The old saying was up a mountain, down a hill. If Phaedra lost memory of anything else, she'd probably remember this one, because it had been etched into the walls of her mind by her first driving teacher, who had in turn had it etched on the outside of her flask, in slanting cursive. It was hard not to remember a phrase when it was tinged with the terror Phaedra had felt upon seeing old Dame Careen take a swig before tackling a particularly steep canyon ledge with her rickety old caravan.
Up a mountain, down a hill, with a screaming apprentice latched into the leather of the passenger seat like a panicked cat.
Well, somewhere up the mountain, Phaedra's caravan had broken down, and she'd had to leave it by the side of the road in order to hike to the town of Karamiss and inform them of where their food shipment was.
The Karamids had been grateful for the shipment, in their curt fashion, but Phaedra felt as if she'd instantly burned through their gratitude when she informed them that she would not be leaving immediately.
"I need to repair my caravan first," she explained.
The caravan was a hardy contraption, and with all the spellwork etched into the undercarriage, it could fit itself to any road, no matter how narrow. But as with anything, there were trade-offs, and in this case it was steep climbs, such as those which had brought her to Karamiss. Phaedra had felt the snap and break of something as she overcame the arch of a hill, and the gentle plink of the clockwork sparrow as it fell, unmoving, onto its side on the dashboard. She explained all this apologetically, hoping to convey that it was not something Phaedra would have chosen.
The Karamids blinked their many eyes at her, with what Phaedra felt was disapproval.
"You may stay in the woods until you can leave," the town's administratrix had said. "The woods do not belong to us."
The administratrix made it sound more like they did not wish anything of theirs polluted by Phaedra's presence.
It suited Phaedra just fine, however. She needed only to engage the local blacksmith for a few days, to replace some old piece in the engine.
What she hoped would go much quicker was the visit to the town's toy shop. She spotted it down the road from the blacksmith, with its glass shopfront, and the hanging sign in bright colors.
As she came closer, she saw that even the traditional depiction of the local deity that every shop in Karamiss boasted was in bright shades. The Many-Eyed Mother drawn on the door of the blacksmith's forge had been smoky, drawn in shades of charcoal, accented with fire-red. The one on the toyshop door was brightly cheerful, each eye in a different color, each one of the Many-Eyed Mother's limbs holding a different toy. The smile, in particular, other than being as sharp as a drawer full of razors, managed to look playful.
When Phaedra entered the shop, however, none of the cheer seemed to carry into it. The shop was dusty, poorly lit, apparently fallen on hard times. Phaedra walked all the way up to the counter before she even noticed anyone was inside. What she thought had been a tarp covering some piece of furniture began moving of its own accord, and sauntered closer to the counter, where a stray shaft of sunlight revealed it as the proprietor of the toy shop.
"May I help you?" the toymaker drawled, one of her eyes blinking lazily while the other two swiveled towards the door and then to Phaedra.
Phaedra reached into her coat pocket, and took out the clockwork sparrow, which she placed onto the counter carefully.
"Can you fix this?" Phaedra asked.
The toymaker reached down, took the sparrow and weighed it in one hand carefully. Then, with long, skeletal fingers, she twisted the sparrow's key. Empty clacks filled the air, the grinding of uncooperative gears and fatigued metal, until the key would be turned no more. When the toymaker released the wind-up key, however, it turned too fast, with a discordant metallic whine. The sparrow did not wake up.
As the toymaker pried open the sparrow to have a look at its innards, Phaedra looked around the shop. The shelves were full of toys, yet by the coating of dust, it did not seem the shop had seen any business in a long time. She did not like how this added up to the fact that she'd seen no children about town, and tried very hard to forget she'd noticed.
"Not a mere toy, this," the toymaker spoke eventually, her voice slow like clouds rolling across the sky.
"Except when it's broken," Phaedra said.
"True enough," the toymaker agreed, and considered for a few moments. "I will repair this for you. But you must make payment first."
"Make it how?" Phaedra asked, already weighing caution against the price.
"In the forest there is a well," the toymaker said. "Bring me water from it, and that will be payment enough."
"How much water?"
"Any at all will be impressive enough," the toymaker replied dryly, before reaching into a drawer and taking out a ceramic whistle in the shape of a bird. "Enough to fill this, perhaps?"
Phaedra took the whistle--she recognized the type, it would make a sharp flat note when it was empty, and it would make a warbling birdcall when filled with water. She'd often played with such things as a child, though in the shapes of different birds.
"About a flaskfull. Sure," Phaedra said, placing the bird whistle back on the counter.
"Be careful," the toymaker drawled, almost amused. "The woods do not belong to us."
Finding the well was no trouble at all, even with the vague directions she received. If anything, the vagueness of the directions seemed to speed up the process considerably. Phaedra was barely out of town when she saw the well's crane through the trees.
The well itself was narrow and circular, made with smooth river rocks. The crane was old weathered wood. One end had a counterweight, and the other had a length of rope tied to a battered old bucket.
Phaedra lowered the bucket into the well, for a very long time before she heard the splash of water, and then pulled on the other end of the crane to lift it up again. When she'd been younger, and a great deal smaller, she'd enjoyed the moment of weightlessness when pulling the bucket back up: when she acted as counterweight herself, and her feet were off the ground for a moment more than a jump would have permitted. Then the crane would lower on her side again, and raise up the bucket on the other, and the moment would be gone again, dropping her back to the reality of the ground.
She was much too old, and her adult arms much too strong now. It seemed she required only a tug, and the rope went taut; the bucket was lifted in moments, and carefully set on the lip of the well again, brimming with water.
Phaedra dunked her flask into the water. It was numbing cold, like a mountain pond, and smelled fresh and sweet. She wondered what would happen if she drank, if there was something special about it, if it belonged to whoever the woods belonged to--not the Karamids, obviously, as they insisted on pointing out. Just to be safe, she wouldn't drink, though her mouth felt strangely parched, nonetheless.
She capped her flask before she even noticed she was not alone, and then froze in place, only her head turning.
An old man stood at the edge of the clearing. He wore a ground-sweeping old robe, which at one point might have been a color other than time-worn, but now settled into a tired brown. The hems were embroidered with stylized vertical eyes, in a disgraced royal purple and waning shades of red. He had a hood pulled up over his head, but both it and the upper part of his face were concealed by an old helmet like a goat's skull, horns broken.
His hands were old. They were old, old hands, tanned like leather, soft like thin paper, ill-fitting over equally old bones. And he carried a bucket, a perfectly mundane object which would have looked at home on any farmstead.
He must have walked this far, Phaedra was sure. He must have taken steps to stand so close to her, but she had not heard a single branch break under his foot, or the rustle of leaves under the weight of his robe's hem. The woods knew him like a favorite coat knew its owner.
"Child," he said, with a voice as warm as a mother's hearth, "will you help an old man carry water to his house? It is not far, but I am very old, and my garden is parched."
Phaedra carefully, pointedly, put the flask inside her coat's breast pocket.
"Sure," she said.
He nodded, slowly, gratefully, and handed her the bucket.
The well's pail was still full of water, so she tipped this into the old man's bucket, filling it almost completely.
"Yes, that will do, that will do," he said. "Thank you. Come along."
She picked up the bucket and followed, along a well-worn trail she had not noticed existing until it was under her feet.
They walked in silence for a while, nothing but the strange sounds of the woods around them. Then, awkwardly, as if out of practice with civility, the old man spoke.
"How are you today, dear?" he said.
"I'm well enough," Phaedra said, because that was true. It was a crisp, windless day, edging into the cold season, and she was not actively experiencing any discomfort, save for the temporary weight of the bucket in her hands.
"You come from Karamiss?" he asked.
"I'm passing through. Caravan."
"Ah," the old man said. "Certainly."
After a few more moments of silence, Phaedra felt compelled to continue the conversation.
"You don't come from Karamiss?"
"I come from the woods," the old man replied. "Since before Karamiss." After a pause, he added in a softer voice, with distant longing "I am no longer welcome in Karamiss."
"I'm not particularly welcome in Karamiss either," Phaedra said. "Don't know if it's for the same reason."
"In a way," the old man said. "They measure a body's worth by the number of eyes, you see. Many eyes of even number is good, but odd numbers are better. You have only two, which is both an unforgivably small number, and an unfortunately even one at that."
"So what problem do they have with you, then?"
"A lack," the old man said, and pushed back his goat skull helmet to reveal his face.
Phaedra's jaw clenched, and she looked into the old man for a few polite seconds, before slowly turning her gaze ahead, to the road. She squelched any other reaction.
"Well, that's pretty rotten," she said.
"Ah, those exactly were the healer's words when looking upon my face," the old man said, with a sly smile.
Phaedra gave him a critical sidelong look, because though his face was now healed, his humor was certainly terminal.
Finally, they came upon a cottage in the woods, made of woven branches and charred black in color, with shutters drawn closed over the windows, and a door as white as bone. An orange cat was curled up sleeping on the roof, breaking the color theme somewhat. It opened a single eye to give Phaedra an uninterested look before going back to sleep.
"Thank you for your help, young lady," the old man said, as Phaedra lowered the bucket to the ground. "Come again if you would like to keep an old man company. You have been here, so you will find the place again. I will make tea."
The old man nodded thoughtfully at his own words, before stopping, and pursing his lips.
"But do not travel the woods at night," he advised as an afterthought. "The woods do not belong to me at night."
"Sure," she said, because it was the only adequate response she could muster.
Property laws around these parts seemed like a pain to deal with.
It did not occur to Phaedra to ask who the woods belonged to at night, mostly because she did not care. She planned to spend the night inside her caravan, and she did not think that counted as being 'in the woods', because from her perspective, she was indoors.
She did not think to account for the fact that some people did not count a vehicle as being quite indoors enough, because she awoke to the sight of a visitor curled atop the cabinet across from her mattress in the sleeping compartment. She could see only the suggestion of a shape in the darkness, but she felt a heavy gaze upon her, as if a full auditorium's worth of eyes were fixed on her. Still worst were the perfectly ordinary sounds of someone scuffling through her compartment, the breathing, the creak of joints, the brush of skin.
She didn't turn on the light, because some instinct told her that would have been the wrong move. As long as she couldn't see whoever had broken in, she knew she was in far less danger.
Phaedra pulled her blanket over her head and went to sleep.
She woke up the next morning fully aware she hadn't dreamed the entire thing the night before, and deeply disappointed by the fact. She disliked interlopers.
She headed into Karamiss, ready to be out of this place for good.
When she arrived at the toy shop, the toymaker seemed far too surprised to see her for Phaedra's liking.
"Have you managed to finish repairs?" Phaedra asked.
"No," the toymaker said in her usual slow drawl, managing to drag the word across three syllables. "In truth, I didn't expect you to return, so I did not even try."
Phaedra had no response to that. She had to compose herself before reaching into her pocket and pulling out the flask.
The toymaker's three eyes all lit up with excitement as Phaedra uncapped the flask and pushed it across the counter.
"Well, well!" the toymaker said, delicately sniffing the contents. "You did manage it! I shall surely have to begin repairs then."
"Surely," Phaedra echoed.
"Before I can do so, however," the toymaker continued, "there is another task you might perform."
"Is it a task you expect me to return from?"
The toymaker tilted her chin up, looking insulted by the question.
"What do you need?" Phaedra said, ready to be done with this town's foolishness.
The toymaker pushed the bird whistle and the flask both towards Phaedra, smiling a saccharine smile. Phaedra's eye narrowed, because she understood full well that she was merely the first fool to manage getting water from the woods, somehow.
"Go back into the woods," the toymaker instructed, "and use the bird whistle. Then take a feather from the first bird you encounter, and bring it back to me."
"Straightforward enough," Phaedra muttered, and crammed the whistle and the flask in her pocket.
She returned to the woods despite the creeping feeling that she might be tempting fate each time she did.
It was eerily quiet, but she filled the bird whistle with water, and blew on it as hard as her lungs could managed. The whistle warbled its watery bird call, the sound bouncing between trees until it disappeared into the wilderness, unanswered.
Phaedra kept her ears pricked, expecting some kind of response to the bird whistle, but the woods remained judgmentally silent.
It occurred to her, perhaps belatedly, that there may well not be any birds at all in the forest. It had the kind of unnatural quiet that came from the absence of living creatures, and Phaedra did not like how it was beginning to look that she was being treated as a fool.
She blew on the bird whistle again, this time a more prolonged note, and when that yielded no response, she blew on it again, this time so hard that the whistle did not even produce an audible note.
Her forehead was beginning to throb unpleasantly with the beginnings of a headache.
Before she could decide what to do next, the crack of a branch startled her. Phaedra whipped around towards the sound, and was almost scared out of her skin at the sight of the old blind man. Phaedra clutched her chest as she let out a breath.
"Oh, it's you," Phaedra said.
"An understated reaction, compared to those I usually receive," the old man commented wryly.
"Gods," Phaedra muttered, more to herself. "Is the usual reaction a genuine heart attack, instead of a near one?"
"One would be surprised," the old man said. "Though I must admit, I suffer no small amount of surprise to see you return, child."
"Probably a bad sign, coming from the creepy old man of the forest. But it couldn't be helped."
"I see," he said, probably being figurative. "Would you like to join me for tea?"
"Uh..."
"There will be small pastries as well," he added.
"Well, I don't see how I can refuse, then."
She followed him to his strange house, where he indeed prepared tea for her. It was deep dark red in the cup, and smelled fruity, though she couldn't name the fruit is she tried. She didn't ask, either; she didn't want some answer like 'it is squeezed from the blood of the forest' or 'I have harvested from the heart of my last guest before you'.
"While you are here," the old man said, sitting on the front steps and blindly staring off into the distance, "would you mind terribly doing me a favor?"
"I suppose not."
"My chickens frequently lay eggs under the woodpile. But I am old, you see, and my knees are not what they used to be."
"Knees go that way. Understandable."
"Would you mind terribly--"
"Scavenging for eggs? Sure. Sure, why not. That's the most normal thing anyone has asked me to do today. Point the way."
So, she ended up crouched on the ground and groping through the mud under the woodpile for eggs.
The old man's chickens were black as tar, and had malevolent little black eyes to match. They sat on top of the woodpile with haughty little chicken faces staring down at her, looking terribly smug that anything they'd done had led to Phaedra flopping around in the mud.
She did find eggs under the woodpile, at least. Three grey-tinted eggs, large and still warm. And stuck to the eggs by slick mud were tiny black feathers--chicken down, if she was not mistaken. They matched the color of the two chickens perched on top of the woodpile, and the birds continued to give her their malevolent little glares as Phaedra looked them over.
Well, this was what she was supposed to get, wasn't she? And these were the first birds she encountered. So she pocketed the feathers and passed the eggs on to the old man.
"Ah," he said, turning them over in his hands, "and they are still fresh. A delight, truly."
"Sure," Phaedra said. "Glad to help."
The toymaker sniffed as the feathers were presented to her.
"They reek," she complained.
"They come from a chicken's behind," Phaedra said.
The toymaker's mouth slanted in disgust, but she had no choice but to accept the feathers. She placed them into a drawer, and her expression mellowed out into only mild distaste once the feathers were out of sight.
"I assume there must be some third onerous errand you need of me," Phaedra said.
The toymaker hemmed and hawed in response. "Now, why would you say that?"
"Because I don't see my sparrow fixed yet."
The toymaker sighed and hung her head as though being forced to concede to this admission was a horrible slight to her pride.
"Very well, the last task," she said. "Go into the woods tonight, with the bird-call whistle. Play it, and bring back into town whatever follows you out of the woods."
"You want me to go into the woods... at night," Phaedra repeated slowly.
"Yes," the Toymaker confirmed.
"And you won't, because--"
"It's dangerous."
"But not dangerous for me to do it?" Phaedra raised an eyebrow.
"Evidently, it is dangerous for you to do it," the toymaker sniffed, as if despising Phaedra for stating something so obvious. She crossed one set of arms, and the fingers on the other set tapped an impatient tattoo on the countertop.
"But?"
"But," the toymaker said, "I'm not the one who needs her sparrow repaired."
Which was true enough.
It was still a way's off from evening, and Phaedra walked the street of Karamiss with a tourist's meander. Not that Karamiss had any of the qualities that encouraged outside visitors. There was an unstirred dustiness to the town's roads, like something was missing. The Karamids watched her with countless suspicious eyes as she passed, all with a certain gray-faced quality of people who did not possess much energy and certainly wouldn't be wasting it on Phaedra if they did.
Phaedra stopped in front of a confectionery shop. The painted glass pane depicted a cheerful spider, nine eyes glittering like globs of caramel. The display in the window was enticing. The only thing missing were children with their faces pressed up to the glass, but then, if not even the toy shop had any, Phaedra was less surprised to see none here.
A toy shop in town, yet no children in sight.
She stopped to ponder the sweets in the window. It was polite to bring a gift when dropping in for a visit, wasn't it?
It was edging into twilight when Phaedra reached the old man's cottage. He sat on his front steps still, whittling something. As Phaedra got closer, she could see it was the shape of some animal sitting on its haunches. It could have been a wolf or a fox or a lion; the details hadn't quite come together yet. The obsidian blade in the old man's hands moved slowly and surely, shaving off a long curl of wood.
"Back already," he said, part curious observation, part non-committal remark.
"Do you ever walk the woods at night?" Phaedra asked with no preamble. If this was rude, she certainly didn't know any forms she would have to follow. She settled for being direct.
"The woods do not belong to me at night," the old man said by way of answer, which really was no answer as Phaedra understood the notion.
"I don't know how that pertains to my question."
A smile curled on the old man's lips, pulling at wrinkles and the suggestion of an old scar across his lips.
"I have no eyes, you see," he said. "I could very well walk the woods, but the woods are not mine at night, and how is a poor old man meant to see danger with no eyes?"
Phaedra nodded, and reached into her coat, removing the object she'd been carrying there.
"You could try this?" she said, extending it towards him.
The obsidian blade faltered over the wood, dug a groove where there shouldn't have been one. The old man's head tilted towards the proffered object. It was a mask, beautifully painted. No holes for eyes to peer out, but five eyes were painted across its surface regardless, precisely and delicately rendered.
"I was told it was a gift," Phaedra continued, "though not for me."
A breath wheezed out of him, sharp with shock. He placed the blade and the unfinished wooden animal aside, and reached for the mask with his bony hands.
When he settled the mask on his face, every painted line seemed to have been made in continuity with his own features, as though the object were bespoke. He did not become the mask, but the mask became him, and Phaedra couldn't remember if it looked like that before he put it on, save that it looked very much like his face now, despite not resembling what she'd seen under the helmet. The eyes of the mask were the same stylized shape as the eyes on his robe, and she hadn't noticed it until that very moment.
The sun was only an orange smear at the horizon, dipping behind the mountains as night encroached. Night settled as gently over the forest as the mask had over the old man's face.
"Would you like to take a stroll, child?" the old man asked. Phaedra only noticed that his voice used to rattle more in his chest because now it sounded smooth and sure again.
"I do have an errand to make," Phaedra said.
It was darker in the woods than the moonlight peeking through the branches should have allowed. It was nothing but shades of blackness to Phaedra, and likely she would have walked head-first into every tree in her path if the old man didn't have a steady hand on her shoulder to steer her.
In her reprieve from needing to navigate the darkness, Phaedra blew into the bird whistle instead. Its call warbled in the dark; it sounded different as it bounced and echoed against trees she couldn't see. The liquid burbling of the sound took on a more organic quality, and if she didn't have the whistle in hand and a slight wooziness from blowing into it constantly, Phaedra would almost think the sound came from a real bird. She couldn't guess which. She wasn't much for ornithology. Some local songbird, she'd guess. Nocturnal, to fit the theme.
Phaedra didn't know what was meant to happen until she finally stumbled into a clearing. The moon shone down like a spotlight, unnaturally bright where before it had been unnaturally dim.
And it reflected off dozens and dozens of eyes.
Phaedra stopped blowing into the bird whistle then. Maybe she was meant to, but she needed a moment for her head to clear and for her mind to match the number of silhouettes to the number of eyes; she'd forgotten the Karamids had so many just as a matter of course. But the Karamids in town were also a lot taller than these ones.
Well, at least she found out where their children had gone.
"You will need to find your own way back," the old man said kindly, and reached into his robes, pulling out a small lantern. He tapped the glass and it flared to light, glowing gold.
The children, eerily quiet until then, flinched back and gasped.
"You are not supposed to have that!" one of them said urgently. "Mother will not allow lights at night!"
"I will talk to her," the old man promised kindly. "But we have grown-up things to discuss, so I am going to have to ask you to leave with this young lady."
Clusters of distrustful eyes turned to Phaedra. In the light of the lantern the old man was holding, Phaedra could see starved faces, streaked with dirt; threadbare clothing, hardly fit to keep out the forest's chill.
Phaedra reached into her coat. She stuffed the bird whistle into a pocket, and took out a brown bag instead, opening it and rolling down the edges of its mouth to better reveal their content.
"I brought sweets for you," she said, with the sense that she was instilling a terrible lesson about whether to accept candy from strangers. "Would you like to try some before we leave?"
The children--maybe fifteen or twenty of them, though it was hard to tell for sure in the dark--leaned towards her, pulled in by the sweets more than anything Phaedra herself said.
The children crowded around Phaedra, and one of the oldest took charge of the bag of sweets, beginning to distribute them among the younger ones. A small snotty child was the first to receive theirs, and after stuffing it into their mouth, proceeded to latch onto the tail of Phaedra's coat with their sticky fingers leaving stains on the material. Phaedra decided to just be grateful she didn't have to hold that child's hand. A different one latched onto her hand instead, some weedy pig-tailed menace with a grip like a steel trap.
The old man gave Phaedra the lantern.
"This will show you home, and keep you warm until you get there, as long as you only step where the light falls," he promised. "But it is best you leave sooner rather than later."
Phaedra turned back the way she'd come, as best she could guess the direction, and began shuffling out of the clearing with her cohort of children. The lantern's light fell onto the forest floor in a narrow shaft, a path bracketed on both sides by fathomless darkness. The children clung close, wary of stepping off the path.
The sound of smacking lips and candy-sucking was almost loud enough in the clear night air to hide the sound of footsteps approaching, the crackling of leaves under someone's soles. But Phaedra knew of the arrival even with her back turned, because she heard the sharp intake of breath the children took.
"Come on, let the grown-ups talk," Phaedra said, pushing the nearest ones along, "it's all boring stuff anyway."
It was morning by the time they reached Karamiss.
They'd walked and walked and walked, a steady trundle through the forest, going only in the direction that the lantern's light revealed, and they emerged from the treeline blinking and dragging their feet. The morning was gray in the coolness of the pre-dawn light, and their breaths were silvery clouds in the cold air.
The children had been huddled together, but now they broke off from the group and scattered across the roads of Karamiss. Since they probably knew where they lived better than Phaedra did, she let them go.
Was the toy shop even open at this time of day? Phaedra felt almost disgusted at the thought of going there again, and dealing with the recalcitrant toymaker. She fiddled with the lantern to turn it off as she delayed, and then remembered the bird whistle in her pocket. She would have to return that as well, wouldn't she?
Yet, as she reached into her pocket to retrieve it, her fingers grasped cold metal instead of ceramic. When she drew out the object, it was not the bird whistle, but her own clockwork sparrow, quiet and still. She did not think the toymaker was responsible for this, if only because Phaedra had not come to expect such prompt and convenient service from her.
Phaedra turned the sparrow's key, three times, with the mechanical grinding sound that she knew by ear, and then the key began turning on its own as it was released. The sparrow's eyes opened, and its legs twitched.
"Oh, I have such a headache," the sparrow complained--a relief in that it was at least awake to complain at all.
"It has been going around," Phaedra agreed.
