happened every time he drank Master Tan’s tea, so Quin merely waited him out.
When he’d gotten over the rotten taste and had wiped his mouth on a sleeve, she asked, “Should we go back?”
He shook his head, and already she could see his good humor returning. Master Tan’s remedies worked quickly.
“I don’t want to go back. I’m not an invalid. I’m nearly healed.” He suppressed a smile, obviously aware of how childish he’d been. Still not quite meeting her eyes, he murmured, “I like it when you order me around.”
“I like it when you’re in a bad mood.”
“Thanks very much,” he said, beginning to explore the clearing before them.
“Doesn’t it remind you of the fights we used to have when we were little?” she asked, lacing her fingers through his as they walked. “Those were funny.”
“Like the time I threw tree sap in your hair and you punched me in the stomach?” Shinobu asked. “That was a barrel of laughs.”
Quin felt her own mood slip at the memory. “I’m still cross about that one.”
“We were six. You knocked the wind out of me.”
“My mother had to cut off a huge chunk of my hair, Shinobu.”
She shoved him away playfully, and now he was laughing.
“You sound angry,” he told her, suddenly looking very concerned. “Where’s your tea, Quin? Should we go back and brew up a batch for you?”
She grabbed at his jacket in mock fury, but stopped in the middle of the motion.
“Look,” she said, catching his elbow.
They’d been examining the large alder trees along the clearing’s border, whose branches nearly joined above them. Beyond one of the grandest trees it was possible to see quite a distance into the woods. Some way off was a fern-covered hillock, and in its side, though obscured from their current position by the forest undergrowth, was an opening that looked very much like the entrance to a cave.
“It’s what Catherine drew in the journal, isn’t it?” she said.
They approached it carefully, and as they drew closer, the hillock showed itself to be quite large and obviously manmade. It was a nearly perfect circle, domed on top and overgrown by plants. Trees crowded around it, but none grew on top. The opening was low and dark and lined with large stones that had been placed quite expertly. Stone steps covered in moss and wild brambles led down into the dark interior.
“Smells old and rotten,” Shinobu said as a trickle of air from inside the hillock brushed past them.
“Did you bring a light?” she asked.
He turned away from her again to rummage in the pack, and turned back with a flashlight. They crouched down, and he shone the light through the doorway.
Inside the hillock was a substantial space, a cave really, lined with stone that had been set in place with rough, sandy mortar. Debris had grown in from the forest and been blown in by the wind as well; old branches, dead leaves, loose rocks, and a large quantity of soil littered a stone floor.
And there were skeletons against the far wall.
Quin and Shinobu both drew back from the opening when they saw the decaying human forms in ragged clothing, remnants of hair and skin around their gaping faces.
“That’s not very nice,” Shinobu said quietly.
“I guess this explains the smell,” she said.
The odor inside the hill was of damp and rot but not of fresh decay. It was the smell of death that had happened in the distant past.
Shinobu swept the flashlight’s beam slowly over the cave, but there was no one hiding in the shadows. The space, like the bodies inside it, had been abandoned long ago.
“Shall we?” he asked, gesturing gallantly toward the interior.
Quin nodded, and she ducked beneath the lintel and stepped down into the cave.
The space was large enough to create echoes, but the echoes were short and close, as though the sounds made by her boots were jumping back at her almost before she’d finished making them.
There were four bodies in all. They lay near each other, their jumbled and deteriorating clothing making it appear they were all part of one mass. All of the figures had died with wool cloaks about them, but there was no other similarity in their clothing. The oldest body, little more than bones with a few leathery tatters of flesh, wore a lace-cuffed blouse. It had mostly disintegrated, but the few details that remained placed the blouse’s owner somewhere in the 1600s. Another corpse wore blue jeans of a kind that might have