Page 32 of The Shape of Silence

A day later, she’d found herself on steep ground, loose shale shifting beneath every step. She’d slipped and slid twenty feet before a twisted pine stopped her fall. Her palms bled for days afterward.

She turned around after that, crying as she gave up the quest, and searched instead for the way back home, to the house in the forest. When she’d finally stumbled back to her house after more than ten days gone, bruised and aching, she had fallen to her knees and cried with relief.

She’d never again tried to get back but finally understood what the man had been trying to tell her all those years.

The forest was not keeping her prisoner—the forest was keeping her safe.

Chapter Nine

Avery knelt beside the firepit, sleeves pushed above her elbows, fingers blackened from scooping wet ash onto a flat piece of stripped bark. The fire she had drowned in haste the night before had left the pit in ruins; the coals had clumped and collapsed, and the stone ring needed clearing before she could build it again properly. Any fire would produce too much smoke until the pit was repaired.

The work required little thought, which created a problem—with nothing to concentrate on, her mind would not settle. She had tried, since returning from the hollow last night, to arrange what she had witnessed into something familiar, something that belonged within reason. She had grown up around staged history. She knew what it looked like when men dressed in wool and leather and all sorts of period costumes for the sake of a camera. As a child on the set of movies her father had promoted, she’d stood beside craft services tables and watched extras in costume armor lean against trucks and complain about the weight of prop swords. She’d heard the clang of aluminum dressed to resemble iron, and had seen directors shout over the noise of generators and helicopters circling overhead for the right shot.

She had been at the premiere in Scotland of that movie about the Scots’ war against England, dressed in a stiff new coat while the actors she’d seen on set towered above her on the cinema screen, their battles carried by music and applause. She remembered her father leaning toward her mother midway through the film, whispering that the sound editing in one scene was off—that the horses didn’t quite thunder the way they had on location. She remembered the swell of music, the riders cresting hills, the sweep of cloaks against wind machines. It had thrilled her then, the spectacle of it.

What had passed through the forest last night did not resemble spectacle.

There had been no lights hidden in the trees, no trailers beyond the ridge, no cables laid across the ground. She had seen enough film sets to know what they required. There were always signs of them if one knew where to look—tracks from trucks, discarded tape, men stepping out of character the moment a scene ended. What had passed through the forest had carried none of that. The riders had not glanced about as though waiting for direction. They hadn’t adjusted costume pieces or spoken casually between ranks. They’d moved in silence and in order, as if the destination was all that mattered.

The armor hadn’t shone like something polished for camera. It had looked worn and practical. The horses hadn’t pranced or balked under unfamiliar weight. They’d moved as though accustomed to long miles and heavy riders. The line of them hadn’t faltered or rearranged itself for better effect. It had simply continued.

She had kept expecting something to break the illusion. A stray modern voice. A cough followed by laughter. The distant grind of an engine idling out of sight. Even the faint smell of fuel would have been enough to explain it. There had been nothing of the sort.

There had only been men, iron, leather, and the steady press of hooves against earth.

She scraped harder than necessary at the ash before her, the bark catching against stone.

English, Morggán had said. At war with the Scots.

War, in her mind, belonged to images from television—the evening news, maps with red arrows, grainy footage of tanks crossing desert roads. It belonged to helicopters and rifles, to reporters speaking into microphones with wind flattening their hair. It did not belong to horses and men moving like ghosts inside a forest.

All of it—what she’d witnessed and the confusion that came in its wake—put her in a sour mood.

She had some suspicion that if Morggán hadn’t come—or rather if she’d never brought him here—life would have happily continued as uneventful as it had been for years. It was his fault—he’d brought the chaos, all these things she couldn’t fathom or explain, himself included.

It wasn’t fair to blame him, but it felt simpler.

She heard the scrape of the bucket before the door was pushed in.

Morggán crossed to the table and poured the water he’d fetched, half into the wooden bowl on the small table and half into the kettle at her side.

Charlie hovered near the doorway, staring up at him with open admiration, tail giving a slow wag. The dog had followed him to the creek and back, and that alone was enough to irritate her further. She brushed ash from her hands onto her thighs and reached for the folded linen she had set aside, handing the dressing to him once the bucket was empty.

“Honey’s on the shelf,” she said with a bit of an edge to her voice, and ran her hand across her nose to satisfy an itch before going back to her work.

He nodded once and began looking for it.

She turned back to the firepit, annoyed that he seemed so steady, that he seemed so much less disturbed by the ghost army than she was.

When she was satisfied she’d scraped away all the watery mess she’d made, she carried the bark plate of ash outside and dumped it well away from the house. Inside the trees, she paused a moment, fearing she was about to cry, her frustration so large today. With her back to the house and a few yards of trees shielding her from view, she stayed there until the feeling passed.

By the time she returned, empty-handed, to the house, Morggán stood near the low flat-topped stump where he had seated himself these past days, one foot braced upon it as he finished tying the laces of his breeches, as if he’d just finished changing the dressing of his injury. The movement was careful but no longer labored. He’d since changed his breeches, wearing now the extra pair that she’d found on his horse, and for which she’d had fairly hopeful plans until she felt compelled to return those things to him.

She turned before she reached him again, walking back to the creek. She didn’t want to dirty the clean water he’d just brought in, but she needed to wash her hands. The cold bit into her skin. She dried them against the edge of the plaid at her shoulders—the plaid that was also his, but that she had no intention of surrendering.

When she turned back toward the house, he was fastening the laces of his quilted vest and watching her approach, his gaze studious, assessing.

“Ye are nae yerself today,” he said casually.