He had leaned over her as she sat against the wagon wheel. She could see his face in the flickering light from the fire. He had said something to her she didn’t understand, and she had said, “Tell Mr. Dunworthy to come and get me.”
“Rosemund does not ride in seemly fashion for a maid,” Agnes said primly.
She had ridden out ahead of the donkey and was nearly out of sight where the road curved, waiting impatiently for them to catch up.
“Rosemund!” Kivrin called, and Rosemund galloped back, nearly colliding with the donkey and then pulling her mare’s reins up short.
“Can we go no faster than this?” she demanded, wheeled around, and rode ahead again. “We will never finish ere it rains.”
They were riding in thick woods now, the road scarcely wider than a bridle path. Kivrin looked at the trees, trying to remember having seen them. They passed a thicket of willows, but it was set too far back from the road, and a trickle of ice– bordered water ran next to it.
There was a huge sycamore on the other side of the path. It stood in a little open space, draped with mistletoe. Beyond it was a line of wild service trees, so evenly spaced they might have been planted. She didn’t remember ever having seen any of this before.
They had brought her along this road, and she’d hoped that something might trigger her memory, but nothing looked familiar at all. It had been too dark and she had been too ill.
All she really remembered was the drop, though it had the same hazy, unreal quality as the trip to the manor. There had been a clearing and an oak and a thicket of willows. And Father Roche’s face bending over her as she sat against the wagon wheel.
He must have been with Gawyn when he found her, or else Gawyn had brought him back to the drop. She could see his face clearly in the light from the fire. And then she’d fallen off the horse at the fork.
They hadn’t come to any fork yet. She hadn’t even seen any paths, though she knew they had to be there, cutting from village to village and leading to the fields and the hut of the sick cottar Eliwys had gone to see.
They climbed a low hill, and at the top of it Father Roche looked back to see if they were following. He knows where the drop is, Kivrin thought. She had hoped he had some idea where it was, that Gawyn had described it to him or told him which road it lay along, but he hadn’t had to. Father Roche already knew where the drop was. He had been there.
Agnes and Kivrin came to the top of the hill, but all she could see was trees, and below them more trees. They had to be in Wychwood Forest, but there were over a hundred square kilometers in which the drop could be hidden. She would never have found it on her own. She could scarcely see ten meters into the underbrush.
She was amazed at the thickness of the woods as they came down the hill into the heart of them. There were clearly no paths between the trees here. There was scarcely any space at all, and what there was was filled with fallen branches and tangled thickets and snow.
She had been wrong about not recognizing anything—she knew these woods after all. It was the forest Snow White had got lost in, and Hansel and Gretel, and all those princes. There were wolves in it, and bears, and perhaps even witch’s cottages, and that was where all those stories had come from, wasn’t it, the Middle Ages? And no wonder. Anyone could get lost in there.
Roche stopped and stood beside his donkey while Rosemund cantered back to him and they caught up, and Kivrin wondered wryly if he had lost his way. But as soon as they came up to him, he plunged off through a thicket and onto an even narrower path that wasn’t visible from the road.
Rosemund couldn’t pass Father Roche and his donkey without shoving them aside, but she followed nearly treading on the donkey’s hind hooves, and Kivrin wondered again what was bothering her. “Sir Bloet has many powerful friends,” Lady Imeyne had said. She had called him an ally, but Kivrin wondered if he really was, or if Rosemund’s father had told her something about him that made her so distressed at the prospect of his coming to Ashencote.
They went a short way along the path, past a thicket of willows that looked like the one by the drop, and then turned off the path, squeezing through a stand of firs and emerging next to a holly tree.
Kivrin had been expecting holly bushes like the ones in Brasenose’s quad, but this was a tree. It towered over them, spreading out above the confines of the spruces, its red berries bright among the masses of glossy leaves.
Father Roche began taking the sacks from the back of the donkey, Agnes attempting to help him. Rosemund pulled a short, fat-bladed knife our of her girdle and began hacking at the sharp-leaved lower branches.
Kivrin waded through the snow to the other side of the tree. She had caught a glimpse of white she thought might be the stand of birches, but it was only a branch, half-fallen between two trees and covered with snow.
