by A. F. Dery
Grace couldn’t help but notice that for his part, Hadrian had stopped forgetting to put on a shirt. It was hard for her to tell just what he was paying attention to, and she wondered often if he was following her with his ears the way she was following him with his eyes. Her face warmed to think of it that way.
To her relief, he did not bring up her confession again. But it was to her consternation that he also made no further mention of the little bottle of poison or of his future plans regarding it. She hoped that if she could help him resume his research, he would change his mind about all that.
It had broken her heart where she stood to have walked in and seen him in silent tears that day. The agony in his face had been undeniable. In truth, she had not realized what the little bottle must be intended for until she’d seen him like that, then all she’d seen fell into place with frightening clarity. He’d spoken of “bad things” and remorse, but she couldn’t imagine what he could have done to feel he deserved the misery he was living in. He was clearly a compassionate man, to have cared for her the way he had when she was sick, and he’d been nothing but kind to her.
The wolf, however, seemed to have different ideas, and his watchfulness was now of a much different tenor. Since that day, he never left her side when she was upstairs, and growled a warning at Hadrian if he came too near to her.
As she’d begun to recover, without the medicine to deepen her sleep, her nights became filled more and more with bad dreams, inextricable from her memories. Over and over, the warlord stopped before her. Over and over, their eyes met, and he held up his hand. Over and over, he pulled her away from the rest of the women, and over and over, she ran. She never stopped getting lost in the first storm of winter.
But that was the point where the dreams changed. The warlord’s men caught up to her, and made her watch as they burned her village while her family and the people she’d known all her life screamed with their last breaths. Or the wolf found her again, but somehow knew what she’d done and attacked her on sight, or the wolf didn’t find her, and she simply froze to death, unable to find her way home. He took her to the tower, but it was empty, Hadrian merely some fevered idea conjured by her mind as she lay dying; he took her to the tower, but the warlord somehow was there, and meant to claim his tax without further delay.
She would wake frightened and in tears, reality and dream still melting together before her eyes, some nights just as panicked at finding herself in the tower that was identical to the one in her dreams as she would have been to find herself still in the snow-drenched forest. Hadrian wasn’t always there, but when he was, he was asleep in his chair, and she felt an irrational fear of waking him lest he, too, be different from what she was expecting once awakened.
But the wolf would come silently to her bedside, and nudge her hand or her arm with a damp nose. She could have sworn she saw something akin to compassion in his eyes, and it emboldened her to throw an arm around him and press her face into his thick fur until her tears ran dry. His calm presence seemed to help break the spell for her and reminded her of what was real and what she had dreamed, and she found stroking his warm fur steadied her breathing and lulled her back into sleep after a while.
After a few nights of this, he started to lay at her feet when she went to bed for the night, and soon after that, began resting at her side from the start, curling up against her. His warm presence somehow kept the dreams away, and once again she knew some respite from her fears and regrets.
Some time had passed since the day of Grace’s confession, but the wolf’s new attitude towards Hadrian still hadn’t ceased. One morning she tried to explain things to him when they were down in the kitchen, washing her old clothes in one of the big metal tubs after she’d finally found them. Feeling a little ridiculous, she knelt down on the floor in front of him and said soothingly, “I want you to understand that Hadrian wasn’t hurting me that day when I was crying. I was sad about something else entirely. He was being very nice to me. You really shouldn’t growl at him the way you do, it’s not what you think.”
The wolf gazed back at her sedately, but gave no sign of either understanding or caring what she was going on about. She sighed. Sometimes he looked as though he understood every word she said, and even every look on her face, but other times, she couldn’t fool herself anymore: he was still just an animal.
At last the work room was about as orderly as it could get. She invited Hadrian to explore it now, and to tell her where to place the things she had been forced to move. He acquiesced at once, and within a couple of hours, the job was done.
“It’s ready, then? Have you thought about it? Trying again, I mean, with your research,” Grace said anxiously. She had not stopped worrying about the possibility of his refusal for one moment since she’d raised the subject.
Hadrian sighed a little. “Of course I’ve thought about it, I told you I would. I’m just not sure your help will be enough. I mean no offense, of course, but I can’t see anything. You’d need to be my eyes and you don’t really know what you’d be looking at.”
Grace deflated, hope rushing out of her. “You’re right. I really wouldn’t.”
Hadrian frowned. “Don’t sound so sad. Maybe we can figure out something. Can you read?”
“Yes, but not very well,” Grace said frankly. “The village priestess gave me reading lessons in exchange for some wool for a couple of seasons. But I haven’t had much occasion to actually practice outside of that.”
“Not much reading on the sheep farm, I take it?”
“No, not beyond the bookkeeping. My father was so angry when that was all she offered.” That was an understatement. He had been livid.
“That must have been difficult,” Hadrian said. “What did he say to the priestess?”
“Nothing,” Grace said, surprised. “It’s the custom to accept whatever she offers without dickering about it. Out of respect.”
“Well, what did he say to you, then?” he pressed, his brow furrowing. There was an odd note in his voice now that she couldn’t identify.
Grace pondered for a moment how to politely transcribe the rant she’d received. “Well, he wasn’t happy with me, of course. He thought I must have brought such an offer on myself somehow. Maybe shown interest in it, or asked her about it, or some such thing, and then the priestess took advantage of that. But of course I hadn’t. We don’t own any books, and I wouldn’t even know where people get them. Why would I need or even want to know how to read one?”
“And what did he say to that?”
“Oh, oh, no, I never said that to him!” Grace burst into a surprised laugh, shaking her head. “Oh no. I wouldn’t say anything like that. I stayed quiet until he was done, that’s what I did. I’m not that stupid.”
“What if you had said something? What would he have done?”
Grace suddenly felt uneasy. He looked very tense, where he was sitting by the door, even though his tone was the same as it had been before. His hands were clenched at his sides.
“You’ve never had a father?” she asked cagily.
“I was under the impression that you think people don’t notice you, but it sounds like your father did.”
“Only when something happened to make him unhappy. That wasn’t the usual state of things. I’m actually very easy to get along with,” she informed him pertly.
He raised an eyebrow. “You’re right, it’s very easy to get along with people who don’t stand up for themselves.”
Grace frowned at him. The remark stung, but she knew a diversion when she saw one. “I think you’re just trying to distract me from what we were talking about before. Which is whether I can help you with your research.”
Hadrian actually smiled. “I didn’t mean to do that, but I guess it did happen that way, didn’t it?”
“Come now, surely there’s something,” she pleaded. She felt the urge to move closer to him, but the wolf sat by her feet, tirelessly vigilant. She could feel his dark eyes following her w
ithout even looking at him. She bent down and scratched him behind the ears instead. He seemed to like that.
“I hear something thumping,” Hadrian said suddenly. He squinted his eyes futilely in her direction.
“The wolf wags his tail when I pet him. He’s a sweetheart,” Grace murmured, barely stopping herself from cooing the words.
“You pet that creature?”
“Oh yes, all the time. He’s started sleeping on the bed with me too. Not all night I don’t think, but he’s usually there when I wake up in the morning. He keeps me warm. Such a lamb.” Now she was cooing, but she couldn’t help it. She stroked the wolf’s fur happily.
“Well, you would know,” Hadrian muttered. She ignored him. After a while, he added thoughtfully, “Maybe we could try something. When last I was…working…well, I was working with some herbs to make a sort of…potion. If you can find the book where I wrote down my notes, it would refresh my memory.”
Grace stopped petting the wolf and straightened up. “There were several books that could have been what you’re talking about. Do you remember what that one looked like at all?”
“Brown, leather bound, thin. Normal book size. The pages were a bit stained from being spilled on. The very first page should say ‘notes’ and have a date written on it.”
Grace went to a set of shelves where she had carefully stacked all the books she found. She quickly narrowed it down to three volumes that fit the description and took them over to the big work table in the middle of the room. She opened the first, but it appeared to be an inventory of strange sounding…things. The second bore the word “notes” in small, cramped letters, followed by a date from the spring of nearly seven years before.
“Found it!” she said happily. She thumbed through it to the last page that had been used, and her stomach felt like it dropped to her knees. Clearly Hadrian had already been losing his eyesight when he’d given up; the words were a smeared, indecipherable scrawl, several times larger in size than the writing from the front of the book but still impossible for her to make out, with each line overlapping the surrounding ones and the whole of it spotted with drips of ink that he probably hadn’t even noticed at the time. Her heart hurt to see it. He worked as long as he possibly could. This must have been so important to him. How terrible it must have been for him when he had to give up.
“Well? What does it say?” Hadrian asked, and she heard a low growl by her feet. She looked up and saw Hadrian had stood and was moving towards her. He raised his hands in a vaguely placating gesture and stopped where he was.
“Hadrian…I can’t read it,” she said in a small voice. He lowered his hands.
“Oh. Well, you did say you hadn’t had cause to practice much. It’s all right, Grace.”
“It’s not that,” she said reluctantly. She began to flip back through the pages, trying to find where he last had written legibly. It was a depressingly thick pile of pages before the words became clear enough for her to interpret, albeit with difficulty. “I can read it about halfway through the book. There’s a lot of pages you used after that, though.”
“I don’t understand,” Hadrian murmured, his brow wrinkling. He shook his head slowly. “Why can you read the earlier ones but…oh.”
He looked so lost and forlorn as realization dawned on him that tears suddenly pricked Grace’s eyes.
“We can still try,” she said thickly. “I can start reading from where I can, and maybe you’ll remember what you tried after that.”
“All that work, lost,” he murmured distantly. “I’m not really sure…it’s been so long since I’ve been able to put my hand to it…”
“I’m sorry Hadrian,” Grace went to him. The wolf growled low behind her, but she ignored him and gently took Hadrian’s hand, squeezing it. “Please, don’t give up again. I can tell this must have been very important to you.”
“It is very important. It was very important. You can’t know…” he stopped and shook his head. “But it’s hopeless.”
“If it were hopeless, you wouldn’t have been able to almost fill a book of notes about it. There must be something you thought showed promise about it,” she told him sensibly.
“That’s actually the last of a series of several books of notes I’ve filled about it, but the reason I stayed here long enough to lose my eyesight over it was because I wasn’t getting anywhere. I actually thought I may have been getting close by the end of that book, but…I finally had no choice but to stop. It was impossible to continue, and it was already winter…”
His face had taken on a faraway look, one Grace didn’t much like. She touched his cheek with her free hand, causing both him to startle and lower his face as if looking for her, and the wolf to bark sharply at her.
Again she ignored the wolf.
“Don’t think about that now,” she said pleadingly. “It’s over, it’s done. You didn’t have me here then.”
“You’re worried about me,” Hadrian said wonderingly. His eyes looked like they were searching for her. “You barely know me, really…please don’t do this, to either of us…I’m not worth your worry, Grace. I promise you, you’ll regret it if you keep on this way.”
But there was no threat or hostility behind the words, only a sadness that made Grace’s throat ache.
“It’s going to be all right, Hadrian,” she said, squeezing his hand again before she released it. “Please, let’s try.”
He stood looking down vaguely at her for several moments, then finally said, “All right. We’ll try. There’s nothing left to lose, after all.”
She smiled broadly at him, even though he couldn’t see it. She went back to the book and the first legible section she could find, midway through, and began to read.
Hadrian’s mind felt sluggish under the onslaught of hearing his last sighted months of research relayed back to him. It felt like an entire lifetime had passed since those days, and it was surreal hearing them read aloud to him while he sat in unrelenting shadow. The notes were strictly about his research, of course; they said nothing about the increasingly urgent frustration and despair of those days, or about the gaps between entries that he had spent either drunk out of his mind in depression over his failures or vomiting from being drunk out of his mind in depression over his failures. Thankfully he had never been one for chronicling his personal life. He’d never thought it would be worth strangers remembering on his behalf. Ironically, many strangers always would remember the very worst part of it now, without any help from him at all.
He pushed away those dismal thoughts and mulled over what he’d just heard. He already had some ideas of what to do next, and yes, some faded memories of things already attempted and failed and illegibly documented.
Hesitantly, he went to the worktable and used his hands and some questioning of Grace to orient himself with it once again. He had not yet quite memorized where things were, and nothing was exactly as it had been before. He patiently described the herbs he needed to her, and she retrieved them for him and set them before him in the order that he requested. She said nothing else, and he was absurdly grateful that she worked in silence. Anything else would have thrown off his train of thought at this point; he felt now like he was groping around as blindly in his own mind as he did in the outside world.
At length he began to prepare the herbs, relying on his memory rather than sight. He had done this so often that he fell back into it with surprising ease, which is why he was very much shocked when his hand slipped in the middle of chopping the leaves of one of the dried plants, cutting into his finger instead.
He actually first knew he’d cut himself by Grace’s sudden cry and grabbing of his hand before he felt the cut itself, or the hot stream of blood pouring from it.
“No,” he muttered, shaking his head vehemently. He pulled his hand away from her and held it before his eyes in disbelief, even though of course, he saw nothing. He couldn’t believe it. Such a simple thing. A child could have done it. He could have done it blindf
olded long before he’d actually lost his sight. “Not possible. I can’t be that useless, that pathetic.” He spat out the word. When he’d given up before, it hadn’t been because of any difficulty in something this basic. It was because of the more elaborate work needed that clearly required functional eyes and better coordination than a newly sightless man was capable of.
“You’re not pathetic,” Grace protested. “It’s been a long while since you’ve even tried this, you told me so. But you are bleeding…”
He stepped awkwardly backward, painfully bumping his hip into the table. “It’s not going to work, can’t you see that? When I ruined my eyes, I ruined everything. I was foolish to think…no, I was just foolish. I’m useless now. This is hopeless.”
“No, it’s not,” Grace said firmly. But he turned away from the sound of her voice and lurched clumsily away from the table. He felt the blood streaming down his hand, pain searing into his finger. He had no idea how deep the cut even was. Perhaps the finger would come off. He had an irrational desire to laugh.
So, so foolish, he thought bleakly. He suddenly felt like his own legs couldn’t support him any longer and he sank to the floor, clutching his hair with his hands, the blood still streaming down. What was I thinking, why did I let myself think…even a child…
He felt Grace’s hands on his wrists, tugging his hands away. A moment later, she was pressing some kind of cloth firmly, painfully to his cut. Some time passed while she pressed, briefly lifted the cloth, then pressed some more.