CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Anya was not afraid of the dark. But the first night in Johanna’s cottage, Anya had refused to close her eyes.
After her long, lonely night in the forest – her mother’s stiff, white corpse, the things she couldn’t see, didn’t hear, still fresh in her teeming mind – giving herself to a darkness so absolute seemed unwise.
Johanna, lost as to how to comfort a frightened child but willing to try, had been patient. After several frustrating hours, she had instructed Anya that the things that could hurt her were very real, but they were outside, not behind her own eyes.
Even back then, Anya didn’t think that was entirely true.
It was enough. She had learned to think that way, even if she didn’t believe it. She had learned to tolerate the dark.
Now, forced to confront the dark, denied even the promise of light, she was forced to confront this: she had not grown as tolerant of the dark as she had thought.
And now, she was forced not only to tolerate it, but to be grateful for it. Forced to be a part of it. To become one of a number of creeping, silent things, poised to strike. To kill.
To die.
After a time, this no longer disturbed her. If she could learn to think one way, even if she didn’t believe it, she could learn to think another.
She could learn to think like a beast.
But she could not learn to think like prey. Dull, easily frightened, unable to act. She could not ever tolerate that.
She picked through a dense patch of the wood, disguising her trail in the packed undergrowth. Not that Sy would know enough to follow her; but someone else might. She barely needed to think, her new senses growing more attuned to the forest, guiding her path.
But as she went, she noticed her hunter’s edge fading from her. A delayed sense of urgency, a complacency.
She struggled to keep it. I am human, still, she repeated to herself. Then, aloud. “I am still human.”
She came upon a camp site. Abandoned – or, mostly.
It looked to have been previously occupied by a fellow hunter, but it was hard to tell; the reddish furry growth all over him distorted most of his clothing and features beyond recognition, but for the limp tufts of hair on his scalp like the seed heads of grass, the blackened teeth poking through his melting jaw.
Though he was long dead, he moved. His corpse crawled with larvae eating decayed flesh, spiders eating the larvae, bats darting out of the darkness to eat the spiders.
A fox, apparently unbothered by Anya’s scent or presence, approached and tugged a bit of skin loose from the corpse’s leg, then wandered off with it.
Pity, she thought, watching it go, I am not hunting foxes.
She stepped closer to the man; the diving bats ignored her. She wondered if she knew him, from the lodge. Friend in winter, foe in summer.
Neither now. She went through his supplies, which had been picked clean long before his corpse was. She found nothing of use but a flask, hidden inside his disintegrating breast pocket.
Clutched in his hand, covered in the same mottled mold, was a leg of an unidentifiable animal. Rabbit, or quail. She realized she still had not tried eating.
She sat across from the dead man’s long-extinguished fire and pulled a walnut biscuit from her pack.
“Cheers,” she said, lifting it to him. Tentatively, she crumbled off a piece and stuck it, delicate as a tea pastry, on her tongue.
It burned her. Horrified, she spat it on the ground, brushing stinging crumbs off her tongue. She recalled Johanna spreading salt in their doorway. “To keep out evil spirits,” she said. Evil spirits, and ants.
Mind reaved by panic, she tried to wash the taste away with a swig from the flask.
It lit her insides on fire. With a cramping gut and burning throat, she spilled it back out, retching into the dirt. Something else came up with it; something that disturbingly resembled the mess left behind by buzzard beetles.
No salt, no alcohol. No hunger. She’d already eaten her last meal and not even realized it.
Last meal, last light, last days. Not a conscious thought so much as a subtle knowing, a certainty.
No. Not my last, she told herself, repeated to herself. Not my last. “Not my last anything.”
But she knew she did have one last something: hope. And giving in to certainty would be the death of it.
As would sleep. Earlier that day, sheltering beneath a rowan’s shadow, she sat with her knife in her hand. Whenever she felt herself being pulled under, she dug her knife into the side of her thigh. Whenever her mind drifted to the grotto, she did the same.
When the sun finally set low enough that she could keep her eyes open for more than a few seconds, she crept out of the shadow, stiff and sore, bleary-eyed and bow-legged.
A wild wind had blown all day, and into the night. Now, the stars were obscured by clouds. Even so, she could hear their celestial song.
She left her decomposing companion and let them guide her to the river.
The less human she became, the more the Lichtenwald revealed its secrets to her.
“In an ordinary forest,” Johanna had instructed her that first day, “at my age, I’d know every leaf, every tree like the back of my hand.
I could tell you the size and shape and exact spot of an oak by the look of its acorn.
But the Lichtenwald is not an ordinary forest. It’s playful, except when it’s vengeful. ”
Tonight, to Anya, it was neither. Nothing disturbed her as she followed the river to the meadow.
She heard no screaming, no wailing spirits, no foul buzzing.
Only the chirp of a cricket, the faraway screech of a lynx, the splash of night-feeding fish, the lonely song of a nightingale calling out for a mate.
Mere hours passed before Augur Meadow opened up before her. She crouched in a clump of gorse, surveying the gently rolling grass from edge to edge. With her new sight, she located a patch of buttercups, their petals dipped in glowing white-violet light.
Buttercup roots were a favorite food of pheasant.
If she had more time, it wouldn’t be much to go on. As it stood, it was the best she could do. She found a tall patch of heather across from the patch and crouched in it, waiting for the birds to come graze at dawn, hoping the phoenix would be among them.
For hours, she crouched beneath the clouded sky, the warm wind lulling her to sleep, her knife in her skin jerking her out of it.
As the sun rose, the clouds remained. The light hurt her eyes, but not so much she couldn’t keep them open. Good luck, she thought without enthusiasm.
But as dawn crept into midmorning, not a single bird had appeared – not in the buttercup patch, and not anywhere nearby. Something was wrong.
On its surface, nothing seemed amiss. But a closer look told another story. Flattened grass, the lingering scent of gunpowder. She followed the mussed grass, the stomped buttercups. Spent bullet casings, from a rifle. Perrine. Or Aquila. Or some other hunter. How far had word spread?
No blood; no feathers. Dozens of frantic pheasant tracks making for the trees.
Someone had tracked the phoenix here, shot at it, and let it get away. It was long gone from this place and would not soon return.
Complacent, again. In her anger, she kicked a stone, stubbing her toe. She should have noticed it sooner. She didn’t have time for this kind of amateur mistake.
Near the meadow’s edge, she spotted a boot print in a patch of shaded ground still soft from the rain two days ago.
The wind whipped strands of her hair from her loose binding as she bent to inspect it, pushing aside the grass.
Faintly, she could make out the name of the cobbler from which Sy had purchased his new boots.
In reaching for the ground, her shirt sleeve had slid up her wrist, revealing the white skin underneath.
Ivory white. Her skin had never been that color. She looked at it; then looked again. Felt it. Yes – there was no mistaking it. Her skin was covered in a soft, white, downy fur. Heart thumping, she yanked her sleeve up. It crept up her wrist, to her elbow.
She threw aside her pack, her quiver, her bow.
Ripped open her jerkin, and her shirt. The fur grew all over her – her shoulders, her neck, her heaving chest, where most alarmingly, it seemed her breasts had receded.
She ripped off her gloves – her hands were hairless, still – and felt her face.
No fur, but on either side of her forehead, she felt two small, round bumps.
A small sigh escaped her, a short, helpless sound.
Her small, desolate breath was snatched from the air by a long, shuddering roar of thunder.
Drops fell on her head, and she quickly gathered her belongings and headed for the trees. A dead branch knocked loose by wind was easier dodged than a bolt of lightning in an open field.
She pulled Johanna’s hat from her pack and tugged it over her head. It kept the light rain off, but soon the drops upon the leaves overhead gathered into a downpour, soaking her. She sheltered under a wide, sturdy oak, trying to think, trying not to think.
Through the tumult of wind and rain, she caught snatches of voices. Men, several of them.
Quietly as she could, she followed them, pulling down the brim of her hat and stopping occasionally to orient herself by the sounds of their shouting.
She spotted them sheltering beneath a narrow stone outcrop, and ducked behind another wide oak, out of their sight.
There were four – she immediately recognized David.
Aquila was there as well, pointing his rifle at the man with the bright red glove. The other, Claude, carried a pistol.
“You know more than you’re letting on,” Claude was saying. “You have the entire time.”
“I swear, I’ve told you all I know,” David protested.