And Rodriguez gathered from the songs they sang something of what they were and of how they lived in the forest, living amongst the woodland creatures till these men’s ways were almost as their ways; killing what they needed for food but protecting the woodland things against all others; straying out amongst the villages in summer evenings, and always welcome; and owning no allegiance but to the King of the Shadow Valley.

And the leader told Rodriguez that his name was Miguel Threegeese, given him on account of an exploit in his youth when he lay one night with his bow by one of the great pools in the forest, where the geese come in winter.  He said the forest was a hundred miles long, lying mostly along a great valley, which they were crossing.  And once they had owned allegiance to kings of Spain, but now to none but the King of the Shadow Valley, for the King of Spain’s men had once tried to cut some of the forest down, and the forest was sacred.

Behind him the men sang on of woodland things, and of cottage gardens in the villages:  with singing and laughter they came to their journey’s end.  A cottage as though built by peasants with boundless material stood in the forest.  It was a thatched cottage built in the peasant’s way but of enormous size.  The leader entered first and whispered to those within, who rose and bowed to Rodriguez as he entered, twenty more bowmen who had been sitting at a table.  One does not speak of the banqueting-hall of a cottage, but such it appeared, for it occupied more than half of the cottage and was as large as the banqueting-hall of any castle.  It was made of great beams of oak, and high at either end just under the thatch were windows with their little square panes of bulging bluish glass, which at that time was rare in Spain.  A table of oak ran down the length of it, cut from a single tree, polished and dark from the hands of many men that had sat at it.  Boar spears hung on the wall, great antlers and boar’s tusks and, carved in the oak of the wall and again on a high, dark chair that stood at the end of the long table empty, a crown with oak leaves that Rodriguez recognised.  It was the same as the one that was cut on his gold coin, which he had given no further thought to, riding to Lowlight, and which the face of Serafina had driven from his mind altogether.  “But,” he said, and then was silent, thinking to learn more by watching than by talking.  And his companions of the road came in and all sat down on the benches beside the ample table, and a brew was brought, a kind of pale mead, that they called forest water.  And all drank; and, sitting at the table, watching them more closely than he could as he walked in the forest, Rodriguez saw by the sunlight that streamed in low through one window that on the copper disks they wore round their necks on green ribbon the design was again the same.  It was much smaller than his on the gold coin but the same strange leafy crown.  “Wear it as you go through Shadow Valley,” he now seemed to remember the man saying to him who put it round his neck.  But why?  Clearly because it was the badge of this band of men.  And this other man was one of them.