“You! What could you say to her? Besides, it is better for her to have her cry out before she comes where her man is.”
“Where is Prassade?”
“Where we must be at mid-morning, at the Ledge.”
“And Mancha?”
“Where he should have been this month past, at River Ward. It was there the stealers came through.”
“Have you any word?”
“Before the Council parted a message came from the trackers who had found a sign. The stealers went through by Broken Head. Sleep now,” she said.
I heard the light scrape of her feet on the threshold, and I lay still at the bottom of a pit of blackness, from which at unutterable heights I could make out a point of light or two cut off at times by the indistinguishable stir of boughs.
Between the trees the lights of the Outliers illumined the space under the shut branches faintly as the lights in crypts that show where the bones of saints are laid. I lay revolving in my mind all the circumstance of my coming here and of my connection with the Ward and Ravenutzi. Suddenly there flashed forth, like a picture on a screen, the incident of that letter which I had helped Ravenutzi to make. The token he had worn so gaily and lost so unaccountably. It had been a true message dropped conveniently for one who waited for it, and I grew sick and hot in the dark thinking how he had used me. I must have dozed after that, for I thought the sound of crying increased outside, and it was no longer the Ward’s mother, but the tall woman of the woods who called me by my name to upbraid me. A moment later it changed to Evarra calling me awake.
As yet no beam shone or bird sang; I saw the shapes of the women blocked indistinguishably in the mouse-colored mist. I watched them, by that wild faculty of theirs for covering their traces as the fox covers its tracks, draw, as it were, the surface of the forest over all the signs of their occupancy. They strewed dry, rotting fern above the caches, leaf litter where the hearths had been. When I rose and went out to them, Evarra touched my bed with her foot once, twice, and it was no bed, but the summer drift about the roots of trees. As we went hillward silence spread behind us in the meadows and took the place with desolation.