eriot's shirt, that had been cut and changed and worked all over
with peacocks' feathers. And he stood staring at it, astounded and
aghast. Recovering himself, he turned to leave the lodge, but stumbled
on the open coffer, hanging out of which was a second smock; and this
one had two lions worked on the back and front, and one was red and the
other white, and the smock had been Hugh's shirt. Then Hobb fell on the
coffer and searched its contents till he had found Lionel's little
shirt fashioned into a linen vest, with a tiny border of fantastic
animals dancing round it, pink pigs, and black cocks, and white
donkeys, and chestnut horses. And last of all he found the shirt of
Ambrose, tattered and frayed, and every tatter was worked at the edge
with a different hue, and here and there small mocking patches of color
had been stitched above the holes.

And at each discovery the light in Hobb's eyes grew calmer, and the
beat of his heart more steady. And he walked out of the Pilleygreen
Lodge and as straight as his feet would carry him across Open Winkins
and the green ride, and into the Red Copse. As he went he shut down the
dread in his heart of what he should find there, "For," said Hobb to
himself, "I shall need more courage now than I have ever had." It was
black in the Red Copse, with a blackness blacker than night, and the
wild races of moonlight that splashed the floors of Open Winkins were
here unseen. But a line of ruddy fireflies made a track on the
blackness, and Hobb, going as softly as he might, followed in their
wake. Just before the middle of the Copse they stopped and flew away,
and one by one, as each reached the point deserted by its leader,
darted back as though unable to penetrate with its tiny fire the
fearful shadows that lay just ahead. But Hobb went where the fireflies
could not go. And he found a dark silent hollow in the wood, where
neither moon nor sun could ever come; and at the bottom of it a long
straggling pool, with a surface as black as ebony, and mud and slime
below. Here toads and bats and owls and nightjars had come to drink,
with rats and stoats who left their footprints in the mud. And on the
ground and bushes Hobb saw slugs and snails, woodlice, beetles and
spiders, and creeping things without number. The gloom of the place was
awful, and turned the rank foliage of trees and shrubs black in
perpetual twilight. But what Hobb saw he saw by a light that had no
place in heaven. For kneelin