22
Misty Vale
Something squeezed the breath from Morgan’s chest as it yanked him upward into the air—squeezing him so tightly that though he tried to scream in sudden terror, he could only summon enough breath to squeak.
He jerked to a halt but still swung helplessly. The mists surrounded him, hiding both the ground and the treetops above so that he seemed to float in a swirling white netherworld. As the first moment of astonishment passed he realized he was not being held by gigantic fingers but by a rope around his chest, and that as he thrashed and fought to free himself the rope was working its way higher up his body—and that rope was the only thing keeping him from falling what he felt sure was a fatal distance.
Morgan stopped struggling. His arms were pinioned, the rope pulled painfully tight around his arms just above his elbows, but he had a swift nightmare vision of the loop suddenly sliding all the way up to his neck. For a long moment all he could think of was the thief he had once seen on the public gallows in Breakstaff Square in Erchester. Inexpertly hanged, the man had wriggled like a fish for an achingly long time as he died. Morgan’s tutor (who along with several guards had been letting the young prince explore the marketplace) had tried to pull him away, but the last sight of the legs kicking in mid-air had never left him.
He looked up into the tree, but the leaves hid whoever or whatever had snared him.
Just then the branches rattled and the whole tree shuddered, as if a hammer as big as the moon had struck the ground. As Morgan swung violently back and forth he remembered that the rope on which he dangled like a plumb bob was the least of his problems.
That thing . . . the giant . . . !
It was still coming toward him, a monstrously huge shape made unrecognizable by mist and angled light. It was far too big to be real—but it was real, it was, and moving closer. Then it stopped. In that moment of stillness he could make out something of the thing’s squat shagginess—or at least its shaggy lower quarters, since the rest of the massive thing was still hidden by the swirling white haze. Its legs made shadows as big as grain silos.
Morgan held his breath and let himself go limp, though his heart was thumping. He prayed to God and Usires and his Mother Elysia that the giant could not see him hanging there like a fat quail curing above a crofter’s door. For an achingly extended moment nothing moved except Morgan himself, gently swaying. Then the massive shadow turned and trudged back into the depths of the canyon, each thunderous step accompanied by the snap and crack of small trees being crushed.
The rope around his chest tightened as Morgan began to rise again, rattling upward through the branches until he could see the other end of the rope was stretched over a sturdy branch, and held by a cloaked and hooded figure. His captor pulled him higher, then pushed him gently to one side as he rose until he felt something solid rub against him—a wide branch—then he was lowered again until he was sitting on it. The hooded figure reached out once more and, with a single flick of the hand so swift he couldn’t follow it, loosened the rope that held him. As it fell into coils his captor quickly reeled it in. No longer held in place, Morgan felt a momentary loss of balance and flung out his aching arms to grab at the branch.
The shape jumped down beside him, landing so lightly the branch did not move. The agility made him think this might be one of the Sithi, but that only slightly reassuring thought was followed almost immediately by another: Or it might be one of those White Foxes.
Before Morgan could get his bloodless, tingling fingers to close on the hilt of his knife, the cloaked figure put a cool hand across his mouth; the grip was much stronger than the slenderness of the fingers suggested. He tried to struggle free, but the stranger kept one hand over his mouth, then reached out with the other hand—which meant he or she was crouching unsupported on the branch—and gave Morgan’s ear a painful but silent twist, like a furious tutor with an unresponsive pupil. Then it pointed down into the mist below.
One last time he opened his mouth, but when the hand pinched his lips closed Morgan finally understood. He stopped fighting and tried to make his breathing as shallow and quiet as possible. Something else was coming, that was clear. Something was looking for him, or for the one who had pulled him up into the tree, or for both of them.
Such a long time passed that he began to wonder if his hooded and still unknown rescuer had been mistaken, but just when he was about to risk a whispered question he saw shapes in the mist below, only a few dozen yards from the tree in which he and his rescuer crouched. The shapes moved as silently as shadows, as ghosts, but they were no phantoms. Morgan held his breath until it burned in his chest.
He had never seen a live Norn before, but he knew the three figures on the ground could be nothing else: their hair, faces, and hands were so pale as to be almost luminous in the day’s failing light. They wore armor made of what looked like lacquered wood, held long black bows in their hands, and seemed perfectly at home in this wild place, their steps soundless, their movements graceful but precise. As Morgan stared, one of them paused, his head tipped to one side as if listening, and Morgan felt his breath turn into scalding steam in his lungs. A dozen swift heartbeats sounded in his chest—two dozen! He needed to breathe so badly, but did not dare. The other two Norns waited like statures. Then, at last, the one who had stopped began moving again. Within a few moments the Norns had all slipped away into the mist, bypassing the mouth of the valley without a look.
Morgan was shaking so badly now that he was afraid he would slide off the branch. He let out his long-held breath and drank in a glorious new one. His rescuer threw back the cloak’s hood and said softly, “Gone. We were fortunate. You were fortunate.”
Morgan stared. He had been right—it was a Sitha, golden-eyed and golden-skinned, with long, white hair pulled back in a simple braid. At first he couldn’t tell whether his rescuer was male or female, but a delicacy in the features at last convinced him this was a Sitha woman crouched beside him. “Who are you?” he asked.
She looked at him curiously. “You do not recognize me? You and your fellows carried me a long journey back to my home.”
“You’re the one who was sick? Poisoned, I mean?”
“Yes. My mother named me Tanahaya. And you are Morgan, grandson of the Hikka Staja, so I am pleased we finally meet.”
He had only ever seen her pale and insensible, so ill that it had been hard to look at her because it reminded him of his father’s last days. In fact, this creature had looked so close to death the last time he saw her—carried into the Sithi camp—that it seemed nearly impossible to believe this could be her. Even more confounding, she had hauled the whole of his weight up into the tree by herself.
“Tanahaya,” he said, experimenting with the sound. It sounded flatter and heavier when he said it. Morgan suddenly had a sense of what a mad picture this would make to someone else, him sitting on a tree branch exchanging pleasantries with a fairy after an impossibly huge monster, and then several demons, had just tried to kill him. “What was that huge thing?” he asked suddenly. “A giant?”
“Not the kind you know—not what mortals call ‘Hunën.’ The thing that lives in Misty Vale is something different, and jealous of its privacy. Murderously jealous. Only a mortal would try to enter that valley—all my kind know it is forbidden.”
“Forbidden by whom?”
She shook her head. “How can it matter to you? The place has been forbidden since Amerasu Ship-Born’s time, or even before. But it is not merely the word of our elders that keeps us out—the smashed and broken bodies of those who wandered into that valley by mistake are warning enough.”
Morgan knew that he was certainly never going to go near the place again. In fact, he was ready to get farther away as quickly as possible, and said so.
“Not yet,” said Tanahaya. “The Hikeda’ya scouts are still close by. We will stay here until after nightfall.”
“Hikeda’ya. That word means ‘Norns,’ doesn’t it? Those were Norns.”
“Yes, your people call them Norns, just as they call us ‘Sithi.’ But I do not know what they were doing here, so far from their own lands. They have been tracking you for a day or two, I think.”
That made Morgan’s blood turn icy cold. “Tracking me? Why?”
“How can I say? I do not know why they are here in the first place. But I came upon them first and followed them until I found you, so I feel certain it was you they hunted.” She finally unfolded from her crouch and lowered herself onto the branch beside him. “You are luckier than you know that they did not catch you before I did. I think it is only your smell that confused them. You do not smell like a mortal anymore, but more like those Tinukeda’ya you were journeying with.”
It took a moment—so many new words. “Hikeda . . . Hikeya, Tinkedaya. All these ‘Daya’s!’ I don’t know what any of it means. What are Tinka—the last thing you said?” A sudden idea came to him. “Are you talking about the Chikri? The little animals I was with?”
She shook her head emphatically. “They are not animals, they are Tinukeda’ya.”
“You keep saying that word.” He vaguely remembered hearing it before, perhaps as part of one of his grandfather’s stories. “You’re talking about the creatures in the trees? They looked like some kind of squirrels to me.”
“I have never seen Tinukeda’ya in forms so crude and animal-like, but they were still Changelings, I promise you.” She put a hand on his leg. “You are damp from these fogs. I think it has been long enough now that we can go down. I have a place that will be safe for tonight.”
He was conscious of her hand in a way he had not been of anything in a while. “Damp?”
“You mortals die if you become too wet, don’t you? You take fever and die.”
“Not if we’re just a little wet.”
“Still.” She was perched atop the branch again in moments, balanced and sure-footed as a bird. He caught his breath to see how nimble she was—it made his own hard-won climbing skills seem small indeed. “Your people saved my life. I could not allow you to die without trying to help.”
She climbed down first, jumping the last ten cubits to land almost perfectly balanced. Despite his weeks in the trees, Morgan could not hope to match her, but he did his best not to seem like an ordinary clumsy mortal.
“What do you have on your feet?” she asked after he reached the ground.
He showed her. “The troll Snenneq made them. They’re for walking on ice, but I used them to climb the trees.” He said it with more than a little pride.
“Strange,” was all she said, then “Follow.”
It was all he could do to keep up.
The Sitha led him to a cave nestled in the rocks at the far side of the entrance to the Misty Vale. “We cannot make a fire,” she said as she ushered him in. “The Hikeda’ya would smell it if they are still anywhere close.”
Morgan looked around the cavern. It was little more than an empty space in the midst of a jumble of boulders, but the entrance was hidden by a spread of gorse. He thought of ReeRee and her troop and felt a momentary ache of loss.
“Changelings,” he said out loud, remembering what Tanahaya had called the Chikri. “What does that mean?”
“Do you know the Niskies of the south? The sea-watchers?”
“Yes. I’ve seen them.”
“And the dwarrows who live in deep mountain places?”
That sounded familiar, but only barely. “Perhaps.”
“Then you know the Tinukeda’ya. They are called Changelings because they grow to fit the places they are, the way they must live.”
“But the things I was in the trees with—they were animals!”
“It is true I have never seen any Tinukeda’ya so far different from the shapes I know, but I swear by my calling as a scholar that I could not mistake those eyes, those voices.”
Morgan remembered the night he had found all the Chikri listening to the oldest of their troop and the strange shiver it had given him to hear them and to see their rapt attention. Animals? Fairy creatures? It was all too much for him, and he realized he was so exhausted that he could not think without effort. He slid off his sword belt and used the scabbard for a pillow, then pulled his cloak tight around him.
“I just need to close my eyes,” he said. “Only for a moment.”
“Then sleep, mortal.” He thought he heard something almost like fondness in her voice—something he had not heard from any other Sitha except the beautiful Aditu. “I will watch over you.”
In his dream, the tree in which he perched was full of singing angels, wispy shapes he could not see. Their soft, wordless voices filled the treetops, and he wanted nothing more than just to listen, but something large was moving in the great darkness below, searching for the singers, and only he seemed to realize it. He tried to call out and warn them but his throat had clamped shut and no matter how he tried he could not make a sound.
“Silence,” said a voice in his ear, and he realized that someone was holding a hand over his mouth. He stopped fighting, then opened his eyes to see the shadowy interior of the cave, the tumbled rocks a myriad of colors in the soft morning light filtering through the bushes covering the entrance. He remembered where he was.
Tanahaya took her hand from his mouth. “You were crying out in your sleep. That is not a good thing to do when Hikeda’ya could still be somewhere near.”
“I’m sorry.” He felt the last of the dream dissolving like the mist of the strange valley. “It was . . . that giant thing.”
“The ogre of Misty Vale.” She nodded. “I am not surprised. We are among the few who have seen it and lived, I think.”
“What did you see? What was it?”
She made a movement like a snake shedding skin. He took it for a shrug. “Nothing but shadow,” she said. “The mist was too thick.”
“But what was it?”
“Better to turn your mind instead to what we will do next. There are other dangers here in the great woods beside the ogre.”
He felt chastised and it made him angry. Hadn’t he survived for a long time in the forest on his own? Again he remembered the way Jiriki had talked down to him, as if he were a foolish child, and also the contempt of the scarred chieftain Khendraja’aro for all mortals, even the grandchildren of kings and queens.
Yes, she saved me, he thought. But that doesn’t mean I have to love the Sithi.
But as the dream faded, so did much of Morgan’s irritation. For the first time in a long while he thought how nice it would be to have a cup of wine. No, not just a cup, he thought, but an entire cask to himself, and the leisure in which to drink it all. Instead, Sitha or no Sitha, he was still lost in the middle of the forest and his stomach was aching.
“Is there anything to eat?”
Tanahaya seemed amused. “None of the things your people eat, I think, but there is bread and a little honey wrapped in that leaf beside you.”
There was, and Morgan fell on it like a beast, devouring it so quickly that he barely tasted the glorious sweetness of the honey as he hurried it down his throat. As soon as he had finished he wished he could start all over again. “We mortals eat honey and bread too.” He licked the last honey from his lips, then searched his beard for crumbs. “That was good. Is there any more?”
“I gave you what I would have eaten myself,” Tanahaya said, but without rancor. “I did not expect to have a guest.”
“I didn’t expect to be anyone’s guest either.” So much talking made his head ache a little, but it was exciting to be with someone who could actually answer him. “Why did you save me?”
“Why? What a strange question. Your people saved me, did they not?”
“I suppose.”
“When I set out from H’ran Go-jao I came across your trail at the forest’s edge, but it led in the opposite direction from where I was told Jiriki had taken you. I did not know the reasons you had turned around—and still do not, although I saw fires out on the meadowlands, so I can guess—but I could not leave you alone to die in the forest. That would be a poor return of the favor your people showed me.”
“I wasn’t dying. I found things to eat. I lived with the Chikri.”
“If you mean those Tinukeda’ya, I have seen the evidence so I must believe you. Perhaps Jiriki and Aditu were right about this too—there is more to your kind than we Zida’ya sometimes wish to believe.”
A memory of Likimeya’s voice in his head came to Morgan suddenly, but he did not share it. Tanahaya might just have saved him, but he didn’t truly know or trust the Sithi, however much his grandparents might favor them.
And it makes no sense in any case, he thought. Why me? Why would a Sithi monarch speak to me, a mortal? And would she speak to me in dreams?
I will keep this to myself, he thought. At least for now. I am a prince, after all. I can keep my own counsel.
“Are you still hungry?” Tanahaya asked. “This is the season for dove eggs. I could find some for you.”
“Do your people eat eggs?”
She smiled gently, as if remembering something. “Sometimes. Only when they have not quickened.” She saw his expression. “Only when they will not become a young bird.”
“But how do you know without cracking them open?”
“By smell, of course.” She gave him an odd look. “But perhaps you cannot smell anything because of your own scent, Morgan. It is very . . . pungent.”
He sat back, still thinking of honey and bread, but eggs had now made their way into his imagination too and were causing quite a commotion there. “You said my smell was why the Norns couldn’t find me, so that’s good, right?”
“Perhaps. But now that we travel together I cannot smell anything but you. I will have to consider which is the greater asset, your invisibility from our enemies or my ability to know those enemies are near.”
“Then we’re traveling together?”
“Unless you know how to find your own way home—yes, Morgan of Erkynland, I believe we are. For it is back to your grandparents’ dwelling I am bound, to fulfill the duty my friends laid upon me so many moons ago. You would be wise to travel with me.”
Suddenly the light sifting down into the tumble of stones seemed warmer, splashing the colors of an inspiring day all over the uneven, rocky burrow. “I do want to go home, by all God’s angels. Yes, I’ll go with you.” He suddenly remembered. “And thank you. Thank you, Tanahaya, for helping me.”
She nodded.
“What month is it?” He knew he was talking a lot, but he was thrilled to have a partner for conversation and was reluctant to be quiet again, although he sensed she would have preferred it. “What day?”
Her clear golden brow furrowed ever so slightly. “I do not remember the name for the ninth month in your tongue—is it ‘Septander’? By my reckoning, it is the eleventh day of the Sky-Singer’s Moon.”
“Septander?” He and Eolair had left the Erkynguards to go with the Sithi in early Tiyagar-month. “Elysia’s Mercy, have I truly been in the forest that long? Two months?”
“It is a noble feat that you have lived so long without help. Be proud. Your people will certainly be proud of you.”
“Yes, perhaps.” But he was not entirely certain of that. He could imagine how his grandparents would feel when he returned with the news that only he had escaped, that the troop of Erkynguards and Count Eolair were all dead and the mission had been a failure. “Perhaps.”
“There is no sense spending the daylight hours talking here,” she said. “You would rather travel in daylight, I suspect, and it is definitely better for avoiding Hikeda’ya scouts. Let us start walking.”
As the morning warmed they made their way up into the rocky heights that formed the northern side of Misty Vale by dint of sheer hard work, much of it requiring the use of hands as well as feet, and reached the top not long before noon. They stopped so Morgan could remove his climbing irons; Tanahaya, who had been climbing in bare feet, took her soft boots from her belt and put them back on. Even in full sunlight, Misty Vale was a trough of billowing white below them, and Morgan was relieved he couldn’t see anything. As he got back to his feet, he wondered where the Chikri might be in that grim, dangerous expanse, and felt another pang of worry for little ReeRee.
Now that the worst of the climbing was over and he didn’t have to worry about falling, the events of the previous day kept spinning through his mind, over and over as they made their way through the woods. Despite Tanahaya’s clear preference for silent travel, he could not stop himself from asking more questions.
“Why are there Norns here? My grandparents and their company were also attacked by some coming back from Elvritshalla. What are the White Foxes doing so far from their mountain or wherever it is they live? Will they make war on us?”
“Their presence is a bad sign,” she agreed. “When I heard from Jiriki and Aditu what happened to your grandparents’ caravan, it made my decision to return to the Hayholt clear. Something strange is happening—something frightening, I think—and it seems plain to me that Dawn Children and Sunset Children must work together to protect ourselves.”
“Dawn Children. That means . . . ?”
“My people, the Sithi—the Zida’ya. And yours are called Sudhoda’ya—Sunset Children.”
“Why ‘sunset’?”
He could not see her face, but she sounded as though she was growing tired of answering questions. “Because this world is better shaped for your kind than ours,” was all she said.
An hour later they came down another long slope cluttered with deadfall. Morgan could hear the sound of rushing water. “What’s that?”
“We have caught up to the course of the Dekusao again, the river that runs from Misty Vale. You would call it ‘Narrowdark.’ That will be a good place for you to wash the stink from you.”
“But I thought you said my smell was useful.”
“I said I must think, and I have thought—and you must wash.” She sounded like Countess Rhona now, or one of the other no-nonsense women from back home. Morgan could not help recoiling a bit—that tone never brought anything good for him. “Yes,” she said sternly, “it shields you somewhat from the noses of Hikeda’ya scouts, but it keeps me from scenting anything myself, and on top of it, I have just realized that since you smell so strongly of—what did you call the climbing Tinukeda’ya?”
“Chikri.”
“Yes, the ‘Chikri’—I have realized that the creatures who eat the tree-dwellers, wolves and bears, must also smell you everywhere you go. And I do not wish to fight a bear.”
“I did! I fought a bear!” He was about to tell her a version that emphasized his bravery and resourcefulness, but felt compelled for some reason he could not explain to tell the truth instead. “It almost killed me. That’s why I was up in the trees in the first place. That and ReeRee.”
“ReeRee?” As she tried the name they emerged from a copse of aspen trees and he could finally see the river, wider than the name “Narrowdark” suggested, glinting jade green in places, but black as tar where it ran deep. “What is a ReeRee?”
He explained how the small creature had first come to him and how he had lived with her troop. “Strange,” she said as she led him down the slope to the river’s broad, sandy banks. “All of it. But you did well.”
“And I can show you all kinds of things that are safe to eat!”
“We will eat later. Now, I think this is a good spot for you—a quiet backwater. You may bathe the stink from your skin.”
“Are you sure . . . ?”
“Yes,” she said firmly.
He sat down and took off his belt and sword, then doffed his cloak and pulled off his shirt before he saw that Tanahaya was still standing and watching. Morgan was not unduly modest—countless guards, servants, and more than a few tavern girls had seen him naked—but something about the Sitha abashed him.
“Are you going to watch? I can clean myself.”
Tanahaya stared at him for a moment as though she did not understand, then nodded in a distracted way and moved farther down the riverbank until he could not see her anymore.
The river was wide and strong, but Tanahaya had picked a bend where the current was slowed by rocks and spread into a shallow, relatively placid pond on the near side. He stripped off the rest of his clothes and waded out. The water was so cold that the first thing he did was curse and retreat back into the shallowest edges, but he braced himself for the chill and manfully waded back in until it was above his waist. Every part of him below that point felt like it had been packed in snow.
Still, once the worst of the shock was over he found himself almost hungry for the feeling of water on his skin as weeks’ worth of grime washed away. In fact, for a brief moment the lost familiarity of getting clean seemed so satisfying that he began to sing one of his grandfather’s Jack Mundwode songs. But before he had sung more than a few hooting words he remembered the patient, death-pale Norns that had walked right beneath them like stalking cats, and he abruptly fell silent.
There was no sign of Tanahaya, so he climbed up the bank and gathered his clothes, then brought them back to the river to wash. He did his best, but it was clear that none of them would ever truly be clean again. Still, it was pleasant to know he had at least removed most of the fleas and spiders and clinging leaves. When he finished he looked for a place to dry them, but the sun had slid behind the trees and the bank was in deep shade. He waded to the edge of the backwater and then scrambled from one rock to the next until he reached the bend, where the shining sun beamed across the river bank without impediment. He was laying out his breeks on a pair of wide, flat stones at the river’s edge when he heard the sound of someone singing.
It was a trill of melody he did not recognize, and although he could sense the shape of words in the flow of sound, he could not understand them. It must be Tanahaya, he realized after a moment. He sloshed a little way through the shallows until he reached a pair of tall stones standing straight in the water as if they had been set there. He could see her in the river just ahead. She was washing herself too, a slender expanse of golden skin in thigh-high water.
A part of him wanted to warn her that he had stumbled onto her bathing place, but he was captured by the unexpectedness. It was strange, too, to see the whole shape of her at once, the hidden nakedness of someone he had scarcely thought of before that moment as female. He felt a stirring in his chest. She did not have the womanly shape he most fancied, curvaceous and wide-hipped; despite her long, wet, white hair, he thought Tanahaya looked more like a boy, her supple back tight with smooth muscle, her legs long beneath her small backside. But she was graceful in her every movement—oh, so graceful—and the river water sliding down her skin seemed to catch every ray of the sun and send it bouncing outward again, cloaking her in a shiny dazzle that sparkled with rainbow colors.
Morgan did not think he had made a noise, but somehow the Sitha heard him behind her and turned. She did not cover herself or look surprised—she did not even look embarrassed—but only gazed at him with the kind of offhand interest another solitary bather might have felt to discover herself observed by a deer or a squirrel. After a moment she turned away again, not to hide, but to continue what she was doing. Morgan sloshed back against the slow current, looking for a less problematic spot—for him if not for the Sitha—to dry his clothes.
“How long will it take to reach the Hayholt?” he asked that night as they ate a meager and not particularly satisfying meal of boiled acorns and dandelion leaves.
“I do not know the answer to that, Morgan. In fact, I think I will take you someplace else first.”
He didn’t like that sound of that at all. “What do you mean? Where?”
Finished with her food, she fixed him with a sharp, steady gaze. She had not mentioned his appearance at her bathing spot, and he had not wanted to bring it up, but it now seemed to hang between them somehow, or at least so it felt to Morgan. “Just my finding you has changed things already. I suppose that your grandparents and the others must still think you lost.”
“I still am lost until we get out of this forest,” he reminded her, a trifle cross.
“I gave you most of the dandelions,” she replied. “Did you mutter at your Chikri friends too for not supplying you with a sufficiency of hazelnuts?”
“No. I’m sorry.” But he wasn’t really, not too much. How long could he be expected to eat the sort of things sensible farmers plowed under before he went mad from hunger?
“In any case,” she continued, “I need to tell my friends that I am with you. Jiriki and Aditu might be able to send word to your family somehow, but even if they cannot, they still will be relieved to know you are safe. It is also important they know I have seen Sacrifice scouts as close to them. As near as Misty Vale.”
Morgan was pleased to hear that not all the Sithi wanted him dead. Still, the idea of anything other than heading straight home undercut the relief he had been feeling since Tanahaya had told him her plan that morning. “God save us, you’re not going to take me all the way back to those Sithi villages are you? They must be leagues and leagues away, and in the wrong direction!”
She showed something that again seemed nearly a smile. “From following your trail, I suspect you are not the best person to decide which direction is which. The Veil of the Sa’onsera snared you and would not let you free.”
If she meant the mad untrustworthiness of the sun and stars, he didn’t want to talk about it. “I didn’t ask to be lost.”
“True. No, I do not intend to lead you back to H’ran Go-jao. With only a slight alteration to our path we can reach the Flowering Hills on our way to your home. My teacher Himano has his house there, and I have not seen him for so very, very long.”
“So we’d go out of our way to visit some old friend of yours?”
She gave him a look this time that could only be irritation. Apparently, Morgan decided with a small thrill of triumph, the Sithi were not as emotionless as they wanted everyone to believe. “Have you not listened to what I said?” She spoke carefully, as though to a bad-tempered child. “I wish to tell those who need to know that I have found you, and that there are Hikeda’ya Sacrifice warriors roaming much farther into the great woods than before. My teacher Himano will have a Witness. Do you know what that is?”
He was about to say that, yes, he certainly did know, because his grandfather had told him all about them, but then he realized that he could scarcely recall a single detail of what King Simon had said. Humbled, he said, “A bit. Some kind of magic mirror?”
Tanahaya made a hand-sign he hadn’t seen before, a quick touching of all her fingertips, almost as though she were folding her hands in prayer. “I have never understood what your folk mean by ‘magic,’ because they use it to describe not only impossibilities seen only in your children’s tales, but also things we Zida’ya do every day, even those who are untutored. Yes, Witnesses, especially the smallest ones often appear to be mirrors, but they can be many things of many sizes—‘Stones, Scales, Pools, and Pyres’ as the saying goes.”
“I’ve never heard that saying.”
“Because you are . . . young.” She hesitated before choosing the last word. “The Witnesses are a way to speak through the between places over great distance, so that our voices do not have to travel through the naked air. But all that matters is, with Himano’s Witness I can speak to Jiriki and Aditu and tell them what I have discovered.”
She gave him another stern look, her golden eyes intent as a hawk’s, and for a moment Morgan almost felt afraid.
“Do you understand? Or will we argue more?”
“Yes, yes, very well.” He tried to surrender with good grace—she had saved him after all. “I suppose it makes sense.”
“It does, so that is where we will be headed tomorrow, although I doubt we will reach it in daylight.” She paused. “And if you are not going to finish eating those leaves, I will have them.”