My five guardians

Chapter 7. A Village.

They left the camp before the sun had fully risen.

Thaeren took it down with the same meticulous care he’d used to set it up, rolling up the tarp, reorganizing the bundles, and erasing whatever traces they’d left behind with an efficiency that suggested this wasn’t the first time he’d needed to disappear from a place without leaving too much of himself behind. Indira watched him do all that while she finished the last piece of bread from the night before and decided that Thaeren was the kind of person who had anticipated most possible emergencies and had a protocol for each one.

Conall carried the heaviest bundle without anyone asking him to and without mentioning the bandaged side that occasionally made him clench his jaw when he thought no one was watching.

Although Indira was watching. But for the sake of the wolf’s ego, she said nothing.

The path eastward began among trees whose leaves still retained some of their natural color, but it grew narrower as they went on until it became more of a hunch than a trail. Thaeren carried a hand-drawn map on the last pages of his notebook, filled with notes in small, cramped handwriting that Indira couldn’t read from the angle she was walking, but which he clearly understood perfectly, since he consulted it so quickly.

The blue lights on the ground had dimmed in the daylight. Almost invisible now, they were only perceptible in the deepest shadows among the roots, like embers waiting for darkness to glow again. Indira saw them anyway. She no longer tried to convince herself they weren’t there.

They walked in silence for most of the morning. Until a musty smell filled their senses.

Indira couldn't place it right away. Something like something burnt, but not wood; something rotting, but she didn’t know what. Conall stopped before she could ask and raised his head with that gesture everyone else used to make when their instincts processed information that a mere human couldn’t process in the same way.

“There are people.” His voice was low. “Go ahead. To the left.”

“The village of Merrath.” Thaeren glanced at the map without coming to a complete stop. “According to my master’s notes, it was on the edge of the safe zone.” A brief pause. “It was.”

Conall looked at her. Then he looked at Thaeren.

“We’ll go around.”

“Yes.” Thaeren was already folding the map.

Indira said nothing. She kept walking.

But the path that circled the village of Merrath passed by a small crag overlooking the valley where the village was situated. When they reached that point, Thaeren kept walking without stopping; Conall did the same; only Indira stopped.

What lay below was not a functioning village.

Most of the buildings were still standing. The central market still had its awnings out—some of them, at least—as if someone had started the day intending to open for business and then something had abruptly put an end to that plan. There were people there. That was what took him a moment to process, because they were moving, but not the way people usually move. They moved as if their sense of direction had been severed, walking toward nowhere without moving in any specific direction. Some in human form. Others transformed, but they weren’t attacking each other aggressively; they were simply there.

And in the center of the square, where there should have been ordinary life, the roots in the ground pulsed blue with an intensity that was visible even in broad daylight from up here.

“Indira.”

Conall’s voice came from behind, low and direct.

She didn’t move.

There was a woman at the edge of the square, down below, who had once been a fox—that much was clear from the patches of reddish fur still covering her arms and the tail swaying behind her in a transformation that had been left hanging halfway. She was sitting on the ground with her knees pulled up to her chest, exactly as Indira had sat the night before by the edge of the camp, and she was staring at her own hands with an expression that Indira recognized before she could name it.

It was the expression of someone who no longer understood what they were seeing.

“Indira.” Conall again, closer now.

“How long have they been like this?” she asked without turning around.

Thaeren replied from her left, his voice having lost some of its usual cadence.

“Judging by the extent of the roots, weeks. Maybe a month.”

“And no one has noticed?”

Silence.

Indira thought of the village where she had spent twenty-three years. Of how she had learned not to expect anyone to come. Of how she had assumed that was a particular condition of her situation and not a more general characteristic of the world.

The blue lights on the plaza floor flashed, and she felt them in her chest like an echo, like something calling to her with the same insistence as the night before, but stronger now, more urgent, and for a moment—just a moment—she thought about going down.

Then the woman raised her head; if Indira had been closer, she would have noticed that her eyes were different from one another, one turquoise green, the other a dead black. The first spoke of the pain and how difficult it was for her to hold onto what little sanity she had left.

Indira took a step away from the cliff.

Then another.

Then she started running.

Conall stopped her before she realized she was teetering dangerously on the edge of a cliff; an arm wrapped around her waist from behind and lifted her off the ground with absolute efficiency—not roughly, but with no room for negotiation—and pulled her out of the way as Thaeren moved ahead of them with long, swift strides.

“Let me go.” Her voice sounded smaller than she intended.

“When we’re far away.” Conall’s voice came from above, calm, and he didn’t let her go.

Indira didn’t fight it.

The forest swallowed them up again, and the village of Merrath vanished behind the trees, but the blue lights Indira had been seeing from the ground in the square continued to pulse inside her long after Conall set her down and stepped back without saying a word.

Thaeren watched them both.

He took out his notebook. He wrote something. He closed it.

“There are more villages like that along the way.” His voice had regained its usual cadence. “My master documented four in this region.” A pause. “That was years ago. I don’t know how many more there are now.”

No one answered that. There was no answer that would do any good yet.

They kept walking east until the light began to change, and when Thaeren pointed to a spot between two boulders that offered something resembling shelter, the three of them stopped without arguing.

Indira sat down with her back against the cold rock and closed her eyes.

She saw the square. The woman with the hands she didn’t recognize. The eyes with nothing inside.

She thought that for years she had believed her problem was not having an animal form, but it turned out the problem was much bigger and had been going on for much longer, and that she was, according to a healer with a notebook full of inherited notes, the only person in the world who could do anything about it.

She wasn’t sure if that was a privilege or the cruelest thing that had ever happened to him.

She opened his eyes.

Conall was sitting a few yards away, looking down the path they had come from, with that stillness of his that wasn’t passivity but sustained attention. As if he were waiting for something.

“Do you think he’s following us?” she asked. She didn’t specify who she was referring to, but in her mind she was thinking of the people from the village. He didn’t ask either.

“Yes.” A pause. “But Aldric doesn’t do things quickly when he wants to do them right.”

Indira took a breath and processed that.

“How much time do we have?”

The blue eyes turned toward her for a moment.

“Enough.” And then he added, with a tone that wasn’t exactly calm, but came close. “For now.”

The forest around them remained silent, and somewhere among the trees, invisible from where the three of them stood, a shadow that belonged to none of them paused, watched, and waited.