Frey reached the village proper. People were milling about like ants after their hill had been kicked. They checked their speech as Frey passed among them. His clothes were caked in blood, his face was busted and bruised. His hair was dusty, and bits of feed and straw stuck out from it. They might’ve made a grab for him had he not still been holding his knife, the blade smeared with blood.

He ran through the village to the whipping post. Desperation gave his face a sickly hue. His eyes were caged and rolled wildly under his half-lidded, roving stare. Settling his eyes on the huffing bulk of the Administrator, ranting to his enraptured audience, Frey saw plainly that it had not gone as planned and that, perhaps, there was reason to hope Nell was still alive. People parted for him, scowling and apprehensive.

“Where is she?” he said, loud enough to silence the chattering talk of the idling mob.

The Administrator turned at the sound of his voice. His face was still red. He seemed about to lash out but checked his tongue, seeing Frey in his bloodied and battered state with his knife held fast in his right hand. After looking him over, toe to crown, he asked, “What the fuck happened to you?”

“Where?” asked Frey. His voice had a vibrating quality, as if a violent tension twanged just under the surface. He gripped the knife in a balled fist so that the burls of the antler handle dug into the palm of his hand. “Tell me.”

The Administrator raised a hand to his left brow and scratched it with a finger, his forehead furrowing, eyes squinting. He crossed his arms across his chest and looked at Frey. “What have you done, Frey?”

Around him, Frey could sense the unfriendly closeness of the mob. Dark eyes shifted in dark faces. Unspoken signals amplified in the equally as murderous look of a neighbour. Under the palpable animosity felt from all sides, Frey saw through his delirium that he was in no position to demand anything. He tried to bargain. “Tell me where she is, and I will leave.”

The Administrator chuckled, and his folded arms jumped on his chest. “You had that option already and you never proved good on it. You came back alive. You’re standing here right now when, by rights, you should not be.”

Frey looked at the knife in his hand, then at the ground. He looked back up at the Administrator. “I was just a kid, then.”

“Whose blood is that?” someone asked behind him.

“It’s mine,” said Frey without turning.

“He’s full of shit,” said someone to his left. “He’s killed someone.”

“Frey,” said the Administrator. “What have you done?”

“I defended myself.”

“Against who?”

“Wolves.”

The Administrator laughed and shook his head. “Hasn’t a wolf been seen around here in years.”

Frey looked around at the snarling faces. “They're around. You just can't see them.” He looked at the Administrator. “Especially if you’re one of them.”

The Administrator’s face hardened. His arms remained folded on his chest, and he nodded his head slowly. “You speak like your father. Can’t help lashing out even when you know it will destroy you.” He unfolded his arms and they hung stiffly at his sides. “Get a fire going!” he shouted. He took a step toward Frey. “I’ll get that lead from your arm when you crumble to ash. And you can die just like your father.”

Frey stood still, eyes widening as if every syllable he heard was more horrible than the one that came before. It was not so much burning alive that horrified him as the thought that he would share an end with his father. It was the thought that his life would be taken by the hateful, brutish people of Endwoode. The one thing over which he ought to have had sovereignty, his own life, would be seized and summarily ended as if it were worth nothing more than the bullet in his arm.

When someone grabbed him by the shoulder, he sprung like a trap and stuck the blade of his knife through someone’s bicep. The grasping arm pulled away with a guttural shriek and was replaced by a bevy of snagging fingers and clawed hands. Frey cut at them like vines and arterial blood misted the air and made him slick and no one could get a grip on him as he fought and twisted and bit and slashed. A way parted for him, and Frey saw the welcoming dark woods, not knowing that Nell had run that very path not long before. He slipped and bounced through bodies that were in turns trying to get out of the way of his knife and grab his body. Stumbling from the melee, he hit the flat at a sprint and his clapping footfalls were answered by a stampede of pursuing boots and outraged howls. Stones clattered around him, and some hit his back sharply but he did not slow to feel it fully. He did not even grimace.

All he knew was the woods. He broke the dark-green line of bush and bramble and leapt over snaring roots and sidestepped holes in the ground that had been made by ground rodents. There was none in the pursuing mob who could match his youth and keep up with the easy way he made through the thickening woods. He lost all but their manic voices in a matter of minutes and slowed to a walk before stopping to lean against a tree. Cold and ragged breaths tore at his throat and there was a warm petal of blood on his tongue. His vision was jumping with every beat of his heart and the ground seemed to swell and depress below his feet. The first inklings of pain from the blows of his fight with Grymes, the sharp scratches of the brambles on his arms on and legs from his flight through the wood, the stones that left welts on his back began to pang and at last he let a wince alight upon his face and he breathed in and out sharply through his teeth.

He stood in this aspect for some time, his pain only flaring and deepening as he let it all catch up with him. Through the throbbing in his ears, he heard a clumsy, shrill sound and recognized it at once.

––––––

Nell was pacing in the shadowy wood. The rims of her eyes were red, and her hair was wild and festooned with twigs and pine needles. She held her book and looked at its cover. The glaucous lead bullet stared back at her from where it nestled in the center, and she let her arm drop in disgust and stared up at the canopy over her head in despair and pleading. On all sides, the dark unfamiliar wood showed her a bleak face and she had given up trying to see hope in any direction.

She paced back and forth a few more times, the dark loam under the amber pine needles having been turned up by the track she made. With a jerk, she put her other hand to her temple and jabbed herself unintentionally. She winced and looked at the whistle in her hand which she had forgotten she still held. Her hand began to tremor, and she squeezed, shutting her eyes and gritting her teeth. With a ragged scream, she threw it into the woods and stared after it for a long time.

She crumpled to the ground and put her free hand to her forehead and let her hair veil her sight except for her book which sat on the ground near her legs. Wheezing, she stroked its surface around the bullet hole and then she balled her fist and slammed it against the cover again and again. She drew her legs in like someone had placed a hot poker to the soles of her feet and wrapped her arms around her knees and tucked in her head so that it her vision admitted no light. She sat, fragile as eggshell, sobs muffled by her clothes, shaking and bemoaning how immediate and horrible her situation was and how she had not been able to convince even one person to be there when it really mattered. Frey had not been there, and it made her want to scream because she truly knew that she meant nothing to no one now and likely never had. She pulled herself more tightly together and if she could only crunch herself into a mote and collapse into nothing at all she would have done so.

In the intervals of her retching sobs, she began to be conscious of human voices. She lifted her head up, face puffy, bleary-eyed, and held her breath so she could listen. She heard the distant calls of men crying oaths or communicating with one another. Her first thought was that they were coming after her. She jumped to her feet and prepared to take off in the direction opposite of the voices. But she thought it strange that so many would come in search of her when no one came to even see her get shot. She thought who it might be that could bring such a multitude in search of them and guessed that it could only be someone beloved or hated. By the tone and timbre of the howling voices, she knew it was the latter and that the latter could only be Frey.

Her heart became still. The desperate thought that he had come after her was enough to sedate her violent misery. Any phantom thought of care was enough to make her delirious with hope. Any possible future in which she was not alone was enough to make her scrounge the bushes for the willow whistle. And when she found it, she found also room enough in her heart for understanding and forgiveness of almost anything.

She brought it to her lips and blew a single, shrill note. It hung briefly in the air, a tangled echo shredded by the serrated branches of spruce and pine. She listened and heard men out of sight bellowing like bulls but saw no movement in any direction. As she brought the whistle up a second time, she heard a branch snap to her left and she spun around.

Like a butcher’s apprentice who had had too much to drink, Frey came stumbling out from the tight-knit woods, clothes bloody and torn, a pink strand of drool pendulously swinging from his chin, his one eyelid drooping, the other pulled back and the exposed eyeball whited and panicked. He tottered the remaining way and toppled at Nell’s knees, resting the side of his head against her legs.

Nell looked down at him briefly, her expression contested, as if two opposed reactions were warring in her mind. But then she knelt before him and reached with a shaking hand to move his blood-starched hair so that it wouldn’t fall over his face and they could look each other in the eyes and see how the other had become necessary for each of them if they wanted to go on living as things now were. The bald, pale fear was disappearing from Frey’s face, and he was the first to look away. He turned his eyes, then his head and stared out into the dark wood. Nell studied his bruised face in profile then turned and looked in the same direction.

The sound of men shouting had grown fainter and less threatening. They had nothing but their talismans: an antler-handled knife, a book with a bullet in its heart, and a whistle carved from the bough of a willow. They carried their own past, each of them, and had become accustomed to the weight. But now they would have to learn to carry each other if they wanted to live on the Outside.

––––––

There was a lonely road that ran between sheer faces of craggy granite. Desperate pine trees made their stand in precarious tilt on the small buttresses and shelves of the stone. A man walked between, his long shadow playing like some trickster form on the uneven rock face. He wore a wide-brimmed hat set low over his eyes. His overcoat was grey and torn and hemmed with elk hide. His doe-skin boots were well worn and held together by rough sutures where they had begun to come apart. On his back was a large traveller’s bag, which contained stores of food, bedding, and weaponry.

A blunderbuss sat nestled in the crook of his left arm. Its stock was of some exotic wood, dark like rich soil, inlaid with silver that suggested the silhouettes of pine trees seen against the starless night. Its fluted end was silver-plated brass, and the inside was dented and black with gun-grime from the many volleys it had sent.

The man’s face was worn, but not old. It was scarred and weathered, especially around the eyes, which were translucent. No white, no colour, no black pupil. Blood-filled tendrils rooted the glass orbs in their sockets, visible and clear.

He walked and walked and eventually came out of the rocky hills and into the beginnings of a wood. As if in confirmation of the fated path he strode, he came across a young man stripped to the waist, tied with thick hemp rope to the base of an oak tree. His body was pale and curled like a maggot and long strains of saliva had spilled and then dried on his chin and chest. He had been left to die of exposure.

The man in the wide-brimmed hat crouched near the youth’s tucked-in legs. “I could cut you loose,” he said.

The young man twitched a little at the sound of his voice. A speck of frothy spittle broke away from the corner of his mouth and floated away.

The man in the wide-brimmed hat turned his head to watch it meld into the expansive grey of the overcast sky. He turned back on the young man. “But that would run counter to why you were tied up in the first place.” He stood up.

The youth watched him, looking up past his brow so that the bloodshot whites made up most of his eyes. His lip curled and twitched. Foam and froth now fell from his mouth like wood shavings falling inversely.

The man in the wide-brimmed hat drew aside his overcoat and unsheathed a bowie knife the length of his forearm and the width of one of his hands.

“I take it you were not a soldier,” said the man in the wide-brimmed hat.

The youth’s upper lip curled all the way back, showing his silvery teeth. He began to thrash. A wretched gurgle rose into wolfish howl. The veins in the youth’s neck stood like fat leeches just below his skin. His bound, murderous hands clawed and flexed and his whole being strove outward, bent on crushing this otherly gaze that shadowed him with its wide-brimmed hat and eyes like glass.

The man in the wide-brimmed did not step back. “Though I suppose you could’ve been, given the chance.” He drew his scarred lips into a sneer. “All men have something of war inside them.” He stood sideways and shook his head at the distant horizon. “Hence the state of the world.”

There was a quick flash of silver, followed by a soft sickening whisper, as the knife passed through the youth’s neck and his head rolled off his shoulders, landing face up in his lap, staring with ineffable hatred at the faceless sky. Synchronized carotid gouts of blood ribboned and swayed like charmed serpents from the stump of his neck and then slowly shrank and became no more than a gurgling dribble.

The man in the wide-brimmed hat wiped the blade of his knife on his thigh and then returned it to its sheath.

“Now, why did I do that?”

The youth’s severed head made no response.

“That’s right. I could not have done otherwise.”

The youth’s eyes had begun to glaze and to sink in their sockets.

“Not in this world, at least.” The man in the wide-brimmed hat scanned the burly branches overhead. He looked down at the head as if he thought of another question to put to it. “And isn’t that wonderful? I paid a dear price to come by such a thought. And here I am giving to you for free.” He paused, opened his jacket and nodded at something on the liner inside. “And now you are clairvoyant, like me.”

He walked away from the crimson-drenched soil, blood seeping into the earth to sustain the buried roots of the oak that stood the lone and blind witness to this isolated act of necessity.