Chapter One #2
When his destrier had exhausted himself, far from the fighting, or when the wound overtook him, he finally went down.
Morggán felt the fall coming but could not control the possessed beast. The world tipped and ground rushed up at him, the breath driven out of his chest in a hard, white-edged burst of pain when he landed.
He rolled, came up on his hands and knees, and heard the horse scream behind him, high and agonized, before it laid its head down.
He stayed with the steed for some time, his hand on its neck, his head swimming, the noise of the battle far in the distance now, broken by the thick forest. When he tried to stand, his leg folded under him, and he had to drag himself upright using the horse’s shoulder, his vision dimming at the edges until he stood still long enough for it to come back.
He left the horse there and went on without any clear sense of where he was going, save back to his men.
The uneven ground kept rising and falling and each step cost him more than the last. The gash in his thigh was not small, the blood already having soaked his breeches down to the knee.
Once, he tried to pull himself over a fallen trunk and failed, the effort leaving him shaking and light-headed enough that he had to sit where he was and wait for the world to steady itself again.
After that, the hours—or days—lost their order.
He slept. He woke. The sun moved, changing the patterns of light within the trees.
The pain in his ribs settled into something deep and constant, no longer sharp, but no less real for that.
When he finally looked at the wound, pushing aside cloth stiff with dried blood, he saw enough to know it was not a thing that would mend itself quickly.
He bound it as well as he could, with hands that didn’t seem to want to cooperate, and waited for his men to find him.
***
She finally named the dog, calling him Charlie, mostly in her mind since she spoke less now than she had when the man lived.
Charles the Second, officially, after the last dog she’d known, who surely must have passed by now.
He’d been seven or eight when she’d left him.
Or since she’d come here—she never had decided how to phrase it, what had happened to her, what she still didn’t understand.
Sometimes she wondered if her mother and father were still alive, but then reasoned that was overly dramatic thinking, since her parents would only now be in their forties.
She wasn’t certain, but she thought ten years had passed, that maybe she was twenty-one now.
She would have been in college now, if she’d stayed there, if she hadn’t come here.
She spoke now, reciting the alphabet song, a way to remember.
Other songs had fled her memory over time.
She might have remembered the words if only she could recall even one snippet or a title.
She should have recited them more often years ago.
The man had once said the mind recalls only what it needs to, but she would have thought that she would have needed—desperately needed—to recall the image of her mother but that, too, had faded with time.
But what did she know? Maybe stress had erased all but what was necessary to survive.
In the first few days and weeks and even months, those ten years ago, she’d listened so carefully for sounds that didn’t belong to the man’s house, for the sound of a vehicle or maybe even a helicopter—surely a search party had been gathered and sent out in every direction.
That day had not faded from memory, not one minute of it.
She’d been holding her mother’s hand while they had strolled the narrow streets of some small town whose name she could not recall.
She’d tugged her hand free from her mother’s, had stopped to stare in a shop window, at a sparkling display of jewels.
Her mother had pulled out a map then. While her parents had studied it, looking for the pub that had been recommended to them, she’d stared at the glistening jewelry, with stones of every color, mesmerized by how the sunlight had glistened and reflected.
Her warm breath had steamed the cold window and she’d used her hand to wipe it clean.
She’d said to her father that he should buy the blue stone necklace for her mother, to match her eyes.
He’d laughed, had said he should buy the ruby necklace, to match her mother’s temper.
“You’ll be seeing that red right now if I don’t get something to eat soon,” her mother had assured him.
That was it, the last thing she could remember of her parents. Yet, their faces were blurry now in the memory. She could recall her mother’s blue wool coat and her father’s dark hair but little else.
The part that followed, waking confused and terrified in the forest, wandering for hours or maybe even days, was even less clear. When next she woke up, she’d been in the man’s house.
Maybe time didn’t want her to remember, maybe her brain believed it was better if she forgot. But again, what did she know? As it was, nothing from her other life, not one bit of knowledge, was needed here. Everything she knew—everything she needed to know to survive—she’d learned from the man.
She returned to the house now, wet laundry in hand, and spread out her shirts and pants and the long socks over the hazel thicket that grew on the south side of the house, thankful for the warm sun.
She paused and considered the vine creeping up against the rough stone and timber, and briefly marveled at two pink blooms just making themselves known.
She thought it pretty, but pulled the blooming flowers down anyway, as the man had always done, lest it draw attention.
While Charlie scrounged around the woodpile—likely after a mouse or some other small critter—she sat and worked on the cord she had started the day before.
The nettles she’d found near the stream had not gone far, and she wished she’d found more.
The pale willow fibers would have to do, and they lay in loose curls across her lap, some still damp from the stripping.
She held the cord taut with one hand while the other hand fed new strands into it, rolling them hard against her thigh until they tightened into rope.
Every few inches she overlapped another ribbon of inner bark, twisting it carefully into the length already made, testing each section with a small pull before continuing.
Yesterday, the cord she’d been using to drag heavier wood back to the house had given way, and despite more than an hour spent trying to repair it, it had snapped again.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Charlie lift his head and turn away from whatever had held his attention inside the woodpile. His ears pricked, and he held himself very still, staring off into the deep forest. He cocked his head slowly and then took off, disappearing beyond the house.
She watched for a moment, then went back to her work. He did this sometimes, caught a scent, followed it for a while, and came back smelling of things she didn’t want to know about. She finished the length she was working on and coiled it neatly before returning her knife to its sheath on her belt.
She stood and listened but heard only the normal silence. Whatever scent Charlie had caught, it must have taken him far to have carried away the sound of him.
Charlie was never gone from her side for long, and when nearly half an hour had passed and he had not returned, she finally went after him.
She followed the way he had gone, not calling his name, but watching the ground instead.
He was not careful about his tracks. After a good ten minutes, she gave a low whistle, but there was no answering sound.
The trees crowded around her as she went, the forest thickening until the afternoon sun was nearly choked out.
The farther she walked, the more she felt the old reluctance settle in her shoulders as she came to the boundary of the known forest. The man had rarely ventured further than this point and so she did not.
She angled toward the old, familiar willow—the one that leaned as if caught between standing and wanting to lie down. This was as far as she ever went in this direction.
She heard Charlie before she saw him, heard his low, uncertain sound, not quite a bark. Forcing herself past the willow, she crested the small rise and saw him standing a little apart from something dark in the grass of a clearing, his tail low, his head down.
It was a horse, she saw, rather astounded.
The size of it gave her pause before anything else.
Larger than any horse she could remember seeing in that other life, it lay on its side with a long, dark wound in its belly, the saddle still on its back, the reins trailing into the weeds.
The smell reached her a moment later, faint but unmistakable. Dead, but not long, she judged.
She stood where she was and looked around before going any closer, turning slowly, letting her eyes move from tree to tree, shadow to shadow.
A saddle meant a rider, her brain said. She laid her hand on the knife at her side and waited, listening, before she realized that Charlie would have warned her if anyone was nearby.
It was a shame the horse was dead, she thought initially. She would like to have a horse, imagining it might come in handy, though she could not immediately think how. Another mouth to feed was all she could think of, and maybe that was reason enough to know she would not like to have a horse.
Her gaze roamed over what the horse carried, finding that much more interesting now.