“And yours. May your journey go well.”
“And your fire burn strongly.”
One could go on in this way for a while, both coming and going, but she released me.
“May we meet again when it is proper to do so,” she said, and put the fiddle to her chin and played such a sprightly tune that my feet wished to walk. I hurried across to the dun. I eased the blade from its sheath just enough to make a tiny cut on my little finger. Sweat prickled on my back and neck as a drop of blood welled from the skin. I touched it to the latch, then pushed. It clicked down with a resonance as deep as that of a struck bell, ringing long and low through the stone. The door swung easily open.
I sucked in a breath of suddenly raw, cold air and braced myself for the temperature change. Just as I stepped through, a shadow leaped from behind and knocked me forward and down to my hands and knees. I felt the hot tremor of a monster’s breath on my neck, and with my heart thundering in a panic, I scrambled forward through rubble until I slammed my knee against a jumble of stone blocks and the pain brought me up short. A dusting of snow covered the ruins of an ancient dun, its walls standing only head height with the crumbling courses resembling teeth with gaps between. The sun shone in splendor, but no heat touched the frozen earth. My nose turned to ice. The air I sucked in was so cold it stabbed in my chest. My fingers had already begun to stiffen. After a dazed moment of paralysis, I floundered out of the ruins through cold-whitened grass.
Ahead stood a venerable oak tree so ancient that its trunk was as vast as a house, and it was actually bulging, almost as if two trees had grown together to become one. A faint buzzing tingled on my tongue; I could almost taste the sound.
“My pardon, maestra! Where did you come from?”
I turned.
A young woman stood beside a humble well ringed with stones and covered with a thatched roof. Bundled in heavy winter clothes and a man’s long wool coat, she looked used to hard work and to laughter between times. Two empty buckets sat at her feet; she held a pole in her right hand, ready to whack me.
“Ah,” I said wisely. I staggered a step sideways and caught myself on the tip of my cane. In daylight, in the mortal world, my sword appeared again as a simple black cane. “I was just… in the ruins. I’m traveling, and I had to stop and… ah… relieve myself.”
“You don’t want to be stopping here.” She did not lower the pole. “There was a jelly buried in that oak a hundred years ago. She haunts this place still. They say she was a powerful and wicked woman, Lucia Kante, and that she eats children. That’s what my mam told me when I was wee and inclined to go wandering off. I’m sure it’s not true, because only the savages who live in the Barren Lands eat babies, and they’re not civilized enough to have jellies. But it’s still better to keep your distance. You know how jellies and bards will mock you if you don’t give them what they want.”
“Oh,” I said, displaying my gift for fluent and clever speech. The buzzing of bees spiked until it rattled in my head, then ceased as abruptly as if a door had shut.
Suddenly, it seemed I had got my bearings and could see beyond dun and oak and well. Some paces past the well ran a road. A pair of wagons, one coming and one going, rolled along, their occupants paying no attention to us. The road led to a town sprawled from the height down a gentle slope that led to the flat Levels below. A very old stone wall contained the town, and even from here I marked its arched gate with the name LEMANIS carved across the lintel.
“I’m Emilia,” she added, lowering the pole. “It’s cold weather to be traveling.”
“Well met,” I said, “and the gods’ blessings on you. I’m called—”
She shrieked.
A striking young man sauntered out of the ruins. He had a reddish brown cast of skin; his coal-black hair, straight and lovely, fell unbound halfway down his back. That he was lithe and long, well muscled and well proportioned, was easy to see since he was stark naked.
She stared for one long breath, then grabbed the buckets and ran away toward the gate.
“Who are you?” I demanded.
“Cat,” he said, looking quite put out. “How can you say such a thing? You know me.”
“I’ve never seen you before in my life. How do you know my name?”
“Have not seen me before in your life? None of that mattered, that we came when you called? Tracked you down far out of our normal range so we could protect you from that high-strung pretty boy prancing around in all his flash and conceit? That means nothing to you?”