Chapter Eight #3
He would not offer pity. He sensed at once she would recoil from it. At the same time, he could not quite silence the thin thread of compassion her words had drawn from him. After a moment, he inclined his head in the direction of her home for the last ten years. “We should go,” he said simply.
They left the shelter of the rock and made their way back through the trees at a slower pace than before. The urgency that had driven them there had dissipated, replaced by something heavier and less easily named.
The hound ranged ahead, Avery allowing greater slack to the lead, but he didn’t bound through brush or circle back in restless arcs as he generally did during the day. He moved with them rather than apart from them, ears flicking at distant sounds but making no effort to investigate.
Avery walked without speaking, her steps sure even in low light. Morggán watched her more closely than he had before. Ten years, she had said, ten years confined within a boundary that only she could see, ten years waiting.
He could not comprehend such stillness. His own absence from his men weighed on him, yet he had never doubted they searched.
They would track signs and question villages.
They would follow rumor if needed, and pursue leads without ceasing.
He did not flatter himself with thoughts of indispensability, but neither did he believe for one moment that he would be abandoned.
There were bonds between men forged in oath and battle that did not dissolve easily.
What would it be like to believe otherwise? To wake each day with no expectation that one’s name was spoken anywhere by anyone. He didn’t linger long on the thought, as it unsettled him—unaccountably so—on her behalf.
By the time the outline of her house came into view, he had reached a conclusion that weighed heavily upon him.
Whatever strangeness surrounded her account, whatever confusion lay in her understanding of the world beyond the forest, one fact was plain: she could not remain here alone.
Not with English columns moving in force, bringing war directly across her path.
He could not, in good conscience, leave her to it.
***
His questions, asked in that voice that sounded frustrated at times, stayed with her, and bothered her.
She wasn’t sure he intended to make her feel guilty, or... weak in some manner, but she did now, for not having tried harder to return to her parents.
The man had never forbidden her to leave the forest, of course, but he had given numerous warnings over the years.
There was nothing beyond the forest but danger, he’d basically said.
The roads belonged to sluagh and thieves alike—she never had figured out what sluagh meant.
Hungry men wandered beyond the forest, the man had said, and strangers were to be feared.
A girl alone would fare poorly outside the forest. It seemed every week or several times a month, he issued a new warning.
She’d believed him because she had been eleven years old when he'd found her, frightened enough to cling to every word he spoke. As the years passed, they had become simply another truth about the world, no different from never wasting food or keeping the wood and peat dry.
Even after he’d died, she had not challenged those lessons. She’d been too busy surviving another winter.
Until she turned eighteen.
She remembered standing outside the house just after dawn with a small bundle over one shoulder, having decided the night before that she could not spend the rest of her life wondering and never knowing, determined that she would put fear aside and at least try to find her way back.
The man had once shown her where he’d found her in the forest, and she’d started from there, going farther than she ever had, walking all day and then the next.
When the forest thinned, she’d felt hope, but then as she left it completely, the expanse before her had seemed endless, and every hill looked like the last. There were stands of trees, which seemed to give way to only another hill and another stand of trees.
She’d crossed streams she’d never seen before and had climbed ridges that revealed nothing but endless woodland beyond.
In every direction, it seemed there was only more uncivilized land.
Then came the rain, but not the brief showers that normally came in spring, but two relentless days of cold rain that soaked everything she carried.
She couldn't coax a fire to life. She spent the nights shivering beneath dripping branches, too cold to sleep and too frightened to stop moving for long.
On the fourth day she tried to cross a swollen river she’d thought shallower than it actually was, having underestimated the strength of the current until it swept her feet from beneath her.
She’d been tossed and tumbled through icy water, striking hidden stones, all the while clawing desperately at overhanging roots until she managed to drag herself onto the bank.
She had lost half her food and nearly her life.
A day later, she’d found herself on steep ground, loose shale shifting beneath every step. She’d slipped and slid twenty feet before a twisted pine stopped her fall. Her palms bled for days afterward.
She turned around after that, crying as she gave up the quest, and searched instead for the way back home, to the house in the forest. When she’d finally stumbled back to her house after more than ten days gone, bruised and aching, she had fallen to her knees and cried with relief.
She’d never again tried to get back but finally understood what the man had been trying to tell her all those years.
The forest was not keeping her prisoner—the forest was keeping her safe.