Exile

XVI

She knew she could not outrun them. She knew too that she did not need to. Through all her life, one thing only had been unchanging, constant: she was a Clever. She had denied it and hidden it. No longer.

Her body ran and staggered and stumbled. Her mind took the raw stuff of the Autumnal entelech and made real one of the countless possibilities it carried within it. She shaped a mist, thick and heavy. She wove it from the air and called it forth from the trunks of the trees. She wreathed herself in it so that her very passage through the forest laid it in thick banks amongst the trees. It flowed behind her like a sluggish river and spilled over every hump and hollow of the ground and sent tendrils curling up into the canopy.

The mist was so dense it swallowed all sound. She heard only her own footfalls and ragged breathing and the cracking of twigs beneath her feet. Behind, there was only silence. As if the world there had ceased to exist, erased into a still, grey fog. She ran on, and everything disappeared in her wake.

Without Ammenor, she could not be certain which way to go. It hardly mattered. Her vision blurred, as if the mist she had summoned was leaking into her own eyes. The only thing that was important was putting distance between her and the wolves behind her.

The ground began to fall away and she found herself leaping, almost falling, as her own weight rushed her on and on. She brushed against tree trunks that flashed past her. She reeled and almost fell time and again. Yet she did not slow. Not even when her lungs and throat began to burn in their desperation to feed her body with air. She staggered into a wide and rocky stream and went flailing across it in plumes of icy water.

The trees thinned and she ran on and up, her leggings now wet and heavy. Every muscle cried out. She let the entelech go and her body shook with its passing. She stumbled – she could not run any further – onto a moor of heather and grass. There were fewer trees here. She had left behind the forest, wrapped in its silent shroud of mist.

There at last she slumped against the bole of one of the pines. She leaned on it, and on the staff she held in her other hand, and panted. Gasped for a renewed vigour that would not come. She felt like she might be sick.

She did not know how long she stayed there, for time slipped away from her. She was not even sure what gave her warning. It might have been a sound or a glimpse of movement. It might have been nothing but chance that made her look back the way she had come just as a lone Huluk Kur warrior came trotting into sight.

‘Come on, then!’ Wren cried, pushing herself a little unsteadily from the tree.

It was the man who had killed Ammenor. She thought so at least: her vision was still not clear.

‘I’m glad it’s you,’ Wren said to him, knowing he would not understand or care. She cared though, and that gave her some strength to call upon. It gave her the will to suffer just a little bit more, and to bend the Autumnal to her purpose one more time.

He closed on her with determined strides, no hint of hesitation. He had both hands on his spear and held it level with Wren’s stomach as he drew nearer. She allowed him to come within a dozen paces and no further.

She made small movements with her free hand – reaching and grasping – the more easily to envisage her desire. It was hard to tell whether that really helped or not, but she got what she wanted.

Arms of mist came over the Huluk Kur’s shoulders. The vapour masked his face, taking hold so firmly that he jerked to a halt and reflexively dropped his spear. He raised his hands and tried to claw his way free but it was only fog that held him and his fingers passed through it as if it was not there.

Wren imagined the mist penetrating his eyes and his mouth and nose. Writhing its way into him. She heard him scream. The sound was muffled. She blended decay into the mist. Rot and the maggots that fed on it. The softening and browning, the melting and the eating by which flesh became earth. He screamed again, a sound that quickly faded away.

The Huluk Kur slumped to his knees. His arms hung limply at his sides. Wren turned her back. She did not want to see what would be revealed when she eventually allowed the mist that hid his features to dissipate. This was the first man she had killed with aforethought, and without a hint of regret afterwards. That did not mean she liked it.

She walked away.

There had to be balance and exchange. Something had to go back into the formless expanse of the primal entelechs. All this exertion was too much for her. Her body was emptied. Her mind spun and thinned. It was only some time – too late – after she had left the corpse behind her that she realised she should have taken the spear. It might have been of use, but it had not even occurred to her. Her thoughts were blunt and broken things.

Dizzy, she blundered half-blinded into a new stretch of forest and soon enough her foot found the edge of a thick root, slid over its slick, wet surface and twisted as she fell heavily.

She lay there, dazed, staring up through the canopy for a time. It would be easy to remain where she was. Easier by far than the alternative. She hauled herself to her feet.

As soon as weight was on her ankle, pain shot through the joint and up the sides of her shin. And she laughed.

‘Of course,’ she said to the forest. ‘Why not?’

Leaning on her staff, she could make a sluggish kind of progress. She imagined herself, lame like Ammenor, as a wounded deer. Hounded. How fitting and entirely of a piece with the world’s bleak humour it all felt. The wind had only been blowing in one direction from the moment she stepped onto that cursed barge on the Hervent. Of course she found herself hobbled. Of course.

She discovered that she was not afraid as she struggled on among the trees. She was angry that her hopes and dreams had become dust so completely and quickly. She was filled with bitter loathing for the savages who had carried death onto this high ground and tormented by the thought that she might have led them to Ammenor. But she was not afraid. Instead, she was finding within herself an answer to the world’s casual cruelty. If she was to die out here in the wilds, it would be as herself. For perhaps the first time in her life she could be wholly and completely what she had for so long hidden. A Clever. A powerful one.

Ammenor had clearly thought her abilities unusual in some way. He had been impressed by what she had done without training or practice. Very well. She would put his judgement to the test. The Huluk Kur would yet find this deer was a terrible quarry, with antlers sharp as knives and hoofs that broke stone.