Calla' POV
I should have run.
That was my first thought when the strange man finished kneeling and stood back up to his full height. He was tall. I mean too tall like a giant . The kind of tall that made the trees around him look smaller than they were.
I did not run.
I sat at the roots of that big black tree with mud on my white dress and moonflowers falling out of my braid and I stared at him.
"Three hundred years," I said.
"Yes."
"That's not a normal thing to say to someone."
"No," he agreed. "It isn't."
He did not offer anything else. He just stood there with his hands at his sides, watching me the way you watch something you are afraid to scare off. Like I was a bird. Like I might disappear if he moved too fast.
I did not feel like a bird. I felt like a girl whose entire life had just been handed back to her in pieces and none of them fit together anymore.
"I'm not going anywhere with you," I said.
He nodded once. "Alright."
Then he sat down. Right there on the forest floor, cross-legged, a few feet away from me. Like we had all the time in the world. Like he was perfectly fine waiting.
I watched him for a long moment.
He did not speak. He did not move toward me. He just sat.
I hated how much that helped.
---
I don't know when I fell asleep. One moment I was sitting stiff against the tree roots, watching him, and the next the sky above the black-bark trees was a deep grey and the air smelled like early morning. Cold. Wet. Real.
My foot hurt.
I looked down. There was a cut on the bottom of my left foot, long and shallow. I must have stepped on something when I ran. I hadn't even felt it.
The man — Kael, some part of my sleeping brain had filed the name away — was crouched a small distance away. He had a fire going. Small and low, barely more than a glow. He had not woken me. He had not moved closer. He was just there, tending to something over the fire, and the smell that came from it was warm and thick and made my stomach pull tight with hunger.
I hated that too.
"You could have woken me," I said.
He looked over. "You needed sleep more than food."
"You don't know what I need."
"No," he said simply. "I don't."
He held out a small cup. Something hot inside it. I stared at it.
"It isn't poison," he said. There was no humor in his voice. He wasn't trying to be funny. He was just stating a fact.
I took the cup.
It tasted like broth. Plain and hot and exactly what my body wanted. I drank the whole thing without speaking and he said nothing about it, just turned back to the fire.
"We should move before the light gets stronger," he said after a while. "My place is not far."
"I'm not going to your place."
He looked at my foot. Then at me.
I looked at my foot.
The cut was worse than I thought. The skin around it was red and swollen and when I shifted my weight onto it a bright sharp pain shot up my leg.
I said a word my mother would not have approved of.
Kael stood and reached into the bag beside him. He pulled out a strip of clean cloth.
"May I," he said. Not a question exactly. More like a door he was holding open.
I looked at him for a long moment. Then I held out my foot.
He knelt again — the second time I had seen him do it, and it was no less strange — and he cleaned the cut and wrapped my foot with careful hands. He did not look up while he worked. He did not speak. His hands were large and they moved gently and he was done in less than a minute.
"Thank you," I said, before I could stop myself.
He nodded and let go of my foot and stood.
"The compound is ten minutes from here," he said. "You can leave whenever you want. I won't stop you."
I looked back at the dark wall of trees behind me. Somewhere past them was the pack. The ceremony ground. Darian's face, flat and decided, saying words I was going to hear in my head for a long time.
I stood up.
"Ten minutes," I said.
---
It took eight.
The compound was not what I expected. I had built a picture in my head — dark, rotting, something out of a bad dream. But it was just a low stone building set deep between the trees, old but solid, with a roof that didn't leak and a door that opened without noise. Inside it was one large room. A fire in the far corner. A table. Two chairs. A shelf of things I couldn't name in the low light.
Clean. Sparse. Like he owned only what he needed.
I stood in the doorway and looked around.
"You've been living here," I said.
"For a while."
"How long is a while."
He set his bag down on the table. "Longer than is comfortable to say."
He moved to the fire and added wood to it. I watched the light in the room grow. Warm gold. Steady.
Then the moonlight came through the window.
It was just a long slice of it, pale and bright across the stone floor. Nothing strange. Just moonlight.
But Kael stepped back from it. One quick step, like it had teeth. His jaw tightened. He moved to the far side of the room where the light did not reach and stood there with his back straight and his face blank.
I stared at him.
He noticed me staring. Something moved in his expression — not shame exactly. Something quieter than that.
"It's a long story," he said.
"You keep saying things like that."
"Because they keep being true."
I turned away from him and walked along the wall. I needed to do something with my hands. I needed to look at something other than his face. The wall was stone and in the low light I could see that it was covered, all the way along, in small careful marks. Hundreds of them. Old. Carved deep into the rock with something sharp.
I moved closer.
They were drawings. Rough ones. A forest. Trees. A wolf, silver and enormous, running under a full moon.
And a woman.
The same woman, over and over and over, across ten feet of stone wall. Standing. Kneeling. Reaching upward. Eyes open. Eyes closed.
I lifted my hand and touched one of the carvings.
My own face looked back at me.