48. Granite
Granite
Sleep didn't come well that night.
Kain lay in the dark with the ceiling beam where the ceiling beam was, and the wolf at the hearth where the wolf was, and his head running over what Jeremiah had said and what the wolf had been doing and the goats and the hills and the gryphon's country and the days running backward in him.
He turned twice and gave up. Out of bed he went before the sky was light.
Roan was at the rail by the time Kain came down from the house with the saddle. The saddle went on. The cinch went tight.
The bridle slipped easy over the gelding's head. Both hands worked the buckle and the keeper and the leather closed where it was meant to close. The shoulder didn't say anything about it.
Ghost was at the gate already.
Kain swung up. The morning was the cool side of dawn and the road into Tillamore was empty.
Sasha was on the front porch of the Kettle with a bucket of water she had just drawn at the well. She set the bucket down when she saw him.
"Kain."
"Sasha."
"What's wrong."
"Why do you say wrong."
"Because you don't ride past this porch at this hour."
He sat on Roan a beat without answering. She crossed her arms.
"Trouble. Maybe. I don't know yet."
"There has been a lot of that."
"Yes."
"You will be back tonight."
"That's the plan."
"Come back tonight. I'll save you a plate." She uncrossed her arms a beat. "You want the map."
"If it's where I left it."
Sasha went inside and came out with the folded map under her arm. She passed it up to him. She didn't ask what it was for.
Sasha wasn't the kind of woman who panicked, and she had a boy at her feet who would learn his calm from her, and she was going to be calm even if a man rode past her porch at the wrong hour with the wolf at his heel.
"Tonight."
"Tonight."
North out of Tillamore the road bent toward the upland farms. John Marge's place stood at the end of the lane.
John himself was wrestling one of the barn doors flat against the side wall when Roan's hooves came up the lane.
He looked up and lifted a hand.
"Kain."
"John. Got a question."
"Then have it."
Kain stayed up in the saddle. Two dismounts was one too many.
"Your sheep. Have they been off lately."
John's eyes went narrow.
"Off how."
"Staring out across the landscape. Two or three of them at a time. Looking at something they can't see and you can't see."
John spent the next stretch saying a string of words a Tillamore farmer didn't say in the daylight. He was the kind of man who didn't curse at his stock and didn't curse in front of women.
Whatever else John was, the words came out of him without him meaning them to.
"You knew."
"I hoped I was being a fool about it. I told myself it was leftover gryphon. I told myself I was making it up out of after-thoughts."
"You weren't."
"No. I see I wasn't."
"What direction."
On a whim Kain swung down. The map came out of his coat and went flat on his thigh. He marked the Marge place with a small cross.
John stepped over and took a beat to find his bearings.
"They look out that way," he said. His finger went past the edge of his own land and out across the country. "East mostly. Northeast."
Kain drew an arrow off the farm pointing northeast.
"A touch more north of that."
The line was corrected. The map went back into the coat without giving John time to see what else was on it.
The sheep were looking past the gryphon ridge. They were looking at a thing well past where the gryphon had been.
Kain swung back up. John raised his eyes to him.
"Should I tell folks."
"Not yet. The plan is to be at the Kettle by tonight. If I'm not, go in to Sasha tomorrow and tell her where I went. She knows enough."
"Where are you going."
"Out to look."
John took it. He spat in the dirt and pointed past the south end of the barn.
"Through that gap, then around the back of our cedar row. There's a half-mile of path my eldest cut last summer. It'll put you on the back side of the line. From there the country is yours."
"Thanks, John."
"Stay alive, Kain."
"Plan to."
The path was where John said it would be. Roan took it at a fast walk.
Ghost came alongside as soon as they were out of sight of the farm; the wolf had hung back through Tillamore.
The cedar row went on the better part of a mile. Trees close-grown, branch on branch, planted thick enough that a man on a horse wouldn't push through and a man on foot wouldn't get through without leaving skin on the bark.
Animal trails ran up to the cedars and turned aside, parallel along the line, marking the easier way around. Here and there a small gap let a fox or a coyote slip through.
Clever engineering. A man who wanted to keep coyotes out of his chickens didn't have to fence the chickens.
He had to fence the country that would have carried the coyote past the chickens. Kain set the lesson down in the back of his mind for his own use.
Past the cedar row the country went open.
Morning came the rest of the way up and put light through the canopy in long crooked bars. Wind worked the upper branches. Birds called and answered.
A buck went past at a flat run with no good reason a man could see for the running. Two does went after him.
Nothing in it was out of place.
The country felt wrong all the same.
A man couldn't have written it down on a piece of paper.
The light came down in ordinary bars. The wind moved the high branches. The deer ran and were gone.
The thing wrong wasn't in any of them and was in all of them.
A man who had ridden a hundred night watches on a road wasn't the man to be told his neck-hairs were rising for no reason. The neck-hairs were rising.
The trail came down to a pond at the bottom of a shallow swale.
No more than an acre wide. Thick mud at the bank worked over with tracks: raccoon, opossum, deer, the long pad-and-claw of a bobcat that had passed through within the night.
Kain swung down and read the mud.
Across the pond was a dark shape under the trees on the far bank.
A beat of his heart went strange.
The shape had the look of a bear hunched at the water with its head down.
The shape didn't move.
The shape didn't move.
The shape didn't move.
Not a bear. A rock.
Around the pond Kain went at a walk with Ghost behind him.
The rock at the far bank was the size of a man bent at the waist. Four feet at the top. Three by four at the base.
It sat in the mud with its weight pressed down a couple of inches into the soft ground around its bottom edge.
Dark granite.
Kain crouched at it and ran his good hand along the surface. The grain was deep. The color was the hard dark grey of a stone that had come up out of a mountain.
Not limestone. The hills around Tillamore were limestone.
Every loose rock in every field in the valley was limestone, in chunks white or cream. Every fence-post stone Kain had ever rested his back against in this country was limestone.
Granite was a mountain rock.
There were no mountains in this country for a long ride in any direction.
The map came out one more time. He unfolded it on the top of the granite and drew a second arrow, this one off Jeremiah's farm running due north.
The two arrows met northeast of Tillamore, on the same side of the country John's sheep had been staring at, and the goats had been staring at since first thaw, and the wolf had been glancing at.
The map went back into his coat.
"You're not from around here," he said to the rock.
The rock didn't answer.
Onward through the woods at a slow walk. The sun crossed the trees and went past noon. The bearing held northeast.
More of the dark granite stones turned up as they went. One on a side-hill, sitting up out of the slope as if a hand stronger than the slope had set it there.
The strange thing was that the rock sat across an animal trail; two trails ran to its base on the lower side and emerged out the upper side, and the faintest line of a new bypass trail was just beginning to bend around it.
The rock had come up under the trail and the country hadn't had time enough yet to rewrite itself around the rock.
Two more stones in the next stretch. One in the middle of a blackberry thicket with the branches that had been the bush stuck out around the sides of it dead at their cut ends.
One across the middle of a trail in the same recent-emergence way as the first.
Then the ground began to go.
The slope steepened the way no slope ever steepened naturally. The country didn't climb in the long worn line of country. The country had been pushed.
The trees on the steeper part stood tilted from a thing that had moved them after they had grown to where they would stand. In places the ground was torn open along a line, and the same dark grey stone showed at the bottom of the tear in plates the size of a wagon bed.
He took Roan slower.
Spikes of the stone rose here and there through the canopy, points up, taller than him in the saddle, driven through the timber like they had been pushed up through it from below.
A few of the spikes had split a tree open as they came up. The wood at the split was bright and new where the bark had peeled. The leaves on those trees were brown at the edges with the dying.
All of it was wrong.
The country was wrong. The stones were wrong. The dying trees were wrong. The shape of the ground itself was wrong.
"Maybe it was a spell," he said to no one in particular. "A mage on the wrong side of a drink, working the wrong thing in the wrong country."
Roan flicked an ear at him.
"I know."
Ghost growled.
The wolf ran a stride ahead and planted itself in the trail and wouldn't move. Its hackles came up along the neck and the shoulders.
Its one good eye stayed forward. Its nose worked at the air.
Kain pulled Roan up.
From the saddle he looked over the wolf's head.
The trees stood ordinary. The trail ran on. The grey granite plates lay flat and quiet.
Whatever the wolf was telling him about wasn't a thing he could see, and was a thing the wolf couldn't be moved past.