Chapter 5

  Glem drug the cart as the girls walked beside him, both trying to process the horror they felt at the destruction of their lives. They traveled through the tall grass of the field that had kept them safe the night before and into the forest as the town slowly receded behind them.

  The smell of their past lives faded under the hard rain as it fell on the walk to the woods, ending as they entered. Alyra noticed the deep shade under the thick canopy that blotted out any warmth the newly emerging sun might have provided.

  Her worry about Glem increased with every cough, each louder and more jarring than the last. He hunched over and hacked and spat until his chest heaved and he almost vomited.

  Glem had begun to tax what little strength he had left. As they climbed out of the protected hollow that the village had rested in, it was clear he got weaker and weaker.

  The high sun had burned away the cloud cover entirely and now beat harshly down on them as they emerged from the forest. Glem’s eyes, unable to adjust quickly enough to the bright sun, caused Glem to stumble over a small root on the trail.

  His strength was utterly exhausted now, and he fell to his knees.

  “Let's stop here. We are far enough away. Grandpa can get some rest tonight, and we can keep going in the morning,” Alyra said.

  Rues glanced at her and back to the ground without responding. The loss of her family made her numb inside, the grief still too recent to fully process left her silent.

  “No,” Glem said. He staggered back to his feet as if he had to be strong, had to make a show of how everything was possible.

  “We need to keep moving and get farther away from the town.” Before they could get moving again, however, another brutal coughing fit took him to his knees and upset the cart.

  This cough was as ruthless and unforgiving an adversary as any they might encounter.

  Rues reacted to something for the first time since they left the village.

  She handed her hammer to Alyra and grabbed the cart’s handles, and with strength driven by anger, pulled it upright. Rues reached out with one hand to Alyra and took back her hammer, only to place it in easy reach near the front of the cart.

  “Can you get Glem up?” she asked Alyra.

  At Alyra’s nod, Rues grabbed both handles of the cart and began to drag it to the side of the trail, back into the edge of the forest as if she were holding onto the splayed legs of a dead man and trying to conceal her crime. Alyra grabbed Glem by the arm and pulled him to his feet. She noticed as she draped his arm across her shoulders that his shirt still smelled of stale beer. Alyra half supported him as they followed Rues off to the side of the trail.

  Glem now saw fit to complain about the support even as Alyra kept him from falling again. Their short walk from the path to the cart was all he could manage, his reserves spent.

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  “We camp here tonight,” Rues said, her voice filled with grief, but her tone left no room for argument. Rues propped the small cart’s handles on a fallen tree next to Glem as Alyra lowered him to the ground and leaned him up against the log. Alyra wrapped his cloak around him with the hope that the log and the cart together would provide some small shelter from the wind.

  Glem, almost before he was settled in his cloak, fell rapidly asleep and had begun to snore. His harsh coughing, however, wasn’t done yet.

  It continued well into his sleep and worried Alyra.

  “We have to keep him warm. Do you think it is even safe to start a fire?” Alyra asked Rues.

  “Keep it small. I can't lose anymore,” Rues replied softly. “And besides, we don’t need him breathing in the smoke either.”

  “What are we going to do? Where are we going to go?” Alyra sobbed quietly as the shadows deepened.

  Glem woke for a moment and heard Alyra as she cried. He shifted, drawing her attention to him. Half asleep, he dug into his cloak and came out with her doll.

  “Be, ok, girl. Just need to rest a bit.” He coughed and grimaced as he fell back asleep.

  “Stay with him. I am going to gather kindling for a fire,” Rues said as she walked deeper into the wood.

  “You can't leave us here!” cried Alyra.

  “Cut up some of the cheese. We will start a fire and eat when I get back,” Rues said as she ignored her friend’s complaint.

  ***

  Coughing and wheezing woke Alyra with a start, to the sound of Glem struggling to breathe in the wet morning air. The fire had burned down to cinders during the night, ignored and untended like a crying baby whose mother didn’t come. It no longer provided enough heat to ease Glem’s ailing lungs, and his chest heaved painfully and raucously.

  Alyra checked the meager handful of twigs that remained to be burned and noticed that the dawn, with its pinks and violets, had begun over the woods to the east end of the field.

  She turned over to wake Rues, and jumped to her feet when she suddenly realized that Rues was not in the camp. She began to search for her friend, rushing around the tiny camp several times before she saw her in the distance as she skirted the edge of the field.

  Three large waterskins were slung over her shoulder, looking heavy and cumbersome. Rues must have walked to the stream at the far side of the meadow, she realized.

  The willows there stood all in a row, a giveaway of its location.

  “How is he doing?” Rues asked Alyra as she got closer. “Do you think we can move him today?”

  “I don't know. Grandpa is still coughing a lot, and I think he is running a fever now too.” Alyra replied.

  “Let's try and load him into the cart. I saw a better place for a camp on the other side of the clearing near the stream,” Rues said. “Once we get there, we can get a fire going. I stripped some bark from the new growth on the willows. We can use it to make tea to try and bring down his fever. Plus, it will warm his chest and steam his throat.” Rues thought the common folk remedy that she had learned from her mother might be able to help Glem.

  Glem mumbled away incoherently the whole time as the three of them worked to get him off the ground and into the cart.

  Rues and Alyra grabbed the handles on the wagon and struggled to turn it to the edge of the forest. They worked their way painfully around the clearing, sticking to the outside edge. What had been just a short walk for Rues now took hours as they drug Glem in the cart.

  The site Rues had found on the other edge of the clearing was set back from the stream only a short distance. A group of giant stones, which stuck up from the floor on the edge of the forest, provided a break in the middle that would block the wind on three sides.

  The woods behind them and the stream in front made it clear that this site got used regularly. The soot up the narrow area of the boulders where they met told them the story of previous campers, while a circle of rocks in the corner under the soot was clearly there to contain a fire.

  Next to it, a small cache of wood was tucked under the lip of an overhanging stone, and the ground between the rocks had been meticulously cleared of small rocks sometime in the past to make the space more comfortable.