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“None at all?” she asked faintly. “I was sure we had enough to last another day.”

“As was I,” said Petyr. “I must have overturned the flask in the night. We’ve enough for this meal and then no more. And I fear we shan’t find any nearby.”

He was quite right. The leaves on the bushes were brittle, the shrubs half-dead. They’d not seen so much as a puddle since they’d entered this dreadful corner of the forest. There would be no water for miles.

Shallah felt a new panic rise within her. In truth, it hadn’t occurred to her that they might perish for lack of water. In an attack by some beast perhaps, but not of something as small as thirst, and so close to the end. For she felt the end was painfully near, the final battle looming. She quivered to think they might not have the strength to fight it.

“Our food supply is good,” Petyr said, “but with nothing to drink I don’t know how we’ll manage. I fear for Liam. This night has weakened him a great deal.”

“How long can a person go without water?” Shallah asked weakly, though she cringed to hear the answer.

“I don’t know, but I’m sure it can’t be long. And the more we exert ourselves, the less time we’ll have.”

The grim facts laid out before them, Shallah and Petyr fell quiet. Thunder rumbled but there was no hint of rain in the air. Just knowing there was no water to come made Shallah feel thirsty.

I may be thirsty for the rest of my life, she thought desolately.

“Shallah,” Petyr said, “do you still dream of that place beyond the wood, that place where we’re all together? Do you still believe we’ll find our way out of here?”

A violent gust of wind blew into them and Shallah took the excuse to turn her face away so Petyr couldn’t see her distress. She knew which answer she had to give, for any other would cause him to lose all hope. Yet to give it meant to carry her dream’s fear alone when already it weighed terribly upon her. Her choice already made, she winced inwardly as she spoke the words. She’d never lied to Petyr before.

“Yes,” Shallah said, forcing herself to face him. “I dream it still, every night. This path will lead us to safety as long as we keep to it.”

He seemed to find solace in her words, and for that she was grateful, though otherwise she felt sickened.

“You ought to get some rest,” she said. “I can care for Liam now, and it’s early yet.”

“No, we should be off soon,” Petyr said brusquely.

“Petyr, don’t be stubborn,” Shallah said. “You’ll wear yourself out.”

“I’ve told you,” he said as he busied himself buckling the satchel, “my thoughts run away with themselves when I try to rest.”

“No man can keep awake forever,” Shallah said. She took hold of his arm. “Why won’t you rest?”

“When I close my eyes they come to me. I see their bleeding eyes. I hear their screams.” He looked stonily ahead. “I will not rest until I see them safe again.”

They spoke no more of it.

They set out with the wind at their backs. Reluctant to wake Liam who seemed finally to be sleeping soundly, Shallah carried him in her arms. The way was more difficult without the light of the boy’s eyes to guide them, and the awful weather made it harder still. Several times Petyr halted suddenly on the path, unsure if the movement ahead was a windswept branch or the clawing limb of their enemy. And still no rain came.

The wind made it difficult to talk, leaving the two to brood over their own thoughts. Petyr’s turned increasingly to his physical distress. His wounded arm was sapping him of energy at an alarming rate. Where days ago he wouldn’t yet have broken a sweat, now he was finding it difficult simply to trudge along. He marvelled at the fact that just two days ago he’d fought two furious oaks on his own. The thought of raising his sword to face such a beast was now utterly beyond him. Too ashamed to admit his weakness to Shallah, he soldiered stoically on, erecting a wall between them to keep his pain within, and her without.

Petyr and Shallah were manoeuvring a steep and rocky decline when Liam awoke. The wind hadn’t let up its woeful howling, and Shallah’s concentration was focused on hearing Petyr’s directions over the air rushing past her ears. Suddenly, Liam began to struggle against her. She lost hold of Petyr’s hand and tripped forward, careening head-first down the hillside.

Petyr cried, “Stop! Not another step!”

Hearing the urgency in his voice, Shallah grasped Liam tightly and put all her weight on her injured foot. Tears sprang to her eyes as the pain spiked up to her knee. They slipped a few inches more, then stopped. Petyr scrambled to reach them, wedging his foot between two rocks and pulling Shallah up by the arm. They collapsed onto a patch of scraggly grass.

“How near did we come?” Shallah asked, eyes clenched against the throbbing in her foot.

“Half a foot more and you would have fallen thirty feet.”

“You didn’t warn me that the way was so treacherous,” she said, though the accusation was half-hearted.

“A mistake I won’t make again,” Petyr said, wiping the sweat from his brow.

Liam sat on his own as Petyr attended to Shallah’s foot. Petyr was concerned about him. Though he knew Shallah didn’t blame the child for the accident, he could tell Liam was blaming himself. When Shallah sat next to him he made sure to keep a space between them. When she fed him, he wouldn’t swallow, as though he felt he didn’t deserve to eat. When he looked at her his expression was fearful.

Shallah did what she could to comfort the boy, but her affections went mostly unanswered. When he finally leaned into her embrace, it was with a tentativeness she couldn’t ignore. The puzzled frown that flashed across her face wasn’t lost on Petyr.

The child was not well. His face was pale, and there was a sallow darkness about his eyes. It seemed trying for him simply to lift his chin from his chest. The light from his eyes fell weak and yellowed upon Shallah’s face, just as it had after the battle with the oaks. He had a haunted look about him, as though his worst nightmares had come to life.

We’ve done this to him, Petyr thought to himself. We’ve robbed him of his trusting nature to which he had every right.

A yearning question entered his mind, tugging at his tired limbs. He looked ahead at the dark trail and sighed.

Will this journey never end?

Chapter Twenty

The wind had died down when they took to the trail again, allowing them some peace. Limping along with gritted teeth, Shallah listened absently as Petyr explained to Liam that he had to keep absolutely quiet.

“You can’t make the smallest sound,” he gently warned the boy. “The oaks have better hearing than all three of us put together, and we don’t want to attract their attention, do we?”

To Shallah, it seemed a threadbare explanation for a boy who’d always seemed to know the truth of the matter, even without her telling him. As they reached the bottom of the incline, she wondered if Liam might already suspect his power. Had some part of his mind put the pieces together with himself at the centre? If he had, he gave no indication. He nodded once, then looked ahead. It was almost as if he hadn’t heard Petyr’s words at all.

The animals they tracked seemed to have descended the hill unscathed, for their trail continued at the bottom just as it had been at the top. Shallah concentrated on matching Petyr step for step, so she wouldn’t lag behind and be a burden. It helped to keep her mind off other things.

She could feel their presence. They may have flitted from her mind easily, like a piece of linen flying from a washing line, but they had never lost sight of their prey. They were almost upon them now. Their hunger was palpable. She sensed them surging forward, unstoppable as a flood. And there was nowhere to hide.

As the day wore painfully on, Shallah had plenty of time to wonder if it had been a mistake to keep Petyr in the dark about their purpuers. She became convinced he knew of her deceit, for his attitude towards her had shifted drastically.

Shallah couldn’t deny that she’d felt Petyr’s attraction from the start. She’d seen it in the easy way he’d spoken with her of his life, and the way he’d found the slightest thing she’d said amusing. She’d felt it when she’d taken his arm; there’d been a certain warmth between them. Now, his arm was as rigid as a board, and when she spoke to him he never seemed to be listening. She knew it was silly to dwell on these girlish concerns at such a time, but she couldn’t help it. She was dismayed. A part of her wished he’d just confront her, force her to tell him the truth. But she couldn’t be positive her lie had triggered the shift. Maybe he’d just realized, as she had, that they knew so very little of each other.

Maybe I was imagining it all along, she thought dismally.

In the afternoon, the wind began to roar again, but still no rain came. After a time, the battered travellers began to wish for a downpour, if only for a change. They’d seen no sign of the oaks that day, a fact Petyr found disconcerting.

“They must be on the lookout,” he said to Shallah, the first words he’d spoken to her since their fall. “It seems strange that we haven’t come upon at least one in all our hours of travel.”

“You sound disappointed,” Shallah said, though in truth there’d been very little emotion in his words. He spoke grudgingly, as though out of obligation.

“What can I say?” he replied, his voice aloof. “I begin to wish for an end.”

“Don’t trouble yourself, Petyr,” Shallah said sullenly. “It will come soon enough.”

Not long after, they came upon a dead raccoon. It lay at the side of the path, half buried in the underbrush. In itself it wasn’t remarkable, but that morning Petyr had found two dead squirrels, and only an hour before they’d discovered a smaller raccoon, its grey fur stripped with coiling cuts.

“An oak has certainly passed this way,” Petyr said as he came away from the poor beast. “But so many dead … I’ve never seen the like before. And there’s no knowing how many more are scattered through the wood.”

“Perhaps it was a group of oaks that came this way,” Shallah offered.

As she spoke, Petyr tripped slightly, his foot rolling over a pinecone. He caught Shallah’s arm for balance and she noticed his breathing seemed haggard. But before she could ask him about it he’d released her arm and gone on talking as if nothing had happened. Puzzled, Shallah did her best to pretend she hadn’t noticed a thing.

“But why would they have gathered together?” Petyr said. “In the past I’ve seen them only on their own, save the two I fought against. Now it seems they’re travelling in a band.”

“In any case,” Shallah said, “they may be close by. We should carry on.”

“Yes,” Petyr said, wiping his hands on his tunic. “Come, Liam.”

Liam had stayed with the dead racoon, and didn’t react when he was called. Shallah came over to his side. He was crouching before the bundle of fur, just as he’d lingered beside the buck, but with one marked difference. This time, the child shed no tears. He petted the animal’s fur automatically, his fingers stilling only when Shallah told him it was time to move on. Yet, for all his detachment, he took his time coming away from the animal, and kept his eyes on it until Petyr urged him to look ahead.

“Other things don’t quite make sense, as well,” Petyr continued, as they entered a grove of redwoods.

Shallah took a breath and forced herself to listen to his conjectures, though it pained her that all he would speak of was the oaks. Did he have nothing else to say to her?

“It occurred to me,” he went on, “that the dark oak we saw yesterday didn’t use the wailing cry against us. It could have saved itself that way.”

“Yes …” Shallah said, urging herself to think it through, “but this time the beast didn’t know we were close by. If it had, it would surely have attacked.”

“Even so, when I fought the two oaks that night, they didn’t use the cry against me either – not during the battle. They used it before the battle began, and then stopped to fight me.”

Shallah shuddered, remembering the disturbing tone of the crying and how it had invaded her body even as she’d struggled to keep it out. She felt intensely glad their enemy hadn’t used it against them again, and saw no reason to question it.

“I don’t think the cry is a means of attack at all,” Petyr said. “That it disables us may only be a coincidence. I think it might be a means of communication, yet so mournful …” he broke off.

“Could it be an alert?” Shallah asked offhandedly.

“Yes, perhaps,” Petyr said. He hefted Liam in his arms so he could reach a stubborn itch along his ribs. “Do you think it could be –”

He left off abruptly as he raised his gaze to the path ahead. The light from Liam’s eyes darted about as though asking each trunk to explain what lay before them. Though the boy’s eyes illuminated only a few feet ahead, Petyr could see that the path was narrowing drastically. Up until then, the passing of hundreds of paws and hooves had trampled the bushes, but now they had to press through them. It was as though, at this point, the parade of animals had suddenly petered out.

A dim shape directly before them brought Petyr up short. Shallah gripped his arm in question. A few steps more confirmed his fears. It was the body of a small doe, most likely a fawn. Beyond it he saw another, half hidden by a boulder, and about it lay dozens of others: rabbits and squirrels, foxes, weasels, a coyote, a bobcat, a bear.

The corpses spread over the area like they’d fallen in clumps from the trees. The path they’d been following had all but disappeared, replaced by the stink of death.

The light faded out as Liam turned away, burying his face in Petyr’s neck. He whimpered only once.

“There was no exodus,” Petyr said. The wind blew through the column of trees, lifting the fur of the doe’s tail. “They slaughtered them.”

Petyr’s collapse was sudden and complete, like that of a house long deserted that can no longer stand the strain of holding itself up and turns, all in one moment, to dust.

He’d felt it coming.

After they’d discovered the sea of dead animals, he’d felt the strength seeping from his body like sap from a tree. Soon he couldn’t stand to hold Liam, for his weight seemed like that of a bucket filling with water, heavier by the second. Without slowing his tread, he deposited Liam on his feet and carried on.