Season of the Wild Hunt(Book 1 of The Seventh Gate series)

Far from Home

Music: Two Steps from Hell - Friendship to Last

Isolated dryland farmsteads scraping out an existence at the end of a lonely dirt track were at first the only sign this was a land unlike their own but as they trekked ever northwards, a gentler climate greened the hills, and the signs grew clearer. Rough pastures and fields of crops clustered about farming hamlets nestled in valleys, and narrow roads wound off to distant, more populous towns. They bypassed the villages, keeping to the cover of the wild lands whenever they could, slipping swiftly across fields and roadways when they could not.

Pilfering from unwatched fields supplemented whatever food they could forage in the wilds. Days passed as the moon shrank and swelled again, with no problems more severe than the occasional annoyance of an overly-vigilant farm dog.

Their most serious challenge came as a night crossing of the Boann River. Half a mile wide at the point they arrived on its southern banks, it was swift, deep, and busy even at night with the traffic of barges and boats plying the trade route from Teamair in the east to Belmór on the coast. Clinging to a small reed raft they had constructed to keep their weapons and packs clear of the water, they drifted with the current. It carried them miles downstream before they could clamber out on the northern shore, chilled to the bone and exhausted. They slept through the whole of the next day and night, tucked away in a hollow beneath a rotted-out oak.

One afternoon, they reached an impasse. A broad valley, several miles across, cut across their route. The entire length and breadth of it was a chequer-board of fields dotted with homesteads, and it buzzed with the activity of autumn harvest. It would take a long time to circumvent, and they had no way to know whether the adjacent lands would be any less populated. Scores of people in every field bent over the rows of crops, and wagons trundled up and down the tracks in between.

They decided to hide out for the afternoon and wait for nightfall to slip by. As darkness fell and the full moon rose into the evening sky, torches were lit, and then great bonfires, and the harvesting continued. It was something of a festival, too - wagons piled with barrels distributed their loads, and before long drunken shouts and raucous singing carried up to where the women lay hidden on the slopes above.

"Ayá ikada! There's so many of them." Ashira chewed her lip as she gazed down at the bustling valley. "How are we going to get past that?"

"I don't know - but if we don't try tonight, we'll have to hide all day tomorrow as well."  They were making good time, but the idea of delaying even one day made Nyani anxious. Summer was gone, and the equinox approaching. They had to reach the Tor by then. "We can do this.  Keep your head down, and let me do the talking if we have to."

They took the time to shift most of their weapons to their backs and draw their mantles over the top, then sauntered down the road to the valley floor and headed along the nearest track going north. Ashira kept her hood up, shielding her face, but Nyani took the cloth blouse Elen had made for her, fashioning it into a head-scarf similar to what many of the women in the fields wore, and walked with her hood down on her shoulders. In the uncertain light of the torches and bonfires, her foreign looks might not be too conspicuous, and it wouldn't do to appear as if they were deliberately trying to conceal themselves.

She nodded amiably at passers-by on the road, or the groups of people gathered around bonfires at the corners of the fields, declining a shouted invitation to join in the festivities with a wave and a smile. The yeasty tang of beer hung cloying on the air, mingled with that of fresh-plucked greens and disturbed earth.