Frey and Nell kept the river in earshot. They went with its current downstream simply because that seemed easier even though it led them through thickets and steep dells. In a fairy circle of mushrooms, they had camped on the slightly damp ground without a fire. They woke up dewed and cold and dampened in spirit. They looked at each other and, without speaking, shared a mutual expression of amazement and terror at being on the Outside.

Stories lived in their heads of the brutishness of the world beyond the environs of Endwoode. It was a place where war, a concept alien to them both, still endured though there not much worth warring over anymore. It was a place where practices crueler than lead administration were as daily an occurrence as the rising of the sun. It was an inhuman place not simply because so few human beings inhabited it, but because human beings were not meant to inhabit it.

But they had each overheard some of the remembered good things of the world that was. Some of the oldest in Endwoode, against the censure of the Administrator, remembered the world before the Frothe as a place of flourishing, plenty, and safety. There was said to be villages so big they sprawled like a forest. There was said to be stone-laid roads that circled the world over and could take you to lands where people had strangely shaped tongues and spoke other languages.

It was with these latter stories in mind that Nell now marched along, bright-eyed and eager, seeing plants that were familiar to her, yet newly aglow with an aspect of novelty simply because they, too, existed here on the Outside just as she now did. Her fire-red hair swooped from one shoulder to the other as she looked to the left and right of her, marvelling at the close foliage that hemmed her in. Every now and then she would turn around and walk backwards and smile at Frey for a few steps before turning forward once again.

Frey would lift his heavy-lidded gaze from the root-infested forest floor and smile as much as he could bear, which was not much, and hold it until she turned back around. Then he would let it drop like a weight from his face. He looked down at his bloody clothes and relived the overbearing violence of his flight from his hated home. He was not sure whether his fortunes had improved or deteriorated.

At every bird call, every scurrying squirrel jumping from branch to branch, he looked around and scowled. He regarded the constricting woods with suspicion and even hostility. When he looked at the bobbing shock of flaming hair ahead of him, flinging this way and that, he felt a bitterness curdle his innards. He had suffered, and was still suffering, because of what Nell had demanded of him. Moreover, the impotence and guilt of not being able to fulfill his promise dogged him and made him feel worthless. Nell had not mentioned his absence at her lead administration, and he wondered if it had really not mattered all that much to her whether he was there or not. He wondered whether he had nearly been burned alive for nothing.

He followed her, brooding silently, then stopped dead in his tracks.

“Nell.”

Jumping at the urgency in his voice, Nell stopped and turned around. “What?”

“You didn’t get shot.”

A guilty look settled on her face. She nodded sheepishly and brought her book to her chest instinctively.

Frey looked at the bullet embedded in its cover, then looked her in the face. He jutted his head forward slightly as if prompting her for an explanation.

Nell picked at her dry lips and looked away.

“You didn’t get shot,” repeated Frey.

“He missed me,” mumbled Nell. “You said he wouldn’t miss.”

“You shouldn’t have stood sideways.”

Nell shot a glare at him. “You told me to.”

“Yeah, well, I didn’t tell you to bring your fucking book up. That one is on you.”

“I’d be dead if I didn’t!” screamed Nell.

Frey tucked his chin and looked out into the wood and stared from his gloomy, bruised eyes. “Then we’d both be better off.”

Nell drew back. Her face was glowing red, and her teeth peeked out from her trembling lip. She turned sharply without another word and stomped off through the woods upriver.

Frey tore his eyes from the woods, and looked at the vacant space where she had been. He touched the bridge of his nose gingerly and then scratched the back of his head and stared searchingly at his feet. He was sorry for what he said, as he always was.

He rubbed his left arm where he had been shot, the lead bullet nestled like a parasite deep in his flesh. He began walking unhurriedly after Nell, brooding deeply about the precarity of her being in the Outside without the protection of lead, wondering what could be done about it.

Of all the stories of people coming down with the Frothe, not one of them was without this uneasy detail: it came down on one without warning or reason. It had nothing to do with the cycle of the moon or the passing of stars overhead. It had nothing to do with bad air or bad soil. It came in weather cold, hot, humid or dry. It was not a consequence of moral character. The wicked and the good alike came down with it, which Frey hated most of all. He could not conceive that being good didn’t matter. He could not accept that there was no genuine protection from it but the soft, heavy metal that took life as often as it prolonged it. It pained him beyond bearing to think a bullet was more important in this world than being good.

He walked along the darkening wood, troubled in mind, his body sore from head to foot. He nearly passed the offshoot Nell had taken which went straight to the river’s edge. Walking down the deer-made path, he found Nell sitting on the bank with her mother’s book in her lap. She looked up and over at him when she heard him and smiled. Her face was soft, but her eyes were sore looking.

Frey returned a culpable smile and sat down next to her.

“Would you do it for me?”

Frey stopped trying to make himself comfortable on the stony shore and looked out at the muddy moving water.

“Frey.”

“Don’t have a gun.”

“But if we did.”

“No powder.”

Nell looked up at the sky. She clenched her jaw. “If we had everything we needed. Would you do it?” When Frey didn’t answer, she looked to her right, straight at him.

Frey leaned away from her. “No.”

“Why not?”

“Cause I can’t.”

Nell caught her knees and sat with her arms wrapped around them. “You’d make me do it myself?”

“I wouldn’t make you do anything.”

“You would.” She put one hand on the ground and supported herself with it as she leaned over toward him. “If you don’t, I won’t have any other choice.”

Frey didn’t answer.

Nell closed her hand around a smooth, fist-sized stone. “Don’t you see? Either way, you’re responsible.”

“Responsible?” spat Frey, staring off to his left. “I’m not your mother. I’m not here to take care of you.”

Nell picked the stone up. “You weren’t there, even though you promised.”

Frey winced slightly. “It didn’t mean anything to you, anyway.”

“It meant everything to me!”

Despite hearing the tortured thickness of her voice, Frey would not look to his left until he heard a sharp clacking. He turned and saw a stone settling on the riverbed as if it had just been dropped. He looked at Nell in alarm. She was sitting slouched over, supporting her head with one hand, elbow resting on her knee.

“I needed you to be there.”

Frey looked down at his own lap and swallowed to push away the lump in his throat, but it stuck fast. He put a hand up to his hairline and pushed his matted hair back even though it hurt when he pressed against a bump or a bruise. He put his hand over his mouth and chin and mirrored Nell’s posture, picking up and dropping pebbles on the stone shore with his other hand, staring sullenly out at the river.

Eventually, Nell sat straight up and pressed her eyes with the palms of both hands. She let out a ragged breath and began to compose herself while Frey continued to pick up and drop pebbles, calming himself in his own way.

They sat for a while longer by the river and let the heavier thoughts go along with it until they felt light enough to stand and keep walking. Never losing track of the river, they walked through increasingly shallow woodland until they came to a grey, split-wood fence. On the other side was a down-sloping field of barley, and beyond that were lights and angular smears of blue and grey which were buildings in the growing twilight. A hamlet sat in the near distance.

“What do you think?” asked Frey after they had both stared at it in silence for a long time.

“I’d love nothing more than a warm meal and a soft bed right about now. But…” Nell looked apprehensively down at the hamlet. “I can’t imagine people would welcome us with open arms.”

“We mean no harm. I’m sure they can tell that.”

Nell looked at Frey’s bloody clothes from up to down. “You think so?”

The gesture was not lost on Frey. “It’s too dark to tell its blood.”

Nell raised an eyebrow and looked back down at the hamlet.

“We can pass it off as mud.”

Frowning, Nell said, “We can say were we attacked in the woods.”

Frey shrugged. “Whatever works.”

“You think these people are any better than in Endwoode?”

Frey scoffed. “Could they be any worse?”

Nell sighed. She clambered over the fence and Frey followed.

It took some time to cross the field. The sun bled its last rays of rust-coloured light on the earth. Two bobbing fires in the dusk, like will-o-wisps, came from the hamlet to meet them. They were torches, lit and carried by two men who also carried hatchets in their off hands.

“Who goes there?” asked a gruff voice.

Frey looked at Nell and saw the same bovine expression that he must have been wearing on his own face.

“I asked you a question. Who are you?”

“Yeah, who are you?” queried another voice, much more nasal than the first. “Pilgrims?”

“Yes. We are pilgrims,” said Nell. “We’ve come a long way. We are tired and hungry. If you could spare us some food and lodging for a night, we’d be ever grateful.”

“Ah, more of you, huh?” said the gruff voice. “More vagrants passing through in the past month than in the whole year previous. You fools come in droves on a false promise. You come for a cure and you’ll get it alright.”

“Don’t speak ill of her, Marston,” said the smaller man, voice shrill with perceived offense. “She does what she says alright. You’re the fool for not believing it.”

The man named Marston ignored his partner. By torchlight, his expression seemed especially grim and full of contempt. “Why can’t you people just get leaded like they used to? When did everyone have the gumption sucked out of them? Have to go and ask vermin for the favour of health.” He looked over and down at his partner. “It’s sickening.”

“Don’t call her that, Marston,” warbled the other voice.

“I am leaded,” said Frey.

Marston’s head swivelled back to Frey. “Are you? Where at?”

Frey pushed up his sleeve and showed his scar. It glistened like grease in the flickering light of the torch Marston had brought closer to see.

“So you are. Well, I take back what harsh words I may have said. What about her? She leaded?”

“I’m not,” said Nell, tilting her chin and speaking up before Frey could answer for her.

“Playing a dangerous game, you are,” said Marston. “The Frothe could come down on you any time.”

“You’re on your way to Mukade, then?” asked the man with the nasally voice, in his sudden excitement somehow sounding closer than he actually was. He lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper as if he wanted only Nell to hear him. “To get bit?”

“Mukade?” asked Nell.

“Poor little lamb. She doesn’t know a thing. Let her stay that way, Sawfeather. Don’t go filling her head with your vermin-worship,” said Marston.

Sawfeather cast him a venomous glare that went unseen in the thickening dark. “You really don’t know?” he said, addressing Nell. “That’s what I took you coming here for. That's what everybody comes here for. To get bit.” Deep, ugly, wrinkles scarred his face as he smiled in the torchlight. “By her.”

Marston spat. “I’m not staying to listen to this horseshit.” He turned sharply, letting linger a look of contempt down on Sawfeather as he did, and passed back through the barley from where he had come.

Sawfeather listened to his footsteps recede, coiled and tense. Then he relaxed and his demeanor became convivial. “Come. You two can stay under my roof. I got mutton stew cooking for the both of you. I got some furs you can sleep on. They aren’t much, but they’ll do a couple of young bones like you.”

The sun was fully obscured by the rim of the earth by now. Frey and Nell deliberated silently in the uneasy torchlight for only a brief moment.

“I’d love a fire,” said Nell.

––––––

In the aftermath of Frey’s flight, the men of Endwoode had spent a long time in the woods searching for him. They moved out in ever-expanding circles, some screaming horrible oaths, some silent in their doeskin slippers, all ready and eager to kill Frey should they catch him. But with the descent of the sun, the trees took on a foreboding cloak, and they were all reminded of the worse world beyond their own idyllic village. And so, with regretful and bitter mumblings, they cut back to their homes, and satiated their bloodlust with venomous backbiting and boasts of savagery should Frey ever try to come back.

Frey left several wounded as he cut his way out of the throng that had meant to execute him by fire. These men sat in their dark houses, with their dark thoughts, eyeing their sutured, herb-pasted wounds with hate, their wives and children tiptoeing in the close quarters, not daring to speak, hardly daring to breathe. They hated Frey all the more for plunging their households into unease interspersed by bursts of violence.

Grymes stayed out longest of them all. He did not return to the longhouse where the other orphaned commonly slept. He camped out in the woods, knowing that Frey had no food, no water, guessing that he would try to steal back into the village to pilfer necessities. Buoyed by ire, he felt none of the fear that had made grown men scurry like rats to their homes.

On the second day of his vigil, he left the woods to see Thule buried under river rock so that his remains would not be uninterred by scavenging animals. When the last clod of dirt was scattered on the grave, he went back to the woods. He had grown mute with hate. He listened to the birds and wished to see them set aflame. Ever since he was a boy, Grymes had been engorged with meanness. He treated his peers harshly, animals worse, and did not hesitate to resort to violence to get his way. When his parents died in the courthouse fire, he realized he did not love them and that their being dead did not bother him much. Rather, he found advantage in this tragedy as one more justification to manifest his wanton cruelty without threat of consequence. The village let him get away with more because they pitied him. And the more he got away with, the worse he got.

It was not vengefulness that kept him out in the woods, so close to the boundary of the unknown world. Revenge is a reason to hurt someone. Grymes never needed a reason.

Around the midday mark of the third day of his woodland vigil, Grymes had ventured further from Endwoode as he ever had. He could hear the sound of rushing water. Drawing a hand along his hairline, his flicked his wrist and droplets of sweat fanned in the golden air. Hearing the water meant that Frey had no reason to come back to Endwoode other than food. He knew Frey would not come back for food.

Grymes began to breathe in short, bursting spurts. His ruddy face became a choked purple. Wrapping two hands around the bramble club he carried, he swung it as hard as he could against the stalwart trunk of a spruce tree, skinning and embedding splinters in his hands as the wood shivered and split, snapping the weapon clean in two. He turned and tossed the impotent half-stick into the trees and screamed until the wormlike veins stood out in his neck.

His vision was blurred and spotted with dark holes from lack of air. Panting and snarling, something in front of him, in between the anonymous trunks of identical trees, suddenly caught his attention. His breath caught as he noticed a tall man in a wide-brimmed hat watching him, completely still. They stood in this fragile aspect of mute scrutiny for some seconds.

Grymes clenched his fists and began approaching the man. “What the fuck do you want?”

The man in the wide-brimmed hat took a step forward and this was enough to push Grymes over the edge.

“I’ll kill you! I’ll fucking kill you!”

Grymes rushed the stranger who did not take a step back. He had withdrawn something from under his coat, but Grymes was too blinded by fury to see it. He had no time for a proper swing. The silver-spined object the man held jumped in his hand and twirled, blunt-side out. He brought the back of the knife down across the side of Grymes’s head, stunning him and stopping him dead in his tracks.

Drooling, groaning dumbly, Grymes held a hand to the side of his head and stumbled back. Unable to keep his feet, he fell on the seat of his pants, the impact jolting him and bringing him to a full realization of the danger he was in. He started kicking and scuttling away, keeping his whited eyes on the knife-wielding man, who marched him down and reached out and grabbed him by the collar of the shirt. Grymes felt himself lifted like the ground under him had risen to fling him off. A stomach-turning weightlessness enveloped him for the brief, disorienting moment he flew through the air before he hit the ground and skidded several feet, plowing through the shed pine needles on the forest floor.

Spitting dirt, rolling on to his front, Grymes got his arms under him, but was forced flat again by the lead-soled boot of his assailant landing square between his shoulder blades. The man grabbed Grymes by the hair, jerking his face upwards, setting the sharp edge of the blade against his neck.

“What do you think is going to happen?” whispered the Clairvoyant.

Grymes looked up, eyes blind with terror. His mouth was set in a crescent of pain and fear and his arms pushed against the dirt to take the weight of his upper body from his hair and scalp.

“Speak! Speak!” The Clairvoyant shook his head violently by the hair, pressing the blade snugly against his neck.

“Don’t… don’t…” gibbered Grymes.

The Clairvoyant stopped shaking his head. “Don’t what?”

With dark, larval eyes, face pale with fear of death, Grymes looked up placidly, voice heavy and flat. “Don’t kill me.”

“Would it be wrong if I did?” asked the Clairvoyant.

“Don’t.”

“Answer.”

“Yes.”

Hearing this, the Clairvoyant’s youngish face writhed with mirth, the uncanny scars around his eyes coiling like snakes. He let go of Grymes’s hair and took his knife from his neck. “You’re wrong about that.” Drawing aside his coat to sheathe his blade, he looked at something sewn into the lining and nodded approvingly. “I can do no wrong.”

Grymes arched like a caterpillar and shuddered and heaved. He was nauseous and distraught with fear beyond anything he had ever felt. He felt as if he had been poisoned.

“Now, tell me.” The Clairvoyant looked down at him with dark endearment. “Any soldiers in that village back there? I take it that’s where you’re from.”

Grymes only sucked air and whimpered.

The Clairvoyant nudged his hip with his boot and Grymes fell flat on his side and then rolled over onto his back. The Clairvoyant crouched next to Grymes’s head. “Answer my question.”

“Yes,” sobbed Grymes.

“How many?”

“Just one,” said Grymes.

The Clairvoyant stood up. “One is enough to make it worthwhile.” He looked around, nodding approvingly at the indifferent woods. “I’ll hunt them out no matter what back wood they hide in.” He looked down at Grymes. “Get up.”

Grymes moaned softly, hoping desperately the Clairvoyant would just walk off without him. He spent as long on the ground as he dared. Then, fully understanding that there was no way out, he stood up shakily, face still pale with terror, hair strewn with dried grass and twigs and pine needles. He rubbed the snot from his upper lip and kept his eyes trained down.

“Lead the way,” said the Clairvoyant.

Grymes sucked in a long, shuddering draft of air and exhaled it in a gust. He walked past the Clairvoyant, head down, and started heading toward his village, not really thinking of what he was bringing to the people of Endwoode. Every living step he took seemed a miracle to him. Behind, he heard the crunch of pinecones exploding under lead-soled boots and melodic humming.