The Trail
The Free Folk's initiation: a whole year lived alone, begun in the sixteenth year of a life, and the door into the community at seventeen
Among the Free Folk a child is made a member of the community by being sent out of it. The Trail begins in the sixteenth year of a life and runs a full year, lived alone and in isolation, and what it is for is to learn what it means to have nobody to help you and to sharpen the skills of staying alive. Come through it and you are welcomed in. The community is every member of the tribe from the age of seventeen, and the Trail is how one arrives there.
What is asked afterward is asked of everybody: to tame at least one horse, to sharpen one’s fighting and above all one’s archery from horseback, to hunt, and to care for the rest of the community. Beyond that a member may specialize, in healing, in the breeding of horses, in cooking. Beyond that again there is the rule they say out loud, which is that the community stands above all.
The Trail falls on those raised among them. There is no price at the Free Folk’s door and no test, and somebody who comes to them grown comes by another road altogether. Koa Attila’s family joined when he was already a teenager, and whether he walked it was never written down.