there wasn’t no reason to be scared. The light was grey, coming from a sky full of heavy cloud. The closest trees was fifty paces off anyway, and couldn’t reach me here. I was safe enough for now.
I stretched my arms and legs a few times to get the cramps out of them. I et a little mutton and drunk a few swallows of water. Then I untied the rope and made my way back down to the ground.
I stood there for a little while, without an idea in my head. This being the half-outside, it was not a place I could stay in for long. It wasn’t hardly a place at all really, being neither village nor forest but only a rag or ribbon of ground that was not claimed by either one.
Then of a sudden I heard the hail from the main lookout in Mythen Rood, the old sentry calling off and the new one calling on. It took me by surprise, and it made my heart hurt a little bit. It was a sound I knowed well, but I was hearing it a different way now, for I was outside the fence. I was not one of them being guarded, but one of the things they was guarding against.
I had got to go. If I lingered long here, I was bound to be seen, and that would bring disaster on my kin. It was not easy to move though, for that meant going into the forest. I had never gone there alone, nor ever give thought to such a thing. Hunters went among the trees with their weapons ready and their hearts running like hares. They took their catch as quick as they could, as close as they could to the roofs of home and the safety of the high fence. The forest wasn’t a place that liked us much at all, except as meat.
I whispered goodbye to my mother and my sisters. Their names come scraping up out of my throat like they had sharp edges to them, and the ache of it brung tears to my eyes. That was a good thing in a way though. Saying their names made me feel a mite closer to them, and the crying, being loud, forced me to walk away from the fence at last, in case I was heard and discovered.
I took the first path that offered, which was a hunting trail. It led me down into the stake-blind, along its narrow channel for a hundred steps or so and then up again on the far side. The trees loomed right in front of me there, stretching up into the sky, shouldering each other aside, or so it seemed, to get a look at me.
That was only my fear, though, and not a real thing I was seeing. The trees was sleeping the dull day away and give no sign they even knowed I was there. Don’t be such a coward, Koli, I says to myself. Think of them men and women of the before times, that had such knowing of trees they could tell them what to do and when to do it. Imagine you’re one of them men of old, and be brave. Imagine the trees bowing down in front of you, like you’re their king.
But I was still just me, for all them words. I didn’t go into the forest like a king, but like a dog that’s just been whipped or fears it’s about to be. The only thing that give me any comfort at all was the path. I had walked it a hundred times when I was out with the catchers, so my feet was among the many that had made it. Where the sentry shout had made me feel how outside I was, the path reminded me that the outside was not just all the one same thing. The path was put there by us, and shaped by us using it. It led to other paths that was made the same way for the same purpose. And beyond them there was the markers we painted up on rocks here and there, or slashed into the bark of the oldest trees, to give direction to them as might be lost. And further out still there was houses of haven – a cave in the wall of the valley, a log cabin in the lee of a hill and suchlike places – for our hunters and catchers to shelter in if they