Nell was the first up. She was in a strange house and it took her some time to remember whose it was. She felt no pain from hunger. She was a little sore from sleeping on the floor, but otherwise she felt much improved compared to the days previous. She had gone to bed the night before, her mind abuzz, but, over the course of her restful sleep, her thoughts had settled into a more solid form.

“There are many of us who take her Gift,” Sawfeather had told her the previous night. He sat on a chair near the hearth, his chin slick with grease from the beef stew he had served himself, Nell, and Frey. Outside it was completely dark. “The worst of it is the receiving of the Gift. But it hurts less than a bullet, I should think. Let me show you where I received it.” He set his wooden bowl of broth down on the floor and got up off his chair. He unfastened the front of his shirt and showed his fire-tinted flesh to Nell. Two torn-looking purple scars ran down over his left collarbone. He tucked his chin grotesquely so that he could see them himself. Then he looked at Nell with wide, almost ecstatic eyes and a manic grin. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

Frey spat a chunk of gristle into his bowl and scowled into the fire.

Sawfeather gave him an unhinged, apprehensive look, then looked back at Nell and smiled.

Nell nodded, touching her own collarbone unconsciously, returning a nervous smile. “And that keeps you safe?” She brought her hand away from her collarbone and made it join the other on top of her mother’s book on her lap. “From the Frothe, I mean.”

Sawfeather peeled his lips back and smiled wide. “The Bite cures all ails. No harm can come of you when you carry the Gift within.” He stooped to pick up his bowl and sat back on his chair without doing up his shirt. Giving Nell what was likely meant to be an encouraging glance, he laughed softly and looked down into his bowl and shook his head. “They just don’t know. They don’t know what it feels like inside.” He looked at Nell and Frey in turn and then back at his bowl of stew and shook his head, still smiling.

Despite his hunger, Frey couldn’t bring himself to eat any more. He looked over at Nell, who sat on the floor, same as him, in front of the hearth. She had eaten her stew and was looking into the fire. She wouldn’t look back at him.

She would go to see Mukade the next day. She would take on her venom, as Sawfeather had done.

Roosters began to crow, and the sun emerged like an imago breaking out of its pupal husk to take wing for the short time it would be alive. Nell had left Frey and Sawfeather to their sleep and gone on alone.

Frey had dreamt in the night.

There was a young man, facing away, in a dreamscape otherwise without memorable feature. Frey put a hand on his shoulder and the young man crumpled and fell to the ground in agony. Frey looked at the hand with which he had touched him and saw that it was slathered with blood up to the elbow. On the ground, the young man had stopped moving and Frey could see that it was Thule and that his skin was pale, his eyes glass, and he was dead.

Then there were hands on his own shoulders. Strong hands attached to strong arms, and he found himself being dragged through the plaza of Endwoode. He saw the whipping post, saw its deep shadow like a pool of blood around its base, and he knew what was about to happen. He was made to stand, blinded by the sun, and could make out only the silhouette of the one who was to shoot him.

“Set yourself.”

The voice was lilting, playful.

Frey turned sideways.

“Really? That’s how you’re gonna stand?”

The blurred person shook her head, and strands of bronze hair shone bright in the sun. From his periphery, Frey watched the familiar shape saunter toward him.

Nell held the barrel of flintlock to the side of Frey’s head.

“Where were you?”

Frey inhaled a lungful of air.

A sharp click.

Frey screamed as he woke, sitting bolt upright, sweat spraying from off his brow. He looked over the strange room in which he found himself and saw Sawfeather, half-dressed, chewing a lump of stale bread, leaning against the front doorway.

“She’s gone on without you,” he said, chewing with his mouth open, eyes giddy and excited. On his collarbone were long scars, jagged, as if made by a handsaw.

Frey scrambled to his feet. He looked over at the empty bedspread and fur covers where he had seen Nell settle for sleep.

“Off to see Her.”

Frey looked at Sawfeather, who smiled wide and stopped chewing. Frey looked away and found his boots. He saw the blood-grimed handle of his knife sticking out from the top of his left boot. He reached out and wrapped his right hand around it then stopped when he realized how quickly he was prepared to resort to violence. A paleness cast itself over his face and he had to work to will the blood to return to his numb limbs. Slipping on the boots as if nothing else had been on his mind, his stomped once or twice on the floorboards to fit his feet snugly within them. “Which way?”

Sawfeather gave him a goggle-eyed look, slowly lifting the rind of bread to his mouth and tearing off some crust. “You aim to follow her?” he asked through the mush in his mouth.

Frey grimaced and nodded.

“You won’t try to dissuade her, will you?” he asked, expression blank, mouth working like he were chewing cud.

Frey shrugged. “If her mind’s made up, I won’t try to change it.”

A slow, sluggish grin settled on Sawfeather’s face. “Take the north path. Into the wood. It is marked by much travel. So many have come to see Her.” His face glowed and he smiled grotesquely.

Frey nodded and concealed a sneer. He took a step toward Sawfeather and the doorway and pushed past and out into the light of morning.

Sawfeather swallowed, watched Frey walk down the road, scratched himself, looked up the road in the opposite direction, then disappeared back inside his hovel.

Frey found himself walking down a suffocating path leading through a grey-coloured wood. He wondered why Nell had gone on alone. Contrary to the single path before him, the road of choice branched in his mind. There would be no easier time to just walk away. He could just walk away and forget the eventuality that he would have to shoot her. It was obvious that her precarity was a problem for her to solve, not him. And here she had gone of her own initiative to do just that. What role was there left for him to play? Their paths had parted.

But Frey began to run, not knowing why. The morning was cool, the road shaded by woods on both sides. Rut marks from wagons and carts gouged the path and left deep furrows that could roll an ankle if one wasn’t careful. Crows flew from tree to tree, screaming at him to stop or to run faster, Frey didn’t know. Every few strides, he would glare into the woods at the feathery shadows that fluttered and cawed and seemed manifestations of his guilt and the tragedy that was soon to come. Over his own retching breath, the sound of an ungreased axle screeching in its sockets pierced the thoughtless trance that Frey had fallen into.

Bobbing on the furrowed path was a cart, drawn by a grey mule that was little more than a rib cage with four spindly legs and a threadbare tail. The cargo was a woman, middle-aged, her hair streaked with white and grey. She was tied to a post, and her head hung limp, dangling like a pumpkin at the end of its vine. The hem of her weather-stained dress was wet with spittle. As Frey got closer, he could see wisps of fine white froth floating away from the woman’s chin. He looked away quickly and pretended he didn’t just see what he had in fact saw. The woman didn’t lift her head as Frey came abreast of the cart, running along to reach the driver seat.

Handling the reins were two young children, a boy and a girl, no more than twelve. Nell was sitting on the far side of them, the same side Frey had come up to.

“Nell,” panted Frey, stumbling up to the driver seat and slapping a hand on the top of her boot.

Nell glanced down, alarmed. Her face settled into an embarrassed grimace. “I was hoping to be back before you got up.”

“Why’d you go alone?”

She smiled painfully. “It’s my responsibility.”

Frey hobbled along the cart, breathing like he had been drowning, looking at the ground in front of his feet, still hanging on to the top of her boot.

“Climb up,” said Nell, moving over. “There’s room.”

Frey lifted his head. Nell wasn’t looking at him, but she didn’t seem angry. He pulled himself up and sat sweat-soaked and out of breath beside her.

The boy and girl next to her sat goggle-eyed, staring unabashedly as if they would swallow his very image with their ravenous gaze.

“Hello,” said Frey, feeling their stares, nodding without looking in their direction.

“Hello.”

“Hi.”

“This is Addie and Sven. That’s their mom in the back,” said Nell.

Frey stole a fleeting glance at the children. They seemed to exist somewhere beyond their faces, as if they wore masks of a permanently stunned expression. He subtly twisted in his seat to eye the woman tied to the post in the back of the cart. She hadn’t moved other than the regular jilting and jarring caused by the uneven road. She was facing away, but Frey could see the wake of spittle she made drifting away like dandelion seeds.

“She’s got the Frothe,” said Nell, her voice plain, but her face a whitish green.

Frey twisted back around and hummed to himself.

“Father’s dead,” offered Nell as if Frey had asked.

Frey grimaced and hummed again.

“They come from way further than we did. Never even heard of the place. What was it again?”

“Silverpine,” answered Sven.

“Silverpine,” echoed Nell. “They’ve been travelling for over a week to get here, they told me. To bring their mom to Mukade.”

Nell pronounced the name with an affectation of hopefulness which made Frey glance at her.

“We were poor for lead,” said Addie. “Pa used it up on himself.” She mimicked putting a gun to her temple. “Had to tie Ma up after that. Had to tie her up and go and get proper help.” She rubbed her nose with the back of a filthy sleeve. “I’m twelve.”

“Me too,” asserted Sven.

“I see,” said Frey.

“How old are you?” asked Sven, eyeing Frey from sunken sockets. An ember of boyish bravado still burned there.

“Eighteen.”

“You ever had to drive a cart before?”

“No.”

Sven nodded as if this satisfied him greatly. “I’m only twelve.”

“I heard you the first time,” snapped Frey against his intention to remain calm.

Addie perked up beside her brother. “What? You’re eighteen and never driven a cart before? You know how old my brother here is? Twelve. That’s right, twelve. What do you think of that?”

“It’s pretty amazing, isn’t it Frey?” said Nell, who was leaning forward, away from the woman in the back of the cart.

Frey held onto the edge of the seat tightly. He kept his eyes straight ahead, sullen and half-lidded. “How much farther?”

“Man back there said it’s not but a morning’s ride,” said Sven. “Why, you getting antsy already? My sister and me rode this here cart all the way from Silverpine.”

“All the way from Silverpine,” said Addie, staring over at him through her bottom eyelashes. “And we’re only twelve.”

Frey was one bump away from snapping like a twig. Mercifully, however, Addie and Sven’s mother began ravening and howling from the cart behind.

“Ah, there she goes,” said Sven.

“Wonder what set her off this time?” asked Addie.

“Who knows? The wind maybe.”

“A leaf touching the hem of her dress is enough to do it.”

Sven nodded in agreement. “Coulda been anything.”

The cart rumbled on, its mad cargo snarling and jerking like it was suffering a whipping from the hands of a thousand invisible assailants. Addie and Sven sat slightly slumped, paying no more mind to their mother than they did the rustling leaves overhead. Nell, who had been wearing a look of delusional bravery on her face, slowly bent forward, away from the cart just behind her. Her face was cracking, and the worry and apprehension showed through in her pale compressed lips and quivering jaw muscles. Frey was too busy nursing a petty resentment for Addie and Sven to notice either Nell’s deteriorating composure or the disease-mad woman in the back.

The cart and its cargo trundled along to the tune of mad howling. A trail of froth twirled in the back draft, specks breaking away to join the faraway clouds. At length, they noticed clean-picked and moss-covered skeletons of mules and cattle and human beings at their eternal leisure on the wayside of the road. Frey came out of his bitter reverie and turned in his seat to stare at a skeleton of a child that went by. He looked over at Addie and Sven and saw they were doing their best not to notice the bones. Both stared straight ahead, fixing their dark, sleep-starved eyes on the road ahead.

Beside Frey, Nell had tucked her head between her knees and put her hands on the back of her neck, knitting her fingers together. Frey raised a hand like he would rest it on her back, but then replaced it in the grip of his other hand. He looked off to the side and watched the corpses go by.

Moments later, Sven drew up the reins and brought the mule to a halt. Without turning to look at either Nell or Frey, he said, “We go alone from here.”

Frey looked at him, looked at the empty road ahead, hemmed in by grey, mournful trees, and then bumped Nell with his shoulder.

She sat up with a violent start. Her eyes were wide and fearful and stayed that way even as she looked at Frey and recognized him.

“We have to get down,” said Frey. He hopped off the seat and waited with an outstretched hand to help Nell down.

Nell looked at his hand as a chicken might eye a serpent. But she took it, grasping her book with her other, and got down off the cart, which began moving as soon as she did so. She watched it go as if it were something precious to her from which she was being separated forever and for unclear reasons.

When the cart disappeared around a bend and the howling had died down, Nell turned and looked at Frey, face fragile with despair.

Frey shrugged. “I guess we’re walking.”

Nell turned away and let out a sigh. Then she started walking.

Frey matched her pace, and they walked in silence for nearly an hour. Frey let his eyes linger on the bones and grinning skulls that watched buried up to their sockets in dirt and mirth. Nell kept her wide green eyes trained on the ambiguous distance. When the sun was halfway to its highest point, they both heard a familiar rumble. The cart appeared at the end of the hollow, looking like a toy drawn by a mule which was the size of a mouse. As they approached one another, Nell and Frey could see the woman who had been tied to the post in the cart was sitting on the driver’s bench in between her children. Her hair was frayed, her face was gaunt. She seemed to be in a state between ecstatic trance and sheer terror. Blood ran down her arm and dripped from the hand with which she held the reins.

Nell and Frey stepped onto the shoulder to let them pass. The children on the cart looked as though they were coming back from burying themselves. None spared a word or a look for Nell or Frey as they passed by. They moved on mute as a plague cart and with as much cheer. Frey thought he might have seen a pale face turn and look back at them, but he didn’t gawk after them for long.

Nell had begun to walk up the path at a brisk pace.

Frey jogged to catch up with her. At her side, he asked, “You’re going through with this?”

Nell swallowed and nodded. “You saw their mother.”

“I did,” said Frey, frowning. “She didn’t look good.”

“She didn’t look sick,” said Nell, curtly.

“She looked worse than sick,” mumbled Frey.

“What do you want me to do?” Nell turned in a fury on him, glowering. “You’re afraid I’m gonna turn but you won’t help me. You never help me.” She glared at him a second longer, then turned away and kept walking. “This is why I wanted to do this alone. You just make things harder.”

Frey looked at the ground, shoulders slanted, giving him an off-kilter, wounded look. “I thought you’d want company.”

Nell stopped. She half-turned and her face was crimson. She seemed about to say something but snapped her mouth shut instead and turned back around and kept walking.

Frey watched her go, saw her glimmering red hair swallowed up in the grey maw of the arching colonnade. He shuffled off to the side and sat down near the head of a bleached-bone donkey corpse. He crossed his legs and set his elbow in the crook of his knee and put his mouth and chin in his hand and rested his head. Drawing aimless shapes in the dust of the road, he sat like a forgotten child, brooding and begrudging and reflective.

––––––

The words buzzed inside Nell’s skull.

“Come alone. Come alone.”

She hadn’t stopped to wonder who had spoken them, hadn’t stopped to wonder whether she should do what they commanded. They moved her as if their implicit guile had set hooks into her skin and taut, compelling wire through the eyes of those hooks. Each step was pulled out of her, and her body went along a captive to itself.

The wood darkened from grey to blue-black. Overhead, branches hung heavy with hoary moss like the hair of the old and the dead. There was no birdsong, other than the macabre heralding of crows that seemed distant and reluctant to alight on the graveyard trees this deep into the wood.

Nell felt like she occupied some room beyond her own perception, seeing herself seeing the world. And something else was seeing her yet.

“Stop, child.”

Nell stopped mid-step. The voice was no longer in her head. It emanated from the dark, thickset trunks off to her right. It had a quality that suggested many voices speaking from a deep, open grave.

Nell turned, skin crawling. From out of the dimness, under cover of the grim thatch-work above, a head of a pale woman extended from a neck, monstrous and swan-like, that terminated in a body unseen somewhere in the woods.

Terror ran rampant across Nell’s body. Her mouth dried completely, her eyes peeled, and she was at once impelled to run for her life but could not make so much as a finger flex.

The head swayed in the air like a serpent eyeing a nest of unguarded eggs. A smile slashed horizontal across her face and from out of her mouth a pair of piercing mandibles emerged and clacked together twice in delight.

“What’s your name, child?”

Wavering, Nell spoke. “Nell.”

The creature snapped her head from side to side quick like a whip. Her ink-black hair tossed to and fro and came to partially obscure her porcelain face. She clacked her mandibles and smiled, eyes bursting with larval glee.

“An unusual name. Unusual names please me. Do you know what my name is?” The creature’s face swelled in a putrescent smile that spread to her ears.

The vertebrae in Nell’s neck cracked as she forced herself to nod.

“Say it,” implored the creature.

“Mukade,” whispered Nell.

Mukade’s face unfurled in glee, jaw unhinged, horrible writhing rows of living teeth lining the inside of her mouth and throat, twitching like beckoning and bewitching fingers. At the end of her tenuous neck, her head jerked spasmodically, and a rattling gurgle that only the most depraved would call a laugh cracked the otherwise still air. Then, abruptly, she stopped moving, stopped laughing, and became completely still, her gouged grin still gaping. “Come to feel the bite of Mukade, young one? Come to be cured of worse ills?”

Nell tried to nod but her neck felt like it had fused together.

“You must have, or you would not have come. Only the mad and the lost may find me here. Only the broken and the crippled are able to come this far. Because they know of the Bite. The alluring, wondrous Bite.” Silvery ichor dribbled from her mandibles, and she sucked it back into her maw and sighed.

Nell was nearly catatonic. “The Bite…?” She mimicked the words, but they were sounds without meaning to her.

Mukade laughed, and it sounded like bones being broken. “The Bite. The Bite that cures. The Bite that saves. Many come to feel the Bite. The ecstasy of it. It stays with you, hatches there, and you carry such pleasure with you wherever you go. Many come to feel it.”

For the first time, Nell looked behind her. She half hoped she would see Frey standing there but knew she wouldn’t. She saw nothing but the sepulchral hollow dotted with moss and bones.

“Do not look back!” hissed Mukade. “Do not look back, or you shall not feel the bite.”

Nell whirled around at the sharp, stinging tone that suffused Mukade’s voice. “I’m sorry!” she blubbered. “I… I… I come to be cured!”

A mulching gurgle poured from the mouth of Mukade. She narrowed her eyes so that they seemed bloodless gashes in her lyme-coloured face. She studied Nell, sole to crown, undulating on her horrible neck. “You don’t look sick. What ails you, Nell? From what do you so suffer that you would rather feel the Bite than go on living as you are?”

“I suffer from anxiety,” said Nell, teeth chattering.

“And of what are you anxious… Nell?” Mukade clicked her mandibles together.

“Of being sick! Of dying!” cried Nell. She became aware of her mother’s book in her right hand and the bullet it still carried. “Of being abandoned.”

At this last answer, Mukade raised up, curved her neck in a pleasing sibilant shape, and looked down at Nell with awful benignity. “Feel my Bite, and never be alone again, Nell. Feel my Bite, and you will take me with you wherever you may go. I cannot get sick. I cannot die. Life with me inside you is…” She stopped and chittered. “A pleasurable arrangement for both of us.”

The words of Mukade poured down on Nell’s mind like a poison. She looked up at the hovering horrid face like a visitation from a kindly star, promising her safe passage through the night and beyond. She found her left arm raising, slowly offering supplication, turning to expose the soft skin on the underside of her wrist.

A half-moon smile opened like a cavern in Mukade’s face. She began to lower her head, her fangs glistening even in the darkness under the obscure canopy. The lower she bent on her sea-worm neck, the wider her maw gaped, until a wave of breath, reeking of compost and death, curdled Nell’s stomach.

The brutal fangs bore down languidly, slowly, ecstatically. But so long did they take that Nell broke through her entrancement just enough to see the willow whistle she held in the offered-up arm. She didn’t know when she had drawn it out of her pocket, nor why she had. She snatched her arm back and took a few panicked steps back, coming fully into possession of her senses.

Mukade, seething, rearing up with aspect horrible, hissed wordlessly from the top of her wrathfully wrangling neck. “You toy with Mukade, Nell? You go back on your word? After everything I have promised, you reject me? You reject the Bite?”

Nell took another step back. She clutched the willow whistle in one hand, her mother’s book in the other.

Mukade swooped down, eye level and studied Nell’s expression.

“You will run, Nell?”

Nell took another step back.

“You will forgo the Bite that saves, Nell?”

The air caught in Nell’s lungs. She mouthed a word but did not breathe it.

“You will run, Nell.” Mukade’s voice had grown heavy, low, as if it were made of the ground upon which they stood. “You will run into the jaws of worse than me.”

Nell turned swiftly. The earth passed under her feet as if it were moving and she was standing still. She seemed not to touch the ground. She ran and ran and not once looked back.

The voice of Mukade, flat, grave, without urgency, remained in her head, not diminishing in timbre despite the distance Nell was putting between herself and the creature.

“Keep running. A swift foot will get you only so far. Run and run and watch the space between yourself and others only grow wider. I could have given you companionship. You could have carried me within you. I would never have abandoned you. True loneliness is yours, now. Death will be a continuation of your life. You will not know the difference. You will not know when you have died. You’re one lone drifting speck of ash crossing from an empty blue sky to a black one. No one will know who you were, or that you had ever been. And all this was your choice.” The voice faded, no more than a rustling behind Nell’s ears. “Remember that.”

The gloomy hollow spat her up like a poisoned meal and she came around the bend and saw the patient, lanky shape of Frey where he sat still brooding and unmoved from the position he had first adopted.

“Frey!” she screamed. Her voice had the quality of a ripped canvas sack. Gut-freezing urgency enflamed her voice and she screamed and screamed until she fell, tumbling, panting, to the dirt near Frey, who had jumped to his feet at once. She scrabbled wildly on her hands and knees across the rough, rutted road and wrapped her arms around his knees as if she were drowning and clung on and screamed until she vomited.

Frey tore his gaze sharply away, feeling his own stomach turn, his shock turning to nausea. He desperately wanted her to detach herself from him. He tried to lift a foot, but she tightened her grip and gasped, “Don’t.” Resigned to stand still for whatever time she needed, he looked straight ahead at the tree line opposite, focusing on the patterns of whorls in the bark of a particular tree, or watching a single leaf rock subtly in the barely felt breeze, listening with a slightly curled lip to Nell retch and gasp.

Eventually, Nell let go. Her breathing became more regular. She braced herself with her palms and made to stand up but stopped. She leaned behind Frey’s legs and picked up her mother’s book. She sat with her legs tucked under her on the road. “Can you get that for me?” she asked, her voice ragged.

Moving only his eyes, Frey looked down on her, careful not see the vomit partially coating his right boot. She was looking at a spot behind him and to his right. Turning slowly, eyes level with the tree line, Frey looked down behind him and saw the willow whistle he had carved her lying a pace away. Moving to get it, his tendons popped and his joints were stiff from standing still for so long. Picking it up, he held it in between his thumb and forefinger and turned it, studying the angular shapes he had etched into the green bark. “You kept this thing?” he muttered.

Behind him, Nell croaked, “Yeah.”

Frey half-turned, seeing her still sitting down on the road from the corner of his eye. He looked back at the whistle and pinched it between his middle and forefinger and his thumb like he would snap it in half. “Why?”

“You made it for me.”

One end of Frey’s mouth curled with a wry twitch. Then a bluish look came over his face and he looked at the ground, deepening the shadows under his brows. He took a deeper than normal breath before turning around and handing the whistle back to Nell.

“Thank you,” said Nell, face smeared with dirt, tears, vomit, and snot.

A puff of air passed from Frey’s nostrils. “Can you stand?”

Nell squinted and looked up at him, then at the dirt in front of her. She took a deep breath. “I think so.”

“You need help?” asked Frey, not moving from where he stood.

Nell looked up at him and flashed a pained smile. “No. I can stand on my own.” Getting her legs under her, she pushed up with her occupied hands and stood a bit unsteadily. “See?”

Frey grunted. “I see.” He made a sour face. “Let’s get away from this mess,” he said, pointedly not looking at the pool of vomit between them.

Oblivious to the fact that she had thrown up, thinking that Frey was talking about Mukade down at the end of the road, mistaking his sour expression for one of sympathy, Nell couldn’t help a short, glad smile from appearing on her face. She hopped to catch up with Frey who had already turned away and was walking back up the road toward the village.

“She tried to bite me,” said Nell, after some moments of silent walking.

“Imagine that,” said Frey. They walked apace for a few more leaden steps. “What are we going to do now that that didn’t work?”

A troubled look passed over Nell’s face. She looked to the slow passing ground before her feet. “I don’t know.”

A laxity fell over Frey’s features, making him look even more unimpressed than usual. “Well, we better think of something.”

“We have time,” said Nell, voice fragile and chipper. “I’m still young.”

Frey raised his eyebrows slightly but didn’t speak.

Shooting anxious glances over at Frey’s brooding face, Nell rubbed some specks of regurgitated stew from her chin with the back of her sleeve and looked at the stain in surprise. “Did I throw up?”

“You know that’s got nothing to do with it,” said Frey, not looking in her direction. “Being young’s got nothing to do with it.”

Nell drew a little way to her side of the path. “You don’t know that.”

“What?” said Frey even though he heard her.

“You don’t know that,” said Nell, face tilted up slightly, staring straight ahead. “I probably don’t need to get shot until I’m as old as that woman in the cart.”

“That’s not true and you know it,” growled Frey.

“I don’t know it’s not not true,” snapped Nell. “What do they fucking know anyway? Shooting us at seventeen.” She turned on Frey, face a rising red. “They’re not friends of my mine. They gave never a shit about me. And they never gave a shit about you either. All they did was hurt you and you just let them.”

A broken look passed over Frey’s face for the merest glimpse before settling on a paralytic blankness. “They never hurt me.”

Nell looked at him with unconcealed shock and disdain. “Look at your fucking face! It’s all busted and bruised and scarred. You’re telling me that didn’t hurt?”

Frey turned a slow, wooden look on her and spoke through his teeth. “No. It didn’t.”

“Then you don’t feel anything and that’s just sad.”

Nell’s words had the finality of a gunshot. All talk between them was silenced and they marched on leaving as much room between them as the narrow path would allow. On the wayside, dead things gave way to living grass. A minstrel of birds struck up a tune and followed them, hopping from branch to branch.

Calmer now, hearing the hamlet alive with voices just around the bend, Nell braced herself to break the silence. “We can part ways, if that’s you want.”

Without hesitating, but without any feeling in his voice, Frey said, “It’s not.”

“But you don’t want to stay.”

Frey inhaled sharply. “I want to keep my promise.”

“What promise?”

“To carry you.”

Nell looked at him, saw his rigid, bludgeoned face. She smiled sadly. “Oh, that. It’s too late.” She squeezed the willow whistle in her left hand. Closing the distance, she sidled over and reached across her body with her left hand and held out the whistle to Frey. “Here.”

Frey glanced at it coldly. He looked her in the face and the same broken look cracked his features, longer this time. But his listlessness indifference rebuilt itself and he looked away. “I gave that to you.”

“I’m giving it back,” said Nell.

“It doesn’t mean anything to me,” said Frey.

Nell choked on the sob-shrouded words she felt coming up as if they were taking her lungs with them. But she couldn’t say them. Instead, they walked in a more painful silence into the hamlet and saw the cart that Addie, Sven and their mother had driven, now unoccupied. An ominous magnetism drew them over to it and they saw the seat was dark maroon with pools of sun-dried blood.

“Made it back, did you?” Frey and Nell both jumped and turned and beheld the hailing form of Sawfeather approaching them with a smile that bordered on lecherous. “Trust it didn’t hurt too bad. Show me where you received…” He licked his lips. “… the Bite.”

Nell shrank back, wiping her eyes with the back of her sleeve. “I didn’t get it.”

Sawfeather stopped as if a gun had been drawn on him. His expression became one of shock, then anger.

“Didn’t get it? Then why the tears if not tears of ecstasy?” He took an urgent step toward her. “You mean to say you denied Her? You turned your back on her Gift?” His voice grew louder as he spoke. “The spot of green in this world that has gone to shit. You finally found it, but it wasn’t good enough for you, huh? You’d rather go back to rolling in the shit. You’re not human. You’re a pig. Knew it as soon as I laid eyes on you. Really, the fault is mine for sending such an unclean animal her way.” He took another sudden, jerking step towards Nell. “You’ll regret what you’ve done. Or, should I say, failed to do.”

Frey had bent down and drawn his knife from his boot. “Step back,” he said in low tones.

Sawfeather’s head snapped to his face. His unblinking eyes had a glassy sheen, his pupils reduced to pinpricks. A bizarre clicking sound emanated from his throat. He made no attempt to speak. He only tracked Frey with his eyes.

It’s uncertain how long the three of them would have remained standing in paralyzed attitudes of hostility. The mood was abruptly severed by the voice of Marston, who had spotted the stand-off as he took a break from splitting wood near the leeside of his hovel.

“What’s going on here?” he called, walking over, axe resting topside up on his shoulder.

Sawfeather snapped his head towards him as he approached. Something rattled from within his chest. “Nothing,” he hissed.

Marston walked right up to the trio and stopped, looking each of them in the face in turn with a stern and searching expression. He pointedly looked at the blade in Frey’s hand before speaking again. “I can see plain as day that it’s not ‘nothing’. Let me guess: this is about that cockroach in the woods? Saw it and had second thoughts, did you?” He looked at Nell. “You’re a fool to have gone as far as you did. But you’re not as big a fool to have gone through with it. Like him.” He nodded at Sawfeather.

Nell looked at Sawfeather. He was shaking unnaturally.

“Call her that again,” he said.

Marston turned a slow, contentious gaze on Sawfeather and blinked. “What?”

“I said, ‘Call her that again’.”

Marston squinted and made a face suggesting he had just witnessed some act of irremediable buffoonery. “Are you telling me what to do? An insect like you?” He hefted the axe from his shoulder and held it in two hands. “Keep chirping, little cricket. I meant what I said. She is a cockroach.” He pronounced this last word with scorn and disgust, spitting it out like it had crawled into his mouth.

The clicking in Sawfeather’s chest had increased to a heated buzz. He snapped his gaze from face to face. From out of buildings and yards and the general land around, onlookers had gathered. Some made resonant clicking sounds much like Sawfeather. Others stared at them with alarm and moved off to the other side of the road. Soon the hamlet was split so that those bitten by Mukade stood on one side of the road, those who hadn’t on the other.

Nell wanted to tug on Frey’s sleeve and implore him to run but was afraid any movement would draw attention.

Marston must have realized that the tension that ran through the hamlet was finally coming to a head. His face had lost its puerile arrogance and had become stiff and grim. His voice, though no more than a whisper, carried like a gunshot. “You have no idea how long I’ve wanted to do this.”

Sawfeather, primed by some preternatural instinct, made a rush at Marston. There was a sickening crushing sound like a pumpkin being crushed and Sawfeather fell onto the road, a horrible gash separating his right shoulder from his neck and chest. His body shuddered and curled up like a dead spider. Then, with a sound like linen tearing, a chitinous, hundred-limbed worm broke through, crawling out of the wound as if birthed by the very act of violence that had felled its host. It whipped around blindly, grasping with sharp mandibles for any soft, warm, living thing it could visit insensible pain upon.

The world broke into pandemonium. Screaming was general. Bodies ran blind like moths, bumping into one another, fighting tooth and nail, hitting the dirt, dead, dying, or cowering in fear.

Nell grabbed Frey by the arm and pulled him with all her weight. He nearly toppled over but caught himself. They ran, darting and dodging the panicked horde of the bitten and unbitten alike. In a moment of clarity, Nell locked eyes with the mother of Addie and Sven. Her face was smeared with blood. Jagged mandibles jutted from the corners of her mouth. Her neck extended, pale and undulating. She held a small, severed arm, upon which she had been feeding.

Blankness stole over Nell’s sight like a visitation of mercy. She ran as an animal might, without thought in words, without seeing or understanding the objects that made up her vision. When she came back to herself, she was in a field. It was near dark, and the hamlet was nothing but firefly lights in the backdrop. Frey was near her side, looking back, panting, drooling slightly.