10. A BRIEF RESPITE

“The Traveling Folk,” Martim said with a laugh, as they set off on the road south. “‘Tis a good thing to see them here. Too bad they are headed west. They make fine companions on the road.”

“You know of these people?” Elyse asked him. “I have never seen such folk before.”

“Never?” Martim looked at her curiously, in that slightly unsettling, studying way he had. “I had heard tale that they visit every land. They call themselves merchants, though they only ever seem to carry trinkets, rarely something practical. I don’t think I’ve even heard of them trading one of their horses, for all they’ll tell you that they’re the best mounts to be found. Still, you can find something interesting among what they carry, every now and then.”

“They did make me a gift,” she said, tucking her stick beneath her arm so that she might produce the fat little frog. The wizard was very interested in it, and they spent a time discussing what they thought the Art within it was for. Though for all their speculating, they still were no closer to figuring out what it was for, only that Martim insisted that he thought that whatever the enchantment was, it served more than one purpose.

They fell silent for a time as they neared the edge of town, where the broken, charred logs of a crumbled palisade marked the boundary between Cross-on-Green proper and the surrounding farmlands that supported it. The clack of her stick striking the stone only seemed to emphasize the quiet between them, and for some reason she could not name, it agitated Elyse. “So, why did you choose to move our camp?” she asked the wizard, after a moment.

“I thought it might be better to sleep by a creek rather than on hard stone, and I did not much like my rest last night. Why were you so eager to tell the traders not to rest in town?”

This was the slippery way he had of evading questions and steering the conversation away from what she intended. She’d answer that question, and he’d have another for her, and before she knew it they’d be talking about something else entirely. Not this time. “I saw you last night, Martim,” she snapped, then frowned. That had sounded harsher than she intended. “I saw you…walking about the plaza. What were you doing?”

She had been watching the path before her, but when he didn’t answer she glanced towards him, and was astounded to find him looking ashen-faced, staring bleakly at the road. “I was dreamwalking,” he said finally, when she thought he would not say anything at all. “That’s the only thing I can think of.” He blushed, and looked away from her. “I did not mean to worry you. I wish you had not seen.”

He seemed so ashamed, his voice so hushed, his manner so stricken, that she almost felt as if she should drop it right there, so clearly did he not want to linger on the subject. “I am not sure that you were simply dreamwalking,” she pushed on. She told him of how she had gone to the tree, and tried to read the tree-speech from it, and how she had found the tree twisted beyond recognition. Martim listened, questioningly at first - he had not known she had the tree-speech - but then grew increasingly quiet as she spoke of how she had felt the tree sipping from something dark within the earth. “I do not think the tree was…as it should have been,” she finished eventually. “I worry that it drew you out, and it was not dreamwalking at all.”

“That may well be,” the wizard said slowly. He worried an end of his red scarf between two fingers, plucking at the wool. “In a place of so much slaughter, it could well be that the Lands of the Dead drew close there…but why…?” His jaw clenched shut, and his expression grew grim. “A good thing that we are quitting the place, then.”

A good thing indeed. Elyse knew little about the Lands of the Dead - she supposed that relatively few would know much about them at all. Your soul went to the Lands of the Dead when you died, unless you were a wicked sort bound for the Hells, and Old Scratch’s punishment. Some described the Lands of the Dead as peaceful for those souls that went to it, but many other stories described them as strange, unknowable, full of dangerous things. Everyone had their own ideas of what lay beyond the veil, and many believed there was no peace after death. Nobody knew for certain. Except, perhaps, for necromancers.

She left the wizard in silence for a time, brooding, and concentrated on walking as gingerly as she could on her ankle. It was not nearly so bad anymore, and soon enough she would not worry about it at all. She breathed in, and looked to the sky. With trees more sparse here, she could see the setting sun, orange and bright, sinking towards the horizon, painting the clouds in soft shades of pink. A beautiful sunset, one to make her wish she could capture it somehow and hold it forever.

After some time, Martim took a dirt path across a field - another farmer’s field gone back to the wilds, with nothing but the vine-covered shell of a burnt home - and soon then to the tree-shrouded bank of a creek. If it was the same creek that the fae Lob had claimed as his own (and it very likely was) then it had grown stronger since they had last crossed over it, perhaps joined by streams, flowing faster and deeper.

The spot he had chosen for camp was beneath the long golden branches of a drooping willow. The wizard had taken three partridges for their meals, and Cecil a squirrel and another rabbit. It would be much nicer to sleep here, with the whispering of the brook nearby, and soft ground rather than stone. She sat in the grass, laying her fae-stick across her knees, glad to be off her feet. Cecil approached her and quite aggressively settled into her lap, purring deeply, glad to be by her side again. She watched as Martimeos prepared a campfire, and a spit for two of the partridges, already plucked and prepared for the cooking. As they cooked, she practiced her healing, which the wizard tried to work at as well, though his efforts were not successful.

Not that this was unusual. The music of the body, the red song of blood rushing through veins, blood and bone and muscle and sinew all working together to make a grand symphony, this was not something easily heard. One had to train the senses for it. Rarely was it the first thing a wizard or a witch learned in their journey with the Art, or even one of the earlier things. Often, or so she had heard, even those who became very skilled with the healing craft learned it only later in life. Knowing some of the other tricks of the Art, something of the nature of magic, helped to learn the complicated art of healing.

It had been different for her. She had a natural talent for hearing the song, though even then it had taken her months of lying in darkness at night, listening, straining to hear what she had been told must be there. When first she had heard it, it had overwhelmed her - strange to feel the dance of blood in your own veins, to know of yourself as this strange, red, wet music, especially when so young; she had wept both at the beauty of it and with fear. And even after hearing the song, it had taken her a very long time to know how to mend it when it was broken - or to hasten the mending, since the song was very able to re-tune itself, to some degree. Sometimes.

She could hear more now, too. She could hear the discord in the song that she knew for disease, and the dark notes of other sinister things that happened in people’s bodies that she could not name. And she could feel old wounds, where the song had been altered and changed to repair itself, not the same, but still whole. And when she laid her hands upon Martim, which she did at least once a day, to see to the mending of his wounds - the cuts in his side were healing nicely now, and the gash near his neck was at least doing better, that one could have been so much worse - when she laid hands upon him, she could feel the wound he would not speak of, the wound which she had felt the moment she had first healed him when they had met.

Something had torn the wizard, ripped him, ruined him, left a wound so deep that even healed it was as obvious as seeing the land itself split open. Rainfall and time might send more earth into the pit, and plants might grow over it, but it would always be clear that the land had been torn apart. This wound was so enormous in him, in fact, that she was not sure at first where he had been injured, though now she thought it must be along his back. Whatever it was had carved deep within him. Deeper than she had thought possible to be cut and still live, in fact. It had cut through bone and organ, it seemed almost like it had very nearly cut him in twain. She would have said that anyone who had suffered such an injury would have never survived, they must be dead. If not dead, it would have taken the greatest of healers and a complete miracle, and even then they would have ended up crippled.

And yet here Martim was, as whole as any other man, without even a limp to show for it. He gave her a small, somewhat mischievous smile as she released him from his healing, though she thought that perhaps smiles just simply looked mischievous on his face. Golden leaves, fallen from the willow, adorned his long, unkempt hair, when she looked into his dark green eyes, she thought that he must know that she knew of his wound. The shock had certainly been too obvious on her face, the first time she had sensed it. She had itched to know the tale behind it, and yet something had held her back. Perhaps it had been the simple severity of the wound itself. So grave did it seem that it felt wrong to ask someone she had just met about it, like asking a stranger why they were crying. Though she might have still asked anyway, if the wizard had not seemed so much like a wild, wary thing, one that she needed all her caution to catch.

She supposed that she still did not know him very well. It had only been a few days, though what a perilous few days it had been through the One-Road Wood. But already she itched again to ask him about the wound, and she did not think unfamiliarity would keep the question from her lips for much longer. Speaking of which… “So where is Pike’s Green?” she asked, as Martim lifted one of the spit partridges from the fire to examine it. If she could not satisfy her curiosity about her wound just yet, she would have some other answers out of the man. “Is that where you are from?”

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The wizard gave a start and very nearly dropped the partridge. Frowning at her, he muttered, “I did mention that to the traders, didn’t I? Yes, it was my home.”

She thought he might say more, but silence fell between them again as they stared into the flames. The tired, comforting dim of twilight was approaching, and from the branches of the willow above, Flit sang his last salute to the day’s sun. Apparently it would not be so easy to get him to crack his lips on the matter. Eventually he removed the birds from the fire, and now offered one to her, grease still running down the stick. She watched him, silently, waiting for her bird to cool. She wondered if he was strange for a man, or whether they were all like this in some way. Absent-mindedly, she gnawed at her meat, and spat out the burnt remains of a feather.

“Sorry,” the wizard told her with a rueful shrug. “I am not so good at dressing birds, I think.”

“I think so too,” Elyse muttered. Not just that either, she thought. She was much quicker and cleaner than the wizard was when it came to butchering kills. “What is it you did before you set out on the road?” she asked, as she plucked some of the meat from the bone and fed Cecil a scrap. “Anything useful at all?”

Martim frowned at her thoughtfully, chewing slowly before he spoke. “My father was a cobbler. I know a bit of that.” The fire crackled and popped, the only other sound that of Cecil’s loud, rumbling purr. “What about you, Elyse? What did you do before you traveled, and where did you come from?”

Elyse gave a start, and didn’t answer him at first. She supposed if she wanted him to answer these sorts of questions, it was only fair that she supply some answers of her own. She stared into the fire for a long moment, considering, before she spoke. “South and east of here, there is a great swamp. The swamp of Rue Ouest. My mother was the witch of that swamp, and I was in her care. She taught me of the Art and how to survive off the land.”

“I think I have heard of it from travelers. Rue Ouest? It has a Calaisan sound to it.” That it did, she supposed. Calais was one of the old Aurelic kingdoms, and apparently the city it was named for still stood, though she did not have any idea whether it held all the lands it once had, or whether her swamp was now or had ever been part of it on a map. The wizard gave her one of those grins, and a shrewd look. “Though I had heard rumor that the witch of that swamp was a cannibal.”

Elyse laughed. Cannibals? She did not know that the tale of her swamp was one that travelers might speak of. She wondered what other wild things might have been said about it. “Well, she was not very fond of visitors. She never ate anyone that I know of, though she…she did kill any man who entered the swamp. Women, though, would sometimes come to her for help. Sometimes asking for silly things, like love potions. Sometimes for more serious things, like help conceiving a child. For the first, she’d sell them some swamp water in a clay jar and send them on their way. The second she would actually help.”

“She would kill any man that entered the swamp? What of your father?”

Elyse fidgeted, running her thumb over the dark ring that decorated her free hand. “I...never met him. Truth be told, you are the first man I have spoken much to. And Chesmed now too, I suppose. I never saw a man except from a distance. Mother would never let me near them...” She chuckled, though the memories saddened her. “When I was little, there were some loggers that worked at the edge of our swamp. I watched them from afar. I thought they were women. I thought a man was what a woman became when she grew old. I was a bit disappointed when I learned I would never be very tall and have broad shoulders and hairy arms.” She sighed. “Or a beard. I would have liked a beard.”

The wizard was staring at her, Elyse realized. In the dying light, shadows seemed to swim in his eyes around the twin pinpricks of reflected orange flame. She wondered if what she had said was very strange. She knew that she had been raised in an unusual way, but beneath Martim’s gaze she began to wonder just how very odd it was. “You have not been on the road for very long, then. Your mother really kept you so isolated?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said slowly,“‘Twas a lonely life. Certainly very much so before I met Cecil.” She wrapped her arms around her familiar, savoring the feel of his deep purr, the scruff of his mane. “The only people I talked to besides my mother were her visitors. When I was old enough to read I asked them to bring me books, and from these I learned of the world. When I was older, mother told me of men, and how dangerous they were, but they did not seem so bad in books.” A dark mischief seized her, and she winked at him. “They seemed…exciting. I think you’ve demonstrated that the books are right about that.”

The wizard actually blushed a bit, which she thought was a pleasing look on him. It was certainly true that in many of the stories she had read, men were having grand adventures, or performing great deeds of valor. Or she was reading about Véreline Valoir, and the sorceress was taking them as lovers and going on about their excellent qualities, sometimes in great and shocking detail, which was exciting in its own way. She had always been very glad that her mother had been so busied with her Art. Elyse did not think her mother had ever read the stories she gave to her daughter. If she had, her mother might have realized that the stories were not making men out to be the barbaric, ravaging killers and despoilers that she had always told her daughter they were.

Martim cleared his throat, having pretended to choke on a partridge bone to excuse his red cheeks.“So glad to be of help,” he said dryly. He tossed the bones of his meal into the flames, and retrieved his pipe. “So what set you on the road?” he asked, as he packed it with tobacco.

“Not so long ago, mother fell ill and died,” Elyse said lightly. “I decided I did not want to spend my life in a swamp, so I left.” She shrugged. “It may seem a sorry end for a witch such as she, but ‘tis the natural course of things, I suppose. Even with all her skill with the Art and as a learned apothecary, she could not heal everything. And what about you? What was the place you grew up like?”

Martim focused on the bowl of the pipe for a moment, and soon it glowed orange, trailing a thin wisp of smoke. He took a long pull on it, considering, and then blew out a thick ring of smoke, nodding in satisfaction as it drifted up to tangle in the branches of the willow. “Oh, nothing interesting,” he said, taking another pull from his pipe.Then he yelped as a pebble struck him in the forehead, coughing up smoke, and glared at her.

Elyse met the wizard’s glare with one of her own. The confusion on his face only angered her more. That had to be a farce. He was not an idiot, or at least she did not think he was. “Nothing interesting,” she snapped. “Unbelievable. I tell you where I came from and you think you can just reply with ‘nothing interesting’ in return.” The man could prick her ire with his evasiveness sometimes, but he had well and truly done it now. She had really thought that if she answered his questions, he’d answer hers in turn. Was he mocking her? She bent down to pick up another rock from the forest floor, this one much larger than a pebble, and glowered at him darkly. “Tell me more, Martimeos, or the next one is going somewhere considerably more delicate.” If he was in reach, she thought she might have pinched him. Or bitten him.

For a moment, he got a stubborn look about him, and she really thought he meant to keep his mouth shut. “Fine, fine!” he cried, finally, as she lifted her arm back to throw. “Fine.” Still he seemed hesitant, puffing on his pipe, as if trying to find the right words. Slowly, though, the stubbornness drained from his expression. His eyes grew distant, as if he were looking at something far away. “I too came from the east, though more north,” he said softly, after a while. “Pike’s Green was one of many villages there, where folk carve clearings from forest. Many farms. People raising goats, chickens. I am told our apple cider was known quite far away in trade. The occasional merchant passing through, or sometimes the Traveling Folk. Certainly an odd-looking place. The folk of Pike’s Green loved to paint their buildings in bright colors. An eccentricity of ours, I was told.” For some reason, he sounded very sad as he said that. “A quiet place.”

“And how did a cobbler’s son learn of the Art in such a simple village as this? Her partridge still had a good bit of meat on it, but she was no longer hungry. She gave it over to Cecil, who took to it with abandon.

Martim paused for a moment, smoke curling from his nostrils. Then he shrugged. “From a book my family purchased from the Traveling Folk. It caught my eye, and it was made as a birthday gift.”

“You did not have a tutor to start you on your path?” Elyse could not conceal her surprise. She had seen books that spoke of the Art long before she had known anything of how to work it, but she could not imagine being able to learn from those alone.

“...Oh, I did. Though I wasn’t a very good listener.” She waited as he blew a smoke ring once more to hear more of this, but then the wizard just laughed. “I mostly just wanted to learn to impress a girl at first.” He tapped out the bowl of his pipe on the side of his boot.

Elyse’s eyes lit up with mirth. “Hah! So, was she impressed?”

Martim had been grinning to himself, shaking his head slightly, but at this, it seemed the mirth in him died. He sagged, casting his eyes to the ground, and all at once he seemed very tired. “Yes,” he said quietly. “Lots of my friends were, in fact.”

Almost absent-mindedly, he drew out his sword, and a long, smooth whetstone from his pack, and began sharpening his blade. She watched him at this for a while. "It must have been difficult to leave them all behind.”

“Yes.” Martim replied once more, focused now on the draw of his sword against the stone. “It was.”

Elyse might have been more annoyed at his reticence, but something about his manner made her more gentle. He seemed so run-down, and all at once. She wondered what he must have remembered. “So why did you?”

The only response was the hiss of his blade against the whetstone for a while. “Just wanted to wander, I suppose.”

Quiet grew between them. She had noticed this about the wizard, by now. He could sometimes be overcome by sudden bouts of melancholy. She did not like it. Smiles looked better on his face, and trickery and jests sounded better on his tongue. “Martim,” she asked, and did not continue until he looked at her, “For what reason do you go to Silverfish? You took it upon you to ask a Dolmec. What Telling did you need to send you there?”

He considered her, and for a moment, she felt drawn in by his dark green eyes, weighing her. “I am looking for someone,” he said, and the long silence that followed made it very clear he would say no more.

Elyse gave a small ‘hmmph’ and lobbed the rock at him, but softly, so that it only hit his boot. She looked around. The daylight had died, and the shadows were settling in. She slid off the rock she sat on to nestle in a pile of leaves, pulling the brim of her hat down low over her head. “Well, if you are not going to talk about it, I am going to go to sleep.”

“Goodnight, Elyse,” Martim called absent-mindedly. But she did not sleep, not right away. Instead she watched from beneath the brim of her hat as Martimeos slowly sharpened his sword, occasional white sparks scattering into the darkness from the edge of the blade, not shutting her eyes until he extinguished the campfire.