She’d gone to bed in a fine enough mood–apprehensive but confident that she was up to the task of whatever this next leg of their journey would bring. But sleep had brought her to Davy, and that night’s Davy happened to be the version of him that had pinched those first few fibers of her love and begun to spin them into devotion. She’d woken into the dream to find him lying on his side, head propped on his arm as he studied her–sweet, puzzled joy drawing his brows together like she, not he, was a dream. An unexpected miracle. Before she could speak, he brought a hand up to cradle the side of her face, thumb brushing over her lips.
“I don’t know how much time we have left,” he said, unblinking gaze fixed to hers. “But I know I can’t bear to spend it fighting with you.”
The sheets rustled as she reached up to wrap her fingers lightly around his wrist. It was odd that he’d reference a previous dream, even vaguely. Such temporal coherence wasn’t a typical element of these visitations. He’d never even mentioned that horrible, blood-soaked dream that had driven her to confess to Eli. Never acknowledged, in any real way, the reality of this unreality in which they found each other.
“Then let’s not fight,” she whispered, the first tendrils of dread coiling in her gut. “Let’s just talk.”
His hand left her face and he captured her fingers, bringing them to his lips. “If we talk about the things you want to talk about, we’ll fight.”
“Why?”
“You’ll be angry with me.”
“Why?”
“Mara. Just don’t. Please.”
So she didn’t. Coward that she was, not wanting to destroy what remained of their time together, she didn’t press just as she knew she wouldn’t press tonight, or the night after, or the night after that. She was ultimately more haunted by the spectre of their ultimate separation than she was driven by curiosity. She didn’t want to risk what time they had left.
And so it was with shame and dread that she woke the next morning, dressed herself for travel, and donned her pack. Shame and dread that swirled around her in the crawling fog. Shame and dread, weighing her down more heavily than her overstuffed pack as she followed Quint, who led their group to some departure point beyond the radius of the outpost’s spellwork.
By the time Quint called a halt, the fog had lifted up to hover just beneath the low canopy, giving the impression that the trees were topped not by branches and leaves but by giant fistfuls of dirty cotton. The effect was somehow more oppressive than before, but Mara didn’t really begrudge the fog its maudlin theatrics.
Before leaving them, Quint collected their amulets and handed a single compass to Eli and a folded sheet of paper to Mara. Mara unfolded the paper as he pulled out a second compass and paper and went to Lev and Far.
The words on the paper were in Vauntner’s neat hand, the letters small and blocky.
- To proceed to the Enclave, follow the silver arrow on the compass. To return to the outpost, follow gold.
- Your journey through the woods will be longer than you expert. Do not lose faith.
- At the red stone, follow the compass closely and cross without stopping. Do not sit. Do not respond to the voices. Do not follow them. DO NOT SLEEP.
- In the mountains, travel slowly. Break often. At signs of mountain sickness (headache, dizziness, vomiting, trouble breathing) turn back two days. Rest one day. Proceed more slowly.
- In the Blue Wood, keep a fire lit at night. Do not stray beyond its light.
- If the snow reaches your knees, avoid the space beneath large trees.
- Upon arrival, you will be detained by a Sentinel patrol and separated briefly from any weapons found on your person. Innate magic users will be required to take a two-day suppression elixir. If you resist, you will be denied entry to the Enclave.
Mara frowned at the paper, caught between alarm and confusion at the vague instructions, but Quint’s departure brought her attention back to the present. Handshakes were exchanged among the adults, and one bone-crushing hug for Eli. Then, with a friendly wave to the children, Quint was gone and the final leg of their journey was underway.
The first day passed without incident. They traveled slowly, taking frequent breaks. Eli gave Mara the compass and had her lead the group. The children walked some, Nick more than Carissa, but mostly rode on the adults’ shoulders. Eli spent much of the day away from the group, mostly hunting, and Mara suspected he was worried about their food supply. If she reached out with her sensing, she could feel him there at the periphery. And if she focused once she found his footprint, listened just a little more carefully to the song of his energy, she picked up a note of creeping tension that was unfamiliar to her in the context of Eli. A high, quiet note, just slightly off pitch from the rest of the hum.
Fortunately, anxiety didn’t seem to affect his aim. They had rabbit for lunch, and some kind of fatty bird for supper. They all went to bed with full bellies, and with four adults to split the watch–Lev and Farin insisted on taking their share–it was a full night of sleep as well.
The next day, the mess of shame and dread in Mara’s gut had faded from a pulsing sickness to a dull ache.
The day after that, it was really more a nagging unease than proper dread, more exasperation than shame.
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The day after that, she felt it only in the morning–a sort of fog that hung over the future’s distant horizon. And it was hard to agonize for too long over the distant horizon when there was so much to do between one step and the next.
And so it went.
The landscape didn’t change much as they walked–more and more of the same dense forest–so Mara couldn’t say whether they made better time as the days wore on, but it did feel like they were moving faster. With good rest and enough food, Lev and Farin grew stronger, and they took fewer breaks. After a few days of fumbling over each other setting up and breaking down camp, the four adults fell into a rhythm of assigned tasks. Nick and Carissa, having quickly overcome their initial wariness of each other, were happy to entertain themselves.
Mara hadn’t had so much time for herself since Nick was born.
She’d have liked to spend it getting to know Lev and Farin, but the language barrier was nigh insurmountable. Eli translated, but he wasn’t around very often. And though she’d had him sit down with her in the early days to write up a list of useful words and phrases, her attempts to use it weren’t roundly successful. She and Lev–often left alone after Farin started joining Eli on his wanderings–did make each other laugh with their efforts to speak each other’s language, but beyond a shared amusement at broken phrases and mispronounced words, it was difficult to find common ground.
She also would have liked to spend the time interrogating Eli about the list of instructions Quint had given them, but her efforts to that end were even less useful than her Trellish. All he could do was shrug and apologize.
At least the first item on the list was beginning to make sense. Days turned to weeks, and the only signs of progress were a creeping chill in the air and a slight upward inclination of the earth, detectable only by the burn in Mara’s legs. The forest didn’t change. The routine didn’t change. The dreams didn’t change. Even her magic practice had hit a sort of standstill, not a wall so much as a patch of thick mud. The sensing exercises came easier with each day, but she was wary of channeling. Wary of inadvertently channeling Eli. Wary of what it meant that she could.
Mara came to miss the sense of doom with which she’d left the guide’s outpost. At least that had been moderately interesting.
In the absence of anything to distract her, the same dull darkness that had haunted her in Ashfall crept in once more. It arrived like smoke around the edges of a door–a conscious, seeking thing that reached tendrils through every crack in her defenses. And once it found entry, it spread overhead like a bank of clouds and cast a pall of interminable shadow that blotted out even the fragile hope and sense of industry that had blossomed inside her during their short respite. Had she really, truly thought that she might have something to contribute beyond her passable skills as a physik?
Ludicrous notion.
Eli noticed. He asked every morning, every noon, every evening. He asked in the dead of night, when she woke him for his guard shift–
Was she okay? Was there anything he could do? Did she want to talk?
Perhaps she should have talked to him, but she didn’t. There was nothing to say. Even her woes were a monotony–nothing wrong now that they hadn’t already discussed. And wasn’t that the trouble? Was a problem even a problem if it didn’t repeat itself, over and over, wearing down the sharp blade of its first occurrence into a dull, serrated edge, a pain that exhausted as much as it hurt?
“I’m fine,” she told Eli, every time he asked, and forced a smile she knew he wouldn’t believe but also wouldn’t question. She wasn’t the only one who was exhausted. If he could sense the clouds over her head, she could sense the dry and cracking earth beneath his feet. She took to asking him, every time he asked her–
Was he okay? Did he want to talk?
“I’m good,” he told her, every time she asked, and forced a smile she didn’t believe but also didn’t question. It wasn’t as if she could lift any of the burdens that weighed him down.
One night, indistinguishable from all the others, he came to sit beside her at the fire after the others had gone to bed, her guard shift always the first.
“You doing okay?” he asked.
“I’m fine,” she answered. “What about you?”
“I’m good.”
But then he did something new, and also not new. He held out his hand, palm up, like he had a hundred times before. This was how he offered healing. Not strange, except in the timing. Healing was a dinnertime ritual, and it belonged not just to her but to everyone he traveled with. It was out of place here, in the darkness and intimacy.
Hesitating only for a moment, she placed her hand in his and felt the familiar cool tingles racing through her veins. But where normally they danced along the outer edges of her physical being, feeling for sore muscles and raw skin, this time they all rushed inward, toward a part of her that had no name she could conjure. It was the part that ached when her son smiled and went hollow when she thought of Davy. More vital than her heart and deeper than her bones. And there, those little tendrils of gentle caring snagged on frayed edges she could not see or even feel, but simply knew were there.
Eli’s fingers tightened around hers and then let go, and the magic went limp and dissolved within her.
After a moment filled only by the crackling fire and the chattering of the woods, he leaned forward, elbows on his knees, fingers loosely interlaced.
“You doing okay, Mara?”
He’d already asked. She’d already lied. It felt like more work to conjure the lie than to release the truth.
She swallowed and wrapped her arms around her own knees. “No. I’m not even sad. I just feel…nothing.” She chewed on the inside of her lip for a moment, thinking of the way her temper flared at the slightest provocation, how her mind was forever swirling her about in eddies of imagined disaster, dragging her downward. “Prickly, heavy nothing.” She turned to study his profile, bathed in warm firelight, and propped her chin on her hand. “What about you?”
She watched his throat move with a heavy swallow, and he narrowed his eyes as if the answer was written in the inky darkness of the night. After a moment he shrugged and tossed a sheepish, guilty smile at her. “Cold, lonely nothing, for me. If I had to name it.”
At first she didn’t respond because she was too shocked at the admission.
Then she didn’t respond because she didn’t know how to.
Once the shock and the indecision wore off, she didn’t respond because this moment of unexpected honesty had the energy of a skittish cat, just working up the courage to wind around her ankles. If she reached for it, even slowly, she knew it would dart away, and she didn’t want that. It was nice, having a cat winding around her ankles–even a metaphorical one. It lifted some of the heaviness. Smoothed down some of the prickles. Filled a little corner of the nothing with something.
She didn’t respond, but she did put an extra couple sticks on the fire and poked it until it flared hot. And she didn’t argue when he sat with her through her guard shift. And she sat with him through his. It wasn’t that great of a sacrifice, really.
A few hours of sleep was nothing.