And so, the moment the priest got close enough, Hen let out a great roar and leapt out of the cave, driving a shoulder directly into the man’s stomach. He went down with a bounce, screaming, “Light the fire, light the fire!”
Hen reached for his sword before he remembered it wasn’t there. With another wordless yell, he pulled back his fist and drove it directly into the priest’s nose. The man, who was burly but not as strong as he looked, thrashed beneath him even as his nose exploded into a spray of blood. It splashed Hen’s face as he pulled back and drove his other fist into the man’s jaw, producing a great cracking sound and a howl of pain, then a gurgle as the man choked on his own blood.
Unarmed combat was important for all guards, of course, since there would always be places where their swords weren’t welcome. Hen knew just what to do to shut the man up and stop him taking Kass any further. Hendrik stood, drew his still-bleeding knee high, and stomped directly on the priest’s throat. Then he stomped again. And again, until a squelching sound told him the man would trouble Kass no more.
A whoosh of heat nearly knocked him over, and when Hen turned, the pile of boxes was alight, the flames already white-hot with oil. Hen took off running, tackling the other priest from behind. She went down with a shout beneath him, the heat of the fire searing their sides. He rolled off her and, with all the power in his legs, kicked. She toppled directly into the fire, her robes going up instantly as they hit the oil-soaked boxes. With an inhuman scream, she tried to stand and run toward the sound of the waves.
She tripped on a ragged piece of flaming robe and went face-first into the sand. The flames, preternaturally hot somehow, ate through her with surprising, sickening quickness. The smell of burning wool and roasted pig meat mixed with the ocean spray.
Hendrik turned away from her when she stopped moving, then sat back on his heels and watched the unstoppable, oil-fueled flames devour the boxes, wood, straw, and bodies all, more quickly than should’ve been possible.
*
Some time later, maybe fifteen minutes, maybe three hours, the surf slipped into Hen’s boots. It startled him into standing, his knees aching and bleeding. His hands hurt from the pummeling, and he had a burn all down his left arm where his shirt had seared away. Hot ashes danced on the wind; soon the pile would be carried away by the sea. That was good. Hen had been wondering vaguely what to do with them, if anything. The ocean was a good place for Kass and the others to rest. Kass did love the ocean.
Hen dug through the wagon for anything the priests had brought. He found some blankets, tinder and flint, a few more jugs of that wicked oil, and a pack with a knife, hard cheese, and biscuits. He took everything but the oil, which he never wanted to smell again in his life, short though he hoped that might be.
He started down the coastline, toward the sun as it set behind the dark forest. If someone on the walls of the City saw him and picked him off, so be it. If someone from the forest did even worse, so be it. He was just looking for a place to end, anyhow.
Kajja had been partly right: Love stories did exist. But then, Hen had been right too: Love stories were warnings, not fantasies.
*
A loud hiss-and-crash seeped into Hen’s restless sleep. A jolt of cold water, smelling of salt and strange life, touched his burned arm and sent a flare of red pain through his entire body. He leapt to his feet before he remembered where he was. Small knife out, at the ready, as if it could do a damned thing to help him, he took in his surroundings. A little pit dug into the sand, trails from his fingers at the edges, sand under his nails. The sea was almost on him, somehow. He was sure it’d been hundreds of feet away last night when he’d dug in.
Fuck, now his blankets were wet.
He hopped out of the pit, aching. The morning was cold and wet, fog over the beach thick as clouds in the sky. He’d crossed the estuary yesterday—or maybe two days ago? It was swampy and foul, the water barely coming higher than his ankle, little puddles of piss-stinking water rather than the rich convergence of fresh-and-salt life he’d been taught to expect. Not a hint of the flocking blue birds that were said to swarm its banks on approach.
Another crash and hiss, and this time Hen turned to see the surf reaching toward him hungrily. He jumped out of the way as it consumed his sleeping-pit, clutching his meager things and making for tree line. It seemed so out-of-place, so alien, how it just popped up out of the sand like that, all foreboding: the dark forest.
Before he’d gone to the Academy and learned how to scorn the night mare, Hendrik was fairly certain this had been the place most of his rides on her had taken him. The wastes were to the other side of the City, yes, and the wild mountains beyond the peak, but none of them held the mystery, the promise of strange magic, like the shrouded forest. A place of wood and wild things, including the people who scurried about it like fire ants, looking for something to swarm and devour.
“Well, we have to find fresh water,” Hen reasoned. “And we won’t find it this close to the sea, I don’t think.”
He’d been walking for days, now, he was pretty sure. When he first started talking, he’d tried to pretend it was to himself. That hadn’t lasted long.
In his mind, he heard Kass’s voice saying, True. Don’t worry. We’ll just stick as close to the beach as we can, so we can see the water. It’ll keep us safe.
Hen wasn’t disordered. He knew Kass was dead. He saw Kass’s chalky face and bloody hair every time he closed his eyes. It was Hen’s own internal voice replying to him; he was just making it sound like Kass for comfort.
Would a disordered person understand that the dead couldn’t really be with them? No, of course not. So Hen was perfect order and light, even if he wanted to pretend to talk to someone who would never talk again.
The sand changed as he neared the trees, darkening into something more like soil. Hen had seen trees in the Ag District, but they were nothing like these, which had a harsh, broken-looking exterior, as if chunks could be taken off and used as blunted knives. They were bare of branches until about shoulder-height, and some of them had long, thin leaves instead of broad, flat ones. Hen gave them as much distance as he could.
It was easier to walk beneath the trees than it had been on the beach, but it didn’t take long until the treetops blotted out the sky almost entirely. Hendrik stopped moving into the forest once it began to feel ominous not to see blue above him.
You’ll never find water if you don’t go deeper, Not-Kass told him with a smirk. Plants and animals need fresh water, remember?
Grumbling under his breath, Hen forced himself to move deeper into the trees, away from the sound of the surf but not so far that he lost it. A sensation like a sword stabbing into his temple crept up on him as he walked. Slowly but surely, it moved further into his skull, deeper and deeper. His mouth felt like he’d been up all night drinking and fucking in the Tavern District but worse. The biscuits and cheese had just made him thirstier, so he hadn’t finished them yet. How long did it take to die of thirst, anyhow? Maybe it’d be quick.
Probably not, Not-Kass said.
“I know.” Hendrik couldn’t be that lucky, could he?
The ground sloped downward, revealing a small valley with a dark green bottom—that arresting emerald color Kass had admired from the walls not-so-long ago. Hen glanced behind him nervously. He could hear and smell the sea but just barely, now. He certainly couldn’t see the beach, let alone the waves.
Keep going, Not-Kass said. Just a little further. It’ll be alright.
And what if it wasn’t? What if Not-Kass was wrong, like Kass had been so many times before, and nothing was alright, and evil forest-dwellers skewered him on their savage spears for setting foot in the little green valley?
“That’s alright, too.” Hen started downhill. Green vines clung to his ankles harmlessly, then sprung back to their original shape as he pulled away from them. He paused and ducked, sitting back on his heels to take a leaf between two fingers. White veins highlighted its jewel-dark green, and its surface seemed both flexible and fragile. If he bent it in half, it would snap, but if he squeezed it, it just left a vaguely damp sensation.
See. Water.
Hen pulled off the leaf and sniffed it. The smells of the forest in general were too overwhelming and strange for comparisons, though. Everything smelled wrong, and none of it had a name. He nibbled at the edge of the leaf. It was bitter, like medicine from the healers, but also decidedly moist.
Told you.
Hen trudged the length of the little valley, starting at every snap of a stem below or rustle of a leaf above. “There’s something in the trees,” he muttered more than once. Not-Kass never answered that, because of course there was something in the trees. All sorts of things lived in the dark forest, not just the disordered humans. Wild animals small and large, creeping, stalking things he’d scoffed at when masters told fairy tales to the creche.
His head pounded, that slicing sword sensation having reached a key spot directly behind his eyes. He tried to blink it away, but nothing helped. At least it kept his mind off the raw, burning pain in his left arm, where half the skin had sloughed off since he’d started walking.
Look how green, Not-Kass said.
Hen paused, eying his surroundings: just to his left, a small rocky outcrop in the valley. The pounding in his head was too loud for him to hear anything, but he moved toward it and—
Water!
