of that farmer near Kloan; beneath the farmer’s heavy belt that still felt so strange on her.
How she hated to wear the clothes he’d stolen for her!
It was not uncommon, Liv knew, for persons in her unenviable situation to form attachments to their captors. She had for an instant felt that it was disloyal to plot against him. She had no intention of allowing that to go any further, either. She’d seen him murder a man—do not lose sight of that.
Creedmoor bounded up the sandy slope. He was happy. The simple purpose of walking west was proving quite enough to entertain him. Fresh air and exercise was, as the good Doctor and the General would no doubt agree, the best of all medicines. More important, it was days since his masters had spoken in his mind; it was days since he’d had to do anything degrading or dreadful. In fact, one could say he was engaged in a noble cause, shepherding the poor old man and the young lady to safety from the Line. . . . It amused him to imagine so, anyway.
When he stood on a high rock and cupped his ear, the Line’s blunderers were just barely audible in the distance. Their heavy stamping boots were a remote echo. He had days of lead on them.
He found a freshwater stream and filled his water-skins.
He’d saved a handful of cigarettes from the long rain in a tin case. Now was as good a time as any to indulge himself. He sat against the rock and smoked and listened to the stream.
The rocks around the stream were marked with swirls of crimson paint. Flakes and facets of cobalt and red glittered in the sun that fell through the trees.
The stream’s water pooled between the rocks. Motion in the water caught his eye, and he knelt to look more closely.
From the water’s depths hands reached up. The pale white hands of drowned men. Thin almost fleshless fingers waving nervelessly like weeds on the tide. He could count three, four, ten: but counting was beside the point. A single broken nail violated the water’s tense surface; a shock, an obscenity, as if his reflection had winked at him in his morning shaving mirror. The dead flesh beneath the nails all red and bloody. Thin arms receding down like a tangle of white roots into the water—the water deep and dark as memory. Creedmoor recalled drowned men. Murdered men. Some women, too—mostly men in his career, but inevitably a few women, murder being no kind of exact science. All waving feebly beneath the water. Some of them beckoning. The whistling of the birds in the trees around him, the trill of frogs in the reeds had gone silent.
This was Folk trickery. It was meant to threaten or communicate or warn or amuse or something; who knew with the Folk? It did not seem friendly, if Creedmoor was any judge.
It was all frankly unpleasant, but he’d seen worse. He’d seen uncannier things near every day in the whispering dark behind his closed eyes when Marmion spoke to him. If this was the worst the valley and the far farthest West could offer, he’d consider himself lucky. He stared into the water until the unsettling images went away; until, in the blink of an eye, they turned back into lilies and white water froth. The birds and the frogs regained their voices, like bar pianists starting up again once the shooting’s over.
The General stood and tried to wander off. Liv held him back; he struggled feebly, but she easily overpowered him. She sat him down on the dry earth of the riverbed, and she sat beside him.
The absurdity of it! Liv nearly laughed; she felt as though she should laugh. Creedmoor seemed to think she could mend the man in a matter of days, while they fled helter-skelter into the wilderness. Creedmoor had her confused perhaps, with a fairy-tale witch or fairy godmother. She did laugh, and she turned to the General and asked him, “Sir, do you have any stories about a fairy godmother? Anything to pass the time.”
The General said nothing. He was shivering. She held him close to her. His breath and his heartbeat fluttered. She stroked his bony shoulder. She felt a great and ridiculous affection for him. For a moment, she felt close to tears.
Slowly she became aware that the General’s eyes were wide and fixed forward, down the valley ahead of them.
Some twenty feet westward, the valley floor