Jar the Innkeeper was screaming, “Shitty mages!” and shaking her fists at the sky. “What about my sodding roof, you scabby roosters?”
Her voice was drowned out by a roar of flame as the fire streamed up through the thatch.
She looked angry enough to forget my rank, so I abandoned the idea of helping out and took up the idea of running away instead. Graceson must have had the same thought. As I was looking fruitlessly for my horse—which clearly had long since bolted for home—he seized my arm and dragged me down an alleyway. Liking his plan so far, I broke into a run and followed him as he sprinted along a couple of dark muddy lanes.
We quickly found ourselves at the edge of the village. By the flickering light of the burning inn, we could see the village temple nestled under its huge Holy Tree.
We both leaned against the tree and coughed smoke out of our lungs.
“That was my lord in the front, wasn’t it? Do you think he’ll get away?” asked Graceson. He was completely devoted to Bright.
“That was a female helping him,” I said. “No way they’ll catch them.”
“Ladybless,” breathed Graceson. He pushed open the temple door and drew me in after him.
The village priest, a very old man, was sitting on a pallet on the floor beside a brazier. Our village was too insignificant to have a female priest. He lit a taper and looked up at us.
“My boy. How wonderful to see you,” he cooed in a voice like dried husks.
“Most Holy Zostre,” sighed Graceson. “Thank the Lady, it’s still you. You must be the only person in this village happy to see me.”
CHAPTER SIX
WE VISITED WITH the priest for the rest of the evening. Graceson recounted the tale of his meeting with his mother, Grace, and of her reproaches. Though he told the story in a humorous way, I could sense the pain beneath it and squeezed his arm. He and the priest began exchanging news about places and people I knew little of, so I left them and wandered into the temple proper. In the flickering light of the votive lanterns, I could see spring leaves and a few early flowers heaped around the feet of the statue of the Bright Lady of Light. But most villagers still believed in the old spirits of place and of nature they had worshipped in the days before Magekind had arrived from out of the rising sun and brought the civilising influence of the Lady of Light, and the temple reflected that. Clustered around the feet of the Lady and huddled in niches in the walls were dozens of little statuettes dedicated to tree spirits and well spirits, to Mooncat and Grain Boy.
Zostre, a village man himself, understood this. If truth be told he was more an old-style shaman than a priest of Light. Grain Boy helped make the crops grow, so I could see the point of him, but Mooncat was a forest spirit who never seemed much use to me. Yet it was a popular spirit in our district, with little shrines all over the forest. It always seemed to me that the villagers had more belief in Mooncat than even Our Bright Lady.
I lit some incense and made a prayerful obeisance to the Bright Lady and to all the other spirits as well. I was officially a Light worshipper, but I had never seen the Bright Lady of the Sky except in her guise as the sun. I had, however, seen things in the forest—shapes rising from lakes and glowing lights moving among the night trees. Sometimes I sensed a personality in trees and other supposedly inanimate things. I could not help believing in spirits. I’d never told anyone except Bright. Auntie Eff, like most educated people, dismissed spirit worship as arrant superstition.
“The gentlewoman is welcome to take my mattress for the night,” offered the priest. “Please, I press you to stay. The spirits of Mooncat are restless at night.” Regretfully I declined. I was worried about the ghost alone in my room and also about what would happen if Impi found out I’d come to warn Bright. Eff’s allowance was the only money we had and Impi kept threatening to have it cut back. Once the village had quietened down, I took a torch from those by the temple door and set out to walk home by torchlight.
Willow was two miles walk from the village. The same cart tracks I’d ridden down so quickly seemed a long way back on foot in the dark, with only torchlight for company. I’d shed my robes before I’d gone out, so I was freezing in my underrobe and body shaper. My dress shoes, which were cheap and flashy, were extremely unsuitable for walking on mud. Curse Bright; he owed me a pair of good shoes.
Worried about where Katti might be, I called out for her a few times, but stopped as the farmland ended and the home forest came into view. The forest surrounding the manor house descended unbroken from the mountains and, despite the river, which acted as a kind of moat, wild cats and grunters would occasionally turn up near the house. No point in attracting their attention.
Or other things. The forest of the Secret Mountains was an uncanny place even this close to habitation. Big pallidly glowing orchids known as corpse lilies hung in the branches of trees like sickly lanterns. The earth around here was impregnated with crystal dust, and magic got into every living thing. Inanimate things moved and creeping animals flew. You heard things talking in strange inhuman voices sometimes.
Tonight, as the trees closed in along one side of the road, I felt certain something was watching me. I wished Katti were there with me to scent danger. Don’t be a coward, I told myself and kept walking steadily, if a little faster.
Then a twig cracked so loudly that I spun round before I could stop myself.
Padding along the track behind me was the biggest glowing white wild cat I had ever seen. I swear it was as bigger than I was.
I screamed and almost dropped my torch.
It stopped, one shimmering velvet paw in mid-air.
“No!” I cried, trying to sound commanding. I held the torch out towards it. It seemed a pitiful matchstick against such a creature and the hand that held it shook.
It stood there, a few small bounds away. Shimmering. Huge. Real. I would never outrun it and it didn’t seem worried by the torch.
It took a step towards me. This wasn’t some tame hunting cat, it was a wild cat three times the size of Katti.
“No!” I shouted again; it sounded pleading. “Don’t.”
I waved the torch around. It took another step towards me.
Suddenly it turned and loped away, with a crashing of grass.
A bright light came skimming around the bend from the house and I ran towards it.
“Help, help!” I cried. The light slowed and hovered above me and I saw it was a messenger mage in one of those enclosed chairs they travelled in. Must have been an important message to have gone to such expense.
“What do you want?” said the messenger, sticking her head out of the window.
“My horse bolted and I saw a wildcat,” I cried. “Please help me!”
“A wildcat? Really?” she cried excitedly. Oh, to be a mage, for whom the thought of a large deadly beast delightful rather than terrifying.
“Please can you take me...?”
But she had set out in the direction of my finger, shining a light over the fields beneath her. Just my luck to have met up with a keen hunter.
“Can you take me back to the house?” I shouted.
“’Gainst regulations,” she called back. “You go on. I’ll stay and keep an eye out for the beast. Go on. You haven’t got far to go.”