by G. Deyke
~*~
When Ty lies still as though asleep, Therrin comes to me and whispers in the dark: “I'm sorry.”
I listen.
“I know you don't like it here,” she says. “This world. I love it and I want to save it, and I don't understand why you're so afraid of it, nor why it reminds you of a past on Thilua – but I know that it does, and that you are, and I'm sorry for taking you here.”
“How?” I ask. I pull at my fingers, distracted.
She laughs nervously and shakes her head. “I don't know. The witch said that the Wind People can know thoughts without speaking – maybe it is because my mother was one of them that whenever someone near me thinks or feels something very strongly, I feel it too. It has always been so. And your fear has been very strong, so that I cannot help but to know it. I feel it as though it were my own.”
I draw up my knees for warmth. It is very cold without a fire. I shan't sleep well tonight, if I can sleep at all.
She is watching me carefully, but I will not meet her eyes. I don't want to give a response. I don't know what to say. I don't like to think of my thoughts in her head, my feelings laid bare for anyone to see. I don't want to think about it.
“You know that you may leave if you wish,” she says. “Not here, of course – and we haven't the time to take you back to the gate before I have all three treasures – but when we're back home. I am glad to have you with me, but if you can't come with me any longer, I understand. We can help you back to the Island, maybe...”
Is she so eager to lose me? Does she want me gone? Have I done something wrong?
For a long moment I say nothing. I don't know what to think of her. She was kind to me; she let me come with her when I had no place else to go. Is that already gone?
Perhaps she didn't mean it. Perhaps she offered to take me with her in the hope that I'd refuse.
Or perhaps my thoughts, that she has listened to without my knowing, are proving a distraction. Perhaps she wants me gone so that her head will clear. Perhaps she cannot live with this deadness that lies all around me, in this vague and broken world, in my cold unfeeling skin, in my fading mind.
At last I shake my head, hoping beyond hope that she will accept my answer: “I have no place else to go. As long as you will have me, I will stay and help you as I can.” And I whistle: Snake, if you hear me, let her not cast me off. I don't know what I'd do. I don't know whither I'd go. I have been thrown away too often; I have no one left to trust.
I don't like to think of my thoughts in her head, but better to share those thoughts than to be left all alone without a home or food or even a place to rest.
“I thank you for your help, then. I only thought to be sure.”
Thank you, thank you. I whistle again. Perhaps I don't like this world, perhaps I am always afraid of it, but all the same I am relieved that I must not leave again. It seems I am always, always leaving. But now I can stay for a while. I hope she is not lying. I hope she won't yet find a way to lose me. I hope Ty will save me if she does – I hope he would choose to.
I cannot rely on them but I have no other choice.
“It must be terrible,” I say. “I can only know my own thoughts, and often that alone is already too much.” It is so now. My head is pounding. The thoughts come slowly but they threaten to overcome me. I don't want to talk to Therrin. I don't want to think about what all she must know about me that I try so hard to keep hidden. I don't want to think.
“It is, sometimes,” she says. “To be afraid of things I do not fear, or angry at myself for another's sake – that is terrible. But I can't control it. Sometimes I feel what others do; sometimes I do not. There's nothing I can do.”
“I am sorry that you have felt mine,” I say.
She frowns, and shakes her head. She says: “I think it is I who must be sorry. Now come – let us sleep, and hope we can find the lake in the morning.”
I nod, and I watch her go, and I shiver and wait for morning. It is very cold. I would rather rest warm in my tunnels, nestled into a bed of old clothing, even with all the filth and stench around me. But I can never do that again. Never.
I curl up against the cold of this bleak world and I shiver and I wait for morning, and perhaps at last I fall asleep, though it is a sleep as cold and colorless as all the rest of this world.
