Chapter 19
Chapter
Nineteen
TUCKER
Iplace my bow into a sling on my back and drag my fallen prey through the wilderness. The bleeding corpse paints a red path in the ankle-deep snow. The deer’s antlers look just like the antlers on the crown and the antlers tattooed on Forest’s forehead. Then again, all antlers look the same.
More or less.
It’s about a fifteen-minute walk back to the village, but I take my time. The more I’m outside, the better. The worst feeling in the world is feeling cooped up indoors. Even during the long winters, I’d rather be outside, bonding with the earth beneath my feet.
Things at home have gone sideways as of late and the trees whisper matters are only going to get worse. The ravens sing songs about impending doom as they line up on snow-covered branches overhead. They follow me wherever I go. Always watching. Singing.
As I reach the clearing where the wilderness offers a reprieve for our village, I spot a flock of five ravens circling the sky.
They fly down to the last branch of the woods and squawk.
I shake my head and try to push the thoughts away.
Alone in my head they must stay. Forest has enough on his plate without worrying about the things he cannot hear.
I drag the deer through the village with an audience of hungry eyes.
A deer a day keeps the hunger away and is typically enough to serve the entire village dinner.
I drop off the deer in a barn on the opposite side of the village where the butcher will carve it up into slabs of meat to be passed out to each household.
On the way to my next stop, I watch as the snow continues to fall, covering the blood-stained trail I left behind.
I knock on the door with my knuckles, but there’s no immediate response. I exhale and step to the side to try to peer through the window, but the curtains are drawn shut so I knock again, this time harder than before.
Again, no answer.
I twist the doorknob, but it’s locked, so I knock again with my whole fist. On the other side of the door, there’s commotion as someone shuffles to the door.
“Sorry,” Zeva yells. “Nothing has changed.”
I lower my ear to the door, steady my breathing, and listen. It sounds like Zeva sniffles on the other side. Could be getting sick. “Zeva, are you sick?”
“No,” she yells, and sniffles again. It sounds more like crying. “Will Shaun be bringing us food later?”
I cock my head to the side and exhale. The breeze tangles around me, pulling taut and holding me in place. Something is wrong. “Zeva, open the door.”
“You know I’m not allowed to.”
I take a step back and brace both hands on either side of the door. “If you don’t open the door, I’ll break it open.”
“Please go away,” she cries.
I turn to my side and shoulder the weight of my body against the door. It takes two blows to bust the door open and I stumble inside, almost losing my footing. Zeva backs away from me, her eyes blood red with tears streaming down her pale face.
I grit my teeth and shove past her to open the door to her mother’s bedroom.
My senses are assaulted with the early scents of death that so often smells of fresh-cut grass.
A fitting smell as we are taken back into the dirt from which we came.
Camilla is dead; her eyes closed and at peace.
Somehow, the interior of the house feels almost as cold as it does outside.
Zeva comes to a stop at the door.
“How long has she been dead, Zeva?”
“A few hours,” she cries. “I doused the fire to help keep her cold and I just—”
“You what?” I seethe. This is such a violation of the rules of the dead.
“I needed more time with her.” She stumbles forward, weak at the knees. “Please don’t tell anyone. I need more time.”
“You know I can’t do that.”
She latches onto my arm with her weak ass grip. If I jerked away from her, she’d fall over. “I’m losing everything, Tucker.”
I grit my teeth, but biting my tongue is impossible. “How the fuck do you think I felt after you took my mother away from me?” I say the quiet part out loud, the thing we all know to be true. The thing I didn’t want to believe. “Say your goodbyes. Tonight, we mourn your mother on a blazing pyre.”
“I’m sorry,” she sobs, taking a step to the side to block the body of her dead mother from me.
“For what we did and for dancing around the truth for so long.” She searches my eyes, trying to find common ground.
“But you were standing there when she was hanging. I don’t know how you’ve forgotten.
I don’t think I could ever get it out of my head. ”
I inch towards her, forcing her into a corner. I tower over her, the fire of the sconce casting my shadow over half her face. “I wasn’t there.”
The truth is a seed that’s planted once and returns every harvest. It doesn’t go away. It doesn’t change. It’s a weed that can’t be destroyed, even if there are a dozen hands desperately ripping it from the ground. It always comes back.
Guilt operates very much the same way. The human mind pulls at the roots of guilt, clinging onto anything to dilute the suffering of being trapped in a prison of one’s own bad decisions. It’s the only explanation as to why they all continue to push this false narrative.
I wasn’t there.
On my way out of Camilla’s house, I slam the door shut.
Camilla’s mortal body lies in wake on a bed of logs with a mound of kindling and branches beneath her.
The rules dictate that a loved one must light the fires as a final goodbye amidst a promise they’d see each other again in another life.
Zeva is catastrophic, crying on the ground, and Bash is nowhere to be found.
Her husband is locked away in quarantine, and her child—and Camilla’s only grandchild—is dead. Darius, too.
That’s why Forest carries the torch through a narrow strait in the crowd. When he reaches the pyre, he tosses the torch into the kindling and backs away. By the time he reaches me, the pyre unleashes a hellish heat on all of us, a melancholic reprieve from the cold.
Even in death, Camilla provides.
It takes only a few seconds for the unmistakable smell of burning flesh to imbue the breeze, carrying embers of Camilla through the crowd.
Another night. Another body. In the grand scheme of things, the number of the dead is not large.
When the count started at a hundred and twenty-something, six bodies is a pandemic.
“How fragile life is,” I say, exhaling a cloud of warm breath that dissipates in the air between Forest and I. “She was here and then gone in the blink of an eye.”
Forest shakes his head, almost in disbelief. “Do you remember what she said to me the first time I saw her again?”
I search the corners of my mind, rolling my eyes to the beat of each memory. I settle on not remembering said conversation and shrug.
“She said something along the lines that her time was coming soon. That she wouldn’t be here much longer. It’s like she saw it coming.”
“She was old. There’s nothing prophetic about an old person croaking.”
“You believe all sorts of fantastical stuff to be true. Yet, a woman who is famed for bringing someone back from the dead potentially sees a vision of her demise, and that’s where you draw the line?”
“What difference does it make? If she saw her death coming, she did an absolutely atrocious job of preparing us for what comes next.” I lower my hand to the small of his back and hold him there.
A gentle touch only he’ll ever know. “She taught me enough about the clearing rituals and I can make a few of her potions, but all that shit is in her head. She never wrote it down. What’s gone is lost.”
“It’s going to be a long fucking winter.” He dips his head over my shoulder. “No sign of Bash?”
“No.”
There’s quiet in the air. The village mourns, but other than the occasional wail from Zeva, that mourning is restrained.
Death, in itself, is not the worst thing in the world.
It’s a part of life. We’ll all experience it a hundred times before we truly experience it ourselves.
It’s easier knowing we return to our roots when we’re finished with this life.
“I’m leaving in the morning,” Forest whispers.
Soft guy no more. I jerk away from him and confront him face to face. “I’ve made it quite clear that’s not happening.”
His eyes peel upwards. “You have no power over me.”
I nod with an amused grin. “Would you like to test that theory?”
I’m very aware of the hierarchy here, and I choose to hold my oath to the Wilds to the best of my ability. Hell, I’m pretty much the ideal follower. I don’t ask questions ever. But I’m not letting Forest out of my sight when the tether that keeps him here is so fragile and new.
“You’re coming with me,” he says.
I dig the heel of my boots into the packed snow. “I will not.”