Volume Two – Chapter 12

Lessons

After all the abis had been twisted and slurped up and all the erues roasted and eaten, the moment came when a change was in order on the little plateau. The jungle below had quieted down in tense expectation. Even the mountain was bating its breath, bringing the air to a near-standstill. But the change just wouldn’t come.

The beast seemed content with gazing at the plains of Tahor. Its hand was no longer shielding its eyes from the sun; its skin had mostly stopped peeling. For days on end, it hadn’t moved, but its eyes always stayed open, blinking rarely and slowly. It appeared to not require sleep. Its back had straightened, was now nothing like that of the cowering figure that had crept out of the cave. They way it sat perched on its bench of rock exuded the confidence of a king that had arrived, and taken its throne atop the jungle.

What did that make her, Pen kept wondering. She only remembered the stories Glane had told her about kings. They were a thing of Gralinn history, a concept of their culture, not hers. Kings ruled over stationary dominions. Before the Empire’s pacification in the First War, there had been few things stationary in Tahor but the few towns near the coasts. People moved, because the warlords moved. The Gwai cared less for the scale of their might than the ferociousness of it, so when they lost their interest, they were up and away leaving the land to recover until their inevitable return.

Not so the great king of rock and monkeys. No, its reign seemed a voyeuristic, passive one. There it sat relishing the view, a view Pen had grown bored of two days in. All there was were fields of trees small as grass stalks, and the never-ending flow of the Foen around its curves and falls, and the dances of birds fleeing the dried-up maize fields of the midlands. It was mesmerizing for an evening, a morning, maybe another evening. After eleven days, it was a reminder.

Whoever was searching for her would stop at some point. She had to get down before then if she hoped to ever get home.

The only piece of home she had were her books. The ‘Northern Rites’ gave her some idea of the resources surrounding her in the jungle. The Gralinn ‘Studies in Humanity’ reminded her that not too far from the plateau still lay a civilization waiting for her, a fact that was surprisingly easy to forget out here in the wilderness. It also taught her some rudimentary things about the Cursed, or as the book insisted on calling them, ‘Gifted’.

But the most important book remained ‘Plants’ by E.B. Luen. The illustrations lent themselves to being copied, and played nicely into Pen’s plan. She nearly filled up her notebook devising, revising, and discarding one sketch after another. It was hard to keep them simple enough to understand, but clear enough so there wouldn’t be misunderstandings. Misunderstandings could mean her life.

On the twelfth day, she knew he had to act. Pen picked up her best works, and walked before the beast trying hard to hide her fear. She wondered what it hid from her by ignoring the three sheets of paper she pinned with rocks to the ground before its feet.

“Listen up,” Pen said.

The beast turned to her.

She swallowed. “I need to get down there. Down, you understand? Not up here—down there.” She mimed the falling down of an object with her hands. “There aren’t enough vines to rappel down. This doesn’t mean we’re square, or anything. It doesn’t mean I forgive you. But I need your help.”

The beast’s eyes had stayed on her, but she could see the utter lack of understanding in them. Nothing about its stare showed a spark, or even an interest in her; rather, they were fixated on the book in her hands. ‘Plants’. Something about books always seemed to intrigue it right until the moment it looked inside.

But it could understand pictures. She’d seen it. “You only need to understand this: One, Two, Three. One, Two, Three. Got it?” Her fingers repeated the count multiple times over. Then, she pointed at each of the three drawings on the ground in turn while continuing the count. “One, Two, Three. One—you pick up me like last time, but not so rough. Two—you jump to a tree, then a lower tree, then the ground. Three—you land and put me down. I’m sure you’ve got the view to get back to, so let’s get it over with. One, Two, Three. Say it with me.”

Hm, said the beast.

She pointed out once more the first, the second, the third drawing, and then bit her tongue. More explanations would only complicate the affair for the beast. She had seen it learn before, if only that abis weren’t worth the hassle if one didn’t mind eating seven-day-old erue instead. Without the fruits’ juice, though, she wonder what it drank. Blood? She did hear it slurp sometimes.

Presently, the beast grunted as if woken from a deep sleep, and left its bench. Yes. It walked up to her drawings, albeit the wrong one, and crouched down to inspect it.

“That’s number two,” Pen said. “You have to pick me up, first.”

Hm, said the beast. It nevertheless stayed crouched over the second drawing. In it, a big hairy stick figure with cold lifeless eyes carried a scrawny stick figure with a brave look on her face down from a plateau, jumping from tree to tree before arriving on the ground. It had been the hardest to lay out, making her wonder many times if Bramu of Ultis ever had to save his life by drawing.

The beast then went to the third, a beastly stick man returning a brave stick girl smoothly to the jungle floor, before finishing with the first, showing the laying over one’s shoulder of the stick girl. The beast looked. The beast stopped looking. Pen realized she had been nodding unconsciously, grinning a moron’s grin.

She watched the beast walk past her to the plateau’s edge and stop there, hand extending pointing down the drop into the lower jungle.

Hm, said the beast.

“Yes!” Pen followed it, gesturing. “Exactly. You take me down there—carefully—and I’ll be out of your hair. You don’t need me up here. I get it now. You didn’t take me, you just saved me from the erues, that’s it, right? Doesn’t mean I forgive you, but that doesn’t matter, does it? Not to you.” She realized she was rambling. “Anyway. Pick me up, get me down, put me down. One, Two, Three. Keep your hands to yourself. Do we have a deal?”

She reached out her hand to no reaction. The beast looked down at it intrigued, hovering before its chest like a small bird, a snack. After a breath, she pulled it back.

Hm, said the beast, pointing down at the jungle.

“Yeah, down there. What about it?”

The beast raised its eyebrows at her. It said, Hm.

“… Me? I can’t go myself, you’ve seen how that turns out. You take me down there.”

The beast suddenly upset her greatly.

“Don’t you dare roll your eyes at me!” Pen snapped. “You’ve kept me up here twelve days for no reason. There’s nothing to do around here!” She wagged her finger at it only to have the beast cock its head as if seeing a delicious worm. “Trees, weeds, rocks, bench, bones, fireplace. Six spots, that’s it. Look down there.” Pen pointed, but the beast still stared at her. “Hm!” she said. It complied. “That’s infinite spots. There aren’t just erues down there. There are birds and cats and hippos and hounds and snakes and boars and fish. Do you know fish? The Foen’s famous for eels and carps. You can kill them, all of them. Is that what you wanna hear? That you can kill and destroy more stuff?”

The beast looked at her, puzzled.

“Then why not me? Why am I here?” Pen felt a tightness in her throat, and her voice turned frail. “Either kill me, or let me go. I’m done with the jungle, and the mountains. I need to go back to the city. I need food, actual food, not twitching half-dead monkeys. Take me down, and leave me. Take me down. Take me. Down.”

Hm, said the beast, and pointed at the jungle below. This time, she did nothing. They stared at each other for an eternity, it seemed. A subtle wind set in only to stop a breath later. It was seething hot even in the trees’ shadow.

The beast lifted its leg and brought it back down with a short Hm.

Pen felt her temper rising. “Kick and punch, is that all you can do? Take me down!”

Hm, said the beast, and kicked once more.

Pen couldn’t contain herself, and kicked the ground herself. “Fuck you! I hope you starve, too.”

Hm, said the beast, and kicked a different kick.

A deep vibration ran through the soil, the rock, her very core. Geysers of dust shot out of the ground not far from her. Pen took a balancing step back, to the side, waiting for the sensation that the ground was less than solid to pass. For a breath, it did.

The rock burst with the sound of a giant biting into a fresh apple, and suddenly, she flew. There was a cacophony of crunches and bangs all around her, below her, sucking her down via gravity. But another force was pulling at her, too.

The beast’s hand held her left wrist and pulled her down onto the triangle of weeds-infested rock atop the landslide. Without its hold she would have fallen down immediately, would’ve rolled over the triangle’s edge and been mangled by the grinder of moving stones and stumps, but the beast seemed acutely aware of the movements required to stay on top, shifting its balance every breath. She had to think of Ibiko and his sleek movement in the jungle. She then looked up and saw that the beast had closed its eyes.

The slide down was short and ended rather unspectacularly with them coming to a halt forty ells deep into the jungle. Behind them went up a ramp quickly collapsing to the sides, burying leaves and trunks and some unfortunate animals under thundering rubble. She looked back up there. The bright rock where the plateau had sat looked even higher up from down here. Pen shook, and breathed heavily after the dust had settled.

“I… suppose that works too,” she said. “So you prefer just One, huh?”

She turned just in time to see the beast’s hand move toward her shoulder. It wasn’t fast, but measured, and touched her with an open palm instead of its knuckles.

The blow felt like a freighter smacking into her. Pen flew once more, this time off the cracked triangle of rock and into a nearby bramble. She cried out, but there came no sound. The fall had knocked all air out of her.

When she raised herself up to her knees, the beast was still standing on the peak of the rockslide, looking back and forth between Pen and its own hand. It wore a puzzled expression on its face.

She gathered her satchel and crawled back. With the help of an ebony, she pushed her body up into a crooked stance. Every part of her was hurting. Her shoulders were the worst, feeling like something had ripped both arms out of their sockets.

A god in man’s clothing. She’d been a fool standing that close to it. This was a Tahori god, nothing like the Gralinn Allfather. Vohl was a saint with powers, complemented by a mass of demons. In Tahor, gods and demons were one and the same.

For three days after, Pen refused to talk to the beast. The jungle took a good deal of her attention, and she didn’t give up hope that a long enough silence might drive away the beast. She stayed on the move throughout the day, until she could go no further. But the beast didn’t leave. It seemed able to tell that something bad had happened, since it kept a certain distance, but all she ever got was a Hm. The few times she saw it, there was no remorse in its eyes. She wondered whether it could even feel remorse.

The days passed and her pains became dull. Fighting through the jungle was a constant struggle against an army of bugs and thorns and sharp branches, but it was also more than sitting around on the plateau. She made what headway she managed to make, each day a little more, and learned to read her surroundings better. Certain mosses had a certain depth. Certain tree formations occurred mostly near edges that one might fall over.  Certain northern rites proved applicable to her situation, and filled her stomach. Certain other rites proved inaccurate, and emptied her stomach. Certain tail postures meant the erue was curious. Certain tail postures meant it was in a spiteful mood. And certain tail postures meant that it was afraid, in a way reserved for the presence of an apex predator. It usually wasn’t long before she heard the silencing of monkey screams somewhere nearby, and sometimes even saw a glimpse of the beast carrying off some by their limp tails.

She made camp always in the forks of lower trees, preferably abi trees. The fruits kept her satiated, and their juice stilled her thirst until she finally came upon a creek. Though it was a bit broader, she suspected it was the same one as before, tasting just as good until she thought of the rotting bodies of Yahu and his family lying in the creek bed, and stopped drinking.

There were naiberry bushes to be picked. There were growth patterns in the plants to be deciphered, and exploited for easier passage. She was nowhere near Ibiko’s speed, but each leaf she saw slowly gained meaning to her, warning her of potential dangers. Unsteady ground. Thorns. Wasps’ nests.

Then, there were the sounds sometimes peaking through the carpet of noise permeating every ell of the jungle. Erues she could already discern, but soon, there were also kibiris, boomfrogs, laitos, mantises, and the odd boar sharing the floor with them. Their calls did not only inform her of their presence; sometimes, she could even read their moods through them.

On the morning of the fourth day, Pen had just stepped down from her bed of the night, a snug wooden hammock in the fork of a telahiem, when she heard an alarming noise across the clearing. The cracking of branches. The thuds of unmuted steps. She turned to find a shadow with hair emerging from the bushes.

“What do you want?” Pen asked.

The beast lifted its hand. Three fingers were pointing up. It looked at her expectantly.

Pen scoffed. “You’re picky about understanding things, aren’t you? Get lost.”

The beast held up the Three.

“I’d say you put me down alright.”

The beast shrugged, and waved its hand through the air nonchalantly.

“That wasn’t just a pat on the shoulder. I’m not like you. I’m not Cursed.” She noticed the sharpness of the word coming off her lips, the same sharpness the old folk who had lived through a warlord’s reign used when talking about the Cursed.

Hm, said the beast.

Pen turned and pulled back the yoke of her sarif to show the purple blots under her skin from where it had struck her. “Here to do more of this, huh? Get it over with, then. I won’t flinch.”

The beast looked confused. When it reached out, Pen betrayed her fear, taking back a step.

“Happy now?” she snarled at it. “Go away.”

The beast rolled its eyes.

“Go. Away.”

It waved its hand again, shrugging. When she didn’t react, it walked past her and waved its hand against the telahiem she had slept in, sending the tree toppling down with one massive thump and a thousand rustles.

“… I told you: chopping down trees is not an option for me.” She walked up to a nearby tree almost as big as the fallen telahiem, and struck it with her palm. Nothing happened. “See? Nothing.”

The beast waved its hand, now slowly as if to make a point.

“It’s not about technique. Look!” Pen slapped the tree again, and yanked back her hand when she felt a splinter. “Ouch!”

The beast stared at her like at a fabled trinoceros before lifting its hand and pointing at another tree, or what would someday grow into one one. A shoulder-high hiem sapling, barely as thick as her wrist. She put her arms on her hip, cocked her head, but when the beast rolled its eyes, Pen felt a deep rage coming on. She charged the sapling with a lunging open hand.

The thin trunk bent back with an elasticity she didn’t expect, bouncing off her palm before she got the sense to hold on. In a flash, a hand with seven leafy fingers rushed up to smack Pen straight across the face. She stumbled back rubbing her cheek.

A weirdly familiar sound reached her ears, one often heard from tourists who overindulged on Koeiji’s famed fire radish. Like the barking of a hound, but subdued, hoarse. A breathless stutter. The beast was holding its belly, convulsing at the shoulders. It slapped its thigh.

“Are you laughing at me?” Pen asked.

The sound then became deeper, more guttural, as the beast sat down on the ground, convulsing still. It was indeed laughing. It was also breaking its silence. This was a voice, a deep, but somehow youthful voice. They weren’t quite Ha’s or He’s or Hee’s coming out of the beast’s belly, but a mix of dull a- and o-vowels.

Pen could do nothing but wait and stare until it had calmed down. “You can’t speak, but you can laugh. Great. At least you can read signs.” She held up three fingers, and took one away to line up her outstretched middle and index finger, the universal ‘Up yours’ of Tahor. “Read this.”

But the beast did not react. It stood up, here and there shaking out another short gust of chuckles, and slapping down another tree as it left the clearing.

Pen gathered her things and embarked on the first hike of the day. Slowly but surely, she was reaching more level ground, and noticed the small changes in her environment as she got closer to sea level, trees growing closer together, the receding rock, the influx of noise. The closer she got to the valley below, the more she felt like she had stepped into a furnace. Not only the plants obstructed her path now; the air itself seemed to slowly gain mass, hampering her descent.

The wildlife changed as well. Pen saw tails disappear behind trees. She saw thick rings wind languidly around branches high and low, their scales painted with hypnotic patterns. She swatted more, and was on the constant lookout for the dark orange of rotten pagalia flowers. According to the ‘Northern Rites’, the ground-up paste of their fleshy petals was supposed to repel the bugs. In truth, it only dissuaded them, but it was better than no protection at all.

There was no perfect in the jungle. Pen found that she had to aim for not-as-bad to keep from getting beaten by her own expectations. Water was a rare substance, so she started measuring her intake more closely, and stopped taking half-aware sips. Abi pieces and naiberries could be kept safe in the paper pouch she folded out of the rebel girl’s newspaper. Her walking distances could be slightly increased by listening to her body, take breaks only when needed, but then long enough to recover.

The only thing her mind refused to learn was to sleep. The plateau that was no more had been a quiet place, and at home, she could sleep at night, in the afternoon, sometimes through mornings, disrupted by nothing and no one.

There was rarely ever peace in the jungle, and of quiet, there was none. The cicadas faded slightly about fifty frags after the sun went down, but picked up all the louder in the dead dark of the night, rendering true sleep an impossibility. She had to split her sleep in two, sometimes three shorter intervals scattered about the day.

And yet, when the time came to sleep, be it night, day, loud, or quiet, Pen found herself being overwhelmed by the life teeming all around her. It did not scare her as much as it once did; rather, it just occupied her mind like the chattering of a hundred grandparents, confusing her with their changes of pace and tone of voice and irregular pauses.

It was so on the night Pen saw the striped tail. She had been turning in her leafy bed for a good while before her eyes opened to spy a strip of yellow and tangerine and black slithering soundlessly through the brush below. The tree’s branches concealed her from its sight, and yet she froze as if its claws were already at her throat. A grown stripecat was about as heavy as her, and a considerable danger even to a grown man; her, it would kill in a couple breaths.

Her heart skipped a beat when the cat turned to shine back eyes of amber, and presented the full span of its snow-white belly. It wasn’t her weight. It wasn’t a stripecat. She closed her eyes and curled up to a ball praying to every god whose name she remembered, holding her breath for what seemed like forever.

When she looked down from her tree again, the brush was empty, and the jungle at peace, for once. The tiger was gone. But so was her sleep.

The following day, Pen could not stop flinching on her final stretch into valley. The ground to her feet had finally submitted, had become almost even, almost easy to walk on. She knew there still lay a good deal of foothills before her, but leaving the mountains behind meant something. She had done it by herself, almost, for the most part. She had survived. Bramu can suck it. Penroe of Koeiji was no more—she stepped into the valley Penroe of the jungle, master of her own fate, survivor of beasts.

When a tangle of vines was ripped down no three ells to her left, Penroe of the jungle leaped up the next tree like an erue before even bothering to glance back. When she saw that there was neither yellow nor tangerine fur, but only black and cinnamon nakedness, she jumped back down.

“What do you want now?” Pen asked. It irked her how relieved she sounded.

The beast waved its hand.

“I’m not gonna get beat up by more trees. Leave me alone, I’m doing fine without you. I’ve got supplies, see?” She opened her satchel to present her half-full paper pouch of naiberries and the thermos.

The beast walked up to take a look. She boasted just a breath too long before realizing its intent. Before she could close the bag, it had already reached inside and fed a handful of half-squashed berries to its mouth, wetting it with violet juice. Pen watched in shock as her breakfast, lunch, and light dinner of the day were chewed twice and swallowed. The beast licked its lips.

“I fucking hate you,” Pen screamed. She then held her lips shut in shock as a flock of kibiris darted out of a nearby ebony and dispersed into the treetops. Her voice had been piercing. Now, it was faint. “Go,” she said. “Go away.”

The beast did not go away, not even when she started walking. It went with her at a slow pace, fell behind sometimes, but always turned back up. She tried hard enough to ignore it, but she could hardly ignore the wood cracking behind her. The beast did not clear its path before walking. It simply walked, letting the bushes, branches, sometimes trunks figure out themselves where they ought to go. More often than not, they went to the ground clawing at her heels.

The beast paused when she paused. As she sat near a trickle of water gathering what little berries were left, it jumped off into the trees only to return a few breaths later holding something out to her. An erue. The monkey’s leg was crushed, and it cried for its life as the beast waved its free hand in a chopping motion, expectantly.

When she tried to rip apart the grip of its finger around the monkey’s throat, the little erue bit her finger to the bone. She saw the red of her own blood on its teeth just before the beast’s jaws closed around its orbital. The crunch was the stuff of nightmares.

She didn’t flinch away, though. For a breath, she couldn’t but feel that Yahu’s little brother deserved to hurt for the pain he’d caused her.

Pen did not talk to the beast for days afterward. It came and went, but something seemed to keep it around. Past fears came crawling back up with a new twist: the beast was attracted to her not sexually, but romantically. It had already bestowed a number of gifts on her, erues, abis, transport, her life even, saved from a rampant horde of monkeys. Judging from the berry-incident, it regarded their property as shared. It kept a kind of loose watch over her.

A tricky notion. Still, seeing where it must lead, she kept a respectable distance, and never shared food with it unless absolutely necessary. Penroe of the jungle belonged to no man, and certainly no romantically inclined beast.

Pondering about how to say no without the use of words, Pen almost didn’t notice the beast falling back. It walked constantly, sometimes in wild zigzags that looped, studying the trees and bugs and birds and tails and berries and abis with the look of a buffoon. But this time, the beast didn’t zig or zag. It only stood there, and looked at something high up in the trees, causing her to do the same.

At first she saw only a couple of vines, hanging down taught—no, not vines. Too even. Those are ropes. She took a step back. Something was hanging off their bottom end, a ball overgrown with moss. Pen walked back briskly, jumping over roots and rock, until she stood almost underneath it. She shielded her eyes, confused. A spindly leg stuck out off the tangled mess hanging a dozen ells above the ground. When she squinted, she could make out a hand, too. A human one.

She looked at the beast, and hesitated. Whether it cared for them or not, her words were the only thing she could withdraw from it. Yet there was no way up there for Penroe of the jungle.

“Can you—“

The beast jumped up with a booming suddenness, snatching the corpse out of the air and ripping the straps apart. It came down to her other side, threw the heap of greens and browns on the ground. A shower of leaves descended on Pen as she came closer.

Her eyes hadn’t deceived her. There was part of a skeleton embedded in the moss, strapped to a giant backpack spawning the ripped ends of six nylon cords. There wasn’t any clothing left, only the sturdy fibers of the equipment. Their colors had faded, but remained a pale beige-and-black-and-blue.

“Gralinn,” Pen said to herself.

Hm, said the beast.

“I’m not talking to you. You don’t even know what the Gralinn are.” She kicked at big ball to move it over and search the backpack. What little of it wasn’t buried under vines and roots and fungi held nothing but the rings holding the straps, a synthetic bottle with a hole in the bottom, and a set of rusted metal tags. She stepped back respectfully when a large spider crawled out of a hole she hadn’t seen and scooted up a tree.

The beast was more occupied with the skeleton itself. Like a berry from a bush, it had dislodged the hand from the wrist and continued to study it. She witnessed it take a sniff before losing interest and throwing away the hand.

“Typical,” Pen said.

The beast looked at her. It then snapped off the dead man’s left foot and threw it into the trees, as well.

“I don’t care.”

The beast reached into the ball and offered a pair of ribs to her. A gift. An anything but romantic gift, she assured herself. Pen shook her head. The beast didn’t react.

“Being disrespectful makes you no better than them. Father always said so.” With her stick, she skimmed a few layers of moss, but there was nothing beneath it but bones and decomposed clothing. She studied the soldier’s tags, but only got an incomplete name: ‘ryll’.

It was a story she knew well. Ryll had left his family in Grale to fight in the Second Great War of Tahor maybe twenty or thirty years ago. She wondered whether he had ever even set foot on Tahori soil; he likely had, on the hot sand of a military base somewhere. But the tragedy of him having been deployed directly from an overseas flight appealed more to her.

She pondered on what could’ve happened to him, had the parachute not been caught by the trees. Ryll, the war hero. Ryll, the husband. Ryll, the father. By now, he would have passed the half-way mark of his life, and would be waiting for the first crop of grand-children to infuse with tales about his tour in the protectorate. A few would be inspired to fulfill their own duty to the Empire someday. And Ryll would be proud.

There were other avenues to consider. Ryll could have become haunted by the things he’d done to survive. He’d grow to resent her people, the Empire, or the world altogether. He could find salvation in praising the Allfather. Or he could die another million ways after the war. A legion of Rylls passed before her mind’s eye, each marching to his own drum, their paths split after surviving the parachute. After that lay infinite paths going off one another, branching out, an expanding of lines spanning the Known World before ultimately converging again. A map of Ryll’s pure, uncut potential.

But when she looked up, Ryll was nothing but old bones beset by a cancer of moss. The beast snapped off another rib. It did not look at her, but the pout on its lips told her it did so on purpose.

In many ways, she knew more about Ryll from looking at his corpse than she knew about the beast. It spoke no language she could discern. It praised no God, no gods. She pictured another expanding of lines, only with the beast sitting at the end, self-content and ruthless and terribly strong. But was there an alternate beast that suffered from self-doubt? Was there a gentle beast? Had it ever been weak, like her?

Pen caught a furtive glance by its eyes, unreadable as ever. But they way in which they shot back down did register as not quite beastly. And she realized what question she was really asking.

Was this truly a god in man’s clothing, or was it the other way around? The more she saw it move through the jungle with the eyes of a child, Pen saw a face that wasn’t monstrous at all. There may have once been a man underneath all that power. He may still be there, locked deep inside, small, withered. Reading romance into its actions seemed nothing but silly to her now; from what she glanced from her books and her talks with Yuri, those feelings were complex and hard to grasp even for adults. The beast would have more basic yearnings.

Recognition. Attention. Kindness. None of those you could find a cave, and when she thought back to the desolation of rock and bone and the candle’s purple shimmer, even those needs seemed imposed on a deeper, more primal one.

“You’re alone,” she said.

The beast didn’t look up, didn’t Hm. But it did stop snapping off bones. Standing up, it arched its neck to a series of cracks, and walked away slowly zigzagging, its broad shoulders and buttocks disappearing into the bushes.

Pen looked at the few bits of spine and rib cage that were left. The casual way the beast had defiled Ryll’s remains only fed her suspicion about the boneyard; a thousand animals, all killed by someone. She remembered the tunnel snake and its detached head, lying against the rock with its jaw broken. The beast was alone, perhaps even lonely, but its ease at killing couldn’t be underestimated. Be they men or gods, monsters ought to be lonely.

A different set of bones then entered her mind, one she had not thought of in a while. The skeleton at the boulder. The young siwe and his Liberation forces overshadowed her memory of it, but now, bits and pieces came rushing back almost to quickly to grasp. Hadn’t the siwe said something about retrieving bones? Hadn’t the liar said something about another one?

Another Cursed. Of course. Pen looked around listening for the beast’s noise as it bent trees and rolled over boulders twice its size, but the jungle was as quiet as jungles get. There had been two of them. The beast knew only the presence of another powerful being; no wonder it couldn’t gauge its strength with her. She remembered Rannek’s words about the skeleton. An old man. Old Cursed, young Cursed. His father. Its, she reminded herself. Whatever it had lost in the other, loneliness would make it seek a replacement. Yet how was she to parent that?

She realized her mistake only a breath later. She wasn’t a new father, the beast was. It protected her. It thought her as powerful as itself and tried to teach her. Pen stumbled back against a tree, exhaling. She was used to people suffocating her with adoration for father, but none of them had ever attempted to replace him.

She also wondered how badly a parent could fail. Withholding light, withholding speech, withholding the world from your child—for what? Only for her to inherit his mess. She couldn’t say what would happen if the beast’s expectations weren’t met. Would it abandon her? Would it kill her, eat her? She would have to be doubly careful not to spurn it until she could make her escape.

As Pen entered the bushes aiming for the valley, she wondered what expectations the beast had. It had not struck her since that one time. It shared its supplies as long as she shared hers.

It seemed to want to train her. How she was to fake the strength that tore down trees, Pen couldn’t tell, but she’d better figure it out quick. She wished she had that strength herself. Penroe of the jungle could be Penroe of her own, then. No one would be able to stop her from making her own choices. If the beast tried, it would suffer the consequences. She would pat it back and see what happened.

She didn’t even notice that the ground had some time ago turned even, and the rock around her had decreased to a minimum. An image of a bony face followed Pen as she entered the valley. It was the father’s skull, staring with its mouth agape at her in her blood-soaked sarif. The look was one of amusement, or bewilderment, depending on the angle she took.

But with flesh, she now imagined it would be a look of terror. The skeleton’s mouth hadn’t just been open, it had been hanging off, one side detached by brute force. Father Cursed had been felled by a broken jaw.

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