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“Oh, do you hear that?” asks Caleb.
Nott listens but mostly she just hears more of the same vague noises of the forest. The distant calls of birds, the rustling leaves of the massive trees, and the buzzing of the flies that have been swarming them since yesterday morning when they left the fight with the juvenile Ankheg wearing the creature’s guts.
“No.”
“Come, this way, this way.” Caleb grabs her hand, which means he is especially excited about whatever he’s noticed, and weaves them in a path through the dense trees.
The Cyrengreen Forest is so much bigger than the woods around Felderwin. And it’s full of all kinds of howling wolves and mysterious crunching noises in the night that make Nott feel particularly not brave but it’s proven to be so far free of goblins (besides her) in the three weeks they’ve spent weaving in and out between the forest and the surrounding farm towns too small to make it on the map, and that’s pretty good in her book.
All the anxieties of becoming completely lost in the woods, of losing their lives and losing any remote chance of returning home, that had twisted her stomach to knots when they’d fled here in the first place (her fault, she’d gotten the itch in a town on the hill called Deastok and brought the Crownsguard down on them both) have been at least a little bit soothed by Caleb’s ability to always walk them right back out of the forest when he needs to.
In addition to being very handsome and incredibly clever and a skilled wizard, he always knows which way is North and can perfectly recall the exact path they took even days later. No getting lost with this guy around.
She tries to focus on this as a comfort, and not let the thought lead her back to those old memories that kept her up at night. Running in what she hoped was the wrong direction, Yeza running in what she hoped was the right direction.
It’s over.
They’re safe now. She knows this. They lived, even if she did not.
Nott stumbles briefly over a root jutting out from the forest floor and Caleb tightens his grip on her hand to help keep her upright. “Thanks.”
“Ja.”
She focuses on the feeling of his large (well, relatively) human hand, calloused and bandaged, wrapped around her stubby little goblin claws. A new time, a new place. That day is in the past.
It works okay and then the treeline dies away and Caleb has led them to a river.
A stream?
Eh, she doesn’t know the difference. She doesn’t want to.
It’s moving slowly in the mid-autumn afternoon. The water is clear and clean and sparkling. There are fish visible within, swimming lazily.
The sight of it fills Nott with a deep terror that sinks into her gut and makes her heartbeat quicken.
She pulls her hand from Caleb’s to rifle through her pack. Please don’t let her flask be empty, please don’t let her flask be empty.
“I usually do not mind being so filthy,” says Caleb. He sets his own pack down on a large rock and begins to remove his coat. “But the inside of our bug friend from yesterday is a bit more smelly than I like and I think its blood is acidic.”
It’s true. One of her bolts had connected with something particularly juicy and splattered them both thoroughly. The blood, or whatever goop it was that splashed out of the monster before Caleb set it on fire, had burned at Nott’s skin where it contacted. She at least was small and quick enough to avoid the bulk of it, though it coated the back of her cloak and dried hard in her hair.
Caleb is such a smart boy but he’s not as quick on his feet and he’d ended up pretty squarely in the accidental viscera splash zone.
“I can watch your things for you,” Nott offers.
Caleb pauses in removing his boot to frown in her general direction, his eyes not quite on her but not not on her. “Frumpkin can do that for both of us. I promise I will not look, for modesty’s sake.”
“Hmm.” Nott debates… not explaining, actually, because then he might reject her, want nothing to do with her, think she’s only following him around just for how he can help her once he’s strong enough and confident enough. But she thinks about admitting a little bit of it.
Telling Caleb how terrified the river makes her feel is just giving him a new way to hurt her, if he decides to. Caleb seems nice, so far. He doesn’t mind her ugly face or her voice and he hasn’t even said anything about her habits except to warn her for caution when she’s helpless against the itch. She certainly wouldn’t have made it out of that jail cell without him.
But other people have seemed nice before.
And as much as she likes Caleb, as clever and handsome as he is and as much as she intends to take care of him for all she’s got, because she knows he can do great things so long as he has someone to watch out for him, she hasn’t survived as this these past years by trusting people. And he doesn’t need any distractions while he’s still working on attaining the success she knows he’s destined for.
She’s stuck to the shadows and the woods and she’s kept her eyes open and her weapons close. And that’s just what Caleb does too.
Caleb reaches out, holding one of his boots in his other hand, and pulls her hood back and he wrinkles his nose at the smell but doesn’t seem otherwise put off by her unveiled face, which is nice. “I think we are going to be attracting more than just insects if we do not wash this shit out of our hair and clothes.”
“All right,” says Nott. “All right.” She takes a swig from her flask and, against all odds, it is not empty. The whiskey burns her throat and softens the edges of her fear. “You know what’s best, Caleb.”
He frowns. “Not always. But sometimes. This time, I think.”
Nott takes two more gulps before the whiskey runs out and then she stands there with her head tipped back and the flask raised to the sky waiting for the stray drips to fall.
Caleb finishes undressing while she drinks and splashes out into the river. When Nott takes a peek, nothing too long, just a look to reassure herself that he isn’t about to be swept away or pulled under, he’d waded out to nearly the middle and the water hardly reaches his hips.
Nott sets her empty flask down on the rock, under Frumpkin’s watch, and pulls her cloak off. The rest of her clothing is muddy and grass-stained, but free of any gross bug insides or blood.
Nott eases her way out onto a rock protruding from the river, still safe and dry but closer than is comfortable. She sits down at the edge, near enough that if she tips forward she’ll fall in, and when Caleb ducks fully underwater and Nott flinches hard enough to hurt. She squeezes her eyes shut and tries to focus on anything else while she waits for him to surface.
Even as skinny as Caleb is under the coat, he’s big enough and the river is slow enough that he’s not going to be pulled under. She’s not about to lose her first shot at getting her life back the same way she’d lost her life in the first place.
He’ll be fine. He’ll be fine. He’ll be fine. He’ll be fine.
Caleb is fine.
Her ridiculous goblin ears hear him break the surface just fine and when she looks, Caleb is in exactly the same spot, just now wet all the way to the top of his head. He’s scrubbing and scratching at his scalp and without all the caked-in dirt, his hair and stubble have turned almost coppery.
It is uncomfortable to see him like this, emerging from the water like almost another person.
After another moment of trying to psych herself up to get into the water, it occurs to her that she can focus on cleaning her cloak first and she dunks that into the running river.
The dried clumps break off under her claws and the heavier parts fall away under the scrubbing. Although the stiffness lessens now that it’s wet, the water on its own is not washing away the stain left behind.
“If we have a fire tonight, Mr. Caleb, I can get the potash from the ashes and then we can clean our clothes a lot better.”
“Hm?” says Caleb. “I can make a fire tonight. We should clean ourselves in the meantime, though.”
“Right. Right.”
Setting the cloak aside, Nott takes a deep breath to steady herself then reaches her hands back into the river and splashes the water onto her face. It’s not fun but it is much better than actually getting in the water.
She washes her face slowly, stretched out on her belly and scooping out the water with her hands rather than letting her face end up beneath the waves again.
Unbraiding her hair proves to be tricky, from the way the bug guts have dried into it. Even untied, it is knotted and glued together and Caleb finishes washing himself before she even finishes untangling the mess on top of her head.
“You are not a strong swimmer?” Caleb asks, now standing a whole lot closer without her noticing his approach. He’d been the one to bring up modesty, but she’s getting the sense that that was mostly for her sake because he’s not exactly being all that modest at the moment.
Maybe she shouldn’t look too closely, but she’s a woman with needs that haven’t been met in two years and Caleb is a very handsome man who is right now completely nude aside from his necklace. He’s pale and too skinny, underfed enough that she can see some ribs and the sharp protrusion of his hip bones. And clearly a natural redhead.
“Oh. Well.” The question is vague enough to not admit much even if she answers it fully. But it’s still giving away one more way to hurt her. Or it might lead to further questions, like why her heart is hammering so hard in her chest right now that she’s almost sure he can hear it too.
If she’d said it when they met, she’d figured he’d think she was crazy.
She’s not so sure about that now, having gotten to know him. He’s a little crazy himself, she thinks. But that’s all right.
And now they’ve been together for over a month. They’ve been sleeping in the same bedroll and eating from the same bowl. If she tells him who she really is now…
When she tilts her head to look up at more than just his midsection, she sees his arms unbandaged for the first time. The bandages have never been bloody but they’ve been a permanent fixture on Caleb since they met over a month ago and she’d assumed they hid more recent wounds.
The scars are thin and old, healed years ago, most likely, but there are so many of them. They’re faint enough for her to not have seen when he was out in the middle of the river but inescapable at such a short distance. Just lines and lines of pale, raised scars all the way up his forearms.
Someone’s hurt Caleb too.
Well, it makes sense. He seems like someone who has been hurt, the way he’s so skittish and uneasy around people. It makes her ache a little to realize this.
“The water is not so fast, but it is deep here. Above your head, I think,” says Caleb. “Maybe you can lean back and I can help you wash your hair, if you are worried about getting in all the way?”
“Oh!” Nott’s cheeks warm. Partly because she is supposed to be taking care of Caleb, not the other way around. And also partly because that will put her face very close to his dick. “I mean… you don’t need to do that, Caleb.”
“Ja, but it will be good to get this out of your hair before we have to shave it off.”
Ugh. Not a nice image, even compared to her current image. “I guess I’d look even uglier then, huh?”
“You know I do not think you are ugly now.”
Such a sweet boy.
“Besides, we will be even. I will help clean your hair and you will help clean our clothes.”
He lights the fire and she picks the locks. She hunts the rabbit and he cooks their meal. He distracts the shopkeeper and she swipes the potions.
“All right.” With measured breaths, she rolls over onto her back slowly and tilts her chin up until the top of her head is in the water.
Caleb’s hand reaches out and touches her head and he does not pull her in.
“All right,” she says. “We’ll help each other.”