episode 4:Debt Unpaid
1964 Words
She had counted eleven words.
That was how many Caelan had spoken voluntarily without being directly asked in the forty minutes since they entered Ashwood. Eleven. She had been keeping track because she had nothing else to do while navigating tree roots in bare feet except catalogue things, and cataloguing things was what she did when she was frightened and refusing to show it.
Grey walked beside her. Warm . Steady.
She was beginning to appreciate the wolf more than the man.
"You're counting something," Caelan said ahead of her.
She looked up. "How did you know?"
"Your lips move."
She pressed them together. "They do not."
"They do." He didn't look back. "What are you counting?"
"Your words."
A pause. "Why?"
"To see how long you can go without telling me anything useful."
"And?"
"Eleven. Since the tree line." She stepped over a root. "It's impressive, actually. Most people fill silence. You seem to find it comfortable."
"I find it efficient."
"Of course you do."
He stopped.
She nearly walked into him again this kept happening and pulled up short two feet from his back. He turned slowly.
They were in a small clearing. And at the far edge of it, half hidden by a curtain of ivy, stood a cottage.
Low. Stone-built. Mossy-roofed. A woodpile stacked with precise geometry along one wall. A small herb garden along the front. A window with old, slightly warped glass that caught the last of the afternoon light.
It had been cared for. Tended. Loved, even, in the quiet way of people who love practical things practically.
"Yours?" she said.
"Yes."
"You live here alone?"
"When I need to think."
She looked at him. "Do you need to think often?"
Something shifted in his expression. Not quite a smile. The ghost of one.
"More recently," he said.
He pushed the door open and stepped back. She walked inside.
One room. Stone floor. Fireplace. A tables with two chairs that didn't match. A narrow bed made up with military precision. A shelf with practical things tin box, folded cloth, a plain knife.
And on the windowsill three smooth stones. Grey, dark brown, almost white. Placed with deliberate care.
She looked at them.
Didn't ask. Not yet.
Behind her he moved to the fireplace. Fire going in under two minutes she timed it. The room began to warm immediately and she felt, for the first time since the square, the cold leaving her bones.
She sat down in one of the chairs.
Became fully, properly aware of her feet.
She looked down. Filthy. Cut across the right sole. Bruised across both heels. She had been not-thinking about her feet for two hours and the not-thinking was finished.
"Your feet," he said.
"Are fine."
"They're not." He was already at the shelf, opening the tin. "Sit still."
"I don't need"
"I know." He crouched in front of her. "Sit still anyway."
She opened her mouth. Closed it.
Because the thing was and she resented this the fire was warm and she was exhausted in the way that lived in the bones rather than the muscles, the exhaustion of nineteen days in a cell followed by a burning and an escape and a forest, and she did not have the energy to argue about her own feet.
She sat still.
He worked without speaking. Clean water. A cloth. Something from a small bottle that stung and that she did not react to. His hands were careful careful in a way that sat strangely against everything else about him. The scar. The jaw. The eleven words in forty minutes.
She watched the top of his head and thought about her father.
About those white knuckles on the railing.
About the colour leaving his face.
King Aldric had signed her death warrant without trembling. She had watched him do it had watched through the cell window as the herald brought the document and her father read it and picked up the quill and signed it, and his hand had been perfectly steady. She had hated him for the steadiness of it. Had spent three days in the dark hating the steadiness of his hand.
But when he saw Caelan
"You were twelve," she said quietly.
He looked up.
"When your father died," she said. "You were twelve."
He went very still. "How did you"
"You said the debt was twelve years old. In the forest." She held his gaze. "That means whatever happened between your family and mine happened when you were twelve."
A long pause.
"Thirteen," he said finally. "I was thirteen."
She looked at him. At the weight of that number sitting on his face sitting on the set of his jaw and the line of his shoulders and the particular quality of his stillness.
"I'm sorry," she said.
He looked back down at her foot. "Don't."
"Don't what?"
"Don't apologize for things your father did."
"I…"
"You are not him." Certainly. "You never were. I knew that before I came."
She stared at him. "How?"
He didn't answer. Finished with her foot. Stood. Moved to the table.
"There are clothes in the chest under the bed," he said. "They'll be too large."
She looked at the ruined white dress. The silver moons on the cuffs her father's mark, still on her wrists.
"Thank you," she said.
He glanced at her. Like the words landed somewhere unexpected.
Then he sat down in the other chair and looked at the fire. And she understood that was all she was getting tonight. That the rest of it the debt, the fathers, the twelve years of waiting would come.
But not tonight.
She found the chest. Changed. Came back to the fire in a shirt three sizes too large with sleeves rolled to the elbow and trousers belted with a leather strip she improvised.
She sat down.
He looked at her once. Away.
The fire c***kled.
Outside Grey settled against the door with a heavy, satisfied thud.
The silence between them was not comfortable. But it was she searched for the word survivable.
For tonight, that was enough.
She was almost asleep when he spoke.
"Your mother didn't die of illness."
Her eyes opened.
The fire crackled. Grey breathed steadily outside the door. Caelan was still looking at the flames, his face unreadable.
"Caelan"
"Sleep," he said quietly. "I'll tell you everything in the morning."
She stared at the ceiling.
Sleep. He wanted her to sleep. After saying that, after dropping those six words into the dark like stones into deep water and then going silent.
She lay completely still and did not sleep at all.
- Writer
