Page 11 of The Shape of Silence

They did not go far the next time either. A fallen birch stopped them, its pale trunk half-rotted and low enough that he could have stepped over it on any other day. She tried once to angle around it, then stopped, set the straps down, and went forward alone, testing the ground with her foot, pushing aside brush, breaking off a branch that would have caught the frame and tossing it out of the way. When she came back, she pulled him in a shallow curve that brought them through with only a brief jolt that made him grit his teeth and fix his eyes on the forest canopy overhead until the worst of it passed.

It went on like that for a long while. Pull. Stop. Adjust. Pull again.

Sometimes she left him where he was and walked ahead to clear a path, and other times she only paused to catch her breath or reach for deeper stores of strength, mayhap. Once she paused to give a curt whistle, which brought her hound back into view.

Morggán had no idea how much time had passed, but realized that the light had changed, the shadows were longer now. The pain in his side never left him, but it blurred at the edges, as pain sometimes did when there was nothing to be done about it, and he found himself watching her instead when he could—how she set her feet, how she leaned into the pull, how she paused to breathe and then went on without any sign of giving up.

It was not strength alone, he realized. It was perhaps only fascinating willpower.

So, a stubborn, determined lass, he deduced, though that might be all he knew about her. That, and that her eyes were blue and her speech—both English and Gaelic—was odd, and that she wasn’t like any female of his acquaintance, certainly not his chatty sisters, in that she seemed to suffer no desire to speak at all.

By the time the trees began to thin in a way that felt meaningful, he no longer doubted that she would get him wherever it was she meant to take him.

Finally, the roof of a small, low house came into view between the thinning trees. The young woman shifted the straps once more and kept walking, closing in on the small, derelict dwelling. He closed his eyes again, acknowledging a weary, reluctant respect for the quiet, fascinating woman who’d just impossibly moved him through the forest, just as she’d said she would.

He had used the last of his strength not to move, but to stay—bracing, holding, keeping himself from slipping off the frame. With the house in front of him, there was no reason to keep fighting it. He let go, and the dark took him.

Chapter Three

By the time the light had faded to the thin gray edge of evening, the house no longer belonged only to her and Charlie.

In truth, she hadn’t intended to bring him inside her house, had left him sleeping on the travois just outside the door, waiting for him to wake. But he didn’t, not before it began to rain.

At first it had only whispered through the trees, a soft drizzle that barely reached the clearing beyond the forest’s edge. She’d stood in the doorway watching it, one hand braced against the frame, telling herself it would pass quickly. The man lay where she had left him, broad and motionless atop the travois, his dark hair dampening slowly beneath the rain. Charlie stood at her side in the doorway with his ears pricked forward, watching him too.

Then the drizzle thickened into steady rain. Water darkened the fabric of the man’s strange outfit. The ground below the travois began to soften visibly, the flattened grass turning slick and muddy beneath the runners.

Still, she’d waited, hoping now the rain itself would wake him. But when the cold water began dripping from the edge of the roof and she began to picture herself waking in the morning to find him half sunk into the mud outside her house like some carcass abandoned in the clearing, the thought sat poorly in her chest. She’d sighed with frustration then and had gone back out into the rain herself.

Getting him inside had not been easy. The door was too narrow to admit a grown man who outweighed her by a great deal, and the travois had been no use once she reached the threshold so that she was forced to slowly tip him off the thing. She’d left it outside against the wall and went back for him while the cold drops of rain began striking hard through the trees overhead. The ground quickly became soft beneath her feet and his bootless feet carved furrows in the muddy grass as she hauled him by stages toward the house, stopping again and again to catch her breath and adjust her grip on his shoulders or arms. He was heavy in a way the man had never been at the end, when she’d had to do so much for him. This man was solid and unyielding, and twice she had slipped and gone down on her butt, losing her grip on him.

The doorframe proved almost impossible. She had to turn him sideways to force him through, one broad shoulder scraping hard against the wood before he finally slid over the threshold and onto the floor inside with a weighty thud that shook the nearest shelf. For several moments she simply stood there bent over with her hands braced on her knees, breathing hard and listening to the rain striking the roof.

Charlie lingered nearby, restless now, circling once before lying near the fire with his head lifted watchfully toward the stranger.

She straightened slowly and looked at the man where he lay near the firelight, his face pale beneath the dark stubble along his jaw, his clothes soaked through in places from the rain and stiff with drying blood in others.

He remained inert and unconscious.

After a moment, she knelt and stirred the fire and hung the kettle over it almost automatically, more to give herself something familiar to do than from any clear plan. Afterward she sat on the stool near the table and watched him from across the room while rain smacked steadily against the roof overhead.

He was breathing now, still, but she wondered for how long. If he died, she would have to drag his body back out through the door, she thought with some annoyance. But then curiosity—about the man, about his strange circumstance and manner—made her kind of want him to live. She glanced again at the blood covering his upper thigh, knowing that wasn’t a good thing. Perhaps, she thought, he would wake after a time and see to himself.

The day had not gone as it should have.

There was wood still to be brought in, and she had not done it. There was no meal made, and it was too late now to be digging out the garden behind the house as she’d planned to do today. She studied the sleeping man, listening to his breathing, watching the color of his skin in the firelight. She told herself that the house would not come apart because she had not kept to her schedule of chores, or because another person now lay within it.

When at last she ate, it was standing, as she always did, her back to the wall, her eyes on him now where previously, she would let her gaze be entranced by the fire. She’d meant to ration and savor her heaven-sent gift of yesterday, the bread and cheese, but felt she’d earned it today for certain. Still, she ate only half of what remained.

She washed up afterward, as quiet as ever, and set things in their places with care that was more routine than deliberate.

Before she lay down, she went through the small, familiar rituals she had never quite lost from that other life. She rinsed her face clean and scrubbed her teeth with the frayed end of a hazel stick she kept for that purpose. The end was too worn now, and she trimmed it with her knife and then chewed distractedly on it until it frayed fresh into soft fibers, all the while staring at the sleeping man while she brushed her teeth. Then she stood for a moment with her hands sunk into the wooden bowl, the cool water a balm to her sore flesh, and she listened to the fire and to the quieter, heavier sound of another person breathing in her house.

She lay down with her boots near to hand and the knife under her old coat-pillow, where she could reach it if she needed to, and she kept one eye on him while the fire burned lower. In its light, his face looked different than it had in the gray of the forest—softer and yet more sharply made, the lines of his cheekbones and jaw standing out as if they had been cut from stone rather than grown. His hair, dark and unruly even in sleep, fell across his brow, and the shadows caught in it and in the hollows beneath his eyes, making him look both harder and more worn than she had first thought. He didn’t look like the man had looked at the end, all angles and thinning flesh. This man looked built for weight and force, and as someone who might actually have used the sword he’d had with him, that she’d left in the forest with his other things and that she would fetch tomorrow at some point.

She watched the steady rise and fall of his chest until the fire sank and the room softened into shadow, and only then did she let her eyes close. The day hadn’t been what it was meant to be, and right now it didn’t seem possible that tomorrow would return to normal. She accepted that in the same way she accepted weather, or an injury, or the sudden presence of things she hadn’t planned for but couldn’t prevent.

When she slept, it was lightly, and she woke more than once to listen and make sure he was still breathing.