Tracks on the Borderlands
The strangest thing about the stuffed bear skin was that it wasn’t even the largest one I’d ever seen. Granted, this one was posed mid-menacing roar, balanced atop a pockmarked border stone engraved with the local dialect equivalent of ‘Don’t ye come in here, or else.’ Whoever set it up had taken some creative liberties too; red ribbons trailed from its hollow eyes and pin-sharp claws, suggesting the bear had, perhaps, seen too much inside the pine forest that surrounded it.
“And you’re sure this is where you wanna go?”
In the excitement of finding a free cart ride into the village that nobody went to, I’d forgotten to get the elderly merchant’s name, and was too embarrassed to ask now.
“Sure as a bear at the fishmonger’s.”
He harrumphed, flogged the horses back into a trot, and adjusted his pipe from the left side of his mouth to the right. “What would you possibly want with the arse-end of the arse-end of anywhere civilized?”
I couldn’t well tell him the truth, no matter how many times he asked or how easy I felt in his presence. What people really wanted were stories loosely based on the truth, but closer to their experience than to the teller’s, and he’d definitely never experienced anything like mine. I couldn’t tell him the man I’d once foolishly trusted tried to drown me, and I wanted to get as far away from anyone who’d ever said his name as one could without falling off the face of the earth.
Although that one-way trip had crossed my mind too.
Instead, I told him the other half of the truth. “I’m looking for folk tales. Mysteries, unexplained things.”
“Why’d you want a thing like that?”
How much closer could I skirt by the real story without bumping into that wasp’s nest?
“A little while ago, when I almost drowned –” and never you mind by which hands and why, “– I saw something otherworldly. I’ve been looking for answers ever since. Looking for proof that there’s anything more to this world than the eye can see.”
My story suggested friendly water spirits more than it did the visions of horror that traveled with me everywhere I went, but why burden him with something like that?
He grumbled low in his throat and nodded. The gray hairs at the back of his head swayed like birches. “That there is. That there is for sure. You be careful, you’re likely to get what you asked for o’er here.”
Everyone said that about their favorite out-of-reach places. Everyone thought there was something out of the ordinary just a step beyond their usual world. It almost never amounted to anything, and I knew firsthand how easily rumors spread. Still, Whisperwood was barely spoken of in more than three hushed words by inn firesides where stern matrons shushed people away from too much telling. Whisperwood allowed nobody but this merchant in or out. Whisperwood devoured stray nomads whole. It held such promise.
“You think there’s something to the rumors? Something in the woods here?”
He nodded again, slow enough to make it look like he was swaying with the cart. “Would you help me with the market?”
His abrupt change of topic took me off guard, and by reflex I replied, “Of course!” in my sweetest voice before I could catch myself. I squeezed my eyes shut and took a deep breath, shaking my head at my own foolish willingness to please anyone who so much as glanced at me kindly. Damn, that’ll be a delay.
“If you help me with the market, I might be like to tell you a tale or two. There’s no time now, we’re nearly there.”
We neared a stream beyond which the ground gently rose and left its marshy airs behind. Our horses shook their manes about and made concerned noises, but they felt the crack of the whip and carried on. Halfway across the bridge, where the water was loudest, and the wood had a hollow, rotten sound to it, they tried to stop again. Again, they were thwarted.
What a promising sign. What did they know? What did they suspect? Could horses even be superstitious? Was that why horseshoes were lucky?
The woods gave up no answers yet.
The merchant’s voice sounded like crackling autumn leaves among the silent trees. “We’re here now.”
He pulled to a stop in a pine clearing a little way outside of town, clearly as far as he was allowed to go. There were hitching hoops and troughs for the horses, benches and tables for the merchant, and a few scattered children dancing in a wide circle around an old water-filled pot, chanting and tossing coals into it at seemingly meaningful intervals. Their hands were black with soot, and as we creaked to a halt, one line stood out: “The old crone from the branches sings: Come here and sit awhile with me.”
Giddy with the anticipation of what they could tell me, when the merchant’s pointed cough reminded me of my promise, I nearly leaped off the cart.
“Can I help you unpack?” I stood on the back of his cart, hanging from a shelf full of rattly boxes with a smile as broad as the day was long, trying to look like I’d meant to offer all along.
“There’s an idea. Careful now, if you break anything, you have to pay for it.”
I glanced at the heavy cast-iron and copper cookware tied to various bits of the cart. A bison trampling across them wasn’t likely to break anything.
Spry as a cat, he hopped off the driver’s seat and offered me a hand down. “What’s your name, then, phantom hunter?”
“I’m Anna. You?”
He mumbled, “Enache,” over his shoulder, barely pausing from unpacking parcels and displaying his wares on the wooden tables and benches quickly and efficiently.
Beautifully decorated combs and brushes went at the back, out of the reach of thieves, their plain wood versions forming the frontline. Closest to him, he saved intriguing knickknacks, which, by that logic, must have been of the highest value in that curious marketplace: bags of salt, chunks of old silver, bundles of herbs, and vials of liquids I could scarcely identify.
As I got to untying little leather straps, I kept a longing gaze on the bunch of children at play. There was so much to be learned from childhood games – in one town I’d wandered through, the song that they used to determine who would go first in a game of catch was secretly instructions on how to avoid a vicious, infectious illness.
Catching wind of my overly interested looks, one of them signaled to the others, and before I could blink twice, they’d scattered among the trees and toward town.
“Are they scared of us? Is that why they’re running back to town?”
Enache’s eyebrows met neatly in the middle of his forehead, making a deep, dark groove that seemed cut with a straight razor. “Dove, we’re the least scary thing for miles. Get on with it, the ladies will be here soon.”
He might as well have said the end of the world would be there soon, for all the gravity in his voice.
I set to work. When all the packages were unpacked and all the wares sorted, we were both surprised at how quickly it had gone. He took off his shawl and spread it out under the nearest walnut tree, handing me half of his lunch packet in the process. A good thick slice of sour bread and a rasher of bacon set my stomach rumbling.
“It’s only fair. You did ease the burden, both on the journey and the unpacking.”
I sat by his side, content as a cat to have a little respite, while the townsfolk arrived. Wielding his bread like a wand, he pointed to the slow stream of bundle-carrying women emerging from the lively town.
“That’s Miss Crosman. I hear she runs the common house, the mail, and acts as moral police. Terrible combination. It’s a good thing they don’t get visitors, or she’d put the fear of God in them. Stay on her good side if you’re stayin’ at all.”
“Why do they have no visitors?”
He smiled, flashing a golden tooth. “Because nobody comes here.”
I chortled crumbs all over his blanket, and he smiled too. We sat in silence waiting for the womenfolk to make their slow and sinuous way down to the trading post, and every now and then he’d point one out and tell me what little he knew about her. A pair of sisters, a freckled red-haired orphan, a very pregnant smith’s wife. It was only a beginning in getting to know my – hopefully – future neighbors, but it was better than nothing. While they were still out of earshot, he seemed to make up his mind about something and turned to me again.
“Look, I’m not one to mind other people’s business. But have you ever considered you might just get what you came for here? Are you ready to call yourself a fool?”
“I try to make a daily habit of it. Calling oneself a fool keeps the spirit humble. Do you really believe there’s danger here?”
With an exaggerated shrug, he nodded toward the first of the women to reach our clearing. “I don’t know. They seem fine.”
Stern, unsmiling, silent figures approached us. There was no cheerful market chatter, no gossip and elbow nudging. They sniffed at the air like wild creatures, too unfamiliar with strangers to accept them but not knowledgeable enough to stay away. Every single one of them paused at the very edge of the clearing, looked around it, then moved inside, as though the safe passage of the woman before her was no guarantee of anything. One by one they stopped in the center, pulled on the collar of their respective dresses, and made as if to spit in their bosoms in what I imagined was a gesture of good luck.
Yeah. Entirely fine.
That fearful nature should have been mine too, perhaps, after what I’d suffered in my own end-of-the-road village. I had no explanation why it wasn’t, and why I still hopelessly and helplessly trusted everyone even as I had trusted Alec. On the other hand, their open and consistent use of ritual was fascinating. Back where I was born, even just singing too loud or knowing the Latin name of a plant while simultaneously being a woman put us at risk of a noose, and here they were, practicing their folk magic. I didn’t know whether to be envious, or terrified of whatever dangers they faced that taught them counterreactions.
Enache took his place behind the main table and spackled a large smile across his face. A well-rehearsed mask, it fit him like a second skin. I rubbed the chill out of my hands and shook the knots between my shoulders loose. There was work to be done, and I promised I’d do it.
It took me just about as long as I expected to get my first disapproving scowl, and in a way that felt comforting and familiar. At least I knew where I stood. It came from Miss Crosman herself, the other women waiting deferentially for her to examine the crockery first.
“Hmph.”
Miss Crosman obviously expected me to introduce myself. She stood before me, looking down her nose at a spoon, stealing glances at my muddy apron. I desperately wanted to smile but forced myself not to, so my face took revenge by doing a funny little half twitch instead.
“Mmph-hmpf!”
I could resist no longer. “Cough drop?”
I couldn’t stop the corners of my mouth from creasing that time, and beside me, a silver mustache twitched violently.
“Well. Master Byrne, I hope this isn’t going to be a regular occurrence?”
I wasn’t even sure who she was talking to until Enache responded. “The lady helping me? No, certainly not.”
Miss Crosman seemed pleased, but I already knew very well where the sly merchant was going, and my lips tensed to prevent the laughter.
“Good. I’m glad to hear it.”
“She’ll be staying with you.”
There must have been a bitter chill in the air or something. A lot of things froze all at once and didn’t thaw again for a good few seconds: Miss Crosman, the other women, the leaves, the sun, the hairs on the back of my neck. Some of the women spat in their bosoms again, and that time I recognized the gesture for what it clearly was: a way to ward off evil.
“I am not amused.” She looked ready to vomit.
Even the merchant seemed taken aback. “Ask her yourself.”
I busied myself untying and tying my apron string for no reason whatsoever. Suddenly, it didn’t seem funny anymore.
She looked at me like one does at dirt on one’s shoe. The little strings that wrapped around her hat and head dug deeply into the sides of her jaw, and for a moment I wondered if she was even breathing at all or just propelled herself forward using pure scorn.
“Fine. If she’s done with life, it’s no business of mine.”
She moved on to the combs as if I had less importance or presence upon her day than they did, and I wondered whether she had meant that threat, or only intended to frighten me away from their private little community.
Swallowing my nerves, I looked to Enache for comfort, but found only a calculating gaze. I drew close enough to whisper to him without being heard by any of the women now milling about the tables as though released from a spell.
“I’m going to sit right here and do a good job. And later, you’re going to pay me in answers.” I wasn’t as confident as I sounded, but hoped he wouldn’t notice.
He didn’t make any sign that he agreed or disagreed, but didn’t send me away either, so I got to work. For the first time in a long time, a current of chilly fear blew past the ankles of my previously sunny excitement.