Some more Vim for you, fresh from the fetid jungles of the imagination!
Stave spoke to me. I thought I was dreaming at first, in the clearing where we had fled after giving up the cavern to the tide of serpents. (I saw them writhing on the carcass of the water beast as we retreated: squirming by the dozen into its open mouth.)
Mist rising off the Fell masked our movements, though we heard the creep of creatures all around, and the grunting, croaking breaths of great shapes that loomed darkly in the fog. Three times we would have left Stave to run, but Slightly tried to drag him by herself, silent and wild eyed, and Honest would not leave her also.
Once, we heard the whispered voices of the luparii, and the rumbling growl of whatever answered, and we pressed our faces to the mist-soaked mulch that makes the forest floor and lay as still as corpses (which well we soon may be) until they passed us by, two light of foot and talking in hushed voices, and a third whose footsteps could be felt in the ground on which we lay. Its voice rumbled on long after they had passed, issuing from lungs too massive to be hushed. I understood no word but "Sun."
We only crawled after that, and pulled Stave in turns by sheer thoughtless habit.
Drenched and shaking, we rolled into our current depression as the fog went gray with dawn. Honest and Slightly and I lay and gasped and wept, but Paradise began to gather stones and make a ring, marking each with the sign of two sticks. When I saw my Neorxenawanga so laboring after all the terror of the night, I could not help but rise to aid her, though the task be useless, and my flesh ragged with fatigue.
We are ringed about by that forbidden sign they say the Prince himself does fear, though I doubt it will do aught against an archer's feathered shaft. As long as the mist holds, we are hidden in this little cleft between the hills, but when the sun burns off our shroud, we shall be surrounded on all sides by high ground. We may have chosen for ourselves our execution site.
I was thinking of these things when Stave called me. We had not even set a watch; soaked through and spent, we slumbered where we lay. If we should wake to the axes of the colliers, I do not think we would have the energy to mind.
Yet, for all that terror and exhaustion, could I not rest. I lay, curled at the feet of Paradise, and thought of the coming sun, and how I had been foolish enough to believe that death would not find us until we gained the Prince's Mountain.
I thought at first the voice belonged to a luperius, and when it called my name, I knew for certain that the snakes had been their spies, for we had whispered to each other much during the whole of that riparian siege. But when he coughed and gasped and called me scum and spado, I knew him for Gill-called-Stave, and crawled along my belly to his side, marveling all the way that he was strong enough to speak, for I had thought we dragged a corpse.
His hand gripped mine before I was even certain I had found him, for the mist was thick, and even the ground below my face felt as though I viewed it through a dirty, frosted glass. His cold, rough fingers curled around my wrist.
"Take out the dart," he rasped.
"You will bleed," I whispered back, "It may be all that stems your lifeblood's flow."
But he pulled my hand up to the arrow's blood-slick shaft.
"You must draw it out if I am to live," he said.
I tried to pull my hand away, but he would not let go.
"This is a task for a doctor," I whispered, and then, when he still would not release my hand but gripped tighter with a frightening, cold-fingered strength: "I will wake Slightly. Her hands are steady with a needle."
"No," came his reply, thick with more than pain, "You must do it. You already know. It can only be you."
I was very still then, but my fingers curled around the dart.
"If you make a sound," I said, thinking of the high ground all around us, "You will bring them all upon us."
"I am a man," he said through gritted teeth.
"If you were a man, you would be dead," I hissed, and made him take my cloak to put between his teeth.
As he mumbled some reply, I tore loose the bloody rags that had glued down to the wound. He clamped down on his scream better than I had expected, though I still heard Slightly whimper in her sleep. I froze, my free hand clamped over Stave's mouth, and waited for the sounds of our pursuers, but all the fog was silent.
"We should have boiled rags to freshly dress the wound," I said, putting off the moment when I would pull the dart, and he would live or die by the skill of my performance, "It has bitten deep. Infection will surely follow if we fail to take precaution."
"Disease can have no hold on me," he said flatly, "Tear it out and to hell with your gutless, unmanned soul."
I have, perhaps, never hated him more than in that moment (less than a moment, really – hardly seconds passed, but I hated him with each falling grain of sand in the fabled room of time.) To have him admit he was no natural man and in the same breath flaunt the cowardice that stayed my hand – it was a goad clearly meant to taunt me into action. I could not prove him wrong without doing as he wished me to, and for that, more than his impure blood and violent nature, I hated him.
He saved my life from the collier's axe, but that was long ago and far away as I hunched, fingers wrapped around the dart, and listened to his jibes and crass manipulations.
"Make me up a room," I said, pressed my free hand down onto his bloody trunk, and twisted free the arrow buried in his ribs.
His flesh was loath to give up the dart which it had gripped for all the night and most of the day, but I drew it out, venomed tooth and all, with a sound like mud. The wooden shaft was etched as if by acid.
"They will all know," I said, as I dropped it on the leaves beside him.
But he said nothing. His breath had stopped within him.
Slightly will be dangerous, if she learns that it was I who killed him. I placed the blood-caked rags back on the wound and pressed his hand across them. With any luck, they will think that it was he who did it.
I did kill him, though I only did the thing he asked. I pulled the arrow free in anger. I could not strike the collier who tried to split me with his axe, but I could hate the man who saved me as he died beneath my hands.
I will push it all to the damaged portion of my mind, where it will crawl away into the night.
The wolf catchers' arrows will find us soon.
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