Both because I want to give the kid a head start, and because he’s riled up the plants, I decide to feed my garden before I leave. Earlier this morning, I shot a twelve-striped weasel, and I retrieve the corpse from where it’s hanging against the back of the cabin. I’ve just hauled its weight off my shoulders, when Nerith appears in the rows of sacral. As always, the not-wolf doesn’t arrive so much as wanders in, bit by insubstantial bit, until he’s gathered in one place, ready to be noticed. My vision re-adjusts and I nod a greeting to the hulking shadow that manages to fit, impossibly, between the plants.

“Long time no see.”

Nerith flickers. His ears lengthen, his body wavers into and out of solidity. Only his grinning, skull of a face remains intact. Hunting, he breathes. His voice reminds me of the sound of a child scribbling furiously with a charcoal stick.

“ Just decided to stop in and say hello, today of all days?”

Nerith looks at me for several extended seconds, his empty eye sockets fixed on my face. I stare back but it’s the same as all the times before - his vision extends past me into someplace I can’t follow. It becomes too disquieting to hold his gaze for long, and I kick the weasel deeper into the plants and turn back to the cabin. Behind me the sacral whisper as their roots tear the corpse to shreds.

It’s dark inside but I find everything I need in short order. I really just came for her guns and I sit on my cot and reload them both. As I’m working, I see that Nerith has wandered inside and is watching me chamber the bullets. He never really looks distinct, not even outdoors, but he looks even less solid here in the gloom. He considers me as I finish with Nail and then fades away without comment as I stand up and sling the long rifle over my back. I holster Tooth at my side, collect the pile of tack on the crude table in a corner, and let myself back out into the rain.

As I walk around to the stable on the far side of the cabin, I realize that I’d been right. That last roll of twitch was absolute shit. I’m already coming down and it’s a messy crash. By the time I’ve started saddling my horse, I’m sweating beneath my clothes and I have to pause and exhale hard before I can finish cinching up the girth. My trembling fingers make it hard work. The gray shies as I start to bridle him and I have to stop and lean up against the wall of the stall, waiting for the worst of the shaking to pass.

Burnt, Nerith says. I raise my eyes to see the not-wolf regarding me from outside the stall. I didn’t even hear him arrive.

“One way of putting it,” I tell him. It’s actually pretty apt but I’m not going to let him know.

I take a deep breath and wipe my watering eyes with the back of a hand. My gray sidles up and noses me, whuffing against my shoulder, and I pat his muzzle as I ride the last of the tremors down.

The cracks are still there, Nerith observes. Still there and still deep.

I bridle the gray and work through the buckles. When I turn from my horse, I find the not-wolf sitting across from me, inside the stall now. He’s almost one with the shadows except for the white of his skull. That skull grins at me.

Almost a year without a visit from him and then he does this shit? “Really, you fuck?”

Nerith shifts so that he gives the impression of rising. A warning.

“Oh, is that what this is meant to be?”

Uneven ground beneath you. His skull face remains unchanged but, somehow, it looks less like it’s smiling than it just did. Uneven, listing ground. Fractured. Step too hard and you’ll go through, yes?

I’m silent for a long time.

Slippery footing, tenuous hold, he presses and I don’t know if he means my current situation or my mental state but either way it’s accurate to reply, “Been that way for a while, Nerith.”

Go with caution, yes? Go with care?

He looks at me and this time I meet and hold his gaze. “And if I don’t want to?” I finally ask him.

Nerith’s body-zig zags into and out of existence. Then it breaks. It all breaks.

“Let it. It’s only a matter of time. Might as well see how the Peace holds up these days.”

And then I have to pause to breathe through another round of tremors. When I raise my head again I see that Nerith has disappeared. I’m alone in the small stable except for my patient horse and the weight of Pandion’s guns pulling at back and hip. I take a moment to recover but the not-wolf doesn’t reappear and I know better than to wait for him.

I tug the oilskin hood over my head and lead the gray out into the rain.    

The horse isn’t overjoyed to be outside in the rain. He fidgets as I swing myself up into the saddle, snorting and flicking his tail, until I gather the reins and urge him forward. Late morning and it’s dark enough to draw a few nocturnal beetles out of their nests in the old pines. They buzz past me, whirring ponderously through the downpour.

I let the gray stretch his legs up and down the first incline. At the bottom of the hill I put my heels into his flanks and we open into a canter for the first mile. By the second, the gray wants his head so I give it to him and by the fourth we’re soaked and mud-splattered.

The road dips and weaves and the horse is finally blowing as we top one final rise. Before us, our goat path veers and joins the Chain, and we follow it, surging onto the largest road in the North. The monstrous straightaway links every Pale mining post together, and even though Pandion had kept it serviceable, it’s Divinters who devotes the labor to its maintenance and security. Even from here I can see the dim glow of a new guard outpost about a mile south. Behind it, somewhere in that direction, is Carnassial, an unapologetic heap of stone and timber, sitting at one end of the Chain like the world’s heaviest anchor. But Barrows is in the opposite direction, north by northwest, so that’s the way we go.

For several miles the road is dark and empty. I walk the gray for a bit but the horse is in good shape and I’m able to run him again before too long. Eventually the smell of some unseen bog rises through the drizzle and the trees start receding, the forest flinching back as if in pain, until I ride past a scraggly half-wood that disintegrates into marshland. The stench of the swamp reminds me of the carcass of a pig I’d once discovered as a boy exploring Carnassial’s alleys. And I know that if I look with the intent of seeing them, I’ll find tall shapes far out in the marsh, deeper than any human would go, moving heron-like through the mist and the mud. But I don’t look. I keep my gaze fixed between the gray’s ears and I ease Tooth a little in its holster.

Another mile later, and a dark shape appears on the side of the road in front of me. I have the flintlock half-drawn and am pulling my horse in before I realize that the misshapen form is actually two separate figures - a badly limping pony and a boy leading her along by the reins. The gray’s already slowed so I stop next to them. By the way she’s walking, the pony’s lame and the kid is just as soaked and wretched looking as he was earlier. Maybe even more so

I take my hand from Tooth. “How much farther is it?” I ask him.

“Barrows? Another mile on the Chain, maybe,” the boy replies. “Clear the swamp and then the road splits. Left at the fork and you’ll know you’re going the right way because the path gets real bad.”

I nod. Flick my eyes out over the bog to either side of us. “Unwise to go slowly down this stretch of the Chain.”

“I can’t leave Snow,” the kid protests. “She’s not even mine. I borrowed her from Settsi’s brother when Captain Fel asked for a rider.”  

Something doesn’t sit right with me. I look at him, down there in the mud of the road and wonder what’s rubbing me wrong about this scene. But before I can figure it out, somewhere out in the marsh something inhuman screams.  

The horses hear it; their heads go up and the gray sidesteps uneasily. The kid’s refusing to let go of the pony’s bridle even as it balks and tries to wrench itself away from him, eyes rolling and ringed with white. And if he won’t leave the crippled beast after what we just heard then I won’t waste my breath trying to convince him. The gray responds immediately when I release the tension in the reins and it doesn’t take much more than that to coax a gallop out of him.

This isn’t a part of the Chain where we can linger.

Even my horse is smart enough to know that.

(7/20/16)