They were sheltering from the rain in a slump block cave when they saw the stranger pass along the ridge below them. No road, no trail, and yet he had found them. But maybe it was that the ridge along the river gorge was the only natural way to go north along the mountain heights. Manrie watched him with her eyes narrowed, one finger pressed to Praeda’s lips to silence her. The big shoulders swaying without seeming volition. The face covered in a muslin sack. Her enemy. He was looking for her, and as his horse plodded through the rain she tried to convince herself that he had found her by accident.

When he was gone she removed her finger from Praeda’s lips and the little girl exhaled heavily. Maybe she had been holding her breath. It was hard to tell with Praeda. She hadn’t taken the blindfold off since her mother had died, and yet there was a playfulness in her. When Manrie carried her on her back, Praeda played with her hair and sang little songs and asked for stories. Then she would take the stories and shift them about, changing the names of people and places to nonsense words, making the heroes into fools and the fools into heroes. But when the sun began to set the games would vanish. The girl would cling to Manrie’s side, terrified. Manrie foraged and cooked with little hands always gripping her leg, her arm, her shoulder. Sometimes Praeda seemed like a useless appendage, a dead limb. But then she would curl against Manrie’s side to fall asleep, and Manrie would feel a sense of contentment, of love and warmth, that she hadn’t known since she was a child. Since her own mother had given her up.

“We’ll have to go back up into the forest,” Manrie whispered, although it was raining hard enough to muffle their voices.

Praeda shook her head. “No.”

“That person who went past, he’s been looking for me. He killed my friend Aizdha. If he finds us, he won’t spare us.”

“Who is he?”

His face flashed in her mind. The blandly handsome features. The strange, gill like quality of his nostrils. The fungal smell of his breath. “I don’t know.”

“Why did he kill her?”

“Her?”

“Your friend.”

“My friend was a man. A scholar. He’s the one who wrote the book of monsters.”

“I thought you wrote it.”

“Well, it’s my handwriting on some of the pages. And my pictures. But he told me what to write.” She thought, then amended that. “He taught me how to write in it.”

“I don’t want to go back into the forest.”

“Maybe the woodpecker will be gone.”

“It won’t be.”

“We don’t know that. And anyway, it didn’t do anything to us.”

“It made you afraid.”

“Well,” Manrie said, staring out at the rain, “I’ll have to be brave.”

It was cold, but Manrie wouldn’t light a fire. She and Praeda smelled like the forest, like animals, and she wouldn’t do anything to create a human smell, the scent of smoke and food cooking. They ate wild apples. As she watched the rain she imagined those nostrils quivering beneath the muslin mask.

Praeda dozed, then played with some of the loose rock that had accumulated in the cave, stacking the flat pieces, making a house, then a village, taking up more and more space. Manrie sat by the cave entrance, her back against a slab of stone, the rain misting in and wetting her face. It was amazing to her that Praeda could play without seeing, that she seemed to remember where she had built her fragile buildings and could move her little body around on the gritty ground without knocking anything over.

Dusk came with a barely perceptible darkening of the clouded air, and the spirits began to gather on the ridge below them. They stood, looking up at the cave, and Manrie looked back at them. Aizdha was there, and Praeda’s mother, and the people of the village that Praeda had come from. Staring at her, their faces blank, without demand or desire. It occurred to her, with a frisson of fear, that the stranger might be following the ghosts. Could Aizdha’s shade be leading him? But Aizdha’s spirit had helped her escape from the Man on the Mountain. And besides, the stranger had ridden past them hours before the ghosts gathered.

By morning, Praeda seemed resigned to climbing back up the escarpment into the strange, quiet forest that fringed the base of the mountain. The rain had let up, or transformed itself into roving patches of mist that amplified the weak sunlight and coiled around the twisted trunks. They had barely gone a mile before Manrie saw the first face. She recognized a woman from Praeda’s village, one of the ghosts that paid their nightly visitations. The face was carved into the trunk of a camphor tree and breathed out a sharp, resinous scent. Praeda was riding on Manrie’s back, seated on the saddlebag that was strapped to her shoulders. Manrie was careful to keep her breathing normal, her shoulders loose and her heartbeat steady. She went past the face in the tree without looking at it, and Praeda sensed nothing in her body that would reveal that it was there.

But when the hammering began in the woods ahead of them, the little girl tensed and whimpered. She dug her fingers into Manrie’s neck. “Praeda, you’re hurting me,” Manrie said. And then, when the grip wouldn’t loosen, “If you don’t let go, you’ll have to get down and walk.”

“I’m scared.”

“Well, don’t hold onto my neck. Can you hold my shoulders? And practice your breathing, like I told you.”

“Breathing doesn’t help. I can taste the faces.”

“You mean that you can smell the camphor. I wish I had never told you about the faces. If you didn’t know about them, you would think that the forest smelled nice.”

“I would still hear the woodpecker.”

“So? There are woodpeckers all through the woods. They’re just hunting for insects in the bark.”

“This one isn’t.”

“How do you know? Maybe it’s the insects that are making the patterns of the faces.”

That was a mistake. Praeda gasped and dug her fingers deeper into Manrie’s shoulders. Manrie fell silent. She wouldn’t speak her real fear. That it was the stranger, the mushroom man, who was controlling the woodpecker. He had told her, when she first met him in Libreigia, that as a child he had seen a face in a field of blighted grain. Or rather, he had told Aizdha when she was in the room. He had never addressed her directly, had pretended that she wasn’t there. As a slave, she was beneath his notice. It seemed unfair that he was hunting her now.

It was because she had the bestiary. If she left it beside the trail, he might abandon his hunt. But if she left it beside the trail, she would surrender who she was. She would loose her link to Aizdha. And the mushroom man might destroy the book. All of the knowledge that she and her master had carefully accumulated would disappear. Perhaps she could make a new bestiary. How much did she remember? Not enough. Facts would disappear. Drawings would shift and lose their exactitude. Any book she made would be one step away from the reality that they had encountered and recorded. And there was one page that she could never replicate.

“Do you want to know about the strangest page in the bestiary?” she asked Praeda.

There was a pause, then the girl said, “Yes,” in a tiny voice that was almost lost beneath the hammering of the woodpecker.

“It’s a monster that can only be described, can only be talked about, really, by two people who have seen it. Aizdha and I made the page together. We had to sit side by side and remember the facts, and when I drew it he had to put his hand over my hand.”

“What does it look like?”

“I don’t know. I can’t remember it because he’s…because I’m alone now.”

“You’re not alone.”

“Well, he isn’t with me anymore.” Although, maybe at night, when his spirit came near, she would be able to see it. She would have to try when they made camp for the evening.

“How did you know what the monster looked like?”

“We encountered it together. In Lacernae. It had come down from the highest peaks and was terrorizing the village. Only they didn’t know it was there. Or, they knew when they were together. They knew when they talked about it together, but when they were alone, they forgot. In some ways it was good.”

“How was it good?”

“All they had to do was go off by themselves, and they would forget to be afraid.”

“Don’t leave me alone!”

Manrie laughed. “That’s not what I’m saying. But you’re not afraid when you’re asleep, are you?”

“I know you’re with me.”

“Yes, but in your sleep you’re alone.”

“No I’m not.”

“Of course you are.”

“There are people in my dreams.”

Manrie thought about that. Eventually she said, “Yes, I suppose that’s true.”

And she didn’t tell Praeda about the way the monster had stalked people when they were alone. When she and Aizdha had arrived in Lacernae, all anyone knew was that people were going missing. They had already taken precautions, had organized into groups. She remembered how crowded the cliff dwellings had been, as hermits and widows left their lonely hovels and found their way to the town, how people had helped them up the ladders and made them welcome in their homes. She could picture the multi-colored robes that had hung down from the ledges, drying in the sun. She could smell the stew pots. For that brief time during which the people had come together, the poor had been protected, the strange and cantankerous had been tolerated. The monster had brought fear to Lacernae. It had also brought love.

The thought of the meals they had shared in the different dwellings made her stomach growl, and she stopped in a grove of twisted trees and squatted so that Praeda could get down from her back. The little girl insisted on clinging to her, and Manrie sighed, and pried one hand free from her shoulder so that she could release the saddle bag’s strap. “I’ve become your horse,” she said.

“The last horse died,” Praeda replied.

Manrie ignored this. “I’m hungry and I need to set some snares.” She moved around the grove, setting her snares in the branches of the low shrubs that grew at the roots of the trees. Praeda moved with her, bunching her robes in one tiny hand and pulling them so that the collar cut into Manrie’s neck. It was like she herself was in a snare that the child had created. When she was done, she picked Praeda up and held her cradled against her chest, so that the little girl’s soft hairs tickled her chin. She realized that the sound of the woodpecker had stopped. “We could build some bird snares, I suppose, and see if we could trap it.”

“What’s a bird snare?”

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

“Just a clever way of catching dinner. Only birds don’t provide much meat, so they’re hardly worth catching if you can snare a squirrel or a hare.”

“I’m sick of hares.”

“You’d be even sicker of squirrels. Come on, let’s try.”

She broke a dead branch off of one of the camphor trees, ignoring the face that stared at her from the trunk and telling herself that it wasn’t like snapping off a human arm. The tree hadn’t become a person when the woodpecker decorated it. But as she worked with her knife to sharpen one end of it and drill a hole near the top, she couldn’t help glancing at the tree to see if the face had changed expression. She didn’t think the woodpecker would choose to be snared, but threading a piece of twine through the hole and tying it about a rock gave her something to do as they waited for the other snares to catch their meal. When she was finished she dug a hole for the pole in the center of the grove, then led Praeda to the base of an uncarved tree, and sat with her back against the trunk, regarding her work as the little girl settled against her side and began to snore.

Her eyes drifted from the bird snare to the faces on the other trees, and when she was certain that Praeda was deeply asleep she shifted the child off of her lap and brought the bestiary out of the saddlebag. She turned through the pages, looking at the drawings and descriptions that she had added over the years. Her handwriting was better than Aizdha’s, and she was a better illustrator. Eventually he had allowed her to fill most of the pages, directing her work at first, then trusting her more and more. His writing and drawing was entirely absent from the last signatures of the book. The only other hand that had written there belonged to Beztrae, the guard captain in Libreigia. She frowned as she considered the page he had written on. Then she turned the page and her frown deepened when she saw the picture she had made of the Man on the Mountain. Aizdha had always objected to having human beings pictured and described in the bestiary’s pages. “We are not monsters,” he had said.

*But some of us are,”* she thought. She dug a stylus and ink pot out of the saddle bag. The pot was still fairly full, although spilled ink had hardened around the cap and flaked off when she opened it. It had a dank, mealy odor which she associated with concentration and the pride that came from writing and drawing well. She dipped the stylus into it, and then paused, considering. Her glance strayed to the bird snare, and she imagined the woodpecker landing on it. She could draw it, if the trap failed, if it chose to pose for her in the weak mountain sunlight. But the trap wouldn’t fail, and the woodpecker was too smart to land on it. She glanced at the carved tree trunks instead, took a breath, and began to draw one of the faces before she could reconsider her actions.

It was a stern, rather angry face. The mouth rested in a permanent scowl, and the little snub nose was dominated by the wide, accusing eyes. A woman whose disappointment with life had settled into her features. Manrie sketched, glanced at the face, sketched again. She imagined the face’s expression shifting between glances, and it scared her, but the sketch gave a kind of permanence to the face. As if by sketching it, she could control what it might do. She didn’t know if she had seen this face in the night, standing in the crowd of ghosts that always appeared but never came close. She wouldn’t want this woman to approach. Wouldn’t want to spend time in the company of such a dissatisfied spirit.

She finished the drawing and shifted her attention to another tree. The face that the woodpecker had carved on it was kind. A young man with deep set eyes and a quirk to his mouth, so that he looked thoughtful and questioning. Someone she would have liked to meet. Again, she wasn’t certain if she had seen him among the ghosts. Maybe death made people anonymous. Maybe the woodpecker was enacting a kindness, returning the spirits’ personalities to them by making them concrete in carved wood.

Thoughts of the woodpecker caused her to glance at the bird snare, and she froze, her breath caught in her throat. There was a bird perched on the branch of the snare. Perched impossibly, since its weight should have caused the branch to slip out the hole in the pole she had carved and snap the twine tight around the bird’s legs. But the bird seemed to have no weight.

It was a very strange bird, smallish but extremely plump. There was a crown of red on its forehead, and its beak was long and pointed. Its body looked lumpy and unnaturally bloated, as if it were hiding large objects beneath its feathers. It was impossible that it hadn’t sprung the snare. It was sitting very contentedly and staring directly at her.

There was a disruption at the other end of the grove. A snap and then a small, distressed squeaking. Manrie and the bird stared at each other. Then it unfurled its wings, folding them out in segments, its body thinning as the great wings stretched. It gave one long, reverberating cry, flapped the enormous wings, and disappeared into the sky.

Manrie held her breath. The squeaking of the trapped hare punctuated the stillness. Praeda’s mumbled something, realized that she was lying alone on the ground, and flailed with her arms, looking for Manrie. “I’m here, Praeda,” she said, gathering the girl into her arms. For a moment the little body relaxed back into sleep. Then Praeda gave her head a little shake. “Did you catch something?”

“Yes. Should we go see?”

It was a tremendous mountain hare, sitting very still beside the tree trunk. The face on the tree was that of fat man, his beard carved in luxurious rivulets. Manrie bent beside the snare, Praeda clinging to her back, and cut the hare’s neck with her knife. She wiped the blade on its warm hide, then glanced up at the face. “Praeda, was there a fat man in your village? With a very big beard?”

“Yes. Mikjoen.”

“A nice man?”

“There were always dogs by his shop. He was nice to them.”

“What kind of shop was it?”

“Butchers.”

Manrie nodded. “I suppose he helped us catch the hare.”

She lit a small fire in the grove, then slipped the saddlebag on and squatted as Praeda climbed up onto her usual perch. They walked away from the grove, Manrie clutching the hare by its hind legs, the fire sending a ribbon of smoke into the air behind them. They walked east for a little while, going uphill, and then Manrie lit another fire on a large flat rock.

“I’m hungry,” Praeda said.

“We need a few fires to confuse the man who’s following us. If he is following us. He passed us by a day ago. And he was on a horse. He’s probably far to the north by now. But we should be sure.”

“But he might just come to the last fire.”

“The last fire?”

“The one you’re going to cook with.”

“Yes,” Manrie agreed. “But he’ll only have a one and three chance. And maybe the woodpecker will frighten him off.” At her words, the hammering started up again, as if she had invoked it. Praeda grasped and seized her hair in both hands. “Ow! Praeda, let go!”

“I’m scared!”

“Well, don’t be. I saw the woodpecker while you were sleeping. It isn’t scary.”

“But the faces.”

“Maybe they’re on our side.”

“Like Mikjoen.”

“Yes. Like Mikjoen.”

She didn’t cook the hare until the third fire was lit, another hour’s walk to the north. They settled beside a stream. As their dinner was roasting on the curious spit that she had found in the saddlebag, she squatted beside the cold water and washed the two strange discs that she had taken from the Man on the Mountain. She found salsify growing at a little bend where the water rushed over a tumble of rocks. Praeda seemed strangely secure in this place, content to stay beside the fire and turn the spit. When Manrie returned from foraging she placed one of the discs directly on the glowing embers at the edge of the fire and simmered the salsify in shallow water.

They ate together in a silence that was so deep that it seemed original to the world. The silence of the land before there were animals or trees, and the only possible sound was that of water running over stone. Manrie watched the little stream and heard only the burbling of the current as it ran around the rocks. Shards of sunlight glinted off of it. And then there was a flash of light, and she looked up to see the strange bird, the woodpecker, soaring across the face of the mountain. Another flash, and another.

“Praeda,” Manrie breathed. “There are three woodpeckers. No, there are more. They keep coming. They’re flying above the stream, going right past us.”

Praeda clutched at her. But she couldn’t subdue her own curiosity. “Where are they going?”

“I don’t know. They’re like fish swimming upstream. If they were fish it would mean that they were going to mate in the mountain pools.”

“Fish aren’t bad.”

Manrie hesitated. “No, they aren’t,” she assured the child, deciding not to tell her of the signatures of the bestiary that dealt with monstrous fish.

“Are we going to go with them?”

“Do you want to?” Manrie asked, surprised.

“You want to.”

And it was true. Manrie did. She hastily washed the disc and the needle in the stream and pushed them into the pack. A steady stream of birds flashed through the sky above them. The movement of their wings blew down into the little valley and fanned the flames of the cook fire. Manrie stomped it out, sending a great plume of white smoke into the air. She imagined the mushroom man looking up and seeing it, and turning his horse. Burdened by the saddle bag and by Praeda, seated upon it, Manrie stepped into the stream and made her way carefully up it, slipping on the slick rocks, her boots filling with cold water. But she would give the mushroom man no footprints to follow, she would leave him no trail of broken branches to hunt them along.

After a few miles they came to a waterfall, and had to leave the water to make their way up a rocky escarpment. They had put enough distance behind them that she could reconcile herself to the signs they left as they scrambled upwards. As they climbed, a great whirring sound grew and grew. At the top of the ridge they found that the stream ran between two tight cliffs. They abandoned it and turned towards the sound, moving carefully, afraid of startling the birds.

The trees fell away and they came out onto the rim of an enormous bowl in the mountains. Birds were settling onto the ground, and a tremendous stench of guano rose into the air. Praeda wrinkled her nose. “You should take the blindfold off,” Manrie whispered.

“No.”

“Praeda, you want to see this.”

“You tell me what you see.”

“Praeda, you should look for yourself. Don’t worry. I’ll tell you if you need to put the blindfold back on.”

“Please, Manrie.”

Manrie sighed. “Very well. We’re looking down onto about a hundred birds. They’re each settling onto a patch of ground, about a man’s length away from any other bird. They’re looking at the sky. Like they’re waiting for something.”

“Waiting for what?”

“I don’t know. Praeda, I wish you’d look.”

“Do they have faces?”

“The birds? They have beaks and eyes and plumage. Like any bird. Is that what you mean?”

“Are they making faces? On the ground?”

“Like the ones carved into the trees? No. They aren’t moving at all. I think the last one just landed. I don’t see any more coming.”

Praeda didn’t say anything in answer. The mountainside fell silent, except for the sound of the running stream. It was eerie, looking down at the faces of the birds. They were so still. As still as the ghosts that appeared each evening. Manrie studied them, breathing slowly. They were of varying shades of black and gray, and there was something almost intentional in the way that they had arranged themselves on the ground. There seemed to be a pattern to it, but she couldn’t quite discern what it was.

Then a high whistle pierced the air, and a shape soared down from the mountain peak. A sleek, white form, no larger than the birds that waited for it, but trailing tendrils of feather that glinted like snow in the mountain sunlight. It found a place in the sky and began to circle, looking down into the bowl.

The birds on the ground ruffled their fat bodies, and then, with bizarre synchronicity, unhinged their hidden wings. Plumage lifted beside their faces, and the air flashed with the deep blue and green of hidden feathers. In unison, they took a few steps to one side, and then a few steps to the other, and began to spin. The green and blue flashed and then flashed again, as if butterflies had settled on the birds and were fanning their intricate wings.

“Praeda, you must look!” Manrie breathed, and the excitement and wonder in her voice caused the girl to raise a cautious hand to the blindfold and lift it above one eye. The birds tail feathers spread out like the skirts of a maiden, and startled the air with the intricate designs that they had been keeping hidden. Praeda stared and pulled the blindfold off, blinking furiously in the light.

The birds began to hop, and their talons clicked rhythmically against the ground. Then they frilled up their wings and held them out in front of their chests, so that they looked like shards of obsidian before they were flipped back against their bodies. They dipped and straightened, as it looked like their whole bodies were striking the ground, then shattering into gem like color as the wings turned back into the folds of swinging skirts. They began to spin, and Praeda laughed out loud, and clutched Manrie’s arm with glee. They were like wobbly, shuffling tops, all moving together. It was as if the entire forest was dancing. The bobbing heads, the flash of yellow from their throat patches, the small piercing pinpricks of blue from their eyes. And above them, the white bird circled lower and lower.

Then, with a satisfied yet ungainly squawk, it fluttered down into the middle of the spinning circle. For a moment, the whole circle froze, and Manrie’s breath caught. For the gray and white feathers, the flash of green and blue, the arrested gleam of yellow, fell together into the pattern of a mosaic. And she saw a face looking up at her from the ground. A human face, kind and intelligent, and very plump.

“Who is it?” Praeda breathed.

“Aizdha,” Manrie said, before she could stop herself. “My master…my friend.”

“A ghost?”

“Yes.”

Seemingly with that word, the pattern fell apart. The bird in the center of the circle mounted the snow white hen and the other birds cast themselves into the sky. They soared right past Manrie and Praeda, and the air was turned to dusk by their feathers. And then they were gone, and the white bird was rising from the ground, its mate rising beside it, flowing up into the sky, where they separated, seeming to cut the air in two with their flight.

Praeda didn’t put the blindfold back on. “Are you scared?” Manrie asked her.

She was blinking, her gaze traveling over the sky and the trees. “It’s pretty,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Are you scared, Manrie? Are you scared of the mountain?”

Manrie remembered the mushroom man, leaning back in Aizdha’s chambers, saying “the land is trying to kill us.” He had seen a face in the ravished fields. But she had seen a face as well. And it was not a cruel face. It was a gentle and sad face. A face she knew better than her own. “No,” she said, “I’m not afraid.”