Tova glances towards the west, where the tiniest gleam of sun is still visible. It won’t be for much longer.
‘We need shelter. Some place where there’s fodder and food and a fire, where we can rest until we work out what to do next. We can’t keep travelling through the night. We don’t know the paths. What if one of the horses loses its footing and goes lame? What if one of us falls and breaks an ankle?’
Merewyn bites her lip. It’s fear above all else that has kept them going all day without food or water, with hardly any pause. That same fear is what drives her still. But for the first time since this morning Tova sees doubt in her eyes: a sign that reason is at last beginning to win through.
‘I thought I saw a hall about a mile back, maybe a bit more than that,’ Tova says. ‘We could ask the people there if they could spare—’
Merewyn presses her hands against her forehead as though an ache has been building for some time and won’t go away.
‘It’s all right,’ Tova says. She puts her arm around Merewyn as she turns and buries her head in Tova’s shoulder.
‘I never meant to do it,’ Merewyn says, sobbing. ‘You know that, don’t you?’
‘I know.’
But she doesn’t know. Still all these hours later Merewyn hasn’t told her the whole story of what happened, and Tova doesn’t feel it’s her place to ask. So she’s guessing, filling in the details as best she can, piecing the story together from what she already knows.
‘This is all my fault,’ says Merewyn.
‘Don’t say that.’
To the west, the sun has at last vanished below the hills. If they’re going to find somewhere to spend the night, they need to do so quickly. Tova doesn’t want to be stumbling across these hills in the moonlight.
‘Look,’ she says. ‘It’s not far back to this hall. If we try, we can probably still make it before dark.’
Merewyn wipes her eyes with the back of her hand. ‘All right,’ she says as she pulls away, breathing deeply, trying to regain her composure. To reassert herself. ‘But we tell no one who we really are. Do you understand? No one. We’re travellers – pilgrims who have lost the road and are looking for somewhere to spend the night.’
Tova nods. As if she needed to be told. She understands they need to be careful. She only hopes that the folk are friendly, that they have food and ale to spare, and a bench by the wall or a mattress of straw set aside where guests can bed down.
And then tomorrow, she thinks, we’ll do this all over again.
*
She knows something isn’t right long before they reach the hall. Night has fallen. Only the faintest ribbon of orange above the woods to the west. The wind has eased, at least, and for that small mercy she thanks God. Her hunger has gone too; her stomach seems to have given up any hope of food. All she wants is to sit in front of the hearth fire, to dry these damp clothes of hers, to warm her ice-bitten hands and to feel the glow upon her cheeks.
Except as she gazes across the vale she sees no smoke rising from the thatch, nor from any of the field labourers’ cottages and laithes that surround it. Not a wisp anywhere. And no smoke means no fire. Yet it isn’t that long since dusk. Surely it can’t be that everyone is already in their beds.
It’s quiet. Not a bleat nor a whinny from byre or stables; no goatherd calling out as he rounds up the last of his lord’s flock, nor the sound of a child crying, nor gentle music carrying softly from the hall. Only the owls calling to one another across the valley.
‘What’s wrong now?’ Merewyn asks.
‘Listen,’ Tova says, surprising herself with her own forcefulness.
‘For what?’ Merewyn asks, her frown darkening. ‘I don’t hear anything.’
‘That’s what I mean.’
It’s as if everyone who lived here has simply disappeared: flown away on the wind to join the swallows wherever it is they go for the winter, leaving their homes and all their possessions behind them.
‘Do you think we should go on?’ Tova asks. Her feet won’t carry her much further, certainly not as far as the next nearest village or manor, wherever that might be.
Her lady doesn’t seem to hear. She glances about, suddenly anxious. But everything is still: no sign of movement anywhere.
Tova asks, ‘What?’
‘I don’t know,’ Merewyn says. ‘Stay close to me.’