Scarecrow

Risa left her cup on the wrong shelf.

I knew it was the wrong shelf because she’d told me twice which one was hers. Then she’d put it on mine while talking to Luna about the western path and gone out without noticing.

I was still deciding whether to move it when she came back for her jacket.

“Don’t look so pleased.”

“I haven’t said anything.”

“You’re going to.”

I pointed at the cup.

She looked at it.

Then at me.

“I’m visiting your shelf.”

“Of course.”

She kissed me before I could think of an answer good enough to deserve it.

It was Day 468. Sera had finished breakfast after her treatment, and the morning light lay across the room we’d made together.

Risa took her jacket.

“Back before supper.”

I believed her.

So did she.

She went with Corr and Ilse.

A short survey beyond the western cache, following the part of Ossa’s old route that lay close enough to reach and return from in a day. Not the long journey north. Not a new search into ground we knew nothing about.

There had been rain upstream during the night. Dot’s wing had shown a swollen channel and a place where the runoff crossed the path.

They would look, mark what had changed, and come back.

I stayed to work with Sera on keeping the treatment compound stable outside the body.

We made no great discovery.

The sample still changed too quickly to become a jar of medicine she could put on a shelf and use without me.

She watched me mark the time.

“Another thing that doesn’t work.”

“Another thing we know doesn’t.”

“That’s what I said, with a better expression.”

I smiled.

She leaned against my shoulder while I finished the note.

Then Dot called my name.

Corr’s voice came through the relay in pieces.

Path gone.

Risa below.

Awake. Answering.

I stood so quickly that my leg struck the table.

Sera caught the little dish before it fell.

Luna was at the screen when I reached it.

“Say again,” she told Corr.

He did.

The runoff had cut beneath the edge after Dot’s picture was taken. Risa had gone across first to check the footing beyond it. The ground had held until she turned back.

Then part of the path had folded away.

She’d slid into a lower hollow with the loose stone. Corr and Ilse were on the upper side. They could hear her but couldn’t reach her without crossing the same failing edge.

No fall into the river.

No loss of consciousness.

She said her ankle hurt and she was angry.

I held on to that last part.

Dot put the wing’s picture on the screen.

A strip of open ground below the trees. Broken stone. The wet curve of the stream farther out.

Risa sat beside an exposed root with one leg stretched in front of her.

She lifted a hand toward the wing.

I couldn’t see beneath her clothes through its camera. Couldn’t tell what the ankle looked like inside. Couldn’t reach through the little bright picture and lift her out.

But I could see her face.

She looked furious.

I had never been so glad of it.

Luna set the route beside the picture.

“Open approach from the south. Land below the trees. Don’t go under the broken shelf.”

I nodded.

“The rain line is moving in. You have time to get there. Coming back may have to wait.”

I looked at her.

She knew what I was thinking.

“Sera’s had today’s treatment. Toby’s with her. You take what you need to stay sheltered if it closes around you.”

“And tomorrow—”

“We plan to be back before morning. If that changes, tell us while you can. You don’t fly blind to keep a promise about the clock.”

Sera had followed me to the table.

She stood close enough to take my hand.

“Bring her home,” she said.

I looked at her face.

“Both of you,” she added.

I took the light hull.

Less to hold in the air. Enough room for Risa to sit with her leg supported and for the things Toby insisted I carry.

Water. Food. Clean cloth. Splint. A groundsheet and a lamp.

Luna checked the load while I checked the hull.

Then she put her hand at the back of my neck and kissed me.

It was a quick kiss, because there was somebody waiting.

Not a small one.

“Listen when she tells you how she is,” she said.

“I will.”

“Even if you don’t like the answer.”

I nodded.

Sera touched my cheek as I passed her.

Then I lifted the hull and went.

The rain was visible before I reached the stream.

A dark curtain moving across the farther trees. Not on top of me yet, but coming with a speed that made the open ground look smaller.

I kept below the worst of the wind and above the things I couldn’t afford to hit.

Risa saw me before I landed.

She had moved from the root to a broad piece of fallen bark and made herself a seat. Her pack lay beside her. Mud covered one trouser leg to the knee.

She watched the hull settle.

Then looked at my face.

“Don’t.”

I hadn’t said anything.

Apparently my face had.

I got out badly on my leg and went to her.

She reached up.

I knelt, took her face in both hands, and kissed her with more relief than grace.

She held the front of my jacket until I stopped shaking.

Then leaned back.

“Hello to you too.”

“Hello.”

“I’m all right.”

“Your ankle—”

“Hurts. It’s not the rest of me.”

I made myself breathe.

“May I look?”

“Yes.”

She shifted so I could see without twisting it again.

No broken bone that I could find. Swelling. Strained tissue. Painful enough without me deciding that because it could have been worse, it wasn’t bad.

I told her what I saw.

She nodded.

“Can I stand on it?”

“Not if we can avoid it.”

“Good. I was looking for a respectable excuse to remain furious with that path.”

We sent the report before the rain reached us.

Risa answering. Injury checked. No sign of a break. Returning if the approach stayed visible.

Corr and Ilse were already taking the safe upper route home. They’d left a marker above the broken ground and weren’t going to try another descent because I had arrived below.

Luna acknowledged.

Sera’s voice followed hers.

“Risa?”

Risa took the little receiver.

“I’m here.”

“Good. Tell him if he’s fussing.”

“I’ve begun a list.”

Sera laughed. I could hear the relief in it.

Then Luna told us the rain was closing across the return ridge.

“Stay below the low shelf if you can anchor there. The wing shows solid ground above the flood mark. Confirm when you’re under cover.”

I looked up.

The far side of the stream had disappeared behind gray.

We didn’t try to beat it.

There was a shallow rise beside the hollow, well above the fresh debris the stream had left. A low shoulder of rock gave shelter from one direction. Open ground on the other side gave me room to move the hull without passing it under the trees.

Risa helped choose it from where she sat.

I brought the hull close enough to let her transfer without standing.

Then moved us to the rise.

The first hard drops struck before I’d finished.

I set ordinary supports where I could see the ground beneath them. Turned the hull on its side and secured it so it made a roof against the rock, with the open edge facing away from the wind.

Not hovering.

Resting on things that would hold it when I stopped looking.

Risa tested the nearest fastening while I fixed the groundsheet.

Then we crawled beneath our boat.

The last clear message went through just before the noise swallowed the receiver.

Sheltered. Both safe. Waiting.

Luna repeated it back.

Told us the next time she’d listen.

Then the words broke into crackle.

I set the receiver where it would stay dry and sat beside Risa.

Rain struck the hull so loudly that for a moment we couldn’t hear each other.

She leaned close to my ear.

“This is a terrible walk.”

I laughed.

It came out unevenly.

She put her arms around me, and I stopped pretending I was merely wet.

For a while, we said nothing.

Her head rested against my shoulder. I could feel her breathing beneath the noise of the rain.

The ankle lay supported on the folded blanket. We’d loosened the wet boot carefully and wrapped what needed wrapping. The rest could wait until we were somewhere with a bed and a medic who hadn’t just flown through the beginning of a storm.

I kept looking at the open edge of our shelter.

Risa followed my eyes.

“Are we all right here?”

“Yes.”

“Are you checking something new?”

I thought about it.

“No.”

“Then look at me for a minute.”

I did.

Her hair had come loose on one side. There was a smear of mud near her ear.

She smiled.

“There you are.”

I told her what hearing Corr’s report had been like.

Not all of it at once. A little at a time, while the water ran off the hull and the light beyond the edge grew dimmer.

The first words. The space before awake. The way my mind had tried to put a body into that space before anybody finished speaking.

Risa listened without trying to make it smaller.

When I finished, she took my hand.

“I was frightened when it went.”

“You sounded angry.”

“I was that too.”

She looked toward the stream, hidden now by rain.

“For a moment I couldn’t stop sliding. I could see the root, and I kept thinking I’d miss it. Such a stupid little thing to have everything depend on.”

I tightened my hand around hers.

“I didn’t miss,” she said.

“I know.”

“I want to remember that part too.”

So we sat with that part for a while.

Later, she asked whether I’d be unbearable tomorrow.

“About the ankle?”

“About me going anywhere ever again.”

I looked at our joined hands.

“I might want to be.”

“Thank you for saying want.”

“I don’t get to keep you in the room because the path broke.”

“No.”

“I know.”

She leaned against me again.

“You can ask me to be careful. You can tell me you were frightened. I want you to tell me.”

“And then?”

“Then we work out what the path needs. And I heal. And I go somewhere again.”

I didn’t like every part of that sentence.

I loved the person saying it.

“I’ll try not to confuse those things.”

She kissed the corner of my mouth.

“That will do for tonight.”

We ate some of the food Toby had packed.

It had survived better than my sleeve.

Risa took the larger piece, looked at it, and broke part off for me without making an announcement about sacrifice.

I accepted it without making one either.

The rain softened for a few minutes, then returned harder.

We tried the receiver at the arranged time.

Nothing we could understand.

I checked the ground beyond our shelter. The water was running past us downhill. The supports hadn’t shifted.

When I came back beneath the hull, Risa had made space against her uninjured side.

I sat there.

“I used to think I’d hate this,” she said.

“Being under a boat in a storm?”

“Being seen looking this bad.”

I turned toward her.

She touched the mud near her ear and made a face.

“At home, there was always somebody who’d have an opinion about what it meant.”

“What did mud mean?”

“Carelessness. Bad judgment. An opportunity to mention somebody who’d behaved better.”

She said it lightly.

I heard the part that wasn’t light.

I wiped the mud away with the clean corner of a cloth.

Risa watched my face while I did it.

“You’re not going to tell me I look beautiful covered in it?”

“You’d know I was trying too hard.”

“Yes.”

“I think you’re beautiful. I think the mud is mud.”

Her mouth moved before the smile quite reached it.

“That was rather good.”

“I’ll try not to repeat it until it stops working.”

She laughed, then leaned forward and kissed me.

There was no hurry in it now.

The rain had made the world small enough that neither of us could find a useful task to hide inside.

She cupped my face, and I put a hand against her back, and for a little while the hull above us was only a roof.

When we drew apart, she stayed close.

“I want things with you,” she said.

“I want things with you too.”

“Ordinary things. I keep being surprised by how much.”

I waited.

“Knowing which cup you used. Being annoyed about your boots. Finding my book where you put it instead of where I left it.”

“You might become very annoyed.”

“I know. I’m being brave.”

I smiled.

She looked down at my hand against her jacket.

“And I want to know I can ask for a night with you without having to fall down a hillside first.”

The smile left my face, not because I disliked the thought.

Because I liked it enough to have no quick answer.

She noticed.

“You can say what you’re thinking.”

“I’d like that.”

Her fingers moved over my wrist.

“Good.”

We talked about the room.

Not as though Sera and Luna were far away from what happened in it. They were in almost every sentence.

The window seat Risa had chosen. Sera’s table. The way Luna had stood with her hand on the closed door.

I told Risa how much that moment had affected me.

She nodded.

“She needs somewhere she can stop.”

“So do you.”

“So do you, Lucas.”

I looked down.

She put a finger beneath my chin.

“There are four people in this arrangement. Stop counting yourself as the furniture.”

I laughed despite the tightness in my throat.

“I don’t know how to do all of it yet.”

“Neither do we.”

“That should be reassuring.”

“It is. It means we can tell each other when we’ve got something wrong instead of waiting for the one who knows the rules to announce them.”

I kissed her hand.

She let me keep it afterward.

At some point, she asked what Mother would think of the room.

“The window,” I said. “She’d go straight to the window.”

“Would she like it?”

“I think so.”

“And the rest?”

I looked at her.

Risa watched me steadily, although her fingers had begun moving against the seam of her jacket.

“I don’t know what she’d say first,” I admitted. “I haven’t told her about us. I haven’t had a way to tell her properly.”

“I know.”

“But I want to. All three of your names. What it’s like when we’re together.”

Her hand became still.

“I don’t want her to think I’m hiding you.”

Risa leaned her head against my shoulder again.

“Neither do I.”

I thought about Mother’s table. Genny listening too carefully. Garnet asking something so direct that everyone else would suddenly need their tea.

I told Risa that part.

She laughed softly.

“Your sisters are going to be difficult.”

“Extremely.”

“I’d like to spend time with them.”

“They’d like that.”

I couldn’t promise when. I didn’t try.

But for a little while, beneath the rain, we talked about a visit instead of a rescue. I liked how easily she belonged in the picture when I let myself imagine it.

The receiver found Luna’s voice late in the night.

Thin. Broken at the edges.

Enough.

I answered before she could repeat the call.

“Both safe. Ground holding. Rain still heavy. Risa’s resting.”

“I’m awake,” Risa said into the space beside my mouth.

We heard Luna breathe out.

Then Sera asked whether we were cold.

“Damp,” I said. “Sheltered. We have the blanket.”

“Use it,” she said.

“We are.”

A pause.

“Properly, Lucas.”

Risa looked at the part I’d left over my bad leg while keeping the larger part around her.

She pulled it across my shoulder.

“Handled,” she told them.

Luna said the storm’s trailing edge had reached the western lookout. Dot would send a wing as soon as the air was clear enough.

We agreed to wait for visibility, not merely for less noise.

Before the signal weakened again, Sera said, “We love you.”

Both of us answered.

Risa slept after that.

Her head rested against my chest. I held her carefully enough not to disturb the ankle and leaned against the folded pack.

I slept too, in pieces.

Woke to softer rain.

Woke to water dripping from the lip of the hull.

Woke to Risa saying my name because I’d begun to slide sideways and was about to make my neck somebody else’s problem.

The world beyond the shelter gradually became shapes again.

Trees. Stone. The pale line of the stream farther below.

I could see the open approach.

Not all of it yet.

I waited.

For once, waiting felt like work I was doing rather than work I was failing to do.

Dot’s wing found us in the gray before dawn.

It came above the stream, paused, and turned toward the clear ground beyond our shelter.

The receiver was better now.

Luna gave us the route home. The ridge was visible. The wind had dropped below the level that would make the light hull a problem.

I checked Risa’s ankle again before we moved.

Still swollen. No new change that frightened me.

She let me help her into the hull without arguing that she could probably hop if I gave her enough time.

I appreciated that.

She saw me appreciating it.

“Don’t get used to carrying me everywhere.”

“I wasn’t going to say anything.”

“You had the expression.”

I smiled.

Then I put the supports aside where they couldn’t roll into the path, secured what we’d brought, and lifted us into the clearing morning.

Sera and Luna were waiting at the landing place.

Toby had brought a chair. Wren stood beside him with a blanket that hadn’t spent a night under a boat.

I set the hull down.

Luna reached us first.

She touched Risa’s shoulder, looked at her face, then turned to me and put both arms around me so firmly that I forgot to get out properly.

“Hello,” I said into her hair.

She laughed once, shakily.

“Don’t.”

Apparently it was a word people needed around me.

Sera waited until Luna stepped back.

Then she kissed me, held my face between her hands, and looked at me as though she was checking something no notebook could record.

“Home,” she said.

“Yes.”

She turned to Risa.

Risa reached for her hand.

They stayed like that while Toby knelt to look at the ankle.

We did Sera’s treatment after I’d washed and eaten.

At the usual morning time, with Toby checking beside me and the light good enough to see what I needed.

I was tired.

Not so tired that I couldn’t do the work carefully.

Sera watched me finish, then took the notebook from my hand and closed it.

“Bed.”

“Risa—”

“Has been examined, wrapped, fed, and told not to walk on it. She’s waiting for you to stop finding reasons not to sleep.”

I looked toward the new room.

Luna was in the doorway with a rolled mattress under one arm.

“Oh.”

Sera smiled.

“Yes. Oh.”

It wasn’t a decision about every night afterward.

Luna said that as we laid the mattresses on the floor.

It was a place for four tired people to rest without having to leave one another again as soon as everyone was safe.

Risa wanted her ankle where nobody would knock it. Sera wanted the window open a little. Luna wanted the receiver outside with Dot, who had already agreed to call if we were needed.

I wanted to lie down beside them.

So I said that.

Risa smiled at me.

“Good. You’re learning.”

We arranged the blankets badly, then better.

Luna kissed me before settling on one side. Sera lay close enough to rest her hand against my chest. Risa found my other hand across the narrow space between the mattresses and kept it.

There was nothing impressive about the arrangement.

One pillow was folded clothing. Somebody would complain about the floor when they woke. The curtains still let a stripe of morning across our feet.

I thought it was the most beautiful room I’d ever seen.

Day 468 into Day 469. Under the hull.

Western path failed after the runoff changed. Risa caught a root. Ankle hurt. No break found. Corr and Ilse returned by the upper route.

Reached her before the storm closed. Landed below the trees. Hull anchored as shelter above the flood mark. Camp knew we were safe.

Talked while the rain came down.

She wants ordinary things. So do I. A night together needn’t require a hillside to fall apart.

Heard Luna and Sera late in the night. Waited for visibility. Home before the morning’s work.

Sera’s treatment done. Risa resting. Toby and Wren have the watch near the shelters.

Four mattresses would not have fitted. We managed with what did.

Four people did fit.

We slept.