The safehouse is eerily quiet when Nauraa returns from town in the afternoon, the shadows just starting to lengthen as the sun dips behind the trees. No horses outside – no fire, no lamps burning, no food cooking, no voices.
“Hello? Is anyone there?”
No one answers.
The girl sets her baskets down and starts down the hall — perhaps Ahnen and the woman had both gone out after she left this morning and were delayed. Surely that was it.
Ahnen’s door is unlatched, and when she pushes on it, it swings open to reveal the room empty and the bed made up. None of his gear, nothing. The shelves are empty, so is the chest of drawers. Now truly worried, she goes to check the woman’s room — it is the same, she realizes, the bottom of her stomach sinking further. Surely she had missed something. There had to be a note, a message, some sign that they were coming back. She scours the house, running between rooms as though somehow she might catch them in the middle of the cruel prank.
There is food left in the pantry, though some of the supplies the woman had brought with her are gone. The place is deserted except for her room.
Not sure what else to do, she sits down at the dining-table, still hoping that someone might walk through the door and prove that the whole thing had just been a misunderstanding.
She had been partially relying on the young hunter’s odd jobs that brought in coin for the pair of them – and supposedly, they were saving that to buy supplies for her journey home. He was going to teach her to fend for herself. No such luck now. She will never make it back herself, and Ahnen is gone, along with his promises. A lump forms in her gut, something uneasy and nauseating that threatens to crawl up the back of her throat. He had abandoned her, and she is stuck here. Alone.
Not completely alone, she thinks, almost independently of herself. There’s Orenn. He would help.
But Orenn is no adventurer, and his family has enough mouths to feed, even if they were willing to let her stay with them. No, pride will not let her ask him for help, and her mother’s voice floats into the back of her head.
Make yourself useful rather than sitting there being sorry for yourself.
There are notices of all sorts posted around Bree-town — perhaps she can make one of her own, find someone traveling north, or even someone willing to teach her to use the bow and knife resting in the corner of her room. If she lets a room or two in the house she can save the money she makes from her dresses and jewelry to prepare for the journey herself, and once she has learned enough to stay alive, she can go home.
For now, though, the empty house creaks as the wind picks up and the sun sets. No one is coming home.
Her initial burst of resolution gone, the girl walks to her room as if still in a dream and sits on the edge of her bed. She doesn’t want to lay down, doesn’t want to sleep, doesn’t feel like making food or working on the mending she had taken for the week. She wants to cry — she can feel it burning its way up from her chest, and the tears will come soon, but for now she only feels…blank, like the unnatural stillness of the water just before a storm.
What did I do to make him leave? He said he’d stay. He meant it. I think he meant it. Why would he not tell me? Why come all this way only to leave me here? What did I do?
Mama said not to trust these southerners. I should have known. He said he’d stay, and he lied.
And then the tears come in waves, great heaving sobs so strong at first that she can hardly get a breath in again. She cannot put words to the feeling, despair and anger as great as the yawning fissures in the huge glaciers of the north — too wide to cross, too deep to scale.
Nauraa gets very little sleep that night. The dark of the house seems more absolute now, the sounds of the beams settling more ominous, the wind more forlorn, and she drifts into an uneasy dream that quickly turns sour. Ahnen is there, on a dock by the great lake where they had first met, and she calls out to him, runs toward him — but he hardly turns to look before he dives into the water and disappears. As she reaches the end of the dock, there is no sign of the man in the water. Something is wrong, the water too blue or the sun too bright, an uncomfortable feeling that the edge of the dock is the point of no return. She cannot go back, though some small conscious part of her brain screams that she needs to. She falls to her knees, leans over the edge to search the water for her companion-
A droplet disturbs the surface, then another, a red stain spreading where she leans over.
Don’t look in the water. Don’t look in the water. Don’t look in the-
There is a body below the surface, pale and still, its throat mangled as if torn out by a wild creature. Ahnen.
And then in the deepening red, her own reflection. Hers, but yet not quite. The eyes red instead of warm brown, the mouth too wide with too many teeth. She reaches to her cheek and feels a stabbing pain below her eye — claws more beast-like than human tear at the skin and leave bloody trails. And her neck — oh gods, her neck, a bloodied mess like Ahnen’s as though she had inflicted the same fatal wound on them both. She reaches for the body in the water in disbelief and it is suddenly farther away, and she is falling, falling, falling-
And then awake in her own bed, slightly damp as though she’d broken a fever and with an earring digging into her cheek where she had rolled over. She touches her face hesitantly. Nothing. Still slightly sticky from sweat and tears. Her neck — fine. A bad dream, then, though she cannot shake the uneasiness even fully awake.
She spends the rest of the night with a lamp burning next to the bed, unwilling to close her eyes or let darkness encroach on the room again.
What did I do? What didn’t I do? Why would he break his promise and leave? What could possibly have gone so wrong?
Every word she’d said to him runs through her head unbidden, every conversation, every joke, as though she could piece together an answer from the wreckage, find enough scraps to cling onto. Deep down, though, she knows that the answer is simpler and more painful. He was a young man, impulsive and irrational, and he had gotten bored. Stuck. Tired of having to play the protector. He’d found a better adventure, and a companion who could keep up with him rather than trailing along behind.
Was I too much of a burden? Or was he too immature to keep his word?
A bit of both, she suspects, not that it matters now. He is gone, and she is still here, and unanswered questions will not keep her warm or safe or her stomach full or look after her animals. Tonight, she will write a notice, and tomorrow, she will go to Bree and begin to find her way out of this mess.
