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Two years later, and the boy returns to the wood.
Two years later and the boy still lives. He still eats and sleeps and dreams as he always had. Two years, and everything is as it was, but his scrapes and bruises heal unnaturally fast, vanishing as though they were never there. Two years, and he is exactly as he was. He has not aged a day.
There is something unnatural about him now, the boy knows. He is frozen as he was that day when he found the wolf. Everything has a price.
(His mother looks worried, and his father just a little afraid, and they look at him from the corners of their eyes and speak together in anxious whispers that he cannot catch.
Roger has grown tall and gangly, and Duncan saw him kiss Deborah Campbell once when they didn’t know he was there.)
He doesn’t know what he hopes to find in the wood, but he knows that he cannot go on not knowing.
He finds the place where he left his rope. He picks up the knife he left there, half buried in leaves. It’s a little rusted, but has weathered the years surprisingly well. Well-preserved, but not unnaturally so.
He follows the path he thinks that he and Roger ran from there. He cannot be sure that he has found the place where the wolf caught him, but he can be sure that he is close.
There are no signs left. No no blood, no disturbance in the leaves. It has been two years, but he had half expected this place to have been as frozen as he was. There is nothing special about this bit of ground. It could be any other patch of trees in any other wood.
The boy sits beneath a tree and waits for something to happen.
He waits a very long time.
There are no answers here.
The sun begins to set and it grows cold. The boy curls up to sleep. It does not occur to him to fear for danger, alone and exposed in a wood far from home. He came to seek the magic here, he does not think of more mundane danger. He does not think the wood would allow any lesser danger to touch him.
In the morning the boy thinks of going home, but he is not one to give up, and he knows that things cannot go on as they have been.
They say that there is a witch in this wood. If anyone can give him answers, she might.
The boy searches the wood for days. In the end, he comes to a place that he knows he has been before. A cottage shimmers into existence right before his eyes, and he feels a strange buzzing in his head.
He walks up and knocks on the door.
The door opens on its own. Inside, the cottage is a snug sort of place, just slightly to the left of ordinary. A woman sits near the fire. She might be younger than he expected, except that he did not expect her to be any age at all. She is beautiful. Almost as beautiful as Deborah Campbell.
“Are you the Witch of Donam Woods?” He asks her, as he steps across the threshold.
“Some have called me that,” She says, “My name is Cassandra. What is yours?”
“Duncan,” He gives it to her, “Duncan MacLeod.”