“Yes,” Jes said again. This time she caught a glimpse of eyes glowing a bit red in the night.
“What is it?” she asked. “Is there someone here?”
“Not now,” he said, at last, a growl in his voice that wasn’t quite human. “But there have been hunters in the forest who do not belong. They hunt for sport and that offends the forest—and they’ve come too near to the cabin for my liking.”
“The new Sept is supposed to be quite a hunter,” she told him. “Some of the nobles the Sept brought with him from Taela stayed when he left. Is this hunting something that you must stop?”
“No,” he replied after a moment. “The forest king told me he will take care of these men if necessary.” Seraph shivered a little at the tone of her son’s voice when he said “men”—it told her that her son, in this aspect at least, did not consider himself one. “This forest yet has the power to keep out killers who hunt wastefully,” he said.
Seraph set another mermora.
“You were talking about Colossae,” he reminded her after she’d placed the mermora she held and was walking back for another handful.
“Ah, yes.” She decided it was too much trouble to keep coming back so she transferred all that were left into the largest bag and carried that with her.
“It was decided after the wizards left and the city died, that they should meet in secret every year. But they had truly bound the evil, and there was no great need of the wizards in those early years so the meetings began to take place every two years, then every five.
“The mermori”—she sorted through and held up a fragile-seeming mermora no longer than her index finger—“were created by the wizard Hinnum and gifted to each of the wizards who left the city. They were passed down to the eldest of each family and in the beginning it is said they numbered five hundred and four. Until the Shadowed rose to power, some five centuries ago, each mermora was held by a large clan, but when the Army of Man gathered to fight the creatures the Shadowed had gathered, Travelers were forefront in the armies—because the Stalker, still imprisoned in Colossae, controlled the Shadowed. More than half of the army fell that day, taking with it most of the Travelers who fought there.”
“You never told me that before—that the Shadowed was caused by the thing the wizards bound in Colossae.”
She smiled a little grimly, “It’s not something that we talk about openly. If people knew that we Travelers held ourselves responsible for the Shadowed, they’d make certain we suffered for it. Even some of the clans claimed there was no connection between the two—or that the Shadowed was the Stalker itself and that we should be freed of our tasks.”
She set another mermora into the ground. “I remember a discussion at the last Gather I went to. One of the Clan Fathers proposed that we quit searching out evil. He said things like, ‘We destroyed the Shadow, completed the tasks the Old Ones gave us. We should settle while there is still good land unclaimed.’ Then my father stood up and said, ‘Arrogance has always been the Traveler’s Bane. The Shadowed was not the Stalker, but merely a man corrupted by it. My grandfather had this story through his line. When the Raven who faced the Shadowed and reduced him to ashes returned to his circle, he told them that the creature he’d killed had never touched the stones of Colossae. We fought true evil on that day, but our task remains.’ ”
Seraph laughed a little at the memory. “My father was a showman. He didn’t wait for the debate that followed, but excused himself to his tent and would speak no more about it. My grandfather always said that if you don’t argue, you can’t be proved wrong.”
“So your father was the only reason the Travelers kept Traveling?”
Seraph shook her head. “No—it wouldn’t have worked if they’d really wanted to settle down. It was hard enough for me to stay here—and I would have followed your father through the Shadowed’s Realm if I’d had to. Staying was more difficult. Travelers are well named.”
Jes followed her silently as she began her task again. Jes was good at silence.
“I remember going to two Gathers as a child,” she said, taking out another mermora and setting it upright. “There were two hundred and thirty mermori held by just over two hundred clans at the first one. I can remember my mother fretting about how few there were. She died before I went to the second Gather, when I was thirteen. There were fewer than two hundred then—and many clans carried more than one.”
The largest mermora she had saved for last, having left an extensive corner of the meadow for it. “The mermori were too dangerous to allow them to exist without safeguards, so Hinnum spelled them so that, eventually, they would find their way into the hands of the eldest of the closest relatives of those who had died and left the mermori lost.”
“Mother,” said Jes, after a bit. “There are two hundred twenty-four mermori here.”
“I know,” she whispered. “I’ve been acquiring them a few at a time since I married your father. Today I bought eighty-three from a tinker.”
“Eighty-three,” he said, startled into losing, for a moment, the aura of danger he carried. “How did you pay for them? They are solid silver and worth more than—”
“People don’t always see that they are silver,” she said, trying to pace off the area for the largest of them again—she kept losing count. “Sometimes they appear to be iron or even wood. Most people dislike them on sight. I paid six coppers for them, and the merchant I bought them from will shortly forget exactly what it was I bought, except that he came out ahead on the deal.”
“Ah,” he said and walked beside her for a while, gradually blending into the darkness until she couldn’t see him if she looked straight on.
She caught glimpses of him sometimes when she wasn’t quite looking. Sometimes she saw a man who looked like her husband, but more dangerous. At others she saw a dark animal that prowled on four legs. Sometimes if she turned her head and looked at him directly for too long, he disappeared into the night. It was only illusion, she knew, though he could take on shapes of animals if he chose. But illusion or not, it was disconcerting.
“What do they do?” he asked finally.
She set the last one in. “I’ll show you. Come with me.”
The meadow was set on a rise and she took her son to the highest point. She had never done this with so many before. At the Gathers, the elders from all the families would stand in a circle and chant together.
She held out both hands and shouted imperiously, “Ishavan shee davenadre hovena Hinnumadraun.”
It had been so long since she’d allowed herself this much magic. She did only a little magic now and then—when they planted their crops, and when she warded the farm to keep the more dangerous creatures of the mountains away.
Even after so long, it came eagerly to her call, thrumming from her bones to the earth, reverberating through the dirt, rotting vegetation, and newborn sprigs of grass.
Jes let out a startled snarl as the meadow lit up with the windows of two hundred and twenty-four houses. Some were smaller than their cabin, but most were as large as the largest of the houses in Redern. By chance she’d put two in such a way that they blended into each other, sharing a wall—it looked so right that Seraph wondered if the houses might have stood in just such a relative location in Colossae. In the very corner of the meadow stood a small castle. The architecture of the houses was distinctly foreign, the windows open and rounded, the roofs covered with some kind of green pottery tiles.