They ate a delicious pie with squirrel and potato filling that night for dinner, and after the boys went to bed, Merilla came out to talk to Kestrel under the stars in the yard.
“Why are you here?” she asked.
“I’m here to wait for you,” he answered.
“No, why were you and your friends out here in the wilderness? This is not on any road or any route from one place to another. We never see strangers around here,” she said.
“We were here to check on the yeti,” Kestrel told her. “And we found it.”
“You came looking for the yeti?” she asked in astonishment. “What sane person does such a thing?”
“We were told there was a yeti that had come down from the Water Mountains and was terrorizing settlers in this area. We were told to come check on the reports. It was a test as part of my training. We just happened to come to the right place to find it and fight it right away,” Kestrel explained.
“If hunting a yeti is training, I’d hate to imagine what the full job must be,” Merilla exclaimed. “Who are you? Are you some part of the army?”
“I can’t tell you, Merilla,” he answered, knowing that they had stumbled close to the secrets he had to keep. “And it doesn’t matter now. I’m just Kestrel, and I’m here to take care of you.”
She stood up. “I’ll go to bed now,” she said abruptly. “Good night Kestrel,” she added, then walked into the cabin and turned down the lantern, leaving only the faint starlight to illuminate the yard.
Kestrel crawled into his covers, remorseful for having offended the woman with his secrets, but knowing he had no choice. “Goddess, let her find peace, and let her choose to leave this place,” he prayed to Kai, seeking the human goddess for the first time since the rain storm.
“I will watch over her as one of my own, young one, just as I watch over you,” he perceived a reply from the goddess, and then he fell asleep.
Kestrel awoke soon after sunrise the next morning, and quietly went to check on his horse. A movement on the far side of the yard surprised him, and he turned to see Merilla kneeling on the ground beside her husband’s grave. She saw him and stood, then dusted the grass and dirt off her nightgown, and came stalking across the yard to stand directly in front of him.
“I dreamed that the goddess spoke to me last night, and said that Youkal wants me to go with you,” she said hesitatingly. “I know that it is the right thing to do; I’ve known that since you first said it, I just couldn’t speak it aloud. If you can wait until tomorrow, I’ll pick and pack today, and tell the boys that we’re going to go on a journey. Is that acceptable?” She pulled her nightgown tightly around her, her arms crossed on her chest as her hands clutched the material.
“Tomorrow will be fine for departing. I’ll do anything you want me to do to help you today,” he answered.
She dropped her arms to her sides. “Would you hold me, just this once? I want to feel a man’s arms protect me here one more time.” She looked up at him, and he saw that tears were flowing once again.
He held his arms wide, and felt the curves of her human body press against him as he enveloped her in a hug. He thought of Lucretia, the girl he had wanted to know, who had died in battle against humans, and he thought of Cheryl, whose father had also died in the same battle. He should hate this woman, a member of the race that was attacking his homeland, the race that he was supposed to infiltrate and undermine. Yet after the short time he had spent here with her, he felt only sympathy for her, with her life being torn apart.
“Thank you,” Merilla said, speaking into his chest. “You feel so good right now. I wish it was all a dream. I wish I could look up and see Youkal looking down at me with his crooked grin. Oh Kestrel, how will I ever be able to live again?” she sobbed.
“You’ll live one day at a time, and you’ll live to remember Youkal and to raise your boys every day as best you can, to be as good as their father was,” he replied, not sure where the words came from, but sensing they were right.
She raised her head up to look at him. “I will; I’ll raise the boys to be as good as Youkal was,” she agreed, then pressed herself away from him, and hurried back to the house.
That day she sorted through her belongings, and made a large pile of the items she wanted to take with her, then sorted again and shrank the size of the pile. Kestrel gently told her it was still too much to take, and they argued about the need to carry the yeti remnants, which were growing pungent in their odor, but Kestrel insisted that the yeti had to go with them, and her pile had to grow smaller. That night, after she prepared a simple dinner, the last one she would cook in her ruined cabin, she stood by the final selection of items she would take back to Estone.
“We used to always watch the sun set above that mountain,” she pointed to a tall, singular mountain with a very steep and pointed peak. “Youkal said that it pointed up to heaven, but that we had a little bit of heaven right here,” she told Kestrel with a sigh, but without breaking into melancholy tears. She put her boys to bed, then came back out and sat in the darkening yard with Kestrel.
“Do you believe we’ll make this journey without troubles?” she asked.
“I’m sure we will,” Kestrel assured her. “With the horse to carry things, we’ll only need seven or eight days to reach Estone,” he guessed.
“How were the roads on the way here? Did you have any troubles?” Merilla asked him.
“We came a roundabout way, through the forest mostly, but everything was fine,” Kestrel assured her, worried about being pinned down in facts he didn’t know. “I’m going to go say good night to the horse,” he stood up to end the awkward conversation. “I’ll see you in the morning,” he told her, then walked away.
Chapter 18 — The River Crossing
The next morning they spent several hours loading and rearranging their goods on Kestrel’s horse, and on their own backs, then stood motionlessly in the yard for five minutes as Merilla looked at the remains of her lost life.
“I’m ready,” she said finally, her head down, and they began to trek eastward. They passed no other habitations that day, and camped atop a small hill that night. Kestrel did not think he and Merilla could maintain watch all through the night with just the two of themselves, so he set no watch, and they all awoke refreshed the next morning. At noon they came to a large river, a different location on the same river Kestrel had crossed before, he suspected, with Arlen and Artur. Their trail was atop a bluff, and so they followed the trail along the south bank of the river until early evening.
He shot several squirrels easily, and they roasted the meat on small sticks held above their fire that night. Kestrel unpacked his horse, and set the yeti remains at some distance from the camp that night to protect them all from the unpleasant smell the rotting flesh emitted.
The next day their trail descended down to a wide sweeping turn in the river, an obvious spot to ford through the current. The little boys had taken turns variously walking and running with them, riding on the horse, and riding on Kestrel’s back up to that point in the journey, so Kestrel piled them both atop the horse, Merilla pulled her skirts up high and tied them around her waist, and they began to cross the flowing water.
Despite its width and shallowness, the water travelled in a surprisingly strong current, and Kestrel held Merilla’s hand with one of his, while he led his horse with the other hand, allowing them to forge through the water together, taking small steps to keep their balance, and letting the strength of the horse help lead them across, though Kestrel could see the current was pressing them towards the downstream end of the ford.
There was a sudden muffled cry from atop the horse where the two boys were tussling, and then a splash on the downstream side of the animal. Kestrel maneuvered around the front of his steed, and saw one of Merilla’s boys floating rapidly away, carried by the river’s current out of the ford and around the bend of the stream.