Shadow (Bridge & Sword: Awakenings #4): Bridge & Sword World

by JC Andrijeski

  “We are friends,” he says. “That is why you should not.”

  She prods him again with her foot. “What is this sudden concern? Are you worried about my prospects? That I might get a reputation as bad as yours?”

  “No.” He frowns again at the sandwich. “But they will find out. Sooner or later. And then it will be bad for you. You know what happens.”

  She snorts, taking another bite of her sandwich. “Do you mean Gerwix and his band of idiots? I am not afraid of that white mutant, with the brain of a horse fly.”

  He gives her a narrow look, his face suddenly hard, devoid of humor. “They are no joke, Kuchta. You have never had them angry with you.”

  “I have seen them plenty. I have known them longer than you, Ewald.”

  “It does not matter what you have seen!” he says, fighting anger for real. “You don’t know him. He may seem stupid to you, but he is not. And he knows things, Kuchta. If he finds out we are friends, it will go badly for you. I promise you that.”

  “Knows things,” she mutters angrily. “He knows I will cut out his eye, if he tries anything with me again.”

  When he looks at her in surprise, he sees a frown on her face.

  She stares up at the rafters, a wrinkle over her nose, between her eyes, like she’s caught a bad smell. In that moment, he sees the look behind her smile, and realizes she knows more than she is pretending.

  “He liked me, you know. Gerwix.” She glances at him, that sharp look still behind her gaze. “He wanted me to go with him to the dance. This past winter he asked… and tried to steal a kiss even. He is lucky my brother was nearby.”

  The boy only looks at her for a moment, a little stunned.

  It has never occurred to him that Gerwix would like any girls, much less that he’d approach his friend.

  Looking at her, he realizes again that she really is quite pretty. Her honey-colored eyes are wide and laughing atop a heart-shaped face. Her sensual mouth is often smiling, and instead of silence, like the boy, she uses laughter to cover up what she sees. Her long hair is wound in braids, stuck now with straw, but he has seen it down before, and knows it is thick and dark.

  Uncomfortable with his own appraisal, he looks away, shrugging. It is a human shrug.

  “All the more reason,” he says. “He will assume it is something else. That we are more than friends.” He gestures vaguely, reddening again. “He will think I am courting you.”

  “Courting me?” She laughs, looking up at him from under her hand. “He’ll think you’re bewitching me, Ewald… not courting. He’ll think you’re talking me out of my clothes whenever we are alone. It is what all of them think about you. No one thinks you are looking for a wife, Ewald, or even a steady girl.”

  “Whichever,” he says, biting back a flush of irritation. “He won’t like it.”

  “We will not get caught eating sandwiches together, Ewald. Your uncle does not watch you as closely now. Perhaps he trusts you more… or has decided to bully you another way.”

  He stiffens, unable to keep his expression still as he turns his head.

  He stares at her face where she lays on the hay, but she only smiles at him, her eyes knowing, holding that intelligence that unnerves him somehow, that feels almost like being read by another seer.

  “What has my uncle to do with Gerwix?” he says.

  She rolls her eyes, again causing a reaction in his light, even though she does it as a human does it, not like a seer. Giving him a disbelieving look, she lays back on the yellow hay.

  “You know he pays them, right?” she says. “He pays them to do that to you. I heard Gerwix bragging about it once, after he bought that horse. The Granger stallion… the one his elder brother wanted and could not afford.” She squints at him against the sun. “Do not pretend you do not know. You must know.”

  He continues to frown at the sandwich, not answering.

  His chest hurts, in a way that actually surprises him.

  Somehow he never thought he’d feel so humiliated, having Kuchta know so much. But that is not the real problem, and he knows it.

  She touches his arm, and it is almost a caress. It pulls him out, enough that he moves away from her fingers, forcing the emotion out of his light.

  “Did I offend you, with what I said?” she says.

  “No.” He looks at her, biting back his worry. “You know too much, Kuchta.”

  “I pay attention,” she says. “That is all. I’ve watched you since that day in school.” She sighed, holding her face up to the sun. “…well, before that, really. We all wondered about you. Not just because of Gerwix and his army of rats. You were always sleeping in school. You bled through your shirts sometimes. You didn’t walk right.”

  Fighting another jolt of that embarrassment, he shakes his head, closing his eyes. It’s not only embarrassment this time. He doesn’t want to hear it, doesn’t want to remember, so he goes back to the other, to where she started.

  “Which day?”

  “You know which day.”

  He shakes his head again, staring at her. “No.”

  “The day you got Miss Pirna fired,” she says.

  He blinks, only just managing to keep his expression still. He considers things he might say to her to deny it, or to pretend it wasn’t him who had done it, but he realizes it won’t matter, not unless he pushes her to forget.

  And he doesn’t want to push her.

  “You did it on purpose, didn’t you?” she says.

  He looks away, feeling a sharper pain in his chest. He won’t look at her through it, and he feels emotion whisper off her light, a pang of regret that she spoke. He feels ambushed too, like she held all of this in, hoping to get him to confess to everything all at once.

  He feels her thinking about this, realizing she has gone too far, wondering what she can say to pretend she hasn’t said it. He feels her wondering about him still, wanting to know why he is so sad.

  He pushes her light from his when he gets to that point, forcing himself to focus on the shafts of sunlight through the hayloft door, the birds winging just outside the edges of the glare. He watches the swallows spin and chase one another in the air outside the barn before darting back inside its shadowed folds.

  The darkness wavers there, a blackness under his feet.

  “Eat,” she urges, pushing at him again with her foot. “You are still too skinny, Ewald.”

  Pain slides through his light. He fights it, until she pushes at him again.

  “Eat,” she says. “Or I will never cook for you again.”

  Sighing, he forces himself to take another bite, chewing it slowly. Remembering Miss Pirna’s face, he feels it stick in his throat, and he can’t look at her until it passes.

  It has been a few years.

  He is sixteen to the humans, twenty-three in reality.

  It has been five years, and everything has changed for him, but he can’t entirely push that day from his mind. He thinks about what Kuchta says, about him bewitching females, and another pain hits at him, catching in his throat. His uncle encourages it, tells him it is all right, that he needs to learn, that human whores aren’t enough––but hearing Kuchta talk about it, and remembering the blank face of Miss Pirna, he feels it differently.

  “Yes,” he says slowly. “He trusts me more now.”

  “Who does? Your uncle?”

  “Yes, my uncle.” He takes another bite of the sandwich, forcing himself to chew without tasting it with his light. “I understand him better. I understand what he is trying to do. He doesn’t need to watch me as much. He never wanted to hurt me.”

  “Really?” she says dryly.

  “Really,” he says, giving her a warning look.

  “How the poor man must be suffering, then.”

  Ewald feels his shoulders clench. “You don’t know him, Kuchta. He is a great man. You would need to understand his work to realize it.”

  “And is that a requirement?” she says, her voice still flat. �
�Must one ‘understand his work’ to earn the privilege of food as a child? To avoid being beaten? You are right, Ewald. What a fine man this uncle of yours must be.”

  He looks at her, feeling another hard pain in his gut. “You talk about things you don’t understand.”

  “Do I?” she says tartly. “Perhaps I need a beating too.”

  He flinches a little at her words, then looks away, into the sunlight streaming through the square hole cut into the wooden walls.

  “You are not alone, Ewald,” she says, softer. Touching his arm, she makes her voice quieter still. “You don’t need to be his slave forever. You can leave this place.”

  He shakes his head. “I can never leave.”

  “Why not? I do not see any chains.”

  “Yet they are there.”

  “You are not a coward, Ewald,” she says angrily. “So do not pretend to be one with me!”

  He looks at her, his clear eyes serious. “I cannot explain this to you, Kuchta. Not as you would like. But one day I will. You will understand that I have a job to do… that he was the only one who could prepare me for this.”

  She does not argue with him that time, but looks at him warily, her eyebrows slightly raised. He sees her studying him with that scrutiny of hers, and he can see she does not believe him. Worse, she thinks his uncle has done something to his mind.

  “What kind of job?” she says.

  He shakes his head. “I cannot tell you.”

  “Why not? Did he say so?”

  “Yes,” he says, looking at her. He sighs a little. “He did. But he didn’t have to, Kuchta. He is right. This job is important. And I need to try and do my best at it.” He glanced towards the sun. “It will not matter one day, that I had to sacrifice for this. It will seem trivial.”

  “Trivial?” she snorts.

  He hears real anger in her voice and turns.

  “I wonder,” she says. “I wonder what your wife will say, when she sees how ‘blessed’ you have been by that frightening uncle of yours with the skeleton for a face.”

  Biting her lip as if to take back the words, she looks away.

  When he doesn’t speak, she prods him again with her foot, trying to smile. “…Or are you too busy bewitching girls to ever want to be married, Ewald?”

  “I will be married one day, Kuchta.”

  She smiles, sitting up on her arms. “Will you, now? You sound very sure.”

  He nods, feeling his face redden as he hugs his knee to his chest. “Yes. I am sure.”

  “You will have to go to another town to find a wife, or she will never trust you to be faithful to her."

  Pain hits him, hard enough that he turns on her. “Will you stop with that?” he says. “I am tired of it, Kuchta!”

  She blinks at him, startled. “I’m sorry.”

  Biting his lip, he shakes his head. “I would never be unfaithful to her. I would never touch anyone else once I had my wife with me.”

  “Promises, promises…” she murmurs, resting her back on the hay.

  He bites his lip harder, but doesn’t answer her. When she breaks the silence, he nearly jumps, having lost himself in the flight of the birds once again.

  “You are one of them, aren’t you, Ewald?” she says.

  Her voice is cautious, quieter than even her murmur from before.

  He doesn’t answer, or touch his light to hers.

  Still, a coldness reaches into him as he replays her words. It seeps past his skin to his blood, despite the heat of the sun streaming through the square window.

  “You are one of those others,” she prompts again, quieter still. “The ones whose eyes glow. The people they found in the mountains.”

  For a long moment he just sits there, holding the sandwich in one hand, his leg with the other. He thinks at first he can brush it off, pretend he doesn’t understand, that she is being ridiculous. But he knows it would not convince her.

  He fights back and forth in his mind, knowing what his uncle would say, what his uncle would want him to do. He would want him to erase her––to make her forget they were ever friends, to make her forget everything she knows about him.

  He would want him to never see her again.

  “Do you like me, Kuchta?” he says finally.

  There is a silence while she sits up slowly, looking at him in genuine surprise.

  “Of course I do, Ewald. You are my best friend.”

  Meeting her gaze, he swallows, studying her light with his.

  “Then don’t ever talk to me about that again,” he says.

  For a long moment, she doesn’t speak.

  He waits for her to think about his words, to see how much he means them. She studies him back, her honey-colored eyes reflecting the sun from where she sits. Finally she nods, her eyes almost afraid as they look at his.

  “Okay,” she says. “I won’t, Ewald.”

  “Thank you.” He continues to look at her, still feeling that tightness in his chest, but now it is not only fear. “Thank you, Kuchta.”

  She grabs his boot, using it to slide over and wrap an arm around his shoulders. He is surprised when she kisses him on the cheek, her eyes holding compassion now, and the kind of fear he knows isn’t for herself, but is for him.

  She puts her mouth right against his ear.

  “Be careful, Ewald,” she whispers to him softly. “You have to be more careful… with the girls. I won’t be the only one to wonder.”

  Hearing her words with more than his ears, he nods to her, fighting that tightness in his chest once more, even as he recognizes it as love, a feeling he hasn’t permitted himself with anyone, not in longer than he can make himself remember. It isn’t romantic love, or even a crush. It is something else, and he feels a kind of protective rush of feeling before he raises his eyes to hers.

  Once he has, the feeling worsens as he scans the worry on her face.

  She is afraid for him. He doesn’t scan her to know why, but it touches him.

  “I will.” He looks up at her again, wanting to say more, to comfort her in some way. Hesitating, he catches hold of her arm instead, studying her face seriously.

  “If I ever ask you to leave here, Kuchta, if I tell you it’s life or death… would you do it?”

  The worry flickers in her eyes, then leaves, replaced by surprise.

  “Leave here? As in this town? Or Bavaria?”

  “Either.” He doesn’t smile when she does. “Both. Would you do it?”

  Sitting back on her heels, she smiles more humorously, rolling her eyes.

  “Only promise you will ask it soon,” she teases. “Before my father marries me off to some wild boar from the valley with a fat ass and bad breath.”

  “I mean it, Kuchta. Would you do it? I would give you money.”

  “Enough money for Paris?” she grins, throwing out her arms.

  He smiles back; he can’t help it. “Enough money for New York, if you wanted,” he says. “And a new dress every week… and champagne.”

  “Then you most certainly have a deal, Mr. Gottschalk.”

  They are shaking hands on it, both faces solemn despite their youth, when a wind comes, blowing straw and hay in and around the open window. It makes her laugh first, and he can’t help but join her as golden strands swirl around where they sit…

  THE WHEEL SPINS, leaving me in a space between spaces, a time between times.

  Pain reaches me there, a kind of crippling hurt that I can’t identify, can’t place. I feel him in it, and feel myself there, too. He is ashamed, lost inside a realization that I have seen what she saw, what Kutcha saw in him and understood.

  Somewhere in that, he feels his own rationalizations, but the blackened hole beckons, self-hate mixed with something else, a terror––a dread of the feeling she brought up in him, a dread of being left alone.

  I can’t go to him here, not really.

  But I can let him feel me near, with him in that lost space.

  I like her. I know he feel
s that, too.

  I like her, and like that she saw more than she told him, and loved him anyway. I feel my feelings confuse him. I feel them confuse both of us, because even in all of that––

  But I don’t have time to complete that thought, either.

  Even in this place of no-time, there is no space left for us before we move off to the next fragment where…

  28

  THE PROMISE

  …HE IS SITTING again.

  Alone, at a wooden picnic table.

  Around him, other kids in his class at the human school laugh and talk, and sit together in clusters around other tables.

  He is alone, as he has always been alone here.

  He hardly notices anymore. He doesn’t even really mind. He doesn’t understand them, or their social games. He finds it easier to be alone, to listen from afar, to pretend to be somewhere else in his mind.

  He eats self-consciously, carefully.

  It is an old habit, one that cannot help but stay with him. Although the memories themselves no longer live in the forefront in his mind, their effects remain in the background, dictating many of his moves. He remembers beatings he got for eating like a seer, for not just chewing and swallowing and grunting like the humans around him.

  He eats an apple because it is easy, potatoes because they are relatively plain. He chooses his own foods now, so it is not so hard as when he was younger.

  He still feels eyes on him, but those are no longer there much in reality, either. They no longer bother to watch him, at least not closely.

  He hears them, though.

  He is aware of where they are, where they eat, where they talk, what they talk about, their thoughts, opinions, flares of emotion, indifferences. He notes when they are silent. It is another habit that cannot die, even though they have not chased him from the schoolhouse in over a year now. Gerwix is bigger now, even bigger than before, and he is loud where he sits with a group of other kids circled around him. He still has his “army of rats” as Kuchta calls them, but he no longer is tasked with setting them on the boy just to keep him in line.