Fool's Quest - Страница 108

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No, cub. The ears keep watch while the eyes sleep. So sleep now, but be wary.

“We should sleep if we can,” I whispered. “Tomorrow we will need to move far and fast.”

Shun settled her back against the tree. “Sleep, then,” she said. “I’ll keep watch.”

I wondered if there was any sense in keeping watch. If they found us, could we fight and escape? But maybe it would only be one or two of them. Maybe we could run. Or turn and fight. And kill them. I was cold and shaking, but somehow I fell asleep.

I woke once in the night to Shun shaking me. “Move off me. My legs are numb!” she breathed by my ear.

I didn’t want to get off her lap. When I moved, it opened her coat and the little warmth my body had stored around itself slipped away into the night. She shifted around, grunting a little as she did, and settled her legs into a different position. “Sit next to me,” she directed. She slipped one arm out of the white fur coat and I crawled inside it. I put my arm down the empty sleeve and she put her arm around me. My bottom did not like the hard, cold earth. I tugged at my coat and found enough slack to fold an edge up around us. We huddled. The night had become colder, darker, and much more quiet. Two owls began a conversation, and I slid into shivering sleep again.

I woke shaking all over. My toes were numb, my bottom ached, and my spine was painful ice in my back. I had buried my face in the fur of the coat, but one of my ears was painfully cold. Morning light was fingering its way through the snow-laden branches that had sheltered us for the night. I listened but heard only the morning challenges of birds.

“Shun. Are you awake?” She did not stir and I felt a bolt of terror that she had frozen to death in the night. “Shun!” I shook her, gently but insistently. She abruptly lifted her head and stared at me without recognition. Then she gave her head a sudden shake and knew me.

“Listen!” she hissed at me.

“I did.” I kept my voice low. “Nothing but birdsong. I think we should get up and try to get as far from here as we can.”

We both began to move stiffly. We could not stand upright under the branches. It was hard for me to untangle myself from her coat, and harder for me to pull my coat from under her and wallow my way into it. It was cold and full of fallen needles. I was suddenly hungry and thirsty.

I led the way out of the tree-well and Shun wallowed up after me. The winter day was bright and clear and for a moment I stood blinking. Then I scooped a handful of snow and put it in my mouth. It melted into a very small amount of water. I stooped for more.

“Don’t take too much at once. You’ll chill yourself even worse.”

Shun’s advice made sense. I could not have explained why it irritated me. I took a smaller scoop and put it in my mouth. She spoke again. “We have to make our way home. We can’t follow the sleigh tracks back. If they’re looking for us, that will be the first thing they’ll expect us to do.”

“If they’re looking for us?”

“The soldiers quarreled with the Servants, I think. The Servants will still want you, if any of them survived. But we can hope the soldiers won’t care about us.”

“Can’t we go to that town and ask for help? Or one of those houses?”

She shook her head slowly. “They were doing bad things in that town. Making people forget they were there. I don’t think we should go there. Because I think that’s what they’ll expect us to do. And the same for knocking on someone’s door and asking for help. I think that today we should walk as far as we can, away from here, but not on a road where we can be seen. They might ask people if they’ve seen us.”

Everything she said made sense but I didn’t want her to be in charge of all our plans. I thought hard, trying to be as clever as she was being. “We should go by ways where it would be hard for a sleigh to follow. Or a horse. Through brushy places. Up and down steep places.”

“Which way is home, do you think?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. I looked up at the overcast sky.

She looked around us and then, almost randomly, said, “We’ll go that way.”

“What if it takes us deeper and deeper into the forest and we die of cold and hunger?”

She gave me a look. “I’d prefer that to what will happen if they find us. If you want to retrace our tracks and see if they’ll take you back, go ahead. I’m going this way.”

And she started off. After a moment, I followed her. It was slightly easier to walk in her broken trail than to force my own way through the snow. The path she had chosen led us up one hill and down the next and away from the mercenaries’ camp, and all seemed like good things at the time. As we continued, the hillside grew steeper and the brambles thicker. “There will be a stream at the bottom of this,” I predicted, and “Maybe,” she agreed. “But the sleighs can’t come this way, and I don’t think the horses would do well here, either.”

Before we reached the bottom, the incline was steep enough that we slid several times. I feared sliding all the way and ending up in water, but when we did reach the bottom, we found a narrow stream that was mostly frozen. The thread of moving water we easily jumped. It reminded me of my thirst, but I took another mittenful of snow rather than put my bare hand in the water. My heavy fur coat was like walking in a tent. The bottom hem gathered snow and added to my burden.

Shun led us along the path of the stream, moving against the current, until she found an easier place for us to try to climb the opposite bank. While it was easier than it might have been, it certainly was not easy, and the brambles on this side of the stream were savagely thorned. By the time we reached the top of the steep bank, we were both sweating and I opened the neck of my coat.

“I’m so hungry,” I said.

“Don’t talk about it,” she advised me, and we hiked on.

As we crested the second hill, my hunger began to tear at my insides as if I’d swallowed a cat. I felt weak and angry and then nauseated. I tried to be a wolf. I looked around the white-swept landscape and tried to find something I could eat. This hill was cleared and in summer was probably used as pasturage for sheep. Not even a seedhead of wild grass peeped up above the snow, and nothing sheltered us from the wind that swept across it. If I had seen a mouse, I think I would have pounced on it and eaten it whole. But there were no mice and a useless tear dared to track down my face. The salt stung on my cold, chapped cheeks. It will pass, Wolf-Father breathed to me.

“Being hungry will pass?” I wondered aloud.

“Yes. It does.” I was startled when Shun answered. “First you get very hungry. Then you think you will puke, but there’s nothing to vomit up. Sometimes you feel weepy. Or angry. But if you just keep on going, the hunger goes away. For a time.”

I toiled along behind her. She led me across a craggy hilltop and then down into a forested vale. As we reached the trees, the wind grew less. I scooped a bit of snow to wet my mouth. My lips were cracked and I tried not to lick them. “How do you know about hunger?”

Her voice held little emotion. “When I was little, if I was naughty my grandfather would send me to my bedroom in the middle of the day, with no supper. When I was your age, I thought it the worst punishment of all, for at that time we had a magnificent cook. His ordinary dinners were better than the best holiday feast you have ever tasted.”

She trudged on. The hillside was steep and so we were cutting across the face of it. At the bottom of the hill, she turned to follow the flat land instead of crossing it and clambering up the next snowy hill. I was grateful but I had to ask, “Are we trying to find our way home?”

“Eventually. Right now I am just trying to get us as far away from our kidnappers as I can.”

I wanted to be walking back to Withywoods. I wanted each step to be taking me closer to my home and my warm bed and a piece of toasted bread with butter on it. But I did not want to clamber up any more snowy hills and so I kept my peace. After a short time, she spoke.

“But I was never truly that hungry in my grandparents’ home. It was after they died and I was sent to live with my mother and her husband that I went days without food. If I said or did anything that my mother’s husband thought was disrespectful, he sent me to my room and locked me in. And left me there. Sometimes for days. Once I thought I would die, so after three days I jumped out my window. But it was winter and the snow was deep over the bushes below. I was scratched and bruised and limped for ten days, but it didn’t kill me. My mother was worried. Not for me, but for what her friends would say if I died. Or simply vanished. She had marriage plans for me. One suitor was older than my grandfather had been, a man with a loose wet mouth who stared at me as if I were the last sweet on the plate. And another family had a son who had no wish for the company of women but was willing to marry me so his parents would leave him and his friends in peace.”

I had never heard Shun speak so much. She did not look at me as she talked, but stared ahead and spoke her words to the cadence of her trudge. I kept silent and she talked on, speaking of being slapped for insolence, of a younger brother who tormented her with surreptitious pinches and shoves. She’d spent more than a year being miserable there, and when she adamantly refused the attentions of both her suitors, her stepfather expressed his interest, cupping a buttock as he passed, standing over her if she sat reading a book, trailing his fingers over her bosom as he became bolder. She had retreated to her room, spending most of her hours there and latching the door.

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