by P. C. Cast
“Father, be reasonable.”
“I am being reasonable. I’m learning from my past mistakes. You will not be alone.”
“Are you ready to share your secret with the rest of the Tribe?” Nik asked.
“No. But I’m also not ready to lose you. I don’t want you out there alone. Who do you trust, Nik?”
“With a secret of this magnitude? No one!”
“Not the entire secret, Nikolas, only a portion of it. Just the fact that you saw a Scratcher girl who appeared to have the power to draw down sunfire, and that I have tasked you—confidentially, so as not to cause panic within the Tribe—with learning more about this girl on fire. At the same time you’ll be looking for the pup.”
“O’Bryan. I trust him,” Nik said. “After him I’d say Davis.”
“I’m more confident of O’Bryan’s trustworthiness. You’ve been more big brother to him than cousin. But Davis is a good second choice, and I can imagine that you’ll need the tracking skills of a Terrier. Start with O’Bryan, but I’ll let Latrell know that I’ve given permission for Davis and Cameron to search with you as needed.”
“I’ll begin tomorrow morning.”
“I’m afraid the best place for you to search is to go back to that Gathering Site,” Sol said.
“I think so, too.”
“Take O’Bryan tomorrow. See what the two of you can discover on your own.”
“I will,” Nik agreed. “I’ll only call on Davis for help if O’Bryan and I can’t find any trace of either the girl or the pup.”
Sol took Nik’s shoulders in his hands and gave his son a little shake. “Be smart, Nik. And be safe.” Then Sol hugged him with a tightness that seemed almost desperate to Nik. Before he released him the Sun Priest whispered, “I’m sorry you have to carry this with you. I’m sorry you know.”
Nik closed his eyes and returned his father’s embrace. Aloud he said, “That’s okay, Father. That’s okay.” But to himself Nik admitted silently, I’m sorry I know, too. Very sorry …
20
In the weeks following Leda’s death Mari would have died had it not been for Rigel. It’s not that she actively contemplated killing herself. She didn’t think about jumping off a cliff, drowning in a river, or walking into Port City and letting the monsters who ruled the ruins flay the skin from her living body until it lived no more. No, Mari wouldn’t have done any of those things.
She simply would have stopped living.
She wouldn’t have struggled to get out of bed and feed herself so that she had the energy to feed Rigel. She would have just stopped everything—eating, drinking, and, eventually, living. Mari would have curled up on Leda’s pallet and stayed there until she joined her mother in death.
But Mari couldn’t sentence Rigel to the same death. She knew he would die with her. She’d known that since the fire at the Gathering Site. If she wished it, her Shepherd would lie on the pallet beside her and the two of them would sleep forever.
Mari couldn’t ask that of Rigel. He’d escaped the Tribe of the Trees and fought his way through hell to find her—to choose Mari as his Companion for life, and he hadn’t even really lived yet. He deserved better than being entombed with her.
So Mari lived for Rigel.
The morning of the first day was the worst. She woke up in Leda’s bed with Rigel beside her. In that moment between awake and asleep, her mama was still alive, and for a few heartbeats Mari was just confused about why she’d slept in Leda’s bed and why she was so sore and achy—and dirty.
“Mama?” she’d called, yawning and stretching stiffly. Rigel had whined and nuzzled her, waking her more fully, and cruel memory came alive.
Leda was dead.
She and Rigel were alone.
Mari curled into herself and began to sob. Where do all the tears come from? Will they run out? They should. They really should.
She wasn’t hungry at all, just thirsty. Mari made her way slowly to the big stone water trough that she and Leda had just filled together yesterday—right before they’d left to hide Rigel’s tracks. She stood staring at the water, her reflection indistinct in the otherworldly light cast by glowshrooms and glowmoss. Mari’s fingers touched the surface of the water, cool and inviting. She used the small ladle to fill Rigel’s wood water dish first, and the pup began lapping almost frantically. Then Mari drank, and drank deeply—once, twice, three ladles full.
Wiping her mouth she went to the viewing hole and peered up at darkness.
“We slept all day. Or maybe more than one full day.” Mari talked to Rigel, as she normally did, though she tried not to think about the truth—that her pup was all she had to talk to, all she had to live for.
He’d gotten done with the water, and was circling around her, huffing and looking at the door expectantly.
“Okay, you have to go out. We have to do this differently now. We have to be even more careful than before—before when Leda was alive.” Mari led Rigel slowly through the brambles, and then made him remain concealed within the thorny thicket while she went ahead and searched the night for dangers. The crescent moon was low in a clear sky. The forest was still. Mari hurried back to Rigel and held her arms open. “Up!” she called to him, and Rigel trotted quickly to her, springing up into her waiting arms. “We have to practice this a lot so that I can keep lifting you. I can’t let you walk around outside our burrow. I can’t take any chance of them finding you.” She carried him far enough away from the burrow, putting him down so that he could relieve himself. Only then did she consider exactly from whom she must stay hidden. “Everyone,” she told the young canine as he watched her with his intelligent amber gaze. “We have to hide from the Companions looking for you, and we have to hide from Sora and the rest of the Scratchers.” Mari drew a long, sad breath and let it out slowly, feeling the weight of reality settling heavily on her shoulders. “We don’t have any friends. Rigel, I don’t think we can trust anyone.”
The pup came to where she was sitting and put his head on her shoulder, sighing and leaning into her, flooding her with feelings of warmth and love and acceptance.
“You’re right. We can trust each other, and that’s enough.” Mari put her arms around Rigel and buried her face in the thick, soft fur of his neck.
The pup held very still, sharing his warmth and his love with his Companion. It was only when his stomach growled ferociously that Mari stirred.
“Hungry. You have to be hungry. Mama smoked some rabbit for us. I can make stew and we’ll—” Mari’s words ran out. We’ll what? Mama’s not here. Mari shook her head. “No. I won’t think about that. We’ll eat. That’s all I have to think about right now.” A skittering sound in the brush behind them had Mari standing and calling, “Up, Rigel!” She held her pup close, drawing strength from him even though her body was exhausted and her mind mired in sadness.
It was while she was preparing their stew that Mari decided to change everything.
“We used to sleep most of the day and stay up, waiting for Mama, most of the night. We can’t do that anymore, Rigel.” Mari kept up a steady stream of her thoughts spoken aloud as she cut carrots and onions for the stew. “Only males mad with Night Fever go out alone at night. And—and we don’t have Mama to wait up for anymore.” Mari paused, blinking hard against the tears that threatened to drown her. “We’ll set snares and check them during the day. We’ll tend our gardens and harvest vegetables and fruits and herbs during the day. We’ll do all the things we used to do with Mama at night during the day. And then, Rigel, at night we’ll be here, in our burrow, asleep and safe.”
Rigel sat close to her, watching her intently while she talked. Gone was the puppy-like mischievousness that used to have him poking his nose where it shouldn’t be, and grabbing anything from a carrot to a slingshot rock to chew on. In the course of one day and night, Rigel had shed his puppyish playfulness; replacing it was the somber, listening demeanor of an adult Shepherd.
Mari told herself that the change in
Rigel was a good thing, though the truth was that in the most secret part of her she mourned the loss of her puppy.
“Okay, your stew is ready. Here you go.” Mari ladled out Rigel’s portion, and then, noting his eagerness and the hollow look his belly suddenly had, she added more to the bowl, and kept filling the silence in the burrow with the sound of her voice as she continued to stir the stew, cooking it more thoroughly for her potion.
“So, where were we? That’s right. We’re going out during the day. Yes, I know that daylight has its own dangers. Someone from the Clan might see me, and if the sun is shining just right they might see my skin glow.” She stopped mid-stir of the stew as a new and freeing thought came to her. “Rigel, I don’t care if they see me!” The pup stopped eating and cocked his head at her. “Don’t you understand? Mama always worried about the Clan finding out about me because she was afraid we’d be banished and she wanted me to be accepted by the other Earth Walkers. All of that has changed now. I’m not going to follow Mama as the next Moon Woman. I’m not part of the Weaver Clan. I’ve never really been part of Mama’s Clan. So, I don’t care if someone sees me and thinks my hair is too light or my skin glows in the sun because I’ve already banished myself!”
Mari stood there, holding the ladle and staring into the steaming stew while she tried to let her new life settle through her skin and into her soul. She wouldn’t go out of her way to flaunt what she was to the Earth Walkers, but she also wouldn’t avoid the daylight as she had been doing for most of her life. She’d be careful. She’d stay away from the Gathering Sites and the Clan’s burrows, but she was finished with hiding from the sun.
A stray thought wound through her inner monologue. I didn’t hide from the sun at the creek, and fire came to me. I lit the forest on fire. How? How did I do that? Mari shook herself. Later. Think of it later. Not now. She began dishing up stew for herself as she continued thinking aloud.
“I do have to be careful that no one finds us here, but this burrow is something that Mama and I have been hiding my entire life.” There were all sorts of checks and balances for keeping their burrow’s location secret, and Mari knew all of them as well as she knew how to make a two-dimensional sketch seem to live and breathe. “And I have to make sure that no one ever finds you—hurts you—takes you away from me.” Mari drew several deep breaths to steady herself. “Hiding. You’re going to practice hiding until you are so good at it that you can appear and disappear like smoke.”
Rigel sneezed and went back to crunching rabbit bones. Mari would have smiled at him, but she wasn’t able to make the corners of her mouth lift.
What’s next? What happens after we hunt and gather and take care of the daily tasks of living? Then what do we do? How do we fill our lives?
Mari didn’t realize she’d frozen again and had been staring motionless into the cauldron of stew until Rigel whined and pressed against her leg.
“Sorry,” she said quickly, refilling his bowl. Then she sat beside him with her own dinner. “Here’s what we’ll do next. We’ll move ahead one day, and then another, and then another. Together.” Resolutely, Mari lifted her wooden spoon, forcing herself to take first one bite, then another, and then another. She ignored the tears that tracked down her cheeks and the terrible ache in her heart.
* * *
It was surprising how simple it was for Mari to change their sleeping pattern and the habits that went along with it. Perhaps part of the reason she slept so easily and soundly was because the only escape she had from the sadness that filled her days was in her dreams. Only when she dreamed was Leda still alive. Only when she dreamed was Mari happy and Rigel a playful pup again.
The screams began not long past dusk the seventh night after Leda’s death. As had become her habit, Mari had closed and barred the door at sunset and was just completing the first of the new snares she had designed to catch live rabbits. Rigel was chewing contentedly on a venison bone Mari had scavenged from a fresh kill she’d made just that morning. The first scream was so feral that Mari almost discounted it as her brain automatically processed the sound as animal rather than human.
The second scream was closer. It was also more clearly human. Rigel dropped his bone, growling low in his throat.
“Stay close to me,” Mari told him, though she needn’t have said anything. Unless they were practicing his hiding skills, the Shepherd never strayed from her side, always keeping her in his sight. Mari unbarred the door and the two of them crept out, maneuvering through the winding, bramble-covered pathway that snaked around the burrow. Mari and Rigel didn’t leave the protection of the thicket. Instead they paused just inside its boundary, listening.
The next screams were more distant, with each succeeding scream drifting farther and farther away. Mari kept listening until there was nothing left to hear, and then she and Rigel returned to the burrow, barring the door once more.
Mari took up her charcoal pencil and pulled out a fresh sheet of paper. The pencil felt almost foreign in her hand, and she realized with a start of surprise that she hadn’t sketched anything since the day of Leda’s death. Suddenly her vision was flooded with images of her mother—her smile, her gentle hands, the thickness of her hair, the tenderness in her gray eyes—and she shook with the effort not to put those images on paper.
“This first. Then Mama. Then I’ll sketch Mama,” Mari said. Clutching the charcoal she started making notes about the screams. She realized she should have counted them, and made a separate note to herself about that—COUNT THE SCREAMS NEXT TIME. Then she went on, writing about the direction the sounds seemed to come from, how long they lasted, and how it sounded like it was only one person screaming, and that it had definitely been a male voice.
“We’ll stay away from the southeast tomorrow,” she told Rigel. “We usually don’t go far in that direction anyway because of the Gathering Site and burrows down there, but there are also wild berries that should be ripe about now. We’ll find them in the north, or we’ll do without them.” Mari made an additional note about the berries, adding a reminder to search elsewhere for them.
And then she chose a new sheet of blank paper. She ran her hand over the smooth surface as she closed her eyes and let an image of her mother come to her. When she was ready, she opened her eyes and began to sketch.
Mari finished quickly. As if she’d just awakened from one of her dreams, she blinked, rubbed her eyes, and then looked down at her creation.
Leda smiled up at her. She was sitting near the hearth, at her favorite spot for basket weaving. Her expression was filled with the familiar warmth and joy with which Leda had looked at her daughter for as long as Mari had memory. Gently, Mari’s finger traced the sketch, not realizing she was crying until her tears dropped with sad plopping sounds onto the paper. With fast, jerky movements, Mari wiped the dampness away and then, taking the sketch with her, she went to the pallet that used to be Leda’s, and that she now shared nightly with Rigel. Hugging the paper to her, Mari curled up with Rigel pressed against her back.
Only this night she didn’t fall so easily into an exhausted, dream-filled sleep. This night Mari remained awake for a long time, listening for screams and thinking … thinking …
21
Mari and Rigel woke at dawn. At first it had surprised her, how easy it was to align her waking and sleeping hours with the sun. If it was above the horizon—she was awake. If the sun had set—she and Rigel were heading to their bed. It actually made life easier, this ebb and flow of days that moved with the sun.
It was almost as if she’d forgotten the moon completely. Almost.
Mari fed Rigel and munched on dried apples while she worked on the live snares she’d been struggling with for the past several days. Weaving the last piece in place, she lifted a finished trap and smiled. “Rigel, I think I did it!”
The pup lifted his head from the bowl of rabbit stew and huffed happily at her, trotting to her as his whole body seemed to wag. Mari petted him and kissed the top of his h
ead. “Go on—finish your breakfast. We’re going to set this trap and then go mushroom hunting.”
Rigel did as he was told, but his reaction to her smile and the excitement in her voice had Mari sighing and looking inward.
This is the first time I’ve smiled since Mama’s death.
The thought shocked her, though Mari wasn’t sure whether that was because she had actually smiled, or because Rigel’s reaction made her realize just how sad she had been—how sad they had been.
“It’s not fair for you,” she told the pup, who stopped eating again to look at her, his tail wagging tentatively. “You deserve a happy family. You had a happy family.” Rigel whined and, with an effort, Mari formed her lips into a smile again. For Rigel I’ll try. For Rigel I’ll smile.
As the Shepherd finished his breakfast he kept watching her while she applied the clay that thickened her features, focusing on her smile, his tail thumping against the floor of the burrow.
She almost didn’t camouflage her features, but habit and fear had her sitting at her desk, meticulously changing her reflection. But she didn’t reapply the hair dye.
“No more. I don’t care that my hair is different. I just don’t care,” Mari told Rigel, who huffed and seemed to agree with her.
When she was ready, Mari took the satchel she’d begun packing every evening before they went to sleep. She had a cutting tool, her slingshot and smooth stones, the bladder newly filled with lavender oil and saltwater—just in case they got caught outside around dusk and wolf spiders tracked them. Mari also wrapped up some leftover rabbit for Rigel and for herself a collard leaf wrap filled with a mixture of sunflower seed paste, spring onions, sprouts, and the last of Leda’s store of mushrooms.
“Okay,” she told Rigel as they paused just outside the burrow door. “We’re going to go away from the screams we heard last night. Good thing the early mushrooms are in the opposite direction, and not far from here. And I can set the live snare in the ash grove where we’ll be mushroom hunting. When I was there with Mama, both of us said it was an excellent place to set the trap.” Mari paused, letting the moment of pain pass that thinking of the everyday things she and Leda used to do always caused her. Then she brightened and tried, unsuccessfully, to smile at Rigel again. “But we’re still going to be really careful. And we’re going to practice a lot of this,” Mari concentrated, imaging Rigel crouched quietly, hiding just inside the door to the burrow.