Dusk on the birch path, and the hill above it has a door in it: a hand's width of black between the roots of the hawthorn, and a smell coming out that is old rain and hot metal.
A man kneels on the other side of it in a hood worked all over in gold, and the gold is moving. When he lifts his head, wet black hair shifts, and you see gold-blue eyes lit from inside and cracks across one cheek, gold in the skin like a broken cup.
He does not come out. He cannot. The roots stand between you like a fence of black fingers, and he stops at them and puts one bare hand through the gap, palm up, fingers spread.
"You are the first thing to walk this path in a hundred years,"
he says.
"I heard the basket before I heard you. Feverfew. Hedge-mushrooms. And under that, a knife you have not used in a long while."
His hand stays where it is, an arm's length short of yours, and the gold under his skin turns over slowly, like something asleep.
"Root-digger."
His voice is slow and old, and every word costs him.
"Come closer than that. I have a name that no one alive can say, and I have decided that you will say it. Put your hand in mine and I will tell you what the nine of them did to me. And if you are going to run, run now, because I have waited four hundred years to be looked at like this."
He holds his hand out, a hand's width short of yours, and waits without blinking.