We Leave Together, стр. 72

“Is she here?”

He nodded. “She’s asleep. She’s been working at night her whole life. She’s not used to this farm stuff. We’re just not used to it.”

“Take me to her,” I said.

He nodded. The mud sucked at my feet. Human feet were not padded and wide like wolf feet, and all the weight digs into the sharp heel. The mud grabbed at my feet. I felt clumps of mud leaping up my back when I tugged my feet free.

“Has it been raining?” I asked.

“You can’t tell?”

“Farmers speak of rain,” I said, “Thus, I ask of rain. It is polite.”

“Yeah, it’s been raining. Well, I don’t know if I’m going to be able to do this,” he said. “Franka’s in there. She’s out hard as a pinker. She won’t wake up for me unless I bang a pot over her head, and she’s not well enough to work so why bother. I say let her sleep.”

I heard my husband’s padded feet galloping to us.

I peered into the tent darkness. I lashed the flaps to the side to let light in. She was spread out on a clump of rags on the ground. Her chest rose and fell slowly. Her stomach had swollen since last we had seen her. She would give birth before the end of the season.

I touched around her stomach gently and sniffed at her skin. She was fine. She was with child, and the babe was healthy even if the mother was weak.

“Has her pregnancy been difficult?” I said.

“Like I’d know that,” he said.

“So it has been difficult?”

“I guess it has.”

I patted her stomach. I touched her cheek. I leaned in close and whispered a blessing into her ear.

Her breath held still. Her eyes opened.

She batted at my hands. “Who the bloody Elishta are you?” she said. She pulled away from me, and grabbed at her muddy blankets.

I smiled. “I saved you from a foul disease, Franka, and I came to check on you and your farmer husband.”

“Oh,” she said. “I’m sorry I didn’t recognize you.” She touched my hand. “Oh, please, can you be around when my time comes? There’s no woman out here.”

“Perhaps,” I said. I ran a hand through her hair. “Are we in the wilderness then, with no woman to help you? Where does such a place begin, if not here?”

Where does the wilderness begin? Where does it end? An eternal traveler, I have stood on the high mountains and gazed down at an endless woods like Erin’s own gorgeous dress. I have seen the small infections in the emerald horizon, where men have lit campfires eating into the green skirt like moths burping smoke. I have opened a door in the tallest tower of the tallest palace of a gigantic city, and butterflies and roaches and mice and birds and lizards all looked up at me as if humans had no place in their wild home.

I do not know where the true boundaries lie.

I know where I am at peace: when the rain falls on my head and the only boundaries between sky and me are tree leaves or stone escarpments on a rock face. I do not trade for meat or fruit there, I merely take it. I do not tell stories of ancient heroes around a campfire. I am too tired from the hunt. I have no fire because my fur and my pack keep me warm. I spread my paws out across the ground, and I sleep in blessed peace.

I think the wilderness is where things happen and no one writes about them. It is the place where there are no maps, no memorials to heroes, no gravestones, no paper, and no ink.

I have had enough of paper and ink.

My husband and I have done all we can with these demon skulls, and demon stains. We return to the wilderness now.

May the blessings of Erin come upon us all.

***

Once upon a time, Salvatore looked out the hole where he used to have a hallway because he heard all these sounds that woke him up. He peeked his head out to see.

A huge herd of cattle, a hundred head at least, marched down the center of the street in one long blur of brown spots and swaying horns and lowing. Dozens of drovers surrounded the herd. The men swiped listlessly at the cattle with whips. The cattle didn’t seem to mind. They walked in that gentle, plodding way that cows always walk until they caught the smell of the abattoir. The aborted canal had changed the path of drovers from the docks. It made noise. It woke him.

In the street, the people stopped to let the cattle pass. They couldn’t get across. People who couldn’t get across jammed the people who were going up and down the way. Salvatore looked down, and saw Jona in the street. He backed away.

Rachel stopped to kiss Jona on his lips. Her eyes stayed open. Djoss stumbled out of an alley. She saw her brother down the street. She froze.

“What?” said Jona.

Rachel pulled away. She let her hands fall down his arm, down his hands, down his fingers. She let him go. She sighed. She said nothing to Jona.

Her brother’s hands had been trembling.

“I have to go,” she said.

Jona reached for her. “Go?” he said. She had already moved on. She didn’t look over her shoulder at him. “Go where?” he shouted, “We’re going dancing!”

She was already gone, past the crowd bottlenecked around the herd of cattle like water catching in a drain.

THE END