“Are you shivering?” Cleves says.
“Of course I am shivering – it is freezing and you are mad.”
“Come here.”
Cleves pulls Seymour back to the deeper water and aligns her naked body with her lover’s. They are neck-deep, and where their skin touches Cleves can feel nothing but warmth, and where their skin does not she can feel nothing at all. She tangles her hands in Seymour’s hair, kisses her.
“It should not be allowed, you know.”
“What shouldn’t be allowed?” Seymour says.
“You are beautiful when you smile, when you are sad, when you are angry, when you are joyful. No one should be beautiful all the time.”
“It is not all the time,” Seymour says. She pulls Cleves even closer, and whispers in her ear: “I am beautiful when I am in love.”
They kiss as though they have eternity, as though they have seconds. This is the impossibility of them: that the two of them can fit so perfectly even though it cannot be for ever.
She is so lost in the ecstasy of Seymour’s body against hers that it takes her some time to realise that Lelij is growling. He is facing away from them, no longer curled up on Seymour’s clothes, but front legs and head close to the ground, back legs up, tail whipping from side to side.
“What has he seen?” Seymour whispers.
Cleves swims, as quietly as she can, to the bank and peers over the edge. The light in the clearing almost makes it impossible to see anything beyond the treeline. Almost.
“Gherzst,” she swears under her breath.
Cleves points to the shape moving in the shadows beneath the branches. A shape with tusks, and abnormally long front legs.
A crone.
They could not be more vulnerable. She is a fool to think that Seymour’s smile could be more important than their safety. And now they are both naked, their clothes and belongings strewn on the bank. The only way to retrieve them is to get closer to the crone.
“Why has it not attacked us already?” Seymour whispers.
Cleves cannot answer that. She contemplates their options – they cannot leave without their clothes, or they will not survive the freezing nights in this part of the island. They will certainly not survive the climb into the Heahmores.
She must retrieve their belongings. She tries to think of a plan, one that will account for the crone’s natural behaviour, but her head is too full of thethumpof soldiers’ boots. In any case, the crone is notbehaving naturally, or it would have killed them both as soon as it spied them so defenceless in the stream.
That fact gives her hope. Perhaps the crone is not hungry. That has never stopped them before – they are renowned for killing all in their path even when sated – but maybe this one is different.
“Stay there. If it comes for me, swim upstream with Lelij,” she says.
“No—” Seymour starts, but Cleves does not have time to argue.
She slips out of the water and crawls towards the still-growling gargoyle. She tosses Seymour’s clothes behind her, hoping that they will land close enough to the stream for Seymour to grab them. Her own clothes are nearer the trees.
Her existence narrows to the crone and her, just the two of them staring at each other. She is reminded of another forest, another time, when she had risked Johana to please a false king. Then, there was a clear reason why the crone did not attack immediately. Now, there is none.Why?
As she reaches her clothes and gathers them up, she understands why. The crone’s head and front legs are clear to see, but not its hind body. That – the impossibility of it again, so many impossibilities today – isin the ground.
She inches closer. The crone struggles, thrusting its head forward, attempting to impale her on its tusks. But it cannot reach her. Her eyes did not deceive her: the crone’s body is embedded within a circle of fleshy mould. As she watches, a waft of decay unfurls from the monster, and as it does so, the mould sprouts. The crone’s body pulls, agonisingly, up from the ground. It takes Cleves a moment to understand further: the crone is not embedded in the ground. It is being grown from that mould.
She starts back, pulling on her clothes, cramming the parcel containing Howard’s supplies into her pocket. Seymour is out of the water and dressed, clutching Lelij to her chest.
“Run,” is all Cleves says.
They run for what seems like hours, always north, always seeking the end of the wood. Cleves would welcome even a soldier, for that would be a monstrosity she understood. But a beast that is not born, or hatched, but that sprouts from the ground? She has never in all her long studies of animals heard of such a creature.
They reach the base of the Heahmore mountains long before nightfall. The freshness of their swim is a childhood memory. They are scratched and bruised, and their feet are all blister. Better this pain,though, than waiting to allow the crone to finish its strange birth and catch up to them.
