Avery stood by the small stream near the Cabin and felt the sun shining on her face. She closed her eyes and breathed in the quiet, wiggling her toes in the mud. The ground was cool and moist from the recent rain. She untied her pants and let them fall, then slowly reached up with her good arm and pulled her shirt over her head. As she stood naked in the sun she reached for the knife and brought it up to her neck. She yanked at a fist full of hair and hacked it off. Relief crept into her body as the weight that pulled on her tender scalp was eased, and her short hair blew freely in the wind. Almost meditative, she held her hand out to the breeze and let the wind pull the dirty, bloody hair from her fingers. She wished the memory of what had happened could blow away so easily.
She sat down in a shallow pool in the creek and sighed with pleasure as she let the water wash over her broken body. Gently, she scrubbed the dried blood off her face and ran her fingers through her cropped hair. The cool water brought relief to the damage done. After washing she rose from the creek and let the sun dry her skin while she sat by the stream in silence.
She felt numb. She had long ago moved through other emotions. Shame, anger, fear, pain. Between attacks she sometimes felt determination. That the next time he came she would fight harder. She read books on combat and understood the technique but it was difficult to put into practice against such a force. For a time she even trained, running through the woods, learning backflips and doing hundreds of push-ups. But even at her peak she was still a human woman and he a sapien male. He would always be stronger.
Avery took pleasure her small victory. By chance she had her knife in her hand and had left a mark across his face. She smiled to herself at the thought of the blood pouring out of his cheek. He was particularly vicious this time. But she landed one blow. One. Next time, she would land two.
She pushed her enemy from her mind, trying not to dwell on what she couldn't control. It had never helped her to think about what he had done and now she had something else to focus on. Someone else.
As the sun warmed her skin she reflected on what Roedin had shared. He was half-sapien and half-faunid; she hadn't known such a thing was possible, but it explained Roedin's exquisite sapien form with the addition of bat wings. None of the books ever mentioned cross-breeding, but that was more due to social separation than physical incompatibility.
The species were closely related: sapiens were like a cross between faunids and humans. She must have read thousands of texts on the origins of each but after such extensive research she knew that no author was impartial and each had his or her own biases. Faunids were always described as little more than primitive beasts who were only good for fighting and hard labour. Humans were portrayed as religious zealots too weak and stupid to fend for themselves. Sapiens were the pinnacle of evolution, perfectly blending the strength, speed, and skills of animals with intelligence and sophistication. Add a small dose of magic and the scholars made sapiens out to be infallible. Avery knew better.
With each species ranked and separated so carefully it was hard to imagine how a sapien and faunid could have joined. Sapiens placed such importance on pure bloodlines they wouldn't want to contaminate their gene pool.
Avery desperately wanted more information from Roedin but she couldn't return the favour. What if he didn't believe her? What if he left her here?
She shook the remaining water from her short hair and dressed with care, contemplating how she could get a sapien to help a human. The walk back to the Cabin was slow. She limped heavily and rested often against trees along the way. She gave one tree a particularly wide berth. The ropes still rested at the base of the makeshift whipping post, but the rain had washed away all the blood.
The Cabin door was open letting in the fresh spring air and she slowly hobbled up the steps with a bucket of water in her good arm. She set the bucket down by the door and began things off the table. She hadn't even noticed Roedin was awake.
"Your hair!" he cried out in horror.
She sighed and ran her fingers through it, careful to not pull on any scabs.
"Don't worry," Avery chuckled. "It hasn't gone far."
She pulled a bubbling pot off the fire and brought it to the table. "Do you think you can eat more today? We need to get some food in you to help with the repairs."
If she focused on him she wouldn't have to think about her own trauma. She didn't want to talk about what had happened, what he had witnessed. She knew he had so many questions, but she had no answers. They were the same questions she asked herself every day.
Avery served the stew and brought it over to Roedin in bed. He was able to hold the bowl and feed himself now that the fever had broken, but he was very weak and tired easily. She dragged the table to the bed so it felt like they were sharing a meal together, and lowered herself into the chair, closing her eyes with relief as she settled in. When she opened them she found Roedin watching her with concern, taking in her exhaustion and disheveled appearance.
Eventually he mustered the courage to ask. "Avery—"
"No."
He waited.
"Avery—"
"I don't know his name, or how he gets here, or how to make him stop." Avery ground her teeth but kept her eyes down on the food in her bowl.
"How long has this been happening?" he asked quietly.
Still Avery kept her eyes averted, looking away but not really seeing anything. "It feels like always. There was a time when he wasn't here, but I have trouble remembering it."
Roedin swallowed and looked down at his own bowl of stew. "Why did you cover for me? I'm a stranger and you could have ended it if you had told him who was in here. What secrets are you protecting?"
She stared down at the table and shook her head.
"It wouldn't have mattered. He can't enter the Cabin anyway. That infuriates him; that there's a spell here he cannot break. So he waits for me to come out. Then he wants to know who I am, and why I'm here. My answer is always the same, but he never believes me."
She paused like she was reliving the memory.
"One time he accused me of being a powerful sorcerer in disguise. He said I wasn't aging so I must be a sapien. I used to imagine that I really was a sapien, a prime even, and my powers were locked away by an evil curse. And when I was free I would revisit all the pain he had put me through, tenfold."
No smile touched her face this time. This was not a light-hearted fantasy she read in her books.
"I'm not as strong as you think," she said, staring straight at Roedin. Then she looked away again. "I would have told him everything to get him to stop. But I have no answers. I don't know why I'm here, and I don't know who cursed this place. And I don't where he came from or what he's hoping to find here."
She looked back to Roedin then, daring him to tell her how he got here.
"So why don't you run? Leave this place and be rid of it?" he asked.
Avery bore into his eyes with a hundred years of fury burning in her face. "I can't."
Roedin waited.
"I've tried. I've tried everything. I know every inch of this forest. I've walked off in all directions. I've followed the creek so that I couldn't turn in circles. But no matter how long I walk, I always end up back here. I've tried sleeping out there, and when I wake I'm back at the Cabin. I've tried mapping it out, but if I write anything down it's gone almost immediately." A corner of her mouth lifted. "If I could write things down I could track the passage of time, which we've already learned is not acceptable."
That's why she had hacked her hair off, knowing it would grow back nicer than the tangled mess the sapien had left her with.
"I've climbed that ridge behind the Cabin and I can see that there's more out there, but I can never get there. So here I stay. The larder never empties, the woodpile is always full. The forest provides and the books renew. I had everything a girl could want and feared nothing. Then he appeared one day, and my sanctuary became a prison. A living hell. I'm not alive, but I can't die. I just 'am'."
Roedin's mouth was open in horror, his stew forgotten in his hands.
"You look sapien but your wings...I took a chance that you weren't like him. I hoped that faunids were better than sapiens," she said tersely, shifting in her seat and scooping up another spoonful before raising her eyes to him.
Roedin cleared his throat. "I don't know what to say."
Avery just nodded then pointed to his bowl. "You should eat."
He automatically took a bite, cleaning out the bowl before speaking again. "They—we—are not all like him."
She cast him a doubtful look.
"Some are, obviously, but the place where I live, Corinth, is a much more open society. The city, at least. There are faunids and sapiens alike working side-by-side."
"And humans?"
"Well, not so much."
"Shocking."
"Humans are an endangered species!" he defended. "There are very few left in the world. They live in isolated preserves where they can maintain their culture and religion. The sapien governments want to work with them but they reject all modernisation and anything to do with magic. It's like they want to remain primitive!"
Avery rolled her eyes, unable to restrain her contempt. "Why would they want that?"
Roedin took a deep breath to control his temper. "Well, I'm not a human so I can't say for sure—"
"Guess."
Roedin narrowed his eyes at her, taking in her new attitude and bitterness towards him. Avery continued chewing, watching him squirm under her gaze. But Roedin surprised her by raising his chin and meeting her glower head on.
"I know what the conditions at preserves are really like. And I know what people—we—say about it. And I know some of those things are true."
Avery kept eating, letting him try to defend the actions of the sapiens, the negligence that had pushed humans to the brink of extinction. Roedin looked away as if debating with himself how to proceed. When he spoke again there was great sadness in his voice.
"A hundred years ago I was helping a friend with his work. He was a firm believer in integration, working tirelessly to bring faunids and humans into sapien society. I had spent so many years being ostracized I thought he was a fool at first, wasting his time on something that would never happen. But he wouldn't give up. I think that made Niamh love him even more.
He would travel all over the territory and visit preserves or colonies, building schools and brokering trade deals. He set up scholarships for the lesser species to attend school in the city. His relentless commitment was inspiring, and I found myself sucked into his campaigns. I would use my skills to find out what was needed and how we could help."
Roedin paused for a moment, the words caught in his throat. "And I got him killed."
Avery stopped eating, engrossed in the story.
"We found a particularly remote village, I don't know that it was even officially a preserve. The humans there were intensely devout, worshipping the earth-gods with prayers and sacrifice, waiting for a king to return to earth and save them. They were malnourished and sickly and completely ignorant of the world around them. We were trying to convince the leaders to let us build a school. At first they seemed receptive, but something triggered them and they turned on us without warning. I wasn't there or else I could have saved him, slipped him away. My friend was a scholar, not a fighter like me. They burned him at the stake as an offering to the gods."
Avery hung off every word. Her imagination built the scene in her mind: a small village in a rotten swamp, houses leaning awkwardly as they sank into the ground. Or maybe crude huts were built out of stones, the cold wind howling through the cracks as snow drifted under the door. She imagined children running barefoot down hillsides to see the magical sapien visitors, daring each other to reach out and touch the dark one's wings. And she saw the elders: crotchety old men and superstitious women sitting around cursing the healthy, rich sapiens who had taken over the world. Who had turned the gods against them. Who had pushed them into history.
Roedin's sapien friend was trying to help and the humans burned him at the stake. But Roedin didn't look at Avery with hate or blame. He looked profoundly sad, like he would give anything to go back and save his friend.
Avery licked her lips. "What was his name?"
"Tao, Son of Richter. Mate of Niamh."
A new understanding formed between them.