by A. F. Dery
“Dark?” Again he sounded surprised. She noticed his voice sounded farther away than it had before as well. “I…yes, I guess it would be. I’ll try to find some candles. I need to get more timber too, to stoke up the fire. I’ve tried to keep it going for you. It’s been a difficult couple of days.”
Grace’s heart sank. Couple of days? Had she been here that long, then? Even though she’d known it would be too late even if it were the same night, hearing it confirmed struck her like a physical blow.
“Why are you crying again? I can’t help you if I don’t go,” he said. He sounded closer now than he had a moment before.
Grace raised shaking, burning hands to her face. She was crying again, or maybe she hadn’t stopped from before. Everything hurt. Her head was swimming…
“I’ll be right back, just…try to calm down, all right? Please calm down,” there was a note of desperation in his voice now, and it made her feel even worse. She heard him moving away this time- he must have walked into something, for she heard a thump and a muffled curse- and then a creaking that may have been a door, though no light came from it.
Grace clutched her own arms painfully and closed her eyes, trying not to think of her village, or the faces of the other girls in the field, or what the warlord’s anger must have been like when she had fled. The more she tried not to think, the more she thought, until she was shaking so hard her teeth were clicking together and it was all she could do to muffle her own keening against her hands. How angry would he have been? How much could one woman really matter? I’ve never mattered before, why now, why now? She felt the hysteria bubbling up inside her anew, remembered the warlord’s eyes on her, seeing her, all her invisibility stripped away and there she was. What had he seen?
At some point in this, sounds broke through the fog she was in. Again the stranger touched her forehead, then her cheeks, then cuffed her shoulder. She realized he was speaking, urging her to open her eyes.
She forced herself to obey, blearily wondering what difference it would make, when she saw there was now light. The first thing she noticed was the fire, which had become a rather intimidating blaze throwing off far more of both heat and light. She could now see it was housed in a massive fireplace set into a stone wall. She looked at once to her right, where she had been hearing the stranger’s voice, and there was indeed a man standing there, a lit lantern on a small table next to the bed she was lying on. He looked somewhat older than she was, though nowhere near to graying as yet. His dark hair fell long and unkempt, untidily pulled away from his face with a piece of twine, and his clothing, old and poorly patched, was hanging loose on his gaunt, lanky frame. He was bearded, but the beard was cut short and choppily, as if it had been hacked at with shears.
But what truly struck her about him was his eyes; they were heavy lidded and reddened with a strange glassiness to them. He was staring off blankly at nothing in particular, somewhere in the vicinity of her knees.
“You’re blind,” she blurted out, then quickly closed her eyes to try to shut out her own stupidity. Her cheeks burned. “Oh, forgive me. I don’t know why I said that.”
Again he made the noise that was not quite a laugh. “I’m actually relieved you did, this is the most lucid you’ve been. I was afraid you’d gone delirious when I came back in here.”
Grace opened her eyes again, looking at him again as she tried to compose herself. He did not appear angry. There was a kindness to his face that was not obvious at first glance, she thought.
“I just…I didn’t expect it. I don’t know how you possibly could have found me. It was snowing so hard. I mean, I couldn’t see.”
“Your dog dragged you in. He was quite insistent,” the man told her. She stared at him, baffled.
“My dog? I don’t have a dog,” she said slowly. The stranger raised his eyebrows.
“Then it’s some other sort of pet, I suppose, but it was definitely an animal around the size of a dog, and it definitely dragged you into my tower. I thought you had to be its mistress.”
Grace looked around wildly, wondering what on earth could have found her and dragged her to a stranger. She saw she was in quite a large room, all made of stone like the fireplace was, with stacks of books about everywhere she looked. Calling the room “dirty” would have been an understatement; dust and cobwebs were everywhere, as if books had been brought in, abandoned, and never touched again. Against one wall was a wooden chest of drawers, the top entirely occupied by dusty glass bottles of various sizes.
Over in one cobwebbed corner, at last, she saw it.
“It’s a wolf,” she said faintly. The stranger standing next to her stilled.
“A wolf?”
“I…did see it…before I mean…I saw a wolf in the forest…before I passed out…” Somehow she just couldn’t get a handle on what was happening here. A wolf?
“Please don’t pass out again,” the man said quickly. “Here, let me help you sit up. I managed to put something together that should help you, but you need to drink it.”
“There’s a wolf in here,” Grace insisted, tearing her eyes from the creature to stare at him incredulously. “A wild animal. It could tear us to pieces-”
“If it was going to, it surely would have done so by now,” he pointed out mildly. “I agree that it’s strange, if that is what you’re getting at, but if we’re in any danger from it, well, there’s nothing to be done about it now. I’ve already tried to shoo it, believe me, and it did not act very appreciative.”
Grace stared at the animal, which appeared to be sleeping, its head resting on its paws. It certainly looked harmless, for the moment anyway.
“How odd that it dragged me here,” she murmured. She did her best to cooperate as the man helped her sit up. She still felt heavy and boneless, and it was growing more and more difficult to stay awake.
“Here, you need to drink this,” he told her, fumbling with a small cup. Reassuringly, it looked somewhat cleaner than the rest of her surroundings. She tried to reach for it to help steady it as he brought it to her lips, and noticed for the first times that her painful hands were bandaged, no doubt contributing to their earlier uselessness. This second attempt at him helping her to drink went much better than the first, possibly because there was a lot less liquid in the cup. It burned as it went down her throat, and when she had finished it she felt like she was falling down a hole, everything around her blurring as she blinked rapidly. He was lowering her back onto the bed, but even when her head was pressed against it, still she fell.
“Sleep,” was the last thing she heard before she succumbed.
Hadrian shut the door behind him and then leaned against it, fisting his hands in his hair and trying very hard not to panic. He had told the girl- for she sounded younger than he’d expected- that it had been a “difficult” couple of days. He was impressed that he had managed to lie so baldly. It had been a horrific couple of days. The truth was that it had now been so long since he had entered any room in the tower other than his own bedroom and the kitchen and the stairway in between that he no longer remembered where anything was. Because he hadn’t really been caring for the place, merely existing in it, many components he could have used to make remedies for her had gone to ruin. It had taken him almost an entire day just to find the bandages and to clean a pot to boil water on, punctuated by frequent anxious visits to make sure she was still breathing, to wipe down burning forehead and arms, and to futilely stoke the fire. He’d only kept a small fire going in his own room and in the kitchen when required; he had gathered no wood for the winter, not anticipating that he would have to endure long in it. In these last weeks, he had not had the strength for anything. His body ached both with cold and the fatigue of unaccustomed labor now. He knew she needed to eat, but the mice had been at most of what he had left. There had been no one to trade with in ages, leading him to believe that his presence here had been forgotten, not that he had anything left to trade anyhow. Most damning of all, he had set no traps in
some time. There was no meat to be had.
He was sorely tempted to berate himself for these neglects, but he knew that he had no way of knowing such a bizarre thing would happen to him. He certainly had never meant to punish anyone except himself, but the poor girl in the room behind him would soon be feeling the same blows, if she recovered enough to feel anything beyond her sickness and frostbite. When the second day had passed since her arrival without so much as a stir from her, he had expected she would not live to see the end of the third, and the thought had both troubled and relieved him. There was nothing he could do for her in that case, so it was all right that everything had gone to ruin around him and he could barely keep a fire going or prepare her a proper meal. It was all right that he was so exhausted he felt like he might die, because it was all right if he died. No one needed him, in that case.
But she had awakened, and she did need him. He had been ill prepared for her fevered hysteria, he who had not even seen another living person in…well, a long time. He was not even sure how long now. When she’d put her arms around him, he’d felt actually frightened, unsure at first what she meant to do until he’d realized she was crying with a despair that spoke to his own.
Hadrian had pitied her at once; he did not know her burden and would not ask her, not wanting his own to be asked after, but it did not take working eyes to see that there was more to her suffering than the damage the storm had done to her. He’d actually regretted leaving her to find more supplies; it had shocked him how her plea for him to stay had thawed something in him. What, he wasn’t sure. But for a moment, he’d wanted to stay, and it was madness.
I can’t let myself form some sort of insane attachment to this girl, he told himself firmly. I just need to do what I can for her, because it’s the decent thing to do, and not think about what comes after.
Because he couldn’t imagine how he was going to get her home. He groaned a little at the very thought. Don’t think about it now. It’s the cart before the horse, she won’t live long enough for it to even be a concern if you can’t get yourself together.
No, he had to keep her alive, get her in some kind of functioning condition and send her back on her way, somehow. Then he could finish what he meant to do. Then it could all be over. He couldn’t just abandon her here to die in squalor, even he could see how selfish that would be. I won’t kill one more, not even one. She’ll either recover or die soon. I can make it until then.
Thankfully, he had managed to find what he needed to make her a cough remedy. The herbs he’d need to lower her fever had been barely salvageable, but with any luck, there’d be enough to return her to some kind of normalcy, at least for a little while. He thought he could find more, if he had the time to search, so he used plenty of whiskey for the base. He was glad now that he’d managed to keep his hands off the “medicinal” bottle he kept with the herbs in what had once been his workroom. It was likely because he’d forgotten about it, but just the same, he was very glad.
Hadrian pushed away from the door, dropping his hands and feeling his way back to the workroom. He spent the rest of the afternoon laboriously sifting through its contents, fortunately coming up with much he thought he could use to help the girl. He went back to check on her, standing carefully next to her bed and listening, reluctant to touch her again even to check her fever, now that he knew she could regain consciousness. He did not look forward to her realizing that she was wearing a man’s shirt, or in pondering how a man who was mostly blind had managed to dress her in it. It had been quite the comedy that she had been lucky to miss.
What he had missed, he realized reluctantly, was the simple act of touching, of reaching out his hand and someone else being there at the other hand of it. Not in any perverse way; he had taken pains even before she’d awakened to touch her as little as possible and only when he had to, and not just because he could have sworn he could feel the dog’s eyes bearing into him (to Hadrian’s knowledge, the beast had not left the same room the girl was in since he’d dragged her inside. He could hear it panting or padding around whenever he listened for it). But just in a human way, in an “I’m not the only one here” way. He refused to think he may have been lonely. It didn’t matter. His own actions had brought that down on him, and what he wanted was irrelevant.
Hadrian thought again of the girl sleeping before him. She was very sick indeed. He wondered how long it had taken the dog- no, the wolf, she had said- to bring her here. Or how the wolf had even known he was here to help her. Or why a wolf would not have just taken her home to feed his pack. It was all very odd, but he had a feeling he would know nothing more until she had recovered enough to see what the wolf would do next. Would it stay, when she was well? Lead her home maybe? That was a hopeful thought.
Finally he forced himself to brush the back of his hand across her head. She was still unnaturally warm, but he thought she was cooler than before. He stifled a sigh of relief. He’d be able to make more cough remedy for her now, but first…he had barely slept since she’d arrived. He needed to rest or he would be incapable of doing any more for her.
He turned from her bedside and groped his way to a chair that he vaguely recalled as being by the window. It turned out to be much nearer to the door, but it made no difference; he sank into it gratefully and was asleep before he could think any more. When he woke, some indeterminable amount of time later, he felt the chill in the air at once and almost cursed out loud. The fire must be going out.
He rose to his feet, carefully listening. The girl’s breathing remained steady and even; he couldn’t hear the wolf, but it didn’t mean the creature wasn’t in there somewhere. Outside the wind continued to rage. The storm had not abated since the girl’s arrival. It was unusual for one to be so harsh so early in the season. There was no chance of getting wood from outside. Even if what he had cut prior to his surrender to fate was still there, it would likely be moldering in the snow.
But there were a couple of rooms worth of furniture that could be used. He set about harvesting it, retrieving an ax from the kitchen downstairs, making his way painfully back up and then gamely trying to hack apart whatever felt like wood without hacking into himself. For once, he mused, being blind was a bit of a comfort, as he couldn’t see the dubious results of his labors or how idiotic he must look creating them. He returned to the girl’s room with an armful of…something…something flammable…he hoped. He added it to the dwindling flames, stoking them as much as he dared as he squinted vainly into the hearth. At last he satisfied himself that there was a good fire going once more and that he had not managed to catch anything on fire that oughtn’t be.
Food was going to be considerably more difficult. He thought perhaps he’d better make sure he was armed before he went looking. There was only one of him, after all, and who knows how many of what was nesting in the kitchen after all this time. He had made only the briefest of forays inside for some time. “I hope there’s something left down there,” he muttered from habit before he could think better of it. He froze and listened, but the girl gave no evidence of waking.
He felt something bump his leg insistently and he started, backing away and squinting downward. He thought it must be the wolf. He heard it pad away, in the direction of the stairway, then a low bark a moment later. Hadrian could have sworn he was being summoned.
Perhaps I am the one with a fever, and this is all a mad dream, he thought bleakly, making his way reluctantly into the hall. He heard the wolf pad down the stairs, but this time he did not wait to follow. When he stepped off the last step, he immediately tripped over something that felt like a tree branch, which sent him sprawling across the floor, only just avoiding knocking his head. Hadrian scrambled back to his feet, peering futilely downward and cursing vehemently. After some careful prodding with his foot and poking with one hand, he came to the conclusion that it was almost certainly a deer, quite certainly still warm, and very certainly dead.
He heard the wolf huff, expecting what, he couldn’t im
agine. Hadrian frowned at the room in general.
“Well, venison is good. I don’t suppose you could clean it for me?”
The wolf made no reply.
“I hope she can keep down meat,” this next he said to himself. He knew he wasn’t saved from having to search for grain, but at least she wouldn’t starve, if she was able to eat at all.
Hadrian set about cleaning and dressing the kill, an unnecessarily time consuming and elaborate exercise thanks to his difficulty in finding appropriate tools for the job, cleaning them, and then preparing the meat so it could be eaten. It took all the longer because of his difficulty in climbing the stairs and his seeming inability to leave the girl unchecked for any length of time. I don’t know what I think will happen to her up there, or what I think I could do even if she did get worse, Hadrian thought glumly, on one of many such trips.
But she was resting peacefully, and though her fever did not break, he was increasingly sure it had improved. He knew he’d need to wake her soon, but hoped he’d have food for her when he did. He returned to his painstaking labors in the kitchen.
Some time later, he returned to her side with water, cooked meat, and an old and rather sorry feeling apple. He hoped it looked better than it felt.
He set the food and water carefully on the table next to her, and tentatively nudged one of her arms. “I’m sorry, but you need to wake up now. Just for a while.”
The girl groaned a little. He heard her moving, then yawning. “So…sleepy…”
“Yes, I think I need to take it easy on the whiskey in the next batch,” Hadrian said dryly.
“Whiskey?” she sounded confused. “That was the remedy you gave me?”
“Among other things. How are you feeling now?”