I wake in the night, shivering and slick from dreams of teeth and slug-like tongues. I hear Maeve calling for me, and I’m awake, my hands reaching for my knives.
Cillian sleeps on, breathing evenly, his face a peaceful blank. We were too tired to eat or do anything but swallow some water and scoop away damp leaves to find dry earth to rest on. Every night it’s easier to sleep beside him, to curl into the warmth of his body. That closeness helps the way we are during the day. I fold myself back into his warmth and shut my eyes again.
Later, I wake again and look around in the half light, surprised at where we are. From my memory, from my recollection of the country around us, with its markers of hills and small round ruined castles, we’re farther west than I’d have guessed. Home is not so far off now, and the thought pinches my stomach. If we don’t find the others in the next few days, will we turn back when we reach the sea and walk the road east again? Or will we keep going, Cillian and me, out past the waterfall in the little skiff to the island? I try to picture it—showing him the island and the house, eking out a life there, the two of us. Mam and Maeve would have been satisfied with it.
I leave him to sleep and go to the road to find space to stretch and exercise. I am stiff with the cold, and it takes a long time to warm my muscles, to feel as if I’m fluid and strong and supple. After a while, Cillian joins me, and he sits at the side of the road going through his pack and watching me as the sun comes up. He is keen to be off, I know, and he looks around him often. He should be watching for skrake, but he’s looking for his family.
“Are you going to teach me some of that?” Cillian passes me the canten.
“You want to learn?” I take a large swig. I feel okay. Good, nearly. My back pinches and screams a little less every day. The palms of my hands are more sore than skin, but they’ll heal too.
“You don’t have to live by the sword to die by the sword.”
I squint against the early sun. “What is that?”
“I heard it somewhere. You don’t have to know how to fight skrake to get killed by one, it means.”
I nod, considering, watching him while he packs up his gear again. It’s nearly like something Maeve would say.
Cillian’s nose is still swollen, and he’s skinny and tired-looking. He takes the canten off me and swallows deep drafts of water, with his head thrown back and his eyes closed. His neck is brown and dirty and soft but strong-looking, and I have an urge to put my lips to the soft skin.
Instead, I get up and get moving. Cillian follows me. We have a good system now. We go quickly and quietly. Fairly quietly. Cillian’s feet are noisy, and he cannot manage his breath well. I wish he’d copy me, like I tried to copy Maeve and Mam while I was learning, but he’s not paying enough attention, and in fairness, his nose is broke.
“Do you think they would have tried to leave markers?” I ask.
“Markers?”
It’s hard for me to be patient.
“Signs? Made from sticks, maybe, or messages written with stones or in the dust.”
“Written? With words?”
I nod.
“They can’t do that,” Cillian says, then, in the same careful tone, and looking at me with his head tilted and his eyes narrowed.
“Nobody taught you to read or write?”
“Not that many in Phoenix City know letters—not women, anyway.”
“Why not the women?”
“Women have enough to be doing,” he says, as if I am not one. The easy way he says it, as if the words haven’t passed through him but have only been skimmed over his surface.
Cillian is staring off toward the west. “They were going to stop and wait, and we’d catch them,” he is muttering. “That was the plan.”
Cillian goes over it aloud to himself as we walk the road, more and more often, with disbelief in his voice. “They’re ahead of us or they’re behind us; those are the only two options.”
Those are not the only two options, I think. There are way more. They could be anywhere at all. They could have seen something that tempted them off away from the road—water or shelter when they needed it. They could have been chased off, by skrake. They could have been worried about us and turned back—we could be moving in opposite directions. They could be injured. They could be dead. They could be bitten and lying in ditches, shitting themselves and turning slowly.
The longer we go on, the longer we don’t see them, the more likely these other options become, until eventually one of them will become a definite. I try to reach out with my senses, to intuit whether they’re still on the road. I can’t feel anything. My gut can tell me nothing, only it’s tight with hunger again. Cillian is talking.
“Nic would be worried that we haven’t caught up with her. Probably she moved fast at first. She always walks fast when she’s angry. Then she’d slow down. If she moved off the road at all, it wouldn’t be for long, and she’d stay somewhere she could keep an eye on things.”
The way he’s talking, I know he isn’t really telling it to me. He’s just saying the words out loud. And he’s right, so he is. We could go back or we could keep going forward.
“If we don’t find them…” Cillian starts again. He is angry with me for being calm when he cannot be calm. I know because of the way it was with Maeve and me. Cillian’s words sound like they’re being squeezed out of him. “If—” he tries again, and then a third time: “If we don’t…”
“We’ll find them,” I tell him, without really meaning to. “I’ll help you.” I try to sound soft.
His eyes are looking for mine, and I let him meet them. We look at each other for a long moment before I tear mine away.
“You’ll stay with me?”
“Yes. You’re the only person I know.”
He laughs a little, a messy, surprised laugh through his nose.
“If we leave signs for them like this, will they follow them?” I ask, going to the side of the road for a stick to draw an arrow in the dust.
He looks at it and thinks but only moves his shoulders up and down.
I try to imagine again what our lives would be like, intertwined, surviving together. His male presence on the island. I’d nearly forgotten these last few days that I should be afraid of him. I think about his face and hands moving around in the house, in the bedroom next to mine. The shape of him in the garden, his hands on the fruit.
Then I think about the way he held on to Nic, the way he kissed her, and her swollen stomach, the way he was with Aodh. He’d never believe, our whole life, that leaving them out here on the road was the right thing to do, even if they’re gone. My chest hurts, and I’m not sure I can distinguish the different pains anymore.
Our hands, between us as we sit side by side in the dirt, are so close. I could reach out and take his.
“We can’t keep going on like this,” Cillian says at last. “What will we do?”
“Quiet your voice,” I say. “We should rest a while, and then we’ll go on again,” I tell him. “We’ll leave arrows and go slower, we’ll look more carefully for tracks.” I try to talk like Maeve, like I know exactly what I’m doing, but the way Cillian looks at me makes me wonder do either of us believe it.
We walk west all morning, slowly and looking about us carefully. The road starts curling around the last hill, the last until the land flattens out and the road ends and disperses into littler ones, leading back to the beach, back home, and we climb it for the view at the top.
The country spreads empty and wide around us. To the west, we can make out a haze that hides the sea beyond.
“I’ll see can I find more water,” I tell him. He’s not listening to me, and we don’t really need water, but I want to stretch out on my own a little. I want space to think. Cillian has his hands in his hair, and he doesn’t sit, despite his exhaustion. Leaving him alone a little while may be no harm.
I work my way round the slope, breathing slowly and deeply. I listen hard for skrake, sometimes realizing that what I’m hoping I’ll hear is Danger’s padded trot. I keep waiting to feel him nudge his nose into the palm of my hand. I grieve for him. It is easier to feel that sadness than to think about Maeve, or my mother, even.
I sit a long time, longer than I meant, and watch the country around me. Here, there are no tall trees, only wind-swept shrub, low rock walls still exposed out of the dry brown earth. We’re closer than I’d thought.
The last time I was close to something I wanted, it didn’t go well for me, so it didn’t.
From here, I can just make out the broad gray strip of the sea. I wonder has Cillian seen it too. The day is bright and dry. I know I’m staying away too long, that Cillian will be anxious. Climbing the walls, Mam would have said. I try again to feel out for Nic and Aodh, for where they might be, for what happened to them. They’re close by, or else they’re dead. Would we go looking for their bodies, back along the road, the way I’d to go looking for Maeve? I lie back against the ground and close my eyes.
I smell it before I see it. Smoke. A plume, close by, thin but getting larger, billowing in the breeze. I scramble to my feet and run toward it, back to Cillian.
I find him where I left him, covered in dirt and soot, standing by the fire. He has gathered branches and leaves, everything he could find, and dragged it all to make a huge pyre.
“Put it out!” I shout over the crackling.
“I can’t.” He wipes his hands on his thighs and looks full at me, his streaked face full of fear and excitement. “I threw away our water.”