Never Kiss A Stranger

by Heather Grothaus

  Warin Mallory sat near the weakening fire, one knee bent to his chest, his other leg crooked under him for support. His gray hair was untied, swooping away from his forehead and falling over both shoulders. His beard and mustache were full and neat. His gaze was icy, but merry, as if death had been so startlingly bright as to have bleached his eyes, but he had enjoyed the experience. He was dressed in his typical dark green tunic, and was shelling what looked to Piers to be hazelnuts by hand, and feeding them one at a time to Layla.

  Layla crouched at Warin’s knee, her little hands clasped patiently before her mouth, nibbling and watching as each shell piece fell onto the pile growing on the ground. Lord Mallory never spoke, but he did keep a gentle smile on his face. Every now and then he would look up at Piers and nod encouragingly, or hold a nut toward him as if offering it to him to eat.

  Piers had managed to barely shake his head no the first time. Now he just looked away. He had tried speaking to his father when Warin had simply walked from the snowstorm and toward the fire, but his words had been garbled and unintelligible to his own ears, even knowing what he was trying to say.

  Why do you haunt me?

  Is it your wish to see me die?

  Was it not enough to torment me with your uncaring the whole of my life?

  Can you not rest until you are certain I have died a death as lonely as my life?

  But his questions had only come out as pathetic sobs, and so Piers had held his swollen and dry tongue out of pride. With Warin keeping the death vigil over him, both Judith Angwedd’s and Bevan’s cruel words had ceased, and that at least was a blessing.

  Piers was sorry. Sorry that he had ever met Alys Foxe and unwillingly brought her into the misery that was his mission. Had he simply abandoned her, she would have eventually returned to Fallstowe, and would not be now wandering a desolate wood populated only with myths in search of nonexistent aid for him. She deserved to live her fortunate life. Everyone deserved that, Piers thought. Poor misguided child had ended up with him instead.

  Piers thought he heard a crunching in the wood beyond. Likely naught but some nocturnal forager, and so he ignored it, choosing to watch his father instead. Piers believed this was the longest he’d ever been in the man’s presence in his life. Warin looked over his shoulder and then to Piers. He gestured toward the sound with his head and then his smile widened slightly.

  Piers nodded. It seemed what was expected of him. In death, Warin Mallory seemed to take great pleasure in such a simple thing as a mouse scampering through leaves in a lonely world painted with black and cold and quiet. And sharing his favorite treat—hazelnuts—with a little foreign animal.

  “I’ve found him!”

  The male voice cut through the night like a blade dragged through gravel. And Piers let his eyes close, knowing that now that Bevan had tracked him down at last, his moments on this earth were like the snowflakes that landed on his cheeks—little, fading miracles.

  “Yes, there! I see the fire!” A woman’s voice, and even though shrill and hoarse, it was not Judith Angwedd’s. “Piers!”

  Could it be Alys?

  Piers’s eyelids felt like stiff, dried leather as he struggled to open them. The crashing sounds beyond the trees grew in volume and intensity. His chest suddenly felt crushed, and when he managed to drag his eyes open as far as they would go—barely a sliver—he saw that Layla had returned to perch upon his midsection. The monkey began to chatter in an agitated fashion, and Piers thought that perhaps she was trying to defend him from the stranger whose voice had called out. But even Layla’s slight weight was proving too much for Piers’s laboring lungs.

  Alys’s little monkey was going to smother him to death.

  Piers flicked his eyes toward the fire—Warin was brushing bits of hazelnut shells from his palms, his smile seeming wise and merry and damnably eternal. He stared into Piers’s eyes as Piers stared back and struggled silently to draw breath, tried to raise an arm to brush at Layla. The vision of his father began to throb as consciousness wavered.

  Warin braced a palm on the ground and began to lever himself up.

  Piers’s view of him was blocked as a figure rushed in front of the fire, blackening his world. Layla screamed pitifully and then Piers felt as if a boulder had been dropped onto his chest as the monkey launched herself upward. But then it was gone, and air trickled into his lungs.

  A breeze fell over him as Alys—wondrous, impulsive Alys—dropped to her knees at his side, holding her pet to her bosom with one arm and leaning into Piers. Her free hand stroked his forehead, his cheek, turning his face toward hers.

  “Piers, can you hear me? God, you’re burning up! I’ve found some men who are going to help us, take you back to their town.”

  His eyes shifted toward the fire once more and he saw four men, but only three strangers. The newcomers were dressed in leather and rough wool, and carried an assortment of weapons and tools strapped across their bodies with thick ropes. Warin Mallory looked each up and down, and then his eyes turned to Piers and he nodded, his smile crooking to one side as if to convey that the men looked likely enough.

  “Alys,” Piers tried to say, and it came out like the scratch of a fingernail against a piece of dried wood.

  But she heard him, for she leaned closer, her tone anxious. “Yes? What is it?”

  “I’d like you”—he tried to swallow, and raise his hand, but only one of his fingers twitched toward the men—“meet my father.”

  Alys was silent for a moment, and in that time Warin Mallory’s smile grew into a proud grin. Then Alys leaned into Piers with a rush, pressing the side of her face to his, her mouth near his ear. Piers could smell the sharp scent of her sweat-wet scalp, her fear. He could feel her humid breath against his skin. He kept his eyes on his father, whose mouth now formed the words that Alys gave voice to.

  “I’m sorry it took me so long, Piers.”

  He felt a catch in his chest, a pressure behind his eyes and they stung, as if they wanted to weep. He blinked to rid himself of the uncomfortable sensation—he had those in spades already.

  When his eyes opened, his father was gone.

  “Snow’s comin’ ice,” one of the new men said brusquely. “We’d best take him now else we’ll not get him up the ladders.”

  Ladders? Piers said to himself.

  Alys pulled away from him. “Ladders?”

  “Aye,” the man answered. He began to walk toward where Piers lay, his hands flying over the numerous straps across his body. “I’ve a fair length of rope and a blanket, we can—bastard!” the man hissed as he stumbled. He looked first to the ground around his feet, then up toward the tree tops and at last at his companions. “We’re standing in a thickness of walnuts. The whole bloody forest is walnut.”

  “Aye,” the old man of the group growled. “So watch yer bloody step, you tenderfooted maiden.”

  “Walnut,” the man repeated and then gestured brusquely with a palm toward the ground. “Where did all the bloody hazelnut shells come from?”

  Piers chuckled, but only to himself, as at last he let himself slip away into oblivion.

  It seemed to Alys that they walked for hours, although the old man, Ira—he of the loathing for nobility and the talent for a fine snare—had informed her that their town was just beyond the place where Alys had been strung up like game.

  Piers was being trundled along between the two younger men, suspended in a sort of cocoon conveyance, all but a tight circle of his face swaddled in the rough blanket. When Alys had asked the old man if he had any idea what could be wrong with Piers, Ira had replied, “Looks to me that he’s ill, woman. Not to worry, Linny will have him springin’ an’ spry.”

  Alys didn’t know who this Linny was, or exactly what “springing and spry” meant, but she prayed that it meant Piers would be well soon.

  She struggled and slipped up the side of a sudden embankment, bearing the awkward burdens of her own sack strapped across her body as well as Piers’s pac
k, which she clutched to her chest. Layla clung to her head as she came at last to the top with the rest of the group. The loud and startlingly close hoot of an owl caused Alys to jump, but then at her side, Ira raised both gnarled hands to his mouth and returned the call, so eerily reminiscent of the bird he mocked that Alys was certain they were somehow related.

  She jumped again as a rustling whoosh sounded, and a long tongue of rope and wood unfurled not six feet before the old man.

  Ira yanked on the rope, nodded to himself and then called upward. “Send down another—we’ve found a sick man an’ he’s unlikely to go it on his own.”

  Then Alys looked up, and brought a hand to her mouth as she gasped.

  The trees seemed to be alight with fae fire—above her and before her, the canopy flickered with little balls of light, some bobbing as if in lanterns, others dancing tall like virile torches. Along the forest floor, she could now see no fewer than a dozen fires crackling, before what looked to be rounded twig huts and pens made out of thick, crooked branches. Shadows began to coalesce from the darkness and move toward Alys and her companions, like trees that had come alive, walking wood, and her mind went back to what the woman she’d met in Pilings had asked her.

  Are you one of the wood people?

  Then another long rope swish-rattled down and the two younger men still bearing Piers pushed Alys aside rather carelessly to stand beneath the ladders. They looked at each other.

  “Could use the lift,” said the youngest, Alys thought. He had curly blond hair and a slim, pointed face.

  “Whilst carrying him?” The other young man shook his head, curly blond also, but wider. Alys decided they were likely brothers. “Too large. Take some fair labor.”

  “No, set him down. Save our backs.”

  “Roll off the side. Strangle.”

  “Pull fast?”

  The older brother seemed to consider it for a moment. “Climb slow.”

  The younger shrugged in agreement.

  They lowered Piers to the ground carefully and then their hands moved so deftly and so fast that their motions were blurred, knotting the ends of the rope to fashion two longer loops. The brothers hefted the loops over their heads to rest on their outside shoulders and began to climb—rather quickly, Alys thought. Piers swayed between them like a swollen bridge, farther and farther away from the ground.

  Ira stood at her side silently, his arms crossed over his chest once more and his face tilted back to track the progress of the brothers and their cargo. Alys’s eyes flicked nervously between the old man’s face and the invisible treetop, not sure what was going on or what would happen next. Would they follow the men and Piers to whatever nest was above them? Alys was anxious to be at Piers’s side once more—he had looked so much worse when she’d come back to him. And he had spoken of his dead father as if the man had been standing in the camp with them.

  The thought made Alys shiver.

  Ira turned to her, his mouth twisted as if he’d consumed something bitter. “I don’t want you here,” he said without compunction. “‘Tis due to the likes of you that we live as we do, and I’d as soon cut off one of me own arms than allow you above.”

  “Ira, I—”

  “But if I turn you away,” he said over her words, “‘tis likely you’ll only give away our place.”

  “I wouldn’t,” Alys insisted. “I couldn’t find it myself—I have no idea where we are, where the road is, the river. I’m completely lost.”

  “Think you I believe your lies, lady?” he spat nastily. “I can’t ken why you’d be with a commoner such as the man who lies above us but I would wager that it’s not but for your own greedy gain.”

  “I love him,” Alys said. She hadn’t intended the confession, but there it was, and it was true. She wanted to tell Ira that Piers was her husband, but if Ira asked Piers, in his current state of delirium—and even once he was completely clearheaded—he would likely only deny her. “I’ve held my tongue in thanks for the aid you are giving us, but it is grossly unfair the horrid things you assume about me, simply because of my birth. You know me not, Ira.”

  “I know enough of your kind,” he said, as if she were a terrible poison. “And a young woman run off from her rich family can only mean so many things.” He looked her up and down and Alys wanted to cringe. “Have his child in your belly, do you?”

  “No!” Alys said, horrified. Her skin crawled with stinging heat.

  Ira’s eyes narrowed and then he chuckled. “No? Perhaps not. But, surrounded by limp lords as you are, ‘tis likely what you love about him is in his breeches, you noble whore.”

  Alys struck him. Ira’s old face snapped to the side with her sharp blow, but when his head came round again, his whole body followed. He grabbed Alys by her upper arms, his gnarled fingers biting into her sore muscles. Layla jumped screeching to the ground, and Ira began marching away from the tree, pushing Alys backward in front of him while she struggled and flailed and tried not to drop Piers’s pack.

  “Let go of me!”

  Ira approached the swell of ground that sloped away from where their village hid and then shoved her over, grabbing Piers’s pack in the last instant. Alys windmilled her arms before falling and tumbling down the slight grade, Layla scampering through the leaves after her.

  Alys slid to a stop on her side, her hips and back already weeping pain from her encounter with the old man’s snare. Layla scurried nimbly over to her and crouched behind her body. Alys looked up the hill to where Ira glared down at her, and eight or so of the wood people from deeper in the village had come to flank him. They stared down at her with blank faces, as if they were not at all surprised to see her there or by Ira’s treatment of her.

  “Hah!” Ira growled and flung his hand at her as if he was shooing away a troublesome dog. Piers’s bag was already slung over one of the old man’s bony shoulders. “Get you from here, whore,” he emphasized. “Dare you not return, else I break with the oath I swore my father and kill a woman.” The old man turned and disappeared from the brink of the hill, while the wood people filled in the void of his presence, all still staring at her and none of them speaking.

  “Are none of you going to help me?” she demanded, astounded.

  No one so much as flinched.

  Alys wanted to lay her numb face on her frozen forearms and simply cry. She felt as though she were living in a nightmare, lost in a dangerous wood, starving, injured, and surrounded by rough social deviants who now had possession of a very ill and helpless Piers, not to mention his precious ring. No one would listen to her, no one would help her.

  Her brow lowered.

  Alys pushed herself to stand with her palms—sore and reddened from the cold and her death grip on the branch from earlier. She stared right back at the wood people while she snapped her fingers at Layla, calling the monkey to her shoulder. Alys began to climb the hillock in stuttering strides, one arm flailing out to the side for balance, the other clutching her bag at her hip. Layla clung to her like a barnacle.

  When she reached the lowly summit, the wood people gave way for her to stand. She looked around at their faces, blowing hair out of her face. Her stomach was in a knot, but she was not about to let this group of people see her fear.

  “Which way did he go?” she asked.

  A middle-aged looking man pointed a leather clad arm toward the tree the brothers had climbed with Piers. Alys glanced at the double rope ladders hanging down and then back at the cluster of faces appraising her interestedly.

  “None of you will try to stop me?”

  “Why should we?” the man asked mildly. “You want to get tossed out of a tree …” He crossed his arms, shrugged. “Your neck.”

  Alys squared her shoulders and took a deep breath. “Thank you.” She began marching toward the dangling ladders as if approaching a battlefield.

  “She’s really going up there,” Alys heard the man say to his companions, as if he couldn’t believe her brazenness.

&nb
sp; “Child, wait!” a woman’s voice called from behind Alys, but she kept walking. She would not be turned away from the one thing in her life that was important, that mattered more than anything ever had. Piers. If she had to physically fight the old man, she would.

  “Child!” Alys’s elbow was seized and she was pulled to a halt by a woman perhaps ten years her senior, with rich brown hair partially hidden by her hood, and eyes with kind tridents at their corners. The woman hesitated and looked askance at Layla for an instant. “Don’t go above. When Ira’s in a temper, he’s apt to say and do aught which he heartily regrets come the morrow.”

  “My—” Alys again wanted to say husband, but she was unsure how the wood people would take her declaration. Would they then mark Piers as related to nobility and turn him away? “My friend is very ill, and he is up there alone with strangers, including one very mean old man, who has stolen a bag not belonging to him.”

  “Your friend is in fine, fine hands. No better than Linny’s for a thousand fathoms,” the woman insisted, her grip gentling, but becoming more insistent all the same. “Ira is not a bad man, and if he’s taken your friend to Linny, no harm will come to him or his possessions by hand of those who dwell here.” The woman seemed to hesitate and then asked, “Did he fall?”

  Alys shook her head. “No. It’s a fever.”

  “God have mercy! Was he cut? Bitten?”

  “He was injured a fortnight ago, but—” Alys paused suddenly, her mind going at once to the bandages on Piers’s hand, and then further back, to the night they had met at the Foxe Ring. Her stomach clenched.

  “He was bitten. Layla”—she gestured to the monkey on her shoulder—“accidentally bit him, several days ago.”

  The woman frowned and released Alys’s arm as she edged away from Alys and her monkey. “Well, there’ll be naught you can do for him this night, as exhausted and cold as you seem.” She looked Alys up and down. “And hungry, too, I’d wager?”