There was a cabin in the woods, and its windows timelessly stared at the gradually growing masses of aspen and elm. No nightjars stood on the branches of the trees, singing their songs at the crack of dawn. They had all flown away in a great V of migration, toward the southwest where paradise was said to be found.
Five years ago, Kai had packed his bags with a tweed shirt, a pair of cowhide boots worn to the sole, a bag of smokes, some arrows, a bow. There was no reason for him to leave, but there was also no reason for him to stay. He rode the current of life and had given up his ability to choose for himself in return for the unpredictable, directionless life. That was how he had ended up in the woodlands far west of Colhen and many hundred miles removed from any sort of human settlement.
The grass around his cabin was wild and untamed as if it had been abandoned for decades, and branches of ivy shot up the walls and worked its way around the roof until it hung from the front like a lantern. The cabin was not very tall. It had been built by one man and one ax and one hammer over a matter of months, using the redwood from all around the forest.
Kai heaved a wood block over toward a flat-topped boulder, carrying the load in both of his arms. He dropped the log on top of the boulder and grabbed his ax, which rested head-down with the handle against the mossy surface of the boulder. Raising the ax to the sky, which glinted with the myriad of reds and oranges of the early morning, he brought the ax down, chopping the center of the block cleanly and creating two new slices. One piece flew off the boulder and landed on a patch of dandelions two feet away, warbling a little as the residual energy from the initial chop worked itself out. The other piece remained on the rock and fell on its newly-made flat side. Kai chopped this block of wood before grabbing the other and repeating the action.
An hour ago, when the stars had not been chased away from the dazzling light of the sun, this man had woken, ate a small portion of veal with a swig of stream water, then gone to chopping wood for the winter. He was half-naked, and a rough patch of hair had grown all over his body. Over the years, he had neglected to correct the spill of hair that slipped down to his sturdy shoulders, having no desire to ever reduce its length. A few age lines had formed around the crust of his eyes and the pinch of his mouth, giving him the worn look of an old fighter. The blue eyes he used to look at the dull world were still sharp and focused.
There was a sound from no particular direction and Kai looked up and around him, lowering his ax to the ground. He could have mistaken it for a deer grazing or a rabbit hopping and kicking up a fine cloud of dirt.
Forty feet behind him, a tree branch snapped. It sounded like an old man's knee popping as the old man bent to pick up his wooden cane.
Kai whirled around.
Nothing. Just the eastern sun rising from the ranks of the trees in front of his heavy-set blue eyes. A fine sea of light filtered through the gaps in the oaks in shapeless bundles that seasoned the lime grass and dirt and cabin below with amber hues.
He knelt down and picked up pieces of wood one after another, placing them in the hard crook of his arm. There was a wave of revulsion, a feeling that he was being watched like a wild animal. Kai carried the wood back to his house, walking on feet that had not been asphyxiated by footwear for a long time. The soles of his feet had grown an extra layer of firm, unbreakable skin.
The bundles of wood joined a pile by the fireplace, a stone-box of some sorts that had accumulated a wealth of ashes from several winters. The wood clanged and fumbled onto the floor, rolling like marbles. That sound he had heard only a minute ago—the branch snapping—worried him. What if it had been a person? If anyone knew about this place…
He shook his head. It couldn't have been a person. He was hundreds of leagues away from any kind of settlement, town, or city. A map would confirm that for sure.
His nerves were bunched together in an unnatural way, like stacks of wheat bound with wire. The space between his temples throbbed with suspicion, and the hairs on the back of his neck were raised hackles. A prickly layer of gooseflesh broke out over his arms and he mindlessly ran his hands over them as if to dispel them.
He walked into his bedroom and grabbed his bow without a second thought.
The feeling of being watched was stronger when he came outside, but he couldn't find anyone looking at him no matter where he looked. The ground beneath his feet felt cold and rough, penetrating that rock-hard layer of skin and working its way up into his nerves, injecting him with flashes of blue ice. He began to shiver.
He thought about yelling but decided not to. When was the last time he had heard his own voice? He had an idea of how it might sound; perhaps it was the sound of an old, ugly grinding of two stones, or the slow crackle of a door swinging open on unoiled hinges.
When he waited around for five minutes and decided the visitor didn't want any trouble, he turned around and went back, still holding the bow in his left hand without drawing it once.
Then, he heard a small pat-pat of footsteps behind him.
He whirled around and in a quick reflex, brought the bow in front of him and aimed at the visitor. His right hand had already pulled the bowstring back to the fullest extent to allow for a lethal strike, but it had stayed there with a bit of hesitation. A master archer knew that holding the arrow at such a length would tire the arm and cause his aim to be untrue, but somehow he still hesitated to release the string.
It was a woman, and her smooth, city-face had become pallid. Her arms were raised in a gesture of surrender, and a shiny metal rod with a glowing bulb on top was strapped to her back, peeking above her head. She looked familiar…too familiar.
The pressure on the string had eased a little, and finally, the archer lowered his bow and relaxed his right hand. The arrow had returned to its resting position, now pointed at the harmless ground. His eyes had gone wide, and hers did, too. He felt a spark between them, the spark of recognition as one feels after finding a friend they had lost after a lot of time has passed.
"Evie?" Kai spoke for the first time in several years, and he flinched slightly at the sound of his own voice. It had become dark and decayed like a rotten bone, and the years of silence where the only thing that came out of his mouth was an occasional grunt had worn his voice down into a gruff semblance of its old sound.
Evie, the woman Kai had called out, lowered her hands and very slowly approached him. He noticed that one of her hands gripped the metal rod on her back, almost defensively, and the other one parted her long and black hair behind her ear. Closer, now, and he saw that her face was still youthful, but more wise and solemn. The beady black eyes that stared at him with an owl-like resemblance had no trace of fear, but one of concern and wonder. When they stood at arm's length, they looked at each other in fuller detail, unsure of what to say. The silence that spoke between them was filled with heat and electricity, and soon it would burst.
Her eyes ran circles around his, then they dropped and surveyed his body out of hungry curiosity. The skin under his arms was scratched recently with the wood he had carried earlier, making faded crisscrosses near his chest. When she flicked her eyes back to meet his long, piercing gaze, she said:
"May I come in?" The voice was a quiet murmur, and it reminded him of how he used to spend time with Evie in her dormitory room, locked up behind a flimsy door and talking quietly about their lives as mercenaries. That life was over, now, as far as he could tell, and he had no intentions of ever returning to that life.
Wordlessly, for he didn't want to hear his voice again, he nodded. With his free arm, he gestured toward the cabin with a slight tension in the swing. The other arm gripped the bow so hard that the knuckles had turned white and the feather of the single arrow shook, despite how calm he appeared. She looked at his eyes again, hesitated as if to say something, and walked briskly toward the house.
When they were inside, Kai closed the door and locked it.
"It's cold in here," Evie said, her voice shaking slightly from either coldness or nerves. She uttered a laugh. "Actually, it's cold everywhere. I should've brought my fur coat."
Kai smiled for a brief moment. His back, still bare, was turned toward Evie, the old, violent scars from his previous life were all out and exposed, and she silently studied them as a curious child does when they see something they're not supposed to. He turned around, forcing his mouth into a flat line, and caught her looking at his chest. Immediately, she flicked her eyes to look around the cabin as if she had never been in such a tiny, confined space before. He felt light-headed, looking at her. It was a feeling of old nostalgia that had crept back from a far and distant place in his deeper memories. Somehow, seeing Evie again had brought life back to those vignettes.
"What are you doing here?" Kai said. His voice had regained a little flavor and color and made it a little more bearable to hear. This was only question number one; he had so many questions he wanted to ask her, and he knew she had many questions she wanted to ask him.
"Well…" She spurted, focusing her vision on a hook on a wall that had a wool hat hanging from it. "It got lonely, that's all." Her voice sounded distant, almost a thousand miles away.
Kai grabbed his shirt from a wooden pole, the one just below the hanger Evie was staring at. It was a shirt from his old life—one of the four shirts he had kept in case it got too breezy around here. He felt Evie's scanning eyes on him as he buttoned the shirt. He left one button at the very top free, and he rolled up his sleeves. Her eyes went up and met his. This time, the eye-contact lasted longer before she diverted her gaze toward his fireplace.
He waited for her to say something, already content to let the silence sit between them for an eternity.
"You alright?" Evie said. The silence had begun to build blocks of drowsiness and hearing her voice had broken some of them down. "I haven't had much to do around town lately. Fiona's got her new friends at the royal army. Karok's moved back down to his Herdlands. The rest—they usually stay out of my vicinity."
Kai thought for a moment, unaware that he was looking at the space between Evie's breasts stuffed in a tight-fitting white and black blouse.
"Guess so," he said. The air around them had gotten stiff, and now he craved a smoke. There was one in the front pocket of his polar bear jacket, but that was all the way in his bedroom. Evie stood in the way.
After a long pause, Evie replied, "I think I ought to leave. Didn't want to bother you much, and maybe I won't again." Despite this, she stood still. Taking a step in Kai's cabin was suddenly forbidden as if the whole area around her feet were surrounded by a thick layer of acid. Take one step, and your feet disintegrate. Simple as that.
There were two elm stools stacked on top of one another behind her, pushed up against a corner where the bedroom doorway was. He walked toward her and grabbed both of them with his strong hands. She had swerved out of his path and watched him carefully, and her casting hand had found her metal staff, almost like a magnet. When she saw that he was only bringing her a chair, her hand eased and brushed some hair behind her ear for the third time. He flipped the seats over and dropped them astride each other in front of the fireplace, making the only sound in the room since forty seconds ago.
"I need to get a fire going. But I'm all out of flint." He looked at Evie sharply, more like a tool than a person, and wondered, "Think you can lend me one?"
"Sure."
There was nothing in the fire pit—a flat stone slab—except for old black chips of wood which smelled like burnt pine on a cold winter day out on the mountain. Kai grabbed a few sticks of wood from the pile, which wasn't very big, and chucked them into the box with a hollow metal clanging sound. Evie, still thinking about leaving, snapped a finger, setting a strong, firm blaze on the wood. The whites of Kai's eyes glowed with a ceramic red-orange from the roaring fire as the fire slowly danced across the brittle surface of the crackling sticks.
It began to get warmer around them.
"Thanks," Kai said before it was long overdue. They both sat down at the same time.
"I can't believe it's already been five years. Five years! I almost didn't recognize you until I saw your eyes. Care to tell me what you've been up to all this time?" Already, Evie had begun to warm up and feel a little less like a clueless child in unknown territory.
When Kai spoke, it was in toneless, mumbled bursts, like an invalid in a mental ward, and he often glanced down at the floorboard where there was a particular streak of dirt from when he walked in from today's morning chores. He spoke about how he had left Colhen quietly and took what little he had, and went over the details of his recent life in as little as a paragraph. Evie's ears were open; more open than five years ago when she had always talked up a storm. Perhaps she had wizened up a little and learned to maintain the balance between listening and talking, he thought.
And now it was her turn to share. "I've been going to the shore a lot lately. I never liked how cold it got during winter back home. Sometimes I still go to the lighthouse where we…" Then she stopped, suddenly confused about what direction she was going in her little tale. Her cheeks were slightly flushed, and the rise and fall of her chest quickened slightly.
Kai felt a strange feeling invade his stomach. He tried to fight it, but eventually surrendered his thoughts to the lighthouse. He could smell the ocean, he could feel the dampness on his skin, he could touch the fine grains of sand.
He could remember all the fine, private noises they had made up there in the warm company of one another.
"You seein anyone lately? Or you just go there alone and weird?"
She shook her head and smiled in disbelief. "Well I could introduce him to you if you came back to town with me. I'm sure you'll like him, he's just like you. Uses his eyes just as well as you do when we're out hunting together. Not for food—just for fun."
"Cool. Maybe I could like him."
Yet, Kai knew he wouldn't like this man at all. When it came to any male friend that Evie had, he was skeptical of them. It had taken him a few weeks to get over the idea of her and Lann's relationship, and the possibility of her and the giant getting a go-round. Deep down, she wasn't that kind of person, the one that used people up like tissues and spat them around the street to be washed out by the rain. Strange, hysterical ideas came into his mind; sure, he thought, the man's eyes sure know where to look.
The corner of her lip quirked. Whatever she had wanted to say immediately was held back. "Have you seen anything strange lately? A kobold, a yeti, perhaps a weird slice in the sky?"
He shook his head and looked at her with peeled eyes, told her that all the Fomorians were no more. The Crimson Blades were no more after everything had happened, and most of its members had dissolved into regular civilians with a little extra baked layer of dutiful murder, kept hidden behind shaded eyes and veiled lips. Life had returned to its dingy self, as it always did.
Evie glanced out the window, a pearl earring lightly swinging against the side of her thin jaw. The sun was out of the trees now, and the light coming through the windows was strong, blinding. She held a hand to brace against the ray of light and then brought it down. She looked back at him, perhaps a little dreamily.
"I've been having these dreams," she said at once. The voice she had used to say this was slightly unsure. "Of us. When we used to go out to the fields with our friends and paint the grass red. Do you ever dream like that?"
"No," he said, furrowing his brow, "I don't dream." He felt an impulse to reach over her shoulder and wrap an arm around her, but that felt inappropriate, given their current position on the ladder of relationships.
A little smile touched her lips, although it looked more like worry than happiness. "That's a first."
"One for everything."
They talked for twenty, thirty minutes until they (mostly Evie) exhausted all of their ideas and stories and mouths. The urge to touch her, to feel her, came twice in great, powerful waves, and both times, he had bit the instinct back. Evie stood up from the wooden stool, a passive smile resting on her unlined face, and excused herself. The archer, ex-mercenary, allowed the sorceress to go, but not before offering her a water sack and a few pieces of veal wrapped in hard smoky paper. She accepted them gratefully and departed like she was late for a carriage. Her last words to him were, "See you again sometime, dear." Kai, as usual, kept mum. He could see the slow rekindling of their friendship begin to emerge in great, dream-like pictures. First, they'd spend some time out together in the musky company of a tavern, chatting like they did today, then maybe he'd put an arm around her. Then he thought about the man she met in Malina.
Yes, he thought, he would like to meet this man.