Almost Dark

It was so terribly cold. Snow was falling, and it was almost dark.

Two men stood among the trees and did not move. They had been taught not to move. They had been taught that the body was a betrayer. A foot that shifted, a sleeve that brushed a branch, a breath let out too hard. Each small thing could become a beacon.

The taller man shifted anyway, once, a slow change of weight that left a faint crunch. He did it because his feet were going numb and he did not want to fall like a drunk in front of someone.

The other man, the one nearer the hut, lifted a hand without looking at him. His fingers spread once, a silent warning.

The taller man stopped. His jaw tightened.

Below them, where the trees opened into a small pocket of space, a hut crouched as if it were ashamed to be seen. It was not a proper house. It was a thing made from need. Logs stacked with gaps stuffed by moss and mud. A roof patched with bark and canvas. A low window whose glass had been replaced by oiled cloth and then mended again. Light did not shine from it. If there was a fire inside, it was smothered and fed only enough to keep the coals alive.

A path led to it that curved behind thickets and dipped into a gully and came back up between two stones. It was a path meant to be forgotten.

The taller man’s hand rested on the iron cuffs at his belt. The other man wore the same cuffs, the same belt, the same cut of coat. Their boots were grimy and worn, too many years of use.

They were not hunters…they were watchers. They were the kind of men the city sent out when it wanted to make the woods afraid.

The taller man whispered without moving his lips. “This is a waste.”

“Quiet,” the other man breathed.

“You believe it, don’t you.” The taller man’s voice carried a small edge, not loud, but sharp. “You believe the stories they say about this hut.”

The other man did not answer. He kept his eyes on the hut’s window, on the dark square of it. The oiled cloth over the glass made it dull. It did not reflect the trees. It swallowed them.

From inside the hut came a sound, muffled. A small, lone figure crept from the thickened trees and softly knocked on the door of the hut.

The taller man’s mouth tightened. “A child.”

The other man’s fingers twitched once at his side. He did not look away from the window.

A small shape passed between the lightless interior and the cloth that covered the window. A head. A shoulder.

Then a voice, very small, barely audible. “Please.”

The taller man inhaled softly. “We could take the child in. Leave the rest. That’s what the code says when—”

The other man lifted his hand again, fingers spread, and the taller man stopped speaking.

The hut’s door opened a crack, then closed again. The crack showed only dark. No light spilled. No warmth.

After a moment the door opened again, wider.

A woman stepped out and peered at the child. The child was a thin body in a too-large coat, the sleeves hanging past the hands. A scarf was wrapped around the lower face. Above it, eyes were wide and too bright, the brightness of fever or fear.

The child turned back toward the woods and pointed.

The child stood in the snow, shivering, and then began to walk to the trees. The child moved like someone trying to be brave with no strength to spend.

The two men watched without breathing hard. The taller man leaned forward, impatience moving him. His hand closed around the cuffs again.

The taller man whispered, “If she…”

“We wait.” The other man said. His voice was flat.

“You’re certain?”

The other man did not answer. A minute passed. Perhaps two. In the cold, minutes were heavy.

The other man looked at the woman. She was the size of someone who had once been taller and had been pressed downward by years. Her cloak was patched and dark, a cloth that had been repaired so many times the stitching looked like veins. Her hair was wrapped in a scarf, and the ends of the scarf were frayed and stiff. The snow didn’t melt when it touched her. There was no heat in the hut, she was just above freezing herself.

She closed the door behind her and stood with her back to it for a moment, as if listening. Then she walked.

The men followed with their eyes only. They did not move. They did not need to. The tree line close to them and was visible from where they stood. The woman reached the tree line and knelt in the snow. A small bundle lay on the ground. An old man, perhaps, or another child. A body wrapped in blankets, trembling.

The woman did not look at the trees. She did not scan. She did not search for danger. Either she had never learned to be afraid, or the world had beat fear from her memory.

She pulled her cloak open and brought her hands out and the man, the one closer to the hut, felt something tighten in his chest.

Her hands were bare…no gloves.

The skin on her knuckles was cracked. Her fingers were chapped and red from cold. Pale scars crossed the back of one hand, old lines like the memory of burns. Her nails were short and uneven, broken and filed down. Her hands were hands that worked. The were the type of hands the man had seen before. Had known very well.

She touched the person on the ground, found the face, brushed snow from the cheek with the back of her fingers. The person’s lips were pale. The breath that came out was shallow, barely a breath at all.

The woman’s mouth tightened as she took a small pouch from inside her cloak and opened it. Inside were cloth bundles. She unwrapped them with stiff fingers, quick and practiced, as if wasting time was dangerous. A pinch of dried plant. A chalk nub worn down to almost nothing. A strip of something dark and pliable that might once have been leather. Nothing that looked sinister.

The taller man whispered, “Now?”

The other man did not answer. His eyes stayed on her hands.

The woman leaned close to the face of the person on the ground. She did not speak loudly. If she spoke, it was under her breath, the way one speaks to a wound, not to a crowd. She took the chalk and drew a mark on the inside of the person’s wrist. A simple line and curve, almost like the beginning of a letter. Then she placed her palm over the mark.

The taller man inhaled.

The woman’s shoulders rose and fell in one slow breath. She held her hand there longer than seemed necessary. Her eyes closed, but not theatrically. In concentration. Her brow furrowed as if she were bearing weight.

In the dimness the other man saw a change that was smaller than a glow. Color returned under her hand. A faint warmth, like embers waking. The trembling of the body eased. The shallow flutter of breath became a breath that moved the blanket.

The child made a small sound, half sob, half laugh.

The woman kept her hand there until her own fingers began to shake. When she lifted her palm, she did it slowly, as if her skin were stuck to ice. The mark on the wrist was gone, as if the flesh had swallowed it.

The person on the ground coughed, deeper now, and drew in air with hunger.

The taller man whispered, urgent, satisfied. “We’ve got enough. Let’s get her.”

The other man did not have time to think.

The taller man’s hand went to the cuffs on his belt, and the other man grabbed his sword.

It was not graceful. It was not brave. It was a body obeying a decision that had arrived before words. He stepped close to the other man and drove the blade into the soft place under the taller man’s ribs where the armor stopped.

The taller man’s eyes widened. Surprise came first. Then something like understanding. Then his mouth opened, but no clean word came out, only a broken sound.

The cuffs fell into the snow, half-burying themselves without a clink. The taller man’s knees folded. He fell against a tree, slid down, and sat with his head bent to one side. His breath came out once, a white cloud, and then did not come again.

Snow fell on his shoulders as if nothing had happened.

For a heartbeat the other man stood over him, chest heaving, blade in his hand. Heat surged in his limbs, and his hands shook. He clenched them until they steadied.

In the snow near the tree line, the woman had frozen.

She had not seen the blade go in, but she had heard something. A crunch. A thud.

Her head turned slightly, and her eyes narrowed, not with panic, but with quick calculation. She stood, and when she stood the child clung to her cloak.

The woman’s gaze scanned the trees now. Not wildly. Precisely.

The other man wiped his blade quickly on the taller man’s cloak, slid it back into its sheath, and stepped out from behind the trees.

He did not raise his hands. He did not smile. He did not soften his posture. None of that would have been honest. He took one step into the open.

The woman’s eyes locked onto him. She saw his coat and saw the insignia at his collar. She saw what he was.

The child whimpered.

The man’s voice came out rough, as if his throat had forgotten how to speak without command. “Go.”

The woman did not move. She shifted slightly, placing herself between him and the person on the ground, though he had not moved toward them.

“Go,” he said again. “Now.”

The woman’s eyes flicked past him, toward where the taller man had been. She saw nothing but trees and falling snow, but she saw enough. Her gaze returned to the other man, and she held it.

He took a half step closer, then stopped. He kept distance. “Leave,” he said, and the word carried something that was not command. It carried necessity.

The woman looked down at the person she had healed. The person was breathing now, not well, but breathing. The child’s eyes were fixed on the other man’s insignia like it was the eye of a predator.

The woman bent and gathered her pouch, tucking the cloth bundles inside with quick hands. She moved as if she was used to not being wanted.

As she moved, her cloak shifted and the other man saw blood on his own coat. A dark patch along his ribs. He had not felt the cut until now. It stung suddenly, like a delayed thought.

The woman saw it too.

“You’re bleeding,” she said, as if stating weather. She stepped toward him with the cautious directness of someone approaching a wounded animal. She stopped close enough that he could smell smoke and bitter herbs on her cloak.

“Turn,” she said.

He hesitated, then turned his side.

She pulled his coat open without gentleness. Beneath, his shirt was cut. Blood seeped from a shallow line along his ribs. He flinched when cold air hit it.

The woman clicked her tongue, a sound of irritation more than pity. She took the chalk nub from her pouch.

He watched her hands. The cracked knuckles. The pale scars. The stiffness in her fingers that she ignored.

She drew a quick mark on his skin, smaller than the mark she had drawn on the other man’s wrist. Then she placed her palm over it.

Heat spread beneath her hand, not like fire, but like comfort. The cut tightened. The pain eased. The mark vanished when she lifted her palm.

She stepped back as if the act had taken something from her. Her fingers trembled now. She tucked her hands under her cloak for warmth, and for the first time he saw the cost in her face. Not suffering. Fatigue.

He swallowed. His eyes stung for reasons he did not have words for.

“Go,” his voice broke, and this time the word sounded almost like a plea, though he did not mean it that way.

The woman lifted her chin slightly. “They will kill you.”

He said nothing.

She looked at him a long moment. Then she turned her head toward the trees, toward a path that did not look like a path.

“There’s a place,” she said. “Not a town. Not the kind of place with names. Just a place.” She glanced at the child, then back at him. “You could come with us.”

The offer was plain. Not warm. Not romantic. Practical.

Behind her the person on the ground coughed again, and the sound was deeper, more human.

The man felt his chest tighten. He imagined following her into the dark, into somewhere the city did not reach. He imagined sleeping without listening for bells. He imagined warmth that did not have to be earned through compliance.

Then he imagined the road back to the city, back to the names, lists, and recorded memories. He imagined the absence of the taller man being noticed. He imagined questions.

He looked at the child. The child stared at him as if trying to decide what kind of monster he was. He looked at the woman’s hands, tucked under her cloak now, and saw again the scars, and something in him pulled tight.

He shook his head once.

“No,” he said.

The woman did not look surprised. She nodded once, as if she had expected it and offered anyway because offering was part of what kept the world from becoming only law.

“Then stand aside,” she said.

He moved back, clearing the narrow space between brush and trunk.

The woman bent and helped the person on the ground sit up. It was an old man. His face was lined, his eyes sunken. He blinked as if he had been underwater and was now seeing air. The woman murmured something to him that the other man could not hear. The old man nodded weakly. The woman lifted the child first, settling the child against her hip, then helped the old man to his feet. The old man leaned on her shoulder. The child clung to her scarf.

For a moment they were just four bodies in falling snow.

She turned as if to go.

He heard his own voice speak before he chose the words. “What is your name.”

The woman paused. She did not turn back fully. She stood with her face half toward him, half toward the trees. “Don’t ask.” She looked at him then, directly, and her eyes were not soft. They were tired and steady. “You can remember what I am,” she said. “You can remember what I did.”

She shifted the old man’s arm higher over her shoulder, adjusting the weight with practiced motion. The child’s head rested against her scarf, eyes half closed.

Then she stepped into the trees.

The snow began to erase them immediately.

The man stood very still until the dark swallowed their shapes and the sound of their footsteps was gone. The woods resumed its quiet as if it had never been broken. The cold returned to his body, creeping into the places heat had fled. Now it felt different. Now it felt earned.

He stepped back onto the path that led toward the city.

He drew his shoulders back.

He lifted his chin.

His breath came out in a long white line and vanished.

Then he began to walk.