There was movement in the meadow’s tall grasses. Lazy, casual movement by a large rock. Manrie thought that it was a person. She had seen the glint of a white sleeve. It had flashed and then disappeared again. She watched from her seat on the horse, waiting for some further movement to disclose who or what she was looking at. The horse was restless, enticed by the grasses. It lowered its head and nibbled at the fringe of the meadow. She had to restrain it from stepping out of the shadows beneath the trees.

She looped the reins over a low hanging branch, then tilted her head to inspect the tree. After a moment she stood up in the stirrups, grasped the crook where a higher branch met the trunk, and began climbing up. She worked her way along a broad limb, to where the sunlight could beat on her back and the meadow was directly below her, then lay flat, inspecting the rock. There was a woman lying against it, her body awkwardly twisted. A corpse? No, for she lifted a languid hand and tried to wave away some insect that was buzzing by her head. Her hair was greenish-gray and long, and she was wearing white robes. They must have been very white, to stand out in the way they did against the tan rock. Manrie watched for a few moments more, and saw the child. A girl, also dressed in stark, improbable white, the sunlight glinting off of her nickel colored hair. She was carrying something, her little arms hugging her burden to her chest. She squatted beside the rock and tipped the load into the dirt, and then began picking up individual objects to show them to the woman.

Manrie slid back along the tree limb. She could ride on, find a campsite further up the ridge. But she had been alone now for at least twelve days, and her throat felt dry even when she drank, as if it were rusting without the lubrication of words. She dropped to the ground beside the tree and the horse rolled an unhappy eye at her, chiding her for startling it. She patted it, then took the reins and led it out into the meadow.

It was high summer, and the grass was tall and green. Wild rye lifted whiskery seed heads into the air and then bent with their weight. Manrie and the horse went slowly, as the ground was seamed with creek beds, mostly dry, some still carrying a trickle of moisture between round stones. She gave her attention to picking their way, worried about the horse and only occasionally lifting her head to glance at the rock.

She half expected the woman and girl to be gone when she reached it. The girl had fled somewhere at her coming, but the woman was waiting for her, propped on an elbow, her legs twisted strangely. Manrie, who had never had much skill with social graces, painted what was probably a false looking smile onto her face and gave a little wave as she approached.

“But you’re just a girl,” the woman said. She had very tight skin, and sunlight glinted on the sheen of sweat on her cheek.

“A woman,” Manrie told her.

“Well, yes,” and there was such joy and relief in the woman’s expression that Manrie relaxed a little, and was even willing to accept the woman’s appraisal of her youth.

“Where did your daughter go?”

“She’s hiding on the other side of the rock. Praeda,” she called, “you can come out.” Silence, and the woman tried to push herself up further. “Praeda?” she called again, her voice sharpening with worry.

A giggle from above. The girl had crawled up on the rock and was peering down at them. She was very small, maybe no more than five or six years old. Her face was softer than her mother’s, although there was a pestered, annoyed expression in her eyes.

“Hello,” Manrie said to her. “I’m Manrie. And you’re Praeda. Why are you hiding?”

The little face disappeared and there was a scrambling sound, pebbles rolling down, feet landing on grass. She came around the side of the rock and went to her mother, squatting by her deposited burden, her back to Manrie.

“I am so relieved that you’ve come,” her mother said. “I…well you see that I can’t move.”

Manrie let go of the horse’s reins and squatted by the woman. “What’s happened to your legs?”

“There was a snake.”

“Is a snake,” the little girl said.

“Yes, I suppose, but it slithered away. It bit my ankle.”

Manrie didn’t ask permission, but carefully pushed up the hem of the woman’s robes. This caused a little mew of distress. Manrie ignored it, and inspected the snake bite. The skin around the two punctures was very white, and when Manrie touched it she felt the cool of stone. “A sugemoema,” she said.

“Is that a word?” the girl asked.

“It’s a monster. Its bite will petrify the body. Like wood is sometimes petrified.” The woman gasped. “The venom doesn’t spread well,” Manrie reassured her. “It won’t go further than it’s gone.”

“But I will be like this forever?”

Manrie pulled the hem of the white robes over the injury. “There’s an antidote,” she mumbled. Then, louder, she said, “but I’m more concerned with the snake. When did it attack you?”

“Two days ago.”

“You’ve been lying here for two days?”

A small, despairing nod. “Praeda has been trying to feed me.”

Manrie glanced at the little pile that the girl had created. She saw sorrel and garlic. Some dandelions. Discarded, off to one side, were lily of the valley, and flat, evil looking mushrooms that made her shudder. She stood and went to the horse, whose saddlebags had been full of food when she stole it. Now her stores were running low, but she removed cheese and flatbread, and the last of her jerky. The little jar of pickled cabbage she left nestled in a saddlebag. She couldn’t bear to part with it.

After they drank from Manrie’s canteen, the woman and girl ate ravenously. Manrie inspected the ground around them. “You haven’t seen the snake since it bit you?” The woman shook her head, her mouth full. Manrie shrugged. “They turn to stone when they are preparing to reproduce. They lay dormant for two moons. The danger is probably gone.”

“It was bad luck, then,” the woman said between bites of cheese.

“Yes.”

A sigh, as if the woman expected nothing less. “And the antidote?”

Manrie hesitated. “We would have to find a village. An alchemist.”

“There are no villages this high in the mountains.”

“I have my horse.”

“We can’t go west.”

“Why not?”

The woman glanced at the little girl, who was making a pattern with the dandelions in the scuffed earth. “We were looking for some place to be alone.”

Manrie looked at the sky. She felt the loneliness of the last days like a weight on her back. Sometimes, when she woke in the night, it sat on her chest and made it hard to breathe. But she nodded. “I’ll set some snares. Build a fire. We’ll go in the morning.”

She had to trek back across the meadow to the tree line to find firewood, and she went carefully, watching for the pale, whip-like form of a sugemoema in the thick grasses. She found herself glancing back towards the rock where the horse nibbled placidly at the grasses, the bestiary in its saddle bags. With each step that carried her further from the book she felt more bereft and naked. She moved quickly when she reached the trees, collecting branches and twigs.

She caught a mountain hare very easily. It came right up to the snare and there was something close to resolve in the way it stuck its head in. As if it were more than tame. As if it had been convinced by some rhetoric of surrender, told by the mountain air and the rye and the dry stream beds that its purpose was to die for her supper. She skinned it and skewered its corpse on the long, strange needle that she had found in the horse’s packs. She had been using it for days, uncertain if it was a kind of stone or metal. It looked somewhat like a quill with all of the feathers stripped off of it, but it was very strong and not malleable. It didn’t heat in fire, and she found that she could roast anything on it. The woman and child watched her cook with avid expressions on their faces. She gave the hare to them without taking any for herself. There was something that she didn’t like about its complacent surrender to the snare.

She served them on the two strange discs that she had taken from the Man on the Mountain. The little girl was delighted by the way that the streaks of grease made the colors change in the discs, and sat making patterns in the fat long after the food was gone. The smoke from the fire drifted lazily over the meadow, and little creatures rustled through the grasses. The sun was barely setting when the child began to fall asleep in her mother’s arms, lulled by the heat and the comfort of a full stomach. “Put your blindfold on, Praeda,” her mother muttered, and the little girl rummaged obediently in an old sack that the woman had been using for a pillow. Manrie glanced a question, but the woman gave a short shake of her head and mouthed “Later.”

The fire burned low. A high thrum of insect noise rose from the grasses, and a flock of striped woodcocks swirled over the meadow and then landed, the little migratory birds feasting on crickets. Manrie watched in silence. She was aware, from time to time, of the woman’s small movements. She was surprised that they gave her such comfort.

When the sun began setting over the rim of the mountains, Manrie said, “Why must she be blindfolded?”

The woman sighed. “You’ll see when the moon comes out.”

“What will I see?”

“Watch the edge of the meadow. The places between the trees.”

“Are we in danger?”

The woman hesitated. “I don’t think so. But they scare Praeda. It’s why we came here. We were looking for a place without people. A place that’s never had people.”

“Why?”

“Because then there wouldn’t be any ghosts.”

Manrie had been sitting with her back against the rock. She turned her head and stared at the woman. “Ghosts?”

“Oh yes. They came out of the grave at Hareramanda. It was overfull, you see. Laenrid put too many in it.”

“Too many ghosts?”

“Too many bodies. Too many people.”

“And who was Laenrid?”

She was quiet for a moment. “Is Laenrid,” she said softly. “He’s still alive. As far as I know.”

“A killer?”

“He wasn’t always. He was just a digger’s son. Poor, but handsome. I remember finding him very handsome, when we were young. But I was a daughter of the First Families, not a client.” She flashed a small, self-deprecating smile. “My ancestor was one of the founders, and Laenrid’s family drifted out of the hills and settled with the other clients long afterwards. We…well, we were together, one spring, and then my father found out. He drove Laenrid’s people from the village, and then I was married to Ruetheted, and I forgot about him. But he came back.”

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She was silent for a moment. The corona of the setting sun flashed against the peaks, and the flock of woodcocks rose into the air with a shrill whirring sound that was reminiscent of a warning whistle. A few embers from the dying fire were blown to light by the breeze that their wings stirred up. “He had gone off into the hills to do what his family did best, dig in the earth. And he had found gold. He was a rich man, richer than my father. He came back to the village and began to build a large house in the sycamore grove along the river. He had clients, men he paid to build and farm for him. And dangerous men, bravos who he paid to do nothing but wander through the village, drink in the tea house and the trading house, and menace the First Families.

“And he still wanted me. He found me one evening after I had gone to the river with the other women to bathe. He told me that I was all he had thought about, when he was digging in the earth, and after he had found gold. I hadn’t thought about him. ‘Surely you’ve seen more beautiful women than me by now,’ I told him, but he denied it. He said that there is a wolf that lives in the Sandhills, around Yenceyan. This wolf mates for life. He compared himself to this wolf, and then laughed when I showed my fear. He told me that Ruetheted wasn’t really my husband, and Praeda wasn’t really my daughter. As if I had stopped living when my father forced him from the village, and now that he had come back I could live again. I ran away from him. I was frightened. And the next day, one of his bravos picked a fight with my husband and killed him.

“They took over the village. The First Families tried to fight them, and some of the young men were killed. Then everyone submitted. Laenrid’s men came to my house and took me. They left Praeda.”

She fell silent. The moon began to rise over the meadow, and its glow illuminated the woman’s smooth cheeks and chimed against her white dress. She was almost too bright to look at. Her heavy lids closed over her wide eyes. She kept them closed as she began to speak again.

“My father was biding his time. He had sent his most loyal clients to hire mercenaries, and one day in late autumn they came. Laenrid had set himself up in the tea house by then, and he often had me with him. I was to sit at the table with him and say nothing. From time to time I would see a slave lead Praeda about the town. To the well. To the weaving rooms and the chandlery. She was growing, a strong, sturdy child. But she never looked up, and she never smiled.

“When the mercenaries arrived, they killed some of Laenrid’s bravos. My father had given them specific orders to free me, and they did, for Laenrid fled to protect his own skin as soon as he saw them. I was reunited with my daughter, and I could go to the barrow and mourn for my husband at last. But Laenrid came back in the early spring. There are always more bravos to buy, if you have gold. This time, the village would not bow complacently. My father was killed in the fighting, and my two brothers. Some of the other patriarchs came to our home and demanded that I give myself to Laenrid, that I sacrifice myself to save them all. But it was too late. Laenrid had decided to punish all of them, and the Lord of Yenceyan was very far away. Laenrid lined up the First Families in the center of the village, and he had them killed, one by one, men, women, and children. Praeda would have died, but I told him that she was already dead, that she had been killed by a fever that winter. And everyone lied to protect her. Even as they saw their own children murdered, they lied. She was hidden in a cellar of my father’s house, and the clients protected her. But he would have found her eventually, if the dead hadn’t come out of the barrow.”

The heavy eyelids lifted, and the woman turned her head and looked across the meadow. “There. Do you see them?” Manrie followed the direction of her gaze, and saw pale shapes standing under the trees. “They can’t come into the meadow. Or they haven’t, yet. I think it’s because no one has ever died here. I’ve lain here, the last few nights, knowing that I would die. And then the dead would come for Praeda.”

Manrie stood. She took a step away from the rock, towards the line of trees. The horse lifted its head and snorted nervously. The forms under the trees were dim and wavy, speckled by the pattern of moonlight falling through the leaves. Human shapes, but indistinct. Some she took to be children, and others women, tall and still in the sudden silence that had come over the meadow. There were taller shapes as well, some large and dominating, some thin and stooped, as if bending under a weight. One caught her eye especially, a plump, comfortable looking figure with his head raised. She could make out his face, even as all the others remained shrouded. “Aizdha,” she breathed. She took a step forward, and the horse snorted again and stamped a foot. It rolled its eyes at her.

“You recognize one of them,” the woman said.

“Yes. My…friend. He died within the last moon.”

“So we are not the only ones who are being followed,” the woman whispered. Then, alarmed as Manrie took another step, “Do not go to them!”

“He is my friend,” Manrie said.

“When they came out of the barrow, they killed Laenrid’s men. At least two of them. Laenrid hid in his house, but I escaped. I have thought, as we traveled, that they are protecting us, guarding the road behind us. But you should not go to them.”

“They never came close? As you were traveling here?”

“We would see them standing at a distance. Praeda would scream and scream. She wouldn’t sleep. The blindfold helps.”

“How does it help?”

“It allows her to pretend that they aren’t there.”

Manrie glanced back at her. “And you?”

A wry smile broke the smoothness of the woman’s face. “I am used to traveling with the dead.”

Aizdha stayed at the edge of the meadow throughout the night. Manrie lay with her back to the rock, drifting in and out of sleep, listening for any sound of increased alarm from the horse and watching the rigidly quiet ranks of the dead. She didn’t dream, or her dozing was too close to dreaming for it to matter. Figures from the past presented themselves before her eyes. Beztrae’s wife, with dirt in the wrinkles of her hands. Larta in the kitchens, sweat gleaming off of her scowling face. Guillaemes the illuminator, hollow-cheeked and spastic, waving his hands around in the courtyard of his house as his wife and seven pretty daughters all laughed at him. The people she had lost when she fled Libreigia. All of them still alive, as far as she knew, but traveling through her half-doze as the dead traveled the road behind the woman and her daughter.

She didn’t sleep but somehow she woke, and the sun was already sharp and defined as it rose over the mountaintops. Dew had settled over the meadow, and a low fog moved across the weighted grasses. The horse nickered at her, sensing that she was awake. She turned her head and saw that the woman had her eyes open, and was looking at her. The girl, Praeda, was stretched out along her mother’s useless legs, lying on her bag, her little mouth open and her chest rising and falling softly. Manrie glanced at the tree line. The dead were gone.

Manrie stood and began to pack the saddle bags. “There must be shepherds,” she said. “Mountain villages. Sometimes alchemists wander among them, looking for unclassified plants. We’ll go north. Even if we find no one, we’ll come to Zaira Lake eventually. There are towns along the shore.”

The woman nodded and gently shook the girl awake. Praeda pushed herself upwards and pulled the blindfold down from her eyes. “I’m hungry,” she said.

Manrie was squatting beside the packs, rummaging for any remaining food, when there was a whirring sound, sharp and distinct, and the horse reared, squealed, and then collapsed onto its side. Manrie blinked, but the sharp and able part of her mind was already taking over, and she turned her head and saw glistening mandibles emerging from the horse’s neck. She moved immediately, without thinking, scooping up the child and dodging around the side of the rock. The woman was crying out in alarm. The whirring sound came again, and she fell silent. Praeda started to scream. Manrie held her face against her chest, and could feel the strength of the screams shaking her own body.

“Quiet!” she hissed. “Praeda, listen, you must be quiet! I have to be able to hear.”

But the girl couldn’t quiet herself, and Manrie stretched her hearing beyond the screams, listening for the whir of wings. She knew what it was. She had seen it, pinned to a board. The zaizectu. Wing spots that were the color of bile. A thin, segmented body. And those mandibles. Heavy. Sharp. Like scissors, seeking to snap a windpipe. The scholars had speculated that it might feed on trapped air, or unsaid words, or screams caught in the throat. Aizdha had said that it would keep flying, looking for soft tissue, relentless and never sated. But, he had said, it was very easy to crush, if you could only catch it under a boot heel. Few people could. There were stories of caravans, wiped out by a single zaizectu, their bodies left to rot or feed the mountain scavengers.

“Mama!” the girl was screaming. “Mama!”

“Pull your blindfold back on!” Manrie hissed. “And stop screaming. I can’t hear your mother over your screams.”

The little hands fluttered at the blindfold and pulled it up, then went to her mouth and pressed flat against her lips, silencing the screams. Her body continued to convulse with the trapped cries, and Manrie gripped her tightly. The meadow sounded like a meadow. The birds were launched in their dawn chorus, and some small mammal was shuffling along beneath the bent rye. The woman was silent. Probably dead.

Holding the girl tightly to her chest, she slipped to the side of the rock, her back to the meadow, their throats protected, she hoped, against the stone. She risked a glance around the edge. She could see the body of the horse, its brown hide turned golden in the morning light. The bestiary was in the pack that it had collapsed onto. The strange needle and the colored discs were in the other pack, and she could see that it had come open a little, and that the edge of one of the plates was peaking out, bright and yellow as the sun. She shuffled forward, and Praeda dropped her hands from her mouth and stifled her sobs in Manrie’s chest. Later, she would think of this as the moment when she first loved the girl. The warmth and dampness of that little face seemed to demand that the world be good, and offer some form of protection.

She could not see the zaizectu. She moved a little forward until she could see the woman, her body oddly arched, as if her frozen legs were acting as a lever, tilting her stomach upwards as her heavy head fell back against the ground. Her torso blocked Manrie’s view of her neck. She couldn’t remember if the zaizectu stayed to suck the air from a ravaged windpipe, as some insects sucked nectar from the mouth of a flower. Perhaps it had sped away, seeking whatever the creature was that was stirring the tops of the rye to the east.

She needed the packs, if they were to survive in the mountains. And besides, she could not leave the bestiary. She cast one last careful glance over the scene of carnage and then scuttled forward, bending her body low, pressing her neck into the top of the girl’s head. But when they got to the packs she knew she would have to let Praeda go. She would have to lift the horse, somehow, to get at the bestiary.

The horse, that had been her companion and friend for twelve days, was now nothing but an obstacle. Her hand was shaking as she snatched one of the plates from the half-open pack. “Praeda, here, it’s one of those colored plates you like. Hold it in front of your face. I have to put you down.”

“No!”

“Just for a second.”

“I want mama!”

“Yes. But hold this plate in front of your neck. Do you have it? Here, press yourself against my back as I work.”

She undid the straps that joined the two packs with quavering fingers, having to fumble at the clasps for useless seconds. Praeda’s little body was wedged tightly against her spine, warm and soft except for the disc, which was, reassuringly, where it should be. Manrie was very aware that her own neck was exposed. She tried to hold her chin against her breastbone and peer out under her brow. Her hand found the needle and she gripped it like a weapon, and couldn’t help raising her face to peer defiantly around her, as if daring the zaizectu to return. But she had to set it down to tug at the trapped bag, and the horse’s weight seemed boundless, as if it had gathered the weight of the mountains into its corpse. She could not get the bag free, but she got the flap open, and there was the bestiary. She used the needle to pry it out.

Just as it was released into the dirt she heard a sound, and glanced up. The zaizectu was sitting on the top of the rock, sunning itself. As she watched, it turned its vicious head towards her. Instintively, she grabbed the bestiary and held it in front of her face. She scrambled backwards, hissing “Praeda, turn around and run. Run, Praeda!”

A sound from the rock, and Manrie peaked over the edge of the book. The monster had disappeared. Then she saw a whirling sheen in the air, and saw that it had launched itself, that it was circling like a hawk, waiting to plummet. Her frantic hands found the pack with the discs and the remaining food. She remembered the needle at the last moment, and held it with the bestiary, weapon and shield clutched awkwardly in one hand. Then she, too, was running, the pack bouncing against her back, held by one thin strap, and the sound of whirring filling the air behind her.

She saw Praeda just ahead of her, stumbling through the grasses. “Hold the plate to your throat! Hold it to your throat, Praeda!”

She couldn’t tell if the girl heard her. The little form tripped, ungainly on the uneven earth, but kept running. Something thunked into the pack, and she glanced back and saw the zaizectu on the ground. She turned back and lifted a boot, but the creature had already recovered, and shot past her face, into the air. She turned and ran again, her chin held tightly against her breast bone. Rolling her eyes up, she thought she caught a whirring glint in the air above them.

She saw the exact moment when it plummeted, not towards her, but towards Praeda. The breath went out of her body. But as the monster streaked downwards, the stalks of rye lifted their heads and whipped at it, as if guided by an unseen hand. The zaizectu zipped away, then turned and began to arc back towards the girl. And a rock shot out of the earth to block its passage. It came so suddenly that the ground shook and Praeda fell backwards. Manrie saw her drop the disc. But she also her a wet slap against the rock, and she ran forward, feeling more hope than dread.

The zaizectu lay at the base of the rock, oozing a strange, greenish bile. Its mandibles were crushed. She stood over it, making sure that it was truly dead. And then she looked at the rock. It was so familiar that she took a step backwards. There was even a smear of blood where the woman had died. But no corpses. Manrie stepped around it and gazed back the way they had come. The rock had moved, had been sucked into the earth to emerge where it was needed. She began to shake with a mixture of relief and fear.

She ran to Praeda’s side. The girl was gasping, tears running down her dirty face. But her white dress was oddly clean. Manrie stuffed the bestiary and the needle into the pack, and gathered Praeda in her arms. “We have to leave,” she said, and she could hear the panic in her voice. “We have to leave this place.”

“Mama!” the girl insisted.

“Maybe it was her,” Manrie said, choosing to misunderstand Praeda’s demand. “I don’t know.” She didn’t speak the other possibility out loud. She didn’t say that the meadow was alive, and that it had chosen to save them.