The caravan traveled without trouble for a fortnight. Each morning, Quil consulted his map while the travelers packed their things. His route was ever-changing — some days north, some days east, some days still, some days trekking backwards until the sun danced on the horizon then turning forward once the evening’s stars tittered into place. They took a day to circle a hill rather than go over its peak, then two more to wind around a creek rather than ford it. Though they never neared enough to fully investigate, Fig searched for magic in these abnormalities when she could. The hill was coated in a bronze sludge of magic that tasted of mustard. The magic of the creek pricked at her like a hedgehog’s spikes.

She absorbed the wilds’ strangenesses with awe. A valley of purple grass and bone-white reeds, a rippling lake with blue stones at its edges, a field littered with granite pillars three times her height. The prairies beyond the forest had none of the darkness or secrecy she was accustomed to. Sunlight hit everything. At noon the land was so bright it burned.

On occasion they passed the remnants of travelers who had come before. Rope and tools long abandoned, firepits long extinguished, skeletons bleached and plain. The caravaners noted all but said nothing. There was little to be won from discussing the dead. Surely there were more, uncountably more, consumed by the grass that swayed, dancing, up to their ankles, knees, waists.

What troubled Fig more than the magic or the fallen was when Quil directed a sharp turn and she sensed nothing. She heard, felt, smelled, saw nothing — and yet Quil diverted their path with an urgency that rippled through their group in moments. A plain stretch of grass was dangerous to them in a way that was beyond both her understanding of magic and the knowledge of the land her mother had taught her so strictly. She felt the danger of traveling alone. Though the caravan’s slow pace made her skin itch, its use was undeniable. Their peace was proof.

Fig did not warm to many of the caravaners. She spent her days in the back of Quil’s wagon and her nights sleeping at the edge of their encampment. She butchered meat, gathered wood, and built fires but spoke very little. Children were happy to chat without response, but adults asked too many questions. She could sense their dissatisfaction with how little of herself she gave to conversation. There was nothing of her world to share. Enchantress, demon, mother, sister. She held her life to her chest as they journeyed, farther each day, from all that was left of what she knew.

In contrast, Wren swiftly took his place as the sun at the center of their wanderings. Fig had been right to assume Wren and Altair were first-time travelers and the latest additions to Quil’s caravan, yet the people took to him with ease. Wren hopped between families telling the same stories again and again, puffing up with laughter in all the same spots. He did not have a surreal, disorienting magnetism like Vaani, but a warmth that built with each flash of his teeth.

He was the fourth of nine siblings born in a large town not far from where Fig had first met him. So many children had produced a seemingly endless fount of hijinks: daring thefts from their neighbor’s land, brothers wrestling in mud, sisters shearing each other’s hair in their sleep. His eldest sister was often very cross with him in these stories. It seemed he had spent much of his childhood either evading her wrath or clinging to her leg. Fig listened with equal parts wonder and confusion; she knew as little of sisters as she did of fathers. Wren’s father did not appear in any of his stories. It seemed she was not alone in growing around such an omission.

Quil, in turn, materialized as a figure for which she had no reference to understand. The man was firm in resolving squabbles amongst the people in his care. He managed their food, their sleeping arrangements, the health of their animals. He was as generous with his supplies as his time. Fig’s talent for eavesdropping was as useful as ever, allowing her to learn that people called magistrates in the cities paid him handsomely for each traveler safely delivered. It seemed each city had its own trade system built on small baubles as an intermediary for goods. Those not bound for cities bartered in other ways. A few days into joining, she had asked him about this, curious.

“You are one of the only useful people here,” he half-sighed, half-laughed. “Most of these folk have never caught their own food, let alone prepared it to eat. City life keeps them soft, reliant. I wasn’t joking when I said you could stay as long as you like.”

She thought of the people who fled the cities to her town. She had never thought of their naivety as a kind of reliance. It was true that the caravaners relied on Quil alone for most everything, and so she fell into any odd task he assigned her. He liked that she worked in silence. When the caravaners did not squawk for his attention, the two sat in companionable quiet and whittled tent stakes or separated the inedible from the edible of what others had foraged.

If Altair felt strangely about her relationship with their father they did not say. In fact, they barely said more than Fig did. When they weren’t with Wren, they kept to themselves, deep in thoughts Fig could not parse from their expression nor the frequency with which they scribbled notes into a journal of their own. Quil had said that Altair would be departing the caravan just below where she planned to. She wondered why they would part from their father, where they were going, and why. Though she and Altair often sat together in the back of the wagon, they did not often speak to her, and so her wonderings yielded no answers.

The two were sitting in such quiet when Quil ordered a stop, which was not unusual, and shouted a warning, which was.

“Come no closer,” his voice boomed. Fig saw her surprise mirrored on Altair’s face. They clambered to stand on the back of the wagon to look ahead.

There were three figures, two on a horse and one on foot. They obeyed the command and stopped twenty paces away.

“Turn back,” the standing one called, his voice hoarse. “Wherever you came from, turn back.”

The caravan had not previously encountered any other travelers. Fig was not sure whether this was a feature of the map or the wilds themselves. Were other travelers a danger? Or did the land prefer to keep them apart?

The man who spoke had narrow shoulders and hair parted so severely it looked as if his scalp had been sliced in two. On the horse perched a smaller man and young girl.

“What happened?” Quil asked the group.

“There’s sickness ahead. We’re not ill, but we’re lucky. There’s a village a half-day’s ride ahead. All of them poisoned.” The man turned his head and spit. “A witch’s work.”

Fear waved over the crowd like heat. Altair’s hands trembled on the frame of the wagon.

Quil was unmoved. “What manner of witch?”

The man frowned. “Woeful, surely. The houses are overtaken by foulness, the people left for dead.”

Fig watched the man shuffle from foot to foot. The bases of his shoes were flecked with a deep brown pulp. She looked for the same on his companions’ boots and found it. There was something there. She closed her eyes. Something loud. She found a deep, murmuring scale of notes like echoes in a cave, like water dripping from stalactite to stone. Magic. It was cavernous. It harmonized with the earthy smell of the soil beneath it, but it was churned somehow. Sour.

“Where you headed?” Quil’s voice was steady.

“Nearest city we can find,” the smaller man said, worrying his reins between his hands. “The wilds are uninhabitable. Anyone who says otherwise is bound for the grave.”

“Northward, we’ll reach Falls before the next new moon. You could join us,” Quil offered.

“No, no,” the rider stuttered. “We just escaped the north. South. You’d better do the same.”

“Thank you for your warning,” Quil replied but did not move.

The man shook his head and pulled his horse forward. His companions nodded in farewell. The caravaners waited for them to leave earshot before descending upon Quil’s wagon.

He unrolled the map from his pocket as they circled him. “The map has not shifted. Our course is still forward.”

The crowd broke out into overlapping shouts and protestations. Fig recoiled.

“To reroute around the area would take us off-path,” Quil insisted. “I cannot ensure our safety there.”

“Surely you cannot ensure our safety ahead!” the mother of the red-haired boy shouted. There were clamors of agreement. Though Fig was unused to living amongst groups of people, she knew the smell of fear. There was an animal musk to it, a viciousness. “To walk into a witch’s curse is to walk to your death!”

Quil only rolled his large shoulders as the caravaner’s volume rose. “As ever, participation in the caravan is voluntary. I am alive because of this map. If it tells me the safest path is forward, I go forward. Anyone who does not wish to go forward may leave.”

A hush fell. The red-haired family were the first to walk back to their wagon, gather the reins of their donkey, and turn back. Their son sat at the rear edge in silence. Two more families said their quiet goodbyes and did the same. Quil stood and watched each wheel carve fish hooks in the dirt.

Their number diminished, he addressed all who remained. “The safest path does not mean safe. Be on your guard. Keep children inside the wagons. We will ride until sunset, then camp. I will take a search party to investigate the village in the morning. Volunteers, seek me before the fire is out.”

He lifted his chin to signal Fig and Altair to sit. Theirs was the first wagon to roll back into motion. Altair curled into the far corner, their knees pulled under their chin. Their face was gray like ash.

“Are you alright?” Fig whispered. They did not reply.

Camp that night was tense. Conversation took place in whispers as if speaking too loudly would summon greater misfortune. Those with wagons stayed inside them; those without unfurled their bedrolls in the grass earlier than usual. Wren was the only one to come forward and volunteer for the scouting party, even his usual cheeriness dampened.

Fig followed him to the edge of camp where Quil had his back to the flickering fire.

“I’ll come as well,” she offered.

Wren forced a grin. “You aren’t scared?”

She summoned the feeling of the magic again, chasmal and sprawling. It smelled like wet soil, fermenting yeast. “I’m curious.”

He brightened. “Did you see the brown material on the bottoms of their shoes? I couldn’t quite place it.” He pulled out his notebook and flipped through the pages. “I can’t think of anything that would leave such a residue. Odd for random travelers to have walked through it like mud.”

The boy was sharp. “I did. It’s strange.” Even the memory of that magic made Fig uneasy, but the hole inside her hungered for it. This was her opportunity to investigate a witch’s magic up close.

“This isn’t a research mission,” Quil scolded. “We’re looking to see if it’s safe enough to pass through on schedule. Whatever we see, neither of you will be touching it.”

As they agreed, Fig watched Wren cross his fingers behind his back. Quil briefed them on his plans to leave at first light, then left to do his rounds speaking to the caravaners.

“Have you ever heard of anything like this?” Wren asked as soon as he was gone.

Sickness, certainly. Her mother had taught her the signs of illness so she could keep away from town when she observed them. Such things spread, and killed, but passed. They could, in many cases, be abated by the right salve or tincture. Her mother had catalogued these tonics alongside poisons and their antidotes.

A sickness brought on by a witch, however? Of that she knew nothing. She said as much.

“Me neither,” Wren admitted. “Stories, sure, but not firsthand. If a witch truly wanted these people dead, you’d think there wouldn’t be survivors.”

She wasn’t sure if he meant to be encouraging or damning. “What kinds of stories?”

“City people are paranoid.” He waved dismissively. “They think everything outside their precious walls will kill them.”

“We’ve certainly passed enough dead,” Fig hedged.

“Sure. But here we are, surviving. So only some things outside the walls will kill them. And isn’t it fun to observe what does not?”

Perhaps Altair was right; Wren’s lack of caution was equal parts impressive and stupid. Fig would have to keep an eye on him.

“Altair has been acting strange since the warning,” she shared. They had not left the wagon to eat or spoken to anyone.

“Ah.” Wren looked down, the gleam in his eye extinguished. “Sickness is personal for them. Quil must be shaken, too, but he’s putting up a brave front for the rest.” He trailed off. “The map has yet to be wrong. We have to believe in that.” For once he did not seem to want to say more. They said their goodnights and retired early.

That night Fig lay in her bedroll and traced the figures in the stars her mother had taught her. To find them in the sky at night was an anchor among the turbulent newness of her days. She had not traveled so far that they would abandon her.

Though she dreamed during their travels — of her mother, her home, snow capped mountains, rolling hills of sand — she dreamed alone. She had not heard from Clover since her dream of the lake. There was a part of Fig’s dream self, deep in that slow, molasses consciousness, that felt the gap of her. That thought that, no matter how distracted Fig was by peril or loss, Clover might drop from the sky like rain, or climb from a goblet of water like a bit of fat glistening at its surface. Each night Fig hoped to find her again. To probe her for answers, to find some miracle path forward, and fast. Each night Fig feared she would never see her again, that she was adrift on this long journey alone.

The people of the caravan trusted Quil’s map with their lives. Quil trusted his seer with his life. Fig wondered if she could say the same about her own.

Before dawn broke, Quil, Wren, and Fig were on horseback. Quil rode his mare alone while Fig sat uneasily behind Wren, clutching his waist. Every time he laughed at her she felt his ribs shake.

“You’ve never ridden before?”

She shook her head against his shoulders. Quil’s horse was gentle and patient, dappled with cream spots like sun through the treetops. Fig had, on two occasions, worked up the nerve to pat the side of her head. Wren’s horse was a menace. He kept her hitched to the edge of camp because she loved to eat hair of all kinds and snap her teeth at children’s fingers. Wren braided her mane neatly but the dark brown color was flecked with red.

“Is that blood?” she’d exclaimed upon first getting close.

“No,” he’d laughed, but then narrowed his eyes. “At least, I don’t think so.”

“Does Birdie know you took the horse?” Quil watched them trot with his brows furrowed.

“I’m sure she’s pieced it together.” Wren smiled. “Nobody else would want her, isn’t that right, old girl?” He patted the side of the mare’s head and she turned to nip at him.

Fig tried not to be sick.

It was midday when they found something. They had climbed a hill with the intent of using its height to spot the village in the distance. Instead, they looked down upon a field of giant, sprawling discs. Each deep brown circle was as wide as a house — no, growing out of a house. Fig could make out cobblestones and wooden logs in the gaps between the pulsing, spongy flesh.

They dismounted, and when her first foot touched the ground the magic of the scene blasted through her like a scream. She clutched at her head in pain and fell to her knees.

“Fig, what’s wrong?” Wren knelt beside her.

She covered her ears to stop the cavernous, echoing sound. She struggled to speak. “Just overwhelmed.”

Wren stayed at her side, but his eyes slid to take in the village.

“What happened here?” Quil whispered.

“It’s mushrooms,” Wren answered, his voice trembling in shock. “Is this what that man meant by ‘overtaken’?”

Fig looked up, her head pounding with a chorus of sounds joining into one. She could see it now. The discs of brown stacked on top of each other, stems the size of tree trunks emerging from the houses, the streets. They were larger than anything she’d ever seen. The magic of them was so loud it made her dizzy.

They waited in silence as if testing whether the growths would detach from the village and crawl towards them. The large mushroom caps stayed where they were, but expanded and retracted as if breathing.

Quil turned to Wren, “What are they?”

“I’m not sure. They look like normal browndells, but I’ve never seen any get anywhere near this size. Have you, Fig?”

She took a few deep breaths, exhaling the magic rushing through her. “They’re all connected.” She could feel that in their sound, in the overwhelming mass of them. “It’s not separate beings, it’s one thing. Feeding on the village.”

Quil cursed. Wren was deep in thought. “Interesting. Like a true colony of mushrooms. Some people theorize they’re far more interconnected than we think.”

Fig caught her misstep too late — would they wonder how she knew? Luckily their attention was decidedly elsewhere.

“Is it safe to get closer?” Quil asked.

“Browndells aren’t poisonous,” Wren explained. “It shouldn’t be dangerous to go near them.”

“And the witch who grew them?” Quil muttered.

“That I don’t know,” Wren replied, faint.

Quil consulted his map. The cloudy shapes of its path were unchanged. “Then we go forward.”

Fig tried to block her senses as much as she could without drawing suspicion. She walked in the rear taking deep breaths, sweat gathering at the nape of her neck. She pressed her nails into the skin between her fingers, hard. The pain distracted her mind from the magic.

Quil led the way, his body tensed like a spring. He wore a large bow and quiver on his back but did not reach for either. The village was quiet, even the noise of their footsteps absorbed by the spongy mushroom tissue. On street level, the mushrooms towered above them, the undersides of each cap pale like ground wheat. The flesh there folded in on itself in layers. Fig watched Wren stare with the focus of someone who would furiously sketch the patterns from memory when their work was done. The buildings themselves were similar to those Fig was accustomed to — neat log walls, thatched roofs. They were scattered evenly around a central well, mostly homes with a few communal spaces like a storehouse and gathering hall. The people had not settled here long, but they had settled here firmly.

They tried the gathering hall first. Two long wooden tables filled the length of the great room with stools, chairs, and benches along their edges. Candles burned to their base had spread yellow wax across the surface of both. There were dozens of plates, bowls, cups — empty but abandoned, coated in equal parts wax and rotten food residue. The hall was cold, the fireplaces at either end empty of all but charcoal and ash. No one had eaten there for a while.

The storehouse behind the hall was large, easily the largest building in the village. It stood two stories tall and its wood was the freshest. Fig helped Quil push aside the large sliding door at its entrance. Behind it lay more food than Fig had ever seen in one place. Wooden shelves lined every wall, each filled so tightly she couldn’t see between them. There were mountains of rice and wheat spilling over the top of jute sacks, wooden crates of potatoes and corn, rows and rows of dried meats hanging from neatly knotted rope. Stacks of garlic and herbs braided together in thick garlands hung from every free beam. The air inside was fragrant and heavy.

Quil spoke for the first time since they had descended the hill. “Do not touch anything. Do not eat anything.”

They wandered narrow walking paths between the mounds of food and inspected the goods. Fig poked at a few loose potatoes with her knife, half-expecting to reveal rot beneath. But it was perfect, all of it. Carefully stored and processed, clearly far too much for the number of people who had resided in the village.

Within the walls of the storeroom Fig felt the pressure of the mushroom’s magic lessen on her skull. She took a tentative breath to identify first the dried herbs – thyme, rosemary, beastsbane, harkrose. Behind that, the dry powdery taste of stored grain. Behind even that, faintly, a sweetness that sunk between the gaps of her teeth like biting into fruit.

“It looks fine,” Wren noted in wonder. “No visible signs of tampering or spoiling.”

“Not all dangers are visible,” Quil muttered, poking at dried sprigs of parsley with the tip of an arrow. “How could they have cultivated this much in one season?”

It was impossible. The garden that sustained just Fig and her mother took up much of their clearing in the woods with constant maintenance. To grow this much food would require three times the hands available to this meager village. Wren did the same calculations in his notebook and shook his head. Quil backed away, displeased. They closed the door behind them.

“Let’s try a house,” he said when they were back on the cobblestone street. The homes were far smaller than the communal buildings. They were squat and wide, well constructed but erected quickly. The mushrooms pulsing on each one cast shadows large enough to darken the streets.

They walked to the nearest house. It had a bed of large red pansies wilted beside the door. Quil bent his large frame to press his ear to the gap between door and wall.

“Nothing,” he announced. When he pulled on the door’s handle, it swung open easily.

The interior had no dividing walls, only furniture designating each space. A table surrounded by stools, a few wooden chests, a large shelf stacked with clothes and smaller boxes, two beds. Quil stepped lightly to the larger bed and cursed. Fig and Wren followed behind.

Tucked beneath a large quilt were two women and a young boy. Their eyes were closed as if sleeping, but they lay eerily still. Their skin was so sickly it looked lavender in the dim light from the open door. Wren grabbed Fig’s hand and stepped back.

Quil took a bolt of cloth from his belt and tied it around his mouth. He threw a second to Fig while Wren did the same. Sickness.

Quil pressed two fingers to the closer woman’s throat. “They’re alive,” he said, his voice muffled by the fabric. “Weak, but alive.”

Fig had seen something like this, once. She and her mother had often foraged together. She’d spent years learning what could nourish, heal, hurt. The people of her town in its infancy had no such guide. One day, a woman had collected poisonous fruit not twenty paces from them. They’d hid and watched. Fig remembered how carefully she had counted her bounty, how tenderly she’d stacked the deep purple flesh in her basket. When she’d finished, she picked the final fruit to taste. In moments, she was choking on the ground, cheeks flushed lilac as she gasped for breath. Fig remembered trying to stand. She wasn’t sure what she’d planned to do — just stand in the face of something wretched. It felt proper to at least have one’s knees unbent in the presence of death. But her mother had pulled her down. Leave it, dear one. The hand was tight around her wrist. Now the foolishness ends with her.

Quil gestured for them to leave the house. They regrouped outside, unconsciously walking until they found a patch of sun outside the overhang of fungus. All three removed the cloth from their faces.

“If they’re alive, they can be cured,” Quil said. “Someone in Falls could heal them. Between all the wagons and horses, we could take them.”

If each house held a family, especially with the caravan split, this was impossible. They all knew it. Fig examined Quil’s face. His square jaw, heavy brow, and lined forehead usually communicated practicality, stability, firmness. Today his eyes seemed to pull down at the edges. He was desperate. She had not taken him for a fool.

He squared his shoulders against their silence. “We have to know how many people are in the village. Wren, search the houses north of the well. I’ll do the south. Fig, walk the perimeter looking for tracks. If people came in or left, I want to know where. Any sign of trouble, shout.”

She was relieved her role did not involve entering the homes. Their stillness made her uneasy. If these people lived much longer it would be from an unusual mercy of fate. Tracking was a more comfortable job that she fell into with the ease of practice. There were their own tracks, of course. Then, fainter, those of the small group who had warned them against coming here. Fig walked a full semi-circle before she returned to the storehouse and the well-worn path connecting it to the fields.

Strange. There was just a single field, only twice the size of her own garden. The mushrooms did not reach this far, and Fig shielded her eyes from the sun as she approached. As the field blinked into focus, she realized it was not even half, not even a quarter of the land the village would need to produce to the amount of food in the storeroom. Beyond that, the crops seemed to be flourishing and ready to harvest despite the amount they’d already collected.

Fig stepped forward with a grimace. The plants were packed together so tightly they should surely have died. She could barely make out the tilled lines separating the proliferation of greenery and gourds. She struck at the soil with her knife and unrooted a large, bright carrot. She sniffed for magic and flinched. It was off, somehow. Off in a way she could not place over the pounding echoes of the mushrooms behind her. She tossed it onto the ground.

Circling the field, she found what she assumed to be the footprints of the people who had been working it. And at its very edge, a patch of a spindly kind of green she’d never seen before. There were wide gaps between its leaves, as if, unlike the rest, whatever grew there had already been harvested. She peered at it with curiosity. Why take this and leave the rest behind?

As she knelt closer, she tasted something on the air — the same sweet taste from the storeroom, like peach juice on her gums. Rich. Magic. Magic so much more pleasant than the pulsing, overwhelming force of the mushrooms, than the overcrowded oddness of the field. She tracked it eagerly, entranced. So entranced she did not see the pile of leaves shift unnaturally before her feet. Did not stop herself from stepping into it and falling under the earth.