The Trubungco's Ring

CHAPTER 4: EMPTY-HANDED

There was nothing to eat that wasn't already gone by the second night.

Karl stood over the empty larder for longer than made any practical sense, as though staring hard enough might conjure a loaf of bread or a wedge of cheese out of bare shelves. It didn't. There was a small jar of honey, half-empty, and a handful of dried peas that would need soaking overnight before they were of any use to anyone, and that was the whole of it.

His father was awake in the other room, propped up against the wall with Maren's syrup jar close at hand, and Karl could hear him trying to breathe quietly, the particular kind of quiet a person adopted when they didn't want their child to hear how much effort it was costing them.

"Karl." His father's voice, when it came, was gentler than Karl had expected. "Come sit. You've been standing in that doorway for an awful long while for a boy who isn't finding anything back there."

Karl went and sat on the edge of the mattress, the peas still in his hand, useless until morning.

"There's honey. And peas, if I soak them tonight."

"Peas will do fine."

"They won't," Karl said, sharper than he meant to. "You need real food. Meat, or bread, something that'll actually—" He stopped himself, embarrassed by how much heat had come into his own voice.

His father studied him for a moment, the way he sometimes did when he suspected there was more to a story than his son was offering. "You went back into the forest today."

"I told you. The wood didn't work out."

"That's not what I asked." His father's eyes moved, slow and deliberate, to the torn sleeve Karl had rolled up and thought he'd hidden well enough. "That's a fresh tear, and a fresher cut underneath it, unless I've badly misjudged the color of a bruise healing."

Karl's hand went instinctively to cover the sleeve, a full beat too late to matter. He considered lying again — a fall, a snagged branch, anything simpler than the truth — and found he didn't have it in him, not with his father looking at him like that, tired and afraid and trying so hard not to show either.

"There was a serpent," Karl said. "Guarding a nest. I didn't see it until I was right on top of the eggs. It attacked, and I—" He made himself say the rest of it plainly, the way he hadn't quite managed to even in his own head yet. "I killed it. With the axe. I didn't mean to go that far, I just — it wouldn't stop, and I was scared, and then it was over and I ran, and I left the wood I'd already cut lying there because I couldn't make myself go back for it."

The silence that followed lasted long enough that Karl started to wonder if he'd made a mistake telling the truth at all.

"You're not hurt worse than the sleeve says?" his father finally asked.

"No. Just the one cut. It's shallow."

His father let out a breath that seemed to carry more relief in it than the words themselves.

"Then that's the only part of this story I care about tonight." He reached over, slow with the effort it clearly cost him, and rested a hand briefly on Karl's shoulder. "A serpent guarding a nest isn't a monster, Karl. It's a mother protecting what's hers, same as any creature would. What happened today isn't a thing to carry pride in, and it isn't a thing to carry shame over either. It simply happened, and you survived it, and tomorrow you'll have to decide what you do with that."

"Tomorrow I have to go back," Karl said. "There's no wood. No coin. I can't just stop going into Briarwood because I'm frightened of it now."

His father was quiet for a long moment, and when he spoke again, his voice had gone thinner, worn down by more than the cough. "I know you have to. I wish more than anything that you didn't." He looked, briefly, like he might say something further — some warning, some piece of advice Karl could see forming behind his eyes — before the moment passed and he simply patted Karl's shoulder once more and let his hand fall back to the blanket, exhausted.

"Eat the honey tonight," he said instead. "Save the peas for tomorrow's supper, once you've had a full day to recover properly. One night going a bit hungry won't hurt either of us. It's not the first time, and I doubt it'll be the last, this winter or any other."

Karl nodded, throat tight in a way that had nothing to do with hunger, and went to fetch the honey jar, and the two of them shared it in near-silence, spoons scraping against old clay, the cottage settling into the particular quiet that came after a hard truth had finally been spoken aloud between two people who loved each other and had very little else to offer one another that night.

Later, lying awake on his narrow pallet by the hearth, Karl turned the day over and over, searching for some version of events where he might have done something differently — approached slower, made more noise to warn the creature off, found some way through the whole encounter that didn't end with something dead in the dirt and a nest of eggs that would never hatch.

He found no better version. Only the one that had actually happened, and the axe still faintly stained despite his scrubbing, propped by the door for tomorrow.

He didn't yet understand that tomorrow's trip back into Briarwood would answer his search for a different outcome in the cruelest way possible — because somewhere in that dark, ancient forest, something with far more reason to hate him than fear him was already waiting, patient and furious, for the boy who'd left him a widower.