Outside the Gates by Molly Gloss

Author:Molly Gloss
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Saga Press

8

Broken Pieces

HE WOKE IN darkness. It was cold, and his body ached as if he had fallen out of his high lookout tree into the shallows of the White Stone River. There was a small movement at his side, and he remembered something of teeth and blood and dark dream shapes. But this beside him was only . . . Trim.

He began to shake. He burrowed his face against the wolf’s great chest, but even so, he could not stop the shaking.

“Vren,” the woman said in a quiet way; and when he saw that Shel was there too, he began to cry.

“I thought you were dead,” he said, now that it was not true.

He could not see her face clearly in the darkness, but he saw her lift her shoulders a little. She said, “When I came out below the falls, there was a big piece of the boat ahead of me on the water, and I caught hold of that and went downstream with it. Then when the wolf came near, I took hold of him by the neck and we got out of the water together.” She may have smiled. There was the sound of a smile in her voice. “I followed the wolf some of the time,” she said gently. “And some of the time he followed me. And we are here now.”

Vren wanted to say again that he had thought them dead. He wanted Shel to know what terrible days those had been. “I found a torn part of your cloak,” he said.

The woman was silent. Then for a second time, but in a different voice, she said, “We are here now,” and he knew that these had been terrible days for them all.

They lay together, the three of them, among the twisted black trunks of bare trees. The trees gave them no shelter. They only made thin lines against the sky, like cracks in a clay bowl. There was no sound at all, here, not even a bit of wind to rub together the twigs of the trees. It was a strange, silent country, colorless and dead-seeming.

The boy did not ask what this place was—why or how they had come here—but in a little while he had to ask, “Have we come far enough away from him?” because he could not yet quit shaking.

In the darkness he could see Shel’s face watching him. She answered slowly, telling more than he had asked, perhaps to keep from saying yes or no. “We stopped near his camp without knowing it,” she said. “And when the wolf cried, and you answered, I could not hold him. He went off into the trees, and I followed him as best I could, through the darkness. He had already brought you down to the edge of the camp when I came. So I carried you myself, into the ironwood. It is a dead place, and it seemed he might not want to follow us here. We went as far as we could.

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