Chapter One #3
Breathing through her mouth to escape the scent, she crouched down, and without touching the body any more than she had to, she tugged at the straps of the tack, testing their tightness, then cutting them where they would give her the most length.
The leather came away stiff with blood and sweat, but still good.
She coiled what she could, laid the rest aside in manageable lengths.
The saddle itself was too heavy for her to lift, but the cloth beneath it came free easily enough, thick and still dry on one side.
She folded that and set it aside with the leather.
The bags were easier to cut away from the animal.
One, miraculously, held food, once-soft bread gone hard at the edges, a fist-sized piece of cheese, and strips of dried meat.
She stared longingly at the small feast, not having seen anything so lovely in a decade.
Even as her mouth watered, she wrapped them again and threw the bag over her shoulder.
Even bread that was not very good, that might be hard as a rock, was still bread.
In the other saddlebag she found things that made her stop and stare with wonder.
There was a huge plaid blanket, worn but whole, two spare shirts, a pair of stockings, and a fine leather belt.
She found a small pot blackened with use, a whetstone, a bundle of cord, and flint and steel wrapped together in oiled cloth.
There was a knife, better balanced and sharper than her own, and she tested its weight in her hand before she slipped it into her belt at her lower back.
There were also a few small, dull discs that looked like ancient coins, and a folded sheet of thick paper that she opened, finding it filled with writing she could not decipher, writing that curiously looked as old as the coins, as if from some long-lost time.
She took them anyway—paper burned and metal could always be used for something.
When she was done, she stood for a moment and looked at the horse again. It felt wrong to leave it as it was, but there was nothing she could do that would change what had already happened.
Charlie had come to her side, and she rested her hand briefly against his neck, then turned away and lifted the heavy saddle before dropping it back to the ground, deciding it would be easier to drag than to carry.
With the two saddlebags flung over one shoulder, rather buoyed by what seemed gifts from heaven, she started back through the trees, the saddle rasping and bumping over roots and brush as she dragged it behind her.
She paid closer attention to the forest on the return journey than she had on the way out, her eyes moving constantly now between the trees ahead and the spaces between them, quite certain that horses with saddles—even dead ones—did not come without a rider.
The forest thickened steadily behind her house the farther north one went, the ground rougher there, darker beneath the pines and old firs where little sunlight reached the earth even at midday.
The horse had lain well back in that deeper stretch, nearly a mile from home.
Closer to home the woods opened slightly, enough for low brush and hazel to grow beneath the trees, making it easier to scan her surroundings as she trudged along.
By the time she glimpsed the house through the trunks ahead, her shoulder ached from the weight of the bags and her hands stung from the leather straps.
She’d always supposed the man had chosen the spot carefully when he’d built the house, since it stood just within the forest’s edge.
In front of the house—one hundred and thirty-six paces, she’d once counted for no particular reason—the forest ended, opening up into a long strip of grasslands that stretched as far as the eye could see left to right.
Beyond the clearing, southward, the land rolled away into open hills and scattered stone, exposed and wind-beaten country she had never crossed and had no wish to.
The forest belonged to her in a way the grasslands never could.
A person crossing the southern hills or even traveling through the grasslands would never notice the house unless he already knew where to look.
Once, while cautioning her never to set foot outside the forest, the man had said that from a distance the house was undetectable, that the forest appeared unbroken, a solid wall of green and shadow.
Only from within did the narrow stretch of open ground reveal itself, the house sitting low against the trees with its weathered roof and thin trail of smoke.
There were evenings when she would sit on the worn stone near the break in the trees and watch the light shift across the tall swaying grass of the meadow.
The red deer passed sometimes at a distance, moving in quiet groups across grassland, their shapes unmistakable against the pale sweep of grass.
She had seen starlings settle in dark, shifting clouds toward the western rise, gathering and folding in on themselves before dropping to roost in the reeds below.
On other days a sudden disturbance would ripple through the air—a large flock lifting all at once, wings flashing silver and black as it broke from the ground and scattered into the sky. Nothing else crossed that stretch.
The openness of the grasslands appealed to her even as she knew it was dangerous, being so exposed. But there was reassurance there as well—if anything moved across those hills, she would see it long before it reached the trees. The grasslands offered no concealment. Only the forest did.
She dragged the saddle into the clearing at last and let it fall beside the house with a heavy thud that startled Charlie.
Even exhausted, she found herself grinning as she crouched beside the saddlebags again, hardly able to believe the strange wealth she had carried home from the dead horse in the woods.