And he saw the Horseman once, whilst out hunting in the chill dark before dawn. He was sitting still as stone in a clearing under the fleeing stars with his mount a raven statue beneath him. Werewolves grovelled at his feet and gore crows circled around his hooded head. Michael had lurched away stifffaced and quaking, knowing that he had not gone away. That he would never go away. Some obscure umbilical connecting them had not yet been cut.
So time passed, unrecorded and unaccounted for. He lost track of the months, but was conscious of a disharmony, a thing half-forgotten at the back of his mind, and as the snows melted and the woods began to flame with buds and birdsong, the feeling grew. He had to be moving on—. He had to journey deeper to the heart of things. He had not lost the conviction that his Aunt Rose was here somewhere; perhaps in the Castle of the Horseman that Mirkady had spoken of. His quest drew him.
The men of the tribe had a meeting in the biggest of the huts to discuss the spring move. It was crowded inside, rank with the smell of unwashed bodies and woodsmoke, but there was a welcome warmth from the close-packed crowd and the yellow flames which were the only light. Cat was there, pressed against Michael's side. Some of the younger men, no more than boys if truth be told, stood around the walls for want of a seat, stooping because of the low roof. Scraps of bark and mud fell from above constantly; the burrowing mice had woken with the change of the season. That, Ringbone told them, was a lucky sign. It meant a good spring, a fruitful year.
The men were leaner than ever, the firelight making skulls out of their faces with the eyes ii deep glitter in cavernous sockets, the cheekbones sharp as pebbles. It had not been an especially bad winter, but this close to the heart of nature all living things suffered in the dark half of the year. Once, for Michael, winter had been snowballing and sledging, coming in out of the dark to hot cocoa and a blazing hearth. It was more now. He could feel the season in his bones, in the lines his ribs carved out of his skin. He could see it in the sunken look of Cat's face. It was a thing to survive, a test. At least three of the very old and the very young of the tribe had not passed it. That was the way this world worked.
The meeting was entirely democratic. The men knew that Ringbone was the man who knew best where the Knights were likely to be and what their intentions would be with the breaking of the snows. Semuin was the best hunter, who knew the widest game trails and had the movements of the deer herds mapped out in his head. And old Irae knew what places to leave alone, those sacred to the Wyrim. He knew what offerings to make to the Forest-Folk to pass through their barriers and territories, though he seemed rather disgruntled because Cat was present and would probably know these things better than he.
No one ordered anyone else. Everything came in the way of a suggestion, which could be agreed with or discarded. There was a kind of osmotic drift of argument as one by one the tribe's most knowledgeable men gave their opinions. The Knights would be out in force soon, seeking the despoilers of the village; the Fox-People would not be able to trade with any of the nearby settlements this spring, but must move south into the empty forests where the game was most plentiful, even if it meant moving closer to the Wolfweald. The Knights would not follow them there.
A few of the younger men, clearly full of themselves, said that they should not run from the Knights; they could beat them in a fight any time they liked, especially with the Farsider's fire-stick.
There was a silence after this, the older men unspeaking. Utwychtan, the Farsider, was what they called Michael, as they called Cat Teowynn, the TreeMaiden. It was a name that pleased her immensely.
It was not good to bring the Farsider into a quarrel that was belonging to the people alone, Ringbone said. The Farsider might want to go his own way some time, and to do that he would not need a troop of Knights on his tail. He no longer looked like the boy who had slain the Knights in the autumn, and so they would not touch him. Better to leave it that way.
Ringbone met Michael's eyes across the fire, and Michael knew then that the fox man did not expect him to remain with the tribe another winter. He was giving him free rein.
'I will go south with the tribe,' he said. He thought his path lay that way in any case, and he was reluctant to begin journeying with only Cat for company. He felt like a child in this land and knew that he had vast things yet to learn.
He could feel her eyes on his face in the dimness. She gripped his arm through the heavy robe.
'Are you glad to be going south?'
He could not answer her.
'No one goes in or out of the Wolfweald but those who are taken by the Horseman,' she said, as though reading his mind. 'Not even the Wyrim go there. And his castle may be only a tale, a legend. None knows.'