“Flowers plucked carelessly soon wither,” he said in the common speech.
“I beg pardon if my words seem carelessly chosen, like thoughtlessly plucked flowers,” I replied, “but on a night like this, and in such circumstances as we have met, you can surely understand why I would ask.”
“I take you for city bred, by your clothing and your manner. Hunters walked into the bush long before others did. Even before djeliw or blacksmiths. Long before there were cold mages. What was never known to those who have not learned history can be excused.”
At the mention of cold mages, I thought his tone shaded toward ice. “If you’re from nearby,” I continued, still probing, “then your people are surely bound to a mage House, for there is such a House close by here, is there not?”
My not-so-innocuous query evidently offended him, because he lengthened his stride, and although I am tall, I had to hasten to keep up. On any other night, I would have forged forward on my own, but no one raised in the north leaves their home after dark on Hallows Night. No one. Not even the scholars who tut-tutted as with their intellectual scalpels they dissected the unsophisticated folk beliefs of ignorant villagers.
Woodland gave way to stretches of pasture and columns of orchard to the stubble of hayfields and strips of plowed fields that had been harvested weeks ago. We plunged into a grove of black pine and halted at the base of a tree whose girth proclaimed it a venerable giant. Its trunk was hung all over with animal horns. The tall man waved at me to step back as, by the light of the wavering taper, they made a half circle and sang more than spoke words while the old man took his knife and nicked the shoulder of the dead beast they carried. Blood trickled sluggishly to dribble at the base of one of the trees. A pressure as of an invisible hand or a flavor as of quivering life or a smell and sound made my head ache. Then it was gone, and wind breathed through the trees. I shuddered and was glad to see them start forward again, for there was power here I did not understand, and I did not want to be too close to it.
A howl rose again, and for the first time I understood it was not the voice of wolves but of some other hunter entirely, something far more dangerous. I quickened my steps until I walked practically on the heels of the tall man, but he deigned not to notice me.
We crossed out of the pine grove. As we walked along the shore of a pond skinned with ice, the stripling fell back to walk alongside me.
“Duvai thinks you’re a spirit woman who followed us out of the bush,” he confided, “but if that’s so, then you would be beautiful and you wouldn’t be shivering and look so tired.”
“My thanks,” I said with as much sarcasm as I could muster in my tired and unbeautiful state, but then I laughed, because I was accustomed to lads of just this age at the academy. While it was only the bold ones who talked this way with the older pupils, I was pretty sure they all thought the same dreadfully tiresome things.
“My apologies,” he muttered, chin dipping; most likely he was blushing. “But Mamadi says you have human blood, like us.”
I knew how to fence. I took a chance at a counterstrike. “So this is your first trip into the bush? Do the hunters of your village often cross into the spirit world?”
“Oh, no!” The young who are male can never resist showing off their knowledge, no doubt because they possess so little. “The veil between the worlds thins in the days leading up to Hallows Night. A very powerful and clever hunter will know where to find the crossroads that lie between the worlds. Even for him it will be a very dangerous crossing—”
He realized he had said too much. With a grunt meant, perhaps, to be some manner of excuse for breaking off the conversation so abruptly, he loped forward to the front of the procession to put as much distance between him and me as he could. The old man chuckled, although I’d thought him too far away to hear.
The lake ended in reed-choked shallows netted with ice. As we made our way down a fenced slope next to a stream, I realized I had seen this place before. A village spread across the hollow below. The walls and houses of its compounds looked much like the interior of a beehive, many-celled and complex. Two stockades ringed the village. The outer separated the village from the fields, and the inner separated the residential houses from the ring of gardens, work sheds, and other shelters. Torches marked the gates of each stockade. I had seen this village from the carriage when we passed; it was the only place in all that long journey Andevai had shown any sort of interest in. We were close to the toll road, although I could discern no trace of it in the darkness. Maybe I should have run, but it was night and it was breathtakingly cold, and besides all that, the air breathed its own warning of danger. Alone on Hallows Night, with no fire and nothing more than the clothes I wore and my sword, how could I hope to survive? The hunt rides.