Faerie Winter - Janni Lee Simner [22]
“I didn’t mean—” I couldn’t say it. I’d meant every word I’d spoken, and Mom knew it.
“I’d best check on Ethan.” She crossed the room and left without another word.
“She’s not well enough to travel,” I said.
“I know.” Kate offered me another square of bread, but I shook my head. “Your mother knows, too—but that doesn’t mean she has to like it, does it?” She pulled me into a hug. “Bring him home safe, Liza.”
“I’ll do all I can.” I had no trouble speaking that truth. I tied my belt around my coat, slipped my knife into its sheath, and hefted the pack onto my shoulders. My foot nudged something on the floor—the leather tie Matthew used to pull his hair back. It still smelled faintly of wolf and smoke. I knotted it around my wrist.
Kate followed me to the door. Outside, flurries fell from the predawn sky. I stopped at my house to get my bow and a quiver of arrows. The smoke was gone, but its stench lingered as I climbed the stairs.
Mom had lied again: she hadn’t gone to Ethan after all. She sat in her room, holding Caleb’s silver-plated leaf. At the sound of my steps, she walked into the hall and silently offered it to me.
I shook my head. That leaf had played some small role in whatever had happened between Mom and Caleb. It had nothing to do with me.
“Caleb told me once this would protect me in dark forests.” Mom seemed pale in the thin morning light. “I’d keep you out of the dark entirely if I could, but as you like to remind me, I have precious little power to do that. Let me do this much.”
I didn’t stop Mom as she draped the leaf over my head. “I won’t force you to struggle with thanking me,” she said, “or with saying anything else you don’t mean. Just come back safely. We’ll talk then.”
I fled into my room, tucking the leaf beneath my shirt as Mom’s footsteps descended the stairs behind me. I tied my bow and quiver to my pack, and I took a map I’d copied, too. Neither Matthew nor I had ever taken the direct route between our town and Caleb’s town—Washville—but it looked clear enough, a mostly straight road broken only by a few spur trails, one of which led to Ethan’s town of Clayburn.
Outside, the sky was gray, the sun below the horizon. Flurries drifted around me, and cold bit through the toes of my boots. I found Matthew’s wolf tracks in the snow and followed them to the edge of town. Beyond the last of the ruined houses, his tracks turned to follow the river for a time, and a second set of tracks joined them. Small human boot prints, newer than Matthew’s paw prints, wound back and forth across them. A child, and one who’d left only a few hours ago.
One of ours, or another stranger? Both sets of tracks continued alongside the river. I followed them, alert for any sound, quieting my own steps as much as the snow would allow. I scanned the forest for shadows, but there was already too much light. Like tree shadows, most human shadows preferred the dark.
Bare gray and brown trunks rose to either side of the path. A sparrow called out from a high branch, its song small and thin in the chilly morning. In one spot, the child had stopped to make snow angels; in another, he or she had scrambled down to look at something by the river and returned several dozen paces on. In places, the smaller prints were oddly shaped, as if the child had been kicking the snow.
The path veered away from the river, widening into a dirt road. Patches of brown earth and dead leaves showed through where the snow had melted, along with chunks of broken black rock from Before. I kept walking, settling into the relaxed awareness I used on the hunt. Other paths branched off the one I followed, but the prints continued toward Washville as the hours passed and morning gave way to afternoon.
A woodpecker rapped a tree, digging for beetles. The sound echoed through the forest. I stopped, scanning the trees for the bird’s red head feathers. Woodpeckers made little distinction between wood and flesh and would peck through human skin in their search for food. The bird was a ways behind me, though,