“About seven or eight miles,” Rowan guessed. “It’s harder to gauge pace in the dark, so I’m not completely sure how fast we were going early this morning. I’m still hoping we can get to Providence by nightfall.”
He glanced around at the woods, his hair-trigger senses distrustful of everything. They doused the fire and moved out without any more delay. The thought of having to spend one more night in the open was motivation enough to haul them all to their aching feet.
The sun set, and they still hadn’t reached the walls of Providence. It wasn’t until after eight that they left the woods and came to a large, open field.
“Providence is there,” Rowan said, pointing across the huge field to a few lights flickering in the distance. “It’s about half a mile away. Come on,” Rowan said, turning back to the woods.
Tristan’s hand shot out to catch Rowan by the arm. “I thought we were going in. You said we needed shelter,” Tristan said, his fatigue wearing his patience thin.
“We’re looking for some sign of the underground train that leads into and out of the city,” he said. Rowan began pacing around the border of the woods and the field, looking down at the ground.
Breakfast copied him, wandering in the opposite direction from Rowan. “Should we be looking for, like, subway grates or something?”
“Yes.” Rowan looked up and pointed to a configuration of lights. “That’s the southern gate. A tunnel runs due south out of Providence, so it’s got to be somewhere around here. Look for vents melting the snow, or anything metal or man-made. But keep an eye out for Woven while you look. They tend to be even more concentrated around the cities.”
That struck Lily as strange. “Why?” she asked. “Most animals stay away from populated areas. They avoid people, in fact.”
Rowan looked up at her and shrugged. “Woven aren’t animals, Lily. Not natural ones, anyway. They come toward people. And the more people, the more Woven.”
Lily frowned to herself. She knew the Woven weren’t like other animals, but they had still been made from animals. It didn’t make sense to Lily that their behavior would be so alien.
“It’s like they have a vendetta against people or something, which is impossible. That’s human behavior,” Lily argued.
“Well, there’s a legend that they are part human,” Rowan said, still searching the ground.
“But you don’t believe it,” Tristan guessed.
Rowan didn’t answer right away. “When I was a kid one of the girls in my tribe captured a wild Woven just a few days after it had hatched. It looked like a tiny cat with iridescent butterfly wings. It was beautiful.” He kicked at the snow, ostensibly to uncover the bare ground, but with more force than necessary. “She fed it, cared for it, tried to teach it tricks like one of the tame Woven that they breed in the cities for rich people. She had that thing for years.”
“What happened?” Una asked, like she could sense that there wasn’t a happy ending to this story.
“It ate her.” Rowan continued to kick the snow aside angrily. “She loved that thing and it ate her while she slept. Not because it was hungry—no. Ahanu would go without food sometimes to feed it. It ate her because that’s what wild Woven do. I don’t care what the legends say. Anything that’s even part human wouldn’t eat a little girl who loved it.”
Lily stopped arguing for Rowan’s sake, but she still couldn’t let it go. There was no animal she could think of that behaved like that. Not even insects killed unless they were hungry or threatened. People were the only creatures on earth that killed for spite. Lily searched the ground like the rest of her coven, but her mind wasn’t fully on her task. The Woven were a riddle to her, and maybe it was because of Lillian’s memories and how important getting rid of the Woven had been to her at one time, but Lily was starting to feel as if the Woven were the riddle she was meant to solve.