The rough highroad of bark grew broader as she neared the trunk. She imagined birds stirring in their sleep and the quick, querulous chirk of a squirrel woken in its nest. The wind breathed in and out across the vault of leaves and made them twinkle. Moon heard her steps on the wood, even and measured: the voice of the drum.
Down the trunk, down toward the tangle of roots, the knotted mirror-image of the branches above. The trunks of other trees were all around her, and the twining branches shuttered the moonlight. It was harder going, shouldering against the life of the tree that always moved upward. Her heartbeat was a thin, regular bumping in her ears.
It was too dark to tell which way was down, too dark to tell anything. Moon didn’t know if she’d reached the roots or not. She wanted to cry out, to call for Grandmother, but she’d left her body behind, and her tongue in it.
A little light appeared before her, and grew slowly. There were patterns in it, colors, shapes—she could make out the gate at the bottom of the garden, and the path that led into the woods. On the path—was it the familiar one? It was bordered now with sage—she saw a figure made of the flutter of old black cloth and untidy streamers of white hair, walking away from her. A stranger, Moon thought; she tried to catch up, but didn’t seem to move at all. At the first fringes of the trees the figure turned, lifted one hand, and beckoned. Then it disappeared under the roof of the woods.
Moon’s spirit, like a startled bird, burst into motion, upward. Her eyes opened on the center room of the cottage. She was standing unsteadily on the sheepskin, the journey-drum at her feet. Her heart clattered under her ribs like a stick dragged across the pickets of a fence, and she felt sore and prickly and feverish. She took a step backward, overbalanced, and sat down.
“Well,” she said, and the sound of her voice made her jump. She licked her dry lips and added, “That’s not at all how it’s supposed to be done.”
Trembling, she picked up the tools and put them away, washed out the wooden bowl. She’d gathered up the sheepskin and had turned to hang it on the wall when her voice surprised her again. “But it worked,” she said. She stood very still, hugging the fleece against her. “It worked, didn’t it?” She’d traveled and asked, and been answered, and if neither had been in form as she understood them, still they were question and answer, and all that she needed. Moon hurried to put the sheepskin away. There were suddenly a lot of things to do.
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 impostor, 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.”