Forty-Two

Having come to a stop, Erik couldn’t rise again. He told himself that he should, that they’d do well to keep walking, but the earth was too nice and flat, his bones too heavy, and Toinette’s head too welcome against his chest. All he could do was roll onto his back, pulling Toinette with him, and stare up at the sky.

For a change, there was a sky, one the mundane gray of low clouds and lit by the faint sun of midafternoon. What midafternoon was a mystery. Based on when they’d eaten, they’d spent only half a day in the temple, but Erik had heard many tales. Time worked differently in such places. They could have emerged weeks or years later than they’d gone in—there was no way to know.

He hadn’t the strength to worry.

Small things occupied his mind instead. Air, for instance: real, clean air, smelling vaguely of the sea beyond the island and vaguely of pine. There were no trees around them—the ring around the temple was a wasteland yet, if not so sinister as it had been when Erik and Toinette had entered—but after so long with nothing but the un-ark’s smell, Erik thought he could have caught the scent of a plant in England.

Toinette breathed as deeply as he did, the motion steady against him. It reassured him where her closed eyes might have otherwise given alarm, as did the slowing beat of her heart. Her hair fell across his face, and tickled, but he made no move to brush it away.

In time, though Erik couldn’t have said in how much time save that the sun hadn’t set, Toinette groaned and sat up. “Praise the saints,” she said and licked cracked lips. “And we’re…mostly…each in one piece.”

The whites of her eyes were as red as Erik suspected his own were, and her voice as hoarse as his throat felt. The cut on her leg was a raw-looking line of red, but it had mostly stopped bleeding from what he could tell. “Aye,” he said, “and glad to hear it from you. Though I fear we left the wine behind us when we changed, and the food as well.”

“Bah,” said Toinette, but good-humoredly. “And we’re quite lacking in mead and fowl as well. Inhospitable, I call it.”

Erik laughed, though it hurt his throat and his ribs alike. They’d both gone without for longer. Survival was food and wine enough.

“We should walk,” he said, though. “Get to the stream, clean your wounds.”

“Clean everything we can, after that run,” Toinette replied, getting to her feet with another groan. “Just poke me in the ribs if I fall over on the way. You’ll never carry me in your condition.”

He might have protested, but knew it for the truth, and was in no shape to speak very much. Instead, when he stood, he wrapped an arm around Toinette’s shoulders and, careful of her burns, leaned his weight a little on the one she offered.

Thus supporting each other, staggering sore-footed like a pair of drunks in the small hours of the morning, they retraced the paths they’d taken.

Dead trees stayed dead, and nothing moved among them. Time and nature might reclaim the woods around the temple, or the blight might remain. Not all scars healed. It was enough for Erik to know that the dead forest was a scar, to look through the trees and see the red light of the setting sun, and to breathe in nothing sinister as he walked.

Likewise, though the trees and wildlife in the livelier part of the forest were yet deformed, no phantom shapes appeared among them. The wind was chilly, more so as the evening approached, but the bone-deep cold was gone. A malignity had made its home nearby, and the land yet bore the marks, but It dwelt there no longer. The forest Toinette and Erik walked through was empty, and then twisted, but it was free.

They walked wearily enough that night fell when they were hours from the stream. Erik glanced down at Toinette as the sky darkened, and she shrugged beneath his arm. “I’d rather keep going. You?”

He nodded. Given the thing that had inflicted it, he didn’t want to sleep without cleaning Toinette’s wound, and his thirst was almost as great as his tiredness. More than that, the stream had become a symbol as they walked, a border. Once they made it there, they’d be back in the world they’d grown to know.

That was all sound reasoning, but by the time they finally dragged themselves to the water, Erik had questioned it to himself on several occasions. Even getting his head down to take a drink was an effort.

Yet the water did help. He was far beyond the reach of a second wind, but after minutes of drinking, when his stomach felt swollen from water, he knew himself to be alive again and possessed of human limbs, not rusty mechanisms. Erik dipped his face into the stream, washing away blood, sweat, and dirt alike, then turned to Toinette.

She sat barefoot and wet-haired on the bank, cupping water in her hands and pouring it over the slash on her leg. Blood ran anew as the scab broke open, and Toinette hissed in pain, but she kept going.

“Let me,” Erik said, kneeling at her side.

Without a word, Toinette leaned back on her hands, staring up at the sky as Erik took over her task. The wound was deep, and running had done it no good, but only blood ran from it. Erik saw no odd colors, smelled nothing unusual, and was cautiously relieved. “How does it feel?” he asked.

“Not bad,” she managed, and though her voice was unsteady with pain, Erik knew what she meant. “It hurts worse than a knife would’ve, but there’s nothing odd about it. Nothing cold, or…well, you know.”

“Aye, I do.”

The scraps of his sleeve they’d have used to mark doors, unused thanks to Adnet’s aid, made decent bandages. While Erik saw to her leg, Toinette lay on her side, soaking her burned hands in the water. “My pride,” she said, glancing down the length of her body at him, “may never recover.”

“Just as well. Pride’s a sin, they tell me.”

“Are you taking credit for saving my soul?”

Erik tied the final knot, sat up, and looked at her: bruised, cut, wearing only the dubious remains of her gown, in need of a far more thorough wash than her brief dip in the stream could provide, and utterly beautiful. “I’ll save you any way I can,” he said, “if there’s need.”

At that, Toinette turned and rose to face him, silent for a long minute before she spoke. “I love you too,” she said, “if you hadn’t worked that out. Now let’s get back onto land before we fall asleep and drown.”

They slept on the ground that night. It was hard, and colder than even the sand of the cave, but they could hear the stream running nearby, and Toinette curled into Erik’s arms, warm and loose-limbed. He couldn’t have voiced any complaints.

* * *

However she’d tried to hope, Toinette had truly thought she’d never see morning light again. Waking to it made up for the taste in her mouth and her hunger, just as having Erik pressed against her back outweighed the lack of mattress or blankets.

It was a good morning. It got better when they stripped and bathed in the stream, as cold as it was. Toinette wrung out her hair and rinsed it twice over, feeling that she rid it of invisible slime as well as the normal sort of filth.

Sleep and her nature had done well. Her hands were still sore, but no worse than they’d been after taking the wheel during a storm. The minor bruises and cuts had vanished. The wound from the un-ark had stopped bleeding, and didn’t start again when Erik cleaned it. It’d take days to heal fully. It would doubtless leave a scar. But it was on the mend.

Erik’s hands on Toinette’s leg were as gentle as the sunlight on her shoulders. She watched him as best she could from her angle, marking the muscles in his bare arms and chest as he worked and the fall of his hair over his face. He was very serious just then.

She smiled and waited, and then, when the bandages were back on her leg, turned and stretched, pointing her toes and parting her thighs. Erik’s head lifted. Although her view wasn’t what she would have wished while he was kneeling, Toinette thought she saw motion between his thighs as well.

“Ah,” he said, his voice low in the morning air, “we haven’t celebrated our victory properly, have we?”

“Tragically.” Toinette ran a hand down from her neck, tracing her fingers around one pointed nipple, and over her stomach to brush the auburn curls above her sex. “And it’s always important to mark these occasions.”

Erik agreed, she saw, as he turned toward her. His cock had risen to press against his stomach, and swayed a little when he moved. He stretched himself out by her side, kisses hot down her neck and hand sliding between her thighs. “Only,” he said, “you’ll lie quiet this time, like a good lass.”

“Is that what you like in your women?” she teased, drawing her nails slowly up his spine. “How clerkly you’ve become.”

“I’ll show you clerkly later, love,” he growled into her shoulder. “Only you’re too tall for me to carry back, so I’ll have to leave you in shape for walking.”

And so they did go slowly, gently, in the steady rhythm of the running water near them. Toinette—looking up into green trees and blue sky as Erik thrust inside her and she felt herself falling into that final dissolution—thought, This is right, and knew she was thinking of more than pleasure or even love. The golden morning and the land itself were a part of what she and Erik did. It was life, and renewal, and a final triumph over the forces that would deny such things.

She did lie still, or still enough not to damage her leg further. Quiet Toinette didn’t manage at all. Before the end, she was crying out with joy in a voice that likely carried to the treetops.