One Girl, A Pack Of Beasts novel · Chapter 12 of 32

Chapter 12: Seven Days

Tobiah's mother gave us her sled.

She just pushed the rope into my hands and kissed her son on the forehead.

We pulled Kell to the Hollow, my leg screaming every step.

The healer caught us at the edge of the pines.

She'd followed us out of the palisade, with her bad knees and her stick. She pressed a pouch of dried root into my hand.

"Boil it. Keep him warm. Feed him cores, one every morning, crushed." She looked at Kell's gray face. "And talk to him. The cold ones drift. Give him something to come back for."

For the first two days, Kell didn't wake.

I kept the fire high.

I crushed cores into his mouth and rubbed his throat until he swallowed.

At night I lay under the furs against his back and held him, and counted his heartbeats.

Sometimes there were four in a minute.

Sometimes there were three.

I talked to him the whole time.

I told him about the lynx.

About my father's terrible singing.

About my knife bouncing off the river wyrm's head at the ford, and him laughing from the bank.

"You owe me for that," I told him. "You laughed for an hour."

On the third morning, his eyes opened.

"It was two hours," he whispered.

I put my face down on his chest and didn't lift it for a long time.

By the fifth day he could sit up.

By the sixth he could walk to the cave mouth and back, complaining.

Tobiah flew between the Hollow and Saltmarket, bringing bread and gossip and terrible jokes.

On the sixth night, by the fire, I asked him.

"Why did they really throw you out?"

He was quiet for a long time.

"When I was twelve," he said, "a girl wandered off from the winter fair. Seven years old. Blue ribbons."

My stomach went cold.

"She'd fallen into a snowbank above the old woodpile. The frost vipers den there in winter. I heard her crying. I pulled her out, and one of them got me on the wrist on the way."

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