a peasant looking for a lost sheep. Maybe this is one of the king’s woodlands, and they’ve been through here hunting. But it wasn’t the footprint of someone chasing a deer. It was the print of someone who had stood there for a long time, watching her. I heard him, she thought, and a little flutter of panic forced itself up into her throat. I heard him standing there.
She was still kneeling, holding on to the wheel for balance. If the man, whoever it was, and it had to be a man, a giant, were still here in this glade, watching, he must know that she had found the footprint. She stood up. “Hello!” she called, and frightened the birds to death again. They flapped and squawked themselves into hushed silence. “Is someone there?”
She waited, listening, and it seemed to her that in the silence she could hear the breathing again. “Speke, ” she said. “I am in distresse an my servauntes fled.”
Lovely, she thought even as she said it. Tell him you’re helpless and all alone.
“Halloo!” she called again and began a cautious circuit of the glade, peering out into the trees. If he was still standing there, it was so dark she wouldn’t be able to see him. She couldn’t make out anything past the edges of the glade. She couldn’t even tell for sure which way the thicket and the road lay. If she waited any longer, it would be completely dark, and she would never be able to get the wagon to the road.
But she couldn’t move the wagon. Whoever had stood there between the two trees, watching her, knew that the wagon was here. Maybe he had even seen it come through, bursting on the sparkling air like something conjured by an alchemist. If that were the case, he had probably run off to get the stake Dunworthy was so sure the populace kept in readiness. But surely if that were the case, he would have said something, even if it was only “Yoicks!” or “Heavenly Father!” and she would have heard him crashing through the underbrush as he ran away.
He hadn’t run away, though, which meant he hadn’t seen her come through. He had come upon her afterward, lying inexplicably in the middle of the woods beside a smashed wagon, and thought what? That she had been attacked on the road and then dragged here to hide the evidence?
Then why hadn’t he tried to help her? Why had he stood there, silent as an oak, long enough to leave a deep footprint, and then gone away again? Maybe he had thought she was dead. He would have beep frightened of her unshriven body. People as late as the fifteenth century had believed that evil spirits took immediate possession of any body not properly buried.
Or maybe he had gone for help, to one of those villages that Kivrin had heard, maybe even Skendgate, and was even now on his way back with half the town, all of them carrying lanterns.
In that case, she should stay where she was and wait for him to come back. She should even lie down again. When the townspeople arrived, they could speculate about her and then bear her to the village, giving her examples of the language, the way her plan had been intended to work in the first place. But what if he came back alone, or with friends who had no intention of helping her?
She couldn’t think. Her headache had spread out from her temple to behind her eyes. As she rubbed her forehead, it began to throb. And she was so cold! This cloak, in spite of its rabbit-fur lining, wasn’t warm at all. How had people survived the Little Ice Age dressed only in cloaks like this? How had the rabbits survived?
At least she could do something about the cold. She could gather some wood and start a fire, and then if the footprint person came back with evil intentions, she could hold him off with a flaming brand. And if he had gone off for help and not been able to find his way back in the dark, the fire would lead him to her.
She made the circuit of the glade again, looking for wood. Dunworthy had insisted she learn to build a fire without tinder or flint. “Gilchrist expects you to wander around the Middle Ages in the dead of winter without knowing how to build a fire?” he had said, outraged, and