He was paying absolutely no attention to anything on either side of him, and she thanked Baby Jesus that she had put the shield up when she had. He shouldn’t sense another magician here, and hopefully he didn’t even know she was one. But if he had managed to tell there was one here, before she had detected him, it would have been—ahead of him, where he would have expected Aunt Jinny to be, and not down here in the lane. She couldn’t tell exactly where someone was, or (more importantly) how far away they were, and she doubted that he could.

Why was Billie McDaran riding up this lane? There was only one thing at the end of it, and that was Aunt Jinny’s cabin.

Well, she surely did not want to encounter him. There was only one thing to do. Take some of the game trails instead of the lane, and come out at the back of the cabin rather than the front. Then what? Wait, I guess. Watch and listen?

Thanks to all her hunting for plants for Jinny’s potions, she knew the forest on either side of the lane intimately. She couldn’t exactly eel through the underbrush the way the Ravens could, but—

A hand touched her shoulder from behind, and she nearly shrieked aloud, stuffing her fist into her mouth to muffle it as she whirled, ready to—well, she wasn’t sure what she was going to do, but she had every intention of defending herself if she had to—

But it wasn’t an interloper, it was Young Raven, an uncustomary expression of deep concern on his face. “Come with me,” he said quietly. “It is not safe for you at your home for a while.”

“But how—” she began.

“Jinny was warned by the Little People, and to be certain they were right, scried the road from Ducktown. She saw the man McDaran on his horse, and knew there was likely only one place he would be coming. She does not want him to see you. She believes it would be very dangerous for you if he did. She sent to me to find you and bring you where you can be safe. Now follow,” he concluded, giving her no chance to ask any more questions.

Soon they were entirely off the trails she knew, and going deeper and deeper into the Holler. It would not be fair to say that this part of the woods had never had man set foot in it—because obviously the Cherokee did make free of its game trails—but they certainly had left it all fundamentally untouched. If there was any sign that anything other than animals used these thread-like paths through the woods, she certainly couldn’t read it.

Old trees grew here, trees that never saw an axe, but had been left to die in their own time. Some were big enough that it would take two or even three people to encircle their trunks. And the growth was so dense that she couldn’t see more than ten or twenty feet in any direction. Only where the giants had fallen, or where tiny cricks wound through the vegetation, were there places for younger trees to seek the light, but that did not mean the forest floor was barren. On the contrary, shade-loving bushes as high as her head and ferns as tall as her waist thrust their way to the dim light through a floor so carpeted with damp, dead leaves that their footsteps made scarcely a sound. Streaks of red, orange, yellow, and brown showed where frost had already touched some parts of this forest. It was actually cold under those branches, and all she could smell was the bitter scent of falling leaves.