It was so early in the morning, nobody was astir. Birds chorused in the woods by the cart track, and somewhere down under the elders I could hear the voices of frogs. Everything seemed swept clean, open to light, full of promise. It felt wrong. Part of me wanted to protest that such a lovely day ill fitted the catastrophe facing the folk of Whistling Tor. Another part of me whispered,
For half the morning I walked without seeing a soul. I grew thirsty and stopped to drink from a stream a little way off the track. I grew hungry. My precipitate departure had left me ill equipped to travel far without help. Memories of my flight to the west returned. I suppressed them, making myself move on. My feet were hurting; Emer’s boots were not such a perfect fit after all. The day grew warmer. I took off my shawl and stuffed it into my bag.
A rumbling, squeaking sound and the thump of hooves sent me down under the bushes to the side, wary of carters traveling alone. A pair of stocky horses came into view, pulling a well-kept cart laden with bundles. A man and a woman sat on the bench seat; she had a child on her knee.
I stepped out and waved a hand. A little later I was perched on a sack of grain in the back, on my way eastward. I imagined the mist-clad slopes of the Tor behind me, slowly diminishing until they could no longer be distinguished from the ordinary landscape of fields and woodland. As the cart moved further and further to the east, I did not once look back.
It made a difference having funds. I spent two nights in a village inn, with my own chamber and a lock on the door. I got directions and arranged lifts. I read a letter for a local trader in return for a place on a conveyance that was going all the way to Stony Ford, a settlement about three days’ travel north of Market Cross. Father and I had executed commissions for the chieftain there, and I was fairly sure Shea and his fellow musicians would be known in that house.
My fellow passengers on this somewhat larger and grander cart must have thought me dour and uncommunicative. They could not know the whirl of thoughts that filled my mind every moment of the day, those I fought to banish and those I tried to concentrate on, in particular how to track down Maraid and Shea without going too near Market Cross. If Stony Ford did not provide any clues I must try other places Shea had mentioned when telling us of his traveling life, but those were few and far between. I thought I could recall a town called Hideaway or Holdaway, where the band had regularly played to entertain people at a big weekly market. Lean enough pickings, Shea had said with good humor, but if they stayed on for the evening’s dancing there would generally be a few extra coins tossed their way.
Failing that, I could look for Shea’s family. That would mean a far longer journey, as they lived somewhere well to the northeast, close to Norman-ruled territories. His father’s name I had forgotten, but he had been a master harp maker before his hands were afflicted by tremors, and such craftsmen would be few in any part of the land. I had a good chance of finding him eventually. Eventually. How long would it take?
As the cart rolled steadily on and my fellow passengers chatted about the weather or how long it might be until the next stop, I pictured Anluan, Magnus, Rioghan and the rest of them in pitched battle against Lord Stephen’s army. I imagined the spectral voice filling the ears of the host with poison and sending them into howling, tortured disarray. I thought of Anluan cut down, wounded, dying, while I went from village to village asking about a band of musicians who might or might not have passed by some time earlier. I saw the Latin words of the counterspell clean on a parchment page, useless without me there to translate them. Often I came close to tears, and it was necessary to remind myself that if Anluan had really loved me, he would not have sent me away forever.That worked for a little, until my mind began to tell me that perhaps Anluan had banished me because he thought there was no chance of defeating Stephen de Courcy, and that he and Magnus and Olcan were all going to die, leaving the host leaderless and adrift. Once this perfectly logical idea had come to me, I couldn’t shake it off. It made me cold all through. I sat on the cart’s padded seat with my shawl hugged around me and my gaze set straight ahead, seeing nothing but Anluan’s pale face, his bright hair, his lovely crooked features. Over and over I thought of the unforgivable words I had said to him, and of how he had looked when he heard them.
