Chapter 9: Big Tree

Crow's Nest

Black Sparrow took a long drag from her pipe, her shoulders beginning to relax. She had so few good memories. Bear telling her stories. When Papa Asan and the neighbors would disappear on hunting trips, returning with freshly killed meat. The weekly communal fish fry in the town square. White Doe braiding her long reddish-brown hair.

Viola knelt on the floor, helping De'afi retwist hir braids. They smelled of rose hip soap and lavender-scented hair oil. They all kept a vigorous bathing, skincare, and hair routine best they could while traveling.

Their mother long since gone to sleep, Sadie Crane used White Doe's knife to whittle a small fox. They endeavored to give it to her on the morrow, thinking such a gesture would soften their questions. They desired to know their sordid family history.

Two hours went by, during which the fox gained itself an upright tail and larger than life inquisitive ears. They'd been trying, without really knowing why, to capture their familiar spirit in mimicry.

Black Sparrow laid aside her pipe, long since gone out. Her eyebrows ambled to the top of her forehead.

"Get some sleep, for gods' sake," she ordered. "You look like a dead walking corpse."

"Instead of an alive walking corpse?" Viola said.

"Still a smartass," Black Sparrow laughed. "Good. I like smartasses."

Viola straightened herself off the floor. Her legs wobbled and she caught herself against one of the tables.

"I wanna see the goats," she said. "You coming with?"

Flanked by her two closest friends, she ventured outside.

The goat house owned a fence-blocked sector in the rear. Two additional blocks, each sequestered by fencing, contained a chicken coop and a large shelter for the burgeoning rabbit colony.

"Goats don't like, eat people, do they?" De'afi asked.

"Get it hungry enough, I think anything eats people," Sadie Crane reasoned.

The lantern in one hand, Sadie Crane ambled for the treeline. The search party, the ones who'd gone after Big Tree, should have been back hours ago. Was he hiding somewhere in the caves? If he'd killed himself, they would have found his body by now. Did he run to another town? Catch a ride on a delivery carriage, leaving Runner behind? Not even staying to plead his case?

"Space cadet?" Viola called.

Sadie Crane backed away, holding up the lantern just to make sure. Putting as much of their body as they could between the woods and Viola, a hand on the knife tied to their belt.

"What do you see?" De'afi asked.

Ze was already pulling an arrow from hir quiver, fast-loading into the bow ze kept on hir.

Sadie Crane and Viola were trained to hunt. But De'afi was trained to fight. Ze used to do mock boar hunts with the able-bodied children in hir village. They subdued the fake boar, played by a large village elder in costume and makeup, on their fifth attempt.

Many people emerged from the treeline and ze tensed, pointing hir loaded bow at what might very well be their end. But it was just the search party, returning at last.

The returning hunters gathered inside the house. Many of them knelt to have their wounds taken care of, others laid down quilts to sleep on. Still others sat and ate the food Black Sparrow offered.

Spirits were passed around, first to disinfect wounds and then to drink. The water in the washtub turned an alarming shade of murky red. At last, White Doe emerged from her bedroom to see what was going on.

Big Tree was not with the others, their numbers reduced from twenty to a mere fourteen. Several of the older hunters were missing, their companions and offspring openly mourning and saying prayers to Mother Gaia.

Sadie Crane and Viola attended to a hunter missing several fingers on her right hand, while De'afi helped transporting water from the well out back and raiding all the cabinets for extra bandages. Black Sparrow offered herbs for pain relief and prayers for the dead.

"What happened?" White Doe demanded.

It took a few minutes for somebody to answer. An older man, going by the name Casia, finally spoke from where he knelt wringing out bandages into the metal washtub.

"Big Tree," he replied gravely.

White Doe cast her eyes at the hunter missing several of her fingers, asking for confirmation. She did not believe for a moment that Big Tree, the once mild-mannered basket weaver of thirty years who lived next door with his sick child, had caused such grievous injury and loss to a hunting party. Even considering what they'd found under his floorboards, she refused to believe he could do this. Would do this was another story.

The hunter, calling herself The Ship Without a Sea, nodded her head.

"It was not, at least I don't think, it was really him," she said. "His eyes were--they were--they were not the way they should be, his eyes."

Black Sparrow returned to her rocking chair, but did not pick up her pipe again.

"You tried to protect them," she said.

The Ship Without a Sea examined bandage-wrapped stubs where several of her fingers had once been. She'd cut them off with the knife tied to her belt, screaming curses down upon Big Tree as she ran off deeper into the woods. An old form of protection they practiced in Kat-Ari. Cutting off one's fingers to draw evil in their direction and away from others.

"I did," she agreed.

Black Sparrow rocked back and forth, closing her unseeing eyes. She could sense they were waiting for her to speak, as if her words alone made real what they knew in their hearts.

"That man's not Big Tree," she said. "Been something else for a long long long time. Of course we didn't know any better. Never could. Holed up in that house with Runner all the day and night long. Then when it got too much--guess you all saw what happened."

White Doe gripped the conjure bag around her throat. For the first time in years, she looked scared.

"You're not serious," she exhaled. "He's a red walker?"

In Mati, strangers. In Turaq and Kat-Ari, the empty folk. In Ladezi and Eudora, vampires. In Arcadia, red walkers. All different names for the same horror. Folks possessed by spirits, tormented by a lust for blood.

White Doe picked up her bow and quiver from where she'd leaned them against the wall.

"Damn it, we have to--," she began.

The Ship Without a Sea stood to her feet. A head shorter than De'afi, a patch over her missing left eye, built like three snowballs stacked on top of each other. She'd discarded her fur-lined jacket, a light brown shirt remaining over her flat chest and a piece of fine white cloth patterned in vibrant red flowers scarfed around her throat. A same-patterned cloth belt cinched around the waistline of her pants. Her dark brown arms were freckled in countless flower tattoos, each bearing the name of a companion. She'd amassed quite the following in her travels.

"I wouldn't," she said tersely. "You didn't see him. He is twice--no, three times maybe? Five times the strength of you or me or anyone in this room. You see what he did to our party?"

Viola, sitting on the floor with a pile of bandages in her lap, looked from the remains of the hunting party, then back to The Ship Without a Sea. Her mouth trembled.

"Don't matter," Sadie Crane replied.

"It matters a whole lot," Black Sparrow said. "You think you're a match for a red walker? One that's been like this for a few weeks?"

"And how do you figure that, little sister?" White Doe asked.

"Cuz I still use my brain," the other woman said back. "He must have been fighting, before he went and killed all those folks dead and ran off into the woods when we came after him. Could have been--no, had to. Had to be early stages. Ran off when he still had enough good sense."

"Why would he go and do a thing like that?" De'afi demanded. "We could have--you could have--"

"Helped?" Black Sparrow's mouth twisted. "Sure could have. Not like he was being rational in the first place, trying to hide what he had coming over him."

"You think saving's him even a thing we can do?" Sadie Crane asked hopefully.

"Maybe could, maybe not," their auntie replied. "See what he's like first."

Casia stood to his feet, his movements quick despite the blood loss.

"And who exactly is going to go--?" he began to ask.

*"Me,"* Sadie Crane, White Doe, and De'afi cut through at the same time.

Viola stood to her feet instantly, holding her arms.

"No!" she protested.

The very thought reminded her of that night in the woods, of Sybil's end. Was she to watch, paralyzed with fear, as the rest of her closest friends disappeared into the trees never to be seen alive again?

"You can come with," De'afi offered.

Viola shook her head, holding herself tighter.

White Doe made quick for the front door.

"Stay here, don't stay here, makes no damn difference to me," she said. "I'm gonna find this man, I'm gonna kill this man if I have to--"

She stopped abruptly as she'd started.

"Adel," she said. "He's--oh gods, he's--shit, he's--"

She covered her mouth with her hand, tears welling up in her eyes. She'd forgotten about Adel and about Runner, both of whom would need to be informed.

Sadie Crane ambled for the front door, bow and quiver of arrows tied over their back.

"I'll go," they said. "If somebody's gotta--"

Viola sprang from where she'd been standing, shoving people aside.

"No no no, fuck you!" she said.

She grabbed up the back of Sadie Crane's shirt in her fist.

"Don't they teach you a damn thing at university?" she demanded. "You can't just up and die on me! Why do you think I followed you out here? So you could--what? Do penance for letting Sybil die? By getting dead yourself? Fuck you."

Sadie Crane actually laughed. They didn't resist in the slightest when Viola reeled them back towards her, locking them in her shaking arms and pressing her head into the back of their shirt. It frustrated them to no end, but they knew she was right.

A Ship Without a Sea cast her eyes at the four, more amused than frustrated.

"You finished?" she asked.

She didn't pause for an answer.

"What we do is we wait," she said. "We wait until it's light out, get as many people as we can. Then we go out, find Big Tree, bring him back, and see what we can do about him. Or kill him. Whichever."

"Good plan," Black Sparrow nodded. "These things got less power when the sun's out."

Viola relaxed, sighing into Sadie Crane's back.

De'afi untied the knife from hir belt and sat down on the floor.

"Until morning?" ze said. "Not gonna, I don't know, at least check the caves? I could scout--"

"Nobody's going," Black Sparrow cut through. "Not until it's light out. You understand?"

The hunters, even White Doe and Sadie Crane, put their weapons away. It was decided that nobody would leave the house until morning.