xxiii. In which Charlotte and Elspeth escape a muddy ending #2
The mule stamped and pranced, braying in alarm. Charlotte looped the driving lines around a nearby branch and stumbled in
Elspeth’s direction.
“Elspeth!”
She was on her back, breathing hard. Mud was crusted into her clothes, daubed onto her arms, splotched on her cheek and forehead. Charlotte wanted to kneel beside her and clean her off, but her knees protested. Instead, she leaned over Elspeth, hands gripping her cane so tight it hurt.
“Are you all right?”
Elspeth squinted at her. “Think I might’ve dislocated my shoulder.”
Her voice shook. She sat up, arms around her legs, looking small.
“Can you,” she started, and stopped. Charlotte reached for her, but Elspeth shook her head. “Don’t say anything. Don’t—You
told me it was the forest, I should’ve known it was the forest, so don’t say ‘I told you so.’”
I wasn’t going to sounded insincere even if true, so Charlotte said nothing. Elspeth sounded near tears.
Charlotte helped her up. They leaned against each other, exhausted and in pain. Charlotte unlooped the driving lines from
their branch. In silence, the women returned to the gig, where Elspeth reattached the traces.
“Let me take a look at you,” Charlotte said.
Elspeth shook her head. “Let’s move, first. Feels like . . . like those hands are gonna come crawling out of the mud after
me.”
Charlotte glanced over her shoulder. The mud looked like nothing more than an innocent puddle in the midst of the undergrowth.
She shuddered.
They clambered back into the gig and went on their way. The mule’s ears twitched constantly. Charlotte made Elspeth wrap back
up in her cloak, worrying over her; she was ashen, clammy.
After a long while, Elspeth rasped, “I thought it was Maggie.”
“I know.”
“Don’t know why I thought it. Daft of me.”
“It wasn’t—”
“It was. You know it was.” A pause. “Do you think she’s alive?”
Charlotte fidgeted with John’s ring. Maggie had gone missing over two weeks ago. Hard enough to believe Arthur might have survived, and he’d entered the forest so much more recently.
Elspeth glanced at her. Dried mud crusted her trousers and shirt. “You don’t think so.”
“I don’t know.”
Elspeth turned away. “That means you don’t think so.”
Charlotte bit back the urge to snap. “It means I don’t know.”
They drove on in silence. Elspeth shuddered periodically, batting nothing from her trousers. Charlotte resisted batting, because
it was foolish. The fingers weren’t there. She curled her toes in her shoes, focusing on that feeling instead of phantom hands
reaching for her.
The gig bumped over a dip, and pain shot through her. Charlotte wished the forest floor were smoother. She rubbed John’s wedding
ring.
Elspeth glanced over, eyes lingering on the ring, and cleared her throat.
“Thanks. For that. Back there.”
“It was nothing.”
“They tried to get you, too. Could’ve left me.”
“No I couldn’t.”
Elspeth bit her lip. “Well, thanks.”
Warmth fizzed under Charlotte’s skin. Foolishness. They grated on each other, she and Elspeth, and they’d known each other
only a few days. Anyone with any decency would’ve done the same in Charlotte’s place.
The trees opened up, the land fell away, and they were on a bluff overlooking the sea. Late afternoon sunlight stabbed orangely
across the sky.
Charlotte’s breath hitched at the sight.
The forest was so close, so dim. Suffocating.
The sea may have stolen Charlotte’s husband, but she’d never lived out of its sight.
She knew how dangerous it could be, but it was steady, too, predictable in its tides.
It was the warp and woof of her life. She’d never slept without the roar of it outside her window as waves crashed at the bottom of the cliff.
The trees on the cliffside were stunted but mercifully free of black veins. A rowan with fernlike leaves turning orange and
clusters of bright red berries clung to the rocks. The air was more seasonable here, not the biting cold of winter but chilly
as a wind swept in off the sea. Charlotte breathed deeply, glorying in the wild, salty air.
“Missed the sea breezes more’n I thought,” Elspeth said.
“Me, too.”
“Might as well stop here a spell. Could use a rest, after . . . all that.” Elspeth climbed out of the gig, unhitched the mule,
and pulled a bag from under the cross-seat. “I don’t know about you, but I’d rather take my chances out here than in there
while we eat anyhow.”
“Amen,” Charlotte said fervently.
Elspeth yanked clean clothes from her bag. Pulling her muddy shirt off, she turned away, but not before Charlotte glimpsed
the curve of a breast. Reddening, she turned resolutely the other way.
After they’d eaten, Charlotte examined Elspeth’s shoulder. Since she’d unhitched the mule easily, Charlotte had already decided
her shoulder probably wasn’t dislocated, but she checked anyway. It wasn’t displaced or swollen.
“Strained, I think, not dislocated.”
“Hurts like balls.”
Charlotte flushed at the language but said evenly, “I have an ointment that can help with the pain.”
Elspeth lay face down on her cloak—sat up, made a face, and removed the silver acorn on its chain before lying down again—so Charlotte could pull her shirt up and massage ointment into her shoulder.
She was wiry and muscular. No matter how Charlotte reminded herself Elspeth was another patient who needed help, she couldn’t stop remembering that flash of breast she’d glimpsed.
She was relieved when she finished with the ointment. Surely because Elspeth’s color and breathing had gone back to normal,
and Elspeth had shown no other signs of shock.
Tugging her shirt back into place, Elspeth froze. “Lottie?”
“What?”
Elspeth turned around, jaw tight. She pulled her collar down, revealing her scar with its stitches.
Its edges were feathered in black.
Sucking in a breath, Charlotte pulled her closer to examine it. The thin blackness unfurled outward into veins before her
eyes. Her heart stuttered. What had caused it? Elspeth had undoubtedly been infected by the sparrowhawk that had left her
scar—but why had symptoms appeared after almost two weeks of nothing?
“It’s just now?” she asked.
Elspeth nodded. “I’d swear to it nothin’ was there before I lay down.”
“Before you lay down . . .” Charlotte murmured. “Where’s your acorn?”
“My . . . ?”
The acorn was on the cloak where Elspeth had left it. Charlotte considered it, remembering how the mud winding around Elspeth’s
body had avoided it.
“Have you taken it off since finding it? Until now, I mean?”
“Nay, sleep in it and everything. Wouldn’t’ve taken it off just now if it hadn’t been so uncomfortable lying on it that way.”
“Here. Let me—”
Charlotte clasped the chain back around Elspeth’s neck. The moment she’d done so, the black veins stopped spreading.
Charlotte let out a breath. “It worked.”
“Veins’re still there.”
“They’re not getting any worse.” That wasn’t much, but it was something. “I think the acorn has been protecting you, somehow,
and that’s why you haven’t had any symptoms until now.”
The wind picked up, colder now. Charlotte shivered, wishing she’d brought a heavier coat. She hadn’t expected it to be so
cold in early September, nor to end up on a bluff while wandering the wood.
“Here.” Elspeth wrapped her cloak around Charlotte. “If you want it.”
Charlotte snuggled into the cloak gratefully. “Thanks.”
Elspeth nodded. She turned away to hitch the mule back up, but she kept pausing to touch her scar uneasily.
Perhaps the acorns were the answer. The sickness was magical, eldritch. Charlotte was certain the cure had to be magical,
too.
One way or another, she’d figure it out. She wasn’t about to lose Elspeth to the sickness as she’d lost so many others.