“Fine morn for childers,” spoke a gravelly voice behind him. He spun around and saw a bald, elderly man with a long, brown-stained beard, sitting on a milking stool beside the gate. “They seem to like thee.”
Coming out, Reynard had not noticed this figure, but now the man surveyed him from a hunched angle, holding a long, flute-like reed with a bowl at one end, from which unwound a steady curl of thin white smoke. Reynard knew of tobacco; it was smoked often by sailors and, he heard, Raleigh and the Queen’s folk, but never among fisherfolk in Southwold. His uncle had shunned it because of the example of Hawkins, whom he had hated with a dark passion.
“Children?” Reynard asked, feeling a moment of such strangeness that his fingers prickled and neck hair stood on end.
“Childers!” the man with the smoking flute almost shouted. “Little ones, come and go—fine weather for ’em around thee, lad.”
“Are they fey—are they fairies?” Reynard asked.
The man drew with a hiss on his reed. “They come, they go. They harm no one.”
“What are they, then?”
“Childers. Get used to them.” He pointed the reed’s bowl around the corner of the manor, away from the fold. “Thou art free to go where thou pleasest—but perhaps not the town for a while. The townsfolk think the Spaniards were led to the island. They might blame Widsith, or thee, but Dana and Maggie work to calm them, and testify thou art no danger and fought hard for Zodiako.” Another long, sucking draw and smoke expelled from mouth and nostrils. “There be no more breakfast here, ’less thou be’st a goat or a sheep.”
Reynard’s discomfort had grown to a peak. “I have eaten and thank you. What know you about the old Spaniard?”
“I am old, lad. Widsith is no Spaniard, and hath not that luxury in which I wallow—to grow old.” He waved his smoking flute. “Widsith hath said I should send thee on his trail. But I saith back, thou art free. Git. Whither thou goest, no matter to me. Thou art a chain, boy, and I am the anchor. Cut loose.” He fluttered one hand and drew on the tobacco again with the other. The smoke that filled the air was at once sweet and acrid.
“Which way?”
Reynard wondered if he should simply avoid Widsith and find his way to the beach. But his inner pleasure was strangely compelling, and gave him courage despite the words he had heard two nights before.
He wanted to explore but not to flee.
The elderly man shrugged, then consented to point along a path through the margin of trees. Reynard started to walk, and then to run, away from the fold and the manor house, his shoes making soft scraping sounds along a well-trodden path rutted by wagon wheels and dotted profusely with evidence of sheep, horses, and kine.
Very familiar. Just shite, some fresh.
After a while, deep in leafy shadow, he stopped to catch his breath. The holed toes of his borrowed shoes provided little protection against roots and stones. He removed them and stuffed in thick leaves and grass. Then, for a few long moments, he sat under a white-flowering tree, taking stock. He had made a kind of pact, a strange sort of friendship, with a man who changed his age as he changed his name. He had seen many things in the last few days: sea monsters and at least one tattoed islander or freebooter. And of course, he had seen vampires who dealt in time, years taken or given… And beyond that, perhaps most formidable and frightening of all, drakes that killed at the behest of those who drank their birth liquor. He had just seen as well the strange, airy souls of lost children, perhaps waiting to be born. He neither needed nor wanted any more marvels. He had to find his way to a place that was not wrapped in dream, or nightmare, or perhaps the gloom that comes after death. Should he continue along this path or strike out?
“Surely I am not the greatest mystery here,” he murmured. “And not so valuable as a town!”
Perhaps not even worth his food and shelter. And as for food…
His earlier sense of balm and health was seeming illusory, the more he considered. He wondered about his meager breakfast. Could he eat in this land without partaking of something unholy? Was there food to be found on this island that would not threaten his very soul?
Thou art wiser than that, lad. Thou pray’st the prayers of others. Find thine own strength, and thine own way.
Reynard turned to see whoever had spoken, fearing it might be the dark man with the white shadow, but the words, the strong and stern advice, came from inside his head. Still, he thought the voice sounded familiar—raspy, smoky, deep and deeply female, like his grandmother. Did the dead come here to haunt… perhaps to become child-ghosts and be reborn in the east, where, he had heard, such things were believed?
He looked down, closed his eyes, wished for a sign. Nothing. And so he looked up. The high branches obscured most of that twisted sky, but daylight still filtered down, as if through a stamped pane of window glass. That light said, however soon he might face doom, for the moment there would be warmth, familiar trees, solid ground beneath his worn shoes.
Ahead, he heard high laughter and female voices. Were they women, humans from local farms—or the Eaters he had seen on the beach? He hid behind thick brush and listened. Several, perhaps four, were walking lightly and quickly along the path he had just abandoned. He pushed aside a branch and saw the first of them, dressed in long, filmy robes, her shoulders draped with a dark leather jerkin. Over the jerkin, swirling waves of brown hair fell to her waist—and then came into his sight three others, similar in appearance, like sisters. One had reddish hair, two brown, and one black. They were speaking a kind of ancient English, mixed with something that could have been Icelandic. Old, accented oddly, some words half familiar… but definitely neither Spanish nor Dutch.
And then, he thought, Greek.
The four paused just yards away on the pathway and turned slowly, like weathervanes, until they faced where he was hiding.
“What is this?” one of the brown-haired women asked.
“Widsith!” the black-haired woman exclaimed, and laughed. “He speaketh o’ a new boy who hideth thoughts and memories—a poor and pure son o’ the sea. This is his lad!”
“Come out, English boy. We mean no harm. We are gentlefolk thou shouldst ken.”
Reynard stepped from behind the bushes. The ladies—for clearly they were used to a kind of deference, looking at him, addressing him as if he were a wayward hunting dog—surrounded him and stroked his hair, his face, his clothes, intent, until they drew breath and sighed as one.
“Not ours to ply,” the first brown-haired woman said, and asked her companions, “Do we fetch him back?”
Another, with locks longer and hair darker brown and straight, falling like a third garment almost to her calves, said, “Knowing his blood, he’ll find a way.”
They all sighed again, like a soft breeze in the woods, then continued forward on the path, away from the town, speaking to each other with sharply sibilant words that seemed to penetrate his ears, like the flash of bird wings fleeing a snake—and yet, words he almost knew, had once heard spoken, but had never bothered to memorize. Words of travel, questions buried in each—questions he could not answer!
“I do not belong here!” he cried out, tears coming to his eyes.
The black-haired woman suddenly stood before him. He had not seen her move! “Why hast thou no memory of place and line? Here, on this blessed isle, no memory for a boy maketh him like a knight without armor. Remember, or another will find and use thee—less gentle than we who are conjured by the King of Troy.”