Willow

Chapter Seven: What the Fire Knows

The fire had burned down to a steady bed of coals by the time Reyna spoke again, voice softer now than it had been all through dinner, the easy humor of the afternoon settling into something quieter as the dark pressed in close around their small circle of light.

"I never told you about my parents properly," she said, drawing her knees up beneath the blanket, eyes fixed on the coals rather than on Willow across from her. "Just camp stuff. Twelve years, the fences, all that. Not them."

"You don't have to." Willow said it easily, tending the fire more out of habit than need, laying a thin branch across the coals to keep them breathing through the night.

"I want to, though. Feels wrong, somehow, walking toward whatever's left of them without saying who they were first. Like they deserve that much before we find out." Reyna drew a slow breath, steadying herself. "My mother's name was Elena. She ran the garden — actually ran it, I mean, planning what went where every season, keeping seed stock through winters that should've killed it twice over. She used to sing while she worked. Old songs, ones she half-remembered from before, filling in the words she'd forgotten with whatever fit the tune. Constance used to sing along even though neither of them ever really had all the words right."

Willow listened without interrupting, letting Reyna find her own pace through it, the way she'd learned over these last few days that grief needed room rather than direction.

"My father was quieter. Practical. He and Grandfather Miles built half of what stood in that camp with their own hands — the well housing, most of the fencing, the roof over the communal hall before it came down." Reyna's voice caught slightly on the last part, thinking of that roof collapsed and burned, but she pushed through it. "He wasn't a fighter either. None of them really were, if I'm honest. We built that place to be safe, not to fight for it. Maybe that was the mistake. Maybe you can't have one without learning the other, out here."

"Maybe," Willow said, quiet, not offering false comfort where none quite fit. "Or maybe you just got unlucky, and building something gentle in a hard world isn't a mistake so much as it's a risk everybody who tries it has to take."

Reyna looked at her properly then, something grateful in the look, like the distinction mattered more than Willow perhaps realized. "And my brother — Eli — he's eleven, like I said. Loud. Climbs everything he's not supposed to climb. Wanted to be exactly like our father when he grew up, which mostly meant following him around with a toy hammer insisting he was helping." A small, aching smile crossed her face at the memory, gone as quickly as it came. "I need him to still be doing that. Being loud and climbing things and getting underfoot. I need that so badly I can't let myself think about the alternative for too long or I stop being able to walk in a straight line."

"Then don't think about the alternative," Willow said simply. "Think about the fences and the well and getting there. Rest of it sorts itself out once we actually know something instead of guessing at it."

Reyna nodded, wiping quickly at her eyes before the tears could properly fall, and drew a steadying breath, visibly working to shift the weight of the conversation before it pulled her under entirely. "What about you," she said, quieter, testing the ground of the question before committing fully to it. "You talk about your father all the time. Every lesson today, every story by the fire — it's always him. I've noticed you don't say much about your mother at all."

The question landed the way Willow had known, somewhere in the back of her mind, that it eventually would. She was quiet for a long moment, watching the coals shift and settle, deciding how much of this particular ground she was willing to walk Reyna through.

"She died," Willow said finally, flat in the careful way she reserved for things that still had teeth even years later. "I was thirteen."

Reyna's breath caught audibly, and she didn't say anything right away, just waited, giving Willow the same room she'd been given moments before.

"She got sick." Willow kept her eyes on the fire rather than on Reyna, finding it easier to say this way, the way confession always seemed to come easier to a flame than to another person's face. "Slow at first. Tired all the time, then sicker, losing weight even though we had food enough. My father tried everything he knew — herbs, what medicine we'd managed to scavenge or trade for over the years, keeping her warm and fed and resting. He was good at fixing things. Just wasn't ever going to be good enough for this one." Her jaw tightened slightly, an old ache surfacing despite the years between then and now. "He said it was radiation poisoning, near the end. Something in the ground or the water, maybe, from wherever we'd settled, or something she'd been exposed to as a kid right after the bombs fell and it just took this long to finally catch up with her. He never seemed totally sure himself. Just sure enough to stop trying things that weren't working and just... sit with her instead, toward the end."

"Willow." Reyna's voice had gone soft, raw with an empathy that wasn't performative, the particular ache of someone who understood loss intimately enough to recognize its shape in someone else's telling. "I'm so sorry. That's — I can't imagine, being that young and watching that happen to your mother, out here, with no way to actually fix it."

"Wasn't easy." Willow allowed herself that much admission, rare as it was. "Father held it together better than I did, I think, at least where I could see it. Kept teaching me things, kept us moving, kept us fed. Guess grieving properly was a luxury he decided he couldn't afford with a thirteen-year-old depending on him for everything." She exhaled slowly, something in her chest loosening slightly at finally saying this much of it aloud to someone. "He raised me alone after that. Ten more years, just the two of us, until he passed too."

"How did he—" Reyna started, then caught herself. "You don't have to say. I don't want to push."

"Not tonight," Willow said, and there was no sharpness in it, just a boundary drawn clean and simple, the kind Reyna had learned over these last days to respect without taking personally. "Maybe another fire. Not this one."

"Okay." Reyna nodded, accepting it easily, and reached out to rest a hand briefly on Willow's forearm, a small gesture that carried more weight than words might have managed. "For what it's worth — I'm sorry. For both of them. You didn't deserve any of that, and you sure didn't deserve to carry it alone as long as you have."

Willow looked at the hand on her arm, then up at Reyna's face, something complicated moving behind her eyes — gratitude, mostly, tangled up with the particular discomfort of being seen this clearly by someone she'd known less than a week. "Thank you," she said quietly, meaning it more than the brevity of the words suggested.

They sat with the weight of it a moment, the fire popping low, the valley beyond their small circle of light settling into the full hush of true night. It was in that hush, that particular held-breath quiet, that Reyna heard it — a branch snapping somewhere close behind her, sharp and sudden in a night that had otherwise gone still.

She barely had time to turn before Willow moved.

Willow's knife was already free of its sheath before conscious thought caught up with instinct, her body reading the sound and reacting before her mind had finished processing what it meant. She was on her feet, turning, knife low and ready, when the wolf came out of the dark at a dead run, gray and lean and clearly desperate, ribs visible even in the dim firelight, the kind of hunger that made an animal take risks it wouldn't otherwise consider.

It hit her before she could fully set her stance, jaws snapping for her forearm as she brought it up instinctively to protect her throat, teeth finding leather and flesh both as they went down together in a tangle of limbs and snarling fury. Willow's knife hand was pinned awkwardly beneath the animal's weight, and she twisted hard, trying to buy enough space to bring the blade to bear, gritting her teeth against the sharp, tearing pain lancing up her arm where teeth had found purchase.

Reyna scrambled backward on instinct, a cry catching in her throat, watching Willow wrestle with the animal in a blur of firelight and shadow that made it nearly impossible to tell where woman ended and wolf began. Panic seized her chest, cold and useless, until some sharper instinct cut through it — Willow's voice, or maybe just Willow's training, four days of lessons rising up through the fear.

"The bow," she gasped out loud to herself, hands already moving before her mind fully caught up, fumbling her own bow free from where it lay beside the blanket. Her fingers shook badly nocking the arrow, worse than they had all day, the stakes entirely different now than a rabbit in the scrub. "Come on, come on—"

Willow managed to get her knife arm free just long enough to drive the blade into the wolf's flank, a solid hit that made the animal yelp and momentarily loosen its grip on her forearm, but it recovered fast, jaws snapping again for her throat this time, and Willow's free hand shot up to grab a fistful of matted fur, holding the head back at arm's length with strength that cost her everything she had left to give.

"Reyna!" Willow's voice cracked out, sharp with real urgency now, all pretense of calm instruction gone. "Now! Anywhere you can hit it, now!"

Reyna drew back on pure instinct, no time left for careful form or steady breathing, and loosed the arrow into the chaos of firelight and struggling bodies with her heart in her throat and no real confidence it would find anything but empty air or, worse, Willow herself.

The arrow took the wolf just behind the shoulder, driving deep, and the animal went rigid atop Willow for one terrible, suspended second before its body sagged, weight going slack and heavy, the fight draining out of it all at once. Willow shoved the dead weight off her with a ragged, gasping breath, scrambling back from the carcass with her knife still white-knuckled in her fist, chest heaving.

For a moment neither woman moved, the only sound the crackle of the fire and both their ragged breathing, the valley beyond holding its silence like it hadn't just witnessed anything at all.

"Willow." Reyna's voice shook badly, bow still raised, arms trembling now that the moment had passed and left only the aftershock behind. "Willow, are you—"

"I'm fine." Willow's own voice came out rougher than she meant it to, and she pressed a hand to her forearm, wincing at the shallow tears in her sleeve where teeth had broken skin without doing worse damage than that. "Bites hurt more than they wound, this time. Could've been a lot worse."

Reyna dropped the bow and was at her side in an instant, hands hovering, unsure where it was safe to touch. "Let me see. Please, just — let me see it."

Willow allowed it, pulling back her sleeve to reveal a set of shallow puncture wounds along her forearm, painful but nowhere near as bad as the ragged tearing the wolf's jaws might have managed with better positioning. Reyna's hands shook badly as she examined the damage, but her voice, when it came, had steadied into something more purposeful.

"I have to clean this. Right now, before it has any chance to get infected." She was already reaching for the waterskin and the small tin of salve Willow had used on her own wounds five days before, some fierce, protective focus overtaking the panic now that there was finally something useful to do with her hands.

Willow let her work, hissing softly at the sting of water against broken skin, watching Reyna's face in the firelight — set with a concentration that hadn't been there five days ago, a competence born entirely out of necessity and four days of lessons that had, apparently, taken root faster than either of them had quite realized.

"You saved my life," Willow said quietly, once the worst of the cleaning was done, her voice carrying none of its usual dry deflection, just plain, unguarded fact.

Reyna's hands paused in their work, and she looked up, something fierce and a little disbelieving in her expression. "I didn't even know if I'd hit you instead. I just — I panicked, and then I didn't, and I just shot."

"That's the whole trick to all of it, same as I told you about the grouse." Willow allowed a small, genuine smile despite the pain still throbbing along her arm. "Feeling ready's a luxury. Being ready's the thing that matters. You were ready when it counted. That's all anybody can ask of themselves out here."

Reyna huffed something between a laugh and a sob, relief and adrenaline tangling together as she finished binding the wound with careful, steady hands. "I'm never going to hear the end of this, am I. First fish, and now first kill that actually saved someone's life."

"I'll allow you that one." Willow's dry humor crept back in, welcome and familiar, cutting through the last of the tension still hanging over the camp. "Historic moment. Might even mention it to someone, this time."

They banked the fire higher than they had all week, neither quite ready to trust the dark again so soon, and sat close together through the remainder of the night, watch shared in unspoken agreement rather than divided into separate shifts, two women who'd started the evening trading grief across a fire and ended it bound together by something sharper and more immediate than either of them had expected the night to demand.

Willow flexed her bandaged forearm slowly, testing the give of the wrapping, mind already turning over what the encounter meant beyond the pain of it. A wolf that thin, that desperate, hunting close enough to smell their fire without waiting out the night first — that spoke of a country picked over harder than the valley they'd left behind, game scarcer the farther north they climbed, predators bold enough to risk a fight they'd normally have avoided. Another fact to file away alongside the cart ruts and the burned symbol on the doorframe, another small piece of the larger picture neither of them yet had the whole shape of.

"You're thinking again," Reyna said, watching her from across the low flames, some of the fierce focus from moments before settling back into simple tiredness now that the adrenaline had nowhere left to go.

"Habit." Willow allowed a faint, wry twist of her mouth. "Wolf that desperate means the hunting's thin up here. Means whatever's ahead of us has probably been picking this country over a good while, animals included. Good to know before we walk any deeper into it."

"You get anything good out of nearly losing an arm?"

"Enough to be worth the bites." Willow shifted, wincing slightly as the movement pulled at the fresh wrapping, but didn't complain further, settling instead into a position she could hold through what remained of the night. "Rest, if you can manage it. I'll keep first watch a while longer, given the circumstances."

"Not a chance." Reyna's voice held no room for argument, surprising steel behind the exhaustion. "You just got bit fighting something with actual teeth. I'm not sleeping through watch after that, not tonight. We'll split it, same as always. You first, since you need the head start on rest more than I do, but I mean it — wake me when it's my turn. Don't try to be quietly noble about it."

Willow studied her for a moment, something warm and slightly surprised moving behind her tired eyes at the firmness of it, then nodded, conceding the point without further argument. "Deal."

They settled into an easier quiet after that, the fire crackling steady between them, the valley beyond holding its breath a while longer before finally releasing back into the ordinary sounds of a night that had, for now, finished asking anything more of either of them.