Page 8 of Property of Prophet

Prophet stirs. I glance over at him. His eyes stay closed, but the way he shivers and flings out an arm tells me his dreams aren’t kind.

I move to the bed, slide a pillow beneath his head, and brush the hair back from his face. Studying him, I’d guess he’s in his late forties. Laugh lines crease the corners of his eyes, evidence of a life lived, maybe even a happy one.

Prophet groans, and I retreat to my own bed. I kick off my boots but don’t bother changing.

Instead, I pull the blankets up, close my eyes, and listen to the wind howl as I try to find sleep.

Chapter Three

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Prophet

The sound reaches me before the light does. A flat, rhythmic crack, iron biting wood, again and again, patient as a pulse.

I open my eyes to a ceiling of rough timber, and I don’t know it. I don’t know the room, the smell of woodsmoke, or the weight of the blankets holding me to a narrow bed. I lie still and let the not-knowing settle over me. Panic wastes strength, and some old instinct tells me I have little to spare.

The crack comes again, and I turn my head toward it.

A small, square window sits in the far wall, its edges furred with ice. Through it, in the thin gray light this place calls morning, I find her.

She is chopping wood.

I have no name for what moves in me when I see her. I reach for one out of habit, the way a hand reaches for a railing in the dark, and find nothing there. So, I do the only thing left to me. I watch.

She works without waste. That is the first thing I understand about her. Every motion folds into the next—the bend, the lift, the fall of the axe, and the small, economical twist as she sets the next round on the block. Nothing is for show. Nothing is spent that doesn’t need to be. Her hair is the color of rust and late autumn, pulled back and half escaped, loose strands catching the weak light. She is built solid, broad through the shoulders, a body made to mean something out here. A body that has had to.

I study her the way something very old sees a thing it has never seen before and suspects it will never stop looking at.

I know her the way I do not know myself. That should be impossible. Two days, a window, and a woman I have no memory of meeting, yet something in me settles when I look at her. Not a memory exactly. Something older. Something that knows her even if I don’t.

I lift a hand to my face, and it is heavier than it should be.

That is the wrong word, but somehow heavy is the only one I have. The cold has worked into the joints, so that the fingers ache when I curl them. I study the hand as if it belongs to someone else. A broad palm with faint pink lines across the knuckles, the ghosts of burns that are no longer there. Dark hair on the back of it. And at the edge of my sight, where it falls against my temple, my hair shows silver.

Silver. I do not remember earning it.

I have the sense—dim and going dimmer the harder I press—that I was once something smoother than this. Something certain. Something that did not ache, weigh, or have to be carried. Now I am all weight, texture, and the small specific misery of cold fingers. And underneath that, I am something else. Something less. It’s as though I have been poured out of a larger vessel into a smaller one, and most of me was left behind in the pouring.

More than I should be.

Less than I was.

I try the rest of myself, carefully, the way you would test ice. I flex my feet under the blankets. I roll my shoulders and feel the deep ache of bruising that is already old, already fading faster than bruising should. There is a body here—it is mine, and it works, after a fashion, and every part of it reports the same strange news. That it is real, heavy, cold, and I am not used to any of those things. I have the distinct sense of a creature unaccustomed to having edges, discovering them all at once, and finding that each one hurts.

I do not know how I know this. I only know that it is true, the way the ache in my hands is true.

The door opens, and the cold comes in with her.

So does the dog.

She does not look at me first. She looks at the stove, crosses to it, feeds it from the armful of split wood she has carried in, and only when the flames have taken hold does she turn. Watching her, I understand this is an order she will not break. Heat, then the patient. The cabin first, then me. She has a sequence, and she moves through it the way water moves downhill because there is no other way for it to go.

She crouches beside the bed. Her eyes go to my hands before they go to my face. “Make a fist,” she says. Her voice is low and rough, as though it gets little use.

I make a fist. The pink lines pull tight and let go.

She watches the skin, not me, and something in the set of her mouth eases by a fraction. “Other one.”