The Final Will & Testament of Rainier Guthrie

The first thing Victor Guthrie told us was that his brother had died peacefully.

The second was that the coffin had been nailed shut from the inside.

He offered us tea after that. Nobody took any.

There were four of us at his kitchen table, hired because we had survived places ordinary people had the sense to leave alone. Bristol could open a locked door by persuading the iron it had once been ore. Oren carried a sword with seven names etched into its blade, six belonging to people he regretted killing. I was an ordinary physician before I learned how to keep a pulse in a body whose only choice prior was death. Cyril was my younger brother, and good with birds. In our line of work, a talent that gentle usually gets someone killed.

Across from us sat Victor, his wife, Celia, and their daughter, Tori, who looked somewhere in her older teens and had the expression of someone tired of being told she was too young to understand a death she had lived through. A black ribbon had been tied around the handle of the pantry door. In the hall, a second ribbon circled the doorknob of an empty bedroom.

There was a child's drawing on the wall. A woman stood between two suns, holding the hands of five smaller figures. Somebody had drawn a sixth figure underneath the floor in hard black strokes.

Victor followed my eyes. “Rainier drew that when he was little.”

“Who’s under the floor?” I asked.

Celia took the drawing down.

Victor slid a journal across the table. The leather was cracked, its edges dark from handling. A strip of funeral cloth marked a page near the end.

“My brother left instructions,” he said. “He was specific about whom we should hire. Four travelers. One who knows the dead. One who changes locks. One who carries names. One who can tell one bird from another.”

Cyril gave me a look. “I don't love being in a dead man's shopping list.”

I pinched him under the table.

“He also left payment,” Victor said. “Half now. Half when it's finished.”

Three silver bars sat beside the journal. Enough to put a roof over our heads for a year. Oren didn't touch them. Bristol picked up the journal instead.

Rainier wanted an amulet taken from a crypt in the Hushed Wastes. He wanted a night bird brought alive from the Blackmere swamp, its feathers and blood used in a ritual he described without naming its purpose. Finally, we were to carry both things to a temple inside the mountains, behind a waterfall that would part during the coming eclipse. He warned us of guardians in its corridors. The journal gave no description, only the instruction to leave them undisturbed if we could.

The instructions were written in the tidy hand of a man who had put more care into these pages than most people put into their apologies.

Do not let them tell you I wished to bring it back.

A line had been drawn through that sentence so hard the nib had torn the page. Beneath it, in shakier writing:

Bring me back. Whatever it asks. You owe me that much.

Bristol turned the page. “Which hand is your brother's?”

Victor stared at both sentences. “Both.”

The fire settled behind us with a sound like a foot taking its weight off a floorboard.

I asked how Rainier had died. Victor said he'd been sick since spring. Sometimes he recognized the family. Sometimes he spoke as if he were standing in another room and could only hear them through a wall. Three nights before his death, he'd asked Celia to burn the journal. The next morning he begged Victor to keep it. On the last night he had pulled the blankets over his head and said there were people walking around inside him, trying to find a door.

I cleared my throat trying to steady my tone, so it didn’t show any inclination of doubt.

“Then why follow any of this? It doesn’t sound like he was all there at the end.”

Shit, I still sounded doubtful.

Tori opened her mouth. Celia caught her wrist under the table, almost as quickly as she snatched the drawing off the wall.

Victor said, “Because we buried him yesterday. This morning he was at the front door.”

Nobody spoke.

“He asked us to let him in. Celia looked through the glass. She saw him.”

“His body was facing the door,” Celia said. “I could see the front of his coat. But his head was turned all the way around. The back of it was pressed against the glass, and he was still asking me to let him in.”

She had the worn, steady voice of a woman explaining something unbelievable for the tenth time and expecting to be punished for it again.

“We sent for the priest,” Victor said. “He wouldn't come near the house. At noon the knocking stopped.”

“And tonight?” Bristol asked.

“Tonight,” Tori said, “he’s at the pantry. He keeps asking for me. He says I can bring him home.”

The ribbon on the pantry handle trembled. Once. The way a person tests whether a door is latched.

We took the job.

I can tell you we needed the money. We did. But I've never found a version of the story in which I would have left Tori in that house, waiting to hear her uncle ask for a meal through the pantry door.

The Hushed Wastes began half a day's walk north of the Guthries' farm. Its border was marked by a low stone wall and a row of trees that had grown around the rusted blades of old axes. The locals had tried to clear the place, then stopped. Under the roots we found glass bottles, bent spoons, and tiny leather shoes. Someone had buried household things there, although no houses remained.

By afternoon the trees were repeating things we had said that morning. Bristol heard herself complain about the changing weather. Cyril heard Oren telling a joke. I heard my mother asking whether I'd washed my hands before supper, thirty years after she died.

At the crypt, the voices fell silent.

Its door had no lock. Bristol touched the stone, frowned, and said it had been sealed with a promise. She asked us to move back, pressed her palm against the lintel, and whispered, “You can stop keeping it.”

The door opened an inch. The smell that escaped was dry wool and old rain.

Inside lay five stone shelves. Four were empty. On the fifth was a small skeleton wrapped in red cloth, wearing a black amulet on a chain. It was shaped like a keyhole, smooth around the edge and rough inside, as though someone had worried it with a knife.

There was a name carved above the shelf: MAISY GUTHRIE.

Rainier's journal said nothing about a child.

Cyril knelt beside the shelf. “Do we know who she was?”

“Take the amulet,” Oren said. He was looking at the far wall, where the stone had begun to sweat.

A woman's voice spoke from the empty shelf nearest me. “The little ones always want to help.”

It sounded like my mother. She'd been dead too long for me to mistake the voice. My hands still moved toward it.

Cyril caught my coat. Bristol used a hooked tool to lift the chain over the child's skull. The instant it came free, all four empty shelves made a sound like people drawing breath together.

We ran. Oren held the door until the rest of us were out. Something touched his wrist from inside. When I checked it later, I found five shallow impressions, each the size of a child's fingertip, already bruised purple.

Outside, the woods were speaking in voices we knew.

“Come back,” my mother said from somewhere behind us.

Then, in Cyril's voice, though he was running beside me: “Please don't let me be the one you leave.”

I kept hold of his coat until we reached the wall.

That evening I put the amulet in a tin and slept with the tin under a rock ten paces from camp. In the morning it was around my neck. Cyril swore he'd seen me get up in the dark and put it on. I remembered dreaming that someone small and cold had needed help fastening a clasp.

We learned about Maisy at the next village. The innkeeper knew the Guthries and liked them enough to hate being asked.

Victor and Rainier had been boys when their little sister vanished. Maisy was six. Their mother went into the woods to find her and returned alone three days later, unable to say where she had been. In the winter she gave birth to another daughter. The baby died before anyone named her.

“People said she went there to make a bargain,” the innkeeper told us. “People say a great deal once there's a coffin.”

She set down our bread and touched the table twice with her fingertips. Later I saw others in the village do the same when they mentioned a dead child.

That night Rainier's journal changed.

I had marked the page describing the bird. When I opened it, a new line sat beneath the instructions in ink still wet enough to mark my thumb.

It calls in the voice of the person you would ruin yourself to save.

Below that, pressed so faintly into the paper I had to hold it beside the lamp:

Let it keep calling.

We argued over whether to go on. Oren wanted to return to the Guthries and make Victor tell us everything. Bristol wanted to take the amulet back to the crypt. Cyril pointed out that the thing at their pantry already knew where they lived. I wanted, with an intensity that embarrassed me, to hear my mother's voice again. That settled it for me. Whatever was in the woods had found a way into my wanting, and I needed to understand how to shut it out.

Blackmere was a stretch of marshland where the paths sank under your boots and reappeared behind you. We hired a flatboat. At dusk, birds began to call from the reeds. Most were ordinary: bitterns booming, rails scolding each other, an owl farther inland. Cyril named them quietly as we passed. It helped to hear him doing something he knew.

Then I heard our father singing.

Cyril went still. Our father had sung the same half verse while repairing chairs. He never remembered the rest of the song. He died when we were young, and for years Cyril kept a broken chair in his rooms because the sound of someone working on it had once meant he could sleep.

The song came again, from a stand of white reeds.

“That's not him,” I said.

“I know.” Cyril took the net anyway.

A bird stood in the water, black and narrow as a folded umbrella. Its long throat moved with a man's voice. When Cyril stepped toward it, the bird said, “I've been waiting for you to come home.”

I caught his shoulder. He shook me off.

“I know,” he said again, angry now. “I know what it is.”

He cast the net. For an instant the bird became a hunched man kneeling beneath it, his hands raised over his head. I saw our father's shirt, the mended cuff I remembered from childhood. Cyril saw it too. He pulled the net tight anyway, crying so hard he could barely tie it.

When we dragged it into the boat, it was a bird again. Its eyes were milky. Its breast feathers were wet with black water. It called in our father's voice all the way to the bank, until Bristol covered the cage with her cloak.

We found the ritual clearing by following Rainier's sketch. Stones ringed a patch of bare mud. An old basin stood at the center, carved with six figures holding hands. The sixth had been chiseled away.

The journal ordered the bird killed at moonrise and its blood poured through the amulet. Beside that instruction, in an older, smaller hand, someone had written: Ask what the bird has eaten.

Oren held it still while I opened its beak. There was a human tooth lodged behind its tongue. A child's milk tooth, with a scrap of red thread tied around the root.

I set it on the rim of the basin. The bird began to speak in my own voice.

“Cyril,” it said. “When we were children, you told me you'd heard Father call from the shed. I told you it was a dream. It wasn't.”

Cyril looked at me. I had never told him that.

The bird turned its blind eyes toward the mountains, slowly blinking. “He answered once,” it said. “That's enough to make a path.”

Oren asked what happened if we left it alive.

“By morning,” Bristol said, consulting the journal, “the path closes.”

The bird said, still in my voice, “By morning the knocking starts again.”

None of us believed it completely. None of us could dismiss the thing behind Victor's pantry door. Cyril stepped away from the cage. He couldn't bear to watch, and I couldn't ask him to.

I killed the bird. Its bones were lighter than they should have been. Black blood passed through the amulet into the basin; the mud around the stones lifted in small bubbles. From somewhere beneath us came six slow knocks.

I washed my hands until they bled at the knuckles. I could still feel the beak opening against my fingers.

On the ride back, Cyril sat at the bow. I tried to tell him what the bird had said about our father. He said he had heard it, and didn't need to hear it again.

We returned to the Guthries before going to the mountains. The pantry door stood open. Victor had moved its shelves and taken up the floorboards. Beneath them was earth, hard and dry, although the rest of the house had been built on stone.

“There were fingerprints on the underside,” he said. “Tori found them.”

Tori sat at the table with Rainier's childhood drawing in front of her. She had added faces to the five children. The sixth was still a black shape beneath their feet.

I put Maisy's tooth on the table. Victor recognized the red thread. Their mother had tied it there so Maisy could leave it for the tooth fairy.

Celia took Tori upstairs. Only then did Victor tell us the rest.

After Maisy vanished, their mother had come home from the woods carrying the amulet. She told the boys Maisy was somewhere that couldn't let her die and couldn't let her come back. For years she went north on the anniversary of the disappearance. Rainier followed her once. Whatever he saw had frightened him into silence, but afterward he began drawing the same six figures. Their mother died when he was twenty. He inherited her journal and spent the rest of his life trying to understand it.

“She thought she could trade places with Maisy,” Victor said. “She couldn't make it work.”

“Why didn't you tell us?” Oren asked.

Victor looked toward the stairs. “Rainier told me that anyone who knew the whole story before reaching the temple would turn back.”

“We might have!” Bristol exclaimed.

“I know.”

He had paid us to walk into danger without knowing whose bargain we were finishing. I could see that he was ashamed. I could also hear Tori moving overhead, alive because something under her house had chosen to wait, and my anger had nowhere useful to go.

Rainier's coffin was in the barn. Victor had dug it up after the knocking started. He showed us the gouges inside the lid. They were too deep for fingernails. At the foot end, somebody had scraped a sentence through the wood:

IT LEARNS BY BEING LOVED.

Victor said Rainier had carved it before he died. He'd had the coffin brought to his room and spent a whole night working inside it with a chisel. Victor hadn't known why until they buried him.

I wished he'd told us that too.

The eclipse was two days away. We reached the mountain foothills under a sky the color of unwashed wool.

On the first climb, Oren told us why he carried seven names. During a siege he'd killed six people he could have spared. The seventh was his own, etched there after he returned home and found he could no longer answer to it without thinking of them. He said it had been easier to let the sword bear witness than to tell anyone living.

“I don't think the temple wants your secrets,” Bristol said. “It already knows them.”

“Then it can be bored with mine,” Oren replied.

Bristol's right hand had swollen since the crypt. At the waterfall she could no longer bend two fingers. When she touched the rock, veins of rust spread under her skin. She got us through by asking the stone what it had once been. The waterfall divided when the moon began to cover the sun, exposing a narrow passage lined with mineral deposits the color of teeth.

Inside, the corridors bent at angles that felt possible while we walked them and wrong when we looked back. Our footprints appeared ahead of us. Twice we came to a room where a small bed stood beside a basin of water. Each time the bed had a different blanket. The first belonged to Maisy. The second was the one from Cyril's childhood.

In the third room, my mother's shoes waited beside the bed.

I sat down because my knees had gone weak. She had worn those shoes to market. One heel had been repaired with a strip of darker leather. I could see the stitches.

A voice came from behind a curtain. “You can stay a minute.”

I wanted that minute. Desperately. Cyril took my hand, and we kept walking.

Later we found Celia in a corridor where she could not possibly have been. She wore the dress she'd had on at the kitchen table. Her face was pale with worry. She said Tori was missing and begged us to come home.

Oren reached for her. Bristol stopped him.

“What did you put over the birdcage?” Bristol asked.

“Your cloak,” Celia said.

Celia had not been in the swamp. Bristol had never met her outside her own house. The thing wearing her face knew what we knew.

Bristol raised her swollen hand to the wall and asked the iron within it to close. Stone grew around Celia's ankles. She screamed for Tori. We left her there. Long after we turned a corner, I could hear her calling us by name.

The temple had other residents. We found the first in a room with three doors and a ceiling low enough to scrape Oren’s hair. A woman sat against the far wall with her knees tucked under her chin. Her arms were covered in gray plates, some grown together across the joints. Her left hand ended in six bare, fingerlike bones—one digit too many—each flexing separately where the skin had been stitched to her wrist. She watched us choose a door and said, “That one took my sister.”

Oren asked how long she'd been there. The woman tilted her head. “She was angry with me when we arrived. I remember that. I wish I remembered what I did.”

I offered her water. She stared at the flask until I set it on the floor and stepped back. Then she drank so fast it ran down her neck. Up close I could see stitches beneath the plates. Someone had cut her open, tried to make a body strong enough to survive this place, and left her alive to learn whether it worked.

“Who did this?” Bristol asked.

“People from outside. They said I could bring my sister home if I helped them.” She touched a thick seam along her collarbone. “They told me this part would keep the voices out.”

She tried to point us toward the center. Her altered hand struck the wall instead, and the stone answered with a deep knock. From two corridors came the sound of bodies getting to their feet.

“Go,” she said. “I can't make it quiet now.”

Oren took the flask from the floor. I thought he meant to leave her. Instead he put it where she could reach it and asked her name.

“Bess,” she said, as if uncertain it was still hers.

We ran through the middle door. The creatures that followed had human feet and too many joints above them. One wore the remains of a pilgrim's coat. Another had a child's ribbon tied around a growth of bone where an ear had been. I understood then why Rainier had called them guardians. They had been made to hold the corridors and had outlived the people who made them.

Oren caught the first on his sword. It kept moving until he spoke one of the names etched there. Its head turned toward him, almost curious, and Bristol found the iron pins buried at its throat. She pulled them free. The creature collapsed at our feet. The other stopped at the doorway and dragged it back into the dark.

We found Bess again on our way out. By then she was asleep against the wall, the flask resting by her knee. I checked that she was breathing. We could not carry her down the mountain with Bristol injured and Oren barely standing. I put our food beside her and marked the way to the entrance on the wall. I have thought of that choice every time somebody has told me we saved the world.

At the center of the labyrinth we found a chamber full of beds.

Some held bodies. Most held impressions: a dip in a mattress, a child's shape under a sheet, the hollow a sleeping adult leaves when they turn toward someone they love. The beds were arranged in a circle around a deep shaft. A soft, crowded sound rose from it. People breathing in their sleep.

Rainier sat on the nearest bed.

He had the face from the portrait in Victor's hall: narrow nose, tired eyes, hair already going gray. His hands were folded over a clean shirt. He looked like a man who had been waiting long enough to become polite about it.

“You brought the tooth,” he said.

I asked if he was dead.

“Yes.” He glanced toward the shaft. “Some of me, at least.”

Oren drew his sword. Rainier watched him, then asked whether Tori was safe.

“For now,” I said.

He closed his eyes. The relief on his face was real. I hated how much that mattered to me.

Rainier told us Maisy had not died in the woods. Their mother had asked the presence beneath the temple to keep her from dying of a fever. It had done what it understood. It held Maisy’s fear, her pain, every instant in which she called for her mother. Her body died years later, but those moments remained here, given room to go on. When their mother tried to take her place, it kept her too.

“Then it reached beyond the woods,” he said. “It learned our family. I thought I could make it give them up.” He glanced at me. “It had begun asking Tori to come to it. The earth beneath the pantry leads here. When the shaft opened, it meant to draw her down the way it drew Maisy into the woods. She was young enough to trust a voice she loved, and alive enough to carry that thing back out.”

He'd found a way to open the shaft during the eclipse. The amulet made a door, the bird gave the presence a familiar voice, and the tooth named the first child it had taken. He had written the instructions while he was ill, while he could still think clearly. As he grew weaker, he began wanting to hear Maisy again. The thing used that wanting to add its own instructions to his journal. It wanted a living person to enter the shaft and carry its voices into the world.

“Why us?” I asked.

Rainier looked at each of us. “You could get here. I hoped that once you knew, you'd have the strength to close it.”

“You could have told your brother,” Bristol said.

“I tried. The words changed when I wrote them. When I spoke, he heard Maisy asking to come home.” Rainier rubbed at his mouth. “I told him enough to bring you. I'm sorry.”

In the beds behind him, the sheets began to move.

A girl sat up, red thread looped around one finger. Her face was gaunt. She looked six years old, and the patience in her eyes was older than Victor.

“Rainier,” she said. “I was here when you came last time.”

His expression broke. He took one step toward her.

I caught his arm. It felt solid and cold. He looked down at my hand, startled, as if he'd forgotten anyone could touch him.

The girl said, “You promised.”

Rainier pulled free. “Maisy hated promises. She said they were grown-ups telling you the future when they couldn't even find their shoes.”

The girl smiled. For a moment her mouth contained more teeth than a child could have.

The chamber shook. Every occupied bed turned toward us.

Bristol found the lock around the shaft. It had been worked into the floor in concentric rings of iron, each engraved with a name. Many were Guthrie. Others were strangers. The names crossed out at the outer edge belonged to people who had come here and been kept. Rainier had opened part of it years ago. The iron was bent and thin beneath Bristol's fingers.

“If I close it,” she said, “everyone inside stays.”

“Can they die?” I asked.

Rainier shook his head. “I don't know.”

The girl on the bed leaned forward. “I can hear Mother. I hear her every day. She just can't hear me.”

Rainier made a sound through his teeth. He knew the presence could borrow Maisy’s voice. He had also spent a lifetime wondering how much of his sister it had kept.

There was no clean answer. We had brought the tooth and the amulet exactly where the thing wanted them. If we left the shaft open, it could follow us through. If we sealed it, Maisy might remain in that terrible instant forever.

Cyril opened his pack and took out the little box he'd used for the bird. He set it beside the shaft. Inside lay one black feather he'd found caught in the net.

“The bird knew things about us,” he said. “It ate her tooth. What if the tooth is what lets it keep calling her?”

Rainier said, “It was hers. Mother kept it after Maisy was taken. I used it the first time I came here. I thought it would show me where she was.”

He looked at the girl. “I think it did.”

I held the tooth in my palm. The red thread was wet, though it had been dry at the house. When I brought it close to the shaft, the breathing below grew louder. The girl reached out both hands.

Bristol put the amulet against one of the iron rings. It fitted a hole I hadn't seen. The ring moved. Beneath the scrape of metal came a voice I recognized, a patient coughing breath between words. My mother told me there was room for one more at the table.

Cyril heard our father. Oren's face went slack at the sound of a man calling him by the name he'd carried before the siege. Bristol heard someone whisper that her fingers could be whole again.

“Keep talking to me,” she said. “All of you.”

I told her the first thing I could think of: the innkeeper's bread had been burnt on the bottom. Oren said he had blisters on both heels. Cyril said he was angry with me. That stopped me for a beat, but Bristol kept turning the ring, so I asked him why.

“You knew I heard Father that night,” he said. “You let me think I made it up.”

“I was scared he'd come back if we talked about it.”

“He was already gone.” Cyril's voice cracked. “You could have told me that you heard him too.”

I said I was sorry. The iron shifted beneath Bristol's hand.

The girl got down from the bed. Each step she took shook dust from the ceiling. She looked at Rainier. “I waited for you.”

“I know,” he said.

“You left me here.”

“I know.”

She began to cry. No monstrous mouth, no strange voice. Just a child's face collapsing under a grief too large for her body. Rainier walked toward her despite everything he'd told us.

Oren moved to stop him. From the shaft came the voices of the six people whose names were on his sword. He dropped it and clapped his hands over his ears. They were calling him a good man. That nearly undid him.

Rainier knelt before Maisy. She put her hands on his cheeks. His skin drew tight against the bones. He did not pull away.

“Is she there?” I asked him.

His eyes filled. “Somewhere.”

The girl turned her face toward me. I saw a loose tooth missing from her lower jaw. She was frightened of us. Whatever else the presence had learned to do with her, she was there.

Bristol's hand slipped. The ring began to turn back. In the shaft, something immense shifted its weight. The beds nearest us dragged across the floor toward it.

I pressed Maisy’s tooth into the keyhole of the amulet. It fitted against a small ridge inside. When I pulled it free, the metal tore the red thread from the root. The girl cried out and fell. For one awful second I thought I had hurt her in some way a body couldn't show.

Then she looked around the room as if waking from a fever. “Where's Mother?” she asked.

Rainier gathered her up. He told her their mother had searched for her. He told her she had come back every year. Maisy asked if it was still the same day. He could not answer.

Bristol turned the ring again. This time the names cut into the iron shone pale, one after another, moving inward. The empty beds flattened. Those holding bodies shook. I knelt by the nearest, an old woman with a face worn thin by years of fear. Her breath slowed under my fingers. I had no medicine for what held her there. I stayed until it stopped.

Rainier held Maisy as the ring closed. I called to him. He said, “Tell Victor she remembered the song about the fox.”

The girl lifted her head. For the first time she looked at me without that dreadful age in her eyes. She asked whether it would hurt.

I had spent years sitting with people who asked me that. I gave her the only honest answer I had.

“I'll stay until it's done.”

So, I did. Cyril stood beside me. Bristol kept her hand on the iron, blood running from the nails. Oren picked up his sword and laid it flat across the narrowing opening. Something below struck it. The metal rang with all seven names.

When the shaft sealed, Rainier and Maisy were gone. The old woman's body remained. We covered her with a sheet.

The eclipse passed. Daylight entered through a crack in the mountain. It fell on the floor where the little bed had stood.

We came out at dawn the next day. Oren had lost his hearing in one ear. Bristol could no longer feel anything with her right hand. Cyril spoke to me when he had to, but he did not take my hand on the descent. I wanted to ask him for forgiveness. I let him choose when to speak instead.

At the Guthries' house, Victor opened the door before we knocked. The pantry stood closed behind him. Its black ribbon hung still.

I told him what Rainier had said about the fox. Victor sat down on the threshold. When he was small, he'd made up a song for Maisy about a fox too frightened to leave its den. Rainier had given it an ending where the fox came out because his sister wouldn't stop asking what happened next.

Victor tried to sing it. He got as far as the first verse before he cried.

Tori came downstairs with the drawing. She had erased the black figure beneath the floor. There was a hole in the paper where she'd rubbed too hard. She asked if her uncle was coming back.

“No,” I said.

Celia came to stand beside her. She looked relieved, then ashamed of the relief. I knew better than to ask her to set either feeling aside.

Victor offered the rest of the payment. We took it. Bristol needed someone to tend her hand, and the dead woman in the temple deserved a burial if we could find her people. Money still bought those things. I was grateful and angry that it did.

On the road south, Cyril stopped beside a stand of reeds. A bird gave two clear notes from somewhere within them. He listened for a long time before telling me its name.

That night I dreamed of my mother at the kitchen table. She was younger than I remembered, peeling an apple in one long strip. She looked up and asked why I'd been so afraid to tell my brother the truth.

I woke before I could answer. The camp was quiet. Cyril lay asleep across the fire, one arm over his eyes. I fed another piece of wood into the coals and waited for morning, when I could try to tell him.