Gertie’s laugh echoed back from the mountainsides above them. “Lady only knows, dearie. Bein’ a rock person myself, it seemed fittin’ that I shouldn’t leave that up to somebody comin’ after. When I saw that piece had tumbled down out of the mountains over the winter, I thought it was just about perfect.”
Tanyth knelt to run her fingers across the rough surface. “Yeah. I think you’re right.”
“I wonder where my girls are,” Gertie said. She spun on her heel, looking out across the grassy hollow. “They usually come running when I’m out here.”
A faint bleating came from the hillside behind them. Tanyth looked up and saw a brindled goat with a head of heavy, curled horns standing on the face of the cliff. “How’d he get up there?”
“Him? He’s always finding new and excitin’ places to stand. Make you dizzy to watch him walk across nothin’ at all on what looks like sheer rock faces. He got up on the cottage once. Thought it was great fun to eat my roof and leave his callin’ cards behind.”
Tanyth turned to see five goats trotting across the grass toward Gertie. Judging from the bags swaying under them, all were does. “No kids?”
“Should be some over on the far side of the meadow.” Gertie held up a hand and pointed. “Squeek can’t see so good that far away but you should be able to pick ’em out.”
“Oh, yes. I thought they were rocks or something over there but one just got up and started eating.”
“A yearling, prob’ly. The little ones are just layin’ low. Give ’em a few minutes and they’ll be eatin’ grass and flowers and anything else that takes their fancy. Scamperin’ around and buttin’ each other. There’s prob’ly twenty, maybe thirty goats over there. You just can’t see ’em.”
The does nuzzled up to Gertie, who stroked them all under their chins and alongside their necks. “My dears need a little relief, eh? Well, let’s go find the buckets and a stool. Come along, dears, come along.” The old woman turned and walked back around the cider mill toward the cottage, the does following in a single line. “You feel free to wander about, Tanyth. I’ll just take care of my girls. You come back when you’ve stretched your legs a bit.” She waved as she disappeared between the trunks of the ancient apple trees.
The sound of the goats’ delicate hooves on the stones faded into the whispering winds, leaving Tanyth blinking in the sun. She turned her gaze upward to the peaks on three sides. The cliff face above her ran bare up to where it curved away toward its peak. Even the ram had disappeared. She closed her eyes and focused on the lone spruce at the top of the ridge. From behind the orchard she couldn’t see it, but she knew it was there. After several long moments she opened her eyes again.
“Foolish old woman,” she said.
She started back along the path but stopped to gaze once more at the standing stones in the grass. Five hundred winters seemed too long a time to be accounted for by so few stones. Logically, it made perfect sense but something twisted in her gut. Five hundred years of old women living out their lives in solitude, stripped of the lives they’d known for half a century. For the sake of a gift of what? Knowledge? An answer to strange dreams that came in the night and befuddled the dreamer?
The wind picked up and rustled the tree limbs in the orchard. It picked at her hair, blowing the loose strands past her face, swirling them around her head. For the first time in ages, she found herself outside without her hat. Her hands went to her head and she turned to see the gust of wind wave across the sward. Change is coming. The blight far to the south festers. The two young women follow a path toward the black rock canyon.
“I didn’t ask you,” Tanyth muttered.
Yet knowing that Rebecca and Penny had begun their trip back to Northport left her feeling relieved that they returned to the relative safety of town.
The wind gusted again, the whispers clambering for her attention.
“What is it now?”
Death comes on snow-white wings. The winds themselves died.
The goats clattered out of the orchard in a flurry, startling Tanyth out of her shocked stupor. “Gertie!” Her feet pounded in time with her heart as she raced through the grove. “Gertie!”
She burst into the clearing and found the old woman with a bucket in one hand and a small milking stool in the other. “Lady sakes, Tanyth. What is it?” she asked, turning from the open door, her face gone slack with alarm.
“You’re all right?” Tanyth’s breath huffed as she skidded to a stop in the scree.
“Well, of course, I’m all right. What else would I be?”
“The trees. Did you hear them?”
Gertie stopped and turned her face toward the branches. “I was milking,” she said after a few moments. “I didn’t hear anything.”
Tanyth took a deep breath and blew it out through her nose, trying to calm her fluttering heart and control her breathing. The air was so thin. It made it hard to breathe.
“What did they say, dearie?”
“Change is coming.”
Gertie laughed and pushed on into the cottage. “Change is always coming, dearie.”
“Penny and Rebecca are on their way back to town.”
“Excellent. They’ll be more comfortable there than in that cave.” Gertie dropped the milking stool inside the door and walked toward the back room. “Was there something else? What disturbed you so?”
“There’s a blight in the south.”
Gertie’s steps slowed and then stopped. She rested one hand on the carved door. “A what?”
“A blight. It’s festering in the south. That’s what they said.”
Gertie turned and cocked her head as if listening. “That’s...unusual.”
“It’s not the first time they told me.”
Gertie put the bucket down with a heavy thump. “When?”
“Last night. It was one of the things they told me last night.”
Gerties face clouded and one hand found her lips. The digits quivered.
“What does it mean?” Tanyth asked.
Gertie took a deep breath and let it out, her fingers swiping at her eyes. “I was listening last night. The trees didn’t say anything to me.”
“But what does it mean?”
“It means we have work to do.”
“Work?”
“What? You thought being hermits meant we sit around drinkin’ cider and milkin’ goats?”
“What can two old ladies do?”
“Woman, get a grip. You walked ten thousand miles gettin’ here. You killed a half dozen men who threatened you and yours along the way. You saved a ship and a crew from a bomb and blew away a storm with a prayer. You changed the ocean’s currents and nearly killed yourself doin’ it so you could be here. Now the Lady is tellin’ us there’s a problem. Don’t ya think those things might all be related? Or do you think you’re just here to write a book about herbs?”
Tanyth felt her jaw drop as Gertie—frail, funny, rock-studying Gertie—flayed her with her tongue.
“I’ll just reload my pack,” Tanyth said.
Gertie grinned. “Make sure you take some tea, dear. I’ll grab some traveling food from the cold room and be right back.”
Chapter Twenty-six:
Going South
The sun had barely reached noon when a very determined Gertie Pinecrest led Tanyth Fairport out of the cottage. She’d come back from the cold room with a rucksack a quarter full of food, a canteen strapped to the side. Gertie folded the covers on her cot in on themselves and then rolled it from the foot. She’d grabbed an extra blanket from a cupboard and an oilcloth to wrap it all in, lashing the bundletogether with some braided twine. She tossed some clothes and a length of rope in on top and pulled a poncho from another cupboard. Last she all but stirred the fire out of existence, leaving only a few coals resting harmlessly at the back of the hearth.
Tanyth lashed her own bedroll to the bottom of her pack and shrugged into her coat.
“Ready?” Gertie asked.
“You sure you should be traipsin’ around the forest?”
“What? You think I’m too old?”
“No.” Tanyth bit her tongue against the lie. “Who’s gonna guard the library?”
“The Lord and Lady know it’s there. Nothin’ll happen to it.” Gertie pulled the cottage door open. “Now, you ready?”
Tanyth grabbed her wide-brimmed hat from the peg and clapped it on her head before shrugging into the familiar weight of her pack. “Let’s go.”
Gertie led the way out into the sunshine. Tanyth grabbed her staff as she followed.
“Where we going?” Gertie asked as she pulled the door closed behind them.
“South.”
Gertie turned a raised eyebrow. “Got anything more than ‘south’? There’s a lot of south out there.”
“A notch in the coast.”
“What? Like a bay?”
“How am I supposed to know? Yesterday this time I thought listening to the trees was a joke. All I got is a notch in the coast somewhere south.”
Gertie snickered. “All right, dearie. Jes’ askin’.” She made sure the latch seated firmly by pushing on the door and then turned away.
“You’re just gonna walk off and leave it?”
“Yep.” Gertie started off on the trail around the ridge. “Come on, dearie. I’ve left that place any number of times and the worst that ever happened is I came back and found a big pile of goat turds on the step.”
Tanyth shrugged and found she had to stretch her stride to catch up with Gertie. “They didn’t like bein’ left?”
“He thought it was a big joke.”
“Goats have a sense of humor?”
“Dearie, if I looked like a goat, I’d really want a sense of humor, wouldn’t you?”
Tanyth laughed and the two of them soon found their stride, wasting no more breath on talking.
By late afternoon they’d walked almost the length of the valley, passing the trail where Penny and Rebecca had gone to the east and the western path that Nick and Sarah had taken. The sulfur smell and bubbling ponds gave way to the spicy scent of spruce and the burble of icy snow-melt brooks. The forest seemed to close against them as they drew near. Rocky ground gave way to weeds in the scrabble and soon they found themselves in the cool, dark forest, walking almost silently between thick stands of spruce.
“How you holdin’ up?” Gertie asked, a faint dew of perspiration on her brow and a spring in her step.
“I’m fine, but we should find a camp before it gets full dark. I don’t fancy flailin’ around in the woods in the dark.”
“Half hour or so and we’ll come to a pond. There’s a campsite there.” Gertie said.
Tanyth measured the sun’s position through the trees and nodded.
Gertie led the way and, as promised, they came to a clearing in the trees. Cattails and bulrushes closed in one side, but the other sported a small sand beach and a stone fire ring between a pair of logs.
“Kinda exposed, ain’t it?” Tanyth asked.
“If you count twenty miles of spruce trees all around you, yeah, I suppose.” Gertie said. “Let’s get some firewood and see if we can find something for dinner, shall we?”
Tanyth eyed the sky, already turning a rosy evening shade overhead. At least there were no clouds at the moment. She dumped her pack and staff beside one of the logs and set out to find some firewood. An old blow-down nearby provided all the wood she wanted, so she was soon back with a full armload.
Gertie came from the other direction with more, and they dumped their piles together beside the fire ring. “That’ll get us started, I think,” Gertie said. “Would you get it going? Squeek here doesn’t like fire and it makes it tough not bein’ able to see the sparks.”
“How do you do it at the cottage?” Tanyth asked, more from idle curiosity than anything.
“Matches.”
Tanyth looked up from stripping some soft, dry bark to see Gertie grinning down at her. “That was rather dumb, wasn’t it?”
“Not really, dearie. You’re doin’ good for bein’ tossed into the ragin’ sea and bein’ asked to serve tea instead of swim.”
Tanyth coughed out a laugh as she struck the flint and steel into the nest of bark and grass. It caught, and by the time she had a small fire built, Gertie was back with another armload of wood. Tanyth pulled the kettle out of her pack and half filled it with water, setting it on one of the ring-rocks to begin warming.
Gertie pulled her own pack over, unrolled the oilcloth on the ground and spread out her bedroll on it, using the spare blanket as a pillow. “There, that’ll be fine for tonight, I think.”
Tanyth glanced upward again. “If it don’t rain.”
“Oh, it’ll be a fine night. No rain. No snow.”
“You sound pretty sure,” Tanyth couldn’t help but smile at the cheerful, smiling face across the fire from her.
Gertie held up her hands and flexed her fingers slightly. “My bones say there’ll be no storm. They haven’t been wrong in ten winters.”
Tanyth shrugged and started stripping away the rocks and twigs from where she wanted to lay her bedroll. “What’ll we do for dinner?”
“I thought you’d never ask.” Gertie rummaged in her pack and pulled out a slab of bread, about a half pound of cheese, and a whole smoked trout wrapped in muslin.
“What? No cider?” Tanyth asked with a grin.
“After last night, do you really think that would be wise?” Gertie responded with a grin of her own.
Tanyth shrugged. “Prob’ly not.”
Gertie pulled a tin cup from her pack and pulled the plug from her canteen. She poured the cup about half full and then offered the canteen to Tanyth.
“I got water,” Tanyth said. “We’ll have tea soon.”
“I know, but I thought you wanted cider.”
Tanyth’s laugh echoed off the trees across the water and startled a pair of wading birds out of the reeds. She held out her cup and let Gertie slosh it half full of cider. She placed it by the fire and finished laying out her bedroll before sitting cross-legged on it and raising her cup in a toast. “You really know how to travel,” she said.
“This is just the first night. Wait’ll we been on the trail a while,” Gertie said.
“Is that good or bad?” Tanyth asked, the heady scent of apple swirling through her nose.
“Yeah. Prob’ly some of each.” Gertie took a sip of cider and leaned back against the log. “I don’t know how far south we have to go before we find out what’s happenin’. Then we’ll need to figure out how to deal with it.”
“You think it’s bad?”
“Oh, it’s bad. I just don’t know if it’s somethin’ we can fix.” She sighed and tipped her cup all the way up to get the last drops out of it. “No sense borrowing trouble today when we can get a full measure for free tomorrow.”
Tanyth nodded and pulled the boiling kettle away from the fire. She tossed a few pinches of tea into the water and slipped it back toward the coals to keep warm. The tart bite of cider in her mouth left her wanting more but the tea would do, and water after that. Tomorrow promised to be a full day.
A breeze sighed through the tree tops and Tanyth strained to hear something, anything.
Gertie smiled at her across the tiny fire. “Sometimes, the trees are just trees. Like most gossips, they don’t necessarily talk to ya when you like and gen’rally don’t shut up when you don’t.”
Stars started blinking in the deepening dark above them, the spruces no more than dark shadows against the sky. White peaks gleamed to the north, still close enough and tall enough that the tallest spruces couldn’t block them from peeking into the camp.
Somewhere in the distance an owl’s hoot broke the stillness. A quiet splash from the pond told of a frog seeking shelter in the water. The fire snapped occasionally while Gertie speared chunks of bread smeared with the sweet goat cheese on long sticks. She handed one to Tanyth who fed their fire with one hand, toastin
g her bread with the other until the cheese bubbled a little.
They didn’t speak. There was no need.
When the moon began sneaking above the treetops, the two women slipped out of their boots and crawled into their bedrolls. As her last waking act, Tanyth filled her small pot with fresh water and a measure of oatmeal and salt before pushing it close to the coals. She lay down and, propping her head on an arm, snuggled into the familiar bedroll with the musky scent of last year’s spruce needles in her nose.
The moon sailed low in the sky but she knew it would soon give her more light than she needed to find food. She hooted once into the night to warn others away from her hunting ground. There would be mice to eat and perhaps voles with their pointed noses. The river gleamed in the moonlight as it raced toward the big water only to fall over the edge and drop down, down into the bay below. The distance muted the sound of its roaring to a quiet background hush, no louder than the burbling of a small brook. Certainly no obstacle to hearing a mouse in the weeds.
The stench of humans wafted on an updraft from below. It made her shift her feet and turn away from the wind. They were no threat, down below in their holes. She’d seen them as she soared above, riding the updrafts and searching the rocky cliffs for food. The seabirds did not appreciate her presence and soon mobbed her back into the forest, but she’d seen the humans.
A mouse rattled two stalks of dried grass almost under her feet and she dropped on it. Its final breath was a squeak that lost itself in the winds that funneled up the deep cut that led to the gleaming, open sea beyond. The mouse made a tasty morsel that promised a good night of hunting. She leaped into the sky and circled back to her perch at the top of a wind-blasted pine.
The moon continued its climb into the sky and she watched the shadows below, listening for the sound of her next meal.
Tanyth woke with her heart racing. People should not be there. A blight festering, the trees had said. The pungent smell of death seemed to cling her nose, a memory gift from the owl. She sat up long enough to thrust another stick into the coals and watch the red sparks rise up to dance with the white ones above. The nearly full moon gleamed on the pond and, somewhere to the south, men died.
The Hermit of Lammas Wood Page 16