-9-
The Split
Whik exhaled a frosty breath as he pulled back the pouch of his slingshot, one hand extended and the other against his cheek. Jasper had called that hand Whik's anchor, his foundation, his attempt at keeping a point of reference. He'd said Whik must cherish that hand, lest he ever lose it. It was the only way to ensure he could repeat the same shot twice.
His prey moved up the tree trunk, its spotted tail swooping through the air. This was one of the white squirrels, harder to kill than red squirrels, according to Tully Grimley. The squirrel stopped on a branch, eyes focused on everything. She couldn't have seen Whik hiding behind a mossy log, his pebble aimed at her belly. Whik dug his toes into the dirt, put his weight against a tree, and exhaled as he steadied the shot.
It scurried about the bark, moving this way and that, poking eyes out from knots in the wood, so Whik took another breath. The exhale was the best time to shoot, when his fingers didn't shake as much. Whik had practiced his shot on leafbugs. He had killed plenty of those, though leafbugs were much smaller than squirrels. The furry creatures seemed to have more life than a stick that moved. It wasn't easy to kill a living thing, Whik suspected. But could leafbugs even feel?
This exhale wasn't right either. The fur stood up on the squirrel's tail, as if she knew she was being watched. Whik lowered his aim. He wondered if she had a mother, or a sibling to take care of. Her eyes were big round things, long eyelashes blowing in the wind.
Whik breathed in, tasted the fog on the air, then exhaled slowly. He pulled the band back farther.
"He can't do it," came a voice.
The pebble flew through the air. Whik's hold on the log gave way, sending him falling into the underbrush. His hand smashed against a rock, splitting skin.
Tully Grimley was over him, leaning himself against a tree, his belly bouncing in fits of laughter. The squirrel ran down another trunk, off into the distance, the pebble bouncing after it.
"He has a lousy shot," Tully said, walking out from the tree. "Did you see that, Torra? Come out from there."
Torra Grimley emerged from the forest, holding back a smile. "You sort of startled him. Nobody can shoot when they're startled."
Tully walked closer, his shirt sagging, belly fat exposed. "Especially orphans."
"I had the shot," Whik told him. He brushed dirt from his legs.
"You didn't have the shot," Tully spat. "You can't kill a squirrel. You can't kill nothin'."
Whik tucked his slingshot into his waistline and grabbed his bag of pebbles. "You don't know that," he told them. What else was he going to tell them? They didn't know whether Whik would have killed it. No one but Whik knew that.
"I can kill," Tully said, stepping closer. His brother sat on a rock, hands against his face as if he were watching a puppet show. "Torra knows I've killed things before. A cat once, when it wouldn't leave the barn. You ever killed a cat?"
Whik stepped back, his bare feet curling around a fallen branch. He looked to his hand. A scrape ran across his thumb, blood pooling around the cut. "I've killed a hundred leafbugs. Have you done that?"
Tully's cheeks puffed up, his eyes widened, then he let out a bellowing laugh. "Leafbugs? Hey, Torra, did you hear that?" Tully wiped his mouth. "Whik has killed a hundred leafbugs. I've killed a thousand flowers Whik, just by stepping on them. Does that count?"
Whik's face reddened. He knew what was happening. Tully was reeling him in, leading him on like a minnow to a trap. "That doesn't count. That's stupid."
Tully stepped onto a rock, surveying the forest like a mounted scout. "Leafbugs. Can't believe it. Hey Torra, what do you think about that?"
Torra shrugged his shoulders. "They're just leafbugs. They don't feel."
Tully put a finger to his chin. "I bet Whik would feel something if we shot a pebble at him."
This was how it always happened. When silence fell between them, when Tully had said his part. Torra just sat there, like he always did, doing nothing. His fat brother walked closer, eyed Whik up and down, took a breath.
When Tully lunged at him, Whik took through the trees. His feet slammed against flat rocks, then soft moss, then there was nowhere to jump. Uneven pebbles tore at his toes. He heard Tully behind him, heaving like he always did. Torra was running now too, if only to watch when the running stopped.
Branches whipped by Whik's face, clouds of fog rolled past him, and the white squirrel followed him along in the treetops, because she knew what it was like to be hunted. Whik stumbled out of the forest, huge tufts of grass catching his fall.
He looked back as he ran down the hill, just north of town. Tully Grimley staggered through the grasses, shouting things that Whik couldn't make out.
Whik's feet ached, his breaths fell short, his slingshot dug into his skin. He spotted the wooden palisades, structures that looked like they could fall from one gust of wind. There were no guards on this side of Tannuchi. There was nothing to look out for, just dark forests until you reached the plains along the western coast. Whik knew of his own entrance through the walls, a trapdoor beneath an outcropping of rocks where he'd seen Frankford Millstone sneak out one night.
There wasn't time to trick them. He ran to the outcropping, dropped down beside a boulder, and moved the wooden panels from the entrance.
"We'll see if you feel something," Tully shouted. "Leafbugs. Ha!"
Whik crawled through the opening. When he looked up, the farm was vacant, just dead leaves still left from the infected. Clumps of dirt wedged in Whik's toes as he ran. There weren't many buildings nearby, but for the windmill and Frankford's place. Tully's shouts had grown distant, but when Whik turned, he spotted the boy coming through the trapdoor.
A dark shape moved through the sky, past the blades of the windmill, then along the wall. Whik's falcon tucked his wings as he flew closer, charging at Tully Grimley. The fat boy screamed, his brother just emerging from the entranceway.
Carter pecked at Tully, gentle at first, then harder, tugging on his shirt. Whik ran over a trickling stream and saw the outline of Frankford's house, nestled between the stable and a drinking well. Whik tried the door, but a padlock gave him pause. Frankford always locked his doors when he wasn't home, said something about respecting a man's privacy. Whik turned the corner, the Grimley brothers out of sight.
Always have two ways out, Frankford had told him. One that everyone knows you know, and another that they don't. Whik pulled open the shutters of Frankford's window. He ran his hands between the next set of boards, sliding them sideways until they dropped to the floor. Some blood from his hand smudged against the wood. He hoped Frankford wouldn't notice.
Whik braced himself against the wall and pulled himself into the window, legs dangling in the air. When he stood, Frankford's house was dark and empty. He closed the shutters and heard Tully Grimley's shouts as the boys ran through the alley, cursing about Whik's falcon and what they would do to it.
Frankford's desk stood in the middle of the room, parchments bunched up on the surface, a quill and jar of ink next to that. A thick rug sat in front, three giant elephants weaved into a circular design, each tusk interlocking with the others'. The corner was pulled back, revealing a crack in the floorboards."
"I bet he ran off to that old wizard's house," Tully shouted. Footsteps stomped in the dirt outside. "Frankford Millstone, Whik's knight in shining armor."
Whik crouched down on the floor, feeling the crack in the boards. When his fingers came across a handle, he pulled with all his strength. The door fell back against the rug. Whik peered inside the hole.
Tully drummed along the wall from outside, faint taps echoing in Millstone's house. The floor of the basement disappeared into the darkness. It was only a ladder, fading away into nothing. Whik hurried to the corner of the room to search for Frankford's flint and lantern. How could Frankford blame Whik for hiding from the Grimley brothers?
When he found the flint, he fumbled with it in his fingers until he gripped it tight and struck it against the piece of steel. Sparks flew as he lit the doused wick of the lantern. Whik placed his feet on the ladder's rung, the lantern dangling from his hand. His feet barely reached the rungs below, so he had to stretch his toes. He reached up and grabbed the small door's edge, balancing himself on the rungs. He pulled it shut, but couldn't grab the carpet in time. How do people pull back the carpet? Perhaps Frankford wanted to keep people out, not in.
The bottom was closer than Whik would have thought. He stepped down onto a hard dirt floor. The room was small, stacked to the brim with crates and shelves. Cobwebs hung in the corners and clay dishes piled on a table. There were more books than Whik had ever seen, and maps too, along the walls.
The lantern's light illuminated a table that rose in the center of the space, and Whik couldn't help but gasp. He lifted the lantern above his head and walked around the platform. An object sat on the surface. Embedded markings wandered from each corner of the golden triangle, intertwining before culminating in three circles in the middle. There was a hollow incision that filled the intersection point of the circles and the hole cut through the object, allowing Whik to see directly through it and onto the table beneath.
His curiosity peaked. He had to touch it. He held his breath, listening for Tully's yells or Torra's pointless babble. Whik's fingers trembled as he curled them around one side of the artifact. The sheer weight of the instrument was overwhelming. He placed the lantern on the ground and used both hands. Crouching, he took a closer look at the markings.
The circles begged to be touched. He'd been admiring the thing so intently that once he noticed the drops of blood dripping from his hand and pooling around the carvings in the artifact, it was too late. The circles glowed with a radiant shimmer, first around the edges of the circle, and then slowly filling in the rest of the shapes. The blood disappeared into the object like water sucked up by sunlight.
Whik wasn't sure if his pure excitement caused the sensation to overtake his body, or if some external force was closing in on him. His legs trembled, eyes twitched, his heart thumped in his chest. He fell backwards onto a pile of dusty books.
It felt like someone was digging their thumbs into his temples seconds before the visions began. In the first, there was a large room with stone walls. Whik shivered from a cold breeze. When he exhaled and the cloud of breath dissipated, he saw Marg's motionless body in a bed. He crept closer. Marg turned his head. His face was pale, hair stuck together in bunches of slick strands.
"Where did I go wrong?" Marg asked. "How could he have betrayed me? The berries..."
Another vision took its place. Whik sat in a field surrounded by lifeless bodies. Massive stone walls hung in the air like fog, dangling over the corpses. Trees were uprooted, hovering over the holes where they once grew, dirt falling from their roots. Whik looked to the towering castle walls and spotted the hole in the sky. A crisp cracking sound hit his ears as the sky tore apart farther. A void of expansive black ate away at the clouds.
Whik jolted upward. The walls of Frankford's basement shook. Dirt fell from the ceiling. The tremors were over moments later. He heard the faint shouts from outside. His head throbbed. He jumped to his feet and repositioned the heavy thing on the podium. There was no sign of the blood from his hand and the glow had all but faded. Reaching for the lantern, he hurried back up the ladder. He threw the rug back over the trapdoor, placed the lantern on the edge of the table as he had found it, and placed the flint next to that. Just as I left it.
Whik climbed back through the window, passed the windmill's blades that slowly turned, as if a giant had flicked one. He walked past the granary, past the family of swans that always waddled through town, and into the courtyard. He spotted Mrs. Hamlond picking up the pieces of a broken pot. Some children clung onto Sir Rolas' legs, but the Grimley brothers were nowhere to be seen.
When he looked to the sky, he almost forgot to breathe. The split had widened. He strained his eyes to look into the gap, but he could see only darkness. It was as if a starless night had fallen in the jagged divide. Whik couldn't help but feel like he caused it.
He approached Margarie's tavern, the sign swaying from side to side. Standing in the alleyway, with sweat dripping down his face, was a very panicked Frankford Millstone.