Episode 36 · The Hunted

Three winters later, his own name was on the governor’s papers.

He had refused the wrong contract or ruined the wrong plan. The governor had masters too. Finding out which one wanted him dead would have to wait until he escaped.

He knew only that now he was hunted by men who did not make beginners’ mistakes. They did not walk the routes they took every day. They did not sleep in the same place twice. They did not run toward screams.

They knew the things he knew.

The governor called Dace’s men Hunters. Phenom had laughed at the name: starving people with an axe and a woman who tied knots, now in dyed cloaks with winter pay.

He was not laughing now.

For six weeks he crossed marshes, slept in hollow trees and ate whatever he could find. He heard his pursuers as he would have wanted to be heard: a step stopping when he stopped, a crow rising where no one should have been.

In the seventh week he reached the split oak on the northern slope.

He and Dace had built his first cache there, the winter after the raw flour. Phenom still replaced its supplies every two years. He reached beneath the roots and drew out a waterskin and a spare knife.

The oak stood at the upper edge of a small clearing. A short slope ran from its roots to a low stone beneath the outer branches. A narrow path skirted the back of the trunk and came out above the stone.

A snare guarded that path. He had first set it nine years earlier and reset the wire whenever he replenished the cache. He glanced toward it, then lifted the waterskin.

He drank. The water was cold and tasted of old leather.

Only after the third swallow did he taste the bitterness.

He froze with the waterskin at his mouth. Someone had hidden the bitterness beneath the taste of leather. Venom knew it from a grain cellar more than twenty years ago.

Black root.

Half a fingernail. His tongue went numb.

He threw away the skin and started down the short slope toward the clearing before he could decide where to go. His hands went numb halfway to the low stone. A whole fingernail. He looked at the knife. His fingers were still curled around the hilt, but he could not feel them touching it.

He had never tasted more than that.

Five black cloaks spread across the clearing at dusk. Two waited below. Three came up toward him: one straight on, one to his side, one circling toward the oak. They let him stagger to the low stone.

Phenom stopped beside it, with the oak uphill behind him. He could not cross the clearing without passing them. He needed one of them within reach while he could still move.

The thought was clear. His knee kept bending when he tried to straighten it.

He let himself sink onto that knee and lowered his head. The first Hunter came too close, too confident in the poison, and bent over him.

Phenom waited until the face was above his knife hand. Then he drove the blade beneath the man’s chin. He could not feel the hilt or the resistance. He watched his hand and drove from the shoulder until the man went still. The body sagged against him. He let go of the hilt, and the man fell into the snow in front of the stone.

The second came around the body from the side. Phenom tried to turn. His shoulders moved; his feet did not move with them. The blade opened his ribs before he could get out of its way.

He caught the armed wrist, hauled it across his shoulder, and dropped onto his side beside the stone. The Hunter pitched forward over him. Phenom trapped the arm against his chest and caught the back of the man’s neck with his free hand. He could not feel that grip either. He pressed his forearm against the neck and drove the head into the stone’s edge. Once. Again. The neck gave, and the body went limp.

The man’s wrist slid off his chest. Blood from Phenom’s ribs darkened the snow beneath him. He looked at it and tried to draw his knees under his body.

The third did not step over the dead men. He circled uphill, behind the oak, along the sensible path, the one anyone with sense would have taken. Phenom saw him turn behind the trunk. He could not get his feet beneath him fast enough to follow.

The Hunter stepped onto the narrow path. The old snare caught him by the throat. He jerked back, and the loop tightened. His hands went to his neck.

Phenom tried to rise. His legs stopped holding him.

He fell backward into the snow, eyes on the oak branches. Beyond them, the sky was clear. Somewhere behind the trunk, someone struggled in the snare, then stopped. Footsteps crossed the clearing. The two remaining men stopped at a distance.

Then one of them came closer.

Dace came closer, white-bearded now, heavy in his black cloak. A cord circled his left wrist: few knots, evenly spaced, tied by someone else.

He crouched beside him.

— You taught us, he said.

Phenom tried to answer. His tongue would not obey. Hollis taught you.

Dace seemed to understand anyway.

— Hollis taught us how to live, he said. You taught us the rest.

He drew his knife. Phenom looked at the blade without feeling anything.

Dace took his left wrist, lifted it, and cut the cord.

The root of knots came away with difficulty, stuck to the skin after so many years, leaving behind a smooth white stripe, like a scar that had never been a wound.

Dace weighed it in his palm. Then he tied it around his own wrist, over his clean cord, and tightened the knot with his teeth.

— These, you carry, he said. That’s what she said.

He stood. Phenom heard him walk away, then his low voice telling the other man not to come closer until the body was cold.

Cold climbed through him like water through cloth. It did not hurt. Black root left no room for pain. It left room only for cold and for thoughts, which came clear and slow, one after another.

For a moment he saw the man beneath the oak from above: left wrist bare, eyes open to the sky. He knew that face, long and narrow, dark stubble against the snow.

He knew that man.

He dropped back into him.

The snow beneath the back of his head was no longer cold.

The oak branches darkened against a sky that was darkening too, slowly, until he could no longer tell them apart. He no longer had hands. He no longer had feet. He still had his mouth, barely, and a little air.

— Not this winter, he whispered.

Winter did not listen.

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