I consider flattering her with some remark about stealing only the best, but instead I say, “It seemed to work so well for you, I thought I’d try it out.”
She takes one step toward me, then another. I stay still and wait for her to saunter over, mindful of the knife still tight in her grip. As she closes the distance, I see that she’s nodding. Her pace quickens ever so slightly, and she steps hard into the dirt as she comes. Within ten feet, she raises the knife and points the tip at me. She stops five feet away and stomps once, her foot pounding up a cloud of dust that softens the darkness around her. The knife is still pointing at my chest.
“Why!” She hisses the word at me, spits it.
Her eyes have narrowed. My heart quickens again, and the blood rushes in my ears and my eyes focus on the tip of my knife pointed at my stomach, and my hands go out again, this time not palms up in a plea of mercy but palms out as if they might shield off her rage. “What—“
“Why did you let them take me at the lake! Why did you sit in your little hole, you coward, you ratone!” The knife point waggles at me, and her voice has become brittle and sharp. She spears me with her gaze, hot anger pouring through me. I’m surprised. I don’t know why I’m surprised. It’s the one question I’d be asking in her place, the one thing I’d have been thinking about for the last three hours, the one thing I’d want answered before gutting and skinning the sniveling little mouse that shivered in his hideout instead of come to her rescue.
And it’s the one question I never dared ask myself since that moment. I’d been thinking instead of my own question, the one I came all this way to ask her, the one—
“And then,“ she shouts as she waves the knife at the forest around us, “you follow all this way. What for? To watch them let a bear eat me alive? To watch them drag me around this forest, tied up like some goat going to slaughter? To—“
“I don’t know!” I can’t listen to her hot rage any more. I can’t stand her being so mad at me. I can’t stand staying so mad at myself. “I can’t…”
She stops and glares at me, waiting. I drop my hands to my sides again. “I don’t… I don’t know,” I tell her. “I was just watching the sunset on the lake. Then you showed up. Then they showed up.” I look down at the ghost-man, his black cap fallen off to expose a completely bald, white head. “Do you know what it’s like to have childhood stories come to life in front of you?” Now I feel some anger growing inside me. And why not? I broke the law to help her. “I should have killed you myself even before you got yourself captured!”
“What?” The knife point rises at my chest again. This time I don’t put out my hands.
“That’s right. The law says that any mutant who wanders into Southshaw is to be killed before—“
“Mutant! Did you just call me a mutant?”
“It’s what you are,” I shout, watching her eyes go wide. What am I saying? I find my mouth shouting things, things I’m not sure I believe any more, things that minutes ago I could not have believed. I risked my life to save her, could have died here.
“You… you…” She’s spitting with anger now, looking around into the blackness as if searching for a word. “Mofayta! You skunk! You… Oh!” She throws the knife down into the dirt between my feet, and it sticks deep into the soft soil. She spins on her heel and stomps to where the ghost-man had been sitting earlier, stoops. When she stands, she holds up the dead rabbit for me to see. Then without another word, she turns her back to me, pauses, then stalks off quickly into the trees.
“No. Wait!” I bend and retrieve my knife, then start after her. Almost too late, I remember my pack and rush back to the hollow tree. I sling it onto my shoulders and break into a dead run in the direction she went.
CHAPTER 3
“Don’t you ever get tired?” My voice comes out hoarse and gasping after two hours of trying to catch up.
What comes back to me through the darkness and branches is a sort of grunted sigh. Tracking her has been easy—even after two hours her anger comes out in snapping branches and stomped twigs. My legs ache and burn. I’m no weakling—Baddock has seen to that—but I’m used to learning the law, not all this crashing through forests and fighting off ghost-men.
“Listen, please!” I’ve only said that a hundred times since I got within earshot. “I’m sorry,” I yell after her. Again. Won’t she ever stop for a rest? She must be as tired as I am. But still we go rumbling on. She’s fifty yards ahead. I can’t see her yet in the dark, but the sun should rise soon, and it will get easier.
Then, a sharp cry ahead. I pause, grabbing a sapling to keep from falling over in my sudden stop. There’s silence out there, an empty and dead omission. I wait, fighting off the roar of my own breath and trying not to tremble with the exhaustion squeezing my whole body. Nothing. I can’t hear her at all.
I start forward again, quickly but cautiously. Her cry echoes in my mind as scene after scene fly through my imagination. A rattlesnake. A bear. More ghost-men. My eyes tear up as I peer unblinking into the darkness ahead and push forward, knocking away branches and kicking back ferns.
About where she’d have been when she cried out, I hear it for the first time. A whimpering sob, soft and nearby. I pull up almost in mid-stride, wondering if I’d imagined the sound. But it comes again, from below and to my left.
“Hello?” I reach out with my voice, hoping she will answer. The whimpering stops. I take one deep breath and hold it, trying to stop the throb of blood through my ears. I point myself at the place where I think the sound came from but am terrified that if I move, I’ll wander farther away rather than nearer. So I wait, certain that she is nearby but unsure what to do.
“Go away.” She’s there. Not far. Her quiet words are followed by sniffling. It sounds as if a small child is hiding nearby, desperate to stop her sobbing.
I glide slowly in the direction of her sounds, exquisitely careful and slow. After a few steps, I stop and ask, “Are you hurt?”
“Go away.”
There. Now that I know where to listen, I know exactly where she is. Very close, ten yards or less. But her voice has an echo to it, a hollow and muffled feel unlike her sharp words before. I take a few more steps, then go more slowly. I reach out one foot to test the ground. It feels solid. I step and repeat the process. The cool night air fills me and surrounds me, and there’s a wet odor of a stream nearby, though I do not hear the hiss of water. The eastern sky is beginning to lighten with the first hints of dawn over the far peaks.
Another step. My foot goes out again and tests the soil. As I push weight onto it, the dirt begins to give and slip away from me. I catch myself and pull back, then kneel. The dim predawn shows a black emptiness before me that I would never have seen walking at pace. I know she’s fallen in this hole. The dank smell of fungus and mildew is strong here, not unlike the smell of the ghost-men up close.
Without meaning to, I soften my voice. “Are you hurt?”
Her voice comes back up to me from the emptiness, damp with tears and mud. “My leg.”
“I can’t see you. How deep is the hole?”
“Not very.” Her voice is still soft but no longer punctuated by quiet sobs. My eyes are adjusting as I gaze into the hole, and I think I can begin to make out her shape. Maybe ten or twelve feet down. Not very deep, but a fall far enough to hurt.
“I’ve rope in my pack,” I say and slip my pack off onto the ground behind me. “Is there any way for you to climb out?” Almost immediately I regret the question. She’s hurt, you idiot, I think. Go save her.
“I can’t see,” she replies. “It seems steep, like it was dug out.”
“I’ll come down,” I say, trying to project a calming confidence through the words.
“To save the mutant?”
Although the rage has drained from her voice, pain still soaks it through. I hear something deeper there, in the dulled constraint holding her. A sorrow, or a longing, or—no, I don’t know what it is, but it makes my heart ache for h
er and brings a stinging to my eyes.
“I… I’m sorry.”
The silence from below pushes me to work. I retrieve my rope and tie a good bolynn around a nearby trunk, then drop the free end into the hole. I hear a light splash and wonder at the water in the bottom. Like it was dug out, she’d said. A trap? A well? I grab the rope and slide down, feeling the treacherous softness of the earthy sides as dirt gives way and sprinkles into the water and mud below. As I descend, I look up to see the starry sky graying with the dawn.
“Tell me if I’m going to step on you,” I say with a hollow cheeriness.
“You’re fine. I’m over here.”
I look down and can see her now, a huddled bulk a few feet away from the bottom of my rope. I hop down the last few feet, splashing into a solid mud and slipping around before finding my balance. I kneel next to her, conscious of the soppy wetness soaking into my trousers. I can’t see her face, only her silhouette. She’s watching me, sitting back with her left leg stretched out. Without asking, I know that’s where she’s hurt.
My hands slip under and gently lift her foot, and my fingers test the bones and the flesh. The ankle is already beginning to swell, She hisses and gasps at my touch, but I press my fingers in harder until I’m satisfied with the injury.
“I think your bones are not broken,” I offer. “But you’ll need to rest a day or more before going much farther.”
“How do you know?”
“What, how do I know you’ll have to rest? Um. Because no one can walk on an injury like this.”
“What if us mutants have special powers? What if breaking our bones makes us stronger?”
I set her foot down and remove my hands, sit back on my haunches. I can’t read her voice. There’s still pain in it, but less, and a hint of heat has crept back in.
“Then,” I reply slowly, “it’ll be you carrying me up that rope instead of the other way round.”
“Too bad for you, then,” she says with a dismissive wave of her silhouette hand. “No mutant powers. Just a regular Tawtrukk girl.”
“That’s too bad. I was hoping for a demonstration of all those special powers. Why else do you think I followed you all this way?”
Now that was a stupid thing to say, Dane, I think. Why did you follow her all this way? Why didn’t you head for home the minute she stormed off? Why would you wander farther away from your life, your obligations, your family, your home? For what? Even talking to her is forbidden.
She appears to ignore the question, and the silence of our pause is more welcome than awkward.
“Well?” She asks finally. “Are you going to help me out of this hole?”
“Oh, yeah.” I grab under her arm and lift as she stands on her good leg. While I hold on, she tests her bad leg, a trial that ends with a sharp gasp and both of us nearly tumbling back to the muddy floor. “Grab on.” I turn my back to her, and she wraps her arms around my neck, locking her hands together against my chest.
Her arms are solid and muscular, strong and powerful. Not in the oxen way a farmer’s are, but in a deer-like, feminine way. The warmth of her breasts presses against my back, and I feel my torso expand with a deep breath. I want her to feel that I’m strong and powerful, too, want her to like the feel of my body against hers as much as I like her weight on me.
We’re wrapped tight together, and her chin rests on my shoulder next to my right ear. Her breath blows hot through my hair and past my cheek, and I feel her trembling against me as she breathes.
“Does it hurt much?” I ask. I guess that her trembling comes from trying to control her breathing through the pain, but I want it to be for a different reason.
She presses tighter against me. “Yes,” she whispers. “Are you sure you can bear me?”
No, I think, and I grab the rope with both hands. The gray circle above us is growing whiter with each moment, and I can see my hands wrapped on the coarse rope. My skin is smooth and young but crisscrossed with new pink scratches and old pale scars. My knuckles tense with effort as I pull up, pushing one foot hard into the soft dirt wall. My arms burn, but it’s a welcome feeling to use these muscles after a whole night of running. And with each step up the wall, with each release and new grip on the rope, I feel the weight of my burden pressing against me. And when we reach the top and clamber out onto the ground, I find myself wishing the hole had been twice as deep.
“Look,” the girl says, pointing to the edge of the hole. “Where I slipped in. Wood.”
I’m out of breath and desperately want to sit and recover, but I look anyway. At the edge of the hole is a thick piece of lumber, old and rotted and nearly wrapped round with a thick vine. Where she stepped, the wood simply disintegrated beneath her foot. And then I’m certain.
“It’s a well,” I whisper.
She pokes at the wood, looks in the hole. “It can’t be. It’s not deep enough.”
“No,” I say. “An ancient well. From before the War, probably.” Vaguely I wonder if she knows about the War, if she has any idea what this land was in the long forgotten, distant past. But mostly I look on in awe. That lumber was hewn three hundred years ago and still has its shape if not its integrity. It’s becoming part of nature again. Dust to dust. The sense of time overwhelms me for a moment, and here in this spot in the forest, sitting with a girl so different from me it was unimaginable just yesterday, I feel a connection to people who lived and died here centuries ago. A bond through ages.
“Oh. Yes, I see,” she says, and I can tell she does not share my sense of awe. “I think you’re right.” She lifts herself to a lopsided semi-standing position and hops and hobbles her way to a nearby tree. She leans on it hard and looks around in the gathering light. She points ambiguously at the well, then around at the landscape, a frown of concentration wrinkling her brow. She mumbles vaguely, “Where there’s a well…” and her voice dies off.
I watch her study the area. In the dawn light, I see that her skin is a golden brown, a beautiful bronze color that accentuates her black hair and eyebrows and deep, deep brown eyes. As I’d thought, she’s near my age, fifteen or sixteen, and although she’s shorter than I, she’s not shorter by much. Her trousers and shirt fit loose on her, and I find myself remembering the feel of her against me and imagining the shape of her body under the garments.
She would be strange in Southshaw, a frighteningly different yet beautifully exotic woman among the girls at the Wifing. Her hair is knotted and snarled. Her trousers are splotched with mud and blood, and her shirt is torn and her face scratched. I try to envision her made up for the Wifing ceremony, a long dress draped on her powerful body. A dress the color of the green bay where we first saw each other, green and pale yet rich and sensuous, full of mystery and life.
Her hair would be braided and wrapped in the traditional stive, the layers piled above her ears and showing off her smooth and confident jaw, her slender yet muscular neck. Her dark skin and black hair would draw every eye to her, away from the plump, doughy girls from Southshaw with their strawberry and wheat hair and their milkish skin and watery eyes. The girls with the simpering giggles and dull tongues. The girls who aspire to be my polished and prized trophy, surrounding but outshined by the girl who kills rabbits with a lightning flick of her wrist.
“Hah!” Her voice barks out like a crow’s caw. “It’s grown over, but what did I tell you?”
I stand confused. She’s pointing past me into the woods, but I can’t take my eyes off her to see what she’s trying to show me. “Um… nothing.”
“Yes I did. I said, ‘Where there’s a well, there’s a house.’”
“No, you didn’t.”
“Of course I did.”
“Nope. You did say—“
“Shut up. Come on.” She waves me over to her with an impatient flick of her hand. I retrieve my pack and sling it on my shoulders, then position myself under her outstretched arm.
Finally I look where she’s pointed, and at first all I see is a hillside stre
tching up before us, fifty yards away, with trees and underbrush growing thick and dark. But as we hobble forward, a shape awakens in the overgrown wildness. Stones piled—no, stacked—behind a sheet of ivy. A thick, wooden beam overhead, maybe a roof joist, protruding from behind a wide redwood trunk. A house, made of stone. Hiding behind centuries of overgrowth. Reclaimed by nature, but not yet conquered.
We creep up the slope. I let her lean on my shoulder and hobble beside me, even though my body has started to ache through and I’m feeling a burn as if my thighs and arms are filled with hot coals. But the weight of her body against mine sends a different kind of heat through me, and I find myself wishing the house were not so close after all. A minute or two and we reach the wall of ivy, and we both start ripping at it in search of the door.
“Good thing this is here,” she says as we both begin to realize how exhausted we’ve become.
“Why’s that,” I gasp.
“Because that guy you knocked out is going to be mad.”
I remember the ghost-man and imagine Tom’s reaction when he returns.
“And he’ll come looking for us,” she adds with a grunt as she yanks down a thick vine, exposing a rusted, iron door handle.
“With friends,” I finish.
CHAPTER 4
When we pull on the handle, it crunches, flakes, and disintegrates in our hands, leaving a stub of metal on the door and a film of red rust on our hands. The door is a thick, solid wood dark with weather and age, but centuries of ivy have only scarred the surface. I give it an exploratory nudge with my shoulder, and it doesn’t budge. I half expected it to splinter and disintegrate like the metal handle, but it stands as firm as the stone wall it’s set in.
I step back, thinking about windows or chimneys or rotted holes in the roof. Any way we could get inside. I let my eyes roam aimlessly across the ivy, among the leafy canopy above, along the line of the beam that juts out over our heads.
With a grunt of exhaustion and pain, the girl lurches past me to the door, limping so much she’s almost hopping on her one good leg.
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