James Enge - This Crooked Way

"Just a moment," Fasra said icily. "I'm not finished."

"You're finished when I say you're finished!" Naeli's friend cried. "Darkness is rising! Come home."

"Not till I'm done."

"We're leaving," Naeli's friend said, walking toward the girl, who ran back a few steps into the wood.

"No!" shouted Fasra. "No! No! No!"

Naeli's friend turned and began to walk away. "Good-bye," she said, over her shoulder. "I hope you can make your way out of the forest by yourself."

There was no answer. After a few steps more she turned and looked back. Fasra had vanished.

They searched for her, of course. But the day was growing old, and they had other children to take care of, their own children. Finally they returned to Caroc without Fasra, and Naeli's friend brought the terrible news to my house around sunset.

Naeli came to Besk's shop immediately. She was weeping, but she managed to tell the story as she knew it.

"Naeli, I'm sorry," was all I could find to say, as she sobbed. "I loved her, too."

"Her name will be mentioned at the next Mysteries," Besk promised her, his pale brown face etched with grief. He was very fond of Naeli, and Fasra too.

"What do you mean?" cried Naeli, in fresh alarm. "Aren't you going to help me find her?'

Besk and I stared at each other in astonishment. Then Besk said firmly, "No. You must mourn her, Naeli. No one can help her now."

"White-faced Bargainer," she cursed him. "Stay here and lick your pennies! My brother will still help me!"

"Help you do what?" I shouted. "I won't help you commit suicide. It's already getting dark!"

"She's alone!" Naeli said. "She's never been alone this long. She'll be getting cold. She'll be afraid. And soon it will be dark and they will come for her. The Bargainers. The Enemy. The Whisperer in the Dark. They'll come for her!"

She stared at us in silence for a few moments as Besk and I refused to meet her eye. The thought of the beloved child dying alone in the dark woods was terrible. But there was nothing we could do. We knew that. We resented Naeli for not knowing it, too.

"Help me!" she screamed in my face. "Help me! Why won't you help me?" Then she ran from the shop, leaving the door swinging open behind her.

I turned resolutely back to the work we'd been doing, a commission from the Baron of Caroc which was to be ready the next day. But Besk reached over and grabbed me by the shoulder.

"Go after her," he said. "Go now. Hurry, Roble."

"No," I said stubbornly. "She'll come to her senses in a little while."

"She's in her senses now," Besk replied. "But that doesn't mean for her what it does for dull fellows like you and me. She is a great one, an empress or a merchant lady by rights. If she lived in the wide world, she would be one or the other by now, or something better than both. She knows everything you know, how the law is about to be broken in the woods. To you, that means she must not enter there. To her, it means she must. Go, Roble. Run. It may be too late as I stand here talking…."

Besk was a good man, but he'd never sent me home early in the ten years I'd been working for him. This, more than anything else, struck me with urgency. I dropped my tools and ran out the open door.

The sun had set, and the narrow lanes of Caroc Town were heavy with shadow. The dark blue radiance left in the evening sky was already dim and fading. As I left the side-lanes for the Road I heard the hillconches ring out like thunder, breaking the law.

"Naeli!" I shouted as I ran. "Wait! Naeli!"

She didn't wait. At the edge of town there were only the black-armored Riders on their black steeds. I could hear the one's voice as I ran up to them, but made no sense of the words. (I realize now what he was saying, of course, having said it so many times myself.)

The one finished speaking and I asked them, "Have you seen a woman pass this way? I-"

The Rider who had not spoken drew his truncheon and pointed it at my throat. Neither of them said a word, and I found myself unable to speak either.

Now I know that the Rider was only threatening to kill me if I tried to enter the woods. But then his gesture seemed full of mystic import. I had never confronted one of these Riders in their dark regalia before, never thought about what they implied. The forest where Fasra had vanished had now taken Naeli, too. But it was their forest, I realized: only they could cross and recross it in the lawless hours. I didn't understand how they dared to do it. But I realized that I couldn't imitate them, that I must not. They had forbidden it. And in that strange moment they seemed to have more power than the Four Barons themselves. After all, the Barons could only say what the law was. The Riders said what it was not, and rode beyond its limits.

"Will you at least look for her?" I pleaded, when I found my voice again. "Her daughter is there, too, a girl of seven years …lost in the woods."

They still did not speak. I suppose they were simply hesitating, wondering whether to explain to me that they could not afford to wander from the Road, that they were powerless and couldn't really help. I suppose they resented me as I had resented Naeli, demanding more than I could give. But I felt none of this. I felt as if I had bowed down in prayer to two statues of the Strange Gods, or asked a favor of a stone wall.

Defeated, I turned and walked away in silence. They watched me go and then, no doubt, rode off down the lawless road. It was long after dark when I finally reached my house. My sister's sons were sitting huddled around the cold fireplace in the front room.

"Where is Naeli?" I asked stupidly, as if I didn't know. I guess part of me expected her to be there, to always be there.

"She went to find you," Stador, the eldest boy said. "She said you would help her…."

I don't remember the rest of that night, or much of the following days. There were the funerals, strangely bitter with no bodies to bury. And I apprenticed my sister's youngest boy to Besk. A month and a half later I enlisted in the Riders.

I thought it would be difficult to join. But it wasn't. There were always places falling vacant.

The trouble with Liskin, I discovered, was that you could shut him up, but he wouldn't stay shut. He kept wanting to talk: about whether we were riding fast enough, about whether we were riding too fast, about whether we should have hunted down the Bargainers tending the trap. The subject didn't matter; he just wanted to run his mouth. But, when you're riding through the woods during the lawless hours, you have to pay attention to what's happening around you. You can't do that with someone nattering in your ear all the time.

Finally, I had to rein in and tell him. I added, as an afterthought, that it was crazy to try to carry on a conversation in full armor on trotting horses.

Up till then he had been nodding (like, chastened). But this he wanted to argue about. "Oh, I don't know, Roble-"

"Bargain it, Liskin," I swore, then stopped. Over his shoulder I could see a flicker of red light filtering through the night-black branches of the forest.

"Stray!" I said, and pointed.

He turned to look and said, "Or another trap."

"Either way, there are bodies to bring out." I dismounted.

Liskin didn't. "Roble," he said, "it's against the Rules to go that far from the Road."

"Then don't," I replied. "But if there were any rules in these woods we wouldn't be here." I drew my sword and left the Road, plunging into the forest that had swallowed my sister and her child.

The light was a longish way from the Road. It took me endless moments to wend through the close-set tree trunks until I approached close enough to see that the light was from a campfire. Someone was sitting beside it.

You get an eye for spotting illusions after you've been in the Riders for awhile. The illusion-bait is always something you want to see, the thing that's too good to be true. It's the image in your mind most likely to kick you forward before you have a chance to think.