The Southlings blinked. They didn’t lower their weapons, but they held them a fraction less tightly.
“You are what?” one of the bowmen demanded.
“Travelers,” Kit said. “Seekers. I am called Kitap rol Keshmet, and this is Marcus Wester. We have come from far to the north to speak with your mother, if she will allow it.”
“No blades come to the mother, no.”
“You may take our swords,” Kit said.
The Southlings turned to one another, speaking in a tongue Marcus had never heard before. His nose itched but he didn’t reach in to scratch it. He didn’t want the soldiers to think he was reaching for a weapon. Kit’s coarse hair and wiry beard framed his calm, smiling face, as if he were an uncle returned from a long journey with salt taffy in his pockets and tall tales to amuse the children.
“If we ever come to a place they can’t understand your words,” Marcus said, “what happens then?”
“I expect that will be more difficult,” Kit said.
The Southlings’ gabble reached a climax, and the bowman blinked at them.
“Throw down your blades, you,” he said. “We take you motherwards.”
Slowly, Marcus unbuckled his belt, pulled it off, and tossed sword and scabbard to the mossy ground. Kit did the same, and added the dagger from his sleeve as well. One of the younger Southlings collected them. The bowman turned and seemed to vanish into the tangle of trees. Marcus and Kit had to struggle to find him again, and then to keep up.
The trail was visible once Marcus saw the Southlings using it, but it would have been easy to overlook. The trees and brush hadn’t been hacked back, but shaped. There were no axe-cut branches or roped-back twigs to show that this was the habitation of humanity. The path was obscure. Hidden. Sometimes the way doubled back, often under high trees where archers might perch. There were no great stone walls and no place to build them, but the forest itself was a kind of fortification.
It seemed like half a day before they reached the first unmistakable signs of human habitation. A stone-paved yard with thatched huts all around it seemed to emerge from the trees like someone walking out of a fog. That the stone was only marked by a green patina where moss had been scraped away, that the fissures in the pavement hadn’t become home to saplings was evidence enough that the place was maintained. Holding the forest at bay, even for so small a space as this, would have been a lifetime’s work. And at the far side of the yard, a massive statue. Perhaps it had once been of a human—Southling or Jasuru or Firstblood. The long ages had eroded it until it was almost shapeless. At at its base, a larger hut with a plume of pale smoke rising from the hole at its top.
The bowman turned to them, lifting a hand.
“You will wait here,” he said. “I will ask our mother if she will speak to you.”
“I am very grateful,” Kit said, lowering himself to the stone.
Marcus sat too. The other warriors who had escorted them remained standing and armed, but Marcus felt no sense of threat from them. The way they held themselves was more proprietary, as if they’d brought some bizarre bird back from the hunt. Before long, people began to emerge from the shadows of the huts. Children haunted the doorways, wide eyes so large they seemed about to consume their faces. And then women and older men, yawning and fresh from sleep. Marcus had forgotten more than once that Southlings were more comfortable in the night. The dragons had made them that way. They came out slowly, one at at time, and then in groups, until something between thirty and forty men, women, and children talked and laughed and pointed from the edge of the yard. There were more than could have fit into the little huts, so Marcus assumed that there were structures under the ground—tunnels or old ruins or some such—where the villagers spent their sleeping days.
He wouldn’t have been surprised to sit on the smooth stones, legs crossed and aching and the insects making a feast of him, until the middle of the night. Instead, the village mother took pity on them. The sun had sunk behind the forest canopy, the sky turned to rose and gold with only the first hints of twilight’s ash, when the bowman returned with an old man who wore a chain of gold around his neck and brightly dyed cloth around his elbows and knees. The cunning man, or anyway a Southling village’s version of one. The cunning man walked a slow circle around them, his breath thick and heavy. Marcus felt the air on the back of his neck stirring. Kit watched solemnly as the cunning man finished his course, clapped his hands together, and shouted. A burst of light and sudden, vicious cold, and then the cunning man was walking up to them, grinning. His hand touched Marcus’s shoulder, and the two men nodded to one another, smiling. A little show of magic and force to keep them in line, then, followed by welcome. Kit’s grin was warm, open, friendly. The wall of guards dissolved, and the villagers came closer, as pleased and curious as if Marcus had been a two-headed puppy. A girl of perhaps six years came up to Marcus, holding out a broad green leaf as a present. When he took it, she giggled and fled.