71

Chapter 13

As safe as one can feel when you consider the only thing standing between you and an army of bloodthirsty Beast's waiting for the opportunity to chew you up and have you as a snack. Hmm.
After I go in, Stone goes out to bath, at my insistence that he smells. He comes back in, still shirtless but with loose night pants, and wearing his scarf in a fashion that's loose, but it's tucked around the area where his brand would be, as always. I knew by now he was doing that on purpose.
Dinner is great. Pine has roasted wild fowl, and there's a surplus of fresh apples, beaded with condensation. There's also bread. It's homemade, but it's still real, actual bread. I stack my plate with the stuff, and whenever I was sure no one was looking, I breathed in it's rich scent deeply. Mother had gotten bread once from a trader in the forest. I can't help but notice Stone glancing at me from across the table. Do I have food on my face?
After supper, Pine hands me a stack of soft blankets and cushions. I lay them out on the ground, as close to the fireplace as I dare, hoping the warmth from the flames will be retained in the hot stones and coals. It's late fall, and the nights are cold.
Stone lays down his blankets not far away, below the window. He carefully lies his back and swords beside him, in reach in case of emergency. He doesn't remove his scarf. Pine bends down, and cranks a handle on the side of the plush sofa, which makes me jump, snapping out into a full size bed. He kills the fire, and the room is plunged into darkness. It's a little awkward, and no one really knows whether to say good night.
After, literally, a few seconds, theres a growling sound so loud I can feel the floor shake. I sit bolt upright, staring out the window, waiting for a vicious Beast to knock the wall to rubble. Then I realize Pine is snoring.
"Holy crap." I exclaim, eyeing the old man, suspicious he might turn into a lion or something.
"Right? I had to stay with him for a week once. A week. I learned how to survive seven days without any sleep." Stone's voice comes over to me from about four feet away.
"Why did you have to stay with him?" I say, not bothering to whisper. I doubted anything would wake his grandfather up now. I take the opportunity to try and get some information from him.
"My father- Never mind." He stops suddenly, and I silently curse. It will be hard to catch him off guard, and get him to spill about his past.
He doesn't say anything else, and I can't think of anything to say, so I roll over, and try to fall asleep. That's easier said than done when the guy snoring a couple feet away from you sounds like an earthquake.
I lie awake forever, tossing and turning, grinding my teeth. It gives me way to much time to think about all the things I'm already confused about, making me even more confused, until I am tempted to grab my head in both hands, curl up in a ball, and scream.
Though it seemed like to much to hope for, eventually, I close my eyes, and fall into a troubled sleep. I have twisted dreams, nowhere near as realistic as the one last night.
I'm dangling in a net, in a pristine, luxurious room, the walls and floor and ceiling made of crystal clear glass. I'm staring down through the floor. Far below me is and expanse of green grass, broken only by the white and silver stalks rising up from it. The City.
" I have found you, finally. Now, you will die!" The voice comes from beside me. I struggle to turn, but can only see boots, and the tail of a red cape. The voice changes with every letter, warping between many different voices. One of them belongs to Stone.
Suddenly, the glass floor vanishes, and I'm plummeting towards the earth, trapped in the net. I'm about to become a bloody grease spot on the well-groomed lawn of the City, when the dream changes.
Now I'm being attacked by a Beast that resembles fried poultry. It lunges at me, the gaping hole between it's shoulders opening, about to swallow me up...
And Stone is there in a chef's hat, chopping up the man-eating chicken with his double-blades, holding them like butcher's knives. He turns to me, an enormous plate of steaming chicken before me, and gestures. "Dinner is served." Then his chef's hat catches on fire, and I'm beating his head with a branding iron, trying desperately to put it out. The branding iron says, in larger-than-life letters, 71. Stone seems unfazed by the entire event.
"Really, I'm okay," He insists, as the fire encases his body, growing brighter and brighter with every beat of my iron.
"No, no you're not!" I scream. " You're on fire!"
"Yeah, isn't it great?!" He grins, and I scream even more hysterically. His grin is growing, getting wider and wider, his teeth becoming pointed, until, standing in front of me, is a snarling, flaming, wolf-like Beast. It lunges, and I beat it one more time with the iron, for good measure, and run away, screaming.
"Why are you running, Ash? Come back! Come back to me..." His voice fades, becoming warbling and distant. I'm running blindly through the darkness, and I can see nothing. The dream shifts.
Now I'm flying, soaring over the Wold. Trees fly by underneath me, streaks of green and brown and now purple and orange, and other bright poison colors, as we get closer to the City. Because that's where we're going.
I'm riding on something, something large and powerful, but I don't know what, and I don't bother looking at it. It doesn't matter, as long as I reach my destination.
I sense there are more behind me, like I'm leading an army. The glowing pearly lights of the First City, an oasis in chaos, are visible, and the creature I'm riding dips in closer.
There's a lone archer defending the City. I squint to make him out, but though his clothes and surroundings are clear, his face remains blank and blurry, featureless. He draws back the bowstring, and my heart drops as I realize the flaming arrow is aimed at my flying steed's heart, and he won't miss. The arrow whistles through the air, and I know I can do nothing about it. I close my eyes, as my steed howls in pain, and suddenly goes limp. The archer's face, his identity, is suddenly clear, and I scream in shock, my heart dropping, followed by my stomach as I begin to fall, slipping off my dead steed's back, into the empty, weightless air. I'm plummeting, again, towards the earth, the long surrounding grass of the wall reaching up to me like the hands of the dead. Long, bony fingers, reaching up at my living heart...
My eyes snap open. I'm breathing hard, my heart pounding a mile a minute. Before me is the cold fireplace, but the room is lit by the cold grey dawn light that shines in through the window. Pine's snoring has stopped, so I assume he must be up and away.
Suddenly I realize the covers are tucked up around me to my chin. Funny, I could have sworn I threw most of them on, convinced it wasn't going to be a cold night. I jump in my skin, hearing the breathing behind me.
I roll over to my right, and inhale sharply. On the other side of the covers, which are wrapped tightly around my body, and beside me, is Stone, eyes closed, fast asleep. I can feel his warmth even through the many layers of blankets. You know how most people say you look peaceful in your sleep? Stone looks troubled, even angry. His brow is furrowed, mouth twitching, once and a while forming a snarl, exposing his abnormally long and sharp incisors, like a dog might when it's sleeping. I decide he's had enough bad dreams, and he's making me uncomfortable.
"Stone!" I say loudly, shaking his shoulders. His eyes open, darting around the room like mine had, looking momentarily confused, until he remembers where he is. Then they meet mine. I feel like I falling through their fathomless depths, sinking forever into the deep dark blue ocean...
"Yeah?" He says as if nothing is strange.
"What are you doing?" I blink, stressing how odd the situation is.
"Oh." He shrugs. "You were shivering, very loudly, at about midnight. I couldn't sleep, especially since you started yelping." I did? Maybe when I was falling...
"Get off." I say, and he sits up, stretching. He glances over at where his blankets had been- They're not there anymore. They're all on me.
"No. No, nonono, oh, God, no," He murmurs, eyes wide, glancing all about the room.
"What?" I frown, sitting up as well.
"My pack, my swords... Where are my swords? Oh, oh no, no," He scratches his head again, his bed-hair now ruffled even more.
"I have your stuff in the kitchen. I put some fresh food in your pack, stocked you up on some medical supplies." Pine says from the corner, startling me. How long has he been standing there?
"Why are your swords so important?" I frown at Stone, who suddenly looks relieved.
"Because," He says matter-of-factly, "Those blades are very important and very relevant to my past.", And heads around the corner into the kitchen area. Well, that was a whole lot of nothing.
Pine gives us both fresh outfits to change into. I go back to my place between the cart and the bushes, and strip off the flowing white night gown. I'm glad to see included in the pile are fresh underclothes, as mine are sweaty and old. Then I dawn the loose white dress, not unlike the nightgown, except the hem of the dress is at my knees. Then I strap on the firm green dyed leather vest, with gold thread for the hemming. After that comes a gold and silver belt, which is many silken strands of thin rope woven around each other into a delicate braid.
I even unbraid my long dark hair, letting it fall down my dress to mid back. I'm feeling very fancy in the new clothes. They are only peasant clothes, made by the vendors, or some other cloth maker hiding out in the Wold, but I feel as if they're the shining new dress of the Ruling Queen.
When I come back in, Stone goes out to change. He comes back in tan shorts that go to his knees and- get this- a shirt. I wonder how long it took his to decide not to go around shirtless in the colder weather. Not that I mind him shirtless. He's wearing a billowy white shirt, the ends of the sleeves on his wrists like large puffy clouds. I don't like this version as much as shirtless Stone, but it works for me. He's in a dark blue leather vest, plain compared to mine, but it's rather dashing on on him.
In the kitchen, I eat some more bread for breakfast, as well as fresh roseberry jam. As my mother explained to me before, after the apocalypse, some fruit from before (example; apples) survived radiation. But new species of fruit and other foods were also created, a few edible, and most of them so poison your lips will turn blue before you swallow.
"Thank you, so much." I say, completely honest for once, to Pine when me and Stone are packed up and waiting in front of the door.
"Honestly, it was nothing," Pine says gratefully, and his eyes meet Stone's for a moment. He turns back to me, "Send me a letter by messenger Glare when you reach the rebels..." His eyes are sad when he says it, though, as if he knows we'll never reach them.
"I'll try," I answer. A Glare is a bird. It's a very large bird, and a very fast one. It's completely silent, and designed not to attract any Beast's who might fancy a feathery morsel. But the special part about it, is the glare of the sun of the specially engineered feathers renders it invisible in flight, hence the name. Bred by the First Rulers when the clocks were officially started again, after the apocalypse, to send out messages all over the world, to see if there were any survivors in other countries. Now, 163 years later, they had still found none.
"And Stone..." Pine and Stone hold each other's gaze for a moment, as if in silent goodbye. Stone nods, and turns to pull open the door. There are no costumers in the market place this early in the morning, when the sky is grey, and the dew on the cobblestones beads on your feet.
"Godspeed to the both of you!" Pine calls.
The door slams shut behind us, and there is silence, broken only by the occasional chirping of the Lover's Bird.
"Lover's Bird," I say to break the awkwardness. "I haven't heard that since... Well, I don't know when." They were supposed to have died out when the radiation became too bad, the little black bird with the red symbol on it's chest, that looked like a cracking heart. Did that mean the radiation was lessening? Suddenly, I became hopeful, for no real reason.
"Oh, is that what it is?" Stone says absently. We stroll past the empty carts and the rusted well, to the edge of the square. We stop then, both looking back at the same time, to the warm windows of Pine's house, which have begun flickering with the light of a fire. We are leaving safety, going off through the dangerous forest on a wild-goose chase.
"C'mon." Stone pulls me away, into the dark, dark Wold.