The Watch (The Red Series Book 1)

by Amanda Witt

  “Does he know me?” I ventured.

  The old man’s forehead furrowed. “No, no. Not like you mean. Knowing is pretty well beyond him now. Sometimes he doesn’t know me. Most of the time he doesn’t know himself. Fortunately he remembers being scolded for eating people, so he decided to give you as a gift to appease his gods.”

  I didn’t follow everything he said, but the part about Jensen eating people was perfectly clear. The skinned man on the steps of the circle flashed into my mind, and the man missing his hands.

  “How old are you, Red Girl?” the old man asked, pulling up his feet so that he sat cross-legged on his pallet.

  “Sixteen. Almost seventeen.”

  “Seventeen years old . . . how time does fly. A lifetime for you, the blink of an eye for me. Where do you work?”

  “In the fields.”

  “Who are her parents?”

  I stared at him. Was he still talking to me?

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  He began laughing again, that cackling, disconcerting laugh. “Of course not,” he said. “The joke’s on me. But it isn’t funny, so we’ll try again.” He eyed me narrowly. “She needn’t be afraid.”

  I discovered that, without realizing it, I had begun edging toward the doorway.

  “No, no, she needn’t be afraid,” he said again. “I don’t eat children. Or adults, for that matter. Nor do I give them to Angel for playthings.”

  “Who is Angel?”

  “You saw him,” the old man said. Now I was you again. “He’s pretty, but pretty is as pretty does, and he does wicked things, so he isn’t pretty at all.”

  I blinked hard. I was so tired, and so frightened, and the old man’s words were hard to follow. “So Angel is the handsome man, and Jensen is the—” I caught myself, not wanting to give offense—“the one who caught me. And who are you?”

  He cocked his head, as if listening.

  I listened too, but I didn’t hear a thing.

  “I agree.” He uncrossed his legs. “There can be no harm in telling her, so long after the ashes. And surely she deserves that much.” More quickly than I would have expected for a man of his age, he got to his feet. I braced my hands against the ground, ready to push myself up and away, but he made no move toward me. Instead he stood in the center of the cave, beaming at me, his teeth crooked and discolored but his blue eyes bright and clear.

  “She will please allow me to present Joint Special Ops Commander Thomas Anthony the Third,” he said, and made an elaborate bow. When he straightened back up, he was looking at me expectantly.

  “That’s a very long name,” I said politely, and he cackled with laughter again.

  “It is,” he said. “She may call me Tom for short. But in front of Jensen she must call me Sir. If she fails I will let him eat her.”

  I decided I’d call him Sir all the time.

  Suddenly his smile faded and his face grew stern. “Does Red Girl know what time it is?”

  I shook my head.

  “Long past bedtime, that’s what time. Her mystery parents would never forgive me for chattering on like this. She’s a young thing and must be worn to a raveling.” As he talked he moved around the room, gathering blankets, even a pillow, and bringing them to me.

  “Clearly she likes the threshold,” he said. “It’s safe enough. Jensen and Angel have never come close to finding this one, and they all know traps are set. So she may sleep on the brink if she wishes, and breathe the fresh air, and dream of the sea.”

  How could he know that I often dreamt of the sea?

  “I will wake her for breakfast—no,” he interrupted himself. “I will wake her to wash and then have breakfast. She has blood on her hands and face. Not hers, I take it, for she appears to be uninjured, at least in body. Mind and soul we cannot so easily say.” He winked at me.

  Then he leaned in close, so close and so intently that I pressed my head back against the hard stone wall and hoped I hadn’t made a terrible mistake in trusting him this far.

  For a long heart-stopping second he held my gaze with those strange bright blue eyes.

  “She shall have no fear,” he said, and his voice was calm and authoritative and completely sane. “Tonight she may sleep in peace.”

  There was no chance of that happening, I remember thinking.

  It was the last waking thought I had.

  Chapter 20

  I woke at dawn parched with thirst. I sat up, pushed my hair out of my eyes, and looked around. The cave was empty, a wash of thin almost-morning light laying a path from the entrance across the dim dirt floor.

  Scrambling to my feet I went to the bucket and lifted its wooden cover. It was full of water, and the cup I had used the night before was sitting on the ground beside it. I drank and drank, and only when I finally paused for breath was I awake enough to wonder where the old man had gone.

  His pallet bed was neatly made, the extra blanket crisply folded at the foot. Mindful of my status—prisoner or guest, in either case I thought I should behave well—I folded my own bedding and set it on the floor beside his pallet. Then I crossed to the entrance of the cave and cautiously went outside, shivering a little in the gray early dawn.

  When I rounded the big boulder that hid the entrance to the cave, I stopped cold. I couldn’t believe my eyes. There it was, shushing gently, rolling in and rolling out, shimmering and shifting in the receding darkness like a breathing, living thing. I had slept beside the sea.

  I couldn’t see the end of it—maybe once full daylight came I would. Or maybe it would still stretch beyond my sight, miles and miles of sea rolling on forever. The thought of so much open space took my breath away, made me feel as if I were standing on the edge of the world. I had never before been more than a few yards beyond the city walls.

  The sand went stretching alongside the waves in a long expanse. It was darker where the waves had washed over it, lighter closer to me. It was mostly clean and bare, strewn here and there with long whips of kelp, ugly and strangely familiar, like giant hairs pulled out by their roots. The air smelled organic, a strangely pungent smell for so much open empty space. It reminded me of the compost piles we kept for the vegetables, piles of decomposing fish heads mixed with rotting leaves and eggshells. Then a salty breeze picked up, blowing in from the sea, and the smell faded, and the wind stirred my hair just like it stirred the shifting darkening waves.

  A little ways down the beach the old man was bent over, putting driftwood on a small fire. The smoke was invisible in the gray light, but I could see the orange flickering flames, and my mouth watered as the smell of woodsmoke and cooked fish reached me. The old man stood up, caught sight of me, and gestured for me to come to him.

  My first few steps took me across a thin stretch of yellowed grass. Then I reached the clear pale sand, which shifted up between my toes, strangely warm on this cool morning. And then I went from dry sand to wet sand, which took my footprints, then erased them.

  “Good morning,” the old man said as I drew near.

  “Good morning.” He was odd and interesting, but at the moment the vast expanse of water before me was more so. “The sea whispers,” I said. “It sings.”

  “Oh yes, she sings. Day and night, she sings in her chains.”

  I gazed out at the wide expanse, at the low-lying clouds just barely beginning to be rimmed with gold, at the gently shifting waters and the smooth bare sand. The sea. I was finally seeing the sea.

  For a long moment I stood there, yearning, held back by some invisible tether. Maybe it was the old habit of unfreedom, or maybe I was afraid to do anything that might upset my strange host.

  “For goodness sakes, go,” the old man said. “Bathe yourself. Be sure to wash the bloodstains from your hands and face. Breakfast is only fish, but we do what we can to stay civilized.”

  I looked at my hands, at Farrell Dean’s blood, and wondered whether he’d survived the night.

  “Go wash,” he said again.

 
; I started toward the water, but then uncertainty hit me and I turned back toward Sir Tom. Did he really mean for me to walk into the sea? How deep was it, how wide—

  The old man met my gaze and pity flashed across his face, replaced almost instantly with a sort of amused affection. “Go on,” he said. “It won’t swallow you whole. The tide’s coming in.” Pointing to a neat pile of fabric near his feet, he added, “Here’s a fresh change of clothes for you. I’ll turn this way, toward the north, and you bathe that way, toward the south, in privacy.” And he turned away from me.

  I tasted those words. In privacy. I said them aloud to see if they changed the world, brought the Watchers upon me again. Slowly I turned in a circle. No cameras. No wardens. No Watchers. Not anywhere.

  It was a strange feeling—exciting but also dizzying. If no one could see me, would I vanish?

  I stepped cautiously into the foamy low-rolling waves. They were cold but silkily caressing, and coy in the way they rushed at me, then hurried away, then came back again. My next few steps brought me knee deep, and I began to feel the pull of the water, its buoyancy and its power.

  When I was hip deep—still wearing all my clothes—I glanced over at the old man. He had rolled up his pants legs and waded out into the water, his back to me, and was pulling some sort of basket out of the sea. I had never seen the tidal traps our fishermen used, but maybe this man had something like them.

  I couldn’t swim, but I wasn’t afraid. The water was alive, moving beneath me, lifting me off my feet but always shoving me toward shore and safety. It splashed in my face and I licked my lips; they tasted salty. Rafe had told us the sea was salty, that it shouldn’t be drunk no matter how thirsty we were.

  The sand shifted slyly beneath my feet; small green plants waved around my toes, tickling. Shells peeked out from beneath the sand; I tipped my face up toward the sky and reached down for them, the waves licking at my chin. I came up with a handful of shells and wet sand, and when I rinsed the sand away and lifted the shells up to the strengthening morning light, I saw that the larger ones glowed inside, pink and white and purple.

  “Red Girl,” called the old man. “Did your instructors never mention the word hypothermia? Get to the fire and get warm.” By then he was sitting on a piece of driftwood a little north of the fire, his back to me still, fiddling with one of his traps—repairing it, I thought.

  When I waded to shore I realized that although the deepening pink and gold light looked warmer than the gray dawn had, the wind had risen; it was cutting through me. Hurriedly I pulled off my sodden clothes, dried myself with the towel the old man had laid out for me, and pulled on the fresh clothes—of a thicker and warmer fabric than I was used to and in splotchy browns and greens, like the clothes he wore. They were big, but he’d left a canvas belt as well. I ran it through the belt loops on the pants and cinched them up.

  “Are you decent?” he said.

  “I’m dressed.” My teeth chattered when I spoke.

  The old man got up off the driftwood and turned around. “Blue lips with red hair,” he said with a wink and a smile. “Very fetching.” He pointed at a blanket on the sand, and I picked it up and wrapped it around my shoulders.

  “Sit,” he said. “Rest by the sounding sea.” He nodded at the fire. “There’s still warmth in the embers, but I must let the fire die now. Angel will be watching for us. ”

  Slowly my shivering subsided and I began to work at rolling the pant legs up to ankle length. Every few seconds I paused, looking out at the waves. The sparkling water went on and on, as far as the rose gold sky. How far did that water go? What was on the other side of it? Did it have another side or did it go on forever without touching land, until it came back to the other side of our island?

  “You like the sea,” the old man said, with that same amused look of affection he’d had before. He was missing some teeth, and the ones he had were yellowed and uneven. The effect was to make him seem a bit unstable, though so far that morning he’d seemed perfectly fine.

  “It’s odd,” I said. “But I feel as if I’ve been longing for the sea all my life.”

  That made him cackle. “What do they long for, as I long for . . .” Grimacing, he closed his eyes. “What do they long for, as I long for a swift salt scent of the sea once more? One soft scent of the sea . . . salt scent of the shore . . . ah.” He opened his eyes.

  “That was lovely,” I said.

  He looked at me uneasily. “No,” he said. “It was not. It should be lovely, for the lovely Edna wrote it. But I neglected to invite her along, and in consequence I am condemned to mangle her lovely lines.”

  His bright blue eyes were beginning to look dim and vague.

  “Is that breakfast?” I asked to pull him back, pointing to the spit of fish above the glowing embers.

  It was as if I had called him from a long distance, as if he could barely make out my words. His forehead creased; his expression was perplexed. But after a moment his eyes brightened and focused. “Breakfast, of course! Do you like fish?”

  “Yes, very much,” I said. I liked anything even remotely edible, but as it happened, his fish was the best fish I had ever tasted. I was even hungrier than usual, and the fish was plentiful and fresh and almost too hot to handle, smoky and crisp and delicious, and I was sitting on a piece of driftwood in the open air beside the rolling, murmuring sea. It was without a doubt the best meal of my life.

  Tom—Sir Tom to me—sat watching me eat, smiling benignly and a little vaguely. His sleeves were rolled up and I could see the muscles in his arms, ropy but strong. He might be old, but he wasn’t feeble.

  Rested, warm, and with both our stomachs full, I decided it was as good a time as any to press onwards with my mission.

  “May I ask you a question?” I said.

  Sir Tom nodded and looked exaggeratedly attentive.

  “Besides you, Jensen, and Angel, is there anyone else living in the woods?”

  The old man looked away. He watched, expressionless, the last few wisps of smoke rising from the red gold embers. Then he sighed heavily and met my eyes.

  “It is not as simple a question as Red Girl assumes,” he said. “But to answer its spirit rather than its letter: We three are the only living souls awake in the woods who still possess a remnant of humanity.”

  A shiver ran up my spine.

  Sir Tom was waiting—not expectantly, it seemed to me, but with resignation.

  “You mean there are living things that once were human?”

  He nodded. “Got it in one.”

  “Last night—at first I thought it was an animal . . .”

  He nodded again.

  “He was human?”

  “Was, is. It’s a tricky line to draw. But as best as I can tell, their memory of humanity has fled.”

  “Something from the woods comes into the city and draws pictures,” I said. “With chicken blood. But I guess that could be Jensen.”

  Sir Tom raised his eyebrows. “Ah. Chicken blood art. That’s one even I have never seen. You’re right, however, to raise the question. Is the ability to imagine, to create art, a sign of humanity?”

  Maybe that was interesting to him; to me it was just creepy.

  “And then of course there’s language,” he said, poking at the near-dead coals with a stick. “We too make noises when we laugh or weep, but words are for those with promises to keep.”

  I really did not know how to respond to that.

  His expression shifted, became contrary. “Birds do not make promises,” he said, and it sounded like a retort. “I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself, but I also never saw a wild thing who understood it was betrayed. Have you?”

  He actually seemed to expect an answer.

  “No,” I said, hoping that would suffice.

  It did. The old man nodded vehemently. “Lawrence always was a self-congratulatory old fool,” he said. “There’s a place for pity, and for self-pity too, long as you don’t drown in it. We can’t all
shrug off every wound with nary a flinch of pain. And we can’t learn empathy unless we too have felt the heat ’o the sun, and the furious winter’s rages.”

  I wondered how long it took for the wilderland to turn a person insane. Maybe I’d better hurry up and do what I’d come to do.

  “You said only a few living souls were awake,” I said. “Does that mean some people are asleep?”

  Sir Tom blinked hard several times, clearly disoriented. Then he nodded, but made no other answer.

  “The ones who are asleep—” I was groping for words—“Are there many of them? And how long will they sleep?” Maybe they hibernated like bears. If that was the case, I sure wanted to be far from the woods come spring.

  Sir Tom’s face was sober. “A fair number sleep,” he said. “Those who died in the time of the ashes, and those who died later, of causes natural and unnatural. All total, twenty-three souls are sleeping in the woods, waiting to be awoken by the trumpet at the end.”

  Sleeping? But Sir Tom had slid over from talking about sleep to talking about death. So the wild things in the woods couldn’t really be woken, could they? Not by a trumpet—whatever that was—or by anything else. And at the end of what?

  Feeling unnerved, I picked up a long stick and poked at the fire. The old man turned his face toward the sea and stared fixedly at the horizon.

  When the wind kicked up and set the sea frothing, making me shiver and reminding me that time was short, I decided to try a different approach, a more direct one.

  “Sir Tom,” I said, and waited until he looked at me. “Have you ever heard of the Guardians?”

  The old man let out a cackle and leapt to his feet, gouging a deep channel in the wet sand. When he charged toward me I flinched back, scuttling on the sand like a crab on my heels and bottom and hands.

  “She’s heard of the Guardians, has she?” I lost my balance in the soft sand and fell, half on my side and half on my back, and the old man stood over me, eyes wild. “Of course she has heard of the Guardians. Bogeymen, monsters under the bed, goblins gobbling up bad little boys and girls, keeping them bounded in their nutshell.”