He could see both in the boy’s eyes then. “But…who am I?”
Cutter shrugged again. “I don’t know, only a baby found in the road, abandoned.” Another lie, but one that was as close to the truth as he would come, as close to it as he dared come.
“You mean…even my parents didn’t want me.”
Cutter had never been good with compassion, with sympathy. There were those, Maeve among them, who had told him often that a boulder was softer, warmer than him, and he had never argued it, but there was no denying the hurt and pain in the boy’s eyes, the need to believe he had not been wantonly cast aside. “Perhaps they were set upon by bandits,” Cutter offered, hoping to give the youth a little peace, “or the Fey. There is no knowing.”
“And you…took me,” the boy said. “Why?”
Cutter did not answer that, only stared at the boy, watched the tears roll down his face, watched some part of him die as he began to accept the fact that the woman he’d known as his mother had not wanted him, that perhaps no one had. “They’re all dead, aren’t they?” the boy asked. “The folks in Brighton, I mean.”
Cutter saw no point in lying. Sometimes, the truth was dark—most times, in fact—but it never did a man any good to ignore it. “Yes.”
The lad’s mouth worked at that, twisting, and for a time Cutter thought he might burst into more tears. Instead, he nodded, his eyes growing cold, hard. “I wish I was. You should have left me.”
“No,” Cutter said, and for the first time there was some emotion in his voice as the boy’s words cut at old wounds, old scars that had never healed, that could never heal. “Death is never something to be courted, boy. Do you understand? It comes for us all in the end—there is no reason to invite it in.”
The boy had known him for years and stood in muted shock at the emotion in his words, an emotion he had never seen before in the normally stoic man he had come to admire. Finally, he cleared his throat, wiping an arm across his face furiously, ashamed of his tears, his grief, as only the young could be. The old, Cutter found, knew far too much of grief to be ashamed.
“What…will they come after us?” the boy asked.
“Yes. No doubt they are coming already. The blizzard should cover most of our tracks, but they will find them just the same, sooner or later.”
“But why?” the boy demanded. “Why did they want to hurt the people of Brighton? Why hurt us?”
“It is what they do,” Cutter said simply. There was more to it, of course, far more, but the truth of it sat behind a wall he had erected in his mind, one that had been long years in the making and that, despite his efforts, was threatening to crumble, laying bare the past and the pains it brought.
“I hate them,” the lad said. “All of them.”
“That’s alright, then,” Cutter said. “Sometimes, boy, hate is the only way a man gets on.”
“So what do we do?”
Saying nothing more about his mother or about the dead, the only people he had known his entire life, but that was not so unusual. It was the shock, that was all, a symptom common enough among those who had suffered a great tragedy, a great loss. Cutter knew that too, knew it better than most, for he had often been the cause of that loss, the reaper of that tragedy. “We continue west.”
The boy’s eyes went wide at that, and he turned gazing off in the direction. The Black Woods were some distance now, blocked by a horizon filled with snow and that only, but he continued to stare as if he could see them—and perhaps, in his mind, he could. “You mean…”
“Yes,” Cutter said. “We cannot outrun them, not for long. If we try, they will catch us.”
“And if they catch us…” The lad didn’t finish, and Cutter said nothing, letting him come to the conclusion himself, for no truth was as powerful, no lesson as well-learned, as the one a man found on his own. “But the Black Woods…” the boy said finally, “it’s…it’s where the Fey live.”
“Yes.”
The boy swallowed hard, no doubt recounting a lifetime of stories about the cruelty of the Fey, the evilness of them, some true, many not. “But if these men, if they want us so badly, won’t they just…follow us?”
The boy was clever, always had been. That, Cutter knew, he got from his mother, the real one. “They will not go so far as that,” he said with more conviction than he felt. In truth, there was no way of knowing, yet the Woods were their only chances of survival, so he didn’t bother telling the boy as it would have served no purpose, only fill him with fear when what was needed was cold, hard strength.
“It will be dangerous, won’t it? Going into the Black Wood, I mean.”
“Living is always dangerous,” Cutter said. “But it is the only chance. There is no other. Now come. It is past time we left.”
They walked for hours, the snow falling around them in a muted blanket of white, the only sound that of their footsteps crunching beneath them and the boy’s rasping, tired breaths.
In time, night fell heavy and as silent as the thickening snow around them, and the boy could walk no farther. He collapsed to the ground. Cutter stepped toward him, meaning to bring him to his feet, to tell him that they must go on, but as he had feared it might, the shock chose that moment
