The street was dry but held the morning’s rain beneath its crust, giving it the unpredictable slipperiness of clay. Most townspeople had already gone inside, and half the houses Molly passed were quiet, dark, or shuttered. But in the lack of talk and bustle, night awakened like an owl. Something filled the shadows, even here between the homes, just as animals and doubt filled shadows in a forest.
Molly felt alert: feral and nocturnal. She was keyed to smell and sound, aware of every dung heap and after-meal aroma, hearing scraps of conversations, night birds, and frogs. But no one stopped her as she ran—a threat she dreaded and desired—and when she came again to the edge of the Antler River, her heart kept thumping and her legs kept moving. She jogged along the riverside, following the berm. She was tired, so tired from her day but too awake to think of resting. There was nowhere left to rest.
“He’s dead!” she’d yelled at Abigail. The night yelled it back. It answered every question, every momentary hope. Go back to Abigail. He’s dead! Return to Grayport. He’s dead! Sail for Bruntland, back to Father. Write to Frances. No, he’s dead. Root would never let her be until she finally told the truth, and then the truth of what had happened would destroy her altogether.
Dampness hung around the riverside. She sweated a musky vapor that reminded her of flesh—the flavor of a kiss, a body on her body. Being filled. Growing round. Pushing out and falling empty. So much life, full and floral, now as inky as the river. Molly stopped and held her stomach, thinking she would vomit, but the feeling stayed within her like nausea under nausea.
She was standing by the ferry. Up the road, very near, stood the tavern in the night, warm and solid with its window lights amber on the ground. There’d be patrons in the taproom talking over beer, smoking pipes, eating chicken or a fresh-baked pie. Any stranger from the road was welcome to a bed but even there she wasn’t wanted. Tom would send her off again.
The road through the forest ran in two directions. Behind her to the west, the way led to Grayport, a place she couldn’t possibly return to alone. Opposite the river it would lead her to Liberty, an unfamiliar city but her only clear option if she meant to leave Root.
Molly crept toward the ferry, loosed the tether, and grabbed the pole. The ferry was essentially a raft on canoes. It was six feet wide and twelve feet long, big enough for horses, difficult to tip. She drove the pole underwater, jammed it into the riverbed, and walked front to back so the deck moved beneath her. Once she reached the back, she raised the pole and did it again.
Ropes from either end were fastened to a ring. The ring rode the anchor line, the bank-to-bank rope Tom had hooked the day he rescued her, and all that kept the raft from drifting in the current. The farther out she went, the more the line bowed until the ring ropes creaked, seeming taut enough to break. She felt petite, so alone on such an oversized platform, especially once she made it to the middle of the river and the pole was barely long enough to reach the lowering depth. Benjamin had told her of the falls to the south and she imagined going over in the great misty roar, being buried underwater, floating onward to the sea.
Panic swirled inside her but she forced herself to move again, remembering the courage she had summoned back in Umber when she stood before the harbor, reassured by her brother, and climbed aboard the skiff and into the Cleaver off to Floria. But where did courage lead me? Molly wondered as she floated and the ferry, and the current, and the world moved beneath her.
Soon the water flowed more gently and the anchor line rose. She smelled the great, green pines and the moisture of the forest. Once the ferry bumped the dock and Molly tied it to the post, she stared across the clearing that would lead her to the woods, where the road disappeared into a chasm in the trees.
A universe of trees in a universe of night, a million dark spires, an infinity of leaves—even eagles in the day would fail to see the limit of the forest, with the town, like a dimple, in the center. That the cities lay beyond it seemed an element of faith. All a traveler could do was trust in one direction.
Silver-blue lights hovered in the clearing. They were wisps of flame, smaller than her hands, and Molly felt compelled to see one up close. She stepped toward the nearest wisp and watched it bob away; she tried again, and then again, until it led her into the reeds and both her feet were in the water. Molly blinked her eyes. The wisp glimmered beautifully, as if to lead her on—as if to draw her into the current where the flow would drag her down.
She saw the house lights a quarter mile off beyond the river, much fainter than the phantom lights hovering around her. She regretted leaving Benjamin behind without a word. A passing whiff of candlefruit she’d spilled upon her sleeve made even Abigail a person she was hesitant to leave. She wondered what would happen when they found she’d taken the ferry. Nothing, she decided. Nobody would care.
She left the river and the wisps and crossed the clearing, walking briskly to outpace her fear of entering the woods, which rose above her in a great dark wall as she approached. The way had not been cleared so much as woven through the trees. Creeping vines snared her feet. Thorns caught her skirts. The farther in she went, the more the forest closed around her till the road veered left and she was thoroughly surrounded, feeling as far away from Root as anywhere on earth.
Long, twisted branches seemed to grapple overhead. There were nuts the size of apples, pine needles stiff enough to penetrate cloth. She passed an evergreen with sap oozing audibly out of the trunk. Stones and lumpy roots protruded from the ground, and there were holes and ferns and mounds of grass, moss, and tangling weeds. She listened tensely as she walked, hearing snaps and rustling swishes. Several times she turned, sensing movement at her back, and lost her sense of direction when the road seemed to vanish in the dark.
The smell of skunk grew alarming, strong enough to gag her. She trampled a prodigious heap of scat, maybe a bear’s. There was eye-shine, there behind a dense mass of bracken, but from what breed of creature, and from what source of light?
“Man is the dominant animal,” she told herself aloud, recalling a thing that Nicholas used to say upon his horse.
She heard an echo overhead and stumbled backward in surprise. A scruffy black bird shifted on a branch, peering down at her intensely with its unblinking eyes.
“Man is the dominant animal,” it said to her again, croaking in a crude imitation of her voice.
She hurried on, and walked and walked, and jogged until she panted. It was two days to Liberty by horse. Maybe three. Benjamin had told her there were inns along the way but it was possible she wouldn’t reach the first till after dawn. She needed money, needed food. She would need another name. But then in Liberty she might begin again and get it right. Another full city for another new life, unless her secret sprang a leak or someone found her, someone who knew.
She thought her eyes were getting tired or the woods were growing thicker. The way was growing more and more difficult to see. Her vision blurred and clarified every other minute and the darkness had texture, pooling on the ground and rising like mist. There were drifting clouds of blindness, more than ordinary dark. She entered one of these, lost her sight completely, and was forced to raise her arms to keep from crashing into trees.
She moved through several patches of the terrible miasmas till they finally disappeared and normal dark returned. The night chilled her skin and clung to her like dew. The earlier sounds of wildlife had given way to stillness, total and uncanny, sprawling out forever.
Then a shadow moved, thirty paces ahead. She thought it was another of the strange, drifting clouds until it gradually resolved. She almost yelped, almost ran.
It was a man upon a horse, motionless and tall. He wore a tricorne and cloak, and Molly couldn’t see his face. The shock of his emergence turned to terror of his silence. It was one thing for Molly not to speak in her surprise, another for a rider who had sat and watched her coming. He moved the horse a quarter turn to view her more directly while a second horse appeared and blocked the way behind her. How could she have missed him, having walked straight by? She was caught between the riders now, with woods on either side. They moved to close her in, still without a word.
They were dressed all in black. The rider at her rear wore a tricorne, too, but it was spoiled out of shape as if he’d ridden in the rain. Both riders wore masks that hid their eyes and noses, and it might have looked absurd—too sincerely evil—if not for the savage desolation of the forest and, conversely, the politeness of the first rider’s voice.
“What are you doing here,” he asked, “alone without a horse?”
Molly tried to speak but didn’t have the air. She paused to take a breath. It filled her up but dazed her head.
“I’m traveling with others, five together out of Root. We’re making our way to Liberty. I walked ahead to gather my thoughts. Listen,” Molly said. “I hear them coming now.”
The rider at her back made a low, chuckling moan. The man in front of her, apparently the leader, cocked an ear.
“I hear nothing but a lot of sunny talk,” he said at last. “Do you know who we are?”
Molly felt the answer in her mind. Just a word, and yet it fluttered like a bat wing, shuddering her vision. Benjamin had told her, and she’d thought of it at night, in the dark before sleep, until it seemed to her that speaking it would cause them to appear.
“Maimers,” Molly said.
She smelled the horses, heard the swishing of the first rider’s cloak. Her fear did not diminish or increase but rather sharpened.
“Do you know our reputation?”
“That you’re bloody-minded thieves.”
The leader laughed but it was odd, as if the mask pinched his nose. His partner creaked his saddle and dismounted with a hop. She would have watched as he approached her, but the leader spoke again.
“Maybe you think the tales are fanciful.”
“You’re real enough that everyone in Root wants your skin. I heard that there were more of you.”
“We’re everywhere,” he said. “Patient as the trees, quiet as the shadows.”
He spoke to her with cheer as if admiring her pluck, like a cook who talks to chickens soon to lose their heads. His companion stepped behind her, so close she couldn’t turn, and pulled back her arms until her shoulder blades squeezed.
“Let me go,” she said. “I haven’t got a thing for you to steal.”
“You have clothes,” her captor whispered. “You have parts like any other.”
He quickly moved in front of her, releasing one of her arms and twisting on the other. Then he grabbed her by the wrists and held them tight behind her back so they were standing, pressed together, hip to hip and eye to eye. He was shorter than the leader—roughly Molly’s height—but as solid in the middle as a well-packed barrel.
The leader stooped toward her, leaning from his mount, appearing to experience a quiver in his conscience. He stared without a word, too far away to see her clearly in the dark and yet attempting to discern something showing in her face. He approached her on the horse, staring harder as he came.
His partner shoved her down and Molly landed on her back. He straddled her and held her to the ground by her neck. The branches overhead looked infinite and crazed.
“What’ll it be?” he asked.
He drew a knife and held it by her chin. Molly bit his hand. He snarled and shook her off, and after licking at the blood and spitting in the dirt, he flipped the knife to use the bottom of the handle like a pestle.
“Smile,” he said.
She struck at him and clawed and knocked his hat behind his head. His eyes were all iris, showing nothing of the whites.
“Wait,” the leader said. He was off his horse and bending down close to see her face, and then he turned toward his horse and grabbed a length of rope.
Molly struggled even harder in the moment of distraction but the brute palmed her face, mashing in her cheeks.
The leader tossed the rope and said, “We’re taking her along.”
“You ain’t swallowing her shite about companions on the road!”
“Tie her up, you block of meat. Lickety split. You’ll thank me later.”
“Bah!” his partner said, kneeling on her gut and tying up her wrists. “I’ll have more than just your teeth before the night is done.”
He hauled her to her feet and shoved her hard against his horse. The creature snorted in alarm, as if accustomed to abuse. He pulled a sack from one of his saddlebags and yanked it over her head. The cloth smelled of onion, like the man’s own sweat. Molly tottered in her blindness, gasped for air, and stumbled forward, but he guided her foot to the stirrup and lifted her onto the horse. He climbed and sat behind her and the horse grew distressed. It was a gangly, droopy specimen and strained beneath the weight, and when the Maimer reached around her and began to tug the reins, Molly felt the tremor in the poor beast’s neck.
In spite of being tied, she could pet the horse’s mane. He calmed beneath her touch but she couldn’t calm herself. The scratchy heat of the bag was stifling, and her minutes of reprieve would only lead to worse. She thought of the stories she had heard, the fear and mutilation of the victims they’d released … What was done to those they kept? Who would know she’d disappeared?
Her day appeared in flickers like the branches of a lightning bolt. She thought of Tom’s scowl and the young boy’s frown, of Abigail’s red flush of anger in the kitchen. She had tried. She had tried and it had all led to this, and now the Maimer held the reins with his knuckles on her breasts.
“My balls are hard as fists,” he whispered in her ear.
Molly flung her head back, hard against his nose. She heard it crunch the cartilage. He groaned and pulled his hands away. The horse reared up, and when the Maimer tumbled off and thudded down behind her, Molly took the reins and galloped up the road.
She leaned down close and found the stirrups with her toes, but Molly couldn’t have slowed his panicked running if she tried. She held the reins tight and fought to keep her balance, blinded by the sack and barely in control.
Were they rushing back to Root or deeper into the woods? She heard the leader on his own strong horse in hot pursuit. The pounding of the two sets of hooves overlapped and the air pressed the sack more tightly to her face. Any moment she’d be battered by a low-slung branch. She waited for a pistol shot to hit her in the back.
She tried to shake the sack away and dizzied herself severely, and it felt as if the horse were spiraling or falling. When the sack was finally off, she saw the trees blurring past, the shrubs and obstacles and holes they miraculously cleared. The leader rode beside her, narrowing the way. Molly spurred harder but the Maimer snatched her reins and the horses slowed with a battery of hooves. Molly jumped off and landed in a bush, but after scratching up her arms in the fight against the branches, she was clear of the entanglement and running for the trees.
The Maimer caught her hair and jerked her off her feet. He stamped his boot upon her chest and held her down against the roots, forcing out her breath while he tied a longer rope around her wrists like a tether. Then he hauled her up and pulled her to the horses in the road.
She was panting and her heartbeat thumped like a rabbit, but he still hadn’t spoken, hadn’t struck her in his anger. He was stealing her, of course, and yet he treated her with care, like property he couldn’t afford to break. She had the ludicrous suspicion he was working for her father, who’d perhaps sought her out with advertised reward. But no, she thought. Impossible. Her father would have shot such mercenary men. This was something else more immediate and grim.
He forced her onto the horse without threat or explanation. It maddened her to know that he was thinking in the dark, full of judgments and ideas about her actions and appearance. Suddenly his mask looked ridiculous and cheap. He was short beside the horse, a coward in disguise. She yanked the tether from his hand, just to prove she could.
He picked the rope up and spat, yet the spitting seemed an act—a cool bit of flair to show he wasn’t irked. He wound the rope around his arm, slipped the end between the loops, formed a barrel knot and said, “Try pulling that.”
Molly looped her portion of the rope around her pommel.
“Hyah!” she said, and drove her heels.
The horse launched off. The Maimer dropped her reins but couldn’t drop the tether, and it tugged him off his feet so he was hanging by his arm. His hat blew away and he was twisting at her side. The line was short enough to keep him at the horse’s rear flank with his head at Molly’s thigh, boots dragging on the ground. He was jostled by the horse’s leg without being trampled, but the hooves were likely clipping him; his wrist was surely broken.
Out of courage or belligerence, he didn’t cry or plead. Molly almost pitied him—she didn’t want to kill him—when she scraped him past a thornbush, tearing up his coat, and whipped him with a passing branch and bounced him over rocks.
Once again she wasn’t certain which direction she was riding. Any second they could come upon the Maimer she’d unhorsed. The road was unfamiliar, all a blur of passing forest with the mists of sudden blindness and the Maimer at her side. He managed to grab her ankle and she couldn’t shake him off. The horse was tiring. The ride began to tire Molly, too, after such an endless day and such a tempest of emotion.
She squinted in the wind and fought to keep her balance. If they stopped or if the Maimer finally pulled her off the saddle, they would still be tied together with a knot she couldn’t slip. Her only option was to ride and improvise the rest.