Willow

Chapter Two: The Night Before

The fire was smaller than Willow would've liked, but smoke traveled farther than flame, and she wasn't interested in announcing where three dead men had gone quiet in a draw a half mile back. She'd built it in a hollow between two boulders, banked low, more coal than blaze, enough to keep the worst of the cold off and cook what little she had left to cook.

Reyna sat close to it with her knees drawn up, wrapped in the spare blanket from Willow's pack, watching the flames with the particular focus of someone who'd spent the last several days learning not to look at anything else. The swelling along her cheek had gone down some since the afternoon, though the bruising had darkened into something uglier, and she moved like every part of her hurt in a different way — careful, testing, the way Willow herself moved after a bad fall on ice.

"You're not going to ask," Reyna said eventually, not looking away from the fire.

"Ask what."

"Why they had me. What I did." Reyna's voice was steadier now than it had been in the draw, food and water and an hour of not being afraid doing more for a person than Willow's salve ever could. "Everyone always wants to know what a woman did to end up like that. Like there's got to be a reason that makes it make sense."

Willow turned the last of the rabbit she'd snared that morning on its stick, fat hissing where it dripped into the coals. "Didn't figure there was a good one. There usually isn't."

That got something out of Reyna that wasn't quite a laugh, more air pushed out through her nose, but it loosened something in her shoulders all the same. "No. There usually isn't."

She didn't offer more, and Willow didn't push for it. Some things people needed to hand over on their own time, in their own order, and Willow understood that better than most — there were things about her own life she'd carried alone for ten years because nobody had ever earned the telling of them. She figured Reyna's story, whatever shape it took, would come out the same way, in pieces, when the fire was low and the dark made confession easier than daylight ever did.

Instead she pulled the rabbit off the fire, split it as evenly as she could manage with a blade that had seen better decades, and passed the larger half across without comment.

Reyna took it with hands that shook less than they had that afternoon. "You always split things even like this? With strangers?"

"Don't make a habit of taking in strangers." Willow tore into her share, chewing slow, savoring the fat and the salt she'd rubbed into it days ago. "You're the first in about two years that wasn't trying to rob me first."

"Comforting." Reyna's mouth twitched, not quite a smile, but close enough to be a start. "So what, this some kind of record for you? A whole day without stabbing somebody."

"Day's not over." Willow said it flat, and it took Reyna a second to catch the dryness in it, and when she did, something in her face cracked open just slightly — not quite a laugh, but the shape one might take if it had anywhere safe to land.

They ate in silence after that, the fire popping low between them, night settling over the valley in the particular hush it always took on once the wind died down with the sun. Somewhere off in the dark a coyote called, thin and lonesome, and another answered it farther off, and neither woman flinched at the sound. Some things about this world didn't scare you anymore once you'd been in it long enough. It was the quiet ones that scared you. The two-legged kind.

"Where'd you learn to shoot like that?" Reyna asked after a while, working the last of the meat off a small bone with more care than the portion probably warranted. "I've seen men carry bows around camp for show. Never seen anybody use one like you did today."

"My father." Willow said it simply, the way she said most things about him, careful not to let more out than she meant to. "He grew up before. Learned it as a hobby, he told me once — something people used to do for sport, if you can believe that. Shooting at paper targets instead of anything that mattered." She turned a stick over in her hands, watching the fire eat at the bark. "After, it mattered. He got good fast, the way people did when things stopped being optional."

"And he taught you."

"Soon as I was old enough to hold the string back without my arms shaking too bad to aim." Willow allowed herself a small, private smile at the memory — her father's hands over hers, patient in a way she hadn't appreciated until she was old enough to miss it. "Took me a year before I hit anything on purpose. Longer before I hit anything that mattered."

Reyna watched her with something like curiosity cutting through the exhaustion. "You talk about him like he's not around anymore."

"He's not." Willow's voice didn't change, flat and even, the practiced flatness of a wound long since scarred over rather than one still bleeding. "Neither's my mother. That's a story for another fire, maybe. Not tonight."

Reyna didn't push, which Willow appreciated more than she said. Instead the other woman pulled the blanket tighter around her shoulders and looked back into the flames, and for a while neither of them said anything at all, letting the popping of the fire and the distant coyote conversation fill in the spaces where words might otherwise have gone.

"Camp before was farther east," Reyna offered eventually, unprompted, like she'd decided some information deserved trading for what Willow had given up about her father. "Started with just four families. My parents were two of them. I was born the winter after the bombs, same as you, probably — everybody our age has that same look, like we grew up knowing the old world only as somebody else's ghost story." She paused, jaw tightening around some old grief Willow recognized on sight. "We moved twice before I was ten. Once for water, once because raiders found the first place and we couldn't hold it. Flathead camp's the third try. Was the third try."

"How long had it held?"

"Twelve years." Reyna's voice cracked slightly on the number, the weight of over a decade of careful building compressed into two syllables. "Twelve years of getting it right. Fences deep enough nothing could dig under. A well that never ran dry even in the bad summers. We had goats. A real garden, not just foraging. My little brother learned to walk on that ground." She stopped there, and Willow didn't ask her to keep going. Some numbers didn't need finishing to land with their full weight.

It occurred to Willow, watching the other woman stare into the coals, that Reyna's life before this had been the very thing Willow had never had — a fixed place, a community that had lasted longer than most people managed to survive out here at all. Willow's own childhood had been three people and however much ground they could defend on any given day, always ready to move if the ground stopped being safe. She'd never had twelve years of anything except her parents' voices, and even those had run out early. There was an ache in that comparison she didn't examine too closely, not with Reyna sitting right there carrying her own version of loss.

"They'll have moved if they could," Willow said instead, more gently than she usually spoke to anyone. "People who build something that lasts twelve years usually know how to survive losing a piece of it."

"Maybe." Reyna didn't sound convinced, but she sounded like she wanted to be, which was its own kind of progress for someone who'd spent the better part of a week lashed to a cart axle. "I keep telling myself that. Doesn't make the not-knowing sit any easier."

"No," Willow agreed. "It wouldn't."

It was full dark by the time Reyna spoke again, voice smaller than before, aimed more at the fire than at Willow.

"The camp's real," she said. "North of here, maybe two days' walk if we don't push. My people are still there. Or were, when those three took me — I don't know what's happened since." Her jaw worked, and for a second the flat careful stillness cracked into something rawer. "There were more of them. Not just the three you—" She stopped, swallowed. "Not just those three. I don't know how many. Enough that it wasn't a fight so much as it was just over before it started."

Willow watched her across the fire, weighing the shake in Reyna's hands, the tightness around her eyes that had nothing to do with bruises. "How many people at your camp?"

"Sixteen. Seventeen, with the baby that came in the spring." Reyna's voice thinned further on that last part, and Willow understood without being told that the not-knowing was its own kind of wound, maybe worse than the ones scabbing over on her face. "We built it up slow, over years. Fences, a well, a smokehouse. It wasn't much, but it was ours, and it was safe, or we thought it was, right up until it wasn't."

"You want to go back."

"I have to go back." Reyna finally looked up, and there was something fierce underneath the exhaustion, something that hadn't been beaten all the way out of her no matter what those three men had spent four or five days trying to do. "Whatever's left of it. Whoever's left of them. I have to know."

Willow said nothing for a while, feeding a broken branch into the coals, watching it catch slow at the edges before the flame took properly. She thought about the arithmetic of it — a two-day walk north into a place that had already proven itself dangerous enough to produce three men like the ones bleeding out in a draw behind them, toward a camp that might already be nothing but ash and silence, or might be worse than that, might be exactly the kind of trouble her father used to warn her away from with that same tired patience he used for everything.

She thought about the eleven arrows in her quiver, now eight.

She thought about how she'd been wandering two years without much reason beyond staying alive and seeing what was left of the world, and how staying alive had gotten easier over time and less like living.

"I'm not asking you to come," Reyna said, quieter now, misreading the silence for hesitation. "You've done more than—"

"I didn't say no." Willow's voice came out sharper than she meant it, and she eased it back a notch. "I'm thinking."

Reyna went quiet and let her think.

The truth of it, when Willow turned it over long enough, was simple enough to be almost embarrassing. She had nowhere in particular to be. She'd been telling herself for two years that the wandering was the point — that she was seeing the shape of this new world one valley at a time because nobody had made her stay anywhere, because staying had never once worked out for her. But sitting across a low fire from a woman who had somewhere to go, something worth walking two hard days for, Willow found the wandering suddenly looked a lot more like drifting. Like a boat with nobody holding the oars.

She didn't examine that thought too closely. There'd be time for it later, probably at three in the morning when sleep wouldn't come, the way these things always surfaced when she least wanted them to.

"Two days north," she said instead. "You know the terrain?"

"Some. I know the landmarks close to camp better than the way there. We came out fast, and it was dark, and I wasn't exactly taking notes." A ghost of that dry humor again, borrowed maybe from Willow, or maybe it had always been there and the beating had just buried it for a while.

"Then we go slow and careful, and you point out what you recognize when we see it." Willow banked the fire down further, coals glowing dull orange under a thin blanket of ash. "We leave at first light. Not before. You need the sleep, and I'm not walking anybody two days on legs that haven't rested."

"You're bossy for someone who lives alone in the woods."

"Somebody's got to be." Willow allowed herself the shadow of a smile at that, quick and gone. "Get some sleep. I'll take first watch."

Reyna didn't argue further, which told Willow plenty about how tired she really was underneath the bravado. She settled into the blanket, back to one of the boulders, and within what felt like minutes her breathing had evened into the slow rhythm of real sleep, the kind that came hard after days without any.

Willow sat with her back to the other boulder, bow across her knees, and watched the dark beyond the firelight the way she'd watched a thousand nights before this one. The valley made its usual sounds — wind combing through pine needles, something small moving through brush farther off, water somewhere working its way over stone. None of it worried her. She knew this language fluently, had known it longer than she'd known almost anything else.

What worried her, if she let herself name it, was the two days ahead and what waited at the end of them. She'd killed three men that afternoon without much more than a held breath and a steady hand, and she didn't regret it, not even a little, not with what she'd seen done to the woman sleeping a few feet away. But three men in a draw was one thing. Whatever had taken a camp of sixteen or seventeen people apart, fast enough that Reyna herself called it barely a fight — that was a different animal, and Willow had no idea yet what shape it wore.

She thought of her father again, the way she often did in the hours when the fire burned low and there was nothing left to occupy her hands. He'd never trusted numbers he couldn't see for himself. Don't walk into anything you haven't scouted first, he used to say, back when scouting meant checking a tree line for deer sign, not counting armed men in a camp that might not exist anymore. She intended to hold to that as best she could, whatever waited north. Slow. Careful. Eyes open the whole way.

She glanced over at Reyna, curled small under the blanket, face slack in sleep in a way it hadn't been all evening, and thought — not for the first time, but for the first time she let herself sit with it — that this was the longest she'd spent near another person since her parents had been alive to keep her company. Two years of solitary fires, solitary watches, nobody's breathing to listen to but her own. It felt strange in a way she didn't have good words for yet, sitting watch over someone else's sleep instead of just her own restless nights.

Strange didn't mean bad. She filed that thought away too, the way she filed everything else that didn't have an immediate use, and turned her attention back to the dark.

The fire burned down to coals, then to little more than a dull red eye in the hollow between the boulders, and Willow sat with the night the way she always had — awake, watching, waiting for whatever came next, only this time not entirely alone in the waiting.

Dawn came up pale and cold, fog sitting low in the hollows the way it had the morning before, before any of this had started. Willow woke Reyna with a hand on her shoulder, light enough not to startle her into anything sudden, and the two of them broke camp with a quiet efficiency that surprised Willow a little — Reyna moved slow, favoring her ribs, but she moved with purpose, rolling the blanket tight and lacing a spare pair of Willow's boots onto feet too bruised for the bare ground.

They ate the last of the jerky standing, splitting it the same way they'd split the rabbit, and Willow slung her quiver and checked the string on her bow out of habit more than necessity.

"North," Reyna said, looking toward the tree line where the ridge rose up pale gray against a paler sky, some of yesterday's fierceness back in her voice now that the night had given her body a few hours to remember what rest felt like.

"North," Willow agreed.

Neither of them said much else. There wasn't much else that needed saying. Whatever waited two days out, camp or ashes, sixteen people or none, they'd know it when they saw it, and no amount of talking around the fire the night before was going to change what they found.

Willow settled her bow across her back, checked the angle of the thin morning light against the ridge to get her bearings, and started walking. Reyna fell into step half a pace behind her, favoring her right side just slightly, and together they left the dead men and the cold fire pit behind them, moving north into whatever the valley had left to show them.