It had been raining since midnight: a heavy, cold rain cursed by farmers who had hoped to make one last cutting of hay. Now, the rain had ended, and the woods lay silent but for the peaceful drip of water and the slow floating down of leaves like embers in a dark fireplace.

The man wore a midlands longshirt and canvas breeches; greased boots and leggings caked with heavy mud; a blanket and satchel slung crossways from shoulder to waist; and from his belt all the dangling pouches, bags, and implements of a wanderer who carries his house with him. His long gray hair was bound at the neck; his expression was complex beyond reading. The woman had nothing, not even an expression on her face.

The man said, “I ask your forgiveness.” He kissed her, and she jerked like a wild creature away from his touch. Then he struck her face with a closed fist, and she staggered. He struck her in the stomach, and she fell to her knees. As he beat her, the woman’s plain tunic became blotted with blood; she seemed to faint. He wiped his face with his sleeve and took a ragged breath, but, as though he dared not pause for long, drew his dagger and stabbed her.

Afterwards, he took her by the shoulders and dragged her through wet leaves and mud to drop her in the ditch by the side of the road. He stood over her, calm but old, with a hand lifted vaguely to his chest. Her eyes fluttered open; she looked at him as though he were one small piece of a monstrous, excruciating puzzle.

The man turned his head, for he could hear the faint jingle of a horse’s harness. He re‑balanced the burdens he carried and walked away, into the wet woods, into the darkness that flowed out of the trees as, behind the lowering clouds, the sun stumbled and fell below the horizon.

Chapter Fifteen

That day, the whole of Shaftal had lain under a cloud. The arrival of autumn mud season had taken Garland by surprise. He had nowhere to go. He dared not ask for shelter in the decrepit farmhouses that he passed, for the rains had caught him in the hostile western edge of the midlands, with its tapped out soil and bitter recent history. He could expect no friendliness here, and certainly no generosity.

He walked the entire day, through intermittent downpours, until the weight of water made his poor burdens so heavy he was tempted to simply drop them in the road. After the day ended the cold would come, which he could stave off only with wet blankets and wet, threadbare clothing; for although his matches were probably dry in their tin, he would find no fuel dry enough to burn, not even if he used his own hair for tinder.

The road had begun to rise in the afternoon. Without regrets, he had left the hostile farmlands, with their suspiciously peering residents, and climbed into forbidding, rocky country. Oak trees gave way to pine, and as sunset approached, the road petered out, and he awoke from his daze of cold and loneliness and wondered if he might die that night.

For a moment, overwhelmed by futility and aimlessness and the vacancy left behind when he abandoned his hopes, he thought he did not care. Then, he heard the ring of a woodcutter’s ax, and he thought longingly of how wood means fire, and fire means a hearth, and a hearth means a house. He stepped into the woods. Soon, he was walking among no mere saplings, but trees much further around than he could clasp in two hands. What kind of people would he find, living beyond a road that had been overgrown for so many years?

The sound had seemed close, but as twilight gave way to deep, drizzling shadows, the sound of the ax mocked him, luring him further from the now distant road, without letting him get closer to the sound. The Shaftali are a people of many stories that they hold up like shields against the boredom of winter, and Garland had heard his share of them, including a number that told of malevolent forces that inhabited the forest and tried to lure solitary travelers from their chosen roads. He asked himself if he was afraid, but was too tired to attempt an answer.

The trees that had closed in around him suddenly flung him out of their company. He stumbled to his knees among slim saplings. The road had not reappeared, but now he was in a clearing, looking at a steep crag looming against a starless sky darkening to black. Between him and the crag stood a humble stone house, and between him and the house, the woodcutter worked in a circle of lantern light.

The woodcutter bent and straightened, graceful as a dancer, but with a moment of brisk violence at the end of each easy stroke. The split kindling leapt up, sometimes bright and sometimes black, and flew, and fell. Garland got up from his sprawl, but dared not step forward. The woodcutter seemed gigantic, a construction of powerful muscle that gleamed wet in the light. The wood split with a single stroke; only the sharp crack told him it was wood, hard and dry for burning. He saw beauty, art, and a fearsome anger, and stood suspended between that terrifying sight and the woods, and wondered if the malevolence of myth might be safer than the bright power at work before him. And yet he gasped as the ax entered the log, and slid through it, and transformed it.

Abruptly, the woodcutter turned, and he saw it was a woman, shirtless, bleeding in the breast where a flying splinter must have struck her. She said, “Help me to pick up the wood–quickly. It’s going to rain again.”

Her hoarse, homely voice galvanized him. He hurried forward, to toss his knapsack onto the porch and wander about the yard, seeking the far‑flung pieces and dumping them under the porch roof by the armload. He and the woman met at the steps, she carrying the lantern and putting her other arm through a shirt sleeve, he with one last load of wood. They ducked into shelter as the sky opened up and the deluge began.

“Quietly,” she said, opening the door. “Don’t wake the child.”

Surely bandits have no children, Garland thought, but he could not imagine what else she might be. He followed her into a kitchen, where a few coals glowed upon the hearth and dirt lay thick on a creaking floor. She hung the lantern on a hook, and he got a good look at her: a large, tangle‑haired woman in clothing as worn out as his own, with big hands, and palms as black as soot. A blacksmith?

He put some wood onto the fire, and went back to get his sodden gear from the porch. A huge table was the kitchen’s only furniture, but the walls had plenty of hooks, on which he hung his belongings to dry. The woman sat on the hearth: silent, monolithic. He lit a candle stub and with it in hand, located a storeroom, surprising clean and practically empty, and came back with some lard and a canister of flour. He hung a battered, soot‑crusted teakettle from the crane and swung it over the fire, and by the time the water boiled he had patted out the biscuits and dropped them into the rusty hearth oven to bake.

While the tea was steeping and the biscuits baking, he put together a pot of beans with onions so sharp he cried as he chopped them, and some bacon ends that he licked first to make sure they were not rancid. He hunted through the storeroom again, and found, all crowded on one shelf, a pat of fresh butter, a big chunk of honeycomb in a cloth‑covered bowl, and a bucket of russet apples. He imagined the big woman walking up the mountain from the closest farm, with the bucket of apples in one hand, the butter in the other, and an ax on her back, setting the supplies down on a stump so she could chop down a bee‑tree, and then … Garland thought for a moment. She had run out of hands. The child would be with her, he concluded, and she was old enough to be trusted to carry the butter. So the woman had carried a bucket of honey the rest of the way up the hill.

The woman still sat unmoving on the hearth. Her face, revealed by firelight, was drawn and stark. She turned her head slowly as Garland lifted out the biscuits from the oven that sat in the coals. He buttered them generously, dripped them with honey, and gave her a tin plate full, with a tin cup of tea, and sat on the hearth himself, and watched her from the corner of his eye.