He walked the lanes for the rest of the day.
He knocked on doors. He spoke in broken Dort that grew a little less broken with each exchange, as ALICE pieced together more of the grammar. He stood in doorways and said, with as much conviction as a sixteen-year-old covered in dried blood could manage: I can work. I'm willing to do anything.
The first farmer looked him up and down from behind a goat pen, noted the narrow shoulders and the soft hands, and shut the door without a word.
The second was a rope-maker, squat, arms like hams, who told him cheerfully that he didn't hire foreigners, because the last one had stolen a length of hemp and he'd promised himself never again.
The third was the blacksmith.
The smithy was open-fronted, the heat rolling out into the lane like a wave. The man inside was enormous, red-raw skin, fifty years near fire. He was halfway through a piece when Dante stopped at his door. He glanced up. He kept hammering.
"You looking for work, boy?"
"Yes."
"Can you pump a bellows for six hours without stopping."
"…I can try."
The smith grunted. The hammer paused. His eyes went to Dante's shoulders. Then his hands.
"Step closer."
Dante stepped closer. The smith leaned over the anvil and sniffed.
Then his face changed.
"Step back."
Dante stepped back.
"I don't take boys who smell like that," the smith said. Not angry. Closed. "Whatever you've been doing in those trees, you bring it in here and my forge smells wrong for a week. Come back when you've had a wash and a change of clothes and I'll think about it. Not before."
"I —"
"I said not before. Move along."
Dante moved along.
He was a dozen steps down the lane before it hit him.
(I don't smell like the forest.)
(I smell like blood.)
He stopped. He looked down at the dark robe, at his hands, washed this morning in the dew from the tool shed but not washed properly in days. The nails were still dark.
(The smith could smell the goblin on me. He could probably smell my own blood under it. Four days in a tree. That's what he meant.)
[The village reads things,] ALICE said quietly. [People who live on the edge of a forest like this learn to notice what a stranger carries in with him. You'll need to learn not to be read.]
He kept walking south. One more door.
The last house before the farms was a cottage with a kitchen garden and a low stone wall. Smoke from the chimney. A few chickens in the yard. Through the open half-door, a woman stood kneading something at a table. She was maybe forty, red-faced from the work, with strong arms and a kerchief over her hair.
He knocked on the frame.
She looked up. Took him in. Her expression did something that none of the others had done: it softened. Not pity, exactly. Recognition. The recognition of a woman who had a son about his age and could see the shape of a boy who'd been sleeping rough.
"Yes?"
"I'm looking for work. Anything. I can carry, I can dig, I can —"
"How old are you?"
"Sixteen."
She wiped her hands on her apron. She glanced at his side, at the place where the bandage sat under the robe, and looked away quickly, as if she hadn't meant to see it.
"I could use someone to turn the garden beds before the frost," she said. "It's not much. Half a day's work, maybe —"
A voice from inside the house. Male. Sharp.
"Mara."
She stopped.
A man appeared in the doorway behind her. Taller than her, thinner, with the weathered face and the suspicious eyes of someone who had spent his whole life making things grow in dirt that did not want to cooperate.
His eyes went to Dante. The look was not kind.
"Ne," he said. Not to Dante. To his wife.
"He's just a boy, Henrik —"
"I said no. We don't know him. We don't know where he's from. We don't know what he brought with him."
"He's hurt —"
"I can see that. And I can see the daggers on his belt and the blood on his robe and the fact that he walked out of the forest on his own. Boys who walk out of the forest on their own are not boys who need help turning garden beds. They're boys who bring trouble with them."
He put his hand on his wife's shoulder. Not roughly. But firmly.
"Go inside, Mara."
She glanced at Dante. The softness was still in her face. But she went.
Henrik stayed in the doorway and tracked him the whole way down the lane. Nothing hostile in it. Just a man making sure the trouble actually left.
He didn't look back.
(She wanted to.)
[Yes.]
(He wouldn't let her.)
[No.]
(Is he wrong?)
A pause.
[He is careful. In a place where the forest sends things out of the trees, careful is not wrong. It is not kind either. But you did not ask about kind.]
(No. I asked about wrong.)
[Then no. He is not wrong. He is protecting his home. You are, to him, a variable he cannot afford. That is the situation.]
He walked the rest of the lane in silence.
The sky dimmed.
The pale blue of the afternoon went gold, then copper, then a deep violet that bled into the first stars. The torches on the wall-walk were being lit again, the same torches he had watched from the wheat field the night before. From inside the village they didn't look like safety. They looked like a cage.
The temperature dropped fast.
He hadn't noticed the cold during the day. The walking had kept him warm; the adrenaline of each rejection had kept him moving. Now, with the last door closed behind him, it arrived. It came through the robe. It came through the boots. It settled into the wound in his side and made it sing, a low dull throb that kept time with his pulse.
He didn't know where to go. There was nowhere. The tavern would laugh a penniless boy out the door. The almshouse was for midday, and Marienne had told him not to bother even then. The square was where the Sergeant picked up vagrants. The rooftops were not an option in a town this small.
He walked, and the cold went deeper.
(After everything I survived in the forest — the goblin, the cauterization, the three nights in a tree — it's the cold that finishes me. Not a monster. Not a fight. Just cold, and the fact that nobody in this town wants me in their house. Which is fair. I wouldn't let me in either.)
ALICE had been silent since the last rejection. Not gone; he could still feel her at the back of his head. But quiet, as if she understood that what he needed right now wasn't information or strategy. Just the right to be miserable without an audience.
He appreciated it.
His legs were getting slower. The cold had stopped being a sensation and become a weight, something pressing down on his shoulders, his joints, his eyelids. His breath was visible in the torchlight. The wound in his side had stopped throbbing and started aching, a deep steady ache that went past the muscle and into the bone.
(No. Not like this. After the forest, the tree, the blood: not from cold. Not on a street.)
He forced his legs to keep moving. He squinted through the dark.
At the end of the lane, set back from the road near the curve of the palisade wall, was a long low building he hadn't noticed before. Not a house. Too plain, too wide, one door standing open. A lantern hung from a bracket above the doorway, its light weak and yellow, throwing a small circle of warmth onto the packed earth below.
He aimed for it.
The walk to the lantern was the longest thirty meters of his life. Longer than the wheat, longer than the gate. His legs moved by will and nothing else. He put a hand against the doorframe, leaned into it, and held his face in that small warmth for a second before going inside.
The smell told him what it was before his eyes adjusted. Animals. Hay. The heavy wet breath of large things sleeping in stalls. A stable. Four cows in the near stalls, one horse in the far one. Warmer than the lane: body heat, the insulation of the hay, the shelter of four walls and a roof.
(Good enough. Better than the tree.)
He found a corner behind a hay bale, away from the door, half-hidden. He pulled hay over himself the way he had in the tool shed. He gathered the sacking heaped near the nearest stall, someone's old horse-blanket, into a nest beneath him. He lay down.
The daggers were at his belt. The Eptarina was in the inner pocket. The note from his mother was over his heart.
He closed his eyes.
He was almost gone, sleep pulling him under with the force of a body that had been asking for it for hours, when something pressed against his side.
Small. Round. Hard. The tip of a walking stick.
"This is not a place for sleeping, young man," said a voice.
The voice was old. Female. Tired, but not unkind.
Dante's eyes opened.
A very small, very old woman stood over him. Gray hair pulled back in a knot under a scarf. A face that was all seams. A back curved but not broken, hunched from a lifetime of bending. She leaned on a carved walking stick and looked down at him with an expression that was curious, not hostile.
"I — I'm sorry." The words came rough and raw. "I was desperate. I didn't know where to sleep. I saw the stable and I didn't think. Please don't send me away. I wasn't trying to steal anything. I just needed — I needed to be warm."
He heard his voice crack. He was close to begging. He was close to crying.
"What a fuss," she said, but the voice was gentle. Even amused. "I didn't come out here to chase you off. I'm not some heartless wretch."
She paused. A smile formed in the seams of her face.
"I came to offer you a proper bed. On the condition that tomorrow morning you give me a hand with my work. My arms aren't what they used to be."
She lifted one scrawny arm and tapped the bicep with a gnarled finger. The arm was the width of a broom handle.
He stared at her.
(She's not throwing me out.)
(She's inviting me in.)
"Thank you," he said, and the voice broke entirely. "Thank you. You don't know — you don't know what this means to me."
"What a sentimental boy," she said, but she was smiling. "I'm not doing it for you. I need strong arms for tomorrow. Hold the thanks until you see what I need done."
She turned and extended one arm for him to take. He stood, his legs screaming, and offered his forearm the way he'd seen old women in his neighborhood lean on their sons. She took it without comment, her walking stick working the other side. Together they shuffled out of the stable and across a small garden.
Even in the dark, even half-blind with exhaustion, he took in the garden. Rows and plots and climbing stakes and stone borders. Things growing that had no business growing at this time of year. A vine on a trellis by the cottage door. Then he blinked, twice. A bed of pale blue-tinted moss that he recognized. The same moss he'd used for his poultice in the tree. Beside it, a patch of small white flowers that moved very slightly in the windless air.
(She grows them. She grows them.)
The thought landed, but he was too tired to do anything with it.
The cottage was small. One story. Warm. The fire in the hearth had been burning for hours. The smell was not the town smell: dried herbs and clean wood and something steeped in something. She pointed him toward a narrow bed against the ground-floor wall.
"You sleep here. I sleep upstairs. Don't try anything strange. You don't want to know what I'm capable of."
She said it with menace. She said it with kind eyes.
He nodded. He didn't fully process the threat. The exhaustion had taken everything.
He sat on the bed. The mattress was thin, but it was a mattress. He put one hand on it and felt the warmth of the cottage settle around him.
"Thank you," he said again, quieter.
"Stop thanking me. You haven't seen tomorrow yet."
She turned and made for the narrow stairs, her walking stick tapping each step.
He lay down.
The Eptarina was in his pocket. The note was over his heart. Both daggers were still at his belt. Through the small window by the bed he could see the garden in the last of the lantern light: the rows, the moss, the white flowers that should not have been moving.
(Mom, I made it to somewhere. I don't know what this place is. There's a roof over me tonight. An old woman who didn't have to let me in but did. That's — that's a lot.)
(Grace, wherever you are, I hope someone let you in too.)
He did not cry. He was too tired for it.
He let his eyes close.
The warmth of the fire reached the bed in slow waves. The animals in the stable next door breathed. The cottage settled around him in the faint creaks of old wood cooling after a long day. Through the thin wall he could hear the old woman's walking stick tapping once, twice, three times on the floor above, and then silence. She had gone to bed too.
Somewhere outside, the Sixth Sense registered a faint hum at the edges of the garden: not a threat, not quite an alarm, more a low fence of attention woven into the plants and the soil and the air. Something that would notice if anything unwelcome came near. Something old and patient and very carefully placed.
He was asleep before he could think about what that meant.
The last thought he had was small and warm, and it sat behind his ribs in the place where the note was.
(Tomorrow.)
(Tomorrow I start.)
[Name: Virgil (alias) / Dante] [Age: 16] [Class: THIEF (Utility)] [Lv. 2] [Blessing: SHADOW] [Rank: I]
[Competences:] [• Animals → Lv.1] [• Athletics → Lv.1] [• Botany → Lv.1] [• Combat → Lv.1] [• Daggers → Lv.1] [• Deception → Lv.1] [• Monsters → Lv.2] [• Survival → Lv.1]
[Skills:] [• Shadow Step] [• Conceal Presence] [• Stab (0/5)]
[Attribute:] [• Sixth Sense]
[Inventory (new):] [• The Eptarina (small leather-bound liturgy, 6-god version)]
