Chapter 116

Malachi

Her stick was still on the floor beside my bed.

I had seen it the first night, when Teague brought me back up the mountain and half carried me through the door, and I hadn’t picked it up. I had stepped over it on my way to the bed and lain down and slept for most of two days, and when I woke, it was still there, and I stepped over it again.

Two weeks now. I stepped over it every morning.

Teague had looked at it once, on the third day, and then at me, and then gone out to split wood without saying anything. He hadn’t touched it either.

***

The cabin had been quiet before her.

I had chosen it for that. A clearing high on the mountain where the road gave out, a stream behind it, a long view of nothing in every direction. In the years before Cressida found me, I had lived in a dozen places like it, and the quiet had been the only thing I asked of any of them.

It was a different kind of quiet now. It had a shape. It was the s