Page 7 of The Shape of Silence

Her gaze roamed over what the horse carried, finding that much more interesting now.

Breathing through her mouth to escape the scent, she crouched down, and without touching the body any more than she had to, she tugged at the straps of the tack, testing their tightness, then cutting them where they would give her the most length. The leather came away stiff with blood and sweat, but still good. She coiled what she could, laid the rest aside in manageable lengths. The saddle itself was too heavy for her to lift, but the cloth beneath it came free easily enough, thick and still dry on one side. She folded that and set it aside with the leather.

The bags were easier to cut away from the animal. One, miraculously, held food, once-soft bread gone hard at the edges, a fist-sized piece of cheese, and strips of dried meat. She stared longingly at the small feast, not having seen anything so lovely in a decade. Even as her mouth watered, she wrapped them again and threw the bag over her shoulder. Even bread that was not very good, that might be hard as a rock, was still bread.

In the other saddlebag she found things that made her stop and stare with wonder. There was a huge plaid blanket, worn but whole, two spare shirts, a pair of stockings, and a fine leather belt. She found a small pot blackened with use, a whetstone, a bundle of cord, and flint and steel wrapped together in oiled cloth. There was a knife, better balanced and sharper than her own, and she tested its weight in her hand before she slipped it into her belt at her lower back. There were also a few small, dull discs that looked like ancient coins, and a folded sheet of thick paper that she opened, finding it filled with writing she could not decipher, writing that curiously looked as old as the coins, as if from some long-lost time. She took them anyway—paper burned and metal could always be used for something.

When she was done, she stood for a moment and looked at the horse again. It felt wrong to leave it as it was, but there was nothing she could do that would change what had already happened.

Charlie had come to her side, and she rested her hand briefly against his neck, then turned away and lifted the heavy saddle before dropping it back to the ground, deciding it would be easier to drag than to carry. With the two saddlebags flung over one shoulder, rather buoyed by what seemed gifts from heaven, she started back through the trees, the saddle rasping and bumping over roots and brush as she dragged it behind her.

She paid closer attention to the forest on the return journey than she had on the way out, her eyes moving constantly now between the trees ahead and the spaces between them, quite certain that horses with saddles—even dead ones—did not come without a rider.

The forest thickened steadily behind her house the farther north one went, the ground rougher there, darker beneath the pines and old firs where little sunlight reached the earth even at midday. The horse had lain well back in that deeper stretch, nearly a mile from home. Closer to home the woods opened slightly, enough for low brush and hazel to grow beneath the trees, making it easier to scan her surroundings as she trudged along.

By the time she glimpsed the house through the trunks ahead, her shoulder ached from the weight of the bags and her hands stung from the leather straps. She’d always supposed the man had chosen the spot carefully when he’d built the house, since it stood just within the forest’s edge. In front of the house—one hundred and thirty-six paces, she’d once counted for no particular reason—the forest ended, opening up into a long strip of grasslands that stretched as far as the eye could see left to right. Beyond the clearing, southward, the land rolled away into open hills and scattered stone, exposed and wind-beaten country she had never crossed and had no wish to. The forest belonged to her in a way the grasslands never could. A person crossing the southern hills or even traveling through the grasslands would never notice the house unless he already knew where to look. Once, while cautioning her never to set foot outside the forest, the man had said that from a distance the house was undetectable, that the forest appeared unbroken, a solid wall of green and shadow. Only from within did the narrow stretch of open ground reveal itself, the house sitting low against the trees with its weathered roof and thin trail of smoke.

There were evenings when she would sit on the worn stone near the break in the trees and watch the light shift across the tall swaying grass of the meadow. The red deer passed sometimes at a distance, moving in quiet groups across grassland, their shapes unmistakable against the pale sweep of grass. She had seen starlings settle in dark, shifting clouds toward the western rise, gathering and folding in on themselves before dropping to roost in the reeds below. On other days a sudden disturbance would ripple through the air—a large flock lifting all at once, wings flashing silver and black as it broke from the ground and scattered into the sky. Nothing else crossed that stretch.

The openness of the grasslands appealed to her even as she knew it was dangerous, being so exposed. But there was reassurance there as well—if anything moved across those hills, she would see it long before it reached the trees. The grasslands offered no concealment. Only the forest did.

She dragged the saddle into the clearing at last and let it fall beside the house with a heavy thud that startled Charlie. Even exhausted, she found herself grinning as she crouched beside the saddlebags again, hardly able to believe the strange wealth she had carried home from the dead horse in the woods.

Chapter Two

Morggán knew what wounds like the one in his thigh did to men who tried to walk on it, but after what he assumed was a full day passing, he tried anyway. He made it a few paces, leaning on a tree, then another, before the world went thin and far away and he came back to himself on the ground with his heart racing and his mouth full of dirt.

He made two more attempts that saw him gain hardly any ground but might have caused more damage to his side and thigh, and then finally stayed where he dropped.

His men would find him. They always did. Someone would come back along the line of flight, counting bodies, calling names, looking for those unaccounted for. He was their laird; they would not stop looking for him.

He slept and woke and slept again. The light shifted through the branches overhead. Thirst became a steady ache, and the pain in his side stayed steady and dull. When he looked at the wound again, pushing stiff, darkened cloth aside, he saw enough to know that it was not a thing to be taken lightly. The cut was high in his thigh, and deep, and it bled still though slower now. He’d bound it as best he could, and that was all he could do at the moment, telling himself that his men would come. He knew he’d be right pissed if he died in this manner, for Caerwyll’s ineptitude.

Once, he imagined he heard horses in the distance and tried to call out, but his shout was weak and obviously unheard, he reasoned, as the sound faded.

When he woke again, the light had shifted, thinning into long, pale bars between the tree trunks. He lay where he was for a time, listening to his own breathing and taking stock of his status—his weakness, as it were—and it was in that quiet that he noticed the change in the shape of the space ahead of him.

Just inside the line of trees, where the ground dipped and rose again, a figure stood where there had been nothing before, far enough back that the shadows reached worn brown boots, close enough that he could make out the line of shoulders and the fall of hair.

She was, unmistakably, female, wearing a tunic and breeches, he realized in the next instant.

She didn’t move, didn’t come forward or slink away. The leaves stirred above her, a branch shifted somewhere higher up, but she remained perfectly still. Unmoving himself, he stared at her, wondering if he only dreamed her and her wild mane, taking in a pair of wide eyes and her stance, which suggested she was ready to bolt at a moment’s notice.

He didn’t reach for his sword, but stayed where he was, measuring the distance between them, and when he spoke, the words came out rough and dry in the quiet, louder than he intended even as they were scraped thin by thirst.

“Dinna run.”

But she did just that.

Her eyes widened even more, and she gasped without sound before she turned and disappeared into the deep dark of the forest.

***

It took her a moment to understand what she was looking at.

He was sitting where he had either fallen or lowered himself, with his back against the trunk of a pine and one knee drawn up, the other leg stretched out at an angle that did not look comfortable. His head was tipped forward slightly, his hair falling into his face in a dark, untidy sweep that stirred when the breeze moved through the trees. His clothes were unlike anything she had seen close at hand before, not the rough patched layers she wore and not the plain things the man had once owned, but heavier and darker, with dark leather crossing his chest and rows of small metal rings that caught the light beneath the folds of cloth.

There was a sword at his side, though his hand was not on it, and a thick strap crossed his chest, the buckle dulled and scuffed. One of his hands rested against his thigh, the fingers curled as if they had closed in some distress. The other lay loose against the ground, palm up, empty. His boots were dark with mud, and what appeared to be blood covered the top half of one leg, not bright but dried and darkened, stiffening the cloth around it.