The Will and the Wilds

by Holmberg, Charlie N.

  “You seem sane enough to me.” I press gauze to the wound. Maekallus eyes me like I’ve said something insolent. I manage to shrug. “If it makes you feel better.”

  He growls. I wrap his arm.

  “The gobler didn’t come.” An obvious observation, but I feel it needs to be said.

  “No.”

  “What next?”

  He shakes his head. A piece of hair spills from the tail holding it. Without thinking, I brush it back.

  Our eyes meet again. His yellow, demonic eyes. I almost forget the horn is there.

  He looks at my lips.

  My chest aches in remembrance of the lost pieces of my soul. I step away from him. My handiwork is finished.

  The sun is beginning its set, but I can’t leave. Not yet. Not before I’ve put this experience to page. I pull my basket free from its hiding place behind the pine and grab my book. Open it to the new section on souls, turn the page. “Beuhgers. Tell me about them.”

  He eyes my book. “Beuhgers can’t help us.”

  I shake my head. “I want to know about them. I’ve never seen them documented. Never heard their name uttered in story.” Unless they had a second name. “How did you know that one was female?” I begin a sketch, trying to remember the creature’s appearance. I pause long enough to write, Cowardly, beside it. “What is their range of height? Are they docile? Do you know their diet, their intelligence, their—”

  My book zooms out from beneath me, causing my charcoal to scrape a hard line down the open page. I protest as Maekallus lifts it up to his face, flipping through the pictures.

  “What is this?” he asks.

  I leap to my feet. “You’ll get blood on it. Give it back.”

  He flips another page.

  “Give it back.”

  My skin tingles at my own boldness. Maekallus looks at me with a questioning gaze, but hands the book back, upside down. I pull a bit of my sleeve over my thumb and use it to blot out as much of that charcoal line as I can.

  When I’m nearly finished, I say, “I like to study. To learn more about your kind.”

  He snorts. “Beuhgers are not my kind.”

  I pause, glance at him. “You sound like you don’t like them.”

  “They’re dumb-witted carrion eaters. No one likes them.”

  A grin works its way across my mouth—I can’t hide it, despite how I try. Maekallus looks at me like I’m a madwoman. Perhaps I am.

  I set my notes against the grass and write down, Unintelligent carrion eaters. I return to my sketch, only to realize I’m having trouble seeing the lines. I glance over my shoulder, past the trees, to the rays of the setting sun.

  A long breath escapes me. It’s edged with the residual anxiety from the arrival of so many mystings in this glade. “It’s getting dark. I need to return.”

  He growls again.

  Closing my book, I glance to the red thread stretching between Maekallus and the ground. Feel the sting in my palm. “I’ll . . . think of something. I don’t know what, but I’ll think of something.” I stand. “I’ll set you free, Maekallus. Both of us.”

  His jaw clenches at the sentiment. Perhaps he doesn’t believe me. He doesn’t meet my eyes.

  I gather my things and walk a different way back—straight west to leave the wildwood as quickly as possible, then south toward home. I clutch the Telling Stone the entire time, half expecting the escaped beuhger to return. Maekallus must have spoken truth, however, because I never get the slightest shiver of cold. Wherever the creatures are, they’re far away.

  And so is the gobler.

  CHAPTER 15

  While grinlers hunt in packs, they attack their prey one at a time. This may be to prevent the prey from escaping, should it evade a strike. More study is needed.

  While I’ve studied mystings from afar for several years now, I’m not sure what entertains them. But I try to imagine what I’d want to do if chained in a confined space for days, weeks, with nothing to pass the time. I would climb trees, or burn circles in the weed-clotted earth, or maybe weave crowns of leaves or flowers. Carve my name into a tree, perhaps. But I would grow restless, and I am a simple woman who leads a simple life. When Maekallus tells me he’s going mad, I believe him.

  After I tend my mysting garden, I pack a meal for him, hoping Papa won’t notice the shortage of food in the cupboards. Meat is expensive, but Maekallus seems to prefer it. He is, after all, a predator. Then I gather some string for cat’s cradle, a few books from my meager shelf, and my father’s strategy game, fell the king. He has not played it in some years. He taught me the rules, more or less, but kept forgetting his strategy, and after so many losses, his interest in the board and its cherrywood pieces waned. I bring my usual supplies, including bandages, and belt the dagger at my waist.

  Once my father is cared for and occupied, I venture into the wildwood. The sun is well out, so I head into the forest straightway. I suppose if I run into anyone who cares about my destination, I could tell them I’m visiting my grandmother. While the gossip mill delights in stories about my immediate family—my mother’s passing, my father’s mind, my infatuation with the wildwood—few even knew of my grandmother’s existence, let alone her passing. She and my grandfather were incredibly self-sufficient, and when they did need supplies, they went to the market in Crake, not Fendell.

  I try to ignore the ache in my right hand, which has already begun to bleed tar again, and enjoy the beauty of the wildwood. Its trees are tall and ancient, and the summer sun against the canopy bathes everything in warm green light. Gnats sparkle over a decaying log. Crickets chirp with the rising heat. The shadow of a bird crosses my path, and the call of a jay pierces the symphony of insect and fowl.

  I take a break near one of the wildwood’s slender brooks, one that will dry up before winter comes. Sitting on a short stone, I look into that water and breathe deeply, feeling the emptiness within me and trying not to dwell on what I’ve lost. On whether I’ll ever get it back. Then I put my feet under me, brush off my gray dress, and continue on my way, tucking a bit of dark hair behind my ear as I go. I pick my way over root and rock, grass and clover, admiring the fiery orange of some wildflowers.

  I am some ways into the wildwood when my stone turns cold.

  I halt, my heart riotous, my thoughts rushing to the mystings from the night before. I grab a crown of oon berry from my basket and settle it over my head. My dress is washed in lavender. I fear it will not be enough.

  I hurry toward the clearing, knowing I’ll never make it before I’m overtaken, and grab my Telling Stone and my dagger in slick hands. The stone is cold, so very cold, and it whispers the word I fear most.

  Grinlers.

  The irony of my ready lie strikes me enough to bring tears. Visiting my grandmother. My mother had been doing that very thing, with this very knife, when grinlers tore her apart. How utterly foolish I have become, to have treated the wildwood so casually.

  I run.

  The Telling Stone chills to the point where I must drop it or have a hole burned through my hand. I stumble on something, but don’t fall, and keep running. If I can just get to Maekallus. If I can just make it to the glade—

  I hear them. It is not just the grunts and snorts once described to me by my grandmother, but a mad giggle, high pitched and half-swallowed. The quick, brushing steps of their feet startle two quail from a nearby thicket. The grinlers are closing in. Oh gods above, I can smell them. Subtle and sour, like decaying mushrooms.

  Tears stream down my face. “Help!” I cry through my burning throat. Anyone. A hunter, Tennith, even a pack of wolves. The furry creatures appear between the trees, and I stop short, digging my toes into mud. I turn, but there are more charging toward me from behind, giggling and snorting, their marble eyes blazing with hunger, their clawed hands raised.

  I will die just like she did.

  Tears fall from my chin, and I lift my dagger in my bleeding, shaking hand. “Maekallus,” I whisper, my throat tigh
t.

  Help me.

  The cut on Maekallus’s hand burns fiercely enough that he loses his grip on the branch and falls back to the earth, knocking his horn on the way down. Pain shoots up his tailbone and across his forehead. Cursing, he examines the bandage Enna tied around his palm, which is now mottled and sore from the black bruising of the mortal realm. Blood seeps through the gauze, two drops rolling down the curve of his wrist.

  Within him, the fragments of her soul whirl, panicked.

  He stands, ignoring the cut on his hand as he presses it against his chest.

  And then a tugging, stronger even than that of the binding spell, jerks him south. He knows that feeling. It’s the same compulsion he felt upon first meeting Enna. It’s why he’d answered when she asked his name. Why he stupidly accepted those two gold medallions in exchange for killing the gobler.

  This same force had been used to control Maekallus twenty years ago, in the War That Almost Was.

  The urge is strong, and without thinking, he charges toward the south edge of the glade, then past it, to the binding spell’s limit.

  The soul swirls. The urge pulls.

  He takes another step. Then another.

  The binding spell, still bright and implanted in his chest, doesn’t pull back. He would laugh, but the need propels him forward until he is running with his head down and horn pointed forward, deep into forest he doesn’t recognize, the uneven floor biting his softening hooves. Blood whips from the soaked bandage on his hand. Black corruption seeps over his hip, his abdomen.

  He runs, not understanding how, but knowing it is her.

  The grinlers are more intelligent than I ever gave them credit for. It’s no wonder my mother couldn’t escape them.

  There are a dozen of them. They’ve surrounded me, blocking every escape—assuming I possessed the ability to outrun them. The beasts march forward like trained soldiers, leading with the left foot, holding out their razor-edged hands, creating an impenetrable fence. A few cringe at the oon berry, or maybe the lavender. No worry. They’ll start at my feet, discard my clothes, and save my head for last. They’ll eat me alive, too hungry to wait for my death, too monstrous to give me a swift end.

  They hardly notice my silver dagger, even when I swipe toward them. I drop my basket and hold the blade with both hands. Point it at one, and then another. Maybe I can kill one before the others take me down. They’ll leap all at once, I’m sure of it, and . . . and . . .

  I’m sorry, Papa.

  I’ve never been so cold. I’m shaking all over. I pick one grinler, one that giggles louder than the rest, and point the dagger for the narrow, furry space between its eyes. I will . . . I will focus on that one, even when the others sink their teeth into my skin and chew through my muscle. Even when their bodies blind me—

  I’m wrong—they don’t all strike at once. One attacks before the rest, vaulting over the space between us. My courage fails me. The knife drops to the ground, and so do I, arms over my head.

  Just before the grinler strikes, a blur knocks it aside, sending it flying beyond the pack. I know instantly, even before I see the horn or the yellow eyes.

  Maekallus.

  Maekallus.

  Maekallus.

  He is swift, though weaponless. He grabs a grinler by its upper arm, lifts it, and slams it into another as a third jumps onto his back and rips into his blackening flesh with its claws. I cry out. The mystings have focused on him, save for one, which charges me.

  I scream and fumble for my dagger. Help me!

  And he is there, grabbing the demon by the head and twisting it until the cracking of its spine echoes against the silent trees. Two grinlers brutalize his back. One clings to his leg. Blood rivers down the side of his neck. Three more strike. He knocks one away, but the other two grab his arms. He cries out when one sinks its teeth into the blackened pit of his elbow, sending a splatter of blood across my face.

  I’m frozen. So cold. So . . .

  They’re going to kill him. Gods above, they’re going to kill him.

  Every fiber of my broken soul screams at them to die, to leave, to stop.

  A wave of ice washes through me, the lancing of a thousand needles, the sensation rushing outward from my left wrist—up my arm and down to the tips of my fingers.

  The grinlers stop. Claws, teeth, the maddening giggles. They fall away from Maekallus, dripping with his blood. Ignoring their dead companions, and me, they look around for a moment, as though blind, and then rush off into the wildwood until the Telling Stone warms once again.

  Maekallus drops to his knees, blood glistening against peach-and-black skin. A bubble of corruption rolls across his ribs, deflating near his shoulder.

  My voice. Where is my voice? The Telling Stone has warmed, yet I tremble as if just pulled from the broken ice of a pond.

  The red line of the binding spell shimmers through the carnage, pointing back toward the glade.

  “M-Maekallus?”

  His breath is wet and raspy. He looks up at me, blood flowing from his hairline over one of his eyes. His cheek turns black beneath it. “How?”

  I reach out and touch the dark spot, then wipe the blood off his eyebrow with my thumb. “I’m sorry,” I whisper, new tears tracing the paths of the old. “You saved me. How? How are you here?”

  He starts to shake his head, then winces. Hot blood pours from a deep gash on his shoulder. So many gashes. A network of them across his back. Blood and tar patter in droplets against the forest floor.

  He reaches out a hand—the one with the bargain’s seal on it, the bandage torn—and grasps my left wrist. Weakly hauls it up to his eyes. The Telling Stone dangles from its silver chain.

  For a moment, the pain contorting his features lifts. “This,” he croaks, eyes wide. His yellow gaze shifts to me. “You never . . . needed me . . . if you had this.”

  He tenses and drops both his head and my wrist, groaning. Black pours from his wounds. He starts to collapse, but I grab him, hooking one arm beneath his shoulder. His blood seeps through my sleeve.

  I turn his face and kiss him.

  His blood is metallic, just like human blood. I taste it on my lips. He doesn’t respond, but he doesn’t need to. I feel the break inside me. It makes me weep all the more as it passes from me to him, ethereal and unseen.

  Maekallus jerks back, breath rushing into him. He gasps, coughs.

  Blood patterns his skin in honeycombs, but the lesions close, and every last speck of blackness vanishes.

  It’s the last thing I see before shadow swallows the wildwood.

  CHAPTER 16

  One can summon a mysting by drawing a ring on the earth and, within the ring, an eight-pointed star formed by two overlapping squares. Each corner of the star must touch the outer ring. A sacrifice must be made to activate it. Blood is the surest means of stimulation, but fire will also work.

  I open my eyes to Maekallus’s face framed by the sun-laced canopy of the wildwood. His yellow eyes dart back and forth, studying me. I blink several times and try to sit up. An encompassing headache introduces itself.

  His hand on my back helps me until I’m upright. Blood crusts on my sleeve. Crusting already?

  I blacked out. For several minutes, at least.

  “Enna?” he asks.

  It takes me a moment to comprehend. I see my surroundings. I’m in the wildwood, but I cannot remember how I came to be here. A grinler with a broken neck lies some paces away. A grinler? I stare at it. For a long time. Maekallus repeats my name.

  I look back at him, at the thread of light wrapping around the right side of his chest and beaming back toward the glade. That’s when it strikes me.

  He’s not in the glade.

  He’s here. Where the grinlers attacked. The memory seeps into my mind like molasses. I wait until it’s all there before speaking.

  “How are you here?” My voice is raspy. There’s water in my basket, but I don’t reach for it.

  His eyes drop to
my wrist. There’s no point in dissembling, not anymore. I lift it and take the cool Telling Stone in my other hand, turning it about, letting its smooth surface catch filtered sunlight.

  “That’s what they wanted.” It’s a statement, not a question. The goblers, he means.

  I nod. “I don’t know why. It’s just a Telling charm.”

  His eyes narrow. “That’s no charm.”

  I clutch the stone in my fist, hiding it from him. “It is. That’s how I knew about the gobler. It turns cold when mystings are nearby.”

  He takes my wrist and pulls until I release the dark rock. He lifts my hand so the stone dangles before my face. “This is Scroud’s Will Stone.”

  My mouth is dry. I try to swallow, to work up some moisture. “Will Stone?” Scroud?

  He lets me go and leans back. A long breath passes his lips. “It’s said to be the petrified heart of the god who first created the mystings.”

  The words chill me. “But . . . a god cannot—”

  “I don’t know the lore.” He glances down, his horn dangerously close to my forehead. I push the point away; he lifts his head to oblige. “That once belonged to a very powerful mysting lord named Scroud. An orjan.”

  Orjans are in the notes I copied from my grandmother’s journal. Humanoid and intelligent, like a narval, but with bluish skin similar to a gobler’s. Two great horns that curve back over the head like a helmet. Tusks similar to a grinler’s. The eyes are shaded completely black.

  Had my father stolen this Telling—Will—Stone from such a creature?

  “What do you mean, a ‘Will’ Stone?” I press.

  He watches me for a moment longer, perhaps trying to discern my genuineness. Then he stands, pushing off the bloody muck beneath him.

  His tail is gone.

  It once hung over the waist of his pants, but it’s vanished, and Maekallus’s backside is smooth. I gape at him, choking on words. Should I tell him? How?