might give me a warmer welcome, but Sowby was as far again as Ludden and I would have to pass through the dangerous place called the Foot to get there.
So I set my sights on Ludden, and for a beginning I cast around to find the road. I stayed on the catchers’ path for as far as it went, and after that I kept on going. The compass Catrin give me showed me where the east was, but at first I couldn’t find no trace of the road that should of been there. I tacked north and south of the true line, back and forth with my eyes on the ground, hoping to see a space between the trees that looked like it might be a made thing.
For a long time there wasn’t nothing. Then I seen a cairn of stones that had been piled up. The top one had a sign painted on it, rust red, in the shape of a hand with one finger raised up and three closed down. That was a way marker, and the four fingers meant a distance of four miles between here and somewhere – most likely Ludden. It also meant I was standing on a road, for there couldn’t be a way marker without a way to be marked.
Once I seen that, I read the ground altogether differently. Where the cairn was, there was a strip or ribbon about three strides wide that lay a little lower than the ground on either side. It wasn’t like it was a cleared space, for there was bushes and seedlings and weeds a-plenty on it, and no shortage of saplings, but the growth was less in that shallow dip than it was on either side, and the line of the dip was marked by cupflowers, which will take the vantage of any break in the ground to make their traps for bugs to fall into. This was the road then, or what was left of it.
I followed the line of flowers into the deep woods, being careful not to step on any of the cups, for they was filled with a stuff that would sting and itch you till you wanted to cut your own foot off. I was wearing the boots Spinner give me, but cupflower sap will go through even the thickest leather.
A man can walk four miles in a lot less than two hours, and not be short of breath when he comes to the end of it, but you’d be a fool to walk at that pace in the forest. For one thing, you would be sure to make a noise. And even if you didn’t, the slap of your soles and heels on the ground, coming in a kind of pattern of samenesses on account of the length of your stride, would get some attention on its own account. You’d have molesnakes wrapped round your ankles, thick as streamers on Summer-dance, before you’d gone a hundred steps. They’d clog your steps till you went down, then knifestrikes would fight them for the bits of you they could get a claw to. Or else something bigger would come and chase them all away, and then at least you’d get to be et all at once instead of in bits and pieces.
So I took my time and walked what’s called the catcher’s walk, two steps and then three with a pause in between to break up the pattern in case anything was tracking it.
Oftentimes too I had got to leave the road on account of trees that had moved to block it sometime since it was last cleared. And one time there was a kind of a pit in the middle of the way that something had made there, tunnelling up as it seemed to me from underneath. It was narrow enough to jump across, but deep enough that you couldn’t see nothing but darkness down inside it. I thought of the cupflowers’ traps, and I did not jump across but walked around a long, long way. And when I come back to the road, I kept on looking back over my shoulder until a bend come in between. Whatever digged that pit, I did not want to meet it, especially not in its own house.
There was no way to tell the passing of the day without the sun, and the sun was kind enough not to show itself, but I reckon I had been walking an hour or so when I