The Companion
She heard him before she saw him, and the sound stopped her dead on the trail.
A sound in the forest behind her, steady and measured and deliberate. A person. Animals moved with purpose or silence, and this was someone walking at a pace that said I know you're ahead of me and I'm taking my time.
Kai stopped where she stood. She put her good hand on the trunk of a fern and listened. The footsteps kept coming toward her. One of them landed wrong. A hitch, a drag, a correction. She knew that particular sound. She'd heard it a thousand times crossing the Communal floor, a thousand times on the road between the shipyard and home.
A limp she had known her whole life.
"Tomin."
He came through the undergrowth with a pack on his back that was easily twice the size of hers, his face scratched from low branches, his dark hair matted with sweat. He'd been walking for days and every one of them showed in his face.
"You," he said between breaths, "are extremely difficult to follow."
She just stood there on the trail with her torn-up hand wrapped in a dirty strip of undershirt and her pack half-empty and her mouth slightly open, because the distance between where she was and where Tomin was supposed to be was so wide that her mind hadn't caught up to her eyes yet. He was here, actually here. In the deep forest, days east of Donath, standing in front of her with branch scratches on his face and sweat darkening the collar of his shirt.
"How did you find me out here?"
Tomin dropped his pack on the forest floor and put his hands on his knees and breathed. The limp was worse than she remembered it being. He'd been pushing it hard to cover the distance, and his left leg had paid the full cost of every mile.
"Followed the road east until the markers stopped making sense. After that I followed the tracks you left in the mud." He looked at her hand. "What happened to you?"
"There was a creature on the ridge above the ruin where I camped."
"A dragon?"
She shook her head. "Thuse called them Vakhari. This one was big, Tomin. Bigger than any of the ones near Donath."
Tomin skipped past the details because details would only slow him down. He looked at her hand again, then at her half-empty pack, then at the forest around them. He was doing the math she'd already done. Low supplies. Bad hand. Unknown terrain ahead with no map. He'd done it faster than she had, which was deeply annoying.
"Mary sent food," he said, and the word food hit her harder than she expected. He opened his pack and pulled out a cloth bundle. Inside: dried fruit, salt meat, two small loaves of bread that had gone hard but were still bread. A needle and thread wrapped in oilcloth. A roll of clean linen.
Kai's throat tightened. She took the bundle and turned it in her hands. Mar had wrapped everything in a square of linen, folded at the corners with the edges tucked under so the bundle held its own shape. Mother's fold. Kai's hands remembered it before her mind did, the muscle memory of watching those folds happen a thousand times at the kitchen table, Mother's fingers quick and certain, turning a square of cloth into something that would hold.
"She folds them the same way Mother did," Kai said. Her voice came out rough and she did not try to fix it.
"She packed it the morning after you left," Tomin said, still catching his breath. "Told me where you'd go."
"Mary doesn't know where I went, Tomin."
"She said east. She said you'd follow the ridge road past the markers and then keep going." He paused, and the corners of his mouth pulled tight, his eyes creasing at the edges around words he'd been carrying too long. "She said to bring bread because you'd forget to eat once you got moving."
Kai sat down on the forest floor with her back against a trunk and broke a piece of the bread with her good hand. The crust crumbled and the inside was dense and dry and it was the best thing she had tasted in days. She ate it slowly, chewing each piece until it dissolved, and she didn't say anything for a while because the bread and the linen fold and the fact that Mary had known where she was going before she'd gone had filled up every space in her chest where words would normally live.
He rewrapped her hand without being asked.
The linen was clean and he had fresh water from a stream he'd crossed an hour back. He worked carefully with the clean linen, pressing the flap of skin flat, binding it tight but not too tight. His hands were steady and sure and warm. She'd seen them this steady over a game board back in Donath, placing stones with a precision that made you forget he was thinking four moves ahead.
"How's Donath?" she asked, because she needed to know and because she needed to think about something other than what was ahead.
Tomin's hands paused on the wrap. His fingers held still against the linen, and the pause lasted long enough for her to hear the forest breathing around them before he answered.
"The Shakes are getting worse. Two in the week after you left. The second one cracked the north wall of the Third Communal. Ace is sleeping at the house now instead of down in the Cellar because he doesn't trust the Cellar walls." He resumed wrapping her hand. "Old Jara's talking again. About the dream. The flood. She told Mary the waters are closer than anyone thinks."
Kai's chest tightened at the name. Jara's dream. The one Ace had told her about in the Cellar hallway, the one that started everything moving. Waters from everywhere. Up from the ground and down from the sky. One family left standing at the end of it.
She'd pushed that thought aside weeks ago. There had been too much else to carry.
"Does Mary believe her?" Kai asked.
"Mary waters the cutting and keeps her mouth shut and watches everything from the corner of the room. You know how she is." He tied off the wrap with a careful knot. "But she's scared, Kai. She won't say it out loud. But she is."
"You shouldn't have come out here," she said.
"Probably not." He said it without apology, the word landing flat and honest in the space between them.
"The creature is still out there somewhere. And the terrain past the clearing is worse than anything before it. And I don't know what's ahead."
"Neither do I." He tucked the end of the wrap under with the careful precision of someone who had decided that this one small thing would be done right, whatever else happened. "But you're going anyway."
He'd known her long enough to stop asking questions he already had the answers to, and this was one of those questions.
She flexed her hand carefully. The wrap held. The pain was still there but it was contained now, organized, something she could work around instead of something that ran up her arm every time she moved.
"Does Ace know you're out here?"
"Ace told me to go after you."
That stopped her cold. She looked at him and for a moment the forest was just noise and the only thing in focus was Tomin's face, steady and serious, delivering the words with the full weight they deserved.
"Your father packed half of what's in my bag," Tomin said. "The knife is his. The flint is his. The linen is from the house. He said—" Tomin stopped. Looked at the ground. Started again. "He said to tell you he was wrong to let you go alone."
Kai held that for a moment. Wrong to let you go alone. Not wrong to let you go. Wrong to let you go alone. Ace had accepted it. He just hadn't accepted the terms.
"The clearing," she said after a while. "Did you find it on the way through?"
"The circle with the pale stone at the center? Yes."
"Did you touch it?"
Tomin was quiet for a beat too long. "I saw it."
"That's not what I asked you."
He pulled a strip of dried fruit from the bundle and chewed it slowly, looking east through the trees. "We should move. How far to the next… whatever it is you're following out here?"
She let him change the subject for now. She'd come back to it when the time was right.
They walked east together. The forest was thick and strange and alive in ways that Donath's woods had never been. Tomin noticed everything she'd noticed. The ferns too tall and too dark. The flowers that pulsed. The moss that pulled away from touch. And a few things she'd missed. A bird with feathers the color of raw copper, watching them from a branch that should not have held its size. A stream that ran uphill for six paces before finding a crack in the rock and vanishing into the ground. The air itself, which tasted different here than anything back home. Thicker. Damp and sweet and warm, even in shade.
"How long have you been out here on your own?" he asked.
"Five days past Donath. Maybe six at this point. I stopped counting."
"And you've been doing what, exactly? Walking east and hoping for the best?"
"Following the signal east."
He let that sit for a while. She watched his face for recognition or confusion or dismissal, and got none of those things. Just the same measured attention he gave everything, his limp finding its pace on the uneven ground, his eyes forward, his breathing steady as the terrain climbed.
"The stone in the clearing," she said. "It's part of a system. There are relay points. Places where the signal gathers and concentrates before passing east. I can feel the next one ahead. A day, maybe two."
"Relay points," Tomin repeated carefully. He held the words in his mouth and turned them over, testing them against something she could not see.
"My mother was there. At the clearing, with that stone. She spent real time there, Tomin. And then she went further east."
Tomin kept the same even stride, the same breathing. But his jaw tightened and his gaze dropped to the path beneath his boots for three paces before coming back up.
"Your mother went east," he said carefully, choosing the words one at a time.
"Further than I thought anyone could go," Kai said. "But she did. I could feel it in the signal when I touched that stone. Her presence, everywhere in the clearing. She went deeper than I can follow. Not yet."
Tomin walked for a while without speaking. The forest filled the silence between them with its own noise. Low warbling from the canopy above. The crack of something large moving through branches two hundred paces to the north. The constant hum of insects in the warm air.
"Thuse," Tomin said finally. "Does he know what you're doing out here?"
"Thuse isn't here, Tomin."
"That's not what I asked."
She looked at him across the trail. He looked back. The same words she'd used on him five minutes ago, returned without a smile but with the full weight of the point behind them.
"I don't know what Thuse knows or doesn't know," she said. "I know the signal goes east. I know my mother followed it further than anyone. I know something is wrong in it. Something dark, something that shouldn't be there. And I know that sitting in Donath waiting for someone to come along and explain it to me wasn't going to work."
Tomin nodded slowly, taking that in. He shifted his pack on his shoulders and kept walking for a dozen paces. Then he stopped.
"Thuse is east," he said. "Past the deep forest. Past the ridgelines. Your mother told me where to find him if anything ever went wrong." He turned and looked at her with something in his face she had never seen before. "That's where we're going, Kai. Not just east. To Thuse."
"You've known this whole time where he was."
"I've known since the day she left us."
The forest closed behind them and swallowed the trail they'd made. Ahead, the ground rose toward the next ridge, and somewhere past it, the signal gathered and waited for them.
Kai walked beside the first person she'd spoken to in days, and the silence between them settled into its own familiar shape. Two people who had spent enough years in each other's company that the absence of words carried everything a conversation would have, full and unhurried and warm.
She'd come back to the question about the stone and what he'd felt when he touched it. Later, when he was ready to answer or when she couldn't wait anymore, whichever came first.