E Stricker - The Almanac

He felt like his blood had turned to fire. It was one thing to remember the smooth dive into the pool. It was quite another to stand at the edge, hearing the roar of the water as it crashed on the rocks below.

The wind pushed him forward, and, by reflex, he pushed back against it, resisting what he knew he had to do. He looked over the edge and watched the spray disappearing into the air. His head spun.

This was crazy.

But he couldn’t just sit there.

Try or die .

You had to try because trying meant you still had hope.

He had to do it because without hope there was nothing. With no hope, he would live out the rest of his short days alone in the little cave, ignoring the world, fading away in shame.

The fire flared high in his blood. He had not gone to the full depths of that pool. There was no guarantee that there would only be smooth blue water to meet him at the bottom.

It was best not to think about it too much. He could spend hours gazing into the pool, and it would make no difference in the end. All there was left was to jump, or not.

He ran, heart pounding, thinking of a million things at once: the angle of his jump, the speed of his legs, the launch needed to clear the protruding rocks, the force of his feet against the edge as they pushed off. Then he was flying into the air with the wind rushing past his sun-heated cheeks. He gasped. Blue rushed up to meet him.

He hit the water, and it knocked out all of the breath he had taken in. His legs slammed into the pebbled bottom of the pool, but the blue darkness surrounded him just as it had before. It cradled his body, slowing his descent just enough that the clash did not break him after all.

Illya pushed his way up toward the wavering blue light above his head. Then his face broke the surface, and fresh air flooded into his lungs.

He had done it. He felt as if he had crossed over a portal into another world as he pulled himself up onto the bank and breathed in deep, full breaths.

There was no time to lose now. Even if he moved as fast as he could, it would still take at least whole day to get back to the village. He wouldn’t make it by nightfall, not with the day half-gone.

He had barely allowed himself to catch his breath when he kept going. Looking up at the sun often to keep his bearings, he scrambled down hillsides and through brush. He was slowed down by his soaked clothes, and whenever he stopped for more than a moment, he began to shiver. The day went on, and he could only hope that he was going in the right direction. When he had first come off the path, he had been too distracted to look for landmarks.

After a while, he remembered the spring that met the path before the third ruin and followed the stream, hoping that it was the same one.

It was dusk when the stream finally crossed the path. The journey to the path had taken an entire day when it should have only taken half. He stopped to drink and splash water on his face. He dried his face off on his shirt, then saw something on the ground.

There were footprints. Not animal tracks, human footprints, but nothing like the prints his feet made in the mud. Everyone in the village had boots made from stitched animal hides. In the summer, they went barefoot as often as not. All of their footprints were smooth, sometimes large, sometimes small, but all with soft edges.

These tracks were covered in ridges, strange, regular shapes with sharp corners.

He squatted down again and examined them. There were straight lines and chunky shapes almost like the letters in the book. He held his breath as if the unknown person could be hiding in the bushes, but after a few seconds, nothing had happened, and he breathed again.

Rover gangs, like the one that had attacked so long ago, just like the Patrollers guarded against.

But the Patrollers were Enforcers now. They couldn’t be guarding all the territory around the village, not if they had to guard a jail full of thier own people.

The footprints was fresh. Whoever they were, they had stopped at this spring recently. If they kept going down the path, it would only be a matter of time before they found the village.

Illya glanced around, shaking off a crawling sensation that was rising up his spine. He set off at a run, hoping to make up a little time and distance between himself and this place before the light was gone.

He had not eaten all day and soon felt the all too familiar weakness that came from too much walking and not enough food. Nevertheless, he did not slow.

A branch cracked up ahead, and he heard an odd shuffling sound. Without thinking, he dove into a stand of bushes to hide, snagging his pants on a thorn. The sound of more breaking twigs approached. He wasn’t close enough to run into a patrol yet, or was he? Not at this time of the evening, it was impossible.

Illya froze, his breath halting in his throat at the sight of a man coming around the bend in the road, a stone’s throw away from him. He peered through the night, his eyes wide and round as the full moon.

Something about the slope of the man’s shoulders was familiar and tickled his memory.

Benja.

It was Benja! He looked again, not believing what he saw. His cousin was thinner than he had been. He was holding his bow in one hand and had a bundle of something wrapped in cloth slung over his shoulder. He had not seen Illya yet. Illya hesitated. The last time he had seen Benja was the day he’d had him arrested. He didn’t know how his cousin would react to seeing him.

Benja was walking with a shuffle as if he was exhausted. Illya looked closer and saw something that made his breath freeze in his throat. Benja was dragging his leg, which had been tied up in red-stained cloth. Behind him was a trail of blood.

Illya stumbled out of the bushes, tearing his pants further. He didn’t care. He pushed his way onto the path just in time to catch Benja as he staggered and sagged to the ground. He was sweating and pale, gray around the eyes. His gaze seemed unfocused as if he was looking across a long distance.

“Ouch,” he said, and his eyes rolled back in his head.

“Benja!”

Illya lowered him to the ground. He shook his cousin’s shoulders, his heart pounding.

“Wake up! What happened? Benja!”

Benja groaned. His eyes opened for a moment then fluttered closed.

“We can’t stay here in the open,” Illya said, his voice wavering. He pulled Benja up to his feet. With his arm around Benja’s waist to hold him up and some coaxing, he got them both through the screen of bushes beside the road to the base of a big tree.

Gingerly, he sat Benja down beside it and scraped together some wood and tinder. He struck his piece of flint over and over into it, his hand shaking as shuddering waves of panic crashed over him. Even if the Terrors were nothing but coyotes, a pack of them could have killed Benja in his weakened state. He thought of the bones in the cave he had found. They would certainly come for the blood that was trailed down the road.

What if the fire didn’t light? What if there were too many of them to fight off?

Finally, a spark caught, and Illya nursed it to life. He moved Benja closer to the heat, swallowing worry when the movement did not wake his cousin.

Carefully, he unwrapped the saturated cloth from Benja’s leg. His ankle had been torn open. Punctures that looked to have come from a powerful set of teeth made a semicircle on it. A ragged chunk of muscle had been torn out of Benja’s lower calf.

The wound was deep. Under continuously welling blood, Illya saw a gleam of white. It had to be a ligament or bone. He didn’t hesitate for another moment. His apprenticeship with Samuel had not been useless, after all. He knew how to stop bleeding.

He tore a strip from the bottom of his shirt and wrapped up the wound again. Firmly, he pushed down on it. His head spun as the blood welled up under the fabric and soaked through with awful warmth. The wound was much worse than the cut he had held on Charlie’s forehead.