It was the first part of their path that worried Caelym the most. Once they got back to the forest, they just needed to follow the river as far as the start of canyons and, from there, cross over a few mountain ridges to find the place marked on Herrwn’s map by the sleeping dragon where Feywn and the rest were waiting—hopefully having found a convent for Aleswina along the way.
But to get to the forest they had to skirt around Welsferth, making their way along patrolled roads and through the farmed lands, and for that they needed the cover of darkness. It was only when the sun was fully set that he picked up the repacked bag and said, with more confidence than he actually felt, “Well, then, it is time to go. Follow me and keep absolutely silent until I say it is safe to speak again!”
Lliem nodded and bit down on his lower lip. Arddwn looked like he was on the verge of saying something, but he caught his father’s stern glance and clamped his teeth together.
With his satchel over his left shoulder and his staff in his right hand, Caelym pushed through the underbrush and started down the road. Arddwn followed after him, and Aleswina, hugging Lliem to her chest, followed Arddwn. Annwr clutched her staff and brought up the rear as they crept along the side of the road in single file, making no more noise than a snake slithering through dry grass.
Counting to himself, Caelym took the third turnoff on the right past the three oak trees. From there they followed a narrow lane that veered northward and away from the village proper, and only once had to duck into the bushes and wait as a trio of men heading home from the Spotted Hound staggered past singing a bawdy song suggesting that the Virgin Mary had been no better than she ought to be. After the raucous (and to Caelym’s highly trained ears, painfully off-key) lyrics faded around a bend, he started on again, leading the group across a footbridge that creaked under their feet and tiptoeing past hedges and gates until they came out through a stand of muttering aspens where the track disappeared into a dark expanse of fields and pastures.
“We must wait here for moonrise.” Annwr’s voice came from behind Caelym, sounding so much like Feywn it took him a moment to gather the courage to stand his ground.
“We will go now, with the darkness blinding our enemy and shielding us from them!”
“So then we will stumble around, blind ourselves, getting lost and going in circles?”
“I have traveled on darker nights than this without getting lost or going in circles!” Before Annwr could make any unkind rejoinder about the night she’d found him wandering wounded and directionless not so long before, Caelym added, “I promised that I would see you safely returned to our people, and I will. You need do no more than follow where I lead!”
With that, Caelym drew in a breath of the brisk night air. Willing himself to become a creature of the wild, untroubled by human qualms and misgivings, he plunged forward, exchanging thought for impulse and deliberation for instinct.
As he picked his path along the crisscrossing trails, Caelym’s senses grew sharper. Peering ahead with narrowed eyes, sniffing the air at each branch in the road, he might have been a wolf stalking its prey, if a wolf could walk upright on two legs. The wind coming from the northwest carried the scent of the forest and drew him unerringly through the web of intertwined cattle tracks to the road that separated the planted fields and grazed pastures from the edge of the forest, which loomed up on the far side of a flat expanse of low-growing brush.
Out of breath from dashing after him, Annwr gasped, “Wait— we should wait for more light. The moon will be up soon!”
“It will, and that is why we must go now,” Caelym answered in a low growl. “We have just this one meadow to cross to reach the forest, and the path is straight before us, but the grass will give us no cover and it is here above all we must go in the dark.”
Coming back to himself, he was relieved to realize they’d reached the entrance to the trail he’d seen from his vantage point on the ridge top—a narrow track running more or less directly to the forest across what had appeared from that distance to be a broad green field—but was actually a bog known locally as Fernley’s Fen.