Page 20 of The Shape of Silence

“Ye have a name?”

Her head bobbed up and down again, slowly this time, but she said nothing.

Morggán grinned despite his vexation. “Would ye like to share it?”

Her reply was slow in coming and was accompanied by a look of wonderment. And then a frown slowly evolved. “Avery.”

“A-very?”

“My name is Avery,” she said, firmer now. “Avery Mercer.”

“Avery,” he repeated.

She didn’t smile, not visibly, but something about her softened. She continued to stare at him. Her mouth opened as if she might say something, but she closed it after a moment, her thoughts left unspoken.

He waited, and returned her stare, but she didn’t ask his name.

And then curiosity got the better of him. Morggán raised a brow. “Why do ye scowl when ye say yer name?”

To his great bewilderment, her eyes welled with tears, though none spilled down her cheeks.

“I... I haven’t said my name—haven’t heard my name—in so... in such a long time.”

This gave Morggán pause. After a moment, he breathed out half a laugh and shook his head. “I’m nae sure what to make of ye, lass. What is it, then? What are ye doing out here?” Surely, there was some sordid tale to explain... her.

She said nothing—offered no explanation, didn’t clarify anything. She stared at him with no small amount of defiance, but even this, Morggán didn’t know how to interpret it. She was an enigma, a contradiction at every turn. He didn’t like puzzles, didn’t like things he couldn’t understand, people most especially. They weren’t to be trusted—couldn’t be.

The greater mystery, of course, was why it mattered to him what she was or wasn’t, whether she lied or not, how this came to be her life. This, her life: alone in the woods, in a house barely fit for shelter, quiet, narrow, held together by her own two hands, with neither kin nor protection.

“I don’t know how I came to be here,” she finally said, her attention returned to the bannock-like rounds she fried.

Morggán considered this, his scowl returning. A foundling then, was she nae? Or cast loose, then. With nae kin to answer for her.

He asked next, “Are ye waiting on something? Someone?” When only a shrug answered—and though he was a wee bit peeved by his own sharp curiosity, for he’d never asked another soul so many questions in one sitting, had never felt the desire to know more so much as he did now—he pressed, “Would ye have gone already? Elsewhere? If ye could?”

This caught her attention and lifted her blue-eyed gaze to his. “I would go home.”

Verra guid, and now he was getting somewhere. “And where is that?” He could and would make sure she got there, home—he owed her at least that much.

She repeated what seemed to be a standard response. “I don’t know.” She chewed her lip, her gaze fixed on him. “I don’t remember—or I only remember California. I’m not from Scotland.”

That explained quite a bit, but then barely anything at all—and he’d never heard of a place called California.

When he remained quiet now, contemplating her—the mystery of her—she seemed to grow anxious, and was happy then to change the subject, or at least not be the subject.

“Will you change the bandage?” she asked, inclining her head toward his thigh.

“Aye, seems a guid idea,” he replied, distracted for a moment longer before he added, “but I’ll need fresh linen and, have ye salve to spare?”

“There’s still some left,” she answered.

He nodded once, though his thoughts had already strayed from the matter of his injury, returning to her circumstance.

She might live five more years here—or twenty-five. It would depend on luck, on weather, on whether her hands stayed quick and her back unbroken. On whether hunger took her first, or fever, or a fall on wet stone with no one around to hear her. He found himself wondering how she would fare when she was no longer young, when strength came slower in the morning and pain lingered longer in the bones. Whether she would learn to trade usefulness for knowledge, skill for shelter, or whether she would simply fade, one hard season at a time.

And when she died—because every person did—who would know she had ever been here at all? Who would speak her name? Who, if anyone, would mourn her, or mark the place where she lay, or remember that she had once stood here and drawn breath and mattered?

The thought left him faintly irritated, for he could not recall the last time he had spared so much consideration for the existence of another soul. He set it aside with some effort, annoyed at the depth of his own curiosity, as unwelcome as it was unearned.