“It looked just like that this morning. How can you tell?”
“Oh, I can’t tell that. I knew how just before you asked me. The way I know Zirriloë didn’t tell Ravenutzi about the King’s Desire; I just know.”
It was, in fact, some of the Outliers who had not been at Deep Fern, drawn from their own places by that mysterious capacity of evil news to spread. They came hurrying all that day and the next. The Covers were peopled thick as a rabbit warren. Coveys of quail whirred up from it with a sharp explosive sound and broke toward the wooded land. Except for that, and the fact that the quail did not come back again, there was no sign. Men sat close in the tunnels, and it was dreadful to see the working in them of their resentment of betrayal. So much the worse because they knew it had been half invited. They had accepted a hostage of the Far-Folk, who never spoke straight nor did truly. What wonder, then, if he had done after his kind? They knew—at this point resentment rose to its burningest—they had always known, and knowing, could not have done otherwise. Ravenutzi came under honorable conditions, and they had served him honorably, being so much the debtor to their own natures. They were not only sick to be dishonored, they sickened of dishonor. As they sat in the green glooms of Windy Covers their bodies heaved and flushed, eyes reddened, hands wrenching at invisible things. Now and then, at the mention of a name or a circumstance, some quick, explosive breath would struggle with a curse; the gorge of the spirit rose.
Never among the Outliers had I found myself so unfriended. I felt myself burned upon by their rages, but they cared nothing for my burning. To have harped upon my own resentment was to advertise myself a witness of their betrayal. I judged best to be as little in evidence as was compatible without making myself a target for the Far-Folk. I found myself as lonely as could well be expected.
Late of the second day I went down to the edge of the chaparral where the trees began to invade it, standing apart and singly, and the chaparral had made itself small to run under the trees. I found an island of dry litter under a pine, and drew myself up in it, out of the pervading bitterness and betrayal, flooding so fiercely under Windy Covers.
It was incredibly still here; neither bird hopped nor insect hummed. The shadows shook in the wind. I sat with my head against the pine and my eyes closed. By degrees I thought the wind increased and drew into a long whisper which was my name. This fancy comforted me with the notion that whoever abandoned me, the wood was still my own. I heard it several times before a crackling in the bushes aroused me. I turned to observe another woman struggling anear through the thick stems of manzanita. As she crept and wormed toward me she drew on to her knees in the open space under the tent of the pine. Then I saw that she was the tall woman who had loved Ravenutzi. I saw more than that; she had come to me through great difficulty and by hard ways, her dress was torn, her hands scratched and bleeding, her hair, which was bound under a leathern snood, disheveled. But whatever her difficulties, they had not marred her so much as the passions that wasted her from within. She was more beautiful; the long, flushed throat, the red, scorning lip, the eyes darkened and hollow. But she was so plainly gnawed upon by grief that as we knelt there, I half risen on my knees and she on hers confronting me, I could feel nothing but pity.
“You!” I whispered dryly.
“Speak low,” she said, though indeed we had done nothing else, so did the stillness of the place weigh upon us. We were completely isolated in a ring of shadow, the chaparral coming up to the outer boughs of the pine, and the fan-spread branches meeting it a foot above our heads.
“I have waited for you all day,” she whispered. “Tell me, have you found him? Where has he taken her?”
“I do not know. We have no trace of them.”