Chapter 53: No Punishment
Chapter 53: No Punishment
She heard the first one four hundred metres before I saw it.
We were following a hedge line east of the rail bridge when she stopped walking, and I only noticed because the sound of her behind me stopped too. When I turned, her head was tilted and both white-furred ears had swivelled toward something I couldn’t hear. After a moment she pointed — not at anything I could see, just at a direction — and then immediately dropped her hand as though pointing had been presumptuous.
"There’s something moving," she said. "Ahead. Low, and it’s dragging."
"How far?"
She hesitated. That was the tell, and I saw it a dozen more times that morning: the pause where she checked what answer I wanted before giving me the one she had.
"Four hundred paces. Maybe less. It’s in the ditch, and there are birds three fields over that went up a while ago and haven’t come down."
She was right about all of it.
Her technique was genuinely good. I want to be clear about that, because everything else I have to say about that morning is about fear. She drew the same way every time, she used the wind, she never once took a shot through a gap that would have closed, and she could put an arrow into a moving Digger’s throat at forty metres with a bow that was visibly older than she was.
What she couldn’t do was act without looking at me first.
Every single time. Nock, draw, and then a glance across — half a second, less, a flick of the eyes for permission — and half a second is enough to lose an animal. She lost three that way before noon and apologised for all of them.
The apologies were worse than the misses.
"Sorry. Sorry, I had it, I should have—"
"It’s fine."
"It won’t happen again."
It’ll happen four more times before lunch, I thought, and that’s fine too, and I’ve got no way to tell you that which doesn’t sound like a threat with the edges filed off.
So I stopped saying it’s fine, because after the second time it started sounding like a man being patient at somebody, and patience is a thing that runs out and everyone knows it. I went the other way instead. I kept my instructions short and practical and I treated every miss as weather.
"Left of the wall. Take it if you get it."
"Behind us — the ditch again."
"Good. Reload."
Around the middle of the morning she stopped apologising for the misses and started apologising only for the loud ones, which I counted as progress.
The wounded one was my fault.
It was a Ridgeback, and something had already opened its flank badly enough that it had gone down in a hollow and stayed there, and it had been down long enough that the flies had found it. I got close enough to see the wound and made a decision I’d have taken back if I could.
"It’s finished," I said. "Come round the left, I want to check the—"
It came up off the ground like a spring releasing.
Not at me. At her, because she was the one moving and she was five metres closer, and I had two-thirds of a second and I used it wrong.
"EIRA — MOVE!"
I shouted it. I shouted it at full volume with everything in me. Her ears flattened so hard they almost disappeared into her hair, every muscle in her body locked, and she stood exactly where she was with her bow half raised and her eyes going flat and empty.
Oh no.
Feline Grace does not make me fast. It makes my feet land where I put them, and that morning it was enough — I covered five metres of broken ground I hadn’t looked at, got an arm around her waist, and threw both of us sideways into the grass while something the size of a wolfhound went through the space she’d been standing in.
I let go of her the instant we stopped rolling. Pushed myself off her and away, and got up, and turned, and put four rounds into the Ridgeback’s chest at a range where even I couldn’t miss.
The noise stopped. The morning came back.
Behind me, her bow hit the ground.
She was on her knees when I turned around, both white ears pinned low. She had both hands flat on the grass in front of her, and she was talking.
"I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry — I heard you, I heard you, I don’t know why I didn’t — please — I’ll do better, please don’t—"
She wasn’t looking at me. Her head was down and her shoulders were up and she was braced, physically braced, in a way that told me everything about the last several years of her life and nothing I wanted to know.
I put the rifle down on the grass. Then I took three steps backwards, which put a good five metres between us and left her the whole open field on her side, and I crouched so that I wasn’t standing over anything.
"Eira."
"—I’ll do whatever you—"
"You froze," I said. "That’s all that happened. I shouted, and you froze. It’s a mistake. Mistakes aren’t crimes and nobody’s punishing you for it."
She kept going.
I let her. That was the hardest part of that entire day, and I want it on the record, because everything in me wanted to fix it — to tell her to stand up, to calm down, to breathe, to trust me, and every one of those is an instruction, and she has never in her life been given an instruction she was allowed to ignore. If I’d told her to calm down she’d have calmed down, and it would have been obedience, and it would have proved her right about me.
So I crouched five metres away in a field with a dead Ridgeback behind me and said nothing at all, for what felt like a very long time.
Eventually she stopped on her own.
We ate an hour later, sitting on the embankment where I’d allocated my points three days earlier. I split the food in half, put her share on a flat stone within her reach, and then turned and looked at the tree line for the entire time it took her to eat it. I didn’t watch a single bite. I didn’t say anything about it afterwards.
That was the whole trick, as far as I could work out. Not generosity. Just refusing to be present as an audience while she took something.
The last two hours were different in small ways I only noticed later.
She said "movement, left" without looking at me first.
She took a shot at a digger on her own judgement, missed it clean, and I said "it’s gone into the drain, we’ll go round" in exactly the voice I’d have used about the weather, and she stared at me for a second and then picked up her bow and came.
And when I found the second Ridgeback’s tracks she crouched next to them — beside me, not behind — and told me the animal had been favouring its right forefoot, which I had not seen.
[Manifestation Remaining: 00:04:11]
We were walking back along the hedge when I told her.
"Four minutes," I said. "You’ll be standing exactly where you were, doing exactly what you were doing."
"Yes." A pause. "Thank you for the food."
She’s thanking me for a piece of dried meat she killed half of herself.
I don’t know what came over me. I have thought about it since and I still don’t have a defensible reason. I reached over and put my hand on her head between the bases of her long white ears — briefly, the way you might touch a friend or a person you have decided is not going to be hurt — and I gave it one small pat.
"Take care of yourself, Eira."
She went completely rigid. Both ears sprang upright, then tilted uncertainly toward my hand. Slowly, her hands came up and gripped the front of her own leathers. She looked at the ground, and I could see the side of her face going red from the jaw upward beneath the fine white fur at her temples.
[Relationship parameters updated.]
Desire: 12 → 50
Trust: 6 → 19
Resonance: 1% → 3%
She said something. It was too quiet for me to catch and I didn’t ask her to repeat it.
Then she was gone, back to a moment that had never noticed her leaving.
[Manifestation duration complete.]
[Eira returned to origin dimension.]
[Return Point: Exact origin place and instant.]
[Origin-Time Elapsed: 00:00:00.]
[Injuries, healing, poison, exhaustion, spent energy, and technique backlash retained.]
[Signature Status: Fading.]
[Repeat Selection Chance: 1% after an eligible D-grade roll.]
[Natural charge recovery initiated: 72:00:00.]
I stood in a hedge line with a full pack and thought about the fact that I had rescued that woman from an animal that would have killed her, and the rescue had moved her a great deal less than a hand on her head had.
Somebody’s been feeding her nothing for a very long time, I thought, if that’s what a full meal looks like.