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"Five years later," he goes on, "I'm out that same stretch of country. Different business, mind, chasing a rumor about a rare fungus grows near the old mines - and I see something at the tree line that isn't a fox and isn't a deer. Took me the better part of an hour, before I understood what I was looking at." He sets the jar down for good this time. "A girl. Feral as anything born in those woods. Running with wolves, near as I could tell. A proper wild pack, and her right in the middle of it like she belonged there." "And you thought - " "I didn't think anything, at first. I just watched. Wouldn't have dared try to take her, not with that pack around, not till the Mama wolf let me close enough on my own account. Which she did, eventually. Strangest thing I've ever seen, an animal deciding to hand a child over. I've never had a good answer for why." He looks up at me, and there's nothing in his face but an old man's fondness for a story he's told a hundred times, no idea at all what it's doing to the woman standing on the other side of his counter. "Never could prove she was the same child from that cabin. No way to prove a thing like that, five years and a mile of forest between them. But I've always believed it. Same stretch of country. About the right age, if you count from when I found the cot. I like to think she walked out of one kind of family and into another, and that whatever happened to the first one, at least the story didn't end where it could have." I was thirteen years old the summer my trainer sent me out to that cabin. My first contract: a man squatting where he shouldn't, and the woman who'd taken up with him - a clean kill, in and out, the way I'd been drilled to do it. I remember being happy with myself on the ride back. Remember thinking I'd done it right. Nobody told me there might be a cot in the corner. Nobody told me to expect a child small enough to have already crawled out the back door and into the dark. And I didn't search, why would I? There was no reason, far as I knew, to search. Dax is still talking - something now about the price of dried poppy this season - and I let the words wash over me without hearing a single one of them, nodding in whatever places seem to want nodding. I am, I discover, extremely good at this. 15 years of practice at looking unaffected pays for itself in exactly this kind of moment. "You alright?" he asks eventually, glancing up. "You've gone quiet." "Fine," I say. "Just thinking about the season's stock. You said poppy's short?" He takes the bait without a flicker of suspicion, and I let him carry the conversation the rest of the way, filing away every word about his ward the way I file everything - except this time I'm adding red ink to an entry I'd thought long closed, and I'm only now discovering which entry it belongs to. I pay for my order and thank him. I leave with my usual courtesy and the usual extra coin left on the counter for good measure, and I do not, under any circumstances, let my hands shake until I am well past the edge of town. | |