They rose and felt their way to the bundles packed the day before, unbarred the door, and came out into the fresh smells of a summer night. Overhead the stars still burned, but less bright than in deep night. Ker could see the dark bulks of the other houses, the looming darkness of the wood, and the pale thread of path leading toward the fields. The dust was dew-damp under his feet.
He could not believe he was seeing his home for the last time, but even as he hesitated he heard a cry from Tam’s house up the lane. Light blossomed behind the windows, around the door, and Tam’s angry voice grew louder. Ker took a step back onto the path.
“Come,” his mother said. “Come now.”
Still he hesitated. And then Tam flung open the door of his house—outlined against the light inside—and yelled into the night. “Damned ill-wisher—he’s still here, he’s putting his evil on the village even now—burn him out! Burn him out, I say!”
Up and down the lane Ker saw light appear in windows and doors as men and women snatched up brands from their fires and waved them into bright flames.
“Come on,” his mother said, tugging at his arm. Ker turned and stumbled after her as fast as he could under the load he carried. Behind, he could hear angry voices. As they reached the turn into the first field, he glanced back and saw that the twinkling brands were together in a mass near their house.
“We must go to the hills,” his mother said. They had crossed the ford, stumbling on rocks that seemed to have grown all points in the darkness and now stood among the bushes that edged one of the grazing areas. “My mother’s mother’s people came that way; I will have kin-sibs somewhere in that direction.”
“But it’s the wrong way,” Ker said. “That’s the path the stones were on, that the rockfolk were on. We should stay far away from it and the curse they bore.”
“If we see any stones, we won’t touch them,” his mother said. “And we have none, so the rockfolk—if they were seeking the stones—should not bother us.”
He was not so sure, but they had to go somewhere: They could not just stand here arguing. The smoke from their burning house trailed after them like an evil spirit. He could hear the villagers yelling in the distance; they might pursue. His mother started off and Ker followed, bending under the load as they climbed away from the creek and back onto the trail.
By afternoon they were beyond the vill’s farthest cow pastures; taller hills loomed ahead. The well-trodden path had thinned to a track scarcely wide enough for one. When they came to a little dell with trees arching over a spring, Ker’s mother left the trail and went down to it. She sat down in the shade with a sigh. Her face sagged with weariness. “We will sleep here,” she said. “It has been too long since I walked the day away. Go and find us some firefuel, Ker, while I sing the water.”
Ker shrugged out of the packbasket’s straps and leaned it against a tree. He paused to take a drink from one of the waterskins they had filled the day before, then left everything with his mother and climbed back to the trail and looked around. Back down the trail, a narrow fringe of trees and shrubs they had passed a handspan of sun before. Far in the distance he could just see a smudge of smoke where the village lay. Ahead the woods in the dell widened up the slope to meet the trail ahead. That was closer, and he’d be coming downhill with the load.
He walked up the trail, light-footed now without the load on his back, and turned aside where the scrub met the trail. He found a rocky watercourse, now dry, though the trees overhead indicated water somewhere underground. Tiny ferns decorated cracks in the gray rock. One delicate-petaled pink flower hugged the ground just below that ledge. All the rocks were rough, gray, blocky; none were egg-shaped. Lodged against one of the rocks was a tangle of sticks, all sizes and all dry. He pulled a thong from his pocket and bound them together. Working his way down the dry creek-bed, he found here a branch that he could break over his knee, and there another flood-tangle.
As he neared the dell he heard his mother moving about, but no more singing.
“I’m coming,” he called, just in case.
“Come, then,” she said.
He worked his way slowly toward her, the bulky bundle catching on vines and undergrowth. Just above the spring a rock ledge jutted from the watercourse, flood-worn to smoothness. Here was another tangle of sticks—a quick flood, he thought, must have dropped it before the water could push it over the edge. It looked almost like a house of sticks. Perhaps some animal—? He bent over awkwardly and picked them up. Blackwood, yellowwood, blood oak, silver ash. Odd. He hadn’t seen any blackwood or silver ash uphill. But they burned well; he carried them in one hand as he found a way down and around the ledge into the dell.
After a meager supper of bread wrapped on sticks and cooked over the fire, Ker sat watching the coals as the fire died down. No need to bank the fire; they would be moving on at dawn in the morning. His mother, tired out by the day’s walk, had already fallen asleep, warded from the night’s chill by their blanket. He was tired too, drained by all that had happened. His head dropped forward on his chest, and he dozed.
Pain shocked him awake, stinging blows to his face; he heard his mother cry out and struggled up from sleep to find himself facing a blazing fire and four rockfolk as angry as any in the tales. Two held his mother, and two more confronted him. His cheeks burned with the slaps that had wakened him.
“Where are they?” asked one. His voice could have been rocks grinding together.
Ker blinked sleep out of his eyes. “What?” he asked. Another slap.
“You stink of them,” the dwarf said. “Do not lie. You have held what we seek: Where are they?”
He realized what they meant. “I don’t have them,” he said.
“Who does, then? Where are they?”
He hesitated, and the other one slapped him again. Again his mother cried out. “Don’t hurt her!” Ker said, suddenly as much angry as scared. “She’s my mother—”
“She is not hurt,” the first one said. “She is scared.”
“Ker…” came his mother’s voice.
“Don’t hurt her,” he said again, surprised to hear his own voice deep and firm. “It’s not right.”
“It was not right of you to steal what was not yours,” the dwarf said.
“I didn’t,” Ker said. It was Tam hovered behind his lips, but he stopped himself. Tam had been unjust to him, but he would not help that ill seed grow.
“But you know what we seek. How do you know, if it was not you who took them?”
Ker glanced at his mother. The whites of her eyes glinted; he could not read her expression as the light of leaping flames came and went across it. Which was worse, to betray Tam to the rockfolk, or see his mother frightened… hurt… dead?
Another slap rocked his head, more bruise than sting. “Who?” the dwarf demanded.
“What will you do to that one?” Ker asked. His mouth hurt; he tasted the salt that meant his mouth was bleeding. “It is not for me to bring someone else into trouble.”
“Ha!” The dwarf facing him straightened. Standing upright he was taller than Ker sitting down, but not by much. Firelight glinted on the metal in his harness; he looked strong as a tree. “You invade our lands, steal our patterans for firewood, despoil our spring, and you worry about getting someone else in trouble? You have enough trouble of your own.”
“But the trail is open to all… I thought,” Ker said. “And what is a patteran?”
The dwarf grunted. “The trail, yes. So the treaties ran, from the days the first men came here: The trail is for all, folk of the air and folk of the forest and folk of the rocks. This is not the trail. The trail is there—” a thick finger pointed up-slope. “This is not the trail. You took our patterans—our trail markers—for firewood—”