“It’s only a bit of blood,” said Shilara—but though she had the tone that Jasen had heard adults putting on around children when they knew better, there was a touch of glee in there too. “It won’t hurt you.”
Alixa looked as though she thought it very well could hurt her—
“Night’s ticking away,” Shilara said. “What happened to being brave?”
That got Alixa moving. She was stiff though, and she gagged again as she came to the wagon’s edge.
“It’s okay—” Jasen started to reassure her.
“Oh, ancestors,” she moaned, loosing the first branch with the lightest touch, clutching a leaf between a thumb and forefinger. She flicked it to one side very slightly, letting it drop as soon as was physically possible.
She reached for the next—
The wagon jolted, and her fingers brushed wood.
She yanked them back, staring horrorstruck at the darkness marring her fingertips.
Shilara clamped down a grin from Milo’s side. “Whoops. Thought he was getting flighty. Seems calm now, though. Carry on.”
Alixa began a soft murmur to herself. Jasen could not pick it out, but when he glanced sidelong at her face, she looked petrified. Every movement she made to clear away the branches was incredibly delicate and hesitant, as if she was assessing the cleanest possible points to touch.
But it would be futile. Shilara’s words rung in Jasen’s mind, as they surely did in Alixa’s: there were buckets in the back for them.
Shilara had affixed the horse at the same time as the wagon was cleared of its camouflage.
“Good work,” she said. “Now hop in the back and grab those buckets, would you?”
Alixa looked queasy.
“I’ll do it,” Jasen told her.
He hefted himself over the side—a particularly ungainly way of clambering aboard a wagon, but it got the job done.
There were supplies stowed in the back, mostly in sacks, so Jasen could not pick out what they were. Changes of clothes, probably; something they could lay across the wagon’s raised sides and stow themselves away for the night should a downpour start too? There would be sacks for the seed Shilara planned to take. Waterskins—that was probably the fattest sack, leaning oddly against one side.
At the front were what he sought: two buckets. And they were awful. Packed to the brimming with inedible organs and trimmings, they were a mass of slick darkness. As Jasen took the handle of one, sleeping flies were jolted to life, and flitted into the night en masse. The second yielded another miniature swarm.
He climbed down via the front, sitting to do so, then brought the buckets round.
By the wagon’s side, he waited.
“Go on then,” Shilara said impatiently. “Get to it.”
“What are we doing?” Jasen asked. He was certain he knew the answer—the wagon itself was a reasonable template of what was expected of them—but he wished to hear Shilara’s instructions. For if he were wrong, he would only know from her mouth … and oh, how he wished to be wrong.
“Cover yourselves in it,” said Shilara.
Jasen looked down. He felt a sudden touch of faintness.
Alixa, at his side, gagged.
“Oh, bloody hell.” Shilara stepped to him, and took one bucket. Dropping it at her feet—the contents made an unpleasant wet noise—she reached in, picked up some discarded lump of flesh, and began to smear it across her face. She shut her eyes and pressed her lips firmly together to prevent any creeping into her mouth.
“Well, go on,” she said as she moved on to her neck and opened her eyes to see Jasen and Alixa had not moved.
He cast a glance at his cousin.
If she had been horrified before, this was another level of disgust entirely.
“Sorry,” said Jasen.
He reached into the remaining bucket, slowly …
It was cold and greasy upon his fingertips. A shudder ran up his arm, breaking him out in gooseflesh. The blood seemed to be partially congealed—or maybe it was just the cool night making it seem thicker. It coated his fingers like a thick oil, his palm …
The thing he removed looked like a liver. It probably wasn’t—the butcher used those—but Jasen didn’t know what it might’ve been.
Not that it mattered. He had one task now: covering himself.
Looking apologetically again at Alixa, he shut his eyes tight, pressing his lips as hard together as he could, and began to rub it over his face.
The smell was wretched. An iron tang so close to his nostrils it delved into his lungs. He coughed, almost gagging—how could Shilara be so unfazed by this?—but pushed on, telling himself, My face is the worst part. It’ll be easier after this.
Alixa still hadn’t moved when Jasen dared to open his eyes.
“Chop chop, girl,” Shilara barked.
Alixa tried to speak. No sound came from her mouth.
“Get your words out. Come on.”
“I can’t,” Alixa said. She sounded strangled.
“If you don’t do it, you won’t be crossing to Wayforth,” Shilara said.
Alixa let out a low noise, pale in the bare moonlight. “But …”
“I mean it,” said Shilara. She reached into the bucket and lifted a fresh handful of viscera. “Now get to it.”
Alixa watched in horror as Shilara rubbed the bloody organs across her face again, darkening the color to a murky pitch as a new coat of blood was laid on top of the old. She scrubbed them from her forehead down, and the organs brushed lips pressed tight—
Alixa gagged, turning away. She brought up nothing—but it sounded as though it was a very, very close thing.
Shilara smirked. “You’d never make a butcher, would you?”
“Butchers don’t rub innards across their faces,” Alixa said.
“You’re gagging and you haven’t even started yet,” said Shilara. “Not much bravery here at all.”
Jasen bit his tongue. Shilara and Alixa could be as bad as each other, and standing here now, as Shilara lorded it over the girl’s discomfort, he did not believe this would be the last of it.
But Alixa was brought into jerky, disgusted motion. With pained eyes darting to Jasen, she reached for the bucket—
She gagged again.
“It’s okay,” said Jasen. “The face is the worst of it. I promise.”
Alixa didn’t reply. A trembling hand dropped into the bucket …
Her fingers made contact with the bucket’s contents. She made a high-pitched noise that came from her throat—her lips seemed afraid to move now, as if an organ might launch itself down her gullet if she parted them—and retracted her hand—but she pushed on, sinking it lower, lower …
Again, Jasen didn’t recognize what was lifted clear. A gelatinous blob of some kind.
Maybe if Alixa could pretend it was a gelatinous blob, and not the interior of some gutted animal, she would fare better.
She lifted it to her face, very slowly. She stared at it in her hand, drawing closer, her eyes getting wider and wider …
Then they clamped shut as it was just inches shy.
It remained there.
Her lips were locked tight. A moment later, she gripped her nostrils with the fingers of her free hand, locking them closed.
She made a sound again, a high-pitched noise between a sob and a squeal, and pressed the organ to her cheek—
And promptly vomited, bringing up a fountain of bile.
Her retching went on for a long time, punctuated only by Shilara’s muffled laughing fit.
Eventually, Alixa’s vomiting petered out. She continued to retch, dry sounds that produced no fluid. But the sheer act of emptying herself of the meager contents of her stomach seemed to exhaust her both physically and mentally, for with Jasen’s help she applied a covering of animal blood. It was a slow task, and every punctuating gag made Jasen flinch back, in case she somehow found a new source of liquid and sprayed him with it. She did not—and, looking beaten down, she w
as finally coated in blood and stank to high heaven.
“There,” said Shilara. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”
Alixa gave her a weary look and said nothing.
“Mount up, you two,” Shilara instructed, climbing aboard. “You’ll ride behind me. Go on, now. We’ve spent long enough dallying as it is.”
Jasen boarded and Alixa followed, taking care not to place themselves near their supplies.
Sitting was unpleasant. Blood had turned their clothes damp, and sitting pressed them against Jasen’s legs and torso. They’d inevitably stick. He dreaded tomorrow, when the warmth of the sun dried it against him. He should be happy, he supposed, he did not yet have a man’s thick layer of body hair; there was less to get matted.
Shilara got Milo moving. He’d been covered too, and had taken it much more graciously than either Jasen or Alixa.
Jasen leaned against the wagon’s side, watching the village grow smaller behind them, ignoring the bucket stowed next to him—the remaining animal blood and organs, for when it came time to re-coat themselves.
Alixa sat opposite, determinedly not looking at it. Instead, she wrung her hands and gazed at the wagon’s floor with a long, far-away stare.
“I always dreamed I’d leave the village someday,” he mused.
Shilara said, “Mm?” over her shoulder.
Jasen nodded, though she could not see. “Didn’t dream I’d smell of death when I did so, though.”
Alixa murmured, “I dreamed that when I left the village, it would be when I smelled of death.”
Shilara smiled. “Prophecy fulfilled then.”
The horse and cart trundled down the trail. It ran along the edge of the boundary for quite some way; close enough that Jasen could pick it out, and the amorphous shape of the rye beyond, whispering in the cool breeze, but not near enough that he would be able to touch it …
Or see any lurking scourge beside it, watching with those dark eyes of theirs.
The boundary did not run the entire way around Terreas. Mountains cupped one side of the village, and this was where the wall gave out. A gate had been erected here; Jasen could not think of a time when it was ever used excepting Baraghosa’s visits. Perhaps not even then; the man had peculiar ways about him, could probably use strange magics to cross without needing to touch the gate at all.
Shilara dropped down to open it.
It groaned as it slowly swung wide.
“Rusty hinges,” Shilara complained.
She did not clamber onto the cart again, instead leading Milo by his bridle.
Jasen held his breath.
Beyond this threshold lay nearly untrammeled wilderness, rarely crossed. The world stretched beyond, a Luukessia he’d spent his whole life wishing to tread. Now, at last, he was going to.
It should have been a momentous crossing. Yet the cart simply rolled over—and they were on the other side.
Shilara returned to close the gate. Then she climbed back onto the cart, pausing before taking Milo’s reins to fish for a spear, which had rolled into the corner where cart floor and edge paneling met. She said nothing, and nor did Jasen and Alixa; she merely repositioned herself, keeping the spear gripped in one hand.
Milo began his canter again—and they were off.
18
Dawn came slowly, spears of pink-red light stabbing through the clouds and brightening the sky by degrees. What had started an indigo backed by a few stars became lighter as the stars faded, blue gradually replacing them.
Light had been filtering into the sky for a good hour now. Perhaps longer. Jasen believed he had slept, though only briefly. Whether Alixa had, he didn’t know. All he did know when he blinked his eyes open was that she had taken up position by Shilara’s side and the sky was suddenly lighter than it had been.
More surprising, she was asking questions.
“What else is in Wayforth?”
Wayforth? Jasen blinked in confusion. Then he remembered: the village Shilara had promised, where she had found stores of whiskey to pilfer.
Shilara started to give a clipped reply.
Jasen tuned it out. Rubbing his eyes—and then biting back the urge to retch when he remembered his hands were coated in slowly drying blood—he swiveled to look out over the landscape.
Terreas sat near the mountains, on highlands. Though the direction opposite the mountains formed part of the highlands too, it seemed that the other side of the mountain began to descend to lower-lying places. A trail was carved in the mountain’s side, or had been once. Shilara directed the horse and cart along it now, gently easing down the mountainside. There was still a way to go, by the look of it; Jasen could see the twisting trail winding below them, turning back and forth like a ribbon.
Up here, the mountainside was not barren, but nor was it particularly rich with foliage. The nutrient-rich soil seemed to have been spewed mostly in Terreas’s direction, not down the mountain’s edge itself. The ground was rocky, covered in stones. That Jasen hadn’t woken earlier was a surprise: the ride was bumpy, mostly composed of small judders but now and again peppered by a larger jolt that sent a bolt of pain up his spine. The little that grew was scrub: stunted trees, spindly bushes. Grasses sprang up in occasional clumps, thin yet tall, eking out existence in the small pocket they were permitted before their roots found unyielding stone again.
Farther down the mountain, the soil was better. A wood was spread out below them. It was a peculiar sight, and one Jasen scoured for long minutes, eyes roving back and forth across. He had seen distant trees, scant few of them springing up along the mountains, and of course Terreas had its own share, carefully tended and renewed now the scourge had rendered the rest of Luukessia inhospitable. Yet he’d never seen them from above, from such a distance. They were tiny and hard to discern, but the strengthening light cast bright patches and long shadows among the treetops, giving them a craggy texture. He imagined reaching out and touching it, and extended a hand to do just that before realizing they were still miles away.
They were probably teeming with scourge.
He hunkered down in the cart, gaze drifting about them and back the way they’d come.
Terreas was long out of sight. Now a mountain stood between Jasen and the place he had lived all his life.
The hairs on the backs of his hands stood up. He rubbed them, and wished he’d asked for a blanket. Shilara would’ve packed some of those, wouldn’t she?
Alixa had a new question: “And there are no people in Wayforth at all?”
“Not one,” said Shilara. “Don’t you listen? I said as much yesterday.”
Yesterday. When Jasen’s home had been burned to the ground. It seemed so long ago.
He touched the pendant about his neck, reassuring himself of its presence. Though often cool, where it lay against him and had absorbed his body heat these past hours, it was just slightly warm.
“I just want to know what we’ll find there.”
“I’ve told you that, too,” Shilara snapped.
“Well, how long will it take to get there?”
“Two days,” said Shilara. “If we aren’t stopped.”
Two days—so a four-day absence.
What would Adem think? Aunt Margaut? The rest of the Weltans?
Would anyone miss Shilara? Jasen squinted at her back, and doubted that were the case. This had been a trip she had made before; certainly if she did have a friend, someone would have missed her for half a week.
Four days gone at a time, and no one noticed. Jasen felt a stab of pity—then guilt, realizing that in all his time haunting Shilara, lingering at her side and listening to her gripes, he hadn’t been aware of her disappearances.
He tried to put it out of his mind, as well as the rest of Terreas. The next four days might be difficult for them, filled with fear. But Jasen and Alixa would return, with seed, and secure a safe, well-fed future for the village that did not include Baraghosa.
And Jasen would be welcomed back into the fold.
No more whispering, no more heckles. Shilara too, he thought.
“How many times have you been to Wayforth?” Alixa asked.
Shilara groaned. “Cease your bloody questioning, will you? Or I’ll prod you in the belly with this spear.” And she brandished it. The haft thumped against the cart’s edge.
Alixa quieted for a time.
Jasen sat silently too, looking out. The woods were around and behind them—and as the cart came to the spot where the ribbon of a trail curved back on itself, winding down the mountain a little lower than before, he realized it would soon vanish too, as Shilara continued ahead, along a new trail. This was even more uneven that the last, and the vibrations increased.
The sky grew lighter and lighter. The sun still had not risen, but the early morning half light had given way to a softening blue. Few clouds had gathered yet, at least anywhere near to the mountains. But a white puff was growing directly overhead: the cratered mountain continued to breathe its endless plume of smoke. From the foot of it, it looked strangely large.
“Hold these.” Shilara thrust the reins at Alixa, then crawled to the back of the cart. “Awake then,” she observed of Jasen as she passed. Rooting around for a moment in a sack by the waterskins, she came out with a ceramic jug, stoppered and wrapped tightly with twine to keep the stopper in place.
When she’d taken up her place at the front of the cart again, she drank.
The smell of grain alcohol carried over her shoulder. Mingled with the coppery smell of the bloody bucket, it was less appealing than it had ever been.
Alixa met Jasen’s gaze. There was a judgmental look on her face, one that said, She’s starting early, though neither said a word.
Soon, Alixa began to question again.
“But how many times have you been to Wayforth?”
Shilara groaned. “I don’t know. Enough.”
“Could you make a rough estimate?”
“A thousand. I’ve been there a thousand times in my life.”
“That seems unlikely.”
“Of course it’s bloody unlikely.” Shilara took another swig. “What does it matter if it’s two or twelve or two hundred? I’ve been before. I know where we’re going.”
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