seen some such as her, southerners, stared at and mistrusted as they passed through the city.
Besides that strangeness of coloring, she was not truly beautiful. Her face was broad, her eyes set strangely in it. But her hair was beautiful, hanging to her knees in wrist-thick braids, swinging gently as she bent her head. If she were naked, that hair would cover her like a cloak.
Malesa glanced up from her work. “Why do you stare at me?”
“I am sorry.” He looked away.
She bent her head over her work again. Ilbran marveled at what she had done. Like him, she had fended for herself. She had been orphaned young, had lived alone. She had fed herself, had kept her sanity, had learned well the ways of the world into which she had come.
Anything that she had, she had made for herself. Yet this home was better than the one he had lived in for all his life. They were not sitting on straw mats, but on cushions stuffed with dried grass. They had eaten and drunk out of carved wooden bowls. The candles on the table were sweet wax, fit to light a lord’s chamber. Though she lived alone, she had hung a curtain to screen off another room in the small house, where she slept. Crude branch-shelves were fastened to the walls and stacked with wooden jars, filled with all she had gathered from forest and field.
She had spoken truly; she lived as richly as a princess in her own domain.
Malesa looked up from her netting. “Tell what has happened to you. What led you into the forest? What led you here?”
Ilbran told her how he had lost his family; he had escaped; the kingsmen had hunted him, so he had entered the forest; the creatures of the forest had hunted him in turn. “And the paths were not the same. I could find no way out.”
She shook her head slowly, wonderingly. “How could you have gone so far astray? I did not know it was possible to make so many mistakes. Do you learn nothing in that world of yours?”
“What did I do wrong? I knew that the paths were not safe at night, that I must find a safehold or be lost. They told me that much.”
“Look,” she said, and she spread out the net she had knotted. “This is a map of what I know. The strands are the paths of the forest and the knots are places of safety, like the one that you found, and like this one where I live. The paths of the forest shift like the shifting patterns of the sky. The distance between the safeholds will change with the rising of the sun each day.
“On one day, a man might walk from one to another in half a morning’s loitering. On another day, a horseman might set out at sunrise, riding as fast as his horse would carry him, and still be lost in the forest at nightfall. I think you know what would become of him then.”
Ilbran shuddered. The girl looked at him gravely, then continued. “So when you travel, if you have not reached a place of safety by noontime, you must turn back. And when you pass one, you take your knife and leave a drop of your blood on the doorstep as a sacrifice and as a talisman that will hold the path open for you to return, if your way forward is not clear.
“You did that by accident, and it preserved you. But it was barely enough. What possessed you to speak to those uncanny ones? They are creatures of air. A sword will not touch them, and though they eat flesh, they do not need it to live. If you do not speak to them, or meet their eyes, they cannot reach you, for all their chanting and their drugged smoke.”
Ilbran thought of the three nights of terror spent fighting them, and shuddered. Malesa went on. “But if you had marked your entrance into the forest with your blood, the way would have been shortened for you, and you could have left the forest safely.”
She smiled suddenly. “I am glad that you did not, since you have no great errands. It has been long since any wayfarers visited here.”
She held out her netting map once again. “See, this knot is my home, and this strand is the path that leads to it. You see, it does not join firmly to the main path, but lies