Matt had had a family once, and truly his or not, it had been a family. He’d had parents that loved him, a mother that sang him lullabies when he’d had a bad dream, and a father who’d bounced him on his knee and played horsey. Now, he had nothing. Nothing except for the man in front of him who seemed as cold, as unforgiving and unfeeling as the landscape which surrounded them. “I miss them.”
The words were out of his mouth before he realized it, and Cutter turned regarding him with a blank expression. He might have been thinking anything. “Yes.”
“We should have left,” Matt said, finding that now that he’d started, he was unable to keep himself from speaking, if for no other reason than to derive some small comfort from the sound of a human voice in this strange, alien place.
“Left what?”
“The village!” Matt said, shouting the words. “I told her, my mom, a hundred times that we should leave. I wanted to go to the city, to see the world, not spend my life stuck in some backwater village like Brighton, but she refused. She always said we couldn’t, said it wasn’t safe.”
“She was right to say so.”
“But what does that mean?” Matt demanded. “Sure, it wasn’t safe, but we weren’t safe in Brighton either, were we?”
He fell to his knees then, overcome with emotion, and the tears rolled freely down his face. He did not bother wiping them away. After all, what was the point? More would come, that much was sure. And so he knelt there, on the cold hard ground, and he cried.
For a time, the big man said nothing, did nothing but stood there, regarding him. Matt, however, barely noticed, for his face was buried in his hands, the tears which he had struggled to hold back for the last several days, tears for all that he had lost, all that had been taken from him, coming freely now. Then, suddenly, there was a hand on his shoulder. A rough hand, with callouses he could feel even through his heavy shirt and jacket, and though the touch was gentle he could feel the strength behind it. “Why did she do it?” Matt sobbed. “Why did she stay?”
At first, he didn’t think the man would answer, thought that, like the several days previous, he would only let the silence speak for him. When he did finally speak, Cutter’s voice was rough and soft, as if it held back some great emotion. “Because I made her promise she would. Her and your father too, before he died.”
Matt’s sobbing cut off at that, and he raised his head, staring at the big man. “What?”
Cutter turned to fully face him now. “Your mother and father stayed in Brighton because I made them promise to when I gave you to them.”
Matt’s head was suddenly full of confused, jumbled thoughts. “So what then? You paid them for that too?”
The man’s eye twinged, a small, almost imperceptible gesture that might not have even been noticeable on another person but which, on him, stood out as a break in his unfeeling, uncaring façade, a crack in the armor he wore over himself against the world. “I never paid your mother and father.”
“But…but you said you paid them to take me in, paid them so that they’d keep me.”
The big man’s shoulders shifted in what might have been a shrug. “I lied.”
Matt had thought himself drained of anger, had thought that all he’d had left in him was sadness and pain and regret. He’d been wrong. “So what?” he said, rising to his feet, his fists clenched at his sides. “You let me believe that my mother and father, that they just took me in because you paid them like some trader paid for a service, let me hate them?”
“Yes.”
“But why?” he yelled, not caring, for the moment, that they were in the middle of the Black Woods, not worried in that instant about drawing attention to himself.
“Because I needed you to get up and walk,” Cutter said simply. “And you did. Sometimes, boy, hate is the only thing that keeps us moving.”
Matt was shaking now, his entire body trembling with rage, and before he knew it, he let out a scream and charged at the man. He’d been in a few fights over the years—mostly with the village boys with whom he would be best friends the next day—and he had always accounted himself well. His mother had told him, during such times when she’d nursed his hurts and scolded him for the use of violence, that it was “in his blood.” Had told him, too, that a person could fight what was in their nature, could rise above it. But while fighting might have been in his blood, while violence might have been in his blood—whatever that meant—it was in Cutter’s entire body, as if he were an avatar of violence and war.
He felt a terrible rush of glee when his first punch struck home in the man’s stomach, but it felt like hitting a tree trunk, and Cutter did not so much as move, only let out a soft groan. “That’s enough, lad,” he said, not sounding hurt in the slightest, only sounding like a man trying to calm down a wild beast.
That made Matt even more angry, and before he knew it, he’d punched the man in the face, a blow that made Cutter’s head turn at the impact. “I hate you!” Matt screamed, rearing back for a third blow.
“I said that’s—”
But he wasn’t listening to the man. He’d listened to him already, and had left his village, his mother to burn because of it. No, he was done listening now. He swung again, wanting nothing more in that moment than to feel the man’s nose break beneath his fist. But Cutter suddenly moved, and the next thing Matt knew he was hurtling through the air, upside down, to land hard
