The Will and the Wilds

by Holmberg, Charlie N.

  He looks away and grits his teeth. Opens the door, ducks low under the entryway. The air outside feels wintry compared to the heat of the fire. He passes the oon berry, falls into the shadows of the wildwood. His eyes still penetrate the darkness. He wishes they didn’t.

  He walks and walks, over hills and streams, listening to the howl of a wolf and the hoot of an owl. Brush rustles nearby, but he doesn’t heed it. He’s a predator, after all. Enna is his prey.

  No longer.

  He reaches the clearing. Stares at the spot where the thread of light pierces the ground. By that light he studies his right hand, the newly healed scar on the palm. Enna believes their bargain has tied their fates together. He’s convinced her the gobler’s spell will destroy her as surely as it will him.

  He presses the thumb of his opposite hand to the bottom of the mark. Slowly draws it up toward his fingers, erasing the scar as though it were merely a smudge of dirt or line of charcoal. When he pulls his hand away, the line is gone, his palm unscathed.

  He’s taken too much. Too much.

  Kneeling before the thread of the binding spell, he closes his eyes, relishing the pain inside him, if only for its vigor, and waits for the mortal realm to devour him once and for all.

  CHAPTER 22

  Tapis root, though scentless, has some sort of aura that protects against the supernatural. I believe this aura to have a small range, but one can never be too careful.

  I wake to a dead fire and early morning light. I shiver, colder than I should be. But the nightmares . . . there were none, only dreamless, black sleep. A long breath escapes me, stirring black dust that’s tried to escape the hearth.

  Pushing myself up, I groan from a shoulder made sore from pressing against the floor. The edge of the rug slips off my back and hits the floor with a soft whap. I twist around at the sound of it and scan the gray room.

  “Maekallus?”

  Nothing answers.

  Finding my feet, I blink sleep from my eyes. Shudder. Touch my lips. My legs aren’t ready to walk, but I hobble down the hallway anyway, past my room, to where my father lies. I hear the sound of his breathing before I see the rise and fall of his blankets. Praise the gods, there is a sound to hear. And does he breathe easier? Could the worst be over?

  I move to his side and press my hand to his forehead. Cool, but not clammy.

  A chill sweeps through me. The Will Stone is clamped in my hand, but it remains cool and distant. The charm is not responsible for my chattering teeth. Blearily, I fasten it around my left wrist.

  Maekallus. I lick my lips. Last night is a blur, and my memory is dull, but I pick pieces from it. Large, sharp pieces. His human shape surrounded by the fog of the descent circle. His lips moving against mine. The breaking of my soul. The cold.

  Stupid, stupid girl.

  I hurry to my room, pulling open the bottom drawer of my small wardrobe, where my winter clothes are folded away. I tug my coat free and fasten it around my waist, then rebuild the fire in the front room. I’m so cold, despite the summer sun peeking over the mountains, highlighting a few clouds in the pinking sky. I rub my hands together. The tips of my fingers are numb, and no matter how I work them, I can’t get feeling to return to them.

  “Enna?”

  I jump at my father’s voice. Run to him, clipping my shoulder on a corner as I go. “Papa?”

  He looks so weak and a little ashen. His voice is dry. “Water?”

  A cup rests on his bedside table. I wriggle my arm beneath my father’s head, lifting it to help him drink. His own hand steadies the cup. He drinks it dry.

  “Thank you,” he rasps.

  “Oh, Papa.” I blink away a tear and kiss his forehead. “How are you feeling?”

  “Terrible.”

  “Not as terrible as you were.”

  He coughs, but has the strength to cover his mouth, and nothing comes up—nothing that escapes his lips, at least. He rests back against the pillow.

  “Let me get you something to eat.”

  “Not broth.”

  “Broth won’t upset your stomach.”

  “Not broth.”

  I smile and leave him for the kitchen. I warm water over the hearth, watching it boil so I can absorb the fire’s warmth into my coat. I make ginger tea and take a heel of bread to his room.

  “Enna?” he asks when I’m near the doorway. “Could I have something to—oh, you have it.” He managed a weak turn of the lips. “Clever girl.”

  I set the meager meal on the table and adjust my father’s pillows so he can be more upright. “Tiny pieces, followed by tea.”

  He smells the tea and wrinkles his nose. He hates ginger, but it’s easy on the stomach. I bully him into taking a sip.

  I tear off a half bite of bread, the texture strange to my numb fingers. My father starts to lift his hand, but I’m quicker and plop the piece into his mouth. He chews slowly, swallows slowly, but the food makes it to his stomach.

  He sips the tea. I give him another piece of bread.

  I freeze when I reach for the teacup.

  My hand.

  I open my right hand, splaying the fingers, and hold the palm to my face. No mark, not even a pale scar. The skin is unblemished. I run my fingers over it, detecting not so much as a trace of the temperamental wound. As if it never existed.

  The bargain.

  “Maekallus,” I whisper. Has he freed himself? But . . . how? Even if our plan worked, he’d need the scrying spell to complete the next step.

  “Enna?”

  I look to my father, barely seeing him. Utter something like an apology and hand him the teacup, spilling some of its contents onto his shirt. He doesn’t seem to notice.

  I check my other hand, just to be sure. The Will Stone remains cool to the touch, just as it’s been since Maekallus was bound to the mortal realm.

  “What is it?” Papa asks. He tries to sit up, but the effort is too much for him, and he sinks deeper into the pillows.

  I shake my head. “I just thought . . . It’s nothing, Papa.”

  He hesitates, but nods. I feed him more bread. My movements are stiff, my thoughts tangled in the wildwood, but I give my due diligence until the bread and tea are gone. Until my father’s eyes close once more in slumber.

  I slip out through the kitchen door, toward the mysting garden, and scan the forest beyond it. “Maekallus?”

  No answer. I don’t know what else I expected.

  I lean against the garden fence. Last night, he came to me of his own volition, not because I willed it. But why did he leave? When? Did something happen, something my damaged mind can’t remember?

  Empathy for my father surges through my chest. I pull my coat tighter around me, though crickets chirp that the air is warm. I fear to leave my father in case he takes a turn for the worse, but the scar is gone, and I don’t understand what it means. For me or for Maekallus.

  I choose my father. I kneel at his bedside, listening to his breathing, waiting for the wetness to return to the sound. It doesn’t. A relief, but in the space between his breaths, Maekallus’s name rings in my ears. I rub my right palm until the skin is nearly raw.

  Papa wakes again, and there’s a little more color to his cheeks. I make him a simple mushroom stew, and while he seems strong enough to feed himself, I take the liberty of doing it. I want to. I owe him too much not to take care of him. He is forgetful, sometimes distant, but he has been my caretaker all my life, and I his. My love for him runs deep, especially now that I understand the sacrifice he made to protect me.

  We talk for a little bit; I read him a few passages of poetry. But my father is not well, not yet, and he slips into another restful slumber.

  I roll the Will Stone between my hands. If Maekallus is near, I could will him to my side and get an explanation, if he even has one. But I know he bristles at being controlled, and the narrow bridge we’re building between us is an unsure one. I don’t dare shake it.

  I take my coat and my dagger and trek in
to the wildwood as quickly as my body will let me. I don’t wish to leave my father alone for long.

  I squeeze the Will Stone, pretending it is just the Telling Stone once more, urging it to lead me to Maekallus. It weakly points me toward the glade, which surprises me. I’ve freed him to roam the entire forest, or at least a good league of it. Why would he choose to linger in the place he claimed was driving him mad?

  Why didn’t he stay with me? Was I so foolish as to imagine the intimacy we had shared?

  I try to shake the thoughts from my head. Speculation is pointless when the answers I seek are so close. I will myself to keep going, to not need a break. I’m breathless by the time I reach the glade.

  I pause at its edge. The binding spell remains just where I left it, glimmering and red, embedded into the ground just as it is in Maekallus’s chest. Maekallus, who kneels not three paces from where the spell sinks into the earth.

  I stare at his feet. Human feet. Peachy and wrinkled and filthy from the wildwood.

  “Maekallus?” I ask.

  He flinches, like I’ve stung him.

  I take a moment to catch my breath before walking to his side. “I don’t understand.” I hold my hand out to him, but he doesn’t look at it. Or at me. His gaze is pinned to the binding spell. “The scar, the mark of the bargain. It’s gone. Maekallus?”

  He is silent.

  “Are you hurt?” I crouch beside him. When he does not answer, I grab his right hand and open his fingers. The scar on his palm has disappeared, too.

  I touch his cheek, turning his head until he looks at me. I try to search his eyes. There’s new depth to them, new darkness.

  “You know,” I whisper, guessing, but I feel the truth of it. “You know what happened.”

  He pulls from my touch. “Our bargain is broken.”

  I stand. Despite all the exercise I got in my trek through the wood, I hug myself for warmth. “How? The gobler has not returned, or the spell would be broken.”

  “You aren’t bound to me, Enna.”

  “But the gobler—”

  “You were never bound to me,” he says, low and gruff, like he bleeds the words. “The spell affects only me, not you. Were I to perish—when I perish—it will have no effect on you. Nor would it have if the scar remained.”

  I loosen my arms. My heart’s beating too quickly. “I don’t understand.”

  “The bargain is merely a token. A token I could break at any time. Your life was never in danger.”

  I step back from him, my body reacting before my mind can unpack his meaning. A blackbird cries from a nearby tree. This would rouse my curiosity, as I thought all wildwood creatures had left this grove, were it not for Maekallus’s words.

  My throat is dry, and I tremble, but not from the cold. I stare at him, waiting for him to move, to do anything, but he doesn’t, and that solidifies his guilt.

  “You lied to me.” The revelation burns like inhaled smoke.

  He studies the line of the gobler’s spell. The only change in his face is a crease that appears at the center of his brow.

  “You lied to me,” I repeat, louder. Even the blackbird quiets at the accusation. I clutch my stomach, as though I could reach that deep, unidentifiable part of me where what’s left of my soul resides. That gaping hole that aches like a pulled tooth, only so much worse. Less than half remains. “You promised my peril! You said if I didn’t . . .”

  His stillness infuriates me. I charge him and shove my hands into both of his shoulders, forcing his attention to me. “You took my soul !”

  Again he looks away. “I needed it to live.”

  “I need it to live!” My throat constricts around the declaration, forcing me to choke it out. “How could you?” Tears start to sting my eyes. I clutch the Will Stone and demand they leave, but they won’t listen.

  His jaw is tight, his shoulders taut, as he speaks. “I knew you would leave me to die. I told you, En . . .” He pauses, swallows, as though unwilling to say my name. “There is no afterlife for me.”

  “And are you so certain there’s one for me? You have half my soul, Maekallus!” I’m shouting now, and tears stream down my cold cheeks. “More than half! How could I possibly cross into Shava with only . . .”

  I push my fists into my middle and turn away, trying to compose myself, but anger is a beast inside me, pressing against my skin as though it could tear itself free.

  What did I expect? That there could be a happy ending for this twisted story? That I could ever love a mysting?

  That a mysting could ever love me?

  I wipe tears off my face and fling them into trampled clover. Wheel on him. His stare remains fixed on that damnable magic thread.

  “Can’t you give it back?”

  It’s a weak plea, too heavy to carry far. A drop of rain hits the side of my nose, and it alarms me that it feels warm against my skin.

  Maekallus finally meets my gaze. “I might.”

  Hope flares within me, hot enough to scorch.

  “But not while I’m bound to the mortal realm.” More raindrops fall, hitting my hair, my coat. They echo off leaf and branch, louder than Maekallus’s voice. “Attaby had a theory once. I’ve never . . . but I can’t, here.”

  He sounds defeated. Rain douses my hope.

  I shake my head, wishing I could deny the truth, almost wanting to remain in ignorance. This, this is what they meant, the poets and bards who wrote and sang about heartache. I feel it now, so much sharper than those flowery words. Like my very chest is being rent in two by long, rusted knives.

  “I’m sorry.”

  I laugh. It hurts coming up my throat. It’s made of briars and gravel and poison. I wipe more tears from my face. “Bastard,” I hiss.

  “I am what I am.”

  It might be the truest thing he’s ever said to me. I glare at him, clutching the Will Stone in my fingers, a violent array of possibilities whirling dark colors through my thoughts. But I release it, tired, aching, and defeated. Shaking my head, I whisper, “I wish I’d never summoned you.”

  He flinches again, granting me some sort of pathetic victory.

  The rain comes down hard. I flee into the wildwood, clutching the hilt of my dagger in one hand, the Will Stone in the other. I break the power that allows Maekallus to roam.

  Let him rot in his prison.

  I’m too tired to cry, so the rain weeps for me.

  It resonates all around me, pattering logs and earth and trees until it sounds like a mess of insect wings or the shushing of a thousand mothers. It thuds without rhythm onto my skull, soaking my hair. It drips into my eyes and runs down my cheeks just like real tears.

  I shiver and grip the front of my coat with frozen fingers. Cold, because of him.

  Fresh mud sucks on my shoe. I rip it free. I barely feel the iciness of the Will Stone as it warns me of grinlers. I will them back to the monster realm with a single hard thought, and in seconds the stone warms.

  I breathe deeply, both to fuel my already sore body and to fill the open chasm in my chest. The air doesn’t help the latter.

  I curse him. I curse him with every obscenity I know, which isn’t many. I curse him with every step of my feet and shudder of my shoulders, with every drop of rain that dilutes my path.

  I needed it to live.

  I shake my head and curse my foolish interest in mystings and the monster realm. Where would I be now if I had never crossed into the glade that night, where Maekallus was a heap of gasping tar? If I’d waited another half day, and let him perish? I’d have a full soul. I’d have been with my father when he fell ill. I’d be able to look Tennith in the eye, happily.

  And Maekallus would have been consumed by the blight.

  A dark, twisted image fills my mind until it’s all I see. Maekallus, melting, devoured by a realm he couldn’t escape. His skin liquefying into tar. His yellow eyes desperate and pained. The sound of his breathing . . . even my father’s sickest breaths couldn’t match that sound. My nost
rils burn in memory of the smell. I trip over a stone.

  I think of the blackness that oozed from the cut on my hand—the cut I thought tied my fate to Maekallus’s—and imagine it seeping from my every pore. Imagine it bubbling and burning and popping, filling my eyes and ears and nose—

  I gag, then choke on rain. It forces me to stop, to clear my lungs, to breathe until I can convince my weary legs to move once more.

  Even then, Maekallus’s suffering had moved me. It was my fault he’d come, at least partially. It was I who drew the summoning circle, who saw beyond his invisibility.

  And yet . . . he’d been shocked to consume only part of my soul. He’d been willing to kill me, just for another few days of health. Had he also known a soul wouldn’t break the spell? Undoubtedly, yes.

  But he’s changed.

  I curse the thought just as I cursed the mysting, but it sticks to me, resolute. Yes, I can admit that much. Maekallus has changed. Every kiss changed him, and not only physically. I remember being shocked at his first thank-you, his first apology. Like I was single-handedly making him more human, inside and out.

  But how much can a soul change a person? A mysting? For even a human soul could not recreate him into a human. He’d already been that once. The blood of bastards.

  And what happens if he descends? Leaves? Consumes the soul I’ve given him? Will he not revert back to a pure narval, a monster from the other realm? Will he forget all he’s felt here?

  Will he forget me?

  Do you think I’m a monster?

  I remember the look on his face when he’d asked. The sorrow, the desire. The way he stepped into that circle and made himself look human to . . . what?

  My steps slow. I’m so tired; I could lie right here in the mud and foliage and sleep, but the nightmares whisper from underground, and I rub wakefulness into my eyes. I force myself forward again, gauging the distance to my home. Rubbing the hurt in my chest through my coat, wishing I could reach the emptiness deep within and stuff it with . . . something.