A
bird’s warble broke the hush of night as Tildi crossed the threshold.
False dawn was not long away. The dark plum sky, with a few straggling specks of stars, began to grow silver above the treetops as she looked out over the garden gate along the track that led southeast, away from town. All of her male relatives had taken this road, to go trading with the humans on the other side of the Eastern Hills, leaving the females at home to wonder what the rest of the world was like. It was her turn to see, but only if she lent speed to her feet. Any moment now someone was going to pop out of one of the three houses that lay in sight of the Summerbees’ front door and order her back, demanding to know in the meanwhile what she had done to her hair, and why was she wearing her brother’s clothes? Had she gone mad?
It was all that reading of fairy stories, Tildi Summerbee!
If only she could go back to yesterday and keep everyone inside, so that when the thraiks descended, they would find no prey. Her heart clenched with sorrow, but she had to move on. The day was dawning, and soon she would be discovered.
The hardest step she ever took was passing through the gate to the road. On this side lay the familiar, the safe, the known. On the other was the unknown, laden with who knew what dangers? She reached out to open the latch, but her hand kept dropping down to her side.
If I don’t do it now, I never will,
Tildi told herself.
Go. Now. Hurry!
A rooster crowing at the Bywells’ farm precipitated action. Before she knew what she was doing, she’d unlatched the gate and stepped out. It swung shut behind, hitting her in the heavy pack on her back. Tildi was knocked forward a pace.
Well, if that’s not an omen, nothing is,
she thought with wry humor, regaining her footing and reseating the pack. She glanced nervously up and down the road. She reassured herself.
I’m a boy,
she thought fiercely.
I’m a boy! Remember that! I cannot be sent back to an empty hearth, for that’s not my fate. I am a man with an office to take up, and people to meet, lands to explore, sights to see before I do.
The thought made her walk straighter, with a longer stride. There. Even her body believed it now. With a glance over her shoulder at the old farmhouse for farewell, she marched as quickly as she could toward the east and the graying sky. A few fat puffy clouds touched with orange and pink at the eastern edge anticipated the arrival of the sun.
In the distance, a dog barked, and a few more roosters raised their hoarse cries. Tildi enjoyed a tender moment of longing for the life she was setting behind her. Dawn was a time of day she normally loved. As the one in charge of getting everyone else in the house up, Tildi rose at the first fingerling sun ray to peer over the ring of hills that surrounded the Quarters. She loved the freshness of the pure, newborn light, the cool sweetness of the air. Unless the weather was very cold, she always threw open the big windows to let in the scent before she started the fire to make the morning tea. Around her she scented the faint, sweet, tangy aroma of wood-smoke, as dozens of women like herself, and a few men, rose to the same task that would get their households up and moving. She could use a cup of that good, strong, sweet tea now. How tired she was! She was not accustomed to staying up all night, and grief bent her spine with exhaustion.
Well, she’d best make speed now. Once she was out of any danger of
being seen by her neighbors she could find herself a comfortable place to make camp. There she would be able to make herself a meal and take a nap. She bent her back to her pack and trudged gamely along the road. The rucksack’s weight wasn’t so overwhelming as to keep her from noticing the spring flowers peeking out at her on either side. Tildi admired the pinks, yellows, and purples, drinking them in to keep in her memory forever. With some difficulty because of the pack, she stooped to pick a small handful of the fragile blossoms, still damp with morning dew. She tied the stems together with strands of grass, and tucked the fragrant posy into the breast of her borrowed shirt. She would miss all the beauty of her home. If only things had not had to change!
Get on with you, Tildi Summerbee,
she thought severely.
The future has to make itself now.
She looked back over her shoulder toward her home. The trees and fences were lit silver-gilt by the light of the rising sun. Tildi felt her throat tighten with grief and longing.
Farewell,
she thought sadly.
The last heir of the Summerbees is leaving in search of her fortune.
She turned away, rasping up the empty road in the unfamiliarly rough pants and boots.
From their property’s edge the land sloped upward in gentle, forested hills for several more miles until it met the foot of the eastern range that guarded the sunrise side of the Quarters. The massif was called the Eastern Hills out of modesty. The peaks were rounded at the top, but they stood as high as proper mountains ought to. Her smallfolk ancestors seemed not to have much imagination. The rest of her homeland was ringed by other ranges with, alas, equally prosaic names: the Northern Tors, the Southwesterns, and the Sunlit Hills that connected the long Southwesterns to the Eastern Hills. Her homeland lay in a kind of bowl that protected it from the rest of the world, but within those boundaries it rose to a dome shape, cut by many rivers and dotted with lakes and marshlands. In almost the precise geographical center was a high tarn known as the Eye Lake. Generations of schoolchildren, Tildi included, had been assured that from the air the water bubbling up from the vast underground streams was so clear that one could see through it down to the center of the earth, though none of them knew how the teacher or the author of the schoolbook had made that discovery. The five streams that flowed down from that lake divided the land into the five Quarters.
Beyond the protective mountains to the south was an ocean. According
to the schoolmaster’s map the Quarters occupied a small part at the south center of Niombra, the biggest of the world’s five continents. Beyond the steep cliffs that terminated the Eastern Hills lay the main river, the Arown. It flowed down all the way to the main trading seaport, protected by a wide, bean-shaped cove protected by natural seawalls.
The Tench, the southeastern river that delineated the border between the Morningside and Noon Quarters, also reached the seaport, cutting underneath the Sunlits and emerging on the other side at the head of a picturesque waterfall high on the cliff face. The natural tunnel cut by the stream was wide enough and high enough for three smallfolk to walk abreast on either side if the river was not in a flood stage. The smallfolks made use of the handy shortcut to bring their goods to market in Tillerton. A cart drawn by a pair of ponies could make their way beside the torrent. Humans never came that way. The echoing tunnel was just low enough that the big folks would have had to walk stooped over for miles. Several attempts to raise the roof had been abandoned for fear of bringing the mountains down upon them.
There were other terrors. Gosto used to scare his smaller siblings with tales of centipedes as long as his arm that haunted the tunnels. Their fierce pincers could nip off a finger. The ceiling was hung with bats that drank blood and ate eyeballs. Ants plied the roadway in silent, armored masses. They carried off shoes after mistaking them for prey, and Nature help the smallfolk who fell behind his fellows when the ant armies were afoot! Tildi always shivered to hear those stories. Once the terrifying journey in the dark had ended, descent to the port city was by way of a causeway cut into the cliff so narrow that the off pony was always walking with one hoof hanging off into thin air. Gosto had been a wonderful storyteller, and was looking forward to telling his tales to his own children as he put them safely to bed. Tildi knew how the seaport looked, how the people spoke, and how many ships went hither and thither from his descriptions.
Teldo had only been interested in the city for what new wonders it could furnish to his deepest passion, magic. The seaport was home to sailors and sea witches, each with their own stories of magic, which Teldo had brought back to a rapt Tildi. One of the sea witches had sold Teldo the book of study she now carried in her backpack.
Tildi hoped to see the port one day, but her path took her in a different direction. Olen lived in Overhill, many miles to the northeast. Perhaps in the future her master would send her to the seaport on an errand,
or perhaps she would travel with him, on a flying chair or a horse that could travel a thousand yards in a step. Who knew what wonders lay in the years to come?
So many lands lay around the Quarters, and lands beyond those, places she knew only from their names on maps. The lands immediately beyond the Arown were good farmland, the teacher had instructed the smallfolk children.
Not quite as good as theirs,
Tildi thought with pride. The Arown’s river valley flattened out in a series of long terraces that often flooded, constantly washing away the best of the topsoil.
Beyond the Arown lay more mountain ranges, then the hot countries where nothing at all grew. According to the schoolroom map, they were all sand except in a few green oases. The sky was reputedly a deep blue without a single cloud. She couldn’t imagine living where there were no trees or grass or rain. The beasts there were strange, too. Each of them had a natural water reservoir within its body to sustain life in between oases.
To the north lay most of the noble kingdoms of humankind. Three were the oldest known, their origins going back more than ten thousand years, predating the earliest written records of the smallfolks, before the dawn of the written word. Overhill lay in Melenatae, the most southern of the three, and possibly the oldest of them all.
Think of that,
Tildi told herself.
I am walking back into history, when I never dreamed I would be traveling at all.
To the west and northwest lay more human kingdoms, but according to her lessons those territories in the high mountains were reputed to be shared by dwarves, whose realms were belowground. Tildi thought she had never met a dwarf, though Pierin insisted she had. Dwarves were reputed to be insular and unfriendly and did not welcome travelers. A story one visiting troubadour had brought to a meeting fire told of a cold winter’s journey where he could smell good food cooking all around him and heard music coming up from beneath his feet, but he never could locate the way in to the dwarves’ hall.
South of the ocean was Niombra’s nearest neighbor, Sheatovra. She always loved hearing stories from Sheatovra. Men lived there, but so did many strange creatures such as werewolves. A peddler who came through the Quarter once brought a square of rough hide he said came from a werewolf he had slain with his own hands, but Gosto and the other men scoffed at that. No ordinary man, especially not a peddler, could kill a werewolf.
The forest loomed closer with every step. Tildi found she was trembling as the great trees rose over her head, blotting out the rising sun in a mass of shadow. She had never gone into the wild woods alone. If the stories were true any of a dozen large predators were waiting to pounce upon a small and defenseless morsel like herself, waiting to tear her into quivering shreds. Anything that behaved like prey, Pierin had warned her, was likely to be stalked. He had bragged that he always walked with confidence even if he didn’t feel it. She must take his advice and do the same. She worked his knife loose from its sheath on her belt and held the gleaming blade up for a talisman as she approached the forest’s edge. It was a small glimmer of blue-white against the sinister hulks of the dark, gnarled trees, too little to protect her against a threat. Tildi felt as though both it and she would be swallowed up in a moment. The gloom had a presence of its own, one imbued with a forbidding consciousness that focused upon the smallfolk that approached it. Who was she to challenge the territory of these most ancient of creatures? How dare she attempt to travel out of her proper sphere and into the country of wild things?
“Walk with confidence,”
Pierin’s voice seemed to say.
Tildi clutched the memory as tightly as she did the knife, and strode forward under the canopy. At that moment she missed her brothers more than she could hardly believe. In the face of her grief, fear lessened, as though she only had room for one overwhelming emotion at a time.
Once she was within the forest the gloom seemed to lessen. The trees emerged from the black-brown mass as individual shapes. For a moment Tildi fancied she could see the word for
tree
drawn upon each in faint strokes of ink, a trifle darker than the bark. Each rune was just a little different, as though the trees were telling her their names. It didn’t matter that her tired eyes were playing tricks on her; the fancy lessened her fear of going forward. She was meeting new acquaintances, that was all.
A shrill whistle overhead made her crouch in place and clutch the knife hilt harder. Thraik! Her heart pounded. She ran to hide behind one of the huge trees.
No, it couldn’t be thraik, could it?
Tildi wondered, scanning the faint blue beyond the canopy of leaves. They’d have attacked her before she entered the forest. Its crown was too thick for the thraik to see her now. Could they detect her presence in some other way, using their own dread magic? The whistle came again, and developed into a warbling song that rang through the otherwise silent forest. She recognized the
call of a woods cuckoo. Tildi relaxed, shook her head at her own fancy. There were no eyes in the sky over her head; just a bird or two coming out in the early dawn to seek its breakfast. She wished it a good day’s foraging. Her sleepless night was making her imagine things. Fie on her fancies!