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The moon was down when Tim dismounted Bitsy and tethered her to a bush at the side of the Ironwood Trail. He had filled his pockets with
oats ere leaving the barn, and he now spread them before her as he’d seen the Covenant Man do for his horse the previous night.
“Be easy, and sai Cosington will come for thee in the morning,” Tim said. An image of Square Peter finding Bitsy dead, with a gaping hole in her
belly made by one of the predators of the forest (perhaps the very one he’d sensed behind him on his pasear down the Ironwood the night before) lit
up his mind. Yet what else could he do? Bitsy was sweet, but not smart enough to find her way home on her own, no matter how many times she’d
been up and down this same trail.
“Thee’ll be passing fine,” he said, stroking her smooth nose . . . but would she? The idea that the Widow had been right about everything and this
was just the first evidence of it came to his mind, and Tim pushed it aside.
He told me the truth about the rest; surely he told the truth about this, too.
By the time he was three wheels farther up the Ironwood Trail, he had begun to believe this.
You must remember he was only eleven.
He spied no campfire that night. Instead of the welcoming orange glow of burning wood, Tim glimpsed a cold green light as he
approached the end of the Ironwood Trail. It flickered and sometimes disappeared, but it always came back, strong enough to cast shadows that
seemed to slither around his feet like snakes.
The trail—faint now, because the only ruts were those made by the wagons of Big Ross and Big Kells—swept left to skirt an ancient ironwood
with a trunk bigger than the largest house in Tree. A hundred paces beyond this curve, the way forward ended in a clearing. There was the
crossbar, and there the sign. Tim could read every word, for above it, suspended in midair by virtue of wings beating so rapidly they were all but
invisible, was the sighe.
He stepped closer, all else forgotten in the wonder of this exotic vision. The sighe was no more than four inches tall. She was naked and
beautiful. It was impossible to tell if her body was as green as the glow it gave off, for the light around her was fierce. Yet he could see her
welcoming smile, and knew she was seeing him very well even though her upturned, almond-shaped eyes were pupilless. Her wings made a
steady low purring sound.
Of the Covenant Man there was no sign.
The sighe spun in a playful circle, then dived into the branches of a bush. Tim felt a tingle of alarm, imagining those gauzy wings torn apart by
thorns, but she emerged unharmed, rising in a dizzy spiral to a height of fifty feet or more—as high as the first upreaching ironwood branches—
before plunging back down, right at him. Tim saw her shapely arms cast out behind her, making her look like a girl who dives into a pool. He
ducked, and as she passed over his head close enough to stir his hair, he heard laughter. It sounded like bells coming from a great distance.
He straightened up cautiously and saw her returning, now somersaulting over and over in the air. His heart was beating fiercely in his chest. He
thought he had never seen anything so lovely.
She flew above the crossbar, and by her firefly light he saw a faint and mostly overgrown path leading into the Endless Forest. She raised one
arm. The hand at the end of it, glowing with green fire, beckoned to him. Enchanted by her otherworldly beauty and welcoming smile, Tim did not
hesitate but at once ducked beneath the crossbar with never a look at the last two words on his dead father’s sign: TRAVELER, BEWARE.
The sighe hovered until he was almost close enough to reach out and touch her, then whisked away, down the remnant of path. There she
hovered, smiling and beckoning. Her hair tumbled over her shoulders, sometimes concealing her tiny breasts, sometimes fluttering upward in the
breeze of her wings to reveal them.
The second time he drew close, Tim called out . . . but low, afraid that if he hailed her in a voice too loud, it might burst her tiny eardrums. “Where
is the Covenant Man?”
Another silvery tinkle of laughter was her reply. She barrel-rolled twice, knees drawn all the way up to the hollows of her shoulders, then was off,
pausing only to look back and make sure Tim was following before darting onward. So it was that she led the captivated boy deeper and deeper
into the Endless Forest. Tim didn’t notice when the poor remnant of path disappeared and his course took him between tall ironwood trees that had
been seen by the eyes of only a few men, and that long ago. Nor did he notice when the grave, sweet-sour smell of the ironwoods was replaced by
the far less pleasant aroma of stagnant water and rotting vegetation. The ironwood trees had fallen away. There would be more up ahead,
countless leagues of them, but not here. Tim had come to the edge of the great swamp known as the Fagonard.
The sighe, once more flashing her teasing smile, flew on. Now her glow was reflected up at her from murky water. Something—not a fish—broke
the scummy surface, stared at the airy interloper with a glabrous eye, and slid back below the surface.
Tim didn’t notice. What he saw was the tussock above which she was now hovering. It would be a long stride, but there was no question of not
going. She was waiting. He jumped just to be safe and still barely made it; that greenglow was deceptive, making things look closer than they
actually were. He tottered, pinwheeling his arms. The sighe made things worse (unintentionally, Tim was sure; she was just playing) by spinning
rapid circles around his head, blinding him with her aura and filling his ears with the bells of her laughter.
The issue was in doubt (and he never saw the scaly head that surfaced behind him, the protruding eyes, or the yawning jaws filled with triangular
teeth), but Tim was young and agile. He caught his balance and was soon standing on top of the tussock.
“What’s thy name?” he asked the glowing sprite, who was now hovering just beyond the tussock.
He wasn’t sure, in spite of her tinkling laughter, that she could speak, or that she would respond in either the low speech or the high if she could.
But she answered, and Tim thought it was the loveliest name he’d ever heard, a perfect match for her ethereal beauty.
“Armaneeta!” she called, and then was off again, laughing and looking flirtatiously back at him.
He followed her deeper and deeper into the Fagonard. Sometimes the tussocks were close enough for him to step from one to the next,
but as they progressed onward, he found that more and more frequently he had to jump, and these leaps grew longer and longer. Yet Tim wasn’t
frightened. On the contrary, he was dazzled and euphoric, laughing each time he tottered. He did not see the V-shapes that followed him, cutting
through the black water as smoothly as a seamstress’s needle through silk; first one, then three, then half a dozen. He was bitten by suckerbugs and
brushed them off without feeling their sting, leaving bloody splats on his skin. Nor did he see the slumped but more or less upright shapes that
paced him on one side, staring with eyes that gleamed in the dark.
He reached for Armaneeta several times, calling, “Come to me, I won’t hurt thee!” She always eluded him, once flying between his closing fingers
and tickling his skin with her wings.
She circled a tussock that was larger than the others. There were no weeds growing on it, and Tim surmised it was actually a rock—the first one
he’d seen in this part of the world, where things seemed more liquid than solid.