Chapter 14: The Wilderness Camp

The dell.

It was nothing, looked at as a place — a stretch of mud and damp stones and grey women in damp clothes — and yet, having come from where we had come from, it was the warmest place I had stood in days. Trimmel had got a small fire going in the time it had taken the rest of us to cross. The kettle was on. Aelea was wrapped in a blanket that was steaming gently at the edges. Maerith was working through the Queen’s hair with her fingers, slowly, the way a woman works through tangles that another woman has not had the time to think about for an hour.

My father stood at the lip of the dell where I had stood, with his back to the river and his face to the fire. He was looking at the ground a pace in front of him.

I came up to the dell and Josen went past me to the fire, set the wet coil of rope down on a flat stone to drip, and squatted to warm his hands. He gave the Queen the small nod a senior retainer gives his lady. She gave him back a nod that was not a lady’s nod and was not a wife’s; it was the nod of a woman who has known a man a long time. I marked it and put it past me. I had other things in my hands.

I did not go to the fire. I went to my father.

He looked up at me when I came, and our eyes met across the small distance, and he held mine for the space of one steady breath. He gave me the nod. It was a small motion, no more than an inch of his chin, and it did not say anything to anyone watching that could be put into a sentence. It said I know what is done. I know the count. I will not speak of it. I gave him back nothing — there was nothing to give back that would not have made of the nod a thing larger than he meant it to be — and the moment was over before any other soul could have read it.

He turned to the fire. I followed him. We sat down on opposite sides of it and warmed our hands.

“Coll has caught fish,” said the King, after a while, conversational, to no one in particular. “I saw him at it as I came up. We shall eat well tonight.”

“Good,” said the Queen, equally easy. “I am hungry. The river took something out of me. I think I have not been hungry properly in a year.”

That was the whole of it. The river had been crossed. We were down a man. The Queen was hungry. The Queen had not been hungry properly in a year. I sat by the small fire and let what had happened settle in my chest where it would, and listened to my parents speak to one another across a fire as though they had been doing it all their lives.

Trimmel came in from the trees with an armful of dry brushwood, and Maerith was setting out bread, and somewhere down the slope I could hear Coll talking quietly to Tarn, and the dell was a camp.

We did not stay there long. Coll, when he came up, took the cup of broth my mother handed him and drank it standing, and looked at the river behind us, and shook his head.

“Too close. We can be seen from the far bank still, by anyone with the eye for it. The wood here is thin. I would not sleep on this water.” He drained the cup. “There is a brook half a mile up. We will follow it. There is a place I know.”

“You know the wilderness,” said the King.

“I know this country,” said Coll. He left it there.

So we packed up the small comfort we had begun to make and we mounted, wet skirts and dripping cleric’s robe and all, and we set off after Coll up the brook.

The brook came out of the woods on the wilderness side and ran down to the Boundary in a long slow chain of pools and small falls, and the path that ran beside it was a deer-track, narrow and stony, with the brook on our right and a steep wooded slope rising on our left. We went slowly because the slope was rough and the day was running out of light, and after the first quarter-mile the river was lost behind us and there was only the small bright sound of the brook and the wood ahead.

Coll, in the lead, was a different man here than he had been beside the river. He had been entirely the working bushman at the rope — focused, efficient, no spare attention — and now, with the river behind us, something in him had loosened. He looked at the trees as we passed and put names on them under his breath, not for our benefit; he stopped once to crouch by the brook and look at a track in the soft mud, and shook his head, and rose, and rode on without commenting; he laid his hand on Tarn’s neck and left it there for a long stretch.

This was Coll’s country, I understood, in a way the rope-and-the-Boundary had not been. The killing had been work. The brook was home.

We followed it for the better part of an hour, climbing slowly, until we came up out of the close trees into a small high meadow that the brook ran through in a long shining bend. There was good grass for the horses. There was a stand of birch on the upslope side that would break the wind. There was no other approach but the one we had come up — Coll showed me, with a small turn of his head — for the slopes on three sides ran down to the brook in tangled wood that a man could not have come quietly through. A man might come un-quietly through, but Coll had already told me he meant to take the first watch with his back to that side, and I knew that he would hear a deer two slopes off, never mind a man.

“This,” said Coll. “Here.”

We dismounted. The light was gold now, the kind of light it goes at the end of a long day. The horses, freed of the bridles, took themselves down to the brook in a slow shuffle and stood up to their hocks in the water and drank for a long time. Tarn drank longest.

“Set the camp,” Coll said. “Slow. There is no hurry.”

This is what I remember of the next hour, because it was, in its small way, the best hour I had on that road, and I want to set it down with care.

Aelea was the centre of everything we did. None of us said so. None of us, I think, had agreed on it. But by the time the camp was half-up I understood that Coll and I had between us decided, without ever speaking of it, that the day she had been given was going to end with her having had a wonderful time. The wolves had been hers, and the river had been hers, and the man who had vanished had been hers, and none of us could change any of that. We could give her this hour.

Coll took her first.

“Come here, princess. There is a thing the wilderness does in its own ground that you will want to know. Look — there. And there. And there.”

He had her down on her hunkers in the soft soil at the edge of the meadow, with his finger on three different marks in the ground that she would not have seen if he had not pointed them out. He told her what each was. A deer had come through in the morning, with a fawn — see the smaller print beside the larger — and had gone away again northwest, where the wind had been blowing from. A badger had moved across the same patch of ground later, judging by the layering. A fox had stood in this place for a long time, looking at something it could not get to. Aelea was on her knees in the mud and did not care; she was naming the prints back to him slowly, getting them wrong and being corrected, the way a child learns a thing she has decided to be good at. By the third correction she was getting them right.

“And this one?”

“That is a hare.”

“Good. And this one?”

She studied it. “Another fox.”