40. Cut by Cut #4
He hadn’t expected the third one.
“Watch your foot.”
Sarah, just ahead.
He looked down too late. His boot caught the root. He went into the trunk of a tree shoulder-first.
His good hand caught the trunk, and he pushed off.
“Right hand on the next one,” she said. “Don’t try to walk straight. Move tree to tree.”
He moved tree to tree.
The sword fell out of his hand at some point. He heard it on stone in the wet leaves off to his right. He stood looking at the dark for a long moment.
“Leave it, captain,” Darien said. “We’ll come back for it.”
He left it.
His ribs hurt to breathe. His ribs hurt not to breathe. He kept moving.
“There. Tall grass on your left.”
Darien, close. The cook’s voice careful, the way it used to come when Darien was naming a leaf or a root for Kain to put in his mouth on the road.
“Not much, captain. But the tall grass here, the bristly heads on it. Chew on a couple of stems. It’ll cut the fever some.”
Kain stopped at the patch Darien had named. He bent, slow, his ribs screaming, and pulled three stems out of the wet earth with his good hand.
He put them in his mouth and chewed. The taste was bitter and grass-water, sharp on his tongue. He swallowed what he could and spit the rest.
“Good. Keep going. The trail bends left here. You know it.”
He knew it. He went left.
The first snare he’d set came up under the moonlight, the bloodied one, the dark shape of the rope just makeable-out. He had his bearings.
“Tillamore’s that way,” Sarah said. “Down the hills.”
“He knows where the village is, woman,” Darien said. He laughed. The laugh ran for half a beat and stopped. “He just needs the legs to go.”
Sarah laughed too, the laugh on a higher pitch than her speaking voice, the way her laughs did. The two laughs ran into each other.
Kain almost laughed.
A piece of his chest moved that shouldn’t have moved with his ribs in the state they were in. He gritted his teeth around the pain.
“Easy, brother,” Mark said, very quiet, somewhere just behind him.
Kain kept moving.
The fever climbed. He could feel it at the back of his head and in his palms. His hair was wet with sweat under his hair and with rain over the top of it.
The forest tilted around him, not all the way over, just a few degrees off true, and then a few more degrees off true.
“Mind the rock,” Sarah said. “Step over.”
He stepped over.
“There’s a stick to your right. The fallen branch. Use it.”
He bent and found the long stick. He planted it in the wet earth and used it to keep himself upright.
“Now go.”
He went.
The dead tree came up against the sky a long way off, the lightning-struck one, the one Sasha had marked and her father had loved on his off-days.
“Look at that,” Darien said. There was something close to wonder in his voice.
The cook had always been the one of them most easily moved by the things on the road.
“Look at the line of that tree against the cloud-break. That’s a picture of something, captain. I’d of sat down and looked at that for an hour, once.”
Kain looked at the line of the dead tree against the cloud-break. He kept moving.
His foot caught on a stone. The stick took his weight and cracked but didn’t go through.
“Slow,” Sarah said. “Slow, slow. We’ve got time. You’ve got time.”
He didn’t have time. The fever was climbing.
He took another step. The foot caught on another stone.
The stick went under him.
He went down. His head whacked a rock on the way down.
Not hard, but hard enough to open the skin across his forehead.
The warm of his own blood ran down the side of his face into the wet leaves.
He lay there.
His face was wet with rain and blood and leaves and dirt.
His body was done.
“Come on.”
Sarah, right at his ear.
“Come on, get up.”
He couldn’t.
“Kain.”
The body wouldn’t.
“Sarah,” Darien said, “he can’t.”
“He can.”
“Look at him.”
“I’m looking at him. He can. Mark.”
She called it. Not loud. The way she used to call across a campsite in the morning when the slow one needed a hand.
“Mark. Tell your brother we need to get moving.”
Mark didn’t answer her first. Mark was already there.
Kain could feel him just at the edge of all of it, the way Mark had always stood by when Sarah did the work of getting Kain up.
Hand on his hip. The corner of his mouth twitching against a smile. Waiting.
Then Mark crouched at Kain’s good side. Kain could feel him there. He could feel the brother-warmth he hadn’t felt in a year.
“Get up, brother,” Mark said. Quiet. Only for Kain. “Sasha’s worried. Matthew’s waiting. The garden needs you. Get up.”
Kain’s chest moved. A piece of it that shouldn’t have moved with his ribs the way they were.
“You know Kain,” Darien said. He chuckled. “When he’s had a bit of a rough night he’s hard to rouse.”
A bit of a rough night.
Kain almost laughed.
The piece of his chest that moved hurt enough that his eyes went wet. The wet on his face was already so much rain and blood and forest that the new wet didn’t show up to anyone but him.
He’d told Darien a hundred times if he’d told him once that the line between a rough night and a night a man didn’t survive was the difference between a man sitting up in the morning and a man not.
Darien had nodded and grinned every time and said yes, captain, sure thing, captain.
And then he’d gone and made the same joke about the next bad night anyway.
The smell of the cave came right up to the front of Kain’s nose. Wet stone. Iron. Dust.
The wyvern’s body somewhere down there with the rest of them.
They hadn’t said a word in the cave.
They were saying every word now.
“All right,” Kain said. He said it quiet. He said it to Mark.
He rolled onto his good arm. He pushed.
He came up in stages.
His good elbow. His good knee. A sapling within reach. Upright by his good hand on the sapling.
He stood swaying.
“Good,” Sarah said.
“That’s it, captain,” Darien said.
“That’s it, brother,” Mark said.
“Now move.”
He moved.
The walk after that was a long slow thing he wouldn’t remember whole.
The fever rode him all the way. The voices stayed.
Darien pointed out where to step. Sarah talked him down the hills. Mark walked at his shoulder.
Once, Mark said, “Apple trees in the spring, brother. I’d of liked to have seen what you do with the field by the creek.”
Kain didn’t answer. He kept walking.
His eyes went wet again. The rain took it.
Once, Sarah said, “You always could carry more than you should, you stubborn bastard.”
Once, Darien said, “Drink, captain. There’s a runnel here. Down at your right boot. Drink.”
Kain knelt at a wet place in the rocks and drank handfuls of cold water from a stone. The water hit his stomach and stayed.
“Now go.”
He went.
The dead tree came up out of the dark and he came past it. The trail dropped down into the lower hills.
Something big and warm pushed at his good shoulder.
Roan.
The gelding had stayed. Or come back. Or stayed and then come some way down the path looking for him.
Kain couldn’t tell.
Roan was here. The saddle was still on his back. The reins hung.
“Up you go,” Darien said. “Right hand on the horn. Right foot in the stirrup. Don’t trust the left for anything. Pull.”
He pulled.
His left leg buckled in the stirrup. He caught himself on the horn. He pulled again.
He came up onto the horse a piece at a time. By the time he was in the saddle he couldn’t feel his legs.
Roan turned and started walking, careful with what he was carrying.
Sarah walked at the stirrup on his good side. Darien walked at the off side. Mark walked at the head of the horse with one hand light on the rein.
“Stay on him, Kain,” Sarah said. “Lean on the mane. Don’t fall.”
He leaned on the mane.
The horse moved through the night. The voices stayed.
He vomited at some point, leaning off the side, his good hand white on the horn.
“Easy, captain,” Darien said. “Spit it out. Lean back in.”
He leaned back in.
“Have,” he said into the mane. “To. Make. It.”
“You’ll make it,” Sarah said. “We’ve got you. All the way down.”
He went down slopes that didn’t feel like slopes. He went up slopes that did.
The fever in his head kept the world a few degrees off true. The voices around him kept it from going all the way over.
He saw the lights.
Torches.
Tillamore.
The hooves changed. Wet grass to packed dirt to cobble. The clop of them on stone came up at him through the buzz of his head.
He looked up.
Storefronts. Lights. People.
A crowd waiting up.
The Kettle.
Voices, jumbled, separate, the voices of the village.
“Doctor.”
“Back.”
“Here.”
Roan pulled up at the front of the crowd.
Kain looked beside him.
He turned, slow, the way a man turns when half of him is broken. He looked at the stirrup on his good side.
Empty.
He looked at the off-side stirrup where Darien had walked.
Empty.
He looked at the head of the horse where Mark had walked with one hand on the rein.
Empty.
The wolf was there. Ghost was there. Roan was there.
The team wasn’t there.
The team hadn’t been there.
Something opened in his chest that nothing in his life had cracked open before. Bigger than the cave. Bigger than the Fist. Bigger than the marker.
They’d never been there.
They’d never been there and they’d carried him just the same.
“Come,” he said.
He said it the way you call your team in. He said it to the empty stirrups and the empty rein.
No one came.
The wet on his face wasn’t all rain anymore. There was too much of it for that. His ribs were moving in a way that hurt them.
Sam stepped forward at the front of the crowd, arms out.
Kain came off the horse the way a man comes off a horse when he hasn’t got any more in him.
Sam took him.