Low firelight cast tall shadows across the floorboards, and Jack watched them dance with listless eyes. He'd bathed and found fresh clothes and prayed with all the concentration he could never muster on the Sabbath, and all he could see was the dirt under his nails and the blood on his skin and the blur of sweat in his eyes. His mother was pale and drawn on the bench beside him. He wanted to speak, to smile, to make her laugh (her laugh was like church bells), for her face was beautiful and warm and lined when she smiled. Now, as he chanced a look at her from the corner of his eye, she was blank and waiting and the crow's feet beside her eyes just made her look so very tired.
They two, loud and exuberant individuals in their own rights, were statues in their silence. Jack thought that if not for the flickering fire, growing lower and darker as the night waned, it might seem that they were frozen in time. He dropped his gaze back to the shifting floor.
(-two of them, out of nowhere, melting out of the trees with their biting iron and their leather and the light eyes that gave away their disguises-)
Jack took a slow breath, and clenched his eyes until it hurt. There'd be time for trauma and nightmares later. Not now. In tandem with his thoughts, the door opened and the hinges squeaked. The apothecary emerged, brushing her hands off on her dark skirts, short fingers twisting into the fabric. A brusque woman by nature, she approached them without preamble, waiting only for Jack and his mother to shoot to their feet before proclaiming,
"Blood poisoning. I haven't the means to treat it."
They could only stare, two identical pairs of brown eyes waiting expectantly for the woman to laugh and tell Jack that his father had only been playing a joke, he's fine, go see him. But his father was never one to play jokes, and it wasn't funny in the slightest. Jack, of all people, knew that. The woman stared right back at them, hands on her hips, an eyebrow raised, and for a moment there was a flash of wonder at this woman's audacity.
"Cupping hasn't worked. It's winter. Honey and yarrow are what I'd normally use, but he's allergic to the yarrow and there's no honey in winter."
His mother sank back down slowly, and Jack hardly noticed. "There must be something," he insisted before she could turn to leave. She glanced at him and her eyes were soft in sympathy that refused to show on her face.
"There's nothing I can do for him here," she told him, almost gently. She spoke carefully, and Jack seized his opportunity. "Here? What about elsewhere?"
The apothecary sighed. "Williamsburg is in possession of an agent, from the Old World, far in the east. It's rare, expensive. And if I may speak frankly, you won't make it back in time, so you ought to spend these hours with him than on a wild chase."
(-and he sped after them as far as he dared, a musket clutched in sweaty hand, and God help him for he was ready to use it-)
"Oh, God," his mother whispered, a hand clasped to her mouth.
"How long?" he asked, eyes determined.
She raised an eyebrow. "To get there? Six hours."
"I'm going." His chin jutted out and his fists clenched at his sides. He would not shake. He would not grieve. That wasn't an option.
"You won't make it back in time," she repeated slowly.
"Then I'll take him with me!" Jack shouted, patience worn thin after a long day, a long fight, a long night.
"He is in no state to travel," she snapped.
"Does it matter?" he asked, exasperated and desperate. "You're telling us to say our goodbyes. At least with Williamsburg there's a chance." His mother had stood when he wasn't looking, and he startled when she laid a calming, trembling hand on his shoulder.
(-the one, the tall one, wouldn't give up and though the barrel of a rifle was staring him in the eye he raised to a boy a knife still dirtied with his father's blood-)
Her eyes were dark and sad and old. "Hush, love," she murmured, and though her words were meant to calm, Jack wrenched his shoulder from her with unnecessary force, for her hold was tenuous. Her fingers held thin air, and he looked to the apothecary imploringly.
"I-," he swallowed. "Please."
The firelight lashed at their feet, and she finally gave a hard, reluctant nod.
The air was freezing and dry, and though light was spilling between the tree trunks in a golden cross-stitch, the sky was not so much the light blue of morning as it was a colorless expanse. The air was biting, but the horse was warm beneath his hands, and his father burned with fever, slumping against him.
Jack's mother had wanted them to take a wagonette, but the apothecary had vehemently insisted it would be too slow. The band binding his father to him dug uncomfortably into his breastbone, but Jack paid it no mind. He heard the horse puff beneath him, and he laid a trembling hand on her neck. She was old but strong, and though the hair on her face was dappled with grey, it shone like a colt's.
His mother was very suddenly beside him, and he jumped just slightly. Blaming stress and exhaustion, he gratefully took the small bag she held out to him for the rivers' tolls, and bent awkwardly to kiss her cheek. Grasping his hand gently, she whispered, "Be careful, love. Godspeed."
"Love you," he murmured, slipping his feet into the stirrups. "Tell Anne I love her, too."
His mother nodded and smiled, a watery thing that was heartbreakingly different from her sunbeam grin. He tucked the coin bag into the leather bag at his hip, adjusted the band around his chest, and she stepped back. Snapping the reins, a desperate boy and a dying man set out for the south.
It was just a hunting trip. They had them so very often, he'd forgotten they were dangerous. He'd forgotten that there were bears and wolves lurking in the shadows. He'd forgotten that the fur trappers in the north hated them with the passion of generations.
And so the shot came, just the one. Perhaps the man had hit something, the boy mused as he checked snares and holes. And so a second shot came. Immediately followed by a third. His head snapped up, eyes suddenly alert. A slow, and two quick. No fourth came, and he knew their signal, their signal, oh, God. The underbrush was grasping with thorny fingers at his ankles where skin showed between thin shoes and tattered pants, but he moved swift and scared and animalistic through the wild in the woods.
He heard his father very close by make a horrible and weak sound of pain, and he heard two men's voices filled with malice and their words were round in their accents. He didn't see them, at first. Their clothes were bark on the trees, and their skin was smudged with dirt. The whites of their eyes betrayed them.
And the tall one had a knife and the short one had a sword, and both of them had teeth which were yellow and green and rotting.
His father was on the forest floor, spilling his blood on the earth and moving so terrifyingly slowly.
The boy was young and scared and grieved, but he had ballistics while they had blades. He shouted with the strength of an entire village, raising and lowering his voice, running in circles around them just beyond their eyesight, firing a bullet or two into the air for good measure. They ducked and yelled and ran, and his vision was tinted red and he gave them chase.
They were only at a trot, but the wind was cold and swift and his eyes teared against the chill. It had only been an hour or two, and the sun was still low in the sky, but Jack ached and was sore and his father burned somehow even more severely.
The day was clear and he saw the Rappahannock before he heard it. Along its banks were but a few young men, it seemed, running the two or three ferries that could cross the monstrous river. He had to fight and bargain and plead with the ferry-runners to take the mare on their rickety boats, and though it cost him an extra half a pound, he made it into the southern region with his father and his horse and enough of a pitying village's money to buy the healing agent.
The ferrymen spared Jack and the barely-conscious man he hauled with him a pitying glance, and with a sick feeling in his stomach, he wondered what they'd say if he returned north alone.
It was late in the year, but when frost came instead of snow. It was late in the year when meat and fresh vegetables were scarce. It was late in the year when the sun was low, low, low in the foreboding west at the time when the church bells struck three.
The mare was heaving her breaths, six hours spent hauling dead weight (not dead, not dead, not dead, not yet). Four rivers crossed, and the pack was light against his hip, and Jack was wondering desperately if he'd make it home. At his back, Jack could feel the heat of the man's fever seeping through frozen air and woolen coats.
When that large village and its smoke and people and palisades came into view as the odd and desperate trio made it to the top of the hill, Jack could not stop the relief that shone across his face, though he knew it was premature.
A prayer on his lips was whisked away into the pale gold air as his snapped the reins again, and the mare stole down the hillside with the speed of youth.
They weren't halfway down when her knees gave out and to the ground they tumbled. Moving without thinking, Jack swung his left leg back, taking his father's limp one with it, and so they fell right while the old, loyal mare twisted left. His father landed partially atop him, and Jack undid the band with frantic fingers when the man did not so much as mumble at the motion.
He hobbled, weighed down with too many things to count, and took the hill far slower than he'd have liked. His father was a tall and strong man, and his dead weight on Jack's lanky frame was difficult to bear.
The mare, Jack could see, was lying at the bottom of the hill, her grey and brown coat tinged with sunlight, and a leg obviously broken. Swallowing his grief for later (later, later, later with the nightmares and the exhaustion and it's been days since he slept-) he screamed with all his might for somebody, anybody, help us.
And they did. A woman poked her head out the door, a child looked up from the well, and soon there was a swarm of strangers around him asking questions he couldn't understand and his father's weight was suddenly gone. Jack thought he must've repeated the words Burgess, help him, blood poisoning, please, dad, dad, dad ten thousand times. The apothecary here was a man with grey hair and intelligent eyes, and it took a moment for the foreign word to come to him, but finally Jack made himself spit out between numb lips the name of the agent, and his father disappeared into a wooden shack of jars and boxes and men wearing crosses.
Jack was far from alone, the eyes of half a village on him, but he'd never felt so empty in his life.
It felt like only a short moment that he sat on the ground, but when the gruff, foreign hand was laid on his shoulder, the sky was deep hues and gentle smoke rose from the houses, catching the last of the light. There was a man next to him, and Jack looked up at him blankly.
"Your horse," said the man. His voice was surprisingly gentle for his appearance.
Trance-like, he rose from the ground, clasping the man's proffered hand, though Jack couldn't remember when he'd extended it.
His knees and hips felt like a door hinge on a cold winter's morning, frozen and stiff and creaky. The man walked slowly, accommodating and pitying, and Jack was too tired to be embarrassed. The mare was still lying at the base of the hill, and for a moment Jack's heart lurched at her still form until she moved her head. Forgetting the man, he knelt by her, a gentle hand settling on her snout. She looked at him with big brown eyes that looked black in the dimness of the evening. The man coughed behind him.
"It's leg is broken."
He didn't say anything more, nor did he need to. Jack closed his burning eyes, and the mare snorted her gentle, warm breath on his frozen hand, and he stroked her nose once more before standing and stepping back. The man didn't look at him, eyes glued to the horse with a grim expression.
Jack wrapped his arms around his stomach and with the single crack of the gun two tears, hot then frigid, streaked down his cheeks and he did not wipe them away.
The night was long and Jack's mind wavered in his exhaustion, but he would not sleep until someone emerged from the apothecary house. There was a young couple that night who spared him a blanket and a bowl of soup and a bandage for a knee he couldn't remember skinning. Cracks and whistles echoed in his ears through the night and into the morning, and he stared at nothing waiting for something to pass.
By the time a cloudless sky was streaked periwinkle and violet, Jack was wavering in and out of a terrified doze, jerking to some semblance of wakefulness without realizing he'd fallen asleep at all.
He tried pacing in the morning, as the sleepy village had its breakfast and said its prayers, but he could not walk in a straight line and every joint protested the movement. At the base of the hill, there was a large plot of freshly turned land and Jack found it difficult to look at.
It was nearly noon, when those wooden doors opened, and though he wanted nothing more than to rush inside, Jack found his feet firmly planted. The man, the one who had grey hair, the one who'd disappeared the night before, emerged with a hat clasped to his chest, circles beneath his eyes, and his light cloak stained yellow and burgundy.
The man whispered the words in Jack's ear, and his hand steadied the boy's shoulder. He walked away, and behind him Jack stood with a bowed head. The door was open a crack, and it seemed as though the shadows inside were spilling out into the street, and sudden, inexplicable fear made itself a barrier at the lintel. He pushed past it slowly, and entered. It still seemed like night in the room, the only light coming from a half-opened door and a slowly dying fire.
Jack sat on the edge of the occupied bed gingerly, though it did not truly matter. A strong jaw, a hooked nose, closed eyes caught the firelight eerily. A calloused hand laid limp on the blankets, and it was cold when Jack's fingers closed around it.
He was strong. Jack was strong. Chin jutting, face heavenward, he clenched his jaw and breathed deeply. He was strong. He needed to be strong. He was the man of his family, now. When he returned home, he'd take care of the girls. He was the eldest male. He would not be weak.
Unwillingly, he let out a half-sob through clenched teeth. Lips pressed into a tight line, he shook with grief, and he closed his eyes against dirt and exhaustion and overwhelming sorrow. And there he stayed, for how long he could not say, whispering and pleading in a broken voice for his dad.
The ferrymen at the Rappahannock said nothing when he returned north on foot.
Author's Note: All characters appearing in this work are the intellectual property of David Lindsay-Abaire, screenwriter for the Rise of the Guardians franchise. I own nothing.
If anyone was wondering, the 'agent' was turmeric, which can be used in healing. But in this case, it was most likely too late. In addition, this story operates under the idea that Burgess is part of the Northumberland community, est. 1648 in northern Virginia.
Reviews are greatly appreciated! Love, hieroglyphsoup.