20. Nerina
NERINA
Igo into the forest the next morning because I want to. Still new enough that I notice it.
Not for materials. Not for the spring, not yet.
I am not ready for the spring, not with everything Vaelka left on the beach still settling in me like sediment finding the bottom.
I go because the forest has become, over the past ten days, a place I know, and knowing a place is not nothing.
The root systems and the thin light and the mineral smell of it.
Different twenty yards in than it sounds at the treeline.
I go because I want to be inside something familiar that is not the beach, and that is reason enough.
I am moving roughly northeast, not quite toward the spring, following a root formation I have used before, when I hear the sound.
It is small. That is the thing about it.
It is a very small sound, a displacement of air and leaf matter that is a fraction of a second wrong, and my body is moving before the sound has finished arriving.
Eight years on the Blackwake docks, working before dawn in the dark among people who did not always have good intentions and a woman alone was a specific category of target — my body has been educated by that in ways my mind does not always have access to.
I drop and turn and the thing that was behind me hits the root formation where my head was.
I run.
Looking back costs a step and a step is not available.
The forest is dark and the root systems are uneven and I know this stretch but I do not know it well enough to run it flat out without watching my feet, and watching my feet means not watching what’s behind me, which is a problem I am managing by simply being faster than the alternative.
I am not, as it turns out, faster than the alternative.
A branch catches my left arm from behind, not a grip, a rake, something with edges, and opens a line of fire from elbow to wrist that tells me the damage is real before I have time to assess it.
I keep running. The arm works. That is the information I need.
I change direction by thirty degrees, cutting south toward where the beach should be, and the forest closes around me differently — denser, the root formations higher, and I realize with the cold clarity of a person who has just made a navigational error under pressure that I have gone the wrong way.
I stop behind the largest root formation I can find and put my back against it and get the knife out and breathe.
The forest is quiet. Not the ordinary quiet, the quiet of a creature that has also stopped moving and is now listening.
I press my back into the root and look at my left arm and the damage is a long shallow rake, bleeding freely but not arterial, the kind of wound that will be a significant problem in an hour and a manageable one right now.
I press my sleeve against it and hold it and think about direction.
I do not know which way the beach is.
This is, I think, with the flat clarity of a person past adrenalin and running on something thinner, a bad situation.
I hear her before I see her. Not the wrong sound this time — deliberate footsteps, unhurried, the particular quality of something moving through the forest that has no reason to be quiet because nothing in the forest is a threat to it.
She comes around the root formation and crouches in front of me with matter-of-fact efficiency, already past the part where she decides what to do about it.
She is young — young for what she is, which I am learning to read differently than young for what I am.
Gold eyes, the same shade as his, the Vhastyr line running true.
Smaller than him by a considerable measure, with the quick economy of movement of someone the world was not built to scale and who has made her peace with this.
She looks at my arm, then at my face, then at the knife still in my hand.
“My cousin has told me very little about you,” she says.
Her voice is warm in a way that nothing else on this island has been warm to me.
“Very little, actually. But you’re human, you’re bleeding, and those are two different problems.” She reaches into the satchel at her hip without looking away from me. “Let me see the arm.”
I let her see the arm.
She works quickly and without fuss, the way people work when they know what they are doing and do not need you to know that they know it.
Clean cloth, pressure, a salve from a small jar that stings considerably and smells of the island’s thermal water.
I watch her hands and do not watch the treeline and after a moment I realize I have made the decision to trust her and cannot remember making it.
“Ysara,” she says, without looking up. “In case you were wondering.”
“I know who you are,” I say. “He mentioned you.”
She looks up at that, briefly, with an expression I cannot fully read. “Did he? That’s more than I expected.” She goes back to the arm. “It’s not deep. It will hurt for a week and then it will be a scar and then you’ll forget it was ever anything else. You’ve done this before.”
“Different circumstances.”
“Usually are.” She ties the binding off and sits back on her heels and watches me with eyes the same gold as his and not like his simultaneously, the same color, a different temperature. His look at you like an assessment. Hers look at you like a welcome. “Do you know what happened?”
“I have a working theory.”
“As do I,” she says. “And I’m not going to say it aloud because saying it aloud means having information I would then have to act on, and acting on it would make a complicated situation considerably more complicated.
” She holds my eyes. “What I will say is that you should not go into the forest alone again. Not until this is settled.”
I want to argue with this. No argument.
She walks me back to the beach. At the treeline she stops, as though the boundary between forest and shore is one she has decided not to cross, and she looks at the cove with an expression I recognize from a different face, a dragon who has been watching the situation change from a distance and is not entirely sure how to feel about what it has changed into.
“He doesn’t talk about himself,” she says.
Not to me exactly — more to the air between us.
“He never has. Even when we were young, which for him was a very long time ago, he held things at a remove. The wars made it worse. Losing—” she stops.
“There are things he lost that he has not put down. That he carries the way the island carries the old barrier damage — built into the structure, not a wound anymore, just… architecture.” She meets my eyes then.
“You are the first thing in a very long time that has made him look like someone who might put something down.”
No words for this. I don’t try to find them.
“Whatever you decide,” Ysara says, “I’m glad you came here.” She says it simply, without decoration, the way true things are said when the person saying them is not trying to do anything with the truth except give it to you.
She goes back into the trees.
I walk down to the fire and I sit with my hands flat on my knees and wait for them to stop shaking, and they do, eventually, and the stone in my pocket is warm and the bound arm aches and the shelter wall is twenty feet behind me and I do not look at it.
I do not need to look at it. I already know what I am going to write.