Wisteria shifted her attention. She kissed Tull with passion, and felt him respond in kind. His eyes closed, and she watched his face for a reaction. He seemed to kiss with his whole soul, using every muscle of his body to caress her. She reached up under his shirt and stroked the hairs of his chest. He felt so strong and reassuring. Being with him was nice.

Yet she knew that if the journey reached a point where it might succeed, she would have to betray him. She wondered how she could accomplish such an act—betray him so that he'd never know. If Phylomon found out what she'd done, he'd punish her.

Tull moved his hand down to her thigh. A wolf howled nearby, followed by others, and Wisteria shivered in fear.

The fire crackled and spread its light to the nearer trees. Beyond that, the forest was impenetrably dark. Wisteria noticed a smell that reminded her of cheese, a delicate yellow cheese her father sometimes bought from farmers far to the south, and she thought it strange that Tull's skin should bear this sweet, sour smell. And suddenly she became aware that the scent was growing stronger, and she thought that very strange.

A twig cracked beside her, and Tull whirled and pulled his kutow, swinging the double-headed ax over his head as he issued a battle challenge.

Scandal jumped for his weapon, but Phylomon shouted, "Hold!"

Four giant women stepped out of the darkness, each completely nude, each of them well over eight feet tall, with dark cinnamon-colored hair and skin as dark as the redwoods themselves.

Wisteria gasped, for they seemed to her to have materialized from thin air, their presence heralded only by their smell. Each was shapely and beautiful, with wide hips and pointed breasts; Wisteria felt so embarrassed by their nudity that she had to stifle an impulse to run and grab blankets to cover them. They were Dryads, of course, keepers of the redwood forest.

One woman carried a thin white bundle on her shoulder.

She stepped forward and tossed the mayor's Dryad to the ground at Wisteria's feet, as if the girl were a sack of grain. The red woman moved her fingers through the air, waving them as if they were falling snow blown by the wind. Wisteria recognized the action from legend——Hukm finger language—but she'd never known anyone who spoke the strange tongue. The Dryad of the redwoods waved her fingers downward three times, then made a single emphatic chopping motion.

Phylomon said, "Get the mayor's Dryad some water." Phylomon waved his fingers at the women, then blinked once.

The red woman raised her hand and let her fingers fall, weaving syllables into the motions of her fingers; she made a chopping motion at the end, and then backed silently into the shadowed woods.

Wisteria raced back to the wagon to get the last of the drinking water. Tull, seeming hesitant to give up kissing Wisteria, went to the wagon and stripped cloth for compresses. Phylomon and Wisteria washed dirt and blood from the Dryad.

Tirilee's pale white skin, normally mottled by a few dark stripes, was blackened by bruises and tiny cuts. Her clothes were shredded. She watched Phylomon with unfocused eyes, but seemed not to realize where she was.

"The Dryads of the redwoods caught her following us," Phylomon explained. "They beat her at first, but decided she might be with our party, so they brought her here. I told them that she was our scout. They say we must take her from their forest immediately. If we let her plant any of her aspen trees, they'll kill us."

"My God!" Scandal said. He walked away from the fire and peered beyond its ring of light. Wisteria could smell the scent of cheese very strongly as she worked. "Do you smell that," Scandal called. "Froghollow cheese, yellow and sweet. You'd think it was fermenting in their breasts."

Wisteria glanced over her back. Shadows covered the wild clover on the forest floor. There was no sign of the Dryads.

Ayuvah stepped up beside her and said, "We should try to get some rest."

Scandal laughed, "How can I sleep with those lovely creatures out there?" He called aloud to the trees, "Ladies, it's warmer here by the fire!" but none of the red women came back into the camp. "Ah, well, I'll go get some water." He grabbed a bucket from the wagon and headed off into the woods.

Phylomon very tenderly prodded each bone in the Dryad's arms, ribs, and legs, checking for breaks. He said to Ayuvah, "She's got some cracked ribs, but I think she'll live. Help us get her on the wagon. We can lay her in the barrel."

Ayuvah shuffled his feet, kicked at a pine cone. "Tcho," he said. No.

Wisteria looked up at her husband, and he too stared down at the ground. She was shocked at his heartlessness. "None of us Pwi can touch her," Tull said. "Touch a Dryad, and she will destroy you. You can wash her and put her in the wagon . . . if you must. I stand with Ayuvah in this."

She had seen how the Pwi men crossed the road when they'd passed the mayor's house back in Smilodon Bay. No Pwi would dare touch a Dryad for fear that they would be destroyed by their own lust.

Phylomon gazed up at Tull, studied him for a moment.

Off in the darkness, Scandal stubbed his toe on a log, muttered a curse, sloshed his bucket into the stream. Phylomon asked, "What would you do, leave her to die?"

Ayuvah said, "Yes, leave her. We would not let any other man-eater into camp. We should not let that creature near, either."

Tull said nothing.

"It is not her fault that she is what she is," Phylomon said. "Her Time of Devotion may be months away. Her lust cannot hurt you now."

"You do not know that," Tull said.

Phylomon stared at the ground, weighing the risks.

"She's just a child," Wisteria said. "I'll take care of her." She took off her own bearskin robe and placed it over the girl. The Dryad seemed tiny and frail, a young thing with breasts that had not budded. Wisteria wondered at the girl's courage, to have come this far in the wilderness without protection.

Scandal brought the water back from the stream, took out a pan and poured some to set by the fire. "We'll have no talk of leaving her," he said. "Why, when I was an apprentice, my master told me to never throw anything away—especially people. You never know what you can get in return. He always kept a few 'table scrap' children around. He said, 'When a girl comes begging for table scraps, you give them to her and ask for a little work in return. You can let her clean the tables in the inn. As she gets older, you put her to work whoring, and when her looks are gone, she goes back to the kitchen. And when she's too feeble for that, you put her to work as a maid, let her do some light sweeping and whatnot. In the end, you can get a whole lifetime of work from the girl, but what have you invested? Why, mostly table scraps!"

Scandal and Phylomon made a bed in the huge barrel on the back of the wagon and then lugged the girl to her bed. Wisteria sat with her far into the night.

When it was time to sleep, Wisteria went to lie beside Tull. He was already wrapped in a bearskin. When she crawled under the blanket, she found he was naked. He put his arm over her and kissed her, as if to take up where they'd left off before the forest women came.

She kissed him once, but in her mind's eye she saw the young Dryad bleeding and broken on a bed of redwood needles, with Tull and Ayuvah walking off to let her die.

Wisteria asked Tull, "Would you have left that girl—I mean really left her, if I hadn't been here?"

"No." Tull said after a moment. "I'd have taken her to a human settlement, given her to someone else."

You would have sent her back into slavery, Wisteria thought. He'd have punished the girl for having the audacity to try to escape. She studied Tull a long time, his flaring nostrils, pale skin smoothed by a round skull. He even spoke with a Pwi accent, making his vowels nasal by routing them through enlarged sinuses. Human thoughts did not flow through his mind. She was ashamed for wanting to make love to him earlier. He was so clumsy and stupid; if he had not insisted on standing next to her on that night, her father might have escaped. Now he was clumsy at love. Why didn't he understand that she couldn't love him after the coldness he'd just shown that little girl? She shoved him away, turned her back.

He put his arm over her shoulder, but neither of them spoke, and neither could sleep.