The village of Endwoode, still recovering from the agitation of Nell fleeing their most prized rite, still nursing a murderous oath against Frey who had gotten away without due retribution, was in the pre-dusk lull of the day. Children were indoors with their mothers. Men, enjoying and exercising their greater freedom, remained outside to bask in the dusty blue light of the oncoming evening. They gathered in twos and threes, speaking harshly from the sides of their mouths, spitting onto the hard-packed earth. They opined. They guffawed. They spoke ill of their children, their wives, and their neighbours.

They saw a hang-dog young man with feathery hair and a hostage’s careful gait step from the woods. They saw a man in a wide-brimmed hat emerge like the phantasmal projection of deathly certitude that shadowed both man and beast from birth. Watching with dark suspicion, breaking into broadside attitudes of hostility, some made to move and meet this unwelcome stranger crossing their home at such an ill-omened time.

Foremost among these swaggering fools was the Administrator. He walked, belly foremost, like a topsail catching a strong headwind. His face was scoured and scowling. Recognizing Grymes, taken aback by his slumped posture, so used to the garish bravado the young man usually assumed, the Administrator called out while a decent distance remained between the approaching parties. “Hold there. Who’s this grim fellow you’ve brought to our home?”

Grymes stopped. He would not look up. The man in the wide-brimmed hat walked up next to him and stopped. Haloed by the brim of his hat, his face was no more than a shadow except for his eyes, which seemed filled with the rosy light of the bloody sun.

A feeling of dread much like the eve before a bloodbath visited the Administrator. He had tried long and hard over many years to make sure he never felt anything like it again. That this man had inspired the abhorred feeling without word turned his heart to wood and his blood to pitch. But he would not let it show on his face. He assumed a furious scowl, knitting his brows, frowning so that his beard seemed to grow longer. “Lost your tongue or what? Speak, boy.”

“This him?” The man in the wide brimmed hat turned and looked down at the side of Grymes’s head.

“Yeah,” replied Grymes in a bloodless tone.

“Oh, you can speak for him!” bellowed the Administrator. “What’s gotten into you? Have you forgotten who puts out the lead around here? Not doing yourself any favours, Grymes, taking up with strangers from out there over kith and kin here at home.” He shook his head. “Nothing good comes from out there. You’ve done wrong to take up with the likes of him.”

As the Administrator spoke, the Clairvoyant closed the distance, his lead-soled boots sending tremors up the shins of all who stood watching.

“No nearer there!” barked the Administrator, pulling his pistol from his waistband. He pointed the inert, unloaded weapon at the Clairvoyant. “Another step and I fire.”

The Clairvoyant came on, not flagging, not flinching, step inexorable, intentions becoming horrifically clear to all ever-widening eyes. Mere paces away, the Administrator gave a futile gesture with the barrel of his gun, as if trying to shoo away a fly. He took a step back, teeth bared in a grimace that was mostly fear.

Close enough now, the Clairvoyant knocked the gun from the Administrator’s hand with a sharp-knuckled unpulled blow and, with his other hand, swung his blunderbuss on its leather strap from behind his back to hip level. Finding his finger hold, the wood stock worn from so many such grippings, the gun slid into his calloused hand like a shovel into a gravedigger’s. He jammed the wide, fluted mouth of the weapon into the Administrator’s gut and pulled the trigger before the shocked breath had been ejected from his target’s lungs.

The hammer struck, a single slug-like spark caught the powder in the pan and, an instant later, with a deafening sulfurous bark, a bevy of cruel, spiked, rusted and fanged shrapnel scraped and howled from the lamprey-mouthed tube in a gout of dull orange flame —nails pulled from abandoned buildings; begrimed, blackened glass from burned down industries; wind-carved pebbles, raw-edged as if designed by sadistic smiths to be projectiles of life-ending agony. Not a single bit of lead in that motley horde of missiles that erupted from the mouth of the gun like bats from a cave into the bloated, arrogant, and soft flesh of the Administrator.

A solid span of metal, glass, particulate smoke, misted blood, and torn viscera sprayed the ground behind the Administrator and he tumbled backwards, slipping in his own gore, sprawling with his feet kicking the air. And like a hound to the neck of a hart, the Clairvoyant was on him, running his forearm-length blade straight through his heart, falling with all his weight so that the blade passed clean through his body and stuck several inches into the hard dirt beneath.

With relish, the Clairvoyant listened to the gurgling end of the man beneath him. “It’s a poor soldier that points an empty gun,” he whispered so that only the Administrator could hear. The Administrator fixed his fogged and fading eyes on the Clairvoyant’s own, but saw only the reflection of his own dying, dilated pupils in the glass orbs that seemed to hover over him. “Poor or not, you writ away your life when you chose that accursed vocation.” The Clairvoyant tilted his head, the cast of thought upon his scarred face. “Though I suppose you could not have done otherwise.” A sick, self-assured grin split his face. “No more than I could have.”

No other man made any move to run or help or even speak. They stood like cairns in a semi-circle. When the Clairvoyant pushed himself up, wiping his long blade on the shirt of the burst corpse at his feet before sheathing it, one onlooking man retched, breaking the others from their transfixion. They ran home to their wives and children and didn’t speak ill of them for a very long time.

Grymes could have run too. But he didn’t. He waited, patient as a vulture, for the Clairvoyant to notice he was still there.

In the near dark, the blue shape of the gore-splattered murderer turned, slowly surveying the lamb-like village. Candles seemed to be snuffed out under the visitation of his glance. At last, he turned back and saw that Grymes was standing, watching, regaining some of his sneer, losing some of the placid laxity of fear that had possessed him since being bested and nearly killed hours earlier.

“Still here?” asked the Clairvoyant.

Grymes made no answer.

“This soldier man mean something to you?”

Grymes shook his head. “Nothing at all.”

“That’s well.”

The dark deepened. Sound seemed weighed down.

“Do you want to join him?” asked the Clairvoyant.

“No.”

“But you’re still here?”

Grymes could tell by the contour of his dark shape that the Clairvoyant had a hand on his knife. He swallowed the billowing fear that rose up in him. “You kill soldiers?”

The Clairvoyant kept a hand on his knife. “I do.”

“Say I know where one more is,” said Grymes.

The Clairvoyant turned, studied the lean, downturned frame of Grymes, which addressed him with a voice that was straining not to tremble. “Say that you do.” The Clairvoyant walked up to Grymes so that the tips of his boots almost touched his. “Would you tell me?”

“I would,” said Grymes. He let out a forced grunt as the Clairvoyant jabbed him in the short ribs with the pommel of his knife and held it against his flesh.

Looming over him, bending so that the brim of his hat rested on top of Grymes’s head, the Clairvoyant asked, “In exchange for what?”

“Nothing,” whispered Grymes. He tried to step back but the Clairvoyant pinned his foot with one of his lead-soled own.

“Do you understand what you’ve just done?”

“No,” whispered Grymes.

“You struck a deal. We tow the same line, now.” He picked up his foot, unpinning Grymes. “And if the payoff is not as you promised,” he pushed the pommel deeper into Grymes’s ribs, “I’ll skin you.”

Not stepping back even though he could, Grymes lifted his head to meet the Clairvoyant’s moon-reflecting orbs. “Have I proved myself a liar?”

Straightening, the Clairvoyant sheathed his blade. “No. No, you haven’t.”

“That’s cause I’m not.”

Moonlight lit up the Clairvoyant’s teeth like a mouthful of opals. “So you say.” He turned to look at the black, amorphous mass of the Administrator’s splattered body. “Where?”

“He took off three days ago.” Grymes’s mouth curdled in a cruel smile. “Name’s ‘Frey’.”

“Don’t care what his name is. Pick up that piece there.” A shadowed hand pointed at the moon-glimmering dragoon pistol that had been knocked a few paces away from them.

Grymes moved his legs for the first time in what felt like days. He felt unsteadied, as if he might tip over. Carefully crouching, he picked up the gun. It was solid and heavy in his hand. He stood slowly as if it were a grave weight that pulled him down. Turning to see what the Clairvoyant would say or do, he saw the dark-haloed silhouette floating away to the tree line from where he had come. Grymes ran to catch up.

“It’s yours,” said the Clairvoyant, ignoring Grymes’s outstretched, offering had. “You know how to use it?”

Loathe to admit incompetency, but not wanting to risk lying more than he already had, Grymes said, “No. Never had the opportunity.”

Nodding silently, the Clairvoyant answered after a few steps in the dark. “You’ll have plenty of those, soon enough.”

Brief as candle smoke on a windy day, the two violent-hearted shadows melded with the trees and the greater dark under the skeletal boughs that welcomed them home.

–––––

When Nell woke, the sun was peeking over the horizon. Soft stalks of barley brushed against her bare arms, moved by a gentle breeze. With the morning came the gift of forgetting. What had happened yesterday seemed nothing more than a bad dream. Yet, as she lay there somewhere between sleep and wakefulness, the grave reality of what had happened settled on her like a huge flat stone. She sat up and spotted Frey lying face down in the barley near her feet. She gave him a rough kick, and he jolted awake.

“What?” he snapped. His face was marked with compression lines from resting on the chaff. His eyes were bloodshot and heavy with dark bags.

“Wake up,” said Nell.

He scowled at her. “I’m awake.”

“What do you think?”

Frey squinted at her as if trying to decide whether she were a phantom of his imagination or a waking life enigma. “About what?”

Nell grimaced and grabbed a handful of dry stalks and threw them up in the air. The breeze caught them and plastered them against Frey’s face. “Anything! Everything! It’s no good. Why did I run, Frey? Why couldn’t I have just taken it like you did?” She gave him a cutting glance and lowered her voice. “Why couldn’t you have just been there?”

Frey’s face drained of what little colour it had. He spat out some chaff and mumbled something inaudible.

Nell placed the palms of her hands over her eyes and pressed until she saw phosphene splotches of purple and aquamarine. “I think we have to go back.”

Frey’s face darkened further. “Back to Endwoode?”

Nell brought her hands away from her face and let them fall with a slap on either side of her. “We can’t survive out here.”

Frey got to his feet. He looked back across the barley to the hamlet. He didn’t see any movement. “I think it’s too late.”

“Don’t say that.”

“It’s the truth.”

“Don’t say it.”

Frey snarled. “Then don’t ask for it.”

Nell watched the sky.

“They’d kill me for sure.”

Nell sat up with a jerk. “Then you have to shoot me.”

Frey turned and looked down at Nell. He shook his head.

“You have to.”

“Like I said earlier. Don’t have a gun. Don’t have any powder.” His made a half-hearted, open-palmed gesture. “And I wouldn’t do it even if I had.”

“Well somebody has to!” said Nell, nearly screaming. “I can’t wind up like that woman on the cart. I can’t let something that horrible happen to me.”

“Then do something about it,” said Frey, turning away, looking back at the smoke-pillared hamlet. The stillness was uncanny.

Nell bit her lip and she glared at Freys back. “I will,” she said, spitting the words at him. He turned as if he had felt them. “I will,” she repeated, shoving herself to her feet, scooping up her mother’s book. She bent to pick up her willow whistle but stopped halfway. She looked at Frey, straightened, and turned away, leaving it in the grass.

Making sure she wouldn’t turn around, Frey walked over and picked it up. A wounded look maimed his sleepy, still-swollen face. He pocketed it and followed in Nell’s trail, keeping an eye on the ground.

They walked away from the hamlet. They buried the day previous like a body in the grave part of their minds. Thirst and hunger moved their feet, and they took to a game trail that led into the woods. Heavy red berries hung on their branches, but they passed them without plucking them, reasoning that if they weren’t eaten by now, they shouldn’t be eaten at all.

During the hottest part of the day they heard the alluring trickle of water and followed it. Lapping up the cool water of a small brook was a deer. It fled, white tail flashing, as Nell came crashing through the reeds that bordered the brook. She fell to her knees and nearly submerged her whole face in the water. Frey came up and knelt by her side, but not too close and not downstream, and cupped the water and brought it to his mouth with careful regular movements.

When she was done, Nell sat back on the bank. The tips of her hair were soaked and plastered to her collarbones. Water dripped from her chin, and she made no move to wipe it away.

Frey sat on the bank, his bruised face having turned from purple to dull yellow. He stared straight ahead. The steady trickle of the brook as it hopped over sticks that lie crossways put them in an easier state of mind that neither had felt since they left Endwoode. The water had taken the edge from their hunger.

“Think we can eat the frogs around here?” asked Nell.

“Raw? I doubt it,” said Frey.

“What’s the worst that could happen?”

Frey shrugged. “Probably just puke and shit your guts out and then die.”

Nell sneered. “Would you care if I did?” She looked over as she asked and noticed the green tip of the willow whistle sticking halfway out of Frey’s trouser pocket. Her breath froze and she wished she could inhale the words back into her lungs. She could see that frey’s face was calm, but she knew she what was coming.

“Be just like you to make fucking a mess when you die,” he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

Nell winced. She looked at his severe profile, then down at the whistle. Then she turned to watch the brook, seeing there all the babbling ambiguities that made as little sense as her life. “Do you hate me?”

Frey blinked slowly. “No.”

“Then why do you say things like that?”

He looked off for a split second. “I don’t know.”

Nell turned to look at him. “Do you have to say them?”

Frey angled his eyes away from Nell.

“If you don’t, I wish you wouldn’t.” She pressed her lips together. “It hurts me so much I’d rather be alone.”

Frey kept his face turned away.

“Do you hear me?”

“I do,” mumbled Frey.

Nell swallowed and rubbed a finger across each of her eyes. “Can I have my whistle back?” she croaked.

For a moment, Frey remained fixed in the other direction. Then he moved as if suddenly animated, pulling the whistle from his pocket, stealing one pained glance from under his heavy eyelids at her before suffering to lean over as close as could to hand Nell back the whistle. She took it without haste or reproach. “Thanks.”

“Welcome,” said Frey, in a toneless voice. He brought a hand to his chin and rubbed his stubble and furrowed his brow at the water as if there something in it he could not understand.

They sat very still, quiet with their worries, exhausted from all they had been through and all they had put each other through, just listening to the brook run and run. From a hawk’s-eye view it was a thread of quicksilver, carving a careful line on the long-suffering earth. It flowed hypnotically. Despite being pure motion, it left a static sinewy afterimage on the insides of both Frey and Nell’s eyelids as they dropped to sleep on the soft ground, the water whispering its eternal lullaby, diluting the sediment of selfhood into tumbling detritus and dreams.

When Nell woke up, it was near evening. She sat up, hair frayed, scalp prickling with pine needles. To her left, Frey was a glob of bluish shadow like something washed up on a shore. She could hear him breathing the deep and rhythmic air of sound sleep. Before her, past her outstretched legs, the brook, now lusterless without the sun or the moon to shine on it, gurgled like uncorked wine. She watched it without seeing it for some moments. Then a shape coalesced, cloth-like, bobbing. Her breath caught when she understood she was looking at a body face down in the water, snagged on something below the surface.

Blindly, she slapped Frey across the face as he slept, and he let out an unrestrained cry and sat up, holding his cheek. “What? What?”

Nell pointed animatedly at the brook with one hand and held a finger to her lips with the other. “There’s someone down there,” she whispered

Frey looked at her blankly. Then his face crumpled into a scornful squint. “Who?”

“I don’t know,” said Nell. She looked back at the brook and saw that the body hadn’t moved. “Go check.”

“You go check,” said Frey.

Nell looked at him like he wasn’t speaking the same language as her. “What?”

“I said, ‘You go check’.”

“Why me?”

“Cause you’re the one who saw them.”

Looking from Frey to the body and back several times. “But I can’t swim.”

“The water’s two fucking feet deep!” shouted Frey.

“Don’t fucking yell!”

Frey took a deep breath. “Would you just go check?”

Nell sat still, face stained with disdain, staring at Frey. Then, as if a thousand biting insects had swarmed her at once, she burst into agitated movement, tearing off her boots, yanking up her pant legs to just below her knees, tossing her hair around, flinging pine needles pell-mell all around her. She threw her boots at Frey, hard, and they clacked off the trunk of the pine tree which he had crawled up against and fell upon his head.

Jumping from the bank, she broke the mercurial surface like glass, and landed on the water-planed, smooth stones, and slipped immediately, landing backwards on her seat. The force of her fall pulled her into a reclining position, allowing the brook to pass over the entire length of her face and body. She sat up, spluttering, near howling, uttering foul curses. Pushing herself up, minding the soft push of the current, she waded, and the water seemed to boil in her thrashing wake. Reaching the body, she snagged it by the mop of waterlogged hair and yanked it up so hard that the neck made a crunching sound.

“It’s a man!” she shouted at Frey, who was watching with a wooden face up on the bank. “He’s dead!”

Frey didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing.

“I’m bringing him over!” Nell towed the soaked corpse through the treacle stream, fording it deftly with her chilled, bare feet. Reaching the bank, she heaved the floating man and he stuck fast to the mud just under where Frey was standing. “Haul him up.”

Frey looked at her and seemed to see something he would not dare converse with.

“If you don’t pull him up, I am actually going to kill you,” said Nell, ankle deep in the water, staring up at him, face infused with blood, dewed with crimson-looking water.

Crouching, Frey got the man under the arms and strained using his legs, back, shoulders and arms until he had him halfway over the bank and just enough so that he would not slide back down. He saw purple clouds and star-coloured tracers of light and he sucked in air in ragged, heaving gasps. He watched Nell clamber up and over the bank. “Why’d… why’d you bring him over here?”

“So we could look at him,” said Nell.

“What’s there to look at?” Frey took a step away from the corpse and eyed it with disgust.

“You know what your problem is?” Nell whipped her head in a wild arc, flicking drops of water over Frey’s face. “You can’t look things in the eye. You don’t know what there is because you’re afraid to look and see.”

Frey, proving her point, would not meet her pointed gaze.

Holding her sopping head steady, Nell at last turned on the corpse near her feet and pulled it over so that it faced up. A grey face of a bone-soaked man stared back up at her from eyes like slug skin. His tongue was swollen and it filled his mouth so that his jaw was forced to unhinge. But his face was but a foretaste of the grotesque puzzle of his body. His shirt had been sheared collar to hem and his blue, bloodless skin looked like the soft top of a mushroom. Holes had been gouged into his body, leaving ‘x’ shaped marks on the skin over his gut and ribs.

Both Frey and Nell couldn’t help but think that something had be extracted from the man’s body. A second horrible thought followed fast on the heels of the first.

“They took his lead out,” said Frey, green-faced, turning away.

Nell looked at his retreating shape and then back down at the map-like skin of the dead man. “Who’s ‘they’?”

Frey leaned against a pine tree and took deep, cool breaths. He kept a manic grin on his face because he had heard once that you could not vomit and smile at the same time. Sweat rolled down the back of his neck and he rubbed his arm where he had been shot.

Nell stood like a sentinel over the body, running her eyes over each knife-edged gouge as if at a constellation to be memorized. Then she turned away and picked up her mother’s book. The bullet in its pages was coal coloured, fat as a blood-swollen tick.

“I would read to you,” she said to Frey, “But my book has a bullet in it.”

Frey stood against the tree, just focusing on his breath. When Nell eventually dragged the body back to edge of the stream and kicked it in, he muttered so that she could not hear. “I don’t want to hear any more of those words, anyway.”

The sun was dying. The moon was not yet full and gave meager light. They could not move in the darkness for fearing being separated or of breaking an ankle in an unseen hole. They knew upstream were people more horrible yet than any met or imagined. Side by side they sat nearly touching at the hip and listened to the brook come bubbling down and past them. In fitful bursts, they slept and then started awake again at nothing. Cruel knowledge, like a weighted net, ensnared them and relieved them of all pretensions of fairytale adventure.

With the rebirth of the sun, they saw in the pale embryonic light three more bodies bobbing in the water that were not there before. Passing their eyes over them, feeling no need to give word to what they were seeing, they left that place, and headed down stream, away from wherever the dead had come.