by Terry Brooks
They sat close together in the darkness without moving for a very long time, waiting for the cat to return. But it did not reappear, and when he couldn’t stand the silence any longer, Pan said, “I think it was just curious.”
She nodded. “I think so, too. But I wouldn’t want to take the chance of being wrong.”
“Did you see what it was doing? It was studying us. It didn’t look hungry. Just … interested.”
“I guess it could have gotten to us if it wanted to. These branches wouldn’t have stopped it.”
“I don’t know what would have stopped it.”
“I don’t think we ever want to be in a position where we have to find out. How big was it? What do you think it weighed?”
“A cat that size? Five hundred pounds easily. Probably eight or nine hundred. All muscle. A hunter.”
“But not hunting us.”
“Not tonight, anyway.”
His arm was getting stiff from being wrapped about her shoulders all this time, and he started to take it away. “No, don’t do that,” she said at once. “I’m freezing. Can’t you feel it?”
She scooted over farther and pressed against him. He couldn’t tell from that alone, but when she put her hands over his, they were ice cold. He put both arms around her at once. “Are you feeling all right? You’re not sick, are you?”
“Not yet. But I don’t want to risk it. Can you put the blanket around me, too?”
He loosened the straps that bound the travel blanket to his backpack and carefully wrapped it about her shoulders. “Now get inside it with me,” she said. “Like before. Put your arm around me again.”
He did as she asked, pulling her against him and covering them both with the blanket. It would have helped if the blanket was bigger, but there was no help for that. They were lucky to have anything at all to warm themselves. “Better?”
She shifted her head until she was looking at him. He could feel her gaze more than see it, could feel strands of her hair brush up against his face as she leaned forward until her forehead was resting against his. “A little.”
He felt her adjust her position slightly, turning toward him. Then her fingers were fumbling at the front of his shirt, working at the buttons, loosening them. He felt a moment of panic, thinking that he needed to stop this, but not wanting to. He tried to think what to say. “Phryne, I don’t …”
“Shhhh,” she said at once. “Don’t say anything. Keep watch for that cat and let me do this.”
When she had all the buttons undone, she slipped her hands inside and pressed them against his skin. They were so cold that he jumped in spite of himself, shivering as they moved from one warm place to the next.
“Much better,” she murmured. “Am I too cold for you?”
He didn’t trust himself to answer, so he simply shook his head no. He closed his eyes as her hands moved around to his back. Pressing harder.
“I’m getting warmer already,” she said, and kissed him lightly on the cheek. “Here, let’s try this.”
Her hands slipped out again, and he could feel her moving against him once more. Cocooned by the darkness, he waited to see what she was doing. Then, abruptly, she took hold of his wrists and pulled his hands inside her now open blouse and held them there.
He gasped in shock. “Phryne, this isn’t …”
“Don’t talk,” she said again. “Don’t say anything. Just leave your hands where they are.”
Then she slipped her own hands back inside his shirtfront and moved them up and down his sides.
“Listen to me, Pan. I don’t know what tomorrow or the next day or the next is going to be like, but I know about tonight. So just do what I tell you. I promise it won’t hurt.”
He was not surprised at all when he discovered that she was right.
WHEN PANTERRA QU WOKE THE FOLLOWING morning, it took him a minute to realize that he was alone. He was still rolled up in the blanket, cradling his head on one arm as he looked out from his prone position at the shadowy forms of the trees in the predawn light. Everything was very still, but he could smell the woods and the damp in the air, and when he glanced at the slowly lightening sky he saw a mix of heavy clouds and mist dropped down so low they scraped the treetops. He was warm and drowsy and filled with a sense of happiness and contentment he found hard to believe.
But when he reached back for Phryne, he discovered she was gone and jerked upright at once, the mood broken. He didn’t see her anywhere at first and cast this way and that, trying to make her out through the dimness and the shadows. He dropped the blanket, crawled from beneath their makeshift shelter, and climbed to his feet, ready to go looking.
Then he spied her, well off to one side, sitting quietly on a fallen trunk and looking off into the distance toward which they had been traveling the day before, so still she might have been a part of the forest. He watched her for a moment, waiting to see if she would notice him. When she didn’t, he looked down at himself and, feeling foolish, quickly pulled on his boots and clothing. When that was done and she still didn’t seem to have noticed him, he began rolling up the rumpled blanket so he could strap it to his backpack.
“I thought you might be planning to sleep the day away,” she said suddenly.
He glanced up from his work and saw her looking at him. By now, he was vaguely irritated with her—first, for leaving him alone, and second, for acting so nonchalant about everything. The way she was speaking to him made it sound as if nothing at all of what he so vividly remembered had even happened.
“I didn’t know you were awake. In fact, when I didn’t find you next to me, I thought you might have gone somewhere.”
“Gone somewhere?” She laughed and brushed back her hair with both hands. “Where would I go?”
She rose from her log, walked over to him, and knelt close. “Did you think I might leave you? Is that what you’re saying?”
He shrugged. “No, I guess I didn’t think that.”
She reached up and touched his cheek and then leaned in to kiss him. “You are a terrible liar, Panterra Qu. That is exactly what you thought. But I forgive you.”
She was so beautiful in that moment, so bright and fresh and wonderful to look at, that he was pleased beyond words to be forgiven, even if he didn’t think for a moment he needed it. “I was just worried about you.”
“Just hold that thought. I might have need of it later. Do we have anything to eat?”
They didn’t, of course. They had eaten the last of their food the night before and drunk all but the last few swallows of their water. Until now, it hadn’t seemed all that important. But their hunger was real and pressing, and suddenly they could think of little else. Bereft of breakfast and anxious to do something about it, they packed up the last of their things in preparation for setting out. There would be little chance for food until they got back inside the valley, and nothing that happened before then was going to make things any easier.
They began walking once more, still heading in the same general direction they had been going earlier, still looking for an end to the lichen-and-moss-shrouded forest. The sun rose above the eastern horizon, but the day remained overcast and gray while the air grew thick and sultry. Around them, the trees formed the walls of a maze that hemmed them in and held them prisoner. They could tell themselves there was an end to this, a way out, but it didn’t feel like it.
Neither of them spoke for a long time as they traveled, lapsed into an uncomfortable silence. Pan didn’t know what was wrong, but something definitely was. Still clinging to the tattered remnants of his euphoria and anxious to share what he was feeling, he finally grew impatient. “What were you thinking about back there, sitting off by yourself?”
She glanced over. “Maybe I was thinking about you. Would you like it if I was?”
He grinned in spite of his uncertainty. “You know the answer to that.”
“I know the answer. But it isn’t what I was doing. I was thinking about something else.”
When she didn’t offer an explanation, he said, “Tell me.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Yes, it does. Tell me.”
“You don’t have to know everything about me.”
“I have to know this. Tell me.”
She shrugged. “I was thinking about choices and how we make them. About how some are so easy and some so hard. I was thinking how we make some because we want to and some because we have to. Does that help?”
He smiled. “Well, I hope last night’s choice was one you wanted to make and not one you felt you had to.”
“Actually, it was both.”
“Because it was something you’d been thinking about and …”
She wheeled on him suddenly, bringing them both to a stop. “Pan, let it go. I don’t want to talk about it right now.”
He could hear the irritation in her voice, and he was suddenly confused and hurt. “Don’t talk about it? What does that mean? I thought …”
“Last night was last night, and it’s over with. Don’t try to make more of it than what it was.”
“Don’t make more …” He glared at her. “That’s a little difficult at this point. Besides, didn’t you tell me you loved me? Are you saying I shouldn’t make anything of that?”
She studied him a moment, biting her lip. “That’s not what I said. I said, ‘I think I love you.’ There’s a big difference. Besides, there are other things that …” She left the sentence hanging and sighed. “Let’s walk while we discuss this.”
Side by side, they went on. Pan stared at the ground in front of him, caught up in a whirl of emotions, chief of which was a mounting sense of doubt that only moments ago hadn’t been there.
“When you lose a father and a grandmother, and they are the last of your family, you see things a little differently,” Phryne said finally. Her voice was softer now. “You think about how fragile life is, about how quickly it goes by, how quickly things become lost. You take life for granted most of the time. You live it in the moment and you don’t think a lot about the future because the future seems a long way off. But when people you love die, suddenly the future seems a whole lot closer and very uncertain.”
She glanced at him quickly and looked away again. “But it’s everything, really. The Drouj threatening to invade our home, my stepmother murdering my father so that she could be Queen, being imprisoned and escaping and going down into the tombs of the Gotrins to find my grandmother, being given the Elfstones to use to protect the Elves when I don’t really know how to do that …”
She trailed off, shaking her head.
“It’s not so different with me,” he interjected quickly, trying to find common ground. “Losing Sider, losing Prue and then getting her back only partially whole, being hunted by this demon I didn’t even know existed, and now running away with you. It’s not so different.”
“Then you should understand what I’m feeling. Time is something precious, especially now. We might not have all that much of it. So there is a temptation to do things because you don’t want to lose the chance. You don’t want to let those things slip away and never know what they might have been like.”
“Last night,” he said.
“Last night,” she agreed.
“But that doesn’t mean—”
“It doesn’t mean a lot of things,” she interrupted him. “Especially in the way I thought it would. But it does mean a few. Last night was a small moment in whatever time we have left. I did it because I didn’t want to miss out on something wonderful. I did it because I was frightened. I felt alone and vulnerable, and I wanted to feel something. I wanted to be close to someone, and you were there. I like you, Pan. Maybe I even love you. But last night was a small part of everything else that’s happening to us. That’s what I was thinking about this morning. I was thinking about what I have to do if I can stay alive long enough to do it. First of all, I have to discover what I am supposed to do with the Elfstones. Mistral gave them to me because she felt that using them would let me help my people. But how will they do that? How am I supposed to use them?”
She held up one hand quickly to stop him from saying anything. “Just let me finish this,” she said, stepping closer to him now, putting one hand on his cheek. “Let me say everything I have to say.”
He could feel her affection for him in the touch of her hand, and all of his anger and growing sense of loss were suddenly gone, and he was ready to do anything for her.
“I have to go home again and face Isoeld. I have to find a way to prove that she had my father killed and should not be Queen of the Elves. I have to stand up with my people—with Tasha and Tenerife and Haren Crayel and all the others—against the Drouj. I have to find out if I can do what Mistral believed I could do. The choice is already made for me in all these things. I didn’t make it; it was made for me. It isn’t something I can walk away from. I know that now.”
Her hand dropped away. “Then, Pan, when that’s done, maybe I can think about us. In the right way, the way I would like to—not just because of last night or some other night but because there might be a whole lot of nights, maybe even a lifetime. I can think about it because then there will be a future that isn’t measured in hours or days.”
“It isn’t measured that way now,” he insisted.
She gave him a sad smile. “Of course it is. You don’t have to pretend this is all going to turn out right. I know the odds of that happening. I know what we are up against. But I need you to acknowledge that I do. Don’t pretend with me. Don’t try to shelter me. I needed that yesterday, but today I’m someone else. I’m who I was always supposed to be, I hope. I’m strong enough to do what I have to do. I need you to be strong with me.”
He nodded slowly. “I just worry we’ve lost something since last night, and I don’t like how it makes me feel. I don’t like that you don’t think last night means something more—that maybe it doesn’t mean as much to you as it does to me. It makes me sad.”
She stepped up to him and kissed him hard on the mouth and held the kiss for a very long time. “There,” she said, stepping back. “That’s what it means to me.” She smiled at the look on his face. “But it’s over and done with, and we have to think about what’s coming. We have to leave last night behind.”
He didn’t want to leave last night behind. He wanted to build his life around it. He wanted to make it the beginning of everything. But he nodded slowly and forced himself to smile back.
“All right,” he agreed.
But it wasn’t all right and he wasn’t done with it, either, not now and not ever. That was what he promised himself as he let the matter drop.
THE DAY PASSED SLOWLY after that. Neither felt much like talking so mostly they were silent. The only exchange of words came when Panterra—assiduously studying his surroundings in an effort to stop himself from thinking about Phryne—felt it necessary to pass along information on what his instincts and tracking skills were telling him. Twice they crossed the prints of what he believed to be the cat they had seen the previous night. Although the tracks were several days old, he was taking no chances and made it a point to direct them a different way. Once, they caught sight of a solitary agenahl, huge and ponderous as it threaded the gaps between the forest trees. Seemingly out of place in such confines, it nevertheless managed its way. It did not detect their presence, and they stood perfectly still until it was well out of sight.
Several times, they saw huge birds overhead, great wings outstretched, soaring through the cloud cover and gloom. It reminded Pan of the dragon, though these were clearly species of a different sort and nowhere near as large. But he knew that life had evolved outside the valley and much of it was larger and stronger and more dangerous than anything living inside. When the two merged, the Races were going to have to find a way to equalize the unequal struggle that was inevitable.
A handful of small rodents with sharp teeth came at them threateningly at one point, but Pan used a quick burst of mag
ic from his staff to turn them away. Insects bit and stung them when given half a chance, and something far up in the mossy trees hurled sticks and nuts at them. But at least they were seeing signs of life now, an indication that their woodsy graveyard was beginning to change into something less barren and empty. Pan picked up a handful of the discarded nuts and broke open the shells. Edible. He gathered more and shared them with Phryne, and they ate hungrily. Then they pushed on, shrugging off their discomfort, keeping their direction fixed in their minds, watching out for each other.
All the while, they searched diligently for a source of fresh water. A few times, they crossed streams that were fouled and smelled as bad as they looked. Once, they found a pool that appeared to be clean but then saw animal bones and half-eaten carcasses scattered about it. The longer they traveled, the more convinced Panterra became that they were not going to find drinkable water until they were safely away from this forest.
It took them almost until sunset to achieve their goal, emerging into a series of barren, empty hills that stretched away father than they could see, folding into lowlands and clumps of heavy brush to their right and abutting a broad plateau to their left. But finally they could see the mountain ranges that were their destination, though the peaks were little more than a ragged line against the horizon and miles away from where they stood.
Phryne glanced left and right. “Which way should we go?”
Pan took a moment to study the choices and shook his head. “Nowhere just now. It’s too late to travel any farther today. We’ll find a place to spend the night and take this up again in the morning.”
He could see that she wanted to object, that she was anxious to press on. But to her credit she didn’t argue the matter, deciding perhaps that he was right about trying to cross those hills in darkness. So she simply nodded and joined him in searching for that night’s shelter. There was not much to be found without going back into the woods, and neither of them wanted to do that. They ended up settling on a fold in the hills that would keep them mostly hidden and hunkered down in its lee. There was nothing to eat or drink, so they soon rolled up under Pan’s blanket, huddled close together, and drifted into an uneasy sleep.