katabasis | [PSL] in this sense the open jaws of wild beasts will appear no less pleasing than their prototypes

[PSL] in this sense the open jaws of wild beasts will appear no less pleasing than their prototypes

The bread that is over-baked so that it cracks and bursts asunder hath not the form desired by the baker; yet none the less it hath a beauty of its own, and is most tempting to the palate. Figs bursting in their ripeness, olives near even unto decay, have yet in their broken ripeness a distinctive beauty.

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He's on his feet in an instant, moving so directly toward the tang of gunsmoke that he's practically asking to be shot. But they can't afford the possibility of the first rifle being reloaded. They can't run and they can't have another person shot if there's more than one man in pursuit of them; and he has one bullet in his gun and it will take time to reload and the result is that this demands close quarters. When the second man parts through the brush, attention pinned on the hill and the dog and the woman bleeding on the ground, James is nearer than he realizes.

The pistol crack is loud between the trees. The dog squirms and whines in the circle of Bettina's arms. Another snap follows, hollow like a hammer on a drum - the sound of a head catching the butt of a rifle. In the thicket, Charlotte has cracked the first rifler over with her long gun. Richard is scrambling to wrench the man's spent weapon out from under him.

It's over on an instant. That James doesn't recognize either the dead man or the one splayed on the ground from the line in the yard is a blessing-- "Is that all of them?" He demands.

Charlotte is already rushing past him up the hill, her rifle clutched in both hands. "Did you see anyone else?" comes out as a snarl. Richard answers: 'No sir, just them. I don't know.'

'Don't know' is the dangerous part. Charlotte is there to Thomas and Bes now, dropping immediately to her knees beside them. Maybe the dog twisting in Bettina's hands is borrowed. Maybe this is a coincidence. Or maybe they're part of some larger effort to stalk the woods. Maybe more men will be coming through the trees toward the sound of gunshots. Flint takes the rifle from the dead man. "Make sure he doesn't wake up. And take all his shot and powder too," he snaps to Richard, then rushes back up the hill.

The round bullet comes out of Bes's flesh with only a little coaxing and her choked sound of anguish, a miracle it wasn't in deep, but the angle it's hit her at is causing so much bleeding that she's already looking unearthly pale, soaking through everything Thomas is putting on her. He presses down firmly and without looking up asks,

"Frances, can you reload a pistol?" to the girl even now coming out from her hiding place. She answers him yes, already hurrying to Sophie to take it from her and do as she's bid. "Stay with James."

Fuck. He almost swears aloud at the mess of blood, listening to Bettina struggle with the dog and Richard shakily searching the unconscious man. Thomas isn't nervous, he isn't afraid - he's frustrated about Bes, at how fast they're going to need to move, but the rest of him feels very distant.

He has been recaptured before. Dragged back into chains before. It isn't happening again.

"Charlotte, take the rifle off. Put your hands here." His voice is quiet, but steady, casting some strange calming effect without trying to. Sophie is busy gathering more strips of fabric - having wisely cut up the dresses some of the women changed out of already, forming something sturdy enough to try and tie around Bes's leg. "Richard. Richard." Pointed, not snappish. "Is he dead?"

Thomas gets a shocked look in response.

"Come here."

Already covered in blood, Thomas switches places with the young man, instructing him quietly where to hold the fabric. The dog is beginning to make a desperate, loud whine, and they can't let it go on like that-- Bettina is using both hands to hold it. She gives him a beseeching look, apology swirling somewhere in her eyes. Thomas comes over to her and fishes the knife out of her apron, between her and the squirming animal that tries to growl at him. "Don't look," he tells her quietly, but she does anyway. Maybe not wanting Thomas to have to do it alone, the act of killing an animal feeling so much worse than doing it to a human, for whatever perverse reason.

Maybe it's because they have more in common with animals. Beaten, trained creatures with masters. The dog quiets, less blood than Thomas thought there'd be. He doesn't touch its soft ears after, though he thinks some years ago, he would have. Bettina scurries up to take the rifle and stand at the edge of their makeshift camp, pointing the business end of it out towards the forest, ready to shoot anyone who comes near. Thomas moves towards the fallen man.

The blood is everywhere - coming up through Thomas's fingers and Charlotte's, underpinned by the crunch of leaves and the crooked small noises Bes makes when she breathes in. He wants to ask how it is - can she feel her toes still? - or even touch the young woman's trembling hand. But Sophie is nearer, quickly weaving strips of fabric into something like a bandage. Charlotte bears down on the bloody gash and Thomas--

Thomas has it well in hand.

"Where did you see them from, Charlotte?"

"There's a patch of blackberries over there. We were down picking some when we saw them coming through the trees in this direction. From--" she struggles not to adjust her grip. "Sophie, be quick about that. From along the bottom of the hill, really. I dont know the direction. I'm sorry."

"Don't be. It's fine."

So he and Frances climb back to the ridge, leaving the bloody business behind them. He reloads the pistol as he goes, pausing at the lip of the hill to search the wood toward the nearby plantation. Then they cut backwards in the direction the two men and dog must have come from, attention sharpened to points as they scout the tangle of trees and brush at the bottom of the incline. If there were others, they should be cutting forward now toward the sound of shots. They should be closing on the escaped slaves on the hill, invisible now to James's eye thanks to the uneven elevation and the undergrowth.

They make a circuit, quick and quiet down the face of the hill and back up in the direction the two men must have come - past Charlotte's blackberries and punctuating up through the brush, the whole forest quiet and unmoved by either their passing or the earlier gunshots. But the fact that the two men were alone is the smallest possible blessing. Someone will be expecting them back. Someone will eventually miss them. Someone will be looking in this direction and they have a woman with a hole in her leg.

"Is she going to die, Mr Flint?" Francis asks, pale even now minutes (it feels like hours) after the fact. The pistol is steady in her hand though.

"No," he says. They make their way through the whispering tall grass and dappled sunlight. He can see Thomas once more, standing over one of the men. There's nothing between them but thin ragged trees. On the hill, Bettina swivels the rifle toward the sound of them coming near, but lowers the gun a moment later. "We aren't so far from where we're going. She'll be fine."

James decides he believes it.

The man Charlotte got is barely breathing, and all Thomas does is turn his face down into the dirt, in the hopes it'll suffocate and kill him without further bloody; he can't pass as anything but a fugitive covered in blood like this, and he and anyone else soaked this way will have to take whatever's cleanest off of the dead men. He stands for a moment just looking at the wayward overseer's prone form. Not reeling. Thinking.

He ducks back down to search for and fish something out of the man's pockets, relieving him of the firestriker he must have (owing to reeking of tobacco). There's one or a flint in one of their packs, but it'd take too long to find. This is convenient. He shrugs his coat off and pushes his sleeves up, looking over at Bettina's flinch and James returning with Frances, taking a measure of fortification in that they aren't at a run.

Which knife in their scattered collection is the widest? He only spares half a minute to decide on whichever one's immediately available instead of taking a poll. His left hand is shaking a little, but it's better than the way both of Sophie's are, or Richard's stricken look standing above Bes.

"This can't wait," he says as soon as James is in earshot.

Or she's going to die. And he can't-- He can't, they can't. Thomas knows they have to leave and right now but it's going to take a few minutes to get a fire and get the knife hot enough to burn the wound, so he's already crouching down and clearing a little space on the ground. "Go pack up," he tells Richard. Bettina is already peeling one of the felled men out of his coat.

If they're ready to move as soon as it's done, it'll be of some small degree of better than just waiting, anguished. Maybe someone can go scout ahead, though maybe that would just be more dangerous. Maybe Thomas should stop thinking about it and focus on what he's doing. Sophie gasps when she realizes what he's up to but Bes talks over any objections through gritted teeth, "Hurry before I fucking pass out."

"Might be better if you did," Charlotte says, as bloodied as Thomas. The knife sits in the small flame, and he does not let himself think what the smoke might look like, or how far away it could be seen from.

(Tick, tick.)

It feels like an impossible stretch of time when he finally decides it's ready - barely able to hold it for risk of burning himself - and calls whoever's closed over to stomp out the fire as soon as he moves the tool from it to Bes, who takes in a breath and pushes it out just as Charlotte pulls the deep red bandages back, wiping it as clean as possible. It's only in the open air for a second but blood still oozes out, then there's a cruel sizzle and the stench of burning flesh and Bes trembles and makes a choked sound, an awful twitch going through her body when the sensation continues-- he has to hold it on, and on, making sure it's sealed.

God, what if it isn't. This isn't magic.

But when he pulls the knife back no rush of blood follows and the black patch of her leg is grotesque, but at least in a state that might heal. She's as white as a sheet and her head's lolling back, supported by Sophie. Charlotte and Thomas rush to bandage her and haul her to her feet, though it's clear consciousness is only the barest suggestion.

He leaves Thomas to it - striking the little fire and the intolerable minutes spent heating the blade. There's nothing he can do to make the metal grow hot faster. Instead he helps Bettina strip the men while Frances watches the treeline from halfway up the hill. While the little finger of smoke twists away up into the treetops. While blood oozes from the dead dog's neck out onto dirt, pulped leaves, yellowed blades of broken grass.

They're going to be fine. They'll support Bes in shifts - haul her overland slung against their shoulders. They'll quit this place and travel into the night then rest all the next day during daylight hours. If they'd been traveling by darkness, it would've made them harder to spot today, he thinks. No changing it now. It won't happen again.

It's only when the kit is stowed and the fire's being stomped out that James strays back up the hill to join them. They're a fragmented collection of people stuffing things into linen bags and folding fresh clothes over arms - mutely transfixed for a moment by the hot glint of Thomas's knife and the bubbling sound it makes on skin. James, new rifle slung over his shoulder and pistol still in hand, watches as the flesh melts under Thomas's fingertips.

He takes the knife the moment Thomas is finished with it, scrubbing it against the dirt until the heat goes out while Bes's leg is rapidly rebandaged and she's all but dragged upright. "Sophie, take this." James gives her the knife; she pulls up a handful of grass and quickly begins to scrub the blood from the blade.

"Charlotte, you and I take her first." Before anyone can argue - he can sense it there lingering at the edge of the women who tolerated his feverish presence in the house all those days, Richard who had certainly watched the beating, and Thomas who-- is Thomas -, James moves to help take her weight. "I'm not getting any fresher than I am now."

It's a curt assessment of the facts. Walking with a gun ready and all his attention for the wood as they move through it won't do anything to make him stronger than he is in this moment. He and Charlotte can manage a mile or two.

With his arm braced around Bes, he clumsily peels the rifle from his shoulder and passes it to Thomas. "Ready?"

Which is for Charlotte. He doesn't need to ask whether Thomas is.

There can be no surprise at the way Thomas does give him a bit of a look, but it's brief - and ultimately, Thomas trusts him. He lingers close enough to touch Bes's face and tilt her head against James's shoulder, not wanting her to hurt herself in her barely-awake state-- not that being bodily dragged along between two other people is going to be comfortable, or that she won't be dislodged anyway.

What on earth is he going to do with a rifle. He takes it anyway, kept in an easy position of his shoulder, careful not to get it tangled with the straps for anything else. Charlotte is as ready as she's going to get and so they set off, with Thomas tempering the collective, urgent desire for ungainly speed with what steadiness he can instill. Rushing will just be worse for Bes, make more noise, and risk someone stumbling and becoming injured.

They walk, and walk, and no one appears from the trees to menace them. Thomas has an ill feeling about it all still, but doesn't bother paying it any attention. It doesn't mean anything, it just is what it is. They are being hunted, but they knew they'd be. Should they have killed everyone at the plantation? Should he have told Liam they all have to die and not let James find that small degree of humanity? These questions, too, are not worth diverting attention towards. No matter what their exit was like, no matter how many dead left behind, they would be chased. There is no greater offense to white men than to shirk their holy authority, and no greater cause to take up outside oneself. Had everyone died, the neighbors would have come instead, and maybe then there wouldn't have been a dog who found Bettina familiar.

(He labors not to think of the dog.)

Hours have gone by when Frances startles, and Thomas stills, heart in his throat, hears Bettina behind him cock the hammer back on her rifle, but it turns out to just be a doe with her fawn some yards ahead of them. The spindly-legged animals pick their way through the undergrowth, ears and noses twitching in their direction, before meandering on. They are unhurried, unconcerned with the humans trudging along, not knowing enough of them to fear.

Ages later, Charlotte says, "They were really beautiful. I'd forgotten how... I'd just forgotten."

Despite every effort and the best intentions, by the time the light starts to fade there's simply no choice but to stop. Bes is all but drenched in sweat from the effort of keeping her leg under her and as dusk creeps through the wood, what by daylight was merely uneven going becomes violently treacherous to exhausted, clumsy feet. Pressing on would be asking for someone to break their neck.

When they come at last to a sluggish stream (maybe a second thread from the same source as the one they'd crossed the night prior), they splash across the it and crawl up past a fallen beech tree. There they finally make camp in the shadow of the unearthed roots, a dirty shirt shortly sacrificed to make a pillow for Bes. She's pale in the dying light, a sickly sheen of sweat over the skin, but she isn't flush. No fever, Sophie says, the back of her hand against the wounded woman's brow. That's good, she says, as if it's something that requires verbalizing. They all agree.

Eventually, when every piece of his body doesn't feel so miserable and his stomach has something in it, James goes down to the creek so he can wash his face and hands. In the darkness, the stillness of the wood cedes in the face of calling night birds and the rasp of insects, the small foliage noises of small game venturing from their warrens.

No fires burn in the distance. No sign of torches illuminate the black forest behind them. From the bank of the stream, stars are visible through the patchwork of the treetops and as he wipes the grit and sweat from the back of his neck, James studies their arrangement. That might be point of Cygnus's beak there, luminescent in summer. If it is, then he can pick out the treetops behind which Aquila and Lyra must be shielded. He thinks he could know how many degrees to turn to find Polaris. The picture of it in his mind is so secure that climbing back up to where they're gathered seems easier than walking down had.

"Thomas," Bes is asking. "Which book are you most looking forward to reading again?"

James first presses his fingers into Thomas's pale hair when he reaches him. Strokes his head and touches the back of his neck before sitting down beside him. "I thought Frances was taking first watch," he says to Bes's prone form through the darkness.

She hums, noncommittal.

Bes thinks she's going to stay awake for watch, but Thomas knows that while the pain is too distracting to let her sleep right now, once she's been sat there for an hour or so and the nervous, hyper-awake rush leaves her, she'll be out in an instant. He hasn't bothered explaining this to her; she'll fall asleep soon enough. There's no harm in letting Frances rest for a while. Rest. Thomas has gotten so little sleep, but he isn't sure, exactly, how tired he is. He sits in the dirt and keeps half his attention on James at the stream, tethered unbreakably.

He closes his eyes at the welcome touch, tilts his head into it just a little, James's fingers smoothing away the worst edges of his exhaustion like drawing venom from a bite. He sits, and Thomas has a sharp, almost painful urge to turn into him, pull him close and press his face against his throat, feel his heartbeat and his breath and smell his skin, his sweat, curl fingers in his shirt and feel him solid and alive.

Thomas flexes his hand nearest James, the tremor mostly gone, and stays where he is.

James's query has bought him a moment with that question, mercifully. In the near-dark it's difficult to make out his expression from six feet away, but even if anyone could, perhaps only someone who knows him as well as the man beside him would be able to tell he's caught short by it. He grasps for possibilities, some comfortable way to answer that lets him recite a few verses of poetry to lull everyone to sleep, or something that'll make James smile. He can't remember the last time, a specific time, he'd touched a book that wasn't a Bible. He remembers the last book he'd been reading in between work on the Nassau issues, he remembers reading things aloud... in his salon, and in James's apartment. He remembers Meditations.

"I admit that question is one I have avoided for fear of it driving me a little mad," he says after a while, hushed tone offering little to slip into the still evening air except what might be uncomfortable honesty. "I defined a significant part of myself and how I related to others by literature and academia, all things challenging and heretical and hedonistic. Having all that in my head has been a kind of talisman, I suppose. I don't know what I'll find when I look again."

What if he's remembered everything all wrong.

But--

His smile, abrupt and lopsided, isn't forced. "I'd like to read something new, and banned."

Bes, whose expression had become bordering on watery listening, huffs out a little laugh - along with Sophie, laying on her side and listening in.

"France," he says, hand idle there at the line of Thomas's spine dipping between hisbshoilder blades. It's an idle touch, as idle as the thought: "Is where you'll want to go then. To my knowledge, banned books don't make up much of the imports to the Americas."

It's not a good joke by any stretch of the imagination, but maybe the trace of certainty makes up for it. If they need to go to France to find Thomas a mountain of banned books, every single one of them expensively profane and intimately reassuring, then they'll go to France. Those lessons scratched into the dirt in the evenings can be put to use after all.

(It doesn't matter if that has nothing to do with where they go or what they do. That he's sure the option is on the table at all is the part that should hold some measure water.)

"Have you ever been, Mr Thomas?" Sophie murmurs across the point of her elbow, head tucked against her bent arm. "To France."

Shoulder aching, James lets his hand slip from Thomas's shoulder to the small of his back. Hooks his fingers in the waist of his trousers to see his hand secure there.

"Just banned people."

Neither of you are funny.

Thomas is going to fall asleep before Bes at this rate; James's touch, no matter how small and merely comforting, lures him into further peace. He wants to be blankly unconscious, but he also wants to sit awake and share words with the man he loves and these people who are-- some kind of family now, probably. His closest hand curls around James's knee, that faint, involuntary tremble only barely present. Where might all of them go? Are there any places left in the world where people such as them can live without being terrorized for accidentally behaving honestly within anyone else's sight?

"No, I never had the opportunity to do much traveling."

He should have, but his father had always put his foot down about it, or it would have been politically unseemly. At the time he found it repressive, but now it feels cossetted and sheltered. Sort of. Mostly it doesn't feel like anything, too distant from whatever (whomever) he is now.

"I'd never been on a ship before," says Bes, and for whatever reason, there's no need for her to spell out what she means. "Is it true you're supposed to sleep in hammocks?" This, to James. Sophie chimes in, "That sounds nice. I was in a box."

"At least nobody could get to you," is crudely optimistic, and Sophie makes an agreeable noise, like this is a topic of routine conversation.

He laughs anyway, a low murmuring noise in the falling darkness. His hand is sure there, knuckles gentle against the small of Thomas's back. And Thomas is still wearing that ruined shirt, the sleeves and waist dark and tough with spattered blood. But it doesn't seem so unnatural, so repulsive in the evening far removed from the place they'd come. Frequency breeds contentment, he knows, but maybe blood on Thomas's shirt is fine for as long as he has his humor. For the duration that his hand is at James's knee (regardless of the tremor of his fingers).

"That's right. Fourteen inches to hang your your hammock in. If you're fortunate, it's yours. If not, you share with the man on the opposite watch." Bettina is awake and watching them from where she lays, a dead man's coat bundled under her head. Richard snores, already asleep where he sits jammed upright against a narrow tree trunk. "Or," James says, at least halfway joking. "You're the captain with a box slung by ropes from pins, sleeping on pillows your wife embroidered."

Sophie gasps so loudly that everyone conscious must flinch. It's a testament to how exhausted she must be that she says the insensible thing in her head anyway. "Mr Thomas! You never said you knew needle and thread!"

Thomas laughs. Immediately. He should still himself and hush Sophie, her exclamation too loud in the still dark, but he can't-- he can't at all, because he laughs too abruptly and too hard for anything but a sudden burst of noise that he dampens (but does not silence) by ducking his head with the back of his free hand over his mouth.

Oh, god. Every ache and pain in him - of which there are legion - is agitated by the way his shoulders shake, practically getting a stitch in his side over it. He ends up with tears in his eyes, clutching James's knee, doubled over, and he's not even sure why it's so funny.

Sophie has her hands clasped over her mouth with laughter and mortification, Bettina's accidentally woken the near-asleep Frances (who mumbles 'Huh?') with her cough. Bes just has her hands over her face.

"That's all the use on a pirate ship I'd be, in fairness," he manages when he can, rasping breathless.

It's hard not to laugh with him, some exhaustion fueled and unreasonable part of him unspooling at the thought of Thomas stitching into linen, from how hard Thomas is shaking from the effort to be quiet. He can practically hear the tears of laughter in Sophie's eyes when she says between her fingers, "Oh but you'll have to learn then. I'll teach you. Daisies are quite simple."

Bes hacks out a noise that's clearly an aborted laugh, which sends Sophie wheezing into her palm and catches a low huff of laughter out of him. Christ. He sets his hand on Thomas's trembling shoulder again, then farther to thread his fingers up through his hair (easier now with him doubled over and clinging to his leg, all but killing himself with the effort to be silent).

"What is happening?" Frances demands, bewildered beyond recognition. It sends Bes and Sophie into muffled hysterics, begging 'Stop, stop, you'll kill her,' as Bes wheezes with laughter while clutching high on her thigh to keep the tremor from disturbing the wound. James has to stare up into the dark to keep from being tangled in it.

After a moment, Sophie quiets. It must be from Bettina's hand at her knee, still pale there against the dark fabric in the dark when James lets his eyes slide back from the treetops. Bes follows, her hoarse subdued laughter falling into heavy breathing. "Lord," she whispers in the dark.

Something dry and stubborn in him insists It's not that funny, and maybe it's not, but it was so unexpected they're all on such an edge that it's become so. Thomas searches in his head for any moment, just a single instance!, in the past of joking about the fact that the love of his life is another man. All he can think of are disparaging, mocking things, weaponized self-depreciation at best. Sophie's innocence about it makes it sweet and affectionate, a safe thing to joke about among people equally punished by the world, and Thomas is almost overwhelmingly touched.

"We're all deliriously exhausted is what's happening," he says, finally quieted down.

The hand that's not on James's knee is folded over his own, and he looks over at him from where he's leaning on his forearm. Did our wife do much needlepoint for you, he thinks, and his consciousness becomes stuck on having the thought of their wife in his head and he nearly laughs again, this time choked up with something else entirely.

He murmurs, "I think I should lay down before I pass out."

"I'm awake," Frances is muttering, peering at Bes in the dark - who, god willing, is teetering on unconsciousness herself, the laughing fit finally draining her of remaining fight-or-flight adrenaline. She continues, "Go to sleep. I'll wake up Richard if I start nodding off."

"Don't take any chances," he says to Frances, hand still there at the base of Thomas's skull. "Wake him up in a hour or two even if you're clear headed. There's too many of us not to trade off often and make sure everyone gets some sleep."

Frances agrees readily enough that he doesn't feel the inclination to stay awake with her. Or maybe it's just that he's hardly slept since they quit that burning skeleton and the desire to lay next to Thomas in the dark is deliriously overwhelming. Sophie curls up like a cat beside Charlotte - still sleeping somehow - and Bes quiets. Bettina draws her legs up and tucks the edges of her skirts around them to keep the warm air in. At last, James gives over: unfolding his legs with a pop of his knee and drawing his hand from Thomas's neck so that he can settle down beside him instead.

What a strange and lovely thing here at the end of a long day - laughter, however delirious, feels like it should be alien. And yet there it sits high in his chest, threatening to bubble out of him for the right word or look. Thank God for the dark, he thinks, hand shifting to Thomas's side as a magnet to a pole. "Daisies," he murmurs, too low for anyone anyone but Thomas to parse and punctuated by a huff of warm breath.

He feels like he should be emanating creaking noises as he shifts to lay down on his side next to James, but all of him is too worn-out for even that. Thomas pauses with his weight on his elbow to lean over him and press a close-mouthed kiss against his lips and bump their noses together-- no audible laugh in response to Daises but he can probably feel it tremble through him. He remembers how he looked in the low lamplight, smelling the herbal scent of the salve for his wounded back, telling him how every small moment they have together lasts a lifetime for him. It's still true.

Once upon a time Thomas was very particular about the state of mattresses; nowadays he is blessed to be able to fall asleep under any uncomfortable circumstance, and is content to lay in the dirt with one arm curled protectively over James's middle. He'll learn how to do needlepoint or knit or any other damn thing James wants, make him a dozen pillowcases, anything, everything. It would be a lovely thing to dream of.

Of course, he doesn't. The cold ground is transporting, every curious insect sting the bite of tiny wounds left by exploratory needles-- it's still dark when Thomas startles away, eyes wildly unable to focus on anything until the faint details of the world dusted by starlight materialize. It's been several hours at least, judging by the fact that Frances is asleep and Richard is up, sitting against the fallen tree - he about jumps out of his skin when Thomas sits up, too awake now and shaking too badly to even attempt to go back to sleep.

"You alright?" is Richard's barely-there murmur. Thomas makes an affirmative sound, and stays with his hip pressed against James's, one hand resting on his leg. Grounded. He sits and just breathes, willing his pulse to quiet to something normal. He doesn't know for how long.

"Shit," he says after a while, contemplating the feel of the air, the way the hair on his arms prickles.

"What is it?"

"I think it's going to rain."

A moment of quiet, then Richard agrees, "Shit."

Some minutes later, thunder growls restlessly in the distance.

Thomas beside him keeps all the heat leeching from his body into the cold, dark ground. Even dead to the world, the solid shape of him flush against his side is like an anchor - secure, sure, a lone point to pin all his confidence in. No dreams find him there - no whispers in his ear, no dark shapes under the surface of some distant choppy sea, no jagged island hungry for broken backed ships.

Eventually though, the chill find him. He shifts over, hand grasping at the empty space next to him. That - the lack - more than the scent of water in the air or the grumble of thunder, is what dredges him out of sleep. James shifts, registering Thomas's hand at his thigh only when he's already fully awake and as aware of the breeze cross cutting through the treetops over head - the call of some night bird - the rain smell at the edge of the air. He rolls slowly over (finding every muscle in his back and shoulders wound tight enough that it feels difficult) and finds his hand at Thomas's hip.

"Thomas--" Murmured low and dense, so raw from exhaustion that it hardly belongs to him.

The growl of distant weather comes again.

It sharpens something in him. He levers himself fully upright. They need to go. Now. There will be no beating the storm, but the weather demands they find shelter immediately or risk getting soaked through. And that could kill them - would kill Bes, certainly.

"Get them up." His body's infuriatingly slower than his brain is; it takes a moment for his weight to shift, for him to start getting himself from the ground. "We can't stay here."

Richard is on his feet before James is, and Thomas sits where he is for a moment until James is up, a solid presence for him to lever himself standing against. He feels like every part of him is bruised deep, but it isn't so bad. It'll be bad later, when the rain hits. It's a bright point to be able to ignore the pain now, in the dark. Thomas wakes Bes gently, Bettina next to him like a ghost at his elbow, roused by some unearthly intuition and already prodding Charlotte awake.

Bes's wound isn't life-threatening as it is, he doesn't think. She just needs to rest and get her strength back, build up humors or blood or whatever-it-is that keeps a person from slipping away in the night after a traumatic injury. There just hasn't been enough time. She is determined, though, and Thomas thinks she looks a little less pale than she did in the evening. They must notice these small things, practical even if they're single grains of sand on a beach, otherwise there's nothing to navigate by.

The sky threatens to hamstring their progress throughout the last black hours of the night and through dawn, morning bringing only dim grey light filtering through the trees. Thunder continues to growl and complain, but does not crack open; it's only a matter of time, really, but thank god or the devil or whomever that Thomas's bloody subconscious woke him up. Waiting and having less time to try and get ahead of it (to where?) would have been worse.

"I swear I keep hearing a horse," Frances says, laboring under the pack she's carrying. "I don't know if I'm going mad."

"I thought I heard it too," Richard contributes. "But it must be the thunder."

Thomas thinks of the feeling of being watched and exchanges an uncertain look with James. He has no idea, personally, too focused on keeping Bes steady against him, too disoriented from the sound of the impending weather and harsh breathing and the way everything is in turns dampened and echoed in the dense forest.

Thunder or exhaustion or it really is a horse. He pointedly isn't thinking about how at this rate, any one of them might see someone killed. There simply isn't another option but to keep going and hope to outrun all three. What else can be done? Hook east, cutting straight toward civilization without telling if they're fully past the fringe of that last plantation. They've been walking for two days, but that hardly means anything when their pace is dictated by the twisting wood and Bes's injured leg. The only rational option is to continue on this trajectory (the cold, starkly logical part of him says that a day of being soaked through by heavy rain won't ruin most of them).

Maybe some fragment of it shows in his face as he glances after Thomas. "We should be so lucky," he says, slashing through the uneasiness prickling at the back of all their necks that only way that's available to him. "If we come across a horse, we can take it. You know how to ride, don't you Bes?"

"A little," she says, breathing hard with her arm slung around Thomas's shoulders - fingers twisting into the shoulder of his shirt. "I think I could stay on."

It's a story. They all must know it is. But maybe it smooths some of the sawing anxiety that the growl of thunder on their heels has sharpened. He studies the land ahead of them, dark trees against an uneasy sky too thick with clouds to parse their exact bearings. The earth runs uneven, shadows split by the broken sunlight, and he slows the length of his stride and finds his hand at the strap of the rifle slung once more on his shoulder. He falls alongside Thomas and Bes, their company strung in an irregular line before them and Charlotte at the rear casting intermittent glances over her shoulder.

He drops his voice. "When we pass into that thicket there, continue on. I'll wait and see if anyone means to follow after. Don't slow - if nothing comes across this path, I can run to catch up."

Thomas is not in love with this plan, evident both because he is who he is and the way he glances over at James-- though there's no reproach in that look. James knows what he's doing and Thomas trusts that above all, he just loathes any circumstance in which they step so distant from the other, no matter how logical or necessary. Thomas stops them but only to shift Bes and the bag on his other shoulder, getting her arms around his neck so he can lift her up with one arm beneath both her knees and give her a break. Too exhausting to keep up for long, but it'll allow him to move quicker if something happens. And at least his posture will like it better for a few minutes.

Another look before they soldier on, this time what's there on his face is as good as leaning over to send him away with a kiss. (I love you, I hate leaving you, good luck.)

Charlotte lingers behind to wait and see if James has any particular instruction for her, her rifle adorned with a bit of sleeve over the flint in apprehension of the weather, and then she does as she's bid.

The wind is picking up now, tugging at hats and skirts, sending leaves and and branches swaying and making it even harder to hear anything over the ambient sound of the wild around them. Bes murmurs an apology about her state, and Thomas squeezes her side. Nonsense. The ground is uneven beneath the crowded bushes and brambles and they have to pick carefully, but everyone keeps moving. Thomas tries to pay attention, catch sight or sound of someone alien around them, but the shifting foliage and thunder mask everything. A wild, panicked thought strikes him, that if they walk too far and James waits too long, he might not see them again in the thick trees, to say nothing of being caught by himself.

Reason feels too exhausting, for a moment, and so Thomas lets himself have that awful thought, the dizzying fearful energy of it at least fueling further momentum. He picks its claws out of himself soon enough-- leaving one or two, perhaps, because it would be willfully foolish to assume no danger is possible. When living in a constant state of terror, a person can become complacent and used to it - that won't do. He has to learn a new kind of intuition.

Up ahead, Richard and Frances have stopped, and Bettina is moving back to Sophie's side.

"What is it?" Thomas asks, regretting the fact that he has to raise his voice to be heard.

Frances looks back at him and shrugs. Hearing things?

He has no further direction- for Charlotte or anyone else. He might say If you hear shots don't come back this way or If you find trouble, call out, but he says neither. Between the seven of them going on ahead, he trusts the sensibility of at least two to hold. Bettina, he thinks, wouldn't tolerate anything else; Thomas, he knows, won't let them fall to pieces. Not if they're relying on him. Not if it's more than just him.

("He made me promise him," she had said. "That no matter what happened next, that you and I would take care of each other.")

So as they pass through the ticket of trees, James touches his side then falls silently behind. Using the sounds of them passing through the wood - rustling leaves and snapped twigs -, he folds himself into the shadow between two trees and takes a knee there. It's not exactly subterfuge that will tolerate close examination - he must trust that if someone is tailing them, that they're far enough behind to miss one absent body until it's too late. He finds himself mentally willing Thomas and the rest to move faster anyway. The sooner they put distance between them, he reasons, the less likely a tracker is to see their backs and spot the ruse. It might be the only thing keeping the knowledge that they're disappearing into the swaying trees tolerable; otherwise it might slash into him. Cut his belly out. Steal away the certain parts of him.

Because he is certain. The world hangs strangely, so intimately near as to be like bared skin. Surely that must mean something. Surely it can't just be the storm after them.

Thomas and the others disappear into the forest. James waits, the rifle primed and ready there against his shoulder if not yet levelled. Every living thing is as a sea shifting in the wind: leaves winking from green to silver and back again, yellowing grass bending as water rises and falls. The sky is so black.

He waits and doesn't measure the time.

And waits.

And after an eternity, something stirs through the trees.

There are no more clock ticks, no more neatly (agonizingly) segmented pieces of time; James waits, and waits, and when something stirs, that something does not immediately reveal itself. The wind comes from neither ahead nor behind but one side, winding through trees to become mingled and off-balance, small moments of cyclones twisting about. Then: like a slice cut out of reality, a horse's foreleg visible through the brambles. Only for a moment. In snatches, would-be steady gait, hooves on dirt and tangled leaves.

Someone following.

Snap.

More than someone. On James's other side, entirely removed from the spot he'd been watching, is a second horse, and upon it, a young man. Without closer education that they all must certainly lack it's impossible to guess if he's Yamacraw or Yamasee, but certainly Creek-- dressed for the ugly weather, he is on the cusp of leaving childhood, and he's looking at Flint with a frown that could mean

anything.

He says something, utterly indistinguishable in its lack of resemblance to any European or African language, but there is some universal thread of exasperation in it.

A chirp-like noise - clearly human-made - tries to catch the boy's attention. He points forward, after where the rest of the party has walked on. Urging. Maybe he thinks this man is lost. He clearly doesn't care about the threat of a gun. Pointing. More words, slower, like maybe if he speaks to the wandering white man as if to a child he'll magically understand.

On the wind are snatches of voices. Just moments, fractured off of something-- up ahead. Thomas's voice?

It's something poured out of a dream - the brief confirmation of what he felt he'd somehow known already followed so immediately by the pistol shot snap of a twig so near his ear. The gangly boy on his dark pony could be made of the weather and James's own lurching paranoia, the patron of some distinct and particular fear. That is: the sudden realization of the world at present piercing definitively into this separate sphere of wilderness inside which they've been pretending to travel. It's a bewildering form of reality. The lack of a shared language is only a small part of why he doesn't immediately parse the young man's meaning.

Then the sound of something else catches in the twisting wind - voices, maybe only in part familiar - and James rises immediately from his knee. For a split second, the rifle is set against his shoulder and his hands are laid on the stock in such a way that it would be easy to--

What? Shoot the boy? Demand his horse? Both seem so divorced from reality that he isn't sure how either even occurred to him. James takes one step back, wary as a keyed up hunting dog, then turns and moves at a clip after the sounds of his companions.

It's not quite running, but it's close. He can't help himself.

He leaves the shadow of his hiding place and nothing reaches out to follow-- no other tracking students materialize to run alongside him, no hoofbeats pounding in pursuit. More experienced woodsmen would have left him there to be adrift in nothingness forever--

(Or they wouldn't have been noticed in the first place?)

The shapes of his companions are not so easily found up ahead, snatches of their voices in the air misleading, offering no distinct clues about the direction they're in. In midday the light should be beaming down but it's dark, darker, and before James makes it across the thicket he'd marked out, the sky finally gives up the water it's been holding so precariously. No ominous crack of thunder or flash of lightning, just rain, sudden and torrential.

Sophie comes into view first, a dirty, pale-faced smudge in the abruptly watery forest, Richard ahead of her and the others in close knot, tension in every figure.

--More than eight.

With a gasp Sophie turns, clutches at James when he's close enough, and nearly all heads turn. Thomas, furthest away, looks for a second like he might faint from relief, and then enormously pained when he forces his attention back to the man in front of him.

Whatever he says to Thomas is lost in the deafening sound of the rain coming down, but despite the scattered men behind him all holding weapons, no one makes a move that looks hostile. It's Frances who turns around and murmurs to the rest of them, "He's inviting us to go with them, he says the 'real hunters' paid for us to share their fire. I think."

The rifle is so solid in his hands that is feels like one of only three things in the world besides Thomas there, ghostly pale in the pouring rain, and then assemblage of men beyond him. There's a lunatic part of him that thinks to raise it when he first staggers back across them, but it's so heavy and Sophie is there immediately clutching at his sleeve and so obviously divided between stark panic and obvious relief. It lodges a strange and completely unexpected sensation under his ribs that forces some measure of sensibility out of him. When was the last time someone other than Thomas was so grateful for his presence?, is not what he thinks in the moment but it might occur to him later around the French trappers' fire.

He slings the rifle back over his shoulder, rain sluicing violently from the wide brim of his hat. "That's kind of them." For what reason? Not that it matters. They don't have the luxury of refusing a helping hand, even a suspicious one. He touches Sophie's shoulder, coaxing her fingers to come away from his sleeve, as all his attention is drawn like a lead weight on a line toward the rain-mangled conversation happening mere paces away.

Thomas is perfectly capable of this - whatever this is. James knows that, but presses forward through the knot of bedraggled escaped slaves anyway: swimming up through the pouring rain to act as shadow at his elbow.

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