by Kara Timmins
“They would have tried.” Malatic spoke with the tone of the killer Eloy remembered from the night Anso’s fighters had tried to ambush their camp. Malatic had his eyes open now, staring at Eloy with a secret ferocity. “Niall and Oisin were willing to kill for their treasure. So am I.”
“What are you talking about?” Neasa tossed the supplies for the fire overhand onto the rock next to Eloy and pulled herself up.
“You,” Malatic said.
“Were you talking about how I’m a woman of many talents?”
“Sure,” Malatic said.
“Then you were speaking the truth,” Neasa said with a smirk. “Look what I came across. She pulled up a flat fish from a rope hanging next to her bag. Its slimy skin was the same murky brown as the water.
“How did you find that?” Eloy asked.
“Would you believe my power of observation is just that good?”
“I would,” Eloy said.
“Then let’s go with that and not that I stepped on it.”
“Do you think it’s okay to eat?” Malatic asked.
“Should be,” Neasa said. “I’m so hungry for something cooked that I’m willing to find out.”
“Sounds good enough for me.” Malatic propped himself up on his elbows.
“You’ll get your food,” Neasa said, “but we need to come clean about something before we do.”
Malatic shrunk back down, folding into himself. “Yeah. Okay.”
“Show me,” Neasa said.
“I was going to say something,” Malatic said. “I really thought it would get better.”
“Show me,” she said.
Malatic opened his mouth. Neasa moved his chin toward a ray of fading light and looked. She pulled away, her nostrils flaring and her mouth pursed.
“I didn’t want you to worry,” Malatic said.
“I know,” she said, softening.
“Is it bad?” Eloy asked.
“That tooth needs to come out,” she said.
Malatic looked out into the darkening bog. “As long as we don’t do it here.”
Neasa followed his gaze. “Of course not here. I’ll mix something up that will help cool you down and help get things back to normal.”
“Neasa and I will take two watch shifts tonight,” Eloy said to Malatic. “You sleep.”
“Sounds great.” Malatic reclined back down to the rock. “But first I want to eat some of that bog fish.”
32
The three ate their meager meal as the sun set. The oily fish meat wasn’t the best meal Eloy had ever had—there was a hint of something metallic in the aftertaste—but it was hot, which was more than enough. Neasa ground together different leaves and roots from her bag and mixed them with water for Malatic to drink.
Malatic drank it with a grimace and fell asleep soon after, his soft snores fluttering through his open mouth.
Eloy hoped the water was too shallow for the eels to show up around the rock that night, but they did. There weren’t as many as there had been the night before, and they were much smaller than the ones that had killed Oisin and Niall, but that didn’t mean the things didn’t have sharp teeth or a hunter’s intention. They still spoke, but not as much. There were fewer secrets to use.
“Thought she was so beautiful once,” one said. “Like a sister now. But wanted her the first time I saw her.”
Neasa tipped her head back and laughed.
“That’s funny, huh?” Eloy said. “Let’s see what else they have to say.”
“I’m not afraid,” Neasa said, getting control of her giggles.
“Yeah, it seems like they’re running out of thoughts to try on us. It’s probably a good thing Malatic was asleep for that one, though.”
“Nah, it would take more than that for him to be upset with you.”
Eloy tapped at his cheek. “So, how bad is it?”
“He should’ve said something a lot sooner. I don’t know how he thought it was going to get better on its own. Our best plan is to get the dead tooth out of his mouth and try to get his fever under control. Hopefully that will be enough.” She yawned.
“Get some sleep. Tomorrow is going to be another hard travel day.”
“You’re right.” Neasa reclined next to Malatic. “If one of those things comes close, kill it.”
“Don’t need to tell me. But I think they’re losing interest in us.”
“Good. Hopefully they bury their shriveled faces back in the mud.” She laid down and closed her eyes.
An eel wavered in the distance. Its body was thin as a branch, its face smaller and more disturbing, like a shrunken head.
“I’m never going home,” it said.
33
The eels were gone by the time Neasa woke Eloy the next morning. Malatic was up too, his face much less pale than it had been the day before, but his cheek had an obvious bulge at his jaw. Eloy didn’t know how he’d missed it. Maybe he hadn’t wanted to see it just as much as Malatic didn’t want to admit it. Eloy wrapped the waxy leaves around his feet, tied them snugly around his ankles with vine rope, and put his shoes on, a ritual he hoped he would be able to say goodbye to soon.
“You guys ready?” Eloy asked.
“If it means getting away from the stink and the nightmare eels, I’m ready to run,” Malatic said.
“Then let’s run,” Eloy said.
“I mean, not really,” Malatic said. “Please don’t make me run.”
They didn’t run, but they took their trek through the bog at a clip. They didn’t talk, instead conserving every bit of energy they had for fighting the dragging pull of the water on their gait.
“There’s something up ahead,” Eloy said a little after midday.
“Is it a house with a fur-covered feather bed?” Malatic asked.
“It’s something good,” Neasa said, “but it isn’t that good. It looks like a hill.”
“Here’s hoping it doesn’t go back down into the water on the other side,” Eloy said.
“Here’s hoping.” And then Neasa did start running.
She reached the mossy soil of the hill first, with Eloy following close behind. Malatic reached land last. Walking on solid ground again felt strange, but unlike the odd sense Eloy had when he disembarked from the Siobhan, this reconnect to normalcy was immediate and satisfying.
“I almost don’t want to look over the hill,” Eloy said.
“Let’s think of it this way,” Neasa said. “We only have to walk the rest of this hill today. We’ll have solid ground to sleep on tonight and a wide distance between us and the eels no matter what. If there is more water on the other side, that can be a problem for tomorrow.”
“Just a little bit more today,” Eloy said, more to himself than to the others.
“Just a little bit more today,” Neasa repeated. “You both ready?”
Malatic was on his back with his feet still on the ground, his knees bent and pointed skyward.
“Or we can stay here,” he said.
“You can stay down here if you want,” Neasa said, already moving up the incline, “but that tooth can start bleeding at any time.”
“All right.” Malatic held out his arms. “I’m up.”
Eloy took Malatic by the hand and heaved him to a standing position.
The hill wasn’t particularly tall, but the incline was steeper than it had looked from the bottom. Eloy craned his neck up toward Neasa to see her reaction as she crested the top, but she didn’t even twitch to indicate what she saw ahead. As Eloy made the final step up, he was even more impressed by her lack of a reaction: there was no other side of the hill. There was no decline. The way ahead was flat and dry.
“Thank. Everything,” Eloy said between breaths.
Malatic had a far more jubilant reaction. Even winded, he managed to u
nleash a whoop of celebration. Birds scattered from the trees and creatures rustled around in the thick underbrush.
“Let’s not be too loud,” Neasa warned. “One thing we know for sure about this land is that the creatures that live here can be dangerous and unpredictable.”
Eloy closed his eyes and inhaled through his nose. “That’s true, but . . . listen.”
He basked in the gleeful communication of the strange songs of the birds around them, a music he didn’t realize how much he could miss.
“Their happiness is a good sign,” Neasa said.
“Let’s move forward a little more,” Eloy said. “Just enough to get the smell of that water behind us. Maybe find a stream or something to wash in. Malatic, are you up for it?”
“You point the way,” Malatic said.
They walked until the early evening, longer and farther than Eloy thought any of them had energy for. But the farther away from the bog water they got, the more they smelled it on themselves. Their soiled clothes were an affront to the sun-rich green of the new forest.
The gurgle of a stream was a sound even more beautiful than the song of the vibrant colored birds milling around in the treetops. They came upon the stream in the grey light of a forest at dusk, and, even in limited visibility, the sight was magnificent. The water that dribbled through the rocks was perfectly clear. The little red, black, and tan pebbles danced around in the flow, clearly visible even though the water reached Eloy at his waist.
Eloy was ready for the water to be ice cold, like the runoff from the mountains next to Midash and Kella’s house, but it was blood warm.
The three stripped their clothes off and floated face up toward the tree canopy. Eloy wished he could see the stars, and—almost like a desire thought and granted—they started flickering above. But they weren’t stars, there were too many colors: green, red, orange, and yellow. They were little light bugs, different than their cousins in the canyon, but wonderful still.
The three stayed in the water until Eloy almost fell asleep, something he was sure Malatic had managed to do. They scrubbed their underclothes clean and left the rest to finish in the morning. Neasa made a little fire and curled up next to an already sleeping Malatic.
Eloy took first watch, one of the hardest of his life. His body was in constant conflict with his mind, and in the delusion of fatigue, his body was making the better argument. There was the looming threat that his body would shut down, whether his mind gave its permission or not. But when the leaves rustled in the wake of something large, he was awake and alert.
“Neasa,” Eloy said, loud enough to wake her.
She had her sword out before her eyes were fully open. “What is it?”
“There’s something in the trees.”
“How far?”
“Ten strides that way.” Eloy pointed in the opposite direction of the bog.
Both rose to their feet with their weapons readied in front of them. They waited. Nothing moved.
“I don’t see anything,” Neasa said, lowering her weapon. “Did you see what it was?”
“No.”
“It could have been an animal coming to check us out,” she said.
“Maybe.”
“We’re the strange ones here, and we’re not the only creatures that get curious.” She sat back down and poked the fire, making the illumination spread. “Get some sleep. I’ll take the rest of the night.”
“I didn’t see it, but it moved enough branches to be big.”
“I’ll wake you if I see it move again. Sleep. You look like you’re about to go unconscious where you’re standing.”
Eloy took her suggestion and stretched out on the soft, leafy ground. “I wonder what it decided.”
“Huh?” Neasa asked.
“Whatever it was, if it was curious about us, I wonder what it saw.”
34
That night, Eloy dove into the vivid dreams of deep sleep. He was back at the Bowl. Corwin was there, but Eloy couldn’t see his face.
“Wake up!” Tudek called out through the camp.
Tudek bent over Eloy on the ground, his face close enough for Eloy to see the sharp teeth in his mouth. But the face Eloy had known at the Bowl wasn’t the one in his dream; in its place was the wrinkled grey face of an eel.
“No,” Eloy said. “I’m not here anymore. I got out.”
“You tried!” The screeching voice came out of a face that became a mix between the waterlogged face of Tudek and the eels. “You had to come back. You have to start again! You have to figure out another way!”
The familiar anxiety of being trapped and restricted, out of control of his own choices, thumped hard enough in Eloy’s chest to wake him up.
The day was hot enough to make him feel sick. The sun bore into the other side of his closed eyelids, making the world a wash of blood red. He opened his eyes in a slit to ease himself into the white light of the sun. He didn’t know if he’d slept until midday, but the resistance every muscle in his body gave as he tried to move told him he’d at least been sleeping for a while. The gurgle of the water was the only thing motivating him to move his stiff body. He gulped against the dryness of his throat, but the thick spit only made him feel nauseous.
“You’re up,” Neasa observed, wrapped again in her clean clothes.
“You shouldn’t have let me sleep so long,” Eloy said.
“You needed it,” she said. “You both needed it.”
Malatic was sitting against a rock a few steps away, sipping on water. The darkness under his eyes was dark enough now to look as if he’d been struck in the nose.
“Did you see anything else out there?” Eloy pointed to the forest.
“Not much,” she said. “A few rustlings. Nothing big enough to wake you for, obviously. Here.” She handed Eloy his water bladder. “I filled it for you.”
“What would we do without you?” Eloy said, taking the container and draining it.
“You wouldn’t get nearly as much sleep,” she said with a smile to Malatic. “Speaking of what I do for you.”
Malatic lifted his eyebrows and gave her a half smile, insinuations that fell away like a rockslide as soon as he realized what she meant.
“Are you ready for that tooth to come out?” Neasa asked.
“If you think it needs to come out, then I guess now is as good of a time as any,” Malatic said.
“It needs to come out,” Neasa said. “Eloy, I’m going to need to you to help me.”
“What do you need me to do?”
“Make sure he keeps his mouth open.”
“If you’d told me when I met him that I would have to keep his mouth open, I wouldn’t have believed you.” Eloy smiled at a scowling Malatic.
“Eloy has jokes now,” Malatic said. “I can handle having a tooth pulled out. He doesn’t need to hold me down.”
“Maybe not for that part, but I have to put something in the hole to help with the healing. That’s probably going to hurt more.”
“Let’s get it over with, then,” Malatic said. “Eloy, watch your fingers. The teeth on the other side are fine.” His scoundrel smile was back.
Neasa sat down on a rounded stone about as tall as her knees next to the stream. “Come here.”
Malatic groaned as he stood. “You couldn’t let me stay there? I’m the injured one.”
“This rock is better for you to recline on so I can see into your mouth,” she said, “and you can spit the blood into the river. We may be out of range of the eels, but they aren’t the only creatures that live off of things that bleed.”
Malatic sat on the ground next to the rock and tipped his head back over its top. “Can’t compete with that logic.”
Eloy walked over to the rock and saw the tools Neasa must have been preparing while he slept. She had stripped and whittled two pieces o
f wood so that both were thin, flat, and about as wide as a thumbnail. One of the pieces was blunted on one end, and the other curved in toward itself. Next to the tools was a mound of something pulpy and wet. Eloy could smell the sharp root fumes without having to bend near it. There were smudges next to the clump of yellow mush from where she had ground whatever the earthy thing was against the rough grain of the stone.
“Ready?” Neasa asked.
Malatic groaned again, his communication becoming variations on his sounds of discomfort and inconvenience.
Eloy sat on the edge of the rock next to Malatic, careful to avoid Neasa’s working station.
“Here.” She handed Eloy a chunk of wood wrapped in leather. “Keep this at the joint in his jaw where it shuts. Hold it there no matter what.”
Eloy took the wedge and looked down at Malatic. He looked almost serene.
Neasa put her hand on the side of Malatic’s face that wasn’t bulging. “I’ll be quick as I can.”
Malatic opened his mouth, his eyes still closed. The tooth at the back of his mouth was black in the center, the soft flesh surrounding it red and bloated. Eloy pushed the wedge into place, the cheek pushing against it like a band.
“Secure?” Neasa asked.
Eloy nodded.
Neasa picked up her newly carved implements and layered the blunted piece under the curved. She slid the pieces back and forth over one another between her thumb and her first finger. The movement was smooth. “Okay, here we go. Hold his head still.”
Malatic held his placid demeanor until Neasa fixed his dying tooth between the curve and flat edge of the tool. His brow furrowed. She slid the pieces closer together, wedging the tooth in the grip of the two pieces. His head twitched. Eloy saw half of the fragile tooth crumble, and blood fill the bottom of Malatic’s mouth like a crimson moat. The smell of rot filtered through the cracked tooth like an underground sulfur leak. Malatic moaned through his nose.
“Almost done,” Neasa said.
She didn’t look almost done. The tooth was taking a stand. She pushed the hooked edge deeper, closer to the root. Her knuckles turned white as she squeezed and pulled, rocking the tooth back and forth, working to free its grip.