Soldier at the Door (Forest at the Edge)

by Mercer, Trish

  She stretched to the side and reached her hand out to the front of the tree she leaned against.

  “But not all of me. I can still reach the field, therefore I’m not completely in the forest, therefore I’m not breaking any rules,” she babbled to calm herself. “And besides, Grandfather Pere Shin’s law first law is, ‘No officer, enlisted man, or citizen of the world . . .’ But I’m not an officer, I’m not an enlisted man, and I’m not actually a citizen. As a woman I have no vote, therefore I’m not truly a citizen, and I can’t be breaking any law,” she declared, more as a reminder to herself than anything else. “Right, Grandfather Pere?”

  She released a tense giggle and looked around. “Only trees, isn’t it? Perrin was right,” she whispered. “Now, how do I go about putting an end to all of this nonsense?”

  She never thought she’d get that far. That’s when she started to feel cold.

  “What in the world do I think I’m doing?” She forced herself to her feet, smoothed down her cloak, and took a few steps tentatively forward, still with the ability to jump out again in a mere two steps. Her hands shook and she found it difficult to swallow.

  “Just find someone or something,” she muttered, turning to head east away from the majority of the soldiers. “If I’m meant to find something, then I will.”

  It occurred to her then, as she crept along, that she hadn’t once asked the Creator if this was a good idea. The night of the raid when she ran to her mother’s, she was first on her knees pleading for guidance and protection. But not once this entire day had she done that. Maybe it was because she dreaded the answer would’ve been, “Get Back Home!”

  The same gnawing feeling overwhelmed her belly again, and now she knew why.

  She shouldn’t be there.

  She wasn’t honest—not with Sareen, who had absolutely no hope in ever getting Shem to fall in love with her.

  Not with her husband, who would be livid to know she was there.

  Not with her mother, to whom she gave a fake illness for a cover story.

  And not with herself, for believing she could find a way to end all of this. Exactly what was she hoping to prove out there? That she was brave? Defiant? Something to be feared? Was it all just pride that propelled her out there and made her think she was something special?

  She swallowed hard at her self-doubt and continued slowly along, skirting the leafless trees and shrubby bushes. She wondered what it would be that would finally force her to her senses, out of the forest, and back to her house. In a way she felt like she had come so far it would be pointless to go back now, with nothing to show for it.

  Besides, she’d be all right. She had to be. Bad things happened to other people, not her. And there was that old man she remembered yesterday morning, the one who last year asked the Creator to preserve them. Mahrree nodded confidently to herself. If the Creator wouldn’t honor the request of a sweet old man, then who would He honor?

  Mahrree would be preserved. Of course she’d be.

  Then again, on the other hand, she realized she could still go back home and no one would ever know what foolishness she committed that night in the name of annoyance, aggravation and yes, maybe pride. She could just—

  No.

  No. She would succeed where no one else—no man—had. She was Mahrree Peto Shin. The daughter of the most intelligent teacher the world never knew, the wife of a commander, the daughter-in-law of the most powerful officer, and therefore, in her own right, quite possibly the most dangerous woman in the world.

  What other woman would be doing what she was that night? None. Women could be just as determined, brave, and strong as men. Even more so. She would do what her husband couldn’t—

  Mahrree sighed as she picked her way through the underbrush. She hated to admit it, but there were moments during the past season that she considered her husband to be . . .

  Well, take that night weeks ago, when he told her that the High General wouldn’t let him back into the forest, and that he wouldn’t defy the law again. Mahrree had started to say she had never known him to be—

  She was going to say “cowardly,” but then he started to say it himself, with such ashamed anger tingeing his voice that she immediately changed it to “cautious.” She’d never known him to be cautious.

  But that wasn’t what she meant, and she secretly still suspected him to be something worse than “cautious.” When he first came to Edge he wanted to know the truth; that was the excuse he gave her for going in to the forest that first time with Karna. He wanted to find someone to get answers. He was tired of secrets too.

  But not anymore. Every time they talked about the Administrators, she could see it in his eyes: a wall went up, and he scurried to hide behind it. There’s twenty-three of them, he’d remind her, and only two of us. She’d never met any of them, and never intended to, but they were only older university professors, and slow-witted ones as well. Perrin had one hundred fifty men under his command, and his father had 15,000 and the army was growing. Those were very good odds, indeed!

  But they never used that power. Relf Shin was as intimidated and hesitant as his son. But this was where she was different. She would find that truth, reveal those secrets, and show the world what it meant to be brave.

  Courage wasn’t killing your enemies; it was looking them in the eyes and proclaiming, “I am here to know you.”

  Then she would—

  “What are you doing so far over here?”

  The voice, barely louder than a whisper, was strong, sharp and—shockingly—female. It came from another black cloak right in front of her. Where it appeared from, and from what direction, Mahrree didn’t know. It completely took her breath away and all she could do was stare and tremble.

  “I told you to go over—Oh. Wait. Who are you?”

  Mahrree could only lick her lips, because no answer came to her completely blank mind.

  The cloaked woman abruptly reached up, grabbed Mahrree’s hood, and yanked it down.

  “Oh, no.”

  Before Mahrree could think, the woman grabbed her arm and led her straight north, deeper into the forest. She took about ten clumsy steps before her frightened mind caught up to her.

  I’m going into the forest, deeper into the forest . . . Dear Creator, I’m heading into the forest!

  Just as suddenly as she pulled her, the woman stopped, shoved Mahrree to the ground behind a large boulder away from the view of the tree line, and pushed back her own hood.

  Later Mahrree realized that was her opportunity to run away, but the thought didn’t occur her until hours later. All she could do was look up into the woman’s face. She had long graying blonde hair pulled into a ponytail and, judging from her lightly wrinkled pale skin, was at least in her fifties.

  “Miss, what in the world do you think you’re doing out here?” Her tone was sharp and cutting, like a dagger.

  “I . . . I . . . don’t really know myself.”

  At that moment, Mahrree’s answer was honest.

  “What, you simply thought you’d take a late night stroll along the most dangerous piece of land in the world?”

  “I . . . I . . . ,” Mahrree stammered stupidly. Then it came to her. “I got lost trying to find my aunt’s house.”

  As soon as the words came out, they sounded dumb.

  And they sounded dumb to the middle-aged woman, too. “Try again, Miss.”

  It came back to Mahrree, everything. She’d told herself she’d find someone, and now she did! Here she was, dressed like the night, strong, determined, and obviously familiar with the forest—this was it!

  “I’m tired of all the secrets! I want to know the truth!” Mahrree declared, getting to her feet to face the woman who was only slightly taller than her. She said it with conviction, with strength, and with a tone that said she wasn’t going to leave until she knew it all.

  But that’s not what the older woman with the ponytail heard.

  “No, you don’t,” she said dis
missively. “Go home, dear. Quickly now.” She turned and headed deeper into the woods.

  Insulted, Mahrree ran up to the woman, grabbed her arm, and spun her around.

  “Yes! Yes, I do! I took tremendous risks to come here tonight. I could tell something was going on in the forest, and I’ve lived here my entire life always being afraid and suspicious, but also knowing that it never added up! Something else is going on. I need to know what it is, and you can tell me. So tell me!”

  The woman patted her on the arm. “Lovely speech, my dear. Truly. From the heart, I can tell. But you really don’t want to know. You think you do, but what you want to hear is something scandalous to share with your little friends, or something secretive that you think will give you power, or something shocking you can expose for a large amount of gold nuggets. But you don’t really want to know. No one does, although they think they do. They aren’t ready for it, because the truth can change everything we’re sure we already know.”

  “I’m not like that!” Mahrree insisted, furious with the woman’s patronizing manner. “I don’t want gold or power or anything else—I only want to know. Why the raids? What do you want? Why so much fear and terror?”

  “I don’t bring terror,” the woman said earnestly. “All I do is save lives, but you wouldn’t understand that. Maybe someday, when you have enough trust in the Creator.”

  Mahrree was growing impatient. “I believe in the Creator! I read The Writings! What do you mean, maybe someday?!”

  “When you can answer this question, my dear,” she patted Mahrree on the shoulder as if she was three years old. “What color is the sky?”

  Mahrree automatically looked up to take the easiest test in the world. “Black with white dots, two half spheres of the moons, and patches of dark gray clouds.”

  The woman stepped closer and peered at Mahrree.

  “Very good,” she whispered. “Very good, indeed. I may have been wrong about you.”

  “You were,” Mahrree declared. “Now tell me!”

  The older woman gave her a genuine smile. “You’re simply not ready, Miss. The truth will change all you know, and you don’t want that.”

  “I do! That’s the whole reason I’m here.”

  “All right,” the woman said slowly. “I can not only tell you the truth, but I can show it to you. But not here. You’d have to come with me—”

  “I’m ready!”

  “—and never come back.”

  Mahrree stopped and blinked. “What do you mean, never come back?!”

  “There’s no going back from the truth, Miss. Once you know it, you have to live it. You can’t know the truth and live a lie. It will drive you to despair or insanity. So ultimately, it’d kill you,” she said simply. “You can’t live here and know it all. Are you ready to make that commitment? Ready to leave it all, for all the answers you’ve ever wanted?”

  Mahrree’s mouth went completely dry at the unthinkable offer. This was the real test. Not the color of the sky, but the willingness of her heart.

  “Why?” she whispered. “Why does it have to be that way?”

  “Nothing costs more than the truth, my dear. It demands everything. And I have a feeling you’re not ready to give it all. Look at you—you’re quite young still, and probably have so much here you shouldn’t leave. Do you have a husband?”

  Mahrree nodded, unable to speak, the thought of leaving Perrin tying her tongue.

  “A child?”

  “Two,” Mahrree’s voice cracked.

  “Two? That’s becoming unusual. How old are your children?”

  “Daughter’s two, son’s one,” she whispered, imagining for just the shortest of agonizing moments leaving their sweet little faces.

  The woman’s face froze in place. “Two and one?”

  Mahrree nodded, tears filling her eyes. The truth at any cost—

  Who did she think she was kidding? The cost was far too high. She’d thought she could find out the truth to help Perrin, to resolve these mysteries, to put an end to all of it—

  No. That was just another lie she told herself.

  The woman was right. She wanted power, and she was doing this for herself, to prove something to the world. It was her haughtiness that sent her there, her growing frustration with the Administrators to whom this school teacher thought she should teach a lesson. Deny her more children? Send her only form letters? Change the way children learned about the world? Let the Guarders become so powerful that they take her husband away, again and again? She’d show them she knew a thing or two! She’d expose everything—whatever it was—and disgrace and shame them!

  But she couldn’t.

  When faced with the actuality of doing it, of doing anything courageous, she couldn’t do it. Even if she didn’t have a husband and children, Mahrree knew she’d never follow this woman one step further into the forest.

  She always thought herself to be brave, especially when she stood on the platform in the amphitheater loudly proclaiming her opinions for all the world to hear, but deep down she knew “the world” didn’t hear her. Only a few hundred, occasionally a few thousand, in the insignificant village of Edge ever heard her, and even then none of them took her seriously. She knew that, and that was the only reason she dared say anything. Before she was married she frequently walked the edges of the forest, but nothing bad ever happened on the edges. It wasn’t nearly as daring as it appeared.

  And neither—Mahrree realized with humbling force as she stood a mere thirty paces in—was she.

  The woman stepped closer to her and took her arm. Initially Mahrree was alarmed, but the touch was kind.

  “Someday will come for you,” the woman promised. “There’ll be a day when you’ll be ready to leave it all behind and embrace the truth. But not for many years still, I suspect. Until then, think of this night never again. Should your mind ever find itself surprised by this memory, tell yourself it was just a vivid dream, for that’s all it really is. You can practice looking at the world in different ways, preparing your mind to realize you know really nothing at all, looking at the sky and realizing it changes minute by second, but until that someday comes, nothing will ever quite make sense. That’s all right,” she said, almost genially.

  Mahrree only gaped at her.

  “But when that day does come,” she continued with a sharper edge and firming her grip on Mahrree’s arm, “everything will hit you with such finality and power you’ll never again be able to forget it or deny it. You’ll find the truth and run to it. But not tonight. Now, you need to get back to that empty field below us, and run home to your husband and babies before they miss you.”

  No—

  No, she couldn’t let it end like this, with a lecture in the trees as if she were some thirteen-year-old child with a rebellious streak!

  She needed something—some hint or clue or number to plug into Perrin’s equation. Just a something more than what she knew this morning, and she wasn’t going to let this woman leave without getting it.

  One last stupid flash of defiance gripped Mahrree, and the most irrational part of her mind screamed, Look—you’re standing in the forest against all laws and logic speaking to a real Guarder! No one’s done this before, so DO SOMETHING!

  By the time all that audacity reached her mouth, though, it had diminished to a whimper. “But I’ve come so far.”

  “Not as far as you think, dear. Only about twenty paces.” The patronizing tone was back, along with a firm pat on the cheek that felt more like a mild slap.

  That did it.

  The very last of Mahrree’s impudence boiled up and filled her with dangerous courage. “I have! You have no idea who I am, or what—”

  “Oh, yes I do!” the woman interrupted her sharply. “I know you have a very ill-named dog. It never barks. Now, GO HOME, Mrs. Shin!”

  Mahrree couldn’t even breathe as she watched the woman march hastily away and be swallowed up by the forest, leaving her completely alone in the trees with
one horrible thought.

  She knew a little bit more, got her one truth, and revealed a secret: she, her children, and even her barkless dog, were known to the Guarders.

  Chapter 23 ~ “And whose side are you on, anyway, Quiet Man?!”

  It was late at night when the man in the black jacket strode through the dark forest, past the steaming vents, around a sulfurous cavern, out of the reach of a spray of hot water, and over a swell of land that seemed to swell a little more each year. He walked alone and knew exactly where he was going. He picked up his pace once he was past the more hazardous terrain and started to jog eastward, weaving in and out of thickets and through meadows.

  He shouldn’t have to be here, he thought bitterly. Something had gone very wrong for him to be taking such a risk again. The stories he had to come up with . . .

  There was too much moons’ light. That was one of the problems. And the forest was too quiet. Usually it was rumbling and gurgling louder, but the world went in cycles like the seasons, and it was a bad time for the forest to be napping. A little bit of ground moaning as cover would’ve been most welcome right now.

  That’s when he saw him, where he shouldn’t be, cowering like a distracted porcupine.

  “Ah, no,” the man in the black jacket whispered, and crept over to the large rocks where the man in a black cloak was clinging to the shadows and looking in the wrong direction.

  “You’re not supposed to be here,” the man in the black jacket whispered in his ear.

  There are many rules of the forest, and the most important is always the one neglected at the moment. And at that moment, the rule of “Never startle a preoccupied porcupine” shot up to the top of the list.

  The porcupine-in-a-cloak nearly jumped out of it in surprise, swung blindly behind him, and smacked the face of the man in the black jacket. Then he took off running directionless, probably spooked because the boulder he’d been hiding behind developed a mouth and a sudden need to communicate its opinion.

  But the smack wasn’t hard enough to faze the black jacket man.

  “No!” he whispered urgently, and was immediately in pursuit. “Go left! Go left!” he hissed, but the man in the cloak veered right instead.