Page 59 of The Shape of Silence

She sighed now as the needle passed through the fabric of the cloth again and again with a soft whisper. Outside, somewhere deeper in the forest, a horse whinnied.

Tomorrow morning, she thought, he would leave.

She thought she understood what was coming next. Some man named Lucas Thain approached with several hundred more men, and once their forces joined, Morggán and the others would ride against the English army moving northward.

He would leave. He had responsibilities beyond this forest and this hut and certainly beyond her.

It was for the best, she told herself. Truly. What possible future could exist between them beyond this strange accidental crossing of lives in the middle of a forest—and apparently during wartime? Morggán belonged to this brutal, fractured country in a way she never would. He discussed troop movements and supply wagons and battle positions as naturally as she once might have discussed gym class or the fried chicken made by Maria, her family’s cook.

His life was larger than this place, larger than her quiet existence in the woods. A man like Morggán was never going to belong to a small forest house—or the woman living inside it.

Avery told herself all of this with severe practicality, as though reason alone might blunt the ache already beginning to form beneath her ribs. Evidently today had been a day of many firsts: the first time she had screamed at a grown man, the first time she had fought one, and the first time she had been kissed. Yet none of those things disturbed her so profoundly as the thought that Morggán might simply ride away tomorrow morning and vanish from her life as suddenly as he had entered it.

Then, despite knowing it was a miserable direction for her thoughts to take, she began imagining what the house would feel like after he left.

Of course, she wasn’t concerned about the absence of soldiers all around her, or even the return of silence to the forest, but the absence of Morggán within the house itself. She had some premature fear that she would miss him—and then had to wonder if she would have worried as much if not for the kiss. She chewed her lip, further torturing herself, trying to imagine what she might miss the most—his large figure ducking beneath the doorway? His deep voice and absolutely knee-knocking accent when speaking English? The steadiness of his breathing across the small room from her each night? Maybe she would simply miss him, and his company, even as half the time he set her on edge.

The realization unsettled her deeply. Before Morggán, she had not considered herself lonely—or she’d not allowed herself to be lonely. Solitude was simply the shape of her life, familiar enough after so many years that she rarely examined it closely. Yet now, imagining the house returned entirely to herself again, she felt not relief but a growing hollowness she could neither reason away nor comfortably name.

When the man lived, they had shared their days though more often than not there was silence, but that too had been shared. When the man was gone, Avery had not consciously thought, I am alone now, but she had felt the difference immediately in the way the silence itself went unanswered.

And after only a week of Morggán occupying the house beside her, Avery found herself troubled by the possibility that the silence might no longer fit her as comfortably as it had once he was gone.

Annoyance stirred almost immediately afterward, directed partly at herself and partly at him. It seemed profoundly unfair that one injured man could stumble bleeding into her carefully contained existence and disrupt it so thoroughly in little more than a week. He had altered the atmosphere of the house simply by inhabiting it.

She didn’t like that he had done that.

And now, she fervently wished that he hadn’t kissed her.

Outside, voices suddenly rose around her house and deeper into the trees, some sharp enough to pull Avery fully from her thoughts. Charlie sprang to his feet at once, ears high and alert, his tail beginning to strike rapidly against the floorboards.

At first she thought perhaps some disturbance had broken out amongst the men, but then she heard it properly beneath the voices and felt it under her feet: horses. Many horses.

The sound came gradually at first, muffled by the forest and damp ground, but it built with startling speed into something unmistakably larger than the scattered movement of Morggán’s company.

Avery rose immediately from the table, her pulse climbing hard as, for one anxious moment she wondered if the English had turned the tides and were now approaching.

Charlie hurried to the door ahead of her with excitement rather than alarm, whining low in his throat as Avery lifted the latch and stepped cautiously outside, pushing Charlie’s nose back as she tucked him inside and pulled the door shut. The doorway faced the grasslands and the south, but the sounds were coming instead from deeper amongst the trees to the southeast. Avery crept carefully around the front corner of the house until the forest beyond the clearing came partially into view.

Only then did she begin to relax.

Men moved quickly through the camp, but not with panic. No one was lunging for weapons or scrambling into saddles. Instead, she saw soldiers turning expectantly toward the trees, some already grinning or calling greetings toward the approaching riders while others moved to make space amongst the horses and fires.

Relief loosened in her chest.

Lucas Thain and his army had come, she guessed.

The sheer scale of the approaching force flustered her immediately. Morggán’s men had already altered the feeling of the forest around her home; this sounded larger still. As the noise continued swelling through the darkening forest, Avery found herself picturing every stretch of familiar ground claimed by strangers—the stream, the game trails, the narrow path toward the hollow, even the quiet spaces between the trees where she had once walked without thought or caution.

As she slipped back inside the house and lowered the latch firmly into place behind her, she told herself she was glad they were all leaving in the morning. The forest would belong to her again. The silence would return. She wanted the silence, the silence returning would be good.

The thought brought much less comfort than she had hoped for.

***

By the time Lucas Thain’s army finally arrived from the southeastern forest, dusk had deepened enough that the woods seemed to swallow much of them whole before releasing them gradually into the spare but relatively greater light directly near Avery’s house. Morggán stood near the remains of the supper fire watching the long arrival take shape, the shifting silhouettes of riders threading carefully through the dark timber in uneven columns. The forest itself seemed to move with men. He glanced toward the cottage, relieved that Avery was tucked within and did not witness this, having some fairly confident idea that she wouldn’t like it, not a wee bit.

The sound differed from that of smaller companies moving camp. There was weight behind the Thain army, same as Morggán would have if he traveled with his full army. The churn of hundreds of hooves became a low continuous tremor beneath the surrounding noise of tack, leather, muttered orders, and exhausted horses blowing hard through their nostrils after long miles. Somewhere deeper in the trees a mule protested sharply, while units separated and filtered toward places suitable for camp.