16. Chapter 16
I woke as suddenly and completely as if someone had screamed in my ear, and I realized why a second before my eyes snapped open. My body was twisted into an impossible position; my head resting against the padded arm of a chair, my knees drawn into my chest, one arm loose and dangling.
The twenty-four hours are up, It said. I felt the switch a moment ago.
I uncoiled myself from the chair Blathilde had crammed me in. My neck had the beginnings of a crick; my legs the fuzzy prelude of numbness. A canyon had been carved into the back of my arm, where for hours it had rested against the wooden edge of the chair’s seat.
Swallowing a groan, I got to my feet. I dressed in the semidarkness and braided back my hair.
Outside it was still dark, night staining the garden violet when I peered out one of the windows.
All quiet out there. I rolled my head upon my shoulders to keep the knots in my neck from setting.
Bent over to touch my toes, stretched my arms. Serich and Blathilde slept on.
Dawn may have been a while off, but I knew I was too alert for sleep, too grateful to be back where I belonged.
Though I wasn’t looking forward to being alone with It, still rankled from the night before. I knew he’d hear that tetchy thought, though he at least did me the favor of holding his tongue.
The fire in the hearth lived on, roaring and crackling and dancing as if it were sentient. I let the flames hypnotize me for a while, turn me half-blind as I watched in silence, when out of the corner of my eye I saw Serich jerk awake.
He drew upright in his chair when I glanced over at him, the threadbare blanket slipping off his lap, a suspicious expression drawing his brows together. As if I were a wild beast looming over him.
“It’s me,” I said. “I woke when I came back to myself.”
His shoulders loosened with relief and he held his arms out to receive me. I sank onto his lap after a moment’s hesitation, my head finding a comfortable spot where his neck met his shoulder as he wrapped the blanket around us.
“Her furniture is much more comfortable than the ones I’m used to,” I murmured against his throat, my back pressed against the padded arm of the chair. “I’ve never seen cushions on chairs before.”
“Physical comfort leads to sin.” Serich’s voice was choked with sleep, though he said it almost reflexively, as if it had been on the tip of his tongue all the while.
I supposed that was why the benches and pews in churches were so unpleasant to sit upon. “And an achy back.”
“The Church thinks choosing discomfort makes a soul more inclined toward God.” He tightened his arms around my waist, a bottomless breath lifting his chest. “Though I suppose a hag wouldn’t care about such things.”
I doubted I would either, were I a hag. I didn’t even care about it now, come to think of it. It offered no comment, though sighed deeply as if he found us rather tedious. The thought had barely floated across my mind when It snatched at it.
Of course I find him tedious, he said. He disdains the cushion beneath his ass but has no issue with the comfort of a woman on his lap.
He wasn’t disdaining anything, just mentioning a fact.
“Are you ready to go back out there?” Serich’s breath ruffled the hair about my face as I stared into the flames. The wind gave a sudden scream against the windows, as if a succubus were howling at the glass. In the sudden updraft, the fire spat a shower of hissing, multicolored sparks.
“As ready as I’ll ever be.” I would miss the security of the cottage but lingering would do no good and only serve to put off the inevitable.
Come first light, we would have to leave.
But dawn was a while off and Blathilde slept on, so I let my limbs fall slack against Serich as he held me against him.
Blathilde woke when the sky had lightened to deepest plum. If she were unhappy to find herself in her own body, she didn’t grumble about it. She set Serich the task of cooking eggs over the hearth and shuffled about with my satchel in her arms, adding bits and bobs to it.
At the look she cast me, I joined her by her bookcase of curiosities and potions.
“I’ve put cuttings of devil’s breath, alcerin, and wulfsnare in here for you,” she muttered, showing me the pocket she’d slipped the herbs in. “You’ll want to take them at first light every day you’re in this place. You’ll cover more ground and shave time off your journey.”
“What do you want for them?” I tried not to sound too shrewd. I did not think I’d want to strike another bargain.
“Call it a gift.”
“Thank you.”
“Fair warning about the herbs: They’re potent and not without side effects. Alcerin saps your hunger, can make it difficult for some to sleep. It gives, but it takes. You’ll get where you’re going quicker but it won’t be without a cost.”
I thanked her as she tucked extra bits of bread carefully inside my satchel. “I’ll take whatever help we can get out there.” Two powerless humans wouldn’t last long without an edge. The only reason we’d made it as far as we had was because of It.
“You have power,” Blathilde said in her bullfrog croak. “Everyone does. Maybe you’re not looking for yours in the right place.”
I didn’t believe her but I smiled as though I did.
An hour later, as the sky turned into smears of rainwater gray and lilac, she bade us farewell at her front door. “This wood has a few hollow trees that might make decent shelter overnight,” she said. “They may be occupied during daylight, but with any luck you’ll find an empty one come nightfall.”
“Thank you,” I said, as Serich headed down the cottage steps, “for all the help you’ve given us.”
“It was a well-struck bargain. I’ve no need for thanks.”
“Well, I would thank you just the same.”
She blinked death-black eyes up at me as she slid through the crack of her front door. “Look after yourselves, then. I wish you good fortune.”
“And do your wishes come true?” I asked, as the crack in the door grew smaller.
A shout of creaky laughter bled through before she closed the door. “If they did, I wouldn’t have to live in this goddamned place, now would I?”
The damp, fog-soaked wood invaded my nostrils and burst onto my tongue with the taste of earth, mist, the sweet stench of decay, and it chimed with nothing but silence, broken only by the occasional whisper of a breeze through the foliage.
Serich accepted the devil’s breath and alcerin with hesitant fingers, but when he saw me stuff them in my mouth, I’m sure he felt he had little choice but to do the same.
The effects of the alcerin came on rapidly.
The sharp bite of peppermint exploding between my back teeth, that curious sizzling shine in my veins, and the only thing in the world that made sense was to move.
Onward, backward, from side to side; to the alcerin it didn’t matter, but we used it to press further south.
As soon as the wood swallowed up all traces of Blathilde’s cottage, the fogs began to waft toward us, impish as ever, though they continued to ignore Serich as thoroughly as if he were but an impediment to drift around.
It shifted uneasily as I let a misty ribbon of fog scale my arm and weave around it like an adder.
What? I said, at that nervous shuffle of claws. It’s not as if I have a choice if it wants to play with me. You never said it was dangerous.
It’s not dangerous. I’m suspicious anyway. I don’t like how it prefers you.
But fog couldn’t be dissuaded or swatted at so I let it have its fun until the temperature rose and it finally floated away, sucked back down into the earth.
How many centuries of trees and wooded dells did we move through, in a nimble careering weave, those first few hours?
We met nothing but the occasional snapping violet that was too slow to nip at our quick heels.
Moss and wet earth muffled our every step, our flesh pearled with sweat and mist, and though the alcerin didn’t like it, I eventually forced myself to stop in a small clearing, tugging on Serich’s sweat-soaked shirt to stop him, too.
Go slow with that, It cautioned when we drank from our waterskins, the alcerin itching to keep us moving. You need to avoid the water here, at least for a few more hours until you can get further south.
Why should the water be avoided?
Because something lives on it, It said, as though I’d asked something dense.
Lives ON it?
It moves from pond to puddle. It sleeps in daylight but it’ll wake if you get too close.
Its water will blind you as soon as you swallow, and you’d never get your sight back.
As long as you don’t disturb any of the water, you’ll be fine.
Even if we’re right in front of it, even if it senses you and knows you’re there, it can’t touch you if you don’t touch the water.
I couldn’t help glancing around anxiously after that, looking out for the shimmer of liquid, though for all my effort, all I spied was crystalline beads of dew on leaves.
“It says the water here is dangerous,” I told Serich in a routine sort of way, trying not to sound frightened so my fear wouldn’t inflame his. “We’ll be fine so long as we take care not to disturb any of it.”
Through the undergrowth, I saw something twitch. Something that seemed made of shadow, there and gone in the time it took me to blink. My neck prickled. I took a step backward, right into a solid mass, and realized it was Serich’s torso when his hand found my waist to steady me.
“What is it?”
I felt the effects of the alcerin through the beat of his heart, wild and impetuous. “Did you see that?” I clapped a hand to my own frantic heart as if hoping to still it.
“No.”
The light plays with your eyes here, It said, though I heard a thread of unease in his voice. Keep moving.
So we gave the alcerin what it wanted and pressed on. The terrain grew thornier, tousled with vines and low-hanging branches, tree trunks wide as dinner tables, rotted logs we had to vault over, yet no more water than what clung to ragged blades of grass.