Chapter 10 Hello
HELLO
BAKER FELT THE throb of impending bruises as she sought shelter at the bank of a bustling, human river.
Physical pain used to make her cry, but now she numbly watched the boots of strangers as they squelched through the mire of the bustling town.
Their collars were turned up against the mist stirring down from a flat, stony sky.
Their covered heads and dark shoulders bobbed like waves.
Baker had been tossed in the throws of those waves, shoved by a passing knee, hip or elbow.
She’d landed twice in the mud, panicking as they’d stepped on a hand, and then an arm, Baker crawling to safety before she dared to venture out again.
It seemed her silence had spread through her like an infection and now she was invisible. She’d wanted to be completely invisible to the Strike since arriving at the Bleeding Grin. One year later, people no longer saw her either.
There was no victory in it. No safety. It wasn’t at all like she’d imagined.
Time had passed with excruciating tension.
She’d seen many of the Strike, watched the Bleeding Grin change from a log cabin style like Marnie had predicted, to plenty of other themes that represented a wide variety of cultures and historical periods.
She’d learned how to follow orders promptly, to navigate quietly, and clean and maintain a multitude of things, but she had yet to learn to speak.
Today of all days, her silence choked her.
At midnight last night, she woke up to primal screaming. Marnie was carried into their room by a group of servants, her naked body covered only in a torn blanket.
Her body was slick with so much blood that Baker couldn’t tell where she bled. Jolie had been shouting orders, arms stained up to the elbow as she rushed to treat Marnie’s wounds.
It had taken several witnesses and Marnie’s own broken storytelling for Jolie to piece together that Marnie was returning from entertaining Strike Yun.
That night, he’d made himself a drink from her fears.
Her visits to him had become so frequent that she’d hardly had any left.
As a result, he’d indulged in her mind, dining on her memories before dismissing her from his room.
Unable to remember the directions to the servant’s quarters, and without her fears in tact, she lingered too long in the halls, happening upon Amiel.
Marnie didn’t seem to remember much else of the event, only the pain and sensation of being dragged through the darkness, grabbed, touched and bitten.
When she described the experience to Jolie, the vacancy in her eyes was eerie. The experiences didn’t seem to frighten her at all. It was only the physical pain that sent her into a screaming frenzy.
No one else seemed afraid either, Jolie coolly asking Baker to venture to the next town over for a specific medicine that would keep Marnie calm.
It hadn’t occurred to Baker until later that Jolie had sent her off to distance her from the scene and the long cleaning, bandaging and hysteria that would soon follow suit.
Baker left without further guidance, having made the trip before on another errand. Jolie had once told her that her greatest gift was being overlooked. Seeing as there was no risk of one of the Strike asking for her, she was the most suited for the long errands.
Baker had been glad to leave the Grin, and now here she was.
Her panic had calmed as she waited on the edge of the road, the only small figure at the outskirts of a wide alley. People seemed to avoid this small bank and so she was safe here from their boots. A quick glance of her surroundings ultimately told her why.
When she saw the corpse, at first, she’d thought it had been an old flag hanging in the wind, an object too ordinary to capture anyone’s attention.
Caked in mud and tattered cloth, it haunted the alley in slow revolutions.
Baker faced it with the entirety of her body, noticing instantly how its slow revolutions contrasted the busy bustling of the world around her.
The gallows had been deserted by all but the maggots, who bubbled under the skin of a man who no longer had a face.
He did have a name. In fact, he had twenty of them tattooed on his forearm.
He was the only one left hanging, other corpses with similar tattoos already having rotted from the ropes into muddied masses on the ground.
She was silent and afraid, but as she stood before this corpse, she saw herself more clearly than ever, and it was only here that she felt room to feel anything deeper than her fear.
She couldn’t understand why, but the image gave her hope.
His voice severed at the end of a rope, he still spoke to her, and as Baker stood there, she listened.
These days she felt a likeness to the dead that she couldn’t describe and quietly, she let time drift by in the form of the bustling crowds behind her.
It had been a year since arriving at the Bleeding Grin, and lately Baker couldn’t stop thinking about Khalid, Von, Bird, and the rest of the ROSE.
Death was no longer a creature hiding out in the woods, or the lord of a kingdom she was trapped in. She saw it everywhere, no longer mysterious, it ravaged and shook people right before her eyes.
But much like everyone else, Death had not seen her yet.
Her fingers loosened around the brown bag of medicine in her hand. She imagined letting it fall into the mud. She imagined sitting at this body’s feet, looking up without fear and seeing him like she wanted to be seen.
Hello. She apologized inwardly for her weakness, even her inner voice feeling so small in the expansive world she lived in.
Chastising herself, she looked down at her shoes, toes swallowed up by the mud.
Hello , she mouthed the words, eyes stinging with a glaze of tears. She looked back up at the corpse as if it were listening. It deserved to be seen. Hello .
The frailty of her own voice made her want to curl up and retreat back into the current of the world, surrender to getting whisked back into her frantic, drowning life.
She pursed her lips, and opened her mouth, but could give nothing but strangled silence.
Perhaps in that way, they were the same.
She wanted to stay here forever, defeated by her efforts and wishing now that the body would talk back. It wasn’t rushing around, not like all of the people, servants, and Strike. Maybe it saw her like she saw it.
“Hello,” she heard, and the voice startled her.
The man appeared beside her as if he’d always been standing there, looking up at the corpse in front of them.
Her eyes moved across the long leather coat from the man’s boots to the high, folded collar.
It followed the line of his jaw that exalted a strong posture as if he carried the weight of wings on his back.
His blond hair had been pulled in a sloppy arrangement behind his head, fully exposing the refined arches of his brows, the lift of his cheekbones and the proud angles of his nose.
She felt strength in him and simply stared, wondering if he actually could see her. He was looking at the corpse too.
She imagined he must also see the maggots bubbling under the skin of the corpse, the violence wrenched through the muscles and bones, the stench that loomed like a cloud. Unlike her, there was no fear in his eyes, nothing but openness and freedom and a turning as powerful as a hurricane.
He glanced down at her, his hands folded behind his back and she was struck by the warmth of his smile and greenness in his eyes. It was a dark green like pine trees.
“The dead don’t usually talk, you know,” he said, voice beaconing like a force of gravity in his chest.
She looked around, and still, no one seemed to notice this man beside her. How could others not notice a figure like him? How could such a figure notice her?
Feeling for a moment that an angelic spirit had appeared beside her, Baker looked back at the corpse and she was no longer so afraid of its fate, not as long as this new figure was nearby.
She tightened her grip around the bag in her hand nervously and noticed a flitter of movements through his fingers.
There was a silver coin, fluttering through one of his hands.
The coin glittered with the movement as he played it through his fingers almost like piano keys.
He seemed to practice the motions absentmindedly and she was hypnotized by it, at first concerned that it could be a curse of some kind.
His hands were gloved, usually a bad sign to her as many Strike wore gloves, but it was common in such cool weather and she reeled in her suspicions best she could.
“I’ve been accused of making friends with some.
..unsavory types,” the man said, tugging her from her anxious thoughts.
He smiled subtly, a quiet expression of humor.
“But I think I’ve met my match.” He started to turn away from her.
He walked into the crowd down the street.
“These streets aren’t good for kids. Be careful. ”
Baker watched him go, scanning the area one more time before realizing she had to go in the same direction.
She proceeded down the street, passively searching for the man as she neared the exit of the city.
As she started on the path into the woods, she noticed him again, bartering with the owner of a wagon.
He noticed her again and she approached curiously.
“It seems you and I might be headed in the same direction,” he said, before dropping some coins into the wagon owner’s hand.
He hoisted himself onto the wagon with an agile swing of his body, sitting back against a bail of hay and a few bags of wheat.
“Where are you going?” he asked her. The owner of the wagon got on the front and grabbed the reins. “The capital, I take it?”
Baker examined the wagon. Riding something would likely get her there before nightfall and she hated sleeping in the woods.
She nodded back at him.