“Should we go in one?” he asked. “I mean… there might be food.”
“Might be ghuls, too,” said the armadillo, trotting along. “Or worse things than ghuls.”
“Are there worse things than ghuls?”
The armadillo threw a brief, ironic look over his shoulder at Oliver. “You’ve read that book of yours. Aren’t there?”
“Yeah…” admitted Oliver. “I just didn’t think they’d be… you know… here.”
That was also the way that a child would think, and he knew it. He walked along with his head down, feeling his stomach growl.
He’d nicked a few cabbage leaves growing alongside the road. He felt a little guilty about it, even though it was obviously wild and going to seed. The farmhouse off in the distance was missing a roof and most of an upper story, so it wasn’t like anyone would miss it.
Cabbage wasn’t exactly stealing. If they passed a living farm with corn or eggplant, though, he wouldn’t be able to help himself, and that would be stealing.
If we pass a living farm, I can pay for food, though. And maybe they can explain what happened here.
“Once we get to Harkhound, we’ll be able to get off the road,” said the armadillo.
* * *
“Off the main road?” Oliver was surprised. The road had become his whole world over the last four days, circumscribed by split rail fences and drainage ditches. “Why? I thought you said we’d get lost?”
“We might,” said the armadillo. “But something’s definitely following us.”
“What?” Oliver twisted his head to look behind him and saw only the slowly settling road dust. His stomach churned. The sorrel leaf suddenly didn’t taste so good. “The ghuls?”
“Most likely,” said the armadillo. “I haven’t seen them since the first night, but I’m nearly certain. I’d hoped we’d meet more people, so I thought we should stay on the road as long as we could, and it’s not like there’s a great deal of cover in these fields anyway, but…”
He trailed off. Oliver nodded glumly. The road had been deserted. And they certainly weren’t likely to meet anyone in Harkhound Forest, which meant that if the ghuls were coming after them, they were on their own.
He went back to reading about invisibility. When he looked up again, the blue band on the horizon had gotten almost imperceptibly larger.
They reached the forest edge around noon. The contrast could not have been more stark. On one side, fallow fields baked in the sun. On the other, the forest cast leafy shadows across the road.
The wagon ruts had vanished from the road a few miles back, at the last farmhouse. The broad road became narrower and fuzzed with green, but not completely overgrown. Even here, the drought had reached brown tendrils. Dried seedheads clicked together along the road, and the crickets sang a parched song. But there was green under the trees. The leaves were wilted, but not dry and curled.
The dirt under Oliver’s feet was packed hard, and vegetation hadn’t colonized it at all.
“It’s an old roadbed,” said the armadillo, when Oliver scuffed at it with his toe. “There was a time when people travelled to the Rainblades regularly.”
“What stopped them?” asked Oliver.
The armadillo gave him a thoughtful look. “Now that is a very good question, isn’t it?”
“And I’m guessing you don’t know the answer?”
“No,” said the armadillo. He stepped under the shade of the trees. Leaf shadow dropped bits of dappled light across his armored back. “Perhaps we’ll find out.”
One thing was certain, Oliver thought a few minutes later. Harkhound Forest felt alive.
There had been birds in the fields, perched on thistle stems in the ditches, singing occasionally from fence posts. But there were a great many more in the forest. Oliver saw them as much as heard them—little brown creepers scurrying up tree trunks and nuthatches with striped heads scurrying down. High up in the canopy, vireos sang their monotonous tune: Here-I-am where-are-you, here-I-am where-are-you.
The path became a mat of pine needles, edged in liverworts. A great vine of poison ivy snaked up a tree beside the path, its stem covered in roots like a centipede’s legs, and Oliver scooted to the far side to keep from brushing against it. (He could fix poison ivy—mostly—with herbs and a couple of magic words, like he had with the Jenson kid, but it was a pain and he didn’t have all the herbs with him.)
A burbling sound off in the distance indicated a stream. Oliver’s head jerked up when he recognized it. To have water—clean, flowing water, not something from a ditch—seemed a sudden luxury. He would love to wash his hands, and maybe even his clothes. He’d been wearing the same pants since he left the village, and they were so stiff with dust and sweat that there was a cracking sound when he bent his knees.
The armadillo made for the stream without asking. They had to step off the path, but any qualms Oliver felt—ghuls or no ghuls—were immediately washed away by the sight of the water.
It was a picture-perfect forest stream, the water dark and dappled, whipped to silver as it crossed the rocks. Oliver dropped his pack on the leafy shore. “Is it safe?” he asked, licking his lips.
The armadillo raised his head and sniffed. “No strange spirits. Of course, there’s him.”
Oliver followed the line of his familiar’s nose and let out a squawk.
The young man sitting on the rock looked as startled as Oliver felt.
For one thing, he hadn’t expected to see anybody out here, particularly not in the ill-omened Harkhound Forest, and if he had expected to see anybody, it wouldn’t have been a scruffy dark-skinned teenager with a growth of scraggly beard and acne scars on his forehead, carrying an ancient and mangled lute.
For another thing, the young man was a mage.
He wasn’t much of one, Oliver was pretty sure, probably not even as much as Oliver himself, but one of the things you picked up along the way was an ability to tell magic in somebody else. There was a hint of color around them, a thread of brightness to their outline. Oliver’s master had called it an aura. His had been very bright indeed. The young man’s wasn’t much at all, but still—
“You’re a wizard!” said Oliver.
“I’m not,” said the young man wretchedly. “Not really.”
The armadillo slapped Oliver’s shin with his tail and muttered something about manners.
“Sorry,” said Oliver contritely. “I—uh—I didn’t expect to see anyone out here. Um. Hi. I’m Oliver.”
He stuck out a hand. The young man looked at it gloomily and then stuck out his own. “I’m Trebastion.”
“That’s an odd name,” said Oliver.
“I know,” said Trebastion morosely. He looked around. “Um. Pull up a rock, I guess. There are plenty.” He bent his head over the lute and began plucking at it—plunk! plunk!—like drops of water into an out-of-tune puddle.
“Thanks,” Oliver sat down on a nearby rock, trying to find a position that didn’t involve something digging into his buttocks. The armadillo jumped in his lap like a cat, which didn’t help matters.