One – "Lou"? – was coming ducking through evergreen branches directly toward her… perhaps following a faint trail of disturbed foliage.
Regretting her slung left arm, Patience tightened her right-hand's grip on the scimitar's hilt… and slowly raised the blade high, cocked it slightly over her shoulder. The odor of evergreens seemed to grow almost overpowering…
The Robin came on, making more woods-noise than he would have if a deer or armed man were waiting. Or if he were older, and wise.
One of his friends called, a distance through the trees.
The young man, almost certainly "Lou," stepped stooping through the thicket… was close enough to almost touch – and saw her standing nearly beside him as he started to straighten.
As always, in her experience of those moments, Patience felt time's sudden winter, a moment's freezing, slow, and difficult to strike through. The young man – blue eyes startled as a frightened child's – crouched for some purpose, perhaps to leap away, then raise his hatchet or javelin for fighting.
Patience saw, as he saw in their shared instant, that would not be possible. Merriment seized her arm's strength, and the sword whipped down before either of them was quite ready, sliced the young man across his eyes – it seemed to Patience he died to his world then, died blind even before the second… and third thrumming strokes left him spouting, shaking in place without his head, before he toppled.
"Farewell, Lou," Patience said – and almost hidden beneath green hemlock fronds on the forest's floor, the head's mouth trembled as if to answer.
Death, though not noisy, had somehow echoed through the woods, and the other Robins were silent as Patience was silent. Then – as if killing had given them its direction – they came booming, leaping through greenwood toward their dead friend, while Patience fled.
… Boston had never preached to praise the night; though perhaps the Productive Mothers, in their pens, welcomed darkness to shroud the remembered sight of their odd or ruined children. Still, Patience composed her own prayers for nightfall while she ran, insistant as if she had every right to demand the whole world go rolling faster. She begged the Mountains' Jesus and Kingdom River's Floating One; she offered what she didn't have to Lady Weather – intending to pay that debt later – while every stride, every leap over winter-fallen timber was a knife-thrust into her shoulder.
The three men came after her, tracking fast, bird-calling back and forth to keep their interval. They hadn't paused at Headless Lou.
Only the mountainside's broken country in dimming light, the tangled rough here-and-there of the thick hemlock grove, gave Patience chances to pause… scent the men's quarterings on errant breezes, then scramble in the other direction. Once or twice, she doubled back to almost meet them – so they passed her by WT yards as she crouched panting quietly as she could, mouth open, her eyes closed as if to see was to be seen.
After a while, exhausted – by hunger even more than pain – she become a dreaming girl again, full of wishes. She imagined Sam Monroe had come to stand beside her in the dusk, amused, liking her as he always had through every exasperation. If he were alive, he would come to help her in just that way. Not as a king, but as the war-worn young man she'd met in the Sierra those many years ago. His hard face, kind eyes, the long-sword strapped down his back.
He – and others, if they were alive – would have come to aid her. It seemed unfair that mere death should keep her from her friends.
Night was falling with the last of sunset's shadows, their darker shade amid the hemlocks, but would not come quite soon enough. Patience was running her last run along the top of an embankment choked with toppled great trees – dredged out and thrown down by the mountain's spring flooding years before. The bark was rotting from huge logs piled confused as if the Lady and Lord Winter played there at pickup sticks.
The men were close behind her; Patience could hear their swift steps through the trash.
Soon to be caught. Then a fight – and perhaps another Robin killed before they hacked her down.
She slowed… slowed to turn to meet them – and saw amid the splintered tumble of ruined trees below, a possible spoiled hollow. She thought it was a shadow, then thought not – and leaped out into the air to fall thudding into timber… rolled off some rough round and fell again through jumbled stacks of trunks and branches, her shoulder a lance of agony flashing in her mind white as washed wool.
When she lay still, bark-burned and bleeding, her scabbarded sword's belt twisted and turned beneath her, Patience took time for only one difficult breath… then crawled deeper into the wreckage, crawled beaten and bruised as if her back were broken, to where she'd seen the hollow. She sought through descending night… and heard the Robins' chirps and whistles above, as they trotted searching along the embankment's edge.
She crawled and clambered – then saw the dark hollow, its massive log-end angled between two smaller broken trees. Gritting her teeth against groans, Patience struggled over the lowest log – and found the hollow just above her. She reached up, right-handed, into its dark crumbling space… hauled herself half into it… and had to shake her left arm out of its sling to aid.
Then, with pain past pain filling her mind like an icy ocean, Patience used both arms – left shoulder twisting in and out of joint with soft crunching, brilliant blazes of agony – used both arms to drag herself up and into a rough, narrow space, rotted deep. Cramped so each breath was half-measure, she wriggled deeper into the great log, scabbarded sword scraping, snagging to haul at its belt, then jolting free. She inched farther into darkness, into shredding damp and spoil. Blood ran in her mouth from lips bitten for silence… and she finally lay satisfied to die there, if promised never to be found.
… Through Warm-time hours poorly counted, Patience lay rough-shrouded in the dark, drifting and dreaming around a core of molten metal searing in her shoulder. She dreamed of her first sight of Max – then tiny, fat, red and slippery with juice and blood… And she'd known in that instant. Though so small, he'd still lain heavy as a man on her breast, crushing the air from her lungs. His eyes had been closed, but he'd watched her through the lids.
"He sees me," she'd said.
"But makes no sound." Woodrow Cabot-Lodge, slender and handsome, had leaned over as if he loved her, though no member of Cambridge Council was permitted that, even one appointed to sire a result upon her… Still, Patience had been certain he liked her – as who would not, and she so pretty? So clever.
"He will never speak, Woody," Patience had said, and knew it, though she didn't know why.
"… Never speak," Patience said, waking in her hollowed log. She took the fullest breath she could, and decided to live at least another day.
Morning would be surely… surely near. Time to begin to wriggle carefully back and back through rotting punk, paying the price in pain… then finally out into dawn's light and air. Another day or two would pass before the shoulder and starvation left her only lying down to do, to wait for death.
The Robin boys, having hunted through the dark and missed her, might be gone from the hemlocks – but not likely. They'd almost certainly be waiting along the forest's lower edge for vengeance, having lost poor Lou.
Pete Aiken woke first – had had no fire – rolled from a bed of hemlock boughs in his place at the bottom of the stand of trees, skin goose-pimpled in dawn's chill.
He trilled a territory warble. Heard no reply to east or west, and called again… Then, Gerald answered from the east. But only silence from Gerald's brother – an idiot, and certainly sleeping through sunrise.
Pete stretched till his joints cracked, eased his muscles from a cold night's sleep, then picked up javelin and hatchet, and paced deeper into the hemlocks to shit… The Boston-woman would have to come their way – or climb Wild-plum Mountain to its crest and over, deeper into Robin country.