The Will and the Wilds(31)

He raises an eyebrow, and I feel as though he’s almost congratulating me. I leave, taking my basket with me. Back to the house. Slow, so as not to tire. As for blood, I will set snares, but they can take days to catch prey, and I dare not wait days. My soul aches at the thought of it. I wish not to waste money in the market for something I can hunt myself, but I’m poor with a bow and arrow, and if I ask my father to help me, he’ll wonder where the meat has gone. In the end, I’d rather be penniless and alive than dead and soulless.

As I step over a brook and navigate an unseen path becoming increasingly familiar to me, I ponder on the exchange with Maekallus. What if he was human once, Grandmother? I think, wishing she were here to answer my questions. He’s of human make, isn’t he?

The thoughts turn on me. And what does it matter? What would I think of him if he was human?

My chest hurts. From the walk. I slow my pace even more and clutch the Telling Stone.

When I arrive at my home too soon, I realize I missed a piece of my journey—my mind blanked again. Yet one thought burns strong.

I must find that gobler.





CHAPTER 14

The only thing that can break the binding spell made by a vuldor-tusk knife is the knife itself, the death of its wielder, or the blood of a mystium.





There is a hierarchy of animals in the wildwood. Insects and crawling things are at the bottom, followed by mice and birds. Then there are larger animals, like harts, and more vicious ones, such as boars. Wildcats and wolves dominate unclaimed land, but more often than not forfeit it to humans, who ultimately surrender to mystings.

I do not understand the magic that loops my world and the monster realm together, and every question I have seems to beget ten more. I will not use human blood to awaken the summoning circle, even at the peril of my own life, but do the unseen mystics prefer fowl over fawn, or hart over hare? Will the circle heed my desire to find a specific mysting, or will it merely let out whatever is closest, as it seems to have done with Maekallus? Something even more dangerous . . .

I do my best given the circumstances. In the evening, when the sun begins to paint the sky, I trek again through the wildwood with my basket in hand. I have to stop once to rest, for the unplucked pheasant I carry with me is heavy, and I am weary. I stop on a hunting trail carved with the intent to avoid mystings and listen to the distant whispers of the stone. When I arrive at the glade, Maekallus is waiting for me—I see him standing between the trees at the very end of his leash, his yellow eyes brighter than the rest of the forest, his arms folded across his bare chest. I pretend not to see the black spot growing like a bruise on the side of his jaw, or the one that darkens his ear, or the dozen others that were not there this morning. His magnificent horn is pure, as is his right hand. I know the latter, for when I arrive, he reaches for my basket and takes the load from my arms, silently leading the way back into the glade. I pause for a moment, surprised. A simple action, yes, but Maekallus has never done anything to aid me. I wonder if he’s grown so desperate that even kindness is beginning to eat away at him.

He’s already drawn the summoning circle. The circle I drew earlier has been stamped out, and the new one etches the northernmost part of the clearing. Maekallus sets my basket down several strides away from it and picks up the pheasant by its neck. He examines it, then glances to me.

“What? We can always try again with a larger animal.”

He smirks and lifts his tail to slice open the fowl, only to notice—remember?—that it’s lost its sharp edge. His frown confirms my own observation. I lift my silver dagger from the basket and offer it to him, hilt first. He takes it and beheads the pheasant.

I accept the bloodied knife back. “Do you think it will work?”

“No.” At least he’s honest. “But I hope it does.”

I cock my head slightly to the left. His words pull on me. Maybe because they don’t feel like the words of a mysting. “Do you hope often?”

The question causes him to hesitate in the grisly work of painting the summoning circle with the pheasant’s lifeblood. He looks at me like I’ve said something profound, and it’s a gaze that makes my skin ripple with gooseflesh, though the summer evening is warm.

He straightens, the point of his horn slicing through a low-hanging leaf on a nearby oak. “I don’t . . . think I have.”

And it strikes me suddenly, like a snowstorm in the late spring, and I don’t know why I didn’t consider it before.

What happens to a mysting if he receives a soul?

Maekallus has only a partial soul. My soul. I can feel it inside him as though I’m peering into a faded mirror, where I can only make out shapes and nothing more substantial. But it lives inside him. He hasn’t eaten it. He did promise, though it remains to be seen whether I can trust his word. Could it be the fragments of my soul that cause him to hope?

Our eyes are locked for too long. He turns away first, focusing on the task at hand. I hug myself and soothe the chill bumps beneath my long sleeves. Turning to my basket, I retrieve my notes, open to a fresh page, and write, The Question of Souls, across the top of it. I needn’t worry about Maekallus looking over my shoulder, since he has already confessed his inability to read mortal script.

I write, What does one call a mysting with a soul? Do they exist?

What would one call a human with only part of a soul? And how large is each portion? How many times can my own soul be divided before there is nothing left?