by Olivia Myers
“You’re sure you don’t want to marry anyone in the clan?” she asked.
Bridget nodded firmly. She knew all of the men in their clan, and couldn’t think of a single one she wanted to spend the rest of her life with. Some, life Ralf, were at least nice, but others were simply cruel.
“Then I have an idea,” Alisa said. “But if you do this, there would be no going back, do you understand?”
Bridget nodded again, her heart leaping this time. “What can I do?” she asked, gazing into her sister’s eyes. “I’ll do anything, if there’s even a hope of escaping this fate.”
Alisa nodded. “If you ran away, or pretended to run away, just for a couple of days, then the clan would have to question your purity. They wouldn’t be able to marry you off anymore. You’d be able to spend the rest of your life as an unmarried woman.”
Bridget nodded slowly. It made sense, and she would then be able to choose a different path for herself. Perhaps she would learn childcare, or midwifery.
“I’ll do it,” she said, her voice firm. She was beginning to feel confident again for the first time since hearing her parents’ conversation this morning. “I’ll go now.”
“Don’t be foolish,” Alisa replied. “You will at least need some supplies.”
“But if I go back,” Bridget said, “they might try to keep me in camp. I’ll be fine, I know how to survive in the woods on my own for two days. I don’t even have to go that far.”
Alisa sighed. “Look, wait here. I’ll run back and get you some stuff. Food, a water skin, a knife, blanket, fire starter… can you think of anything else?”
Bridget shook her head.
“Okay, wait here,” Alisa said. “I shouldn’t be long.”
Bridget hugged her sister tightly in thanks. “I’ll be here, waiting.”
***
True to her word, Alisa wasn’t gone for more than half an hour. She had managed to stuff all of the supplies in a small pack, and handed it over to Bridget.
“Sorry,” Alisa said. “The food is leftover from yesterday, and the blanket is kind of old. I didn’t want them to notice anything was missing.”
“It’s okay,” Bridget said, hefting the pack and then slipping the strap over her shoulder. “Thank you, Alisa,” she said. “Thank you so much.”
The sisters hugged again, and then Bridget turned towards the forest.
“Are you sure about this?” Alisa asked.
“Two days,” Bridget said, taking a deep breath. “It should be easy. The men do it for much longer when they go hunting.”
“If you’re not back within two days,” Alisa said, “then I’m telling them everything. If you get hurt out there, I’ll never forgive myself.”
“I’ll be fine,” Bridget said, meeting her sister’s eyes with a smile. “See you in a couple of days!” Bridget chose a direction away from the village and began walking. She could feel her sister watching her, blessing her with her gaze.
***
The going was easy. Bridget knew these woods well. She had been playing in them since she was a little girl. Even though she wasn’t allowed to go very far alone, she had often accompanied her mother on trips into the forest looking for herbs, and she had followed her father around on patrols. She knew that to really be out of reach of anyone at the village, she would have to go a ways past the normal boundary. She wasn’t scared, though. She decided that if she was going to be spending two days alone in the woods, she might as well take advantage of it. She would take the opportunity to explore.
Bridget paused at the stream that served as a marker for the clan’s usual territory. Past this, the forest was wild. Only the men came out here, for hunting, and Bridget knew she would have to keep alert so that she didn’t stumble onto a hunting party. But that should be easy enough; even the men tended to stick to the well-worn game trails.
Bridget chose a faint trail that was heading slightly north, and decided to follow it as long as she could. She wasn’t that worried about getting lost; once the clan knew she was gone, they would send people out to look for her. She could always light a signal fire if she got into trouble, and she would be found within a few hours. But she was determined not to do that unless it was an emergency. She didn’t want to be found too quickly, because then the clan elders might decide that she was still marriageable.
The day wore on, slowly at first, and then with growing urgency, as if the night was rushing toward her at a breakneck pace. She realized that she would have to stop soon and find somewhere to camp. She had never been this far away from her family, and she had never been this alone. She wasn’t scared, exactly, but she was very aware of her aloneness.
It was getting chilly out as the daylight fled, and Bridget thought longingly of the blanket in her pack, but she forced herself to keep going. She didn’t want to stop too close to the village and risk being found in the morning.
She rounded a bend in the trail and stopped in her tracks. A great gray wolf stood on the trail in front of her. Bridget felt frozen, too surprised to even be scared. The wolf regarded her with an oddly aware look. Bridget felt almost as if a person was looking back at her, instead of a wild beast. She met the wolf’s silver-gray eyes with her own. Something seemed to pass between them, as if their hearts were beating at the same speed, in rhythm with each other. Bridget felt a strange connection to the wolf. The wolf seemed to feel whatever it was too, because it cocked its head and continued to gaze at her, instead of running away or attacking, like she would expect a normal wolf to do.
Suddenly a branch snapped somewhere, deeper in the forest. The wolf was gone, as quickly as a deer disappears when it hears a hunter. Bridget didn’t move for a moment after the wolf left. Her heart was pounding. What had just happened? And what had scared off the wolf?
She didn’t want to find out. She bit her lip and looked around. It was nearly dark enough to set up camp, anyway. She gazed at a nearby tree that had nice, sturdy branches. While spending the night in a tree wouldn’t be comfortable, it would at least be safe. She hadn’t been afraid of the wolf when it was standing in front of her, but now the thought of a wolf pack stalking through the trees around her made her shiver. Plus, there was something out there that had scared off the wolf.
Her mind made up, Bridget walked over to the tree and began to climb it. The lower branches were easy to reach, and she hauled herself up about twenty feet before she felt safe enough to stop. Two branches formed a sort of cradle near the trunk, and Bridget settled here. She pulled the blanket out of her bag, and then looped the strap of the bag around a branch. Then Bridget leaned back against the trunk and closed her eyes.
Sleep didn’t come easily. The sounds of the forest seemed louder than ever, and Bridget found herself jerking back awake every time she approached the edge of sleep. She kept reminding herself that she was in a tree, safely off the ground, and that there was nothing else in these woods that could climb, other than squirrels and bears. As far as bears went, the hunters said that only baby bears really climbed, since the adults were too big. This was a small comfort, and after nearly an hour of unsuccessfully trying to sleep, Bridget retrieved the old knife out of her bag and held it in its sheath against her chest. It made her feel slightly better; the solid weight of steel in her hand was always comforting. It didn’t do much to stop her mind from wandering to thoughts other than those of the immediate danger of being eaten, though.
She kept thinking of her home, and what her parents must be thinking right now. She wondered if Alisa had told them anything. Alisa had probably kept her word, and would remain silent unless Bridget failed to return after two days.
When Bridget thought of her future beyond returning to her home, it was fuzzy. She wouldn’t be able to be married off to one of the men of the clan, but she would still have to make herself useful somehow. If she ended up not having a natural aptitude for healing, then what would she do? She supposed that she could spend her days tending gardens and gathering herbs and berries when it was warm out,
and in the cold seasons, she could repair clothing for the unmarried men. It wouldn’t be the most interesting life ever, but at least she would have more freedom than she would if her father forced her to marry some boorish man who wouldn’t let her leave the house without permission.
Bridget’s thoughts also kept wandering back to the wolf. She hadn’t been scared of it, even though she should have been. Something about the way that it had looked at her, the intensity of its gaze, made her feel like the wolf had really seen her, the person she was. It was as if the wolf had looked at her and known her, in a way that no one else ever had.
Sleep finally came to Bridget as she lay cradled in the branches in the tree. Her last thoughts before she sank into her dreams were of the gray-eyed wolf.
***
The morning dawned cold and gray. Bridget blinked in the pale light, disoriented at first. Why wasn’t she in her bed? Then she remembered the events of yesterday, and squeezed her eyes shut again. Yesterday, she had made the decision to take her life into her own hands. Right now, that decision seemed frightening and harshly real. But she knew that she would have made that same decision again today, or tomorrow, or any other day.
A sudden rustling made her freeze. She exhaled slowly and opened her eyes. Shadows and sound moved beneath her. Something was roaming around her tree.
Bridget still had the knife clutched in her hand; it had grown warm with her body heat during the night. It was still in its sheath, though, and she didn’t want to draw it yet. Climbing down from a tree with a naked blade in her hand didn’t seem like a good idea.
She was getting ahead of herself. It was probably just a deer, or an especially large rabbit. Bridget gathered her courage and slowly moved her head, peering down around one of the branches that supported her. She almost fell out if the tree in surprise when she saw a man standing below her. He was dark-haired, but that was all she could really tell from this angle.
She shifted, trying to get a better view, and to her horror one of her arms snapped a small branch. She froze, and the man looked up. Their eyes met, and for a moment, Bridget flashed back to last night, when she had looked into the wolf’s eyes. She could have sworn that they were exactly the same color as the man’s eyes. And something about them, the intensity of his gaze, reminded her of the wolf, too.
“You’re awake,” the man said, jolting Bridget from her thoughts.
She blinked at him, and realized suddenly how foolish she must look, staring silently down at him from twenty feet up a tree.
“Who are you?” Bridget asked, trying to keep her voice from wavering. She didn’t think it would be good to show fear to this stranger. Perhaps running away from her village had been a mistake. She only wanted her family to think that she might be impure; being alone out here with a strange man seemed too close to the real thing for her.
“My name is Will,” he said. “Don’t worry; I’m not going to hurt you. I just—I saw you last night. There were wolves, and I thought you seemed like you could use some help.”
The man’s eyes were warm and sincere, and he wasn’t carrying any weapons that Bridget could see. Even though she knew, logically, that she shouldn’t go near him, something inside of her seemed to instinctively trust him. Still, she was wary.
“I’m Bridget,” she told him at last. “Are you alone?”
She sat up and carefully folded her blanket before sliding it into her bag. She kept the knife on her though; she slipped it into a small pocket in her shirt.
“It’s only me right now,” he replied, “but I have some companions—my brothers—in an encampment deeper in the woods. I can swear to you that none of them will touch a hair on your head. We can protect you from the other wolves, and we have extra meat, and drink. You’re welcome to come and share a meal with us.”
The other wolves? But his voice was reassuring. Bridget still hesitated for a moment, telling herself she was being foolish to trust him. But when she looked at him, she felt no promise of danger. He seemed…familiar, somehow.
“All right,” she said. “I’ll come down. Just…step back.”
Will stepped back a few measured paces and then looked up at her again. “Is this acceptable?”
Bridget nodded. She grabbed her bag and dropped it down between the branches, and then followed, going much more slowly. She paused every few feet to look over her shoulder, checking to make sure Will was still there. But he didn’t move and, soon enough, Bridget had her feet on the ground again. She picked up her bag and then looked at the man. He was taller than she, and had lean, well-defined muscles that told of a very active life. He had the scruffy beginnings of a beard, and wore clothes of a different style than those of her clan.
“You look like you could use a warm fire and a place to get cleaned up,” he said.
She blushed, realizing that she must look a mess. “I could,” she said. “The fire part sounds nice.”
Will smiled and gestured along the path, in the same direction that the wolf had come from last night.
“This way,” he said. “And stick close. Nothing will hurt you as long as you’re near me, but I can’t keep that promise if you wander off into the woods alone.”
Bridget nodding, reached up to pat her shirt and reassure herself that the knife was still in her pocket.
***
The trail grew fainter and more overgrown as they travelled farther into the forest. Will didn’t seem one for idle chit-chat, and Bridget didn’t try to force him to talk. She was wary, but she wasn’t afraid, not really; somehow she didn’t think Will would hurt her.
The walk took nearly an hour, and Bridget was acutely aware that each step she took was one step farther from her home and everything she had known. She was journeying into the unknown with a stranger—shouldn’t she feel more concerned? Bridget glanced over at Will, admiring his high cheekbones and strong brow. His face was serious, but not unkind. His gray eyes watched the world with the wariness of someone who had been hunted. Bridget bit her lip and forced herself to look away. Why couldn’t there have been a man like this in her clan?
Will put out his hand in a silent gesture that made Bridget stop in her tracks. “We’re here,” he said. “My brothers will want to meet you. Would you like the chance to clean up a bit first? I know I didn’t give you much time to get ready after you woke up.”
“Thanks,” she said, nodding. She felt nervous at the thought of meeting more men. “I must look a wreck.”
Will led her into an encampment, a collection of four tents situated around a common fire. He walked resolutely, in a way that Bridget could only admire—she wished she shared his confidence.
A few men were standing around the low burning fire, but when they started towards Will and Bridget with their eyebrows raised in silent question, Will simply gave them a hard stare. The men paused, obviously wanting to know who Bridget was, but made no further move forward. Will guided her towards a tent that was slightly larger than the others, and Bridget knew instinctively that it was his.
“There’s a water skin to the left,” he said, holding the flap of the tent open for her. “And don’t worry about anyone coming in. I’ll be right outside the door.”
“Thank you,” Bridget said, giving him a small smile before ducking into the tent.
It was roomy inside, with a comfortable looking sleeping pallet and a few bags of extra supplies. Bridget wondered if Will and his brothers were hunters from another clan, or if they were wanderers. She set her small bag down and looked around for the water skin that he had promised. She was beginning to regret not bringing a change or two of clothes, but then, she hadn’t really planned to stumble upon a camp full of strange guys. At least she could wash up a bit, and get her hair looking decent.
Bridget found a small silver plate that she could use as a mirror, though it wasn’t as good as her mirror at home, and managed to get her hair brushed—thankfully her sister had remembered to pack her small brush—and pulled up and away from her face. She
washed her face and hands with the water from the skin, and also rinsed out her mouth. Then she tucked her bag into a corner of the tent, and made sure that the knife was easily accessible under her clothes. She didn’t feel like she would need it, but it was best to have it close by just in case.
When she felt like she was presentable, Bridget pulled back the tent’s flap and peered out. True to his word, Will was standing in front of it, his jaw set as he looked out at the camp. Bridget smiled to herself, enjoying the feeling of being protected. Then she cleared her throat slightly, causing Will to turn his head and look at her.
He grinned when he saw her. “Feeling better?” he asked.
She nodded. “I left my bag in your tent. I hope that’s okay.”
“Of course, it’s fine,” Will assured her. “Are you ready to meet the rest of the pack now?”
Pack? Bridget thought, confused, but she just nodded again.
“I’m ready,” she said.
Will stepped aside, gesturing for her to join him. She did so, and looked around, taking in the encampment. There were three men that she could see, besides Will, and three tents slightly smaller than Will’s in a half circle around the campfire. The fire had burned low, and the men had obviously stopped tending it now that it was fully light out. They were probably only keeping it burning enough that there would still be coals when night fell again. Some sort of animal, rabbit, probably, was on a spit above the fire. She could smell the cooking meat, and her stomach responded with a growl. She was hungry; she hadn’t eaten yet this morning, and had only had a small piece of jerky the night before.
Will stepped forward and Bridget followed next to him. The three men by the fire watched warily as they approached.
“These are my brothers. This is Aiden,” Will said, gesturing to the youngest of the men. He looked like Will, but slighter, as if he hadn’t yet grown in to his height. Aiden nodded at Bridget, his eyes raking over her in a manner that brought a blush to Bridget’s cheeks.
“And this is Connell, and Eric.” The other two men were older than Aiden, and seemed close enough in age with each other to be twins. They weren’t quite identical though; the one that Will gestured to second, Eric, was slightly shorter and broader than Connell.