“It was only torture . . .”
The wind trembled as it tiptoed along the ravaged rope of the man’s voice. What had happened to the sweet, melodious note that always soothed and rocked the wind to sleep? It hadn’t heard the man’s gentle, stream-in-a-meadow voice for . . . it didn’t know. A long time.
“It is torture, but it is not only torture,” the man’s father said, and the wind shivered at the cold leaking through the dark, watching stone place.
The wind hated this place. It didn’t visit often. It was skyless. Formless. It was always night, but there were never stars.
The man crouched, his arms wrapped around his knees, his head bent.
The stone had soaked up the acrid scent that was seeping from the man’s pores. The wind knew the smell. It was the same scent men had before their second battle. Throughout history, it had always been the same. The first battle, men smelled scared but naïve. By the third battle, men smelled numb. It was the second battle that was the most pungent and horrible. It smelled of the razor’s edge of terror men walked between innocence and numbness. They knew what was coming and couldn’t turn away. That terrible smell spiked from them in violent waves. The wind always blew it away, sending it to the sky with the smoke and the poisonous gases. It was better to flee into the arms of numbness than squat in this terror.
But the man, even after so many seasons of snowfall, unfurling springs, and hot-pavement summers, still refused to fall into numbness and tell his father what he wanted to know.
“Where is she, Philoneas? Where has Lucinda gone?”
The wind moaned and stroked a feathered touch over the man’s bearded cheek. Why wouldn’t he tell? If the wind knew, it would tell. But it had searched waters and cities, deserts and forests, and it hadn’t found a whisper of the fawn-eyed girl or the wolflike one.
“Wind. Leave.” The father’s voice was a whip, and the wind shrieked, flying back to a crack in the stone wall. “Is that why you don’t break? Does the wind comfort you?”
No. The wind didn’t comfort the man. Why would it? The man never asked for anything except for the wind to keep his secrets. It didn’t come to this place often. To get to it, the wind had to slip through tiny wormholes in the soil, trickle through cracks in the weathered schist, and finally, tag along with a cockroach as it wriggled into the vile stone place to skitter in the dark.
It was a Ward cell, and it was difficult even for the wind to come and go from a place like this.
It wedged itself into the tight crack and peered through the dark as the man’s father twisted an illusion around the man’s mind.
“Where is she? Where is she?”
The man’s breathing grew labored, like the bellowed heaving of an injured deer after it had sprinted from a ravenous wolf.
“Where is she?”
The wind crept out of the crack, crawling over the man’s anguished breath. It slipped up his ridged fingers and climbed his arm until it was resting on his shoulder. Quietly—so quietly that the man’s father wouldn’t hear—the wind began to whisper.
What was night without stars?
The wind whispered of a night when the man was gangly-legged like a new colt. He was sitting cross-legged in the cool grass beneath a full moon. The Smith, battle-hard and wolflike, but still a smooth-cheeked boy, was leaning against him. They were sitting back-to-back, propped up against each other, staring at the heavens. The scent of clover and summer grass rose around them, and the stars flickered like candlelight. The wind kneeled in the gentle pool of their clasped hands and wondered at the quiet.
“Phil?” It was the wolflike one, somehow in the stone place.
The man blinked at the wolflike one and smiled. “You’re not real.”
Behind him, the fawn-like girl sighed. “I’m sorry we didn’t come sooner.”
The wind sniffed blood. Carefully, it crawled over the cooling skin of the man’s father. The stone sucked up his blood and ate his warmth. The wind shrieked. The wolflike one had killed the man’s father?
The man convulsed, his back arching. He whimpered, and the wind moaned. The man was becoming the Ward.
“Wolf,” the fawn-like girl said.
The wolflike one crouched on the stone and pulled the man to him. He sent his fingers through the man’s hair and smoothed the wrinkles on his brow. He sat and rested the man’s head in his lap. He stroked the man’s face and tenderly wiped the sweat and dirt free.
“We’re back,” he whispered, his voice gentle and hard all at once.
The wind sifted through the scents clinging to the wolflike one and the fawn-like girl.
And there . . . surprisingly but not, was the scent of spring. It was the new-growth, sun-warmed-soil, seed-leaves-poking-their-heads-to-the-sun smell that all creatures had when they were creating a new life.
So that was why they’d returned.
