Chapter Text
The old man listens.
(Delacey, he is called. People are called words, like Vi–)
The unseeing eyes are rapt as always, as the tale falls from his mouth, curdled and leaden.
(Yet it is not even his mouth, is it? The clumsy tongue, the teeth like weighted stones beneath stolen lips…is this why, he wonders, sickened, his speech comes so slowly, with none of the fluidity and eloquence the old man possesses? HIs throat, his mouth, his voice–robbery, all, unwilling and riotous.)
A deep, sucking ache pools low in his chest and stings his eyes (not his, not his!), and he searches Delacey’s milky gaze for anything, anything as he pronounces his final judgment: “A monster.”
Immediately, the old man shakes his head, one gnarled hand coming to rest upon his own marbled and mottled one. The ancient knuckles blanch as he squeezes a dead man’s cold fingers.
Does the cold of this flesh send an ache into his joints? Does it hurt him to touch me?
The old man brings his hands to either side of his companion’s face. He welcomes the anchoring touch; he feels liable to scatter like scratching husks of leaves blown apart by the wind in late autumn.
“I know what you are,” Delacey tells him in that querulous crackle. The eyes do not work, yet they burrow deeply into him, as they always do. “A good man. And…you are my friend.”
“Friend?” he manages, the ache a hard thing gathering in his throat. He cannot swallow it.
The old man’s thumb–bent like a tree root, and just as sturdy–wipes the moisture from the corner of his cheek.
“Yes,” comes the response. “You–”
“Father?”
He freezes, the muscles in his back seizing. He leans in, almost instinctually, almost without thinking, into the old man, who seems to anticipate his fear and sets to rubbing his back, as he has seen the mother do with the little one.
No, no, no–
“Felix,” says the old man–genially, he thinks, too genially (run, hide!). “You’re back.”
“Father…” The fear in the hunter’s voice is a live thing, wriggling and growing in size. “What–what is that?”
“This is my friend,” the old man says, and there is something else now in his words. Granite, hard and unmoving.
A spike of pain lances through his jaw as he clenches his teeth.
Do not see. Do not look.
The hunters shot him once with their guns. They hold them now, gleaming and dark in the low light of the fire. They will shoot again.
“Father…get away from–!”
He hears the wolves before he sees them. The baleful notes of their howls, sliding upon the frosted wind and through the door. Their bellowed, hot panting as they run–-closer now. The hunters exclaim, cock their weapons.
He springs up, spins to face the door, one arm out to shield Delacey. The three men standing in the silver light pooling into the room from the doorway whirl around and let out fresh cries at the sight of him, their faces reddened, beards snow-dusted. He flinches, quickly looks to the ground.
One of the men breathes out something, low and terrified. And the son, Felix, points his rifle at his chest. The other two follow suit.
“DON’T MOVE!” he orders.
Wolves–!
The first of them–-black and brown fur knotted with hoarfrost and dirt-–explodes into the room, and there are others, at least four that he can see.
He runs.
He hears gunfire, shouting. Searing heat slamming into his left shoulder, his thigh, his back where the old man’s hand had been moments before.
A roar rattles up through the barrel of his chest as he seizes the first wolf, the black one with yellow eyes, and squeezes and pulls and cracks and slams it, dead, upon the floor.
One of the other wolves hunches into itself and scrambles to flee through the door. He grabs it by its tail, peels its thick fur from its back, the skin catching on the muscle, its screech drowned by the shouting of the men, the firing of rifles, the cry of the old man.
“Father, move!” he hears the son yell as he seizes a third wolf, cracks its neck, coats its dead body with another furious roar.
The remaining two seize him–growling, rumbling, tearing at his skin (Stolen skin, not theirs to take! Not theirs to rip!), and he screams, a wild, guttural thing as they set upon his face, his stomach, his throat–
He smells blood only, blood and musk and the citric, sweet tang of rot.
(The tower, the cellar—)
One last bit of strength, he thinks. One last conflagration–
(“Make me save you. Say one word. One.”)
(“Victor!)
Cacophony. The men yell, their bullets hailing into him, into the gnashing animals besieging him, and he tears and shreds and rips: cracks another neck, thick with ripened red, the smell acrid syrup his nostrils, bubbling on his tongue. Dead, that one–-and now he shoves his hands into the mouth of the last wolf and pries, screaming, howling, and it screeches like the damned and the jaw cracks and its flailing stops.
The last wolf's body thuds to the ground.
He falls, his back slamming into the floor.
His face is flayed, his throat is open, flesh peeled and hanging from his neck like wilted petals. He cannot feel his legs, and he is slick with red. The hole in his neck gurgles and bubbles–like the spring, he thinks, his vision clouded in a web, like the spring where they had sat together and the old man had told him of many things and he had thought of her–Elizabeth–when he saw a leaf filter sleepily down and rest upon the clear, fresh water painted with dappled dots of white sun.
The men shout from far away now. The old man joins them. He cannot understand them–-like at the beginning. Distantly, he fears he has lost his words again, so lately gained; lost the sacred alchemy of sound that transmutes chaos into meaning. His ears are crammed with moss. There is a wet, rattling, sound, a rain and water sound, as he breathes from punctured lungs.
A tree-root hand finds his. Again, the old man’s voice. He cannot hear what he says, and that lances him sharply.
He is heavy, back melded to the woodgrain. He is the earth. Black is above him. He is cold.
Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Black.
Then
nothing.
“...both in town at the inn, thank God they didn’t…”
“...take it to…”
.
.
.
.
“...outside? In the field? How can…?”
“...killed them all, five of them with its bare hands–”
“His! His! He has stayed with me all winter, I tell you he…”
.
.
.
.
“...with the body?”
Rattling again, scratching breath. Red.
Pain: white. Sound. Voices.
Low moan, above him, yellow in the air above him or far away, the lone and level sands stretch far–
“--alive!”
“The Lord God protect us–”
Pressure on his cheek, light, and he knows it, this pressure, knows the deep grooves of the fingers and the winding blue veins beneath the wrinkled and spotted skin, and feels a rush, the sun roaring above the trees.
He sees wood. The beams of the ceiling, the mice that make their home in an alcove in the roof, to the left. He left it up on the beam, the book. He left it up–
Alive.
Alive again.
As he was in the water, after the fire and the beginning and the tower, belching up water and ash and mud before he rose and met the vaulted gray sky.
It settles into him with frigid finality:
I cannot die.
“My friend! My friend, can you hear me?”
The moan, he realizes, curls from his own mouth. Pain is still hot about him, greedy and scraping.
It circles him and squeezes: I cannot die.
But the old man is–
“I am here, can you hear me?”
He lets out another noise, feels it vibrate beneath his sternum, feels it thrum in the stalks of eyes.
(Not his–)
He shuts them.
The horror of it roils in bile.
I cannot die. I cannot die. I cannot die.
"Can you hear me?"
He nods, and his fingers tighten around Delacey’s.
“How–?!” comes another voice. The hunter’s. The son’s, Felix. “His wounds–”
“They’ve healed,” one of the other men says, slowly, wonderingly. The one with the grey hair; he recognizes the rasp, like smoke from a newly-extinguished woodpile.
“How?” Felix demands again.
Delacey exhales beside him.
“I know not.” The voice trembles. The old man’s words are heavy and drooping, trailing into him where he lies. “I am thankful for it.”
“It’s not possible,” comes another voice, that of the second hunter, the one with sandy hair and a square face and a body like a badger. “They ripped his throat out! We shot—!“
“He saved us all,” says the old man. “We owe him our lives. And our gratitude.”
“Father, please–!”
“Have you no compassion?” The voice is hard now, laced with ire–the hard, granite thing. “We would, all of us, be gored and dead were it not for this man!”
“But it’s–what manner of man is it? It’s not a-a man, no man could survive an attack like that–!”
“He has kept me constant company and has given himself over to keep us safe.”
“And if he is--Father, if he is bewitched? If he has bewitched you?”
“The spirit of the forest, Felix. This is that selfsame being. He confessed it. Not a spirit at all, perhaps, but a friend.”
“What?”
“All he has done for us and you rail against him even still?” He had never heard the old man speak so, words barbed and loud. “Fetch a doctor, bring him water–help him!”
“No.”
Silence, abrupt. The men fall speechless at his low plea.
He moves to stand. They murmur, exclaim. The old man’s hand does not leave his.
It aches to breathe, to speak. When he rises, lurching, long fingers of agony rake through him, and he feels as if he’s spinning. The bones within him throb, the pilfered muscles smarting, the sinews snapping. He thins his mouth against the cry that threatens to erupt from it.
He cannot bear to look at these men.
Slowly, sucking in a breath of air through his teeth as the muscles of his newly-healed neck yelp, he turns to the old man. The weathered face is blanched, but, blessedly, unharmed. It glistens with sweat, and the clouded eyes are over-bright, brimming.
Gently, as he has so often, he helps Delacey stand. His spine cracks and mends, skin singing and tingling as it seals itself again. He bites down harder on the dead man’s tongue in his mouth.
His hair obscures his vision. He cannot look at the hunters, there, below him. He does not know if he is taller than all men, though that seems to be the case, and he can feel them stare up at him, feel their trepidation slap the air like a shivering eel.
“Please,” he says again, wishing and willing the rocky rumble of his baritone softer, gentler. He knows the word well, knows to use it for politesse and supplication alike. “Do not…ffffetch a…doctor. Please.”
Heat creeps up his cheeks. His words are slow as his heart bangs itself against his ribcage, his ease of conversation with the old man entirely absent. He towers over them, yet he is minuscule and shriveled.
Unbidden, he thinks of his reading lesson with Delacey days ago.
“‘When I have fears…that I may…cease to be...Before my…pen has…gl–glea–”
“Gleaned,” Delacey sounded out for him. “Good, go on.”
A surge of that warmth fluttered in his breast again, as it ever did when Delacey offered praise.
“Gleaned. Before my pen has…”
He paused.
“Go on, lad,” Delacey said.
He shook his head, peering down at the word.
“What is that one?”
“Ah. Gleaned. It means ‘to divine meaning.’ To gather information–precisely what you are doing now, as matter of fact.”
He had another word for it, then. For “learning:” “gleaning.”
“And…what does…this one mean?” he asks. “‘Before my pen has…gleaned my t-ee…?”
“Teeming,” Delacey repeated, as he always did–with grace and patience whenever he stumbled, or questioned. It was quiet and safe here, to stumble. “It is to be full of something, overgrown with it, or, perhaps in this case, to be so full that it overflows.”
He hummed, staring at the word, repeating it again and feeling it stretch his mouth into the widened sound that showed his teeth.
“Like the river,” he said, the realization brightening his tone. Delacey let out a low chuckle.
“Yes, very like the river, I suppose. Too much water and it floods the banks. Too many thoughts, too many words here. ‘Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain.” And what do you suppose that means all together?”
He knew precisely what it meant, more intimately, perhaps, than any of the other, often foreign, things that hid within words.
“Cannot keep up,” he said. “Cannot keep pace. There are too…mmmany thoughts, too many to…count…too many to…speak.”
His teeming brain. His unanswering mouth.
And now he knows why. His mouth is not his own.
Refuse and the discarded dead.
Yet I cannot die.
“My friend,” he hears Delacey begin. “I understand your hesitation. But you were grievously hurt. You need a doctor—“
“No,” is all he can say, plead. He nearly yelps at the word, “doctor,” though the books suggest it is a helpful word, a source of relief for those within the pages over which he lingers.
But knows what it will entail.
(“Make me save you.”)
“Who are you?” It is Felix. The man’s voice is as familiar as his own, as familiar as V—
He cannot look up. It would undo him. The old man’s hand in his is too precious—if he looks, the hand will slip from his forever.
But how can he tell these men with their guns and raw, reddened faces and raised voices? How can he lay that horror at their feet?
“I—“ is all he manages.
“He does not remember,” Delacey cuts in suddenly, patting his forearm as he often does on their walks. He looks down at him, furrows his brow, but his companion continues, staring in the direction of the three hunters. “He has lost his memory. An accident or injury in battle, I presume—note his scars. His coat is a uniform, do you see? He took refuge here in the wake of whatever has befallen him. I could not turn him out. He was injured and ill, and utterly alone. You see plainly for yourselves: he has come here to help us, and has helped us since he arrived. The spirit of the forest, if not in body, then in deed.”
His chest skitters curiously, as if insects scuttle beneath it.
For the old man has lied.
Delacey now knows the truth: the creature whose arm he clutches so gently, with the ease and tenderness he shows to the small one, Anna Maria—the dark companion who has trailed him like an eager shadow for months is not a man at all. The child of the charnel house.
Delacey has lied to the others.
Why?
“It is bad, then? To lie?” he asked one evening from his customary spot at the old man’s feet, as he read Delacey a passage from Proverbs.
Delacey hummed thoughtfully, the frost blue eyes roving across the opposite wall, as if the woodgrain was the one thing he could see-–as if it would afford him an answer to the question.
“Yes, it is a bad thing,” he answered at length. “Generally.”
He cocks his head. “What does it mean? Generally?”
“Lying for personal gain, for wicked purposes, to hurt others. That is wrong. But there are other instances in which…well, suppose a malfeasant was pursuing us both–”
“Mmm–malf–?”
“Ah–malfeasant. A wrongdoer. Someone with ill intent. Say it, go on.”
“Mmmaaallfeeeasant.”
“Well done. Yes, ah–suppose a malfeasant is pursuing us both and we hide from him, you and I, in the mill gears, as you have done. And the fellow calls out, ‘Is anyone there?’ Remember: he intends to do us harm.”
“Hurt us?”
“Yes, very like. Are we to answer him truthfully then? Are we to say, ‘Yes, we are here!’ to the one who wishes to hurt us?”
“No. He will fffind us if we…make a sound. If we…answer, he will find us.”
Delacey nods. “He will. And so in this case, we remain silent. Is that lying? I suppose, in a way, it is. We are there, where he seeks us. And so we lie by omission. But it is not a harmful lie. It is one of protection. Do you understand?”
“We may lie…to protect…each other.”
“Certainly, we may. If the occasion calls for it. I’ve not much use for either-or thinking, you know. ‘This is always bad or that is always good.’ Some things are always bad, of course. Just as some things are always good–”
“What are those…things? The…good ones and… bad ones?”
The old man chuckles. “Why, there are so many of each, it would take a lifetime to list them all. You will encounter them in life again, I imagine, just as you did before you lost your memory. You will know–and if you do not, you must rely on your instinct and conscience to determine which is which.”
Has Delacey told a good lie?
For him?
Felix stares, unabashedly, and he can feel the stress of it, though he keeps his eyes trained on his worn boots.
“Is it true?” Felix asks. The question is for him, not for Delacey, because it is hard, arresting.
Another squeeze on his arm. This one says something. He knows what it is.
A good lie.
“Yes,” he answers.
It is very, very quietly spoken. How good is it, this lie? For he is no spirit of the forest. Just as he is no soldier, wounded and lifted high by noble deeds and bravery in battle. His hands are a soldier’s hands, his feet, those that carried braver men to their deaths. But he is no soldier.
I cannot die.
And he has his memory now. Or knows where memory begins.
He wishes he did not. He has at once tasted the forbidden fruit and fears himself the serpent.
But what is true, he thinks, desperation roiling within him–-what is true is that he would give anything, anything to stay, to continue to help and protect this family, to feel the gnarled hand of his companion in his own always.
“You fetched the firewood, then?” Felix asks. The question is not soft and open, like Delacey’s; it is ringed with thorns, and with disbelief.
He can hardly breathe.
(What right has he to breathe at all, with lungs lifted from the battle-dead?)
He nods. “Yes.” Then he thinks, remembers what he has read in some of Delacey’s books, and adds: “Sir. Yes.”
“Felix,” one of the other men starts slowly. It is the one with gray hair and plaits, and it sounds like a warning.
“Shh,” Felix snaps. And the son again speaks directly to him. “What else, then?”
Delacey, as always, seems to sense his growing fear, and begins to say, “He–”
“No,” Felix interrupts. “No, I need to hear it from…from him. Do not speak for him, Father. You tell me: what else?”
Delacey nods, encouragingly.
“Tell them,” he says, gently.
No lies now. The truth only. Instinct. Conscience.
“I…” He swallows, feels the muscle between his brows crease. “I built the…enclosure for the shhheep.” He hates the way his voice is no longer steady, but trembling, skipping. “I…cleared the stones…from the field…The w-wheel on…your plow was broken. I repaired…the wheel. The trees…in the clearing…n-needed to be felled for ffffirewood. I felled them and brought…the wood to your door the night it rained…ssssso hard and sssso long that you…awoke to the sheep bleating.”
One of the men, the badger one, lets out a low whistle.
He continues, for he fears if he does not, he will never speak again:
“When the…w-wolves…came. That fffirst time, when they…k-killed many sheep, and when you…killed two with your…r-rifles…you were tired. And you…were frightened, too. And hungry. And…the woman and…the little one were…were frightened. And I did not wish…for you to be frightened, or for you to be...tired from your…efforts to save the…sheep. And so I picked berries in the woods…the ripe, dark berries. And I took a…basket the woman, Alma, had left. Outside. And I…put the berries in the basss...ket. And left it outside the door. Like…the firewood.”
Felix exhales. The silence in the room is so thick, he feels he can grasp it where it presses against his face, plush and wooly, like the wolves’ hides.
“...why?” Felix asks at length. Something else colors the voice now, something he cannot identify.
The old man’s hand is warm. Steady.
“I…desired to help you," he answers. "Your…family. I took…shelter…” he pauses. Thinks. He cannot tell them of the mill house, how he had made it his home for months. It feels a violation, now, but he cannot lose it, his cramped home. A good lie. “I took shelter in the…woods. N-nearby. I was…hurt. And I desired…t-to help. Because I saw you…required…help.”
Felix says nothing. The other men say nothing. He can hear them moving, can hear the rustle and whisper of their coats and boots like the hiss of adders’ tongues.
Then, footsteps, edging nearer. He freezes, finally looking up, seized with the certainty that they will shoot again–and this time, they will shoot Delacey. For his great forbearance, for his kindness to a monster.
Breathing hard, he steps in front of the old man, arms extended. Delacey lets out a noise. The fear rears up from his gut to his throat like a wild stallion.
“Please,” he begs, voice hoarse. “Do not…hurt–”
But Felix has stopped, and his gun is not drawn. Instead, the hunter is studying him with renewed intensity, gaze flicking to his father, then back up to his father’s guardian.
“We will not shoot,” Felix says, resolutely. The other men have similarly lowered their guns. Their eyes hold the same unidentifiable something flickering in Felix’s. He does not know if it is a bad thing–-a dangerous thing.
“We will not shoot you,” Felix repeats, more slowly, this time. “You–my father…”
“Felix–” Delacey starts from behind him.
“Your father,” he says, because he must, because it wells up from somewhere deep, deep within him, “has shown me…more kindness than…anyone. He is a…” He swallows, the echoed words infused with weight. “A good man.”
Felix nods, very slowly, still staring, that unreadable thing yet lingering in his face.
“Yes...Yes, he is…Why did you not make yourself known to us before?”
He swallows. He knows the answer to this question--acutely. But his heart pounds still. Felix has said he will not shoot his father, but he cannot be sure.
He does not move, keeps Delacey anchored behind him. He feels the old man grip the sleeves of his tattered coat and whisper:
“It’s alright. You’re alright.”
And then the old man clears his throat and shuffles to the left, out from his protector’s shadow, and moves in front of him.
His dead man’s hands find the old man’s shoulder, in case the hunters should change their minds, in case–
“He was frightened,” Delacey says, “as you all can well imagine. And I rather think you know why he wished to remain hidden. You had, after all, shot at him before, had you not? In the woods?”
His face suddenly heats as if it burns anew, scraped raw by the wolves’ teeth. And again, comes the silent plea, renewed by the sickening knowledge of what he is:
Do not look at me. Do not look. Do not look.
“Sir.”
He blinks, hazards a glance upwards. A form of address that extends to himself, too, then.
Felix’s warm brown eyes–-the eyes that glitter when he plays with his daughter, glitter like raindrops on leaves after a storm, when the sun peeks out-–fix on him again.
“We–we mistakenly assumed you were…well, we couldn’t rightly make out what you were. In the woods. And we were–I suppose we were frightened, as well.” The man looks pained, but he steps forward again. “Forgive us. Please. Forgive us. And…thank you. For–the wolves, my father–I–” he shakes his head, blowing out a shaking breath. “Thank you.”
He lets out a soft sound, and knows the expected response to "thank you," feels it, knows he must say it, for it is polite and Delacey has taught him well.
But he cannot speak. His eyes find the hunter’s, incredulous, searching. Felix stares back, his expression now baldly tinged with something very like awe.
All he can manage is a terse nod, and the movement jerks against the lingering pain in his neck and throat.
The guns are out of the hunters' reach. He sees the metal glisten dully on the floor, past the wolves’ bloodied and limp bodies. Yet he knows guns are not the only weapons capable of wounding.
(“Your leg. Give me your leg.”)
But–
“Thank you.”
The words hit with a bullet’s force, but none of its agony, none of the throbbing anger. Something else, something powerful, stirs instead. He feels it bloom and ripple. It feels warm.
“Reckon he does need a doctor, Felix,” comes the gruff voice of the gray-haired man, the one with plaits. “How he’s alive at all, I can’t rightly say. Beggars all belief.”
Felix nods, swallowing, and extends a gloved hand towards him. “Yes, please, s-sit…sir. Rest, we need to fetch–”
That brief blooming within him seizes--shrivels.
He shakes his head, holding his own bloodied, newly-healed hands up in supplication.
“No–please. I–”
“My friend–” Delacey starts, and it is laced with concern.
“I cannot,” he manages against the tightness in his throat. He wishes nothing more than to collapse into Delacey’s well-worn, familiar robes, inhaling the woodsmoke there to quiet his teeming brain.
But the men are closing in, and the knowledge of what he is—the terror that will pierce their hearts should they discern it-–engulfs him.
“I am…well,” he lies. Another lie. A good lie. A lie of protection. The urge to flee, to run his feet raw, wars with his desperation to collapse into Delacey, to weep for an age. “I do not…require assist…ance. I must…I must go–”
All assembled cry out, protesting. He flinches at the sound, bracing for an impact, a blow, but, as ever, Delacey senses his fear.
“Come now,” Delacey says gently, very gently. “They mean you no harm, it’s alright.”
“Listen.” It’s the sandy-haired one now. His pale eyes are wide. “You were attacked. We watched–-God as my witness, I watched those wolves tear into you whole and I can’t rightly make heads or tails of how you’re standing there at all but surely you need…some, some tending to, at the very least.”
“Thank...you,” he says as sincerely as he can muster against the white panic clawing at him. “But I am… well. I must go–”
Delacey’s grip tightens on his arm. “You must not. Please, my friend–”
“I–” his voice cracks. The other men creep closer still. They appear harmless now, but he does not know, cannot know if they will suddenly retrieve their guns and shoot again, and catch the old man in the crossfire. “I must go–”
“Return then,” he hears Delacey say, as if from a great distance, and with great resolve. “I cannot…I cannot stop you. But promise me you will return. Promise me.”
“Yes,” he says immediately, quietly, and only to the old man. He knows he should not. He knows he should flee before more bullets find him, before these men learn the truth of what he is.
But his tongue is not his own and it rises in rebellion.
“Yes,” he repeats, placing his large, blanched hand on the gnarled one. “Yes, I…promise. I promise. I will…return.”
Delacey’s clouded eyes moisten, and he inhales shakily, nods sharply.
“Good.”
He swallows, and a physical pain stronger than the blazing fire between the wolves’ jaws scrapes through him as he pulls away, moves as quickly as he is able past the bloodied heaps of wolf carcasses; past the three men who still protest, still cry out; past the wooden door and the millgears and the beautiful wooden archway and gate that first welcomed him to this home, this family, the sanctity of touch and words.
He feels their eyes upon him still, tenses the sheet of muscle on his back, bracing for bullets, but none come. They watch him limp away, and say nothing.
The snow crunches beneath his boots, muffles everything in cotton, and he tries and fails not to remark how similar its color is to Delacey’s soft hair, his beard.
He fears more wolves will return and lay siege to the family again, and so he does not-–cannot, will not–-wander far. Let them think he has left. Let him remain, unnoticed again. Circling back around, silent, he slips into the familiar sanctuary of the mill house through several loose planks near the back. He does not make a sound, and knows he will remain unseen. Like the wolves before they ambush, he is adept at this invisibility.
Is that ability even his own? Or stolen from the men whose skin he wears as poorly as his tattered rags?
It is frigid in the mill house, but the familiar bark smell of the walls, the hulking silhouettes of the gears, the sudden chittering and squeaking of the mice dull the bite of the ice and snow. Though he pulls his coat tighter about himself, he does not feel the cold as keenly as others, he has realized. It will gnaw at him, leave him stiff and brittle, pain him. But it will not harm him beyond repair as it would Delacey, or Felix.
And now he knows why.
He all but collapses in the corner against the wall bordering the house–the makeshift bed he used for months. His vision spins again, but he risks a glance through the peephole in the woodgrain. The men are huddled just out of sight, to the right by the hearth. He can hear the low murmur of their voices, but cannot discern what they are saying.
But when he hears Delacey’s trembling crackle filter through the din, he finally allows himself to exhale, head falling back against the mouldering blankets. And sleep claims him immediately.
He dreams of howling, of faces burned red and pink from frost, of mouths parted in “Os” of accusation. He dreams of caked blood and fur and fields of shouting and cannon fire and a riot of hands and eyes and sounds he knows yet cannot understand, and rearing up in the center of the maelstrom is a red-gloved hand. He leans into it. It sears him alive.