was benighted in among the trees. It was like Mythen Rood was the most inside of a whole lot of different insides, and though I was outside the fence yet I was not outside of everything.
My fear of the trees didn’t lessen though. I was watching the sky with every step I took in case it gun to clear. This was a day we would of said was safe for hunting, for the clouds was thick and dark. But I was skittish, and did not trust them.
I come over a rise, and the valley was away under me as far as I could see. I was looking at the tops of trees in the far distance, in between the jostling flanks of the trees that was near to hand. Under my feet was a narrow strip of packed dirt, cut through a mass of nettles, burdock and speargrass out of which the spiky ropes of bramble sprung up high and threatening. I heard a skein of crows go by, high overhead, screaming bloody murder, though I couldn’t see them. Then an echo bird said the same sounds, only mixed with what sounded like a dog’s bark. Under the trees’ wide arms, close enough that I could of reached up and touched them, spiders as big as my head run back and forth in their great webs, plucking a thread here and there to spread the word about some danger or some meal that they had seen coming. It could of been me they was talking about, though whether that was as a danger or a meal I couldn’t rightly tell.
This being Winter, there was no flower smells in the air. Only wood and earth and rot, and under that an animal smell that was strong and rank. I thought a fox or a tree-cat must of walked this way not long before I come.
I had got a hard choice to make. The paths was mostly made for hunters and catchers to use. They went round in big, nested curves on the south side of the valley, most times turning back when they come to the river. When they turned back, they always come the same way, towards the village where it would not do me no good to go.
So I had got to think of somewhere else to go, and I had got to do it soon. I couldn’t sleep out in the forest and have much hope of waking. A cave down by the river might offer some shelter, but there was many beasts besides me that would take such an offer. I knowed how to set traps, so I could live for a few days eating small deer and such if I did not get myself et along the way. But in the long road I had got to get myself taken in somewhere. Nobody ever choosed to live alone in the outside even for a little while, except only Ursala, and she had the drudge to guard her while she slept.
The nearest place I could go to was Ludden. I knowed it lay east of Mythen Rood, and I knowed four miles of walking would bring me there. There was even a road if I could find it, or at least there used to be one. Jemiu said when she was a girl it was kept open all year round, except for the hottest days of Summer. Obviously nobody walked it then, but come Falling Time the people of both villages would be out there, Ramparts among them, opening it up again with axes and saws and tech.
It had been years, though, since Mythen Rood and Ludden had talked each with other. Dam Catrin got news of our neighbours now from Ursala, and if it was news worth telling she passed it along on meet-days in the Count and Seal. I could not remember the last time even that happened.
Them arguments might of give me pause another time, but right then they struck me as good things for a man in the corner I was in. If Ludden got no better tell of Mythen Rood than we did of them, they wouldn’t know I was made faceless. They would cast a cold eye on a stranger walking the road all alone, but they might take me in if I told them I was a woodsmith from a family of woodsmiths, with years of catching and cutting to my name. Sowby was a bigger settlement, no doubt, and