Her of the Wood

by Veronica Watts

  Her answer starts eagerly, but she calms her voice quickly. "No, no." She pulls the book to her chest. "This is more than enough, and I would love to talk to Jin about it when I see him. Please give him my best."

  "I certainly will. And Callie, I'd like to talk to you in a few weeks to see how that tea is treating you."

  "Sounds like a plan." The women leave, and when the door closes, Callie turns to Euodia. "A very unnecessary plan."

  "You didn't have to stay." Euodia is trying to play it cool; she's got too much running around in her head, but the truth of the statement hits her. "So why did you?"

  Callie is focused on the stairs. This house has a handrail, which makes it easier, but she is still careful. "Why did I do what?"

  "Why did you stay and take the tea and agree to talk to him in a few weeks, and what was that smile you gave me before we went in?"

  She gets to the ground and turns back to Euodia. "Because I understand that this," she gestures up to the doctor's place, "is your way of showing that you care." The old woman turns as she reaches the ground and places her hands on Euodia's shoulder. "Accepting it is my way." Euodia smiles and thinks of the other ways that Callie has already shown her care. "Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to brew some tea."

  Euodia thinks through the schedule for the week and remembers that Ailie is on watch duty. She walks to the village circle and heads left. She passes two other outposts before she finds Ailie. Both of the scouts ask her where she's going with a knowing smile, and she nods back politely, neither confirming nor denying. She finds Ailie, oddly enough, reading a book. She decides to speak as she's approaching, and Ailie jumps a little, accustomed to hearing people moving before she hears them talking. "Why didn't you tell me there are books to be read here?"

  "I didn't know you were a reader." She's right. It isn't something they've discussed, and that fact is disconcerting to Euodia.

  When she's close enough to sit, she does. "Second question, are Manny and Jin a couple?"

  Ailie laughs. "Yeah. You didn't know that?"

  "I completely missed it." She really is baffled. "It's just such a foreign concept to me that they could live together openly. I mean, I guess I should have realized. They were squabbling like a couple the first time I saw them."

  "Yeah, they do that." Ailie passes the book to Euodia. "You want to borrow it?"

  The book is one Euodia has never heard of. She reads the jacket and looks back up to see Ailie smiling. "Thank you." The words feel like something more, or at least like they're for something more than the book, and Euodia can tell from the way that Ailie starts to blush that she understands.

  Ailie stands as she talks. "I was going to check a few nearby traps. Want to join me?" Euodia hops up and follows, leaving both books with Ailie's bag. Since she's on duty, they won't go far. Euodia hasn't seen any of Ailie's traps. Hunting is separate from watch duty, but traps are usually set near watch points. It's a good way to pass the time and bring in some food. Auston once showed her a trap for fish that he maintains at the watch point closest to the river. He's put a few rock walls into the river so that all of the water flows pretty strongly through three open points. Past the rocks, he's made an underwater fence. Many of the smaller fish can swim through, but the larger fish get caught. They can't go forward through the fence or backwards through the redirected current, so they become dinner.

  Ailie pipes up as they walk. "You're awfully quiet today."

  Euodia smiles. "I didn't want to scare away your catch."

  "Well if they're caught, they're not going anywhere. It's not hunting." She's not picking on Euodia. She says it matter-of-factly. She seems, for the most part, to have stopped being surprised by what Euodia doesn't know.

  "So what is it we're bringing back today?" She's learned that different scouts have different traps they like to set.

  "Hopefully we'll have a few rabbits, but even if there's not, we can review the traps. You might want to start setting your own soon." Euodia hasn't set a trap or taken down an animal, but her marksmanship with the bow has improved by leaps and bounds. She isn't at Ailie and Hana's level yet, but she suspects she never will be.

  They're walking a beaten animal track when Ailie suddenly turns to the right and stoops down. Euodia looks over her shoulder to see a simple trap on the ground, but no catch. She would have completely missed it if Ailie wasn't with her. This must be why they all check their own traps. They're unobtrusive enough to be hidden. Ailie motions for Euodia to join her, so they squat down together and look at the trap. "We'll need to replace the bait here. It looks like a very gentle eater made off with the berries." Ailie pulls out an apple and knife and carves off a piece.

  There's a rock balanced atop a stout stick. Ailie rocks this back to flip it over and picks up a few small sticks suck together in the ground underneath it. "Now, you want to put your bait on this round peg here, and since we've got a clever eater, we'll use something a little tougher to move and chew." She places the bit of apple on the pointy end of the peg. "You want to use a little tie to hold these two together and make sure this bottom one is secure in the ground." She places them back in the ground and works to replace the rock. Euodia awaits instruction. Ailie stays poised behind the trap. "Can you tell me how it works?" she asks.

  Euodia takes a minute to look it over. When the rabbit nibbles the food from the peg, the peg will fall away from the stake in the ground, releasing the tension from the longer branch it's tied to, which will pull out the stick holding up the rock and dropping the rock onto the rabbit's head. Euodia is happy to see Ailie nodding as she explains.

  "The hardest part of this trap is choosing the right rock," Ailie says. "You want it to be heavy enough to kill the rabbit quickly so it doesn't suffer, but you don't want it to be heavy enough to hold the sticks in place when the trigger is let go. A good way to keep that from happening is to make sure that the stick holding up the rock here is put in at an angle and that the tie is closer to this end."

  Ailie leans forward to reach around the rock so she can show Euodia which spots she is talking about, but Euodia isn't looking at her hands. This is the closest they've been since their moment by the weapon shed. When Ailie looks up their noses are just inches apart. Euodia can feel Ailie's breath on her cheek, and for a moment the world around her disappears.

  And then Ailie starts to smile. It's slow, nervous and excited, and Euodia's mouth starts to turn up at the corners, too. They lean in until, all at once, they both push forward, hands tangled and confused as they touch each other's cheeks. Euodia feels herself falling backwards to the ground, but she's pushing up the whole time, into Ailie, into the sky.

  FOURTEEN

  Euodia's wrapping up her last dual watcher duty. She's done a week's worth of them on her own now, but there were a few left shared in the schedule to address any questions that may have come up. This shift is with Auston. They've just had some dinner when she starts thinking about the schedule change and what it means for the others as well as her. "Will you get to have fewer shifts now that there's another scout?"

  "It's all stays pretty even. Jobe was a scout until recently."

  It takes her a minute to place the name, but then she remembers one of the older men and speaks without thinking. "He seems a little..."

  Auston waits for her to finish, and when she doesn't, he wraps it up. "Old."

  She responds slowly. "Yeah."

  "You can say it. That's not a bad thing here. I know how it is in the city. Lots of old people get sent here." He stopped for a minute and corrected himself. "Well, they end up here if they're lucky anyway." He gets back to the topic at hand. "Jobe was already starting to cut back on shifts before you showed up. He'd stopped hunting entirely. At the time, I assumed that was why Lorna assigned you to us."

  Euodia notices the word choice and turns to him with a smile. "What, you think something different now?"

  He pushes a few of the logs around with a stick, waiting for her to speak, but as
hard as it is for her to let the silence ride, she does, and he breaks first. "Let's just say that Lorna reads people well, and you and Ailie didn't take long to hit it off."

  She can feel the blush rise like a fever and hopes that the firelight obscures it. When she's returned to a normal temperature, if still a little pink, she resumes the conversation. "You seem to know more about Dracon than Hana and Ailie. Are you from there, you and Ilford?"

  Auston looks into the fire, picks up a leaf and tosses it in. "Yeah, my parents were caught stealing in mid-city."

  Euodia feels herself take a deep breath. People steal on the edges, and it's between individuals. You get caught stealing in mid-city or city center, and you're out. "Have I met your parents?"

  He tosses the stick in his hand onto the fire to follow the leaf. "They passed away a few years after we came to Solace."

  "I'm sorry." She doesn't know what he's comfortable discussing, so she leaves it up to him to progress the conversation.

  "It is what it is." He seems so calm and collected when they're out here, at peace, but when they're inside the community, especially if they're with his brother, he's energetic, wired.

  "How is Ilford?" Euodia hasn't seen much of the younger brother recently, since he and Hana have become more connected. Rumor has it they're scoping out a spot for a tent.

  Auston shakes his head. "He's a crazy kid, thinks he's in love." There's something more behind Auston's words, Euodia can tell, but she doesn't know how to ask him about it. Auston seems lost in thoughts for several long minutes, and then he pulls himself back to the fire and Euodia. "I don't know. Maybe he is."

  It's just then that they hear a noise in the woods behind them. Auston turns towards it, calm. He's been in these woods most of his life now, but Euodia jumps as she turns, feeling her muscles flex ready for flight. Fear sharpens her senses, but she still can't see a thing because she's spent the last thirty minutes staring into the fire while she and Auston talked. She can tell after a moment that it's a person walking towards them, but she has to wait for him to step into the firelight to see that it's Broderick.

  They all say hello, and as Broderick settles himself down by the fire, the guys talk easily about his hunt earlier that day. Euodia is quiet, feeling that Broderick's appearance isn't just a coincidence. Eventually he gets around to it. "Auston, if you wouldn't mind, I'd love some time with Euodia, this being her last joint watch and all. You mind if I take over your shift?"

  Auston's eyes perk up. "I'll happily get back to bed, as long as E's okay with it."

  He's giving her an out, but she knows there's no respectful way to say no, so she plays it as casual as she can. "No problem. See you tomorrow."

  Auston doesn't run but takes advantage of the situation and heads back to town quickly. From the way he jumps at the opportunity, Euodia wonders if, like his brother, he has some sweetheart to sneak back to.

  Broderick stands up after Auston takes off and steps around to the side of the fire where Auston had been sitting, exactly opposite Euodia. She's never been comfortable around him. There's always a tension there that she can't quite put her finger on. At first, she thought it was because she was new, but as the rest of the community has opened up to her, he has stayed cold. "Did you guys have a nice evening?"

  There's nothing threatening about his words or tone. Maybe he just seems threatening because he's a big guy. It wouldn't kill him to crack a smile once in awhile. She decides to try to talk to him like she would any other member of the community. She can do it. It just might take a little more work than usual. "Yeah, he was telling me about his family."

  He makes a grunt. It sounds affirmative. She waits for him to input into the conversation. "Did he tell you about his parents?"

  "He just said that they passed away." She starts thinking back to the conversation. "It must have been awful to lose them both at the same time like that." She couldn't help but wonder how it had happened and how old he had been.

  Broderick gives her that and more. "They got sick. We still don't know what it was, but we'd been trading with some other villages, and we think it came from that. We lost twenty people, out of a hundred and some." He looks into the fire for a minute, and she wonders if that's the whole story. When he speaks again it's out of nowhere. There's no shift in his body beforehand, no audible intake of breath. There's just words, as if there was never a pause. Euodia immediately finds herself thinking about how Ailie does that too. "Auston was fifteen; Ilford was ten. They'd been here for a few years, so we all helped take care of them the best we could, but Auston always saw Ilford as his after that. The two of them have something special."

  The fire's dying down. Euodia has goosebumps, but they're not from the warm night air. She's thinking about how to pass the rest of the watch with him when he speaks again, but his words are too fast and low for her to catch. "I'm sorry. What was that?"

  He looks up from where he's picking at a nail and speaks clearly. "It took Ailie's parents, too." He holds her gaze, and she gets it. He didn't say Hana and Ailie's, just Ailie's. This is what he's here to talk about.

  She holds quiet as long as she can, but he's more patient than her. "I didn't know that."

  "She was thirteen. My mom took her in."

  If he didn't have Euodia's attention before, he certainly has it now. She'd thought of Broderick as a loner and certainly hadn't known about any close connection between him and Ailie. "Have I met your mother?"

  "Lorna." He just says the name, no other explanation, and then he gets serious. "Ailie is like a sister to me. She's had friends." He pauses after the word, as if it's difficult for him to say and he wants to be sure she gets the meaning. "But she's never acted like this with anyone. She's shy around you in a way that..." He pauses, looking directly at her now. "She is sensitive. Don't hurt her."

  Euodia is dumbfounded. She feels attacked in a way she doesn't know how to defend against. She wants to tell him she'd never hurt Ailie, but she's sure she hurt Orchid by leaving, and there was a time when she thought she'd never do that either.

  She decides she has to say something, but she can only fumble out a few words in a ridiculously light voice. "The last thing I want is..." He's shaking his head, so she stops. There's nothing else to be said right now. She lays back and props her head on her pack. She no longer feels that Broderick might be dangerous, but she certainly isn't going to get any sleep around him.

  FIFTEEN

  She goes back to the cabin just after everyone else has left for breakfast to get some sleep. The tension in the air between her and Broderick last night was more exhausting than anything else since she's been here, including the day she'd helped Jenson and Thackery in the fields. By the end of the night, she resented even the sight of Broderick. She tried to sleep while he took watch, but she kept thinking about how he'd practically accused her of intending to hurt Ailie. She's worked her ass off to show that she wants to be part of this community, and she's been very careful with Ailie, albeit for her own reasons. Why hadn't she said any of that to him last night? She wishes she had; but maybe it wouldn't have made any difference.

  Eventually she gives up on sleep and goes to the meal hall for breakfast, but it's already being cleaned up. She heads over to the side tables and takes a roll and an apple and goes to find Ailie, but she runs into Ilford instead. He tells her Ailie is out hunting all morning. She tries not to show her anger, but he must notice something's up, because he asks if everything's okay. "I've got some time if you need to talk."

  His words are kind and his offer genuine, and it softens her a bit, the first thing in the last twelve hours to do so. "No, I'll be fine, but thanks." He keeps looking at her for a moment, a subtle confirmation. "Really." They both know where he'd rather be.

  Feeling a little more even, Euodia walks around Solace as she eats. She knows most of the streets now. She hasn't gotten lost in a while. She knows most of her neighbors, and while she isn't in the mood to stop and talk this morning, she waves and nods as
she passes people. This place has become comfortable. She feeds her apple core to a passing dog, looks down the path to her left to see Manny's hut, and heads towards it.

  Jin answers the door. Like Manny, he waits to let her speak first, but there is much more awareness in his face. "Hi, I was hoping that I could borrow another book. Manny loaned me one, and I have another that I think Ailie borrowed, but I kind of barreled through them. I can bring them back later, but I'd love to borrow another now." Reading is the only thing she can think of that will help clear her mind.

  Jin's smile widens. "Come on in."

  She steps inside and immediately moves towards the wall of books. After closing the door, Jin steps up behind her. "It's nice to have another reader around. The others read of course, but they don't need it like we do." She looks up to meet his eyes, and then together, they both look at the wall.

  The spines are faded. Many are torn. The old leather is cracked, and the gilding worn away. There are words from titles still legible here and there and images with a strong contrast still hold: a flower here, a shell there. Most of the visible images are simple. There are patterns and repetitions on individual books that grow into patterns for the shelves as a whole.

  One image in particular pulls her in, and she breaks the reverent silence to reach forward and take it off the shelf. There's a boy playing pipes on the spine. As she turns the front of the book towards her, she discovers that it's a book of poetry. She's only ever read stories and books about reality, but she heard about poetry once in the stall where she sometimes bought books.

  Books were expensive, and workers weren't supposed to have them, so the shop owner kept them in the back and brought people into his home where the books were hidden, though he never allowed them into the closet where he kept them. She was certain he had them hidden in a tricky way so that neither reassignment workers nor thieves could find them. She didn't get to pick what she wanted. She would save up for months, and it was luck of the draw as to what he gave her. Once, when she'd been there, waiting for him to return with a book, she'd heard him talking to his wife. "Not the poetry, we can get more for that." She'd never learned what was so special about it, but she was excited to find out.