He was my boy. I spent years with him, down in the worst of the Pens. I spent years with him, and he does that. I had so many dead boys. I wish I could kill him again. I wish he was still alive, but not so I can kill him again. I want him to be alive. I wish he hadn’t done what he did, and I wish he was alive. Also, I’m glad it was me that killed him, and I wish it wasn’t me.
It’s all right. You did the right thing. They’re hard things to do, but you were right. He betrayed the king, the city, and killed so many good men. Do you know when he started killing for the Night King what he was doing?
No.
She didn’t want anyone else to throw a party to compete with hers. She had her loyal demon child wipe out anyone that accepted another nobleman’s money until the merchants and the nobleman figured it out.
He killed a lot of people?
Innocent people. He died, Nicola, and it was right that he died.
Every one of my boys was a little dirty, though. The Pens is dirty. You know, I can’t imagine what it’s like to wake up and not think about all the terrible things I’ve seen down there. When I was dying, before you came, I had nightmares.
They’re gone now.
***
“What did you see when you were asleep, wicked fiend?” said the sergeant, holding a rusty sword to Jona’s chest.
“I think…” said Jona, squinting into the black night above his head. “I think I had my first dream.”
“Your first dream?” asked the sergeant.
Jona closed his eyes. “I don’t sleep. I never sleep. My blood doesn’t let me. My dad was a demon child. My granddad was, too. I am. I don’t sleep. I never sleep. I was born with wings my ma cut off. But, I think I was sleeping, just now. I was lying in water. It was so cool. I looked up at the sun and it was hot, but the water was cool. I was just a boy, like I was just a boy again. I was floating in the water. I looked over to the beach and Rachel was waving at me. She was so beautiful there, and she was waving at me. Then she was my mother. Then, she was someone else. I thought… For a little while, I thought it was real. I started to swim to her. Then…”
“Then you woke up?”
“No. Then, there were horses. Thousands of them. Every time the waves broke upon the shore, the white foam was horses. It was so beautiful. I was swimming to shore, and I ended up on a horse’s back. We charged up, past Rachel, past the forest, and into the darkness. Into the… Then…. Um… Then…”
“Already, the dream fades.”
“I can’t… I don’t remember. Rachel always remembered her dreams.”
“May the Gods absolve me, Lord Joni. You killed innocent men. You caused so much death out here.”
“Please don’t, Nicola. I’m just going to leave. I’ll leave Dogsland, and I’ll walk away and I’ll never come back.”
“No,” said Nicola.
The sword pushed through Jona’s chest. The blade was cold and hot at once. Jona felt the strange sucking of blood-loss—but painless at first—and also he heard the sucking sounds in his ears, echoing up his bones, like two separate things. Was his body really making these sounds? Was that him? Is that his blood? He looked down on his skin, and saw his hands twisted in pain and shock. He saw the blood pouring all over his chest. He felt his eyes fade to nothing. His eyes fell back into his head, and rolled out of his own wounded neck. His eyes saw a puddle of blood, and red and red and red. Then, a strong wind came and picked up his eyes, lifting them up.
And then Jona saw the whole forest, and the whole city, and everything in the whole world. He was above everything, and it was so beautiful.
It was so beautiful, that he wanted to cry, but he couldn’t feel anything to cry with. No skin. No teeth. No tears.
***
Weeks later, my husband and I found this child of a demon—we found his body. He called out to me from Erin’s sacred rocks.
Where is my body?
Where is Rachel?
***
And what of Rachel Nolander and her brother, Djoss? They traveled beyond the red valley, but the demon weed ran deep inside of him. He would never truly leave the city. He couldn’t. He would come back to the city, seeking it. He would lose his tongue and ears in the night, trying to find it. He would forget himself, and become forgotten in the city.
If Rachel is the person Jona loved, than she would return for her brother. She will be in the city pulling him from the sewer and cleaning his face when he has slept in mud.
We do not search for her there.
The hills call to us.
The forest and swamps and mountains sing night music, where all the creatures of Erin sing as loud as they can their song of joy.
If she is not in the city, she will be found.
That will be enough to quiet the lost soul that haunts me still, and will be with me a long time. Jona, this will have to be enough.
Rest, now, lost child. Find your peace.
***
Calipari’s farm was far from a road. My husband and I stopped in at the tavern where Franka used to work, and already they had disappeared into the green hills.
The tavern keeper told us what direction they had taken. He didn’t know where it was, exactly. A farmer on his way into the city knew and pointed to familiar landmarks. He told us we could wait for him to finish his business inside the walls and he’d take us on his cart.
We thanked him. We pulled the wolfskin over our backs and darted into the treeline. We would find the farm ourselves.
We followed bear trails through the marshlands dodging bramble canes and the roots of high sour nut trees that rooted shallow enough to trip a man in the water. We ran into the maple hills above the mud. We howled to the moon, and to our pack, but they were both too far from us to hear.
We missed the wolves of our home.
Through the maple hills and the myrtle marshlands and to the northeast and northeast my husband and I ran, until we came upon a sweaty back digging fence stumps on barren ground. Nicola Calipari didn’t have a shovel. He was using a small, flat plank to dig.
He was surprised to see us.
I stood up, a woman. My husband stayed wolf and sniffed the perimeters of the farmland.
“Hello,” I said.
He dropped his stick. “You’re back, huh? Anything else I can do to help?”
I bowed to him.
“Never thought I’d see you two again,” he said, “Still hunting?”
“No,” I said, “Salvatore Fidelio is dead. We were unable to find Rachel Nolander.”
“Who?”
“If you encounter a woman named Rachel Nolander, tell my husband and I which way she went.”
“That’s the Senta Jona was with, right?”
“Yes.”
“What about Jona’s mother?”
“Her head was on the wall when we crossed the gates.”
He nodded. “That’s it, isn’t it? Anything else?”
I looked around his farm. He had a few sticks beginning to look like a fence. He had a plow under a makeshift hut to keep the rain from rusting it. He had a dirty tent where—I assume—Franka kept house. Her son was in a tree, pulling at acorns. He had stopped when he saw us. A man could live a long time on acorns, if he washed away the bitter in the nut.
“You have no animal to pull the plow?” I said.
“Coming soon, if my neighbor is honest.” He looked back at the fallow fields. This was a farm before the war, but so many farms in this borderland went abandoned when the armies clashed here. “I’ve got a wagon coming, too. Wagon has the grain and seed. I bought it all from this fellow Franka knew. Good price.” He grimaced. “I think it was a good price. I don’t know Bloody Elishta about farming. He’s getting it to us soon. He better.”
“What will you grow?”
“Some barley, and some beans. Franka wants a separate garden just for vegetables, but we got to get a good cash crop down first. We should get chickens, too.”
“A pig might be wiser, for now. Pigs can forage
in the hills on their own, and when they are big enough, you can cure the meat to last all through the rains when the fields flood.”
“Pigs, huh?”
“Pigs,” I said. My husband disappeared around some trees on the land. “You did a great service to Erin when you killed the demon child. Then, you served us again when you wrote your maps and letters for us. The church is grateful. I shall arrange some pigs for you. They will help you through the winter. Collect their dung for the barley fields. Collect your own shit, if you can. You’ll need everything you can to feed the fields. Bury everything there.”
He scratched his neck. He looked around his farm. “You don’t think the wolves’ll get to the pigs, do you? I’ve been hearing wolves all night for weeks.”
“We are the only wolves in these hills,” I said. “Our brothers and sisters are on a long hunt past the red valley. We howl to them, far away. Your pigs will be safe from us and our kind this winter, at least, if not the next.”
He nodded. He looked down at the hole he was digging. He kicked at the misplaced dirt. He looked over his shoulder at the boy collecting acorns from the tree, who had stopped for us. We still frightened him. He stayed in his tree.
I looked directly in his face. “Are you and Franka married, yet?”
He shrugged. “We’re married because we say we’re married. Same thing as having someone else say it over our heads, isn’t it?”
“Is she here?”
He nodded. “She’s asleep. She’s been working at night her whole life. She’s not used to this farm stuff. We’re just not used to it.”
“Take me to her,” I said.
He nodded. The mud sucked at my feet. Human feet were not padded and wide like wolf feet, and all the weight digs into the sharp heel. The mud grabbed at my feet. I felt clumps of mud leaping up my back when I tugged my feet free.
“Has it been raining?” I asked.
“You can’t tell?”
“Farmers speak of rain,” I said, “Thus, I ask of rain. It is polite.”
“Yeah, it’s been raining. Well, I don’t know if I’m going to be able to do this,” he said. “Franka’s in there. She’s out hard as a pinker. She won’t wake up for me unless I bang a pot over her head, and she’s not well enough to work so why bother. I say let her sleep.”
I heard my husband’s padded feet galloping to us.
I peered into the tent darkness. I lashed the flaps to the side to let light in. She was spread out on a clump of rags on the ground. Her chest rose and fell slowly. Her stomach had swollen since last we had seen her. She would give birth before the end of the season.
I touched around her stomach gently and sniffed at her skin. She was fine. She was with child, and the babe was healthy even if the mother was weak.
“Has her pregnancy been difficult?” I said.
“Like I’d know that,” he said.
“So it has been difficult?”
“I guess it has.”
I patted her stomach. I touched her cheek. I leaned in close and whispered a blessing into her ear.
Her breath held still. Her eyes opened.
She batted at my hands. “Who the bloody Elishta are you?” she said. She pulled away from me, and grabbed at her muddy blankets.
I smiled. “I saved you from a foul disease, Franka, and I came to check on you and your farmer husband.”
“Oh,” she said. “I’m sorry I didn’t recognize you.” She touched my hand. “Oh, please, can you be around when my time comes? There’s no woman out here.”
“Perhaps,” I said. I ran a hand through her hair. “Are we in the wilderness then, with no woman to help you? Where does such a place begin, if not here?”
Where does the wilderness begin? Where does it end? An eternal traveler, I have stood on the high mountains and gazed down at an endless woods like Erin’s own gorgeous dress. I have seen the small infections in the emerald horizon, where men have lit campfires eating into the green skirt like moths burping smoke. I have opened a door in the tallest tower of the tallest palace of a gigantic city, and butterflies and roaches and mice and birds and lizards all looked up at me as if humans had no place in their wild home.
I do not know where the true boundaries lie.
I know where I am at peace: when the rain falls on my head and the only boundaries between sky and me are tree leaves or stone escarpments on a rock face. I do not trade for meat or fruit there, I merely take it. I do not tell stories of ancient heroes around a campfire. I am too tired from the hunt. I have no fire because my fur and my pack keep me warm. I spread my paws out across the ground, and I sleep in blessed peace.
I think the wilderness is where things happen and no one writes about them. It is the place where there are no maps, no memorials to heroes, no gravestones, no paper, and no ink.
I have had enough of paper and ink.
My husband and I have done all we can with these demon skulls, and demon stains. We return to the wilderness now.
May the blessings of Erin come upon us all.
***
Once upon a time, Salvatore looked out the hole where he used to have a hallway because he heard all these sounds that woke him up. He peeked his head out to see.
A huge herd of cattle, a hundred head at least, marched down the center of the street in one long blur of brown spots and swaying horns and lowing. Dozens of drovers surrounded the herd. The men swiped listlessly at the cattle with whips. The cattle didn’t seem to mind. They walked in that gentle, plodding way that cows always walk until they caught the smell of the abattoir. The aborted canal had changed the path of drovers from the docks. It made noise. It woke him.
In the street, the people stopped to let the cattle pass. They couldn’t get across. People who couldn’t get across jammed the people who were going up and down the way. Salvatore looked down, and saw Jona in the street. He backed away.
Rachel stopped to kiss Jona on his lips. Her eyes stayed open. Djoss stumbled out of an alley. She saw her brother down the street. She froze.
“What?” said Jona.
Rachel pulled away. She let her hands fall down his arm, down his hands, down his fingers. She let him go. She sighed. She said nothing to Jona.
Her brother’s hands had been trembling.
“I have to go,” she said.
Jona reached for her. “Go?” he said. She had already moved on. She didn’t look over her shoulder at him. “Go where?” he shouted, “We’re going dancing!”
She was already gone, past the crowd bottlenecked around the herd of cattle like water catching in a drain.
THE END
About the Author
J. M. McDermott is the author of six novels and two short story collections, including Last Dragon, Never Knew Another, Women and Monsters, and Maze. He holds an MFA from the Stonecoast Program at the University of Southern Maine.
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