Ilse Witch

“A short journey is required to provide you with the reassurances you seek—a journey that would best be begun under cover of darkness.”


Walker glanced skyward, as if assessing the weather. He couldn’t see moon or stars or fifty feet beyond the fog. “A journey we will make on foot, I hope?”

The big Rover grinned anew. His sister cocked her eyebrow reprovingly.

Walker sighed. “How soon do we leave?”

Redden Alt Mer draped one companionable arm over Rue Meridian’s shoulders. “We leave now.”

The boy with the iron hoop and stick remained hidden in the deep shadows of the dockyards across the way until the trio emerged from the alleyway and disappeared up the road. Even then, he did not move for a long time. He had been warned about the Druid and his powers, and he did not wish to challenge either. It was enough that he had found him; nothing more was required.

When he was confident he was alone again, he left his hiding place, hoop and stick abandoned, and raced toward the woods backing the village. He was small for his age and wild as an animal, lean and wiry and unkempt, not quite a child of the streets, but close. He had never known his father and had lost his mother when he was only two. His half-blind grandmother had raised him, but had lost all control before he was six. He was bright and enterprising, however, and he had found ways to support them both in a world that otherwise would have swallowed them whole.

In less than an hour, sweaty and dirt-streaked from his run, he reached the abandoned farm just beyond the last residences of March Brume. His labored breathing was the only sound that broke the silence as he entered the ruined barn and moved to the storage bins in back. Within the more secure one on the far right were the cages. He released the lock, slipped inside the bin, lit a candle, and scribbled a carefully worded note.

The lady for whom he gathered information from time to time would pay him well for this bit, he thought excitedly. Enough that he could buy that blade he had admired for so long. Enough that he and his grandmother could eat well for weeks to come.

He fastened the message to the leg of one of the odd, fierce-eyed birds she had given him, walked back outside with the bird tucked carefully under his arm, and sent it winging off into the night.

TWELVE





Redden Alt Mer and Rue Meridian took Walker along the dockside for several hundred yards, then turned onto a narrow pier bracketed by skiffs. Stopping at a weathered craft with a knockdown mast and single sail and a rudder attached to a hand tiller at the stern, they held her steady while the Druid boarded, then quickly cast off. Within seconds, they were out of sight of the dock, the village, and any hint of land. The Rovers placed Walker in the bow with directions to keep an eye open for floating debris, and went about putting up the mast and sail. Walker glanced around uneasily. As far as he could determine, they had no way of judging where they were or where they were going. It did not seem to matter. Once the sail was up and filled with a steady wind off the sea, they sat back, Alt Mer at the stern and his sister amidships, tacking smoothly and steadily into the night.

It was a strange exper1ience, even for the Druid. Now and then a scattering of stars would appear through the clouds, and once or twice the moon broke through, high and to their right. But for that, they sailed in a cauldron of fog and darkness and unchanging sea. At least the water was calm, as black and depthless as ink, rolling and sloshing comfortably below the gunwales. Redden Alt Mer whistled and hummed, and his sister stared off into the night. No bird cries sounded. No lights appeared. Walker found his thoughts drifting to a renewed consideration of the ambiguity and uncertainty of what he was about. It was more than just the night’s business that troubled him; it was the entire enterprise. It was as vague and shrouded as the darkness and the fog in which he drifted, all awash in unanswered questions and vague possibilities. He knew a few things and could guess at a few more, but the rest—the greater part of what lay ahead—remained a mystery.