The Book of Koli (Rampart Trilogy #1) - M. R. Carey Page 0,29

is get on with living and with forgetting what can’t be mended.

Maybe not though. For I had got an idea rooted in my deepest heart that give me torment. It was that Spinner loved me as much as I loved her, and had only gone pair-pledge with Haijon because he was a Rampart and her eyes was dazzled. It speaks ill of me, I know, to think such disrespect of her, but that was what my hurt and pride had fixed on.

It’s a curious thing, when I think on it now, that I felt so trapped and so despairing of my station. The burden of my fears was that this place and these feelings I was stuck in wouldn’t ever change as long as I lived. Yet it was but three weeks later that the gates of Mythen Rood closed behind me for the last time as I walked into exile.

But I am running out in front of my own story again, and this is a time when I have got to be most careful to get it right, since what happened next was to matter so much both to the boy I was and to the man I am.

I remember there was a day, maybe two or three days after Ursala sampled Haijon and Spinner and spoke them sound, that I went out of gates by myself. This was not exactly a thing forbid, but only because there wasn’t no need for it to be. You wouldn’t forbid someone to hold their hand in a fire, or to catch a choker seed as it fell. The woods just wasn’t anywhere to be by yourself if you meant on the whole to stay alive.

This was Falling Time though, which was a safer season than most, and I didn’t go beyond the stake-blind, only into the half-outside. I walked up to the high lookout that I had a hand in building up on top of Cloughfoot. The building was mostly finished now, with only the armouring still to be done. And the track up there was wide and clear on account of all the coming and going that had been done when we was putting up the walls.

I just went up there to be alone for a while. I was going to say I wanted a quiet place to think in, but the truth is that my thoughts had soured in my head and I wanted as little to do with them as I could manage.

So I sit there for about an hour, on the wall at the top of the lookout, with my feet dangling over the drop. The forest was close at hand, like an army that was creeping up to the gates of the village but had been seen doing it and now was pretending to be still. For some of that time I thought about leaning forward until I fell, but I only thought it idly. Unhappy though I might be, yet I hadn’t come to the point where my life felt like a burden to me. I was just catched in a snare, is all, and running in tight circles, but since I made the snare myself there wasn’t none but me could get me out of it.

When the sun come close to touching the tops of the trees, I thought it best to go. Night was still a ways off, but there are plenty of things that like to hunt in the cool that comes around lock-tide, and the shadows would just go on getting darker and more numerous from here on.

I had not come out by the gate and I didn’t go back by it. There would of been questions to answer both ways. Instead I went by what we called the grass-grail. This was a place on the fence where it had been cut ever so careful to be like a ladder you could climb if you was cut off from the gate. Nobody was supposed to use the grass-grail unless they was pressed hard and close and didn’t have no other choice – for shunned men or faceless might see you do it, and use our secret way for their own purposes.

And shunned men was rampant that year. Three hunting parties was attacked over the Summer, and one man struck dead – though them that was with him saved him from being took away by the shunned men and et. It had got so bad that Catrin was talking about making up