"I don't know what the symbols mean," Frederigo told her, "but I am sure
that they
are nothing that we need worry about." Andrea had the feeling that Fred
was being evasive.
He was clearly familiar with the fens, to be able to keep them on a safe
path, so it
seemed unlikely that he could genuinely be ignorant about the symbols. And
if
he didn't know what they meant, how could he be sure that they were
harmless? She might
be very naïve, but she was far from being a fool.
After a while, she began to wonder if the symbols were marking the safe path. What else could they be for? And to have marked the trees throughout the rest of the fens in the same way as those near their path would have been a massive undertaking. But if the explanation was as innocent as that, why hadn't Fred said so? Unless... Perhaps the symbols marked a path to somewhere where she would rather not go? They had been travelling through the fens for several hours now. Once or twice, Andrea had stepped off the path, and Fred had had to pull her free from the sucking mud. She was mired up to the knees now. Fred himself seemed to have an almost uncanny ability to avoid putting a foot wrong, however. It was cold, a dank chill that seemed to enter her very bones, and a mist was beginning to form. To add to her discomfort, she had a persistent itch in the small of her back, in the one spot that she couldn't really reach to scratch. She'd be damned if she'd ask Fred to scratch it for her, though.
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1/1/2000 9:58:47 AM
Extending Enabled
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