“But I need to know —” Safred began, and at the same moment the gods roared into Bramble’s head, forbiddingly. No! they ordered. Safred jerked as the command hit her. Ash shook a little, as though he had heard them too, but his face stayed stony.
“No,” he echoed the gods.
Safred stared at him, her eyes burning and her face pale, but at last she nodded and the pressure in Bramble’s mind eased off. Bramble could see the effort it took her not to ask more. She waited for Safred to say some final exhortation or blessing, but she just stepped back from the altar and walked away, her back to the altar. That unsettled Bramble, who always backed away, out of a mix of respect and caution. It seemed to her that Safred took the gods for granted, and that was not quite safe. She shrugged. None of her business. She had to see to the horses for the journey.
They walked back to the town and Bramble went straight to the stables instead of to Safred’s house with the others. She led the horses around to the house, trying not to think about being separated from Cam and Mud. There was no choice, really, but she took a few moments as she led them to talk to them, telling them they would meet again, soon, soon. Trine got jealous and bumped her head against Bramble’s side. Instinctively, she braced for a lance of pain from her arm, but of course there was none. She was healed. She wasn’t sure she would ever get used to that.
Bramble had bought provisions for a few days’ journey from Heron and had insisted on paying for the room as well, over Ash and Martine’s protests. “Least I can do,” she said. She never had liked being in someone’s debt and only the knowledge that the gods had sent Ash and Martine to her at the right time allowed her to bear the gratitude she owed them. She grinned at Ash. He was still walking stiffly from the long ride. She remembered how much learning to ride hurt.
“Think you can manage another ride?”
He looked at Cam with some doubt. “If I have to,” he said, then laughed with her. There was something false about the laughter, though, as if he was trying hard to seem light-hearted. Bramble felt a little protective of him, which was stupid, considering it was he who had saved her life. Zel brought a sack out from the house and dumped it next to the door frame.
“Another journey,” Martine said. “Maybe Acton was right when he sent us on the Road. It seems like we can’t get away from it no matter how we try.”
“No rest for the Traveler,” Ash said. “Not this side of the burial caves.”
“I guess we must be Travelers, then,” Martine said wryly. Zel went back in for another load, leaving the door open behind her. Martine said quietly to Ash, “I cast again, and the stones said the same thing.”
He went very still for a moment, then shrugged. “Doesn’t change anything.”
“It may be that you need to find different —”
Ash cut her off. “Forget it. I can’t do it, and that’s all.”
Bramble busied herself with checking the girths on the horses. No business of hers. They had the right to their own secrets. But she noticed distress in both their faces, although they tried to disguise it with the blank face so many Travelers seemed to develop. A protective face, that gave nothing away.
Safred’s voice reached them, murmuring quietly. Then the sound of a man sobbing uncontrollably. One of the pilgrims, no doubt. Bramble was uncomfortable with this side of Safred’s power. To heal flesh was extraordinary enough. To heal the spirit — something in her rebelled against that idea. To be so vulnerable to someone who was, after all, only another human… although at one time she had intended coming to the Well of Secrets for exactly that kind of healing, now it seemed inconceivable to her. There was no way she was baring her soul to Safred.
Safred’s voice came again. Martine, Ash and Bramble exchanged glances. After a few moments the sobbing stopped and Safred appeared in the doorway, Cael behind her.
“Sorry to keep you waiting,” she said cheerfully.
Bramble looked at Ash and smiled. “Parting of the ways. I guess we’re not meant to travel together, lad,” she said half-regretfully. He nodded, half-regretful himself.
Zel and Flax emerged from the house, Zel talking in a big-sisterly tone.
“You help as much as you can. Stay out of the inns. Wait until we’re together again.”
Flax bore her advice patiently; more patiently than most younger brothers would have. His mouth was crooked up a little at one corner, as though he found it amusing, but he listened and nodded and said, “Yes, Zel,” in all the right places.
Mullet came around the corner leading four horses, three skittish chestnuts who looked like they had the same breeding and a much older, steadier bay. The old man nodded familiarly to Bramble. She nodded back and smiled. They had met already that morning to groom and saddle the horses. That had been the best time since she’d come to Oakmere, going quietly about the familiar tasks in the warm, lantern-lit stable, working companionably with Mullet as she had done so often with Gorham, the comforting smell of horses surrounding them.
She had been surprised to find the horses in such good condition after their frantic race to get her to Oakmere, but Mullet had grinned.
“Well of Secrets, she gave them a visit,” he said.
“She healed them?” Bramble asked, astonished. It had not occurred to her that Safred would care about animals. Animals had no secrets.
“Said you’d need ’em,” he confirmed. Yes, that made more sense. Safred might be a seer, but she was practical, too. She wouldn’t let anything get in the way of the task at hand.
Now, as Safred swung up on the old bay, Bramble could tell that she had been right. Safred didn’t care about the animal; it was just a way to get to where she was going. Bramble was trying hard not to dislike Safred, out of gratitude, but she suspected that it was a losing battle.
“Let’s go,” Safred said. “May the gods go with you.”
“We might have less trouble if they didn’t,” Cael said softly to Bramble, and she chuckled.
Safred jammed a battered old leather hat on her head — all those freckles, thought Bramble, still amused, glad in some way to notice any weakness in her. They mounted their horses. They paused for a moment, exchanging glances: Zel and Flax, Ash and Martine. Then they rode away, Safred, Zel, Cael, Martine and Bramble to the north; Ash and Flax to the south.
Cael laughed openly at the look on Safred’s face as she twisted in her saddle to watch the young men ride away.
“That boy has a secret,” she said, her eyes hungry.
“And the right to keep it,” Cael said.
Reluctantly, Safred nodded and started her horse off again. “For now,” she said.
They rode out of the town toward the north, passing through streets which led to houses with large vegetable gardens and then a narrow strip of farmland, just showing the first greeny-purple tips of wheat above the soil. There were oats, too, in strips among the wheat, and cabbages, onions, beets — all the staples that would get a northern town through the long stretch of winter.
Not far from town they skirted a lake fringed with willows.
“Oakmere?” Bramble asked.
Cael grimaced. “They cut down the oaks to build the town, then someone brought a willow up from the south and they just took over.”
Bramble pursed her lips. “Yes, incomers do that.”
He gave her a look that showed he understood that she was talking about more than trees, but made no comment. She found herself liking him. He reminded her a bit of her own uncle, her father’s brother, who was a chairmaker and woodcarver. She hadn’t seen him often in her childhood because he lived in Whitehaven, where there was a bigger market for the intricate and expensive carving he loved, but she always enjoyed his visits. He was far more jovial and light-hearted than her parents, and took Bramble’s daily explorations of the woods in his stride, unlike every other adult she knew. Cael had the same acceptance of life, the same good-natured easiness and enjoyment. But her uncle had been no fool, and neither was Cael.
> Soon the farmland gave way to scrub and heath and then to sparse woodland, mostly birch and beech and spruce. It was clear that the trees were harvested by the townsfolk. There were stumps and coppiced trees, cleared areas where young saplings were springing up, the remnants of charcoal burners’ fires.
The road was bordered by hedgerows — hawthorn, in flower, and wild white roses, which sent thorned canes onto the track and forced them to ride single file, Zel leading, ahead of Safred. Gorham must have thrown Zel up on a horse before she could walk; she rode as if she were a part of the animal. Safred was competent enough on a horse, Bramble had noted, but mounted clumsily, and she used reins and a saddle, which somehow surprised Bramble. She herself was riding Trine, not trusting her to anyone else, and as usual went without a bit. She had given Trine’s saddle to Ash, for Mud, and rode Trine with just a blanket and saddlebags. The bags Merrick had given her. A torrent of grief broke over her at the memory and her chest felt painful, as though her heart was being squeezed. She forced herself to pay attention to where they were going. Ahead of them was a line of darker trees. Bramble couldn’t see what they were — pine or larch or oak, maybe elms. There was no sense of a specific color green, just a wall of darkness which grew as they rode closer.
They reached a crossroads where a much larger road led off to the northwest. Safred dismounted and the others followed suit and stood by their horses. Martine and Cael thankfully stretched their legs.
“Ahead is the Great Forest,” Safred said. She paused and took off her hat, pleating its crown without looking at it. “When we get to the altar we’ll be safe, I think. Until then, be careful. Don’t leave the path.”
“They always say that in the stories,” Bramble said involuntarily. “The old stories about children lost in the Forest always say, ‘Don’t leave the path,’ and the child always does.”
“Yes,” Safred said. “Remember what they meet when they do.”
They rode on.
The Forest began abruptly. There was a small slope covered with a dense thicket of wayfaring trees, not yet in flower. The grayish branches and rough leaves almost barred the path, but Cael pushed through, and they were suddenly among pine trees. Huge, straight, ugly. It was a little like the forest near the Lake, but more.
The enormous trees made Bramble feel as though she and the others had been shrunk to child size, or smaller; that they were toys pretending to be human, like the dolls Maryrose used to play with. She wondered if anyone or anything was playing with them, and what the game really was.
Under the high, intertwined branches, they rode in an artificial dusk that pressed heavily on them. The ground was covered by a carpet of browned pine needles so thick that the horses’ hooves made no sound and Bramble was for the first time glad of the chink of bits and bridles from the others’ horses. Far above them, patches of orange lichen spread like disease on the trunks. The smell of pine was so strong that after a while Bramble’s nose blocked it out and she could smell nothing. See nothing except the gloomy brown and tan of the forest floor. Hear nothing except the faint sough of wind in the branches high above them. There were no stumps, no clearings. No one came here for wood or charcoal or pine, Bramble suspected. No one came here unless they had to.
Back at her home in Wooding, she had wanted so badly to come to the Great Forest, but this was not what she had hoped for. All her life, she had imagined herself running free here, but in her imagination it had been a wilder, more isolated version of her woods at home, filled with familiar, beautiful greens: oak and elm and alder and willow, holly and rowan and hazel, each a different shade, each taking its proper place in the burgeoning life of the wood.
This Forest’s life was the opposite of that simple kitchen table they had sat around yesterday, of the daylight life of eating and drinking and talking and being. The opposite of the familiar stable where the horses’ breath had showed misty in the chilly morning. Even the opposite of the gathering in the dawn around the black rock altar, where their own breaths had billowed out like steam. This was a place where breathing was foreign. Unwelcome. She felt the pressure of the Forest in her mind, like the pressure from the gods but with a different flavor. There was no voice here, as the gods had voices. There was nothing here but time, endless tree time, where a single heartbeat took a whole year and a thought might last the length of a human life.
Bramble remembered her panic in the forest by the Lake and how the presence of the horses had saved her from it. She saw that the others were starting to feel the same panic now. Picking up on their riders’ anxiety, their horses were growing increasingly nervous, especially the two skittish chestnuts that Zel and Cael were riding. Bramble did not give into it so badly this time — perhaps because she had found a way through it before, and now kept her attention on Trine’s warm hide and the way her muscles moved.
“Concentrate on your horses,” she called to the others, her voice dropping flat and harsh into the silence. “Feel their warmth. Smell them. They’ll comfort you.”
Her companions turned back to look at her in surprise, then they nodded and moved with more confidence. Safred leaned down in her saddle to lay her face against the bay’s neck. Zel dropped her hands so that they rested on the saddle bow, where she could feel the shift of her horse’s muscles.
Bramble saw them relax a little and was pleased. Whatever they had to face in this forest, they weren’t going to be in a panic when it found them.
Then they reached a stream, bubbling over flat, round stones, no more than a hand-span deep but too wide to jump across. At least, it was too wide for these horses. If the roan had been with her, they would have made it easily. She pushed aside a sharp pang of grief at the thought, but the memory of the roan lying in a stream much like this one, bleeding, his head in her lap, returned implacably. Guilt, as well as grief, welled up in her. It was her fault he had died. If she hadn’t made him run in that last chase, he would never have fallen. He would still be alive. Concentrate! she told herself, and looked up and down the stream, searching for a crossing place.
The stream was wide enough that a shaft of sunlight made it down through the bordering trees, and bushes and grasses grew along its banks, their sharp green shocking in the gloom of the pine forest. It was the most cheerful place they had come to in the Forest, but the horses refused to cross. Bramble dismounted and walked to the front, leading Trine. There was a flat space on either side of the stream, but it was bare of any marks. Not even animals came here to drink. Trine snorted and backed away from the water.
“Water sprites?” Bramble asked Safred.
Safred shrugged, but Cael answered. “You can see water sprites, usually.”
“What, then?” Bramble asked.
Martine bent to sniff the water. “It smells of something I’ve met before,” she said thoughtfully, “but I can’t quite place it.”
In turn, they bent and sniffed the brown water. For all of them, it brought up an almost memory, a feeling that they knew the scent if only they could remember. It was neither pleasant nor unpleasant, but it was not pine or fruit or flower or bog or anything else that you would expect to find in a forest.
“If the horses don’t want to cross it, I don’t think we should,” Cael said. The others nodded and Bramble was relieved. She trusted the horses’ instincts more than the humans’.
The stream crossed the path at a right angle and there seemed no other way over it. The path clearly continued on the other side.
“Don’t go off the path, children,” she said wryly.
“Bramble’s right,” Zel said suddenly, not seeming to notice the wryness. “This might be a trick to get us off the path.” She swung down from the chestnut and sat on the pine needles to take off her boots.
“Zel?” Martine said. “What are you doing?”
“I reckon I can make it across there,” Zel muttered, pulling her boots off with a strange ferocity. “This is something I can do.”
Bramble nodded. She’d feel like
that, too, surrounded by people who can speak to ghosts and tell the future. Hells, she did feel like that, and she was the Kill Reborn. But although Gorham had told her that Zel was a tumbler, it was a very long way across that stream. She said nothing. The girl knew her own business best.
Cael wasn’t so sure. He measured the stream by eye. “It’s too far!” he said. “You’ll fall halfway.”
Zel jumped to her feet and began to do some limbering exercises, swinging her arms and legs. The horses edged away, the white of Trine’s eyes showing. Bramble went to her head and soothed her.
“We’ll see,” Zel said. “If I get over we can string up a rope and you can slide across.” She paused. “Do we have rope?”
“Aye,” Cael said, his voice deep and comforting. “We’ve got rope. But that won’t get the horses over.”
“We’ll have to leave the horses,” Safred said, her voice tight. “We have to get to the lake by sunset.”
Neither Bramble nor Zel liked that idea. Bramble didn’t want to leave Trine in a strange place with who knew what hiding in the shadows. Zel, it was clear, had anticipated who would be left behind to look after the horses. She prepared for the jump with her mouth set.
Bramble found it hard to believe there was any danger. She remembered jumping the chasm near Wooding. That had been dangerous. This was just a shallow stream which, as the sun rose above the trees, began to sparkle in the sunbeams. But the horses wouldn’t cross it. Bramble shrugged. Nothing was ever shagging easy.
Zel backed up the path and motioned them to move out of the way. Bramble and Cael took the horses off a little; Martine and Safred went to the other side of the track. Bramble expected Zel to run, instead, she took a couple of long paces and then started to do flip-flops, hands to feet to hands, building up speed. At the very edge of the water she jumped high and curled into a ball as she spun in the air, across the stream: once, twice, three times . . .
Her feet came down only a foot from the bank. She splashed heavily into the water, landing on hands and knees. The water flew up and doused her and the smell, whatever it was, immediately grew much stronger.
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