She looked up, and Fenris walked out of the shadows, his tread slow and heavy as a draft horse. “I have little enough sense, Lady Fox,” he said. Again that bemused smile. He turned his gaze to Marra. “We ransom prisoners often in my land, and usually it is only with gold. But you have bought my freedom with your own blood and bone. What little honor I have left is yours, and if I can be of service, I will.”
* * *
Breakfast the next morning was dry bread without even one third of an egg apiece. Fenris snapped his up in three bites but did not complain about the scanty rations. Marra wondered how on earth they were all going to feed themselves on the way to the Northern Kingdom.
Fenris walked much more quickly than either of them at first, a ground-eating stride that would probably have him in the Northern Kingdom before Marra and the dust-wife had even left the Southern. He had to stop and check himself several times, almost apologetically.
Marra was having a difficult time herself. She had become used to ducking away from travelers, to making sure that Bonedog was out of sight. The first time that a farm wagon passed them, she grabbed his collar and almost dove into a hedgerow before she remembered.
The wagon driver did stare at them, but not at Bonedog. Instead he was looking at the hen on top of the dust-wife’s staff and grinning hugely. “How’d you teach her to do that?” he called.
“Teach her, nothing,” said the dust-wife. “Couldn’t get her to stop.” The driver laughed loudly and tapped his cap, then drove on, while Marra tried to calm her racing heart.
“Easy,” murmured Fenris.
It was on the tip of Marra’s tongue to be annoyed, but then she looked over at him and realized that he was talking to himself as much as to her.
How long was he in the goblin market? Does this seem strange to him as well?
She turned it over in her mind for a few moments, and then she simply asked.
“Too long.” Fenris looked up at the sky, which had lost the pale gray-gold notes of dawn and was turning to blue. “It was hard to keep track of the days. They say that people who go into a fairy fort will dance for a night and come back to find that years have passed. I don’t know if that’s true. I don’t know if the goblin market is always running. It seemed like I was always there in the stall, but sometimes I’d sleep and it felt like a long, long time had passed. And sometimes it was … different.”
“Different how?” asked the dust-wife sharply.
“Colder. Darker. Different … things.”
“Things? Do you mean people?” asked the dust-wife.
“I mean that when my captor sold a tooth, the thing he sold it to looked like a woman, right up until it bit the tooth in half like an apple.” His voice was very calm, and he did not look at either of them as he spoke. “Then it pounced on the first person that walked by and left them dead on the floor of the market. And that yellow-eyed bastard only complained about the mess and called someone to haul the body away.”
For the first time that Marra could remember, the dust-wife looked very slightly abashed. “Ah. Dark of the moon. The goblin market is at its worst then.”
“I’m sorry,” said Marra.
Fenris looked at her then. His eyes were bleak, but he forced half a smile. “I was, too. For all of us. There were a few other humans, I think, working in other stalls. It’s hard to say. We would nod to each other, but we did not get a chance to speak.” He drew a deep breath and straightened his back. “Well. If that was the dark of the moon, then I suppose I was there for three months. I would have guessed it was more like a few weeks. The days seemed very long, but not like that.”
“What did you do?” asked Marra.
He shrugged. “Thought, mostly. Turned over all the ways that I had failed, and all the places I could have turned aside from my path. Thought about escaping.” He shook his head. “I wasn’t able to talk to anyone else but the Toothdancer. He was not so bad, for all his looks. But it was a cruel place.” He exhaled slowly through his nose. “And I, being a selfish bastard, thought only of getting free. Perhaps I should have told you to take someone else in my place. I deserved my captivity.”
“You’re the one we needed. Or that the moth said we needed.”
He shrugged again.
“Perhaps when this is all over,” said Marra recklessly, “perhaps we could go back. Find the others there.”
The look he gave her this time was surprise. “Will you sacrifice a tooth for each of them, then?”