The Way Home by Peter S. Beagle

Author:Peter S. Beagle [Beagle, Peter S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2023-04-04T00:00:00+00:00

V

I was the one to see the boy when he came, the first time.

We’d both been seeing the footprints for some mornings, circling us from every angle—dainty and precise, and almost human, except for having four toes on each, divided down the middle, like hoofs, two and two. They had a swagger about them; indeed, a number of the prints had passed impudently close to our sleeping heads, never rousing either of us. Dakhoun shook her fist at those, and swore in her own tongue. After that, she did not sleep at all for some while.

That same day was also the first time that she faltered on the trail. Except for the sand-seeping wound that never closed, just below her heart, I’d almost allowed myself to believe that she was neither in danger nor in pain from my blind, frantic attempt on her life. Seeing those strong legs stumble over a fallen log wasn’t what caught my conscience—it was the swift side-glance she stole at me to see whether I had noticed. The weakness never recurred, not then; if anything she increased our pace, and by now I knew her better than to suggest slackening it, or even resting briefly. But there was no disguising my knowledge, or my fear.

That night, sitting across the fire from me in a vine-shrouded clearing, she said, out of a faraway silence, “It is plain that we are never going to find your sister. You should go home.”

Until I opened my mouth to answer her, I had no notion of how deep my weariness ran, nor of how deeply it had bitten into my heart since that man who sang to himself had first laid his hands on me. “Where is home?” I asked her. “I’ve no more chance of finding my way back there than you have of finding Death waiting for you, as he promised.” That had been a joke between us once; now it had come as true as breath. All my quest for Jenia had brought me was rape and loss and exile; as for her own mission . . . well, Death had lied to her, as to so many, and that was all there was to that. I said, “I am responsible for you. I will turn back when you do, not a moment before.”

She stared at me. I fully expected laughter, a snort of mockery for claiming any sort of share in her fate. But she only sat staring, as though she had never seen me before, never hunted to feed me, nor ever kept me from tumbling straight down into a wild river. Her winter-pale eyes held me just as fast as her fierce grip had done, and I saw the stone then: the stone skeleton behind the slow-beating heart and the dusty blood still sifting from the wound that I had made. And I saw the parents who had chanced loving her, and because of whom—I’ve never doubted it—she had turned aside for a ravaged child.

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