strange, but she did. She felt like an imposter, and
expected every chance-met traveler to ask if she was old enough to
be on the road by herself.
She thought she’d been lonely at
the cottage; she thought she’d learned the size and shape of
loneliness. Now she knew she’d only explored a corner of it.
Walking gave her room to think, and sights to see: fern shoots
rolling up out of the mushy soil, yellow cups of wild crocuses
caught by the sun, the courting of ravens. But it was no use
pointing and crying, “Look!”, because the only eyes there had
already seen. Her isolation made everything seem not quite real. It
was harder each night to light a fire, and she had steadily less
interest in food. But each night at sunset, she beat Alder Owl’s
drum. Each night it was silent, and she sat in the aftermath of
that silence, bereft all over again.
She walked for six days through
villages and forest and farmland. The weather had stayed dry and
clear and unspringlike for five of them, but on the sixth she
tramped through a rising chill wind under a lowering sky. The road
was wider now, and smooth, and she had more company on it: Carts
and wagons, riders, other walkers went to and fro past her. At noon
she stopped at an inn, larger and busier than any she’d yet
seen.
The boy who set tea down in front
of her had a mop of blond hair over a cheerful, harried face. “The
cold pie’s good,” he said before she could ask. “It’s rabbit and
mushroom. Otherwise, there’s squash soup. But don’t ask for ham—I
think it’s off a boar that wasn’t cut right. It’s
awful.”
Moon didn’t know whether to laugh
or gape. “The pie, then, please. I don’t mean to sound like a fool,
but where am I?”
“Little Hark,” he
replied. “But don’t let that raise your hopes. Great Hark is a week
away to the west, on foot. You bound for it?”
“I don’t know. I
suppose I am. I’m looking for someone.”
“In Great Hark? Huh.
Well, you can find an ant in an anthill, too, if you’re not
particular which one.”
“It’s that big?” Moon
asked.
He nodded sympathetically. “Unless
you’re looking for the king or the queen.”
“No. A woman—oldish,
with hair a little more white than black, and a round pink face.
Shorter than I am. Plump.” It was hard to describe Alder Owl; she
was too familiar. “She would have had an eggplant-colored cloak.
She’s a witch.”
The boy’s face changed slowly. “Is
she the bossy-for-your-own-good sort? With a wicker pack? Treats
spots on your face with witch hazel and horseradish?”
“That sounds like
her... What else do you use for spots?”
“I don’t know, but
the horseradish works pretty well. She stopped here, if that’s her.
It was months ago, though.”
“Yes,” said Moon. “It
was.”
“She was headed for
Great Hark, so you’re on the right road. Good luck on
it.”
When he came back with the rabbit
pie, he said, “You’ll come to Burnton High Plain next—that’s a
two-day walk. After that you’ll be done with the grasslands pretty
quick. Then you’ll be lucky if you see the sun ‘til you’re within
holler of Great Hark.”
Moon swallowed a little too much
pie at once. “I will? Why?”
“Well, you’ll be in
the Seawood, won’t you?”
“Will I?”
“You don’t know much
geography,” he said sadly.
“I know I’ve never
heard that the Seawood was so thick the sun wouldn’t shine in it.
Have you ever been there?”
“No. But everyone who
has says it’s true. And being here, I get to hear what travelers
tell.”
Moon opened her mouth to say that
she’d heard more nonsense told in the common rooms of inns than the
wide world had space for, when a woman’s voice trumpeted from the
kitchen. “Starling! Do you work here, or are you taking a room
tonight?”
The blond boy grinned. “Good luck,
anyway,” he said to Moon, and loped back to the kitchen.
Moon ate her lunch and paid for it
with a coin stamped with the prince’s face. She scowled at it when
she set it on the table. It’s all your fault, she told it. Then she
hoisted her pack and headed for the door.
“It’s started to
drip,” the blond boy called after her. “It’ll be pouring rain on
you in an hour.”
“I’ll get wet, then,”
she said. “But thanks anyway.”
The trail was cold, but at least
she was on it. The news drove her forward.
The boy was right about the
weather. The rain was carried on gusts from every direction, that
found their way under her cloak and inside her hood and in every
seam of her boots. By the time she’d doggedly climbed the ridge
above Little Hark, she was wet and cold all through, and dreaming
of tight roofs, large fires, and clean, dry nightgowns. The view
from the top of the trail scattered her visions.
She’d expected another valley. This
was not a bowl, but a plate, full of long, sand-colored undulating
grass, and she stood at the rim of it. Moon squinted through the
rain ahead and to either side, looking for a far edge, but the
grass went on out of sight, unbroken by anything but the small
rises and falls of the land. She suspected that clear weather
wouldn’t have shown her the end of it, either.
That evening she made camp in the
midst of the ocean of grass, since there wasn’t anyplace else.
There was no firewood. She’d thought of that before she walked down
into the plain, but all the wood she could have gathered to take
with her was soaked. So she propped up a lean-to of oiled canvas
against the worst of the rain, gathered a pile of the shining-wet
grass, and set to work. She kept an eye on the sun, as well; at the
right moment she took up Alder Owl’s drum and played it, huddling
under the canvas to keep it from the wet. It had nothing to
say.
In half an hour she had a fat
braided wreath of straw. She laid it in a circle of bare ground
she’d cleared, and got from her pack her tinderbox and three
apples, wrinkled and sweet with winter storage. They were the last
food she had from home.
“All is taken from
thee,” Moon said, setting the apples inside the straw wreath and
laying more wet grass over them in a little cone. “I have taken,
food and footing, breath and warming, balm for thirsting. This I
will exchange thee, with my love and every honor, if thou’lt give
again thy succor.” With that, she struck a spark in the cone of
grass.
For a moment, she thought the
exchange was not accepted. She’d asked all the elements, instead of
only fire, and fire had taken offense. Then a little blue flame
licked along a stalk, and a second. In a few minutes she was
nursing a tiny, comforting blaze, contained by the wreath of straw
and fueled all night with Alder Owl’s apples.
She sat for a long time, hunched
under the oiled canvas lean-to, wrapped in her cloak with the
little fire between her feet. She was going to Great Hark, because
she thought that Alder Owl would have done so. But she might not
have. Alder Owl might have gone south from here, into Cystegond. Or
north, into the cold upthrust fangs of the Bones of Earth. She
could have gone anywhere, and Moon wouldn’t know. She’d asked—but
she hadn’t insisted she be told or taken along, hadn’t tried to
follow. She’d only said goodbye. Now she would never find the
way.
“What am I doing
here?” Moon whispered. There was no answer except the constant
rushing sound of the grass in the wind, saying hush, hush, hush.
Eventually she was warm enough to sleep.
The next morning the sun came back,
watery and tentative. By its light she got her first real look at
the great ocean of golden-brown she was shouldering through. Behind
her she saw the ridge beyond which Little Hark lay. Ahead of her
there was nothing but grass.
It was a long day, with only that
to look at. So she made herself look for more. She saw the new
green shoots of grass at the feet of the old stalks, their leaves
still rolled tight around one another like the embrace of lovers. A
thistle spread its rosette of fierce leaves to claim the soil, but
hadn’t yet grown tall. And she saw the prints of horses’ hooves,
and dung, and once a wide, beaten-down swath across her path like
the bed of a creek cut in grass, the earth muddy and chopped with
hoofprints. As she walked, the sun climbed the sky and steamed the
rain out of her cloak.
By evening she reached the town of
Burnton High Plain. Yes, the landlord at the hostelry told her,
another day’s walk would bring her under the branches of the
Seawood. Then she should go carefully, because it was full of
robbers and ghosts and wild animals.
“Well,” Moon said,
“Robbers wouldn’t take the trouble to stop me, and I don’t think
I’ve any quarrel with the dead. So I’ll concentrate on the wild
animals. But thank you very much for the warning.”
“Not a good place,
the Seawood,” the landlord added.
Moon thought that people who lived
in the middle of an eternity of grass probably would be afraid of a
forest. But she only said, “I’m searching for someone who might
have passed this way months ago. Her name is Alder Owl, and she was
going to look for the prince.”
After Moon described her, the
landlord pursed his lips. “That’s familiar. I think she might have
come through, heading west. But as you say, it was months, and I
don’t think I’ve seen her since.”
I’ve never heard so much
discouraging encouragement, Moon thought drearily, and turned to
her dinner.
The next afternoon she reached the
Seawood. Everything changed: the smells, the color of the light,
the temperature of the air. In spite of the landlord’s warning,
Moon couldn’t quite deny the lift of her heart, the feeling of glad
relief. The secretive scent of pine loam rose around her as she
walked, and the dark boughs were full of the commotion of birds.
She heard water nearby; she followed the sound to a running beck
and the spring that fed it. The water was cold and crisply acidic
from the pines; she filled her bottle at it and washed her
face.
She stood a moment longer by the
water. Then she hunched the pack off her back and dug inside it
until she found the little linen bag that held her valuables. She
shook out a silver shawl pin in the shape of a leaping frog. She’d
worn it on festival days, with her green scarf. It was a present
from Alder Owl—but then, everything was. She dropped it into the
spring.
Was that right? Yes, the frog was
water’s beast, never mind that it breathed air half the time. And
silver was water’s metal, even though it was mined from the earth
and shaped with fire, and turned black as quickly in water as in
air. How could magic be based on understanding the true nature of
things if it ignored so much?
A bubble rose to the surface and
broke loudly, and Moon laughed. “You’re welcome, and same to you,”
she said, and set off again.
The Seawood gave her a century’s
worth of fallen needles, flat and dry, to bed down on, and plenty
of dry wood for her fire. It was cold under its roof of boughs, but
there were remedies for cold. She kept her fire well built up, for
that, and against any meat-eaters too weak from winter to seek out
the horses of Burnton High Plain.
Another day’s travel, and another.
If she were to climb one of the tallest pines to its top, would the
Seawood look like the plain of grass: undulating, almost endless?
On the third day, when the few blades of sun that reached the
forest floor were slanting and long, a wind rose. Moon listened to
the old trunks above her creaking, the boughs swishing like brooms
in angry hands, and decided to make camp.
In the Seawood the last edge of
sunset was never visible. By then, beneath the trees, it was dark.
So Moon built her fire and set water to boil before she took Alder
Owl’s drum from her pack.
The trees roared above, but at
their feet Moon felt only a furious breeze. She hunched her cloak
around her and struck the drum.
It made no noise; but from above
she heard a clap and thunder of sound, and felt a rush of air
across her face. She leaped backward. The drum slid from her
hands.
A pale shape sat on a low branch
beyond her fire. The light fell irregularly on its huge yellow
eyes, the high tufts that crowned its head, its pale breast. An
owl.
“Oo,” it said, louder
than the hammering wind. “Oo-whoot.”
Watching it all the while, Moon
leaned forward, reaching for the drum.
The owl bated thunderously and
stretched its beak wide. “Oo-wheed,” it cried at her. “Yarrooh.
Yarrooh.”