by Evren, S. K.
“What’s wrong?” he wrote, feeling very self-conscious.
“I think I’ve said before that I’ve had entire classes devoted to why life after death does not exist,” she answered. “Now, here I am, dressing up a skeleton for a walk into town. If you had told me prior to graduation that I would be doing this now, I would have suggested a year or two at an asylum—or at least less alcohol.” She smiled wryly. “Someday, if we ever get the chance, there are a few professors I’d love for you to meet.”
Drothspar bowed to her, almost toppling on his newly padded feet. Regaining his balance he wrote on his slate. “Sounds like fun.” He drew another smiling face after the words.
Chance looked at it and laughed. “That’s really cute,” she said smiling herself.
“You never really appreciate facial expressions,” he wrote, “until you can’t make them.”
“Or read them,” she agreed.
“Is that one of the reasons it’s hard for you to look at me?” he asked.
“It’s one,” she said blushing. “It’s probably the major reason. I think the other reason is because I feel like I’m peeking at something secret, something I’m not meant to see at all.” She frowned. “That’s the strange part,” she added, “I’m usually the first to peek into things that aren’t my own.” She cut off the sentence abruptly, as if she were afraid she’d gone too far. If she had, Drothspar didn’t notice.
He nodded his head to show he had heard what she’d said. He nodded often now, he noticed, trying to compensate for his lack of expression. He felt that his nodding helped her to see what she might normally read in his eyes or on his face. He thought he’d noticed her nodding a bit more than she had when he’d first met her. He wondered if his assumed mannerism had carried itself over to her, a contagious gesture.
“Okay,” she said, dismissing his question and continuing with the next day’s disguise, “You’re going to be a beggar.”
“A beggar,” he confirmed on his slate.
“And I,” she said humbly, “will be a young noble woman, leading you to the ruins of Æostemark to atone for sins past.”
“Yours or mine,” he asked.
“Both. You’re going to atone for your behavior during the invasion, asking the fallen defenders of Æostemark to forgive you for… abandoning your post as a border guard.” She paused, tapping one finger to her lip. Her eyes lit as she made up her own sins. “I’ll be leading you in order to break myself of the sin of pride.” She adopted a mournful tone of voice. “I had spent so much time among the upper classes that I looked upon the poor as a lower form of life. I took no more notice of them than I did of a dog lying in the street.” She snuffled slightly and raised her kerchief to her eyes and nose. “The Maker is merciful, however, and He has shown me the error of my ways. One of His portly servants suggested this ‘pilgrimage’ to help me see that all of us are gifted with the Spirit of Life, the high-born, and the lowly alike.” A look of skepticism filled her eyes as she spoke this last bit, replaced at the end by blind hope and devotion.
Drothspar could see she was enjoying herself immensely. It seemed to him that she had created their stories very quickly. He wasn’t entirely certain, because he wasn’t entirely certain just how much time had passed. The one thing he was sure of, however, was that she became her part. She spoke with a vapid and pampered air until she came upon the subject of the poor. Her voice would change ever so slightly, indicating the topic was as difficult for her as putting on an out-of-fashion gown. Drothspar had seen plays performed by actors and wondered if Chance had studied the art. He took up his charcoal and slate to ask her.
“Did you study acting at school?”
“No,” she laughed warmly. “Well, yes, I guess I did, but it wasn’t my main focus of study. Father would never have approved of something as frivolous as acting.”
“You’re very good at it,” he encouraged her.
“I’ve had a few successes,” she blushed. She paused only briefly, her face unchanged as her eyes instinctively examined the area where his face should have been. She blinked a few times and stifled a yawn. “It’s getting late,” she suggested, “and I’m ready to sleep. We can work out more as we travel.”
Drothspar nodded his head and wrote on his tablet.
“‘Goodnight’ to you, too,” she read and replied. She yawned once more and made her way to her spot in front of the fireplace.
Drothspar stepped out into the cool night air and took a seat beside the front door. His wrapped feet made no sounds as he seated himself on the wooden planks of the porch. He leaned back against the cottage and began to think about the trip to Æostemark.
Chapter 14 – Forest
The next morning, Chance woke early. Drothspar could hear her stirring in the cottage. He waited patiently outside. Eventually, Chance called out that she was ready, and Drothspar stood from his place. He moved away from the door just as she stepped out to join him. She was once again dressed in her black cloak, though she had the hood down. Her hair was caught up in a plain cloth, and her eyes were excited. She had her bag slung over her shoulder, and her dagger, as far as he could tell, was well concealed. She asked him if he was ready, and he nodded slowly. Chance closed the cottage door behind her, and the two walked out toward the lake.
From the outset, Chance began a running commentary on the wonders of nature. She reminded Drothspar of her urban upbringing and marveled at the sheer size of the lake. She noticed the low mist hovering over the surface and mentioned the splashes of fish as they jumped for insects just over the water. She didn’t know at first that the splashing had actually been fish. She asked Drothspar excitedly, and he wrote the answer on his slate. She asked him questions for a while, but finally lost herself in her own adventure. They walked along the southern lakeshore for hours, then struck out to the east, leaving the lake behind. The lake had provided a break in the forested landscape, a vast area of light and open, if inaccessible, space. Once past the lake, however, the forest closed in around them with gnarled and naked arms.
Chance continued to comment on the new wonders she encountered. No longer answering questions, Drothspar lost himself for a time in his own thoughts. Although he heard the young woman’s voice, he honestly wasn’t paying attention to her words. When her wonderment worked its way into his thoughts, he smiled internally, happy for the company. Chance, for her part, wasn’t the least bit bothered by Drothspar’s lack of attention. She was simply happy to be moving east instead of west.
They did not meet any other travelers or woodsmen. The forest, itself, was quite still, as if some familiar accompaniment were missing. The deeper they pressed into the trees, the more the stillness settled on Chance, depressing her mood with an invisible weight. She eventually stopped talking altogether, the silence of the woods becoming contagious.
At first, Drothspar didn’t notice the change in her mood. His thoughts ranged from the time they had spent in the cottage to questions about their entry into Æostemark. He thought about Chance closing the front door as they had started out, an action he had seen Li perform many times. He wondered how it had come to pass that he watched another woman close the door to his home—watching through the hollow eyes of a fleshless skull. He wondered how others would react to that same, animate skull. He questioned the effectiveness of his disguise. He worried about what would happen if a sudden wind caught his hood and pulled it down, or if a border guard demanded he identify himself. What would they do? What would happen to Chance?
What had happened to her? He had grown so accustomed to the sound of her voice that he wasn’t even certain when it had stopped. He looked at the young woman and saw the change in her manner. She no longer walked with her head up and her eyes everywhere. Instead, she watched the forest floor, her shoulders slumped forward. His mind focused on the moment, and he noticed a deeper silence in the woods.
The animals were quiet. They had been quiet around the cottage just after the rains, but life had return
ed to them once that storm had passed. Here, however, the animals were still quiet. True, he thought, it was late in the year, but as far as he could guess it was still too early for them to have all flown away or gone to winter’s sleep.
“Are you all right?” he asked, holding his tablet low for Chance to see.
“Yeah,” she said curtly, wanting to avoid conversation. Drothspar watched as her brow furrowed. “No,” she said abruptly, “I don’t think I am.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I’m not sure,” she answered. “I was fine, just watching the world go by. I mean, this is all pretty common to you probably, well, I mean the forest part. It’s all still new to me. The last time I came through the forest, to get to the cottage, I was trying to get there as fast as I could. Anyway, I wasn’t paying much attention that time, so this trip was exciting for me.” She paused for a moment, looking up from the forest floor for the first time since she started speaking.
“Then I just started feeling… different,” she groped for the word. “I don’t know when, I think just a little while after we came back into the trees.” She searched for a way to describe her feelings. “I feel like I’m walking over row after row of graves in a spooky old cemetery. It’s like a combination of an unwelcome awkwardness and how I felt when I saw those bodies at the farm—and you, for the first time.”
“I don’t know what to say,” Drothspar wrote.
“It’s okay,” Chance replied. “I actually hadn’t even been fully aware of it, I think, until you asked me about it. I’ll try and keep my spirits up.” She smiled wanly at him.
Drothspar nodded then stopped, and stopped walking entirely. His vision centered on a still animal form lying beside a tree. The brown of the animal’s fur had blended with, and been buried by, the dead leaves blown down by the recent storm. Drothspar walked to the body and pushed some of the leaves aside. The deer’s neck had been snapped. Oddly, the animal showed no signs of being eaten, either by its attacker or by any scavenger. Chance had come up behind him and looked down at the carcass. He heard the sharp intake of her breath.
“Look at its eyes,” she said, her voice little more than a whisper.
Drothspar moved to look at the deer’s eyes. He twisted the head with its antlers to get a look at both sides. The eyes had been torn out, leaving streaks of bloody tears to mourn their passing. Drothspar let go of the antlers and stepped away from the animal.
What could do this, he wondered. What would do this? What creature would leave such prime prey uneaten? Why bother with the eyes? Blackbirds, he had heard, would occasionally pluck eyes from a corpse, attracted to their shine. No blackbird, he thought, no matter how industrious, could have moved the deer’s antlered head to get both eyes.
He silently said a simple prayer for the dead, hoping it would be appropriate for the creature. When he finished, he folded his hands.
“Amen,” he heard Chance say. He turned quickly, asking her what she said, but his jaws only clicked loudly. Chance looked startled, almost frightened.
“What did you say?” he wrote urgently on his tablet.
“I said, ‘amen.’ You looked like you were praying,” she explained.
“I thought you had heard me,” Drothspar wrote, “I’m sorry if I scared you.” A small flash of disappointment ran through his mind.
“It’s all right,” Chance replied. “I understand. It was just the way your teeth were snapping together, I guess, mixed with all this other stuff. You just made me a little nervous is all.”
Drothspar nodded. “I’m sorry,” he wrote again, feeling slightly guilty.
“It’s no problem, really.” She looked around, her eyes still nervous. “Can we keep going, though, I’d really like to get away from here.”
The gloom of the forest deepened as the day passed into evening. The fading light brought a chill to the air and lengthened the shadows around them. A few hours after they encountered the mutilated deer, they found a clearing in the woods. Several of the surrounding trees had been reduced to stumps, their remains lying on their sides, ready to be cut into pieces.
Drothspar and Chance entered the clearing gratefully, eager to be out from under the growing shadows of the forest. As they neared the center of the clearing, they recognized the simple sawhorses that woodsmen used to reduce trees into unfinished logs. In the fading light, the travelers could clearly see the glint of metal abandoned in the leaves.
Drothspar wondered what the local woodsmen would leave behind. As he walked around the sawhorses, he found abandoned tools scattered in the leaves. What surprised him most, however, was the dark, dried liquid that had been splashed all over the area. He knew immediately that the stains were blood.
Chance stayed outside of the work space, watching Drothspar from several feet away. She was a stout-hearted woman, but she decided she had seen enough death over the last few days. She was certain, watching the way Drothspar examined the area, that death had been working in this camp. She put her finger on the feeling she had experienced since they entered the forest. She felt like a living creature among the dead, out of place, and unwelcome. She watched as Drothspar returned.
“They’re all dead, aren’t they?” she asked, certain of her intuition.
“There’s a lot of blood,” he wrote, “but no bodies.”
“Nothing?” she asked, incredulous.
“Abandoned tools.”
“No bodies,” Chance repeated, still unable to reconcile her feelings with his words. She stepped around him and walked into the work area.
She was amazed by the amount of blood covering the ground. Her eyes sought out the dark stains with morbid fascination. The blood wasn’t merely pooled, she realized, it was splashed and scattered in all directions. She walked to one of the sawhorses on the far side of the clearing. In the remaining light, she could just make out the print of a hand on the wood, a hand that had been soaked in blood. She walked back to the work area and kicked the leaves off of the tools with her feet. She was looking for, hoping to find, blood on the tools. Maybe it had all been a terrible accident. The only blood she saw on the tools fit with the patterns of the blood splashed in the area.
Drothspar, guessing at her intentions, pushed some of the leaves aside with his own wrapped feet. Uncovering a large saw, he noticed bits of material stuck to the blade. He lifted the tool and looked at it closely. Bits of old cloth were caught in the teeth, along with a white, wood-like matter. It was unlike any of the wood in the clearing. Most of what the loggers had been working on was recently felled, not fully aware its body was dead. Chance finished her search, a haunted look in her eyes.
“Please,” she said to him simply.
He nodded, understanding. They walked away swiftly, trying to get as far away as they could in the remaining light.
Their increased pace allowed them to make good time. Although they were still a few hours from the edge of the forest, they had walked a comforting distance from the woodsmen’s camp. Nightfall dictated the end of the journey for the day, spreading like a blanket over the forest, and dissolving the spindly shadows into the surrounding darkness. Drothspar took his flint and a nail from the pocket of his robe.
“Don’t,” Chance said, “please don’t make a fire.” Drothspar put the flint and nail back in his pocket. He started to write something on his tablet. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I can’t read what you’re writing in this light.”
Drothspar sat confounded in the darkness. He couldn’t speak to her, he couldn’t make light, and he couldn’t write. He thought he understood her request to forgo the fire. He was fairly certain she didn’t want anything to draw attention to them. He sat quietly, listening.
“Drothspar,” she said, “I’d like to ask you something.” She became quiet for a moment. “How about this, I’ll ask you something, and if your answer is yes, clap your hands twice. If it’s no, just clap once. Understand?”
Two soft smacks, like dry sticks struck together, sounded in the
darkness.
“Excellent,” she said, a thin enthusiasm returning to her voice. “Okay,” she started, “do you sleep?”
She heard a single clap.
“You stay awake all the time?”
She heard two claps.
“I know I’ve asked you to go outside for the nights, to go away from me. I’m sorry about that. I can only hope you understand—”
She was interrupted by two claps.
“Well,” she continued, “I’m actually really nervous tonight. Frightened might be a good word, a better word. Do you think—could you not go away tonight?”
She heard him clap twice.
“Thank you,” she told him, relief sounding in her voice. “To tell you the truth, I’m not sure I can sleep, either. If I do sleep, I’m not really sure I want to dream. Oh well. Please, though, please don’t leave me, okay?”
Again, she heard two claps in the darkness.
“Thank you, Drothspar,” she said earnestly. “I’ve really got to lie down now. I’ll see you in the morning. Great Maker, I hope it comes quickly.”
Drothspar wished that he could say “goodnight.” He settled up against a tree and looked out over her reclining form. He rustled his feet in the leaves to let her know exactly where he was. It was strange, he thought, that she couldn’t seem to see him at all. It was dark, certainly, and he couldn’t make out every detail around, but he could make out her form in the leaves. He leaned back against the tree and waited for morning.
Dawn found Drothspar still leaning against the tree. He wondered through the night about the strange scenes they had encountered the day before, but let them go as pale light stained the eastern sky. His eyes focused on the quiet form before him. Just as he had when they first “met” in the cottage, he watched her chest, hoping to see some sign of breathing. As it had then, her cloak made it difficult to see any movement, especially in the pale light. His vision remained focused, however, studying, waiting, hoping. It had been a cold night, and her cloak didn’t seem like much for warmth. He would have given her his robe, but they’d worked so hard to fill it with material that he was more concerned that she’d be upset about losing all that work.