Whispers of Long Lost Voices

7. Dead Men Do Tell Tales

Two life signs. They remained, weak, flickering like candles sputtering at the bottom of their containers, their wicks soaking up every last bit of wax they could to keep burning. These were the people they'd come to rescue. They'd survived and they were going to continue to survive if Brenn had anything to do with it.

She concentrated on every step forward. A steady breath in, a steady breath out. The humus covered ground was spongy and gave way beneath her feet. Each sip of the thick air tasted green and alive. Sweat prickled on her hairline and cooled her arms as they swung beside her. These were her sensations, the things her eyes, ears, nose, and millions of nerve endings picked up. The headache belonged to her as did the painful throbbing in her back and feet. The sharp stab just above her kidneys accompanying every step and the way pain radiated from her ribcage through her lower back when she took too deep a breath, those belonged to her as well.

The rest she'd built a wall around and she struggled to maintain it. The fever; the nausea; the pain above her pubic bone like a terrible unending pressure that had grown more intense with every other symptom the closer they got to the life signs; these did not belong to her and she could push them to the back of her mind. Awareness without feeling. Once she'd accepted the impossible, that Rora was here, it'd grown easier to compartmentalize. If the mind were a muscle, then her muscle memory had taken over. This was the proof, right? If it weren't Rora, she wouldn't have been able to build the barriers.

Right?

When their bond had been new she'd been half mad, hadn't she, unable to suss out which of them was hungry, or tired, or aching from a hard day's work? It'd been a mess of emotional and physical confusion. It made sense, what was happening now.

It had to make sense, because Rora had to be here.

Or was she just wishing—running her finger along the unbroken line of a wishing stone with her eyes pressed closed and heart set as she cast it into the sea. Please let me look into Rora's eyes again. Please let me hear her laughter fill up a room.

It was just as likely the stim had kicked in and the skills Rora had taught her to separate their minds had allowed her to untangle the place where her pain and her need to finish this mission intersected. The brain could play tricks. Hadn't Rora taught her that, too? People could convince themselves of many things simply for the want of believing.

Dusk continued to deepen, and shadows filled the blocks of overgrown fairy mounds surrounding them. It was just like the fair folk of Ma's tales to take back the gleaming metallic dwellings of mortals—cover them in moss and vine, scent them in perfume, and create pockets of mystery to entice careless beings into the otherworld.

'Mind the wood when you're out there, a stór.' she used to say when Brenn had ventured outside the Human District, which hadn't been often as a child. If she'd been going out to sea with Da, it was the merrow she had to be wary of. As if the Aesir weren't enough to fear. Out here, she should have been far from the superstitions of home, but like hope, they were hard to shake.

This forest had eyes. They were on her now, judging her impossible hopes. Rora would say no hope was impossible, merely improbable. If she were feeling particularly impish, she'd add,

'There are more things in heaven and Earth, dear Brennan, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.'

Brenn never saw the appeal of Shakespeare, but for once hoped the aul English lad had been right.

The Interface indicated the life signs were almost beside them in a mound with no visible entrance. By unspoken agreement, she and Tara both fell silent in case the eyes in the trees weren't the results of a mind fed a steady diet of justified paranoia and a touch of magical thinking. Tara held up a hand to halt her. On one side, the foliage created an impenetrable wall of branches and vines one would have to hack through, making it impossible to sneak up on them. The building they needed to find their way into was single story and long, perhaps it'd once been a community center or a market when the settlement was new.