Oli became aware, first, of a soft cloth beneath his face. He had been lain on his right side with his head cushioned. Before opening his eyes, he listened. The last thing he remembered was that piercing scream. Now he heard the rustle of leaves and a gentle, low humming. As he focussed on the unfamiliar tune, he realised it was not humming but singing.
...The road flowed fast and I followed it blindly,
The fool's road carried me far from my family,
Far from the market and far from the revelry,
Far from the arms of my lovers that road carried me...
Oli heard a louder snap and opened his eyes. Blurry, they perceived at first only light and darkness. The sky and trees. Then another light. Gradually a fire came into view, along with a huddled figure bent over it, breaking sticks. He blinked and looked again, then bolted to his feet. The patchwork cloak!
Suddenly dizzy, Oli staggered and regained his balance, only to double forward and vomit. He felt thin, strong arms around his shoulders guide him back to the ground. His head began to pound.
“You fell hard.”
The voice sounded distant, like an echo from the back of a deep cave. He felt a hand on his forehead, and the throbbing eased a little.
“You picked up a fever, too.”
The rough calluses and bony fingers scraped as much as caressed. Not like his mother when she felt his forehead for a fever. Not unpleasant though, either.
“Who are you?” Oli mumbled, straining to look through drooped eyelids.
“I’m sorry?” the voice replied.
Oli tried to speak again and realised that though his mouth moved, and sounds emerged, they were not intelligible. He grunted in frustration.
“Easy. Drink this.”
He felt a water pouch on his lips and sucked. He was thirsty and did not notice the bitter taste until after he had swallowed. He ran his tongue over his teeth. Yarrow root, perhaps. Or perhaps not. The taste reminded him of the smell of scursleaf, a herb used by Elder Mildred when all else failed to dull the pain of her patients. The headache subsided and drowsiness took its place. He felt the bony hand pat his shoulder and a blanket was pulled over him.
----------------------------------------
He dreamed of someone, or something, chasing him through the forest, while he chased another in front of him. He knew, as one sometimes knows the rules of a dream, that when he caught the one in front, he would take their place. He ran beside the mountains in the North, leaping up onto the pinnacles in the distance and bounding from one summit to the next, clearing the mountain pass as though he were playing at stepping-stones. He caught sight of his quarry, nothing more than a movement changing course and he too ran South, down the length of the gently curving river; the Scursrun. It is the spine of the forest. He did not think it, but he knew it as part of the landscape of the dream. He sensed movement behind him and quickened his pace. Now he passed through the valley, with the great falls ahead where the Scursrun and the Sevarun separated. Cascades crashed into rocks, splintered into smaller cascades and were subsumed in bigger ones. Water particles glittered in the air like shattered ice exploding upward. They caught the sunlight, refracting into colours Oli had never seen before. That’s what the Levon falls look like, he thought to himself. This is the neck of the forest. He readied himself to jump, just over the top where the chase led. And then his arm shook, and the waking world intruded.
Clinging to the remnants of the dream, he tried at first to brush off the hand. What’s over the ridge? Then, as the dream faded and he remembered his questions about the real world, he opened his eyes.
“Where am I? Who are you? What happened to Ingo?” he blurted.
“Sit up slowly.”
Oli rubbed his head. It felt better, but he did not trust himself to stand. He looked around. The sides of a small, low cave pressed close around him. A fire smouldered at the entrance and smoke from the glowing wood billowed around a pan set in the centre. It wafted out between roots that hung down over the entrance. As the breeze changed, the smoke blew his way and Oli’s nostrils flared around the smell of hot food. His mouth watered. The fire lit the cave to the back, casting jerking orange forms on the wet stone walls. A crescent moon hung low, adding a little light of its own.
The outsider moved to the other side of the fire and sat on his haunches watching Oli, who pushed himself upright. He thought of his questions and repeated the first one.
“Who are you?”
He leant forward as he asked it, almost expecting the outsider to disappear into thin air instead of answering. He poised his legs to run past him if he grew angry, like he had on their first meeting.
“Kass,” the man replied in a matter-of-fact tone, as though that explained everything.
His pale face with its fine features contrasted sharply with his trailing black hair and beard. Patches of silver on his shirt caught the light of the fire and glittered from beneath the cloak. Oli had no doubt this was the man from the river, yet he seemed calmer than he had done that day. Oli’s eyes darted around, checking for the crooked spear, but he could not see it.
“Is that it? Just Kass?” he asked, confused and a little disappointed.
The lanky man smirked and stood. He gathered the ends of his heavy cloak and swirled it about himself in a gesture at once mockingly exaggerated and genuinely graceful.
“But of course not,” he replied, his lyrical voice playing at the edges of sarcasm. “I am known more formally as His Grace Kastor... the magnificent!” He spread his arms and bowed. “Like I said though, call me Kass.” He resumed sitting.
Oli smiled. He detected the kind of cynicism he liked in certain grown-ups. A friendly, self-effacing humour that promised to mock itself as much as it mocked others. The man’s manner reminded him a little of Elder Joturn. He sat up straight.
“I need to get home. I have to find my parents.”
Kastor stayed put. “Before I answer your other two questions?”
Oli thought, trying to remember what he had asked the moment he woke. He thought the man had ignored him.
“Go on, then.”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?” He looked at Kass warily. “You don’t know where we are, or what happened to Ingo?”
“Both. So,” he crossed his long, thin legs and smiled apologetically, “you see the problem with getting you home.”
Hesitantly, with one eye on the outsider, Oli edged out of the cave. Kastor did not stop him. He looked up at the sky. He spotted the constellation of Terlos. He got a sense for where North was. He listened for the river but could not hear it. Kastor spoke to him from inside the cave.
“We’re west of the Scursrun, I can tell you that. Far west, and a little too far north for my liking. If we go east for a while, we could reach the river again and travel upstream. But I don’t know these parts. I don’t know the paths, and the soldiers have started to use the river to travel.”
“Don’t you know how you got here?” Oli called back into the cave.
Stolen story; please report.
“With you slung over one shoulder and arrows whistling past the other,” replied Kastor, somewhat testily.
Oli returned to the mouth of the cave and looked again at his unexpected rescuer. Their eyes met and they regarded one another silently. Once, when he was young, Oli had stumbled across a bear in the forest. It was an old memory, from before he knew how special they were. Great forest spirits were rarely encountered, especially benevolent ones, but at that age to Oli it was just a big black animal. They had watched each other for a long time, each trying to see beyond the other’s expression into their hidden thoughts, or so Oli had thought. He remembered thinking that he and the bear were not so different. The boy and the young man watched each other like that, until Kastor broke the spell.
“I’m not fit to make promises, little fellow, but I’ll do my best to get you home.” He waved at the trees. “There’s ground to cover though and soldiers about. You still need rest as well, and I’m not carrying you again.” He rubbed his shoulder and right arm.
As though the reminder of his headache caused it to return, Oli felt a wave of dizziness and sat down next to the fire. He peered at the broth bubbling in the pan. There were some rich chunks of meat floating in it. His stomach rumbled. Kastor poked the pot off the embers with a long stick.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Oli.”
“And what were you doing running around the forest with a spear you could barely carry?”
Oli glanced around and flushed in panic, remembering his father’s spear.
“Sorry,” said Kastor as he tested a piece of meat on the end of his skewer. “I didn’t have time. Shame. It looked like a special weapon.”
Oli put his face in his hands. He had no idea how far from home he was, and he had lost his father’s spear. He knew Ingo was alive, though. He looked up. He was about to ask his rescuer another question, then stopped. He heard his mother’s voice chiding him. Politeness matters to people, Oli, whether it matters to you or not.
“Um, thank you, by the way,” he mumbled.
Kastor looked up and smiled.
“You’re welcome, Oli.”
He pushed the pot towards him and snapped a stick, passing him half. Oli held it in the flames until the pointed end was black and tucked into the meat. When he had stuffed himself, he noticed Kastor staring at him. He felt as though the man were trying to see something behind, or through him. He asked the question he had held back from earlier.
“Could you save Ingo, the way you saved me? Did you scare them with that battle cry?”
The memory of the scream, or screech, brought a shudder to Oli. He could still feel the way it had entered his body, not just his ears, and bounced around inside. But this thin, friendly man who had cooked him a pot of stew did not seem the type to wail like a ghoul and split skulls. Perhaps he had imagined it.
Kastor shook his head slowly and placed his stick on the ground.
“I’m sorry, Oli,” he replied gently, but firmly. “I don’t know what happened to your kinsman. I don’t know where they took him... and I don’t know where to find him now.”
“Who are they? Why do they want us?”
“From their armour, I’d say they’re apostates from Dombarrow, from the Sundered Republic. As for what they want it’s anybody’s guess. They’ve never shown an interest in Saltleaf before. At least,” he added, “I don’t think they have.”
“Where do you come from?” asked Oli. “And why did you help me?”
Kastor stared out of the cave as though he had not heard the questions. Oli was about to repeat them when he answered:
“The South.”
“Lake Silence? Where the Levonin wander?”
“I suppose so, yes. And further South.”
What was further South than the Levonin and their lake? An impassable swampland, wasn’t it? And beyond that the steppes of the southern mountains, where the worshippers of Terlos lived in their frigid halls. They’d never been known to visit the forest.
“My parents thought you were a Western adventurer,” Oli said. “Do the Southern clans make shirts like that? My dad says Seveners don’t have time to dye wool.”
“Is that so?” Kastor raised an eyebrow.
“I think really we don’t have the dyes.”
Kastor chuckled and grinned, then his grin faded into a soft smile, and he looked far away.
“A Western adventurer,” he said. “They were half right. Although I prefer the term explorer.”
“What’s an explorer?”
Kastor frowned and then, animated by the question, waved his hands as he spoke.
“You have scouts in your clan, don’t you? People who learn new paths in the forest.”
“Joturn does that, mostly. He’s the hunt leader. But only after we move. We know all the paths around our village now. At least the others do. I’ve never been able to see them.”
“Ah, well, the Northern clans don’t move around as much. Those in the South have scouts who train apprentices... Interesting...”
He trailed off and took out a small rectangle of leather, which he opened to reveal sheafs of parchment so thin they seemed to be innumerable. He flicked through the dense writing and, upon identifying a narrow strip of blank space began scribbling with a sort of shiny black quill. Kastor muttered to himself as he scribbled, then looked up at Oli and made a start.
“Yes, sorry, where was I?” He slipped the book and quill inside his cloak. “They have scouts down south and the scouts also hunt. You have hunters who scout. Either way, you know what scouting is.”
Oli nodded and Kastor continued:
“Now, imagine someone who scouts – not just nearby, to see what’s beyond the bend in the river, where the sleeper nests and the ghoul circles are and so on. Imagine someone who leaves the forest, leaves the country even, for new lands, beyond even the borders of your king and scouts those places!”
Kastor’s dark eyes twinkled with enthusiasm. Oli tried to work out why.
“You mean, in case the oracle on Hurean’s night tells us to travel really far?”
“No no no. The rest of the clan don’t go – just the explorer. And the explorer comes back and tells them what’s there!” Kastor looked at Oli, perhaps expecting him to mirror his own enthusiasm for this bizarre idea.
“But... why does he need to explore there if the rest of his clan aren’t going?”
Kastor blinked, then puffed his cheeks and exhaled. “Just like everyone else here. Just like home. Forget it.”
Oli thought it over in the silence that followed. Explorer. It wasn’t that he disapproved of or disliked the idea. He had simply never heard of it before. Even his grandfather, whose travels were legendary in the clan, had only thought to visit the capital of the king to whom their forest ostensibly belonged.
He looked at Kastor, whose mood had altered as suddenly as a leaf turns in the wind. The man scowled and pushed the remnants of the stew around the pot. He looked completely different to the man who had fed and looked after him. He looked more like the outsider by the river, and less like the mysterious rescuer. Oli felt sorry, and a little disconcerted. He edged away. He knew that he had disappointed Kastor but not how to undo it. Eventually, Kastor looked up. His face was tired, but Oli could see that he must only be a few years older than Ingo.
“It’s a while until the morning. I’m going to sleep. You should, too.”
“Ok.”
Oli shuffled back to where he had lain before. He put his head on the pillow, which he now saw was a sack with a pelt jacket folded on top. He must have already slept for the best part of a day, though, and it took more effort to close his eyes than to stare up at the cave roof and the embers reflected in it.
“Kass,” he asked. “Can we try to find Ingo tomorrow, before we go back? You like to explore, and you can scare the soldiers. Please?”
He heard a deep in and out breath from the other side of the cave. “Go to sleep, Oli.”
It wasn’t long before Oli heard the deeper breathing of a man sleeping. He thought about the stories he knew of children getting lost, like the one where the Hallin boy followed fireflies and met a hunter from another clan. The hunter promised to take him home but brought the boy instead to a sleeper nest. Not just any nest, but the nest of the queen herself. She had the hunter’s own son, poisoned and buried deep in the ground, and the hunter offered the lost boy in exchange for his child back.
The story ended in three ways, depending on who told it. Elder Mildred said the sleeper queen accepted the swap and the Hallin boy died in place of the hunter’s son. That was the price of wandering off and trusting strangers. But Elder Oslef said the hunter tricked the sleeper, and when she woke his son all three of them fled to safety, and that is why the sleepers no longer speak to us.
Elder Joturn told a darker tale. In his version the sleeper queen accepted the swap, saying: “Come and show me which of my prey is yours.” When the hunter entered the dark lair, dragging the little boy behind him, she caught them both, betraying her word, and all three ended up under the ground. He’d grunt after telling it, and mutter to the children.
“Saltleaf is your home, boys and girls, but it doesn’t belong to you. Better have your wits about you. Nobody owns the forest.”
Oli looked up. The embers were barely glowing now, but the first hint of an azure glow came in through the trees outside. He wasn't sure if he had slept or not. He shivered and smelled the chilly air. The cool scent of a spring morning invaded the deep odour of old, damp stone. The cave was almost pitch black, apart from the entrance. He listened for the reassuring sound of breathing and realised he could not hear it.
In the darkness, he saw Kastor lying impossibly still. There was something deeper about it than sleep. A silence that was more than the mere absence of sound seemed to emanate from his supine form, oppressing the small cave. The outline or shadow of something, a sack perhaps, sat on his chest. Oli blinked and focussed. He glanced back and forth and saw more from the corners of his eyes than he did looking straight ahead.
Were those claws or talons that he glimpsed? Had something attacked his rescuer? Was Kastor poisoned? He crept forward on trembling hands, forcing himself to inch across the cave. The darkness deepened and within it something fluttered in a sudden, rapid rhythm like a bat’s wings. Then he heard the shriek again, inside his head. Not loud, like last time. Short and sharp, stopping as suddenly as it started. He panicked and leaped away. The shadow moved in front of him. Scrambling to the far side and panting in ragged breaths, he pressed his back up against the wall and waved his arms in the darkness. They moved freely in the empty space.
Silence again outside, and inside the walls of his own head, the echo of that screech.
Holding his breath, he lowered his hands. Kastor lay there, unmoving. For a moment the shadow on his chest seemed to look at Oli with two bright, red pinpoints, which a moment later faded into the darkness like dying embers, so that he was not sure if he had seen or imagined them. A bead of sweat dripped from his forehead and ran into the corner of his eye. He rubbed it and when he looked again, the shadow was gone.
Kastor sat up.
“Oh,” he said. “You’re awake.” He pulled up his knees, pushed himself to his feet and walked to the cave entrance. He stepped beyond it and stretched his whole body upwards as though he wanted to reach his fingertips right into the sky and brush them against the last of the morning stars. He yawned loudly. Then he turned to Oli and flashed him a broad smile that revealed the whitest teeth he had ever seen.
“Let’s go.”