#farsent

Violet shared her watery stew with him next moonrise. Antelope, mostly gristle, seasoned with nettle leaf. It was awful, and he relished every bite.

The next sun, they let her take him to the river to wash off the grime and the lice. She’d had to swallow a shriek when she moved the locks behind his ear and his scalp crawled. Apologising with every breath, she spent the next bell carefully shaving away matted hair at the root with a paring knife while he sat unshivering in the icy water, knees pulled up to his chest.

With nowhere to hide, his itchy passengers were rinsed away. Ticks were twisted ‘n’ plucked, leeches peeled off. She scrubbed him down and bundled him up in her own spare clothes, leagues too large. He said nothing the whole time, staring at her while she asked all kinds of questions and made up the answers when he wouldn’t give one.

“What was yer village like? Why did yer mum give ya up? Didn’t she want yer? Did ya do somethin’ bad? D’ya have any brothers? Sisters? Did they die? D’ya talk at all. C’mon, say somethin’. Did they take out yer tongue?” She grabbed his chin and made him open his mouth to check. He let her.

“Pff. Y’can talk. Say somethin’. ‘Ey. What’s yer name? Y’must know yer name. I’ll call ya… eh, pebble. ‘Cause rocks never say nothin’ but yer too small t’ be a rock. So yer a pebble. Like what y’get stuck in yer shoe.” She glanced at his bare feet, caked in river clay. “Oh, right. Y’need shoes. Should have some that’ll fit at the hideout. Let’s go, pebble.”

Violet took his hand and started to walk, but he dug his heels in, his hazel eyes pointed downwards. He muttered lowly, under his breath.

“What’s that?”

“Osric. I’m Osric.”

The girl cracked a smile. “Y’can talk. Knew it. I’m Violet. Like the flower. I was born while they was in bloom. It’s too late t’ see ‘em now. Turnin’ cold. But when spring comes, I’ll take ya t’ pick ‘em. What’s yer name mean?”

She walked him back to ‘the hideout’, a cluster of huts and tents lodged into the rocky, wooded hills of the South Shroud, not unlike a true hornet’s nest. The hive that dwelt there was led by a wildwood woman who styled herself their queen. All Osric had known until then was life with his siblings and his mother, but the queen wasn’t his mother, and the wasps weren’t his kin. The hive wasn’t his home.

Violet felt like a friend, though. Maybe his first.

They wasted little time putting him to work. They’d taken him in for his potential uses, not out of the kindess of their hearts. He was small and slight, which meant he was the one getting shoved into a cellar through the window to unlock doors, or helping them empty larders. He’d climb into wagons to relieve them of their goods, waded through forests of legs in crowded markets to lighten pockets.

Osric was good at it, all of it. Too good, and that was the problem. It didn’t take long for his impulses to land him in trouble. Violet was the first to find things that didn’t belong to him hidden away under his blanket. A search of his pockets turned up more.

“Y’don’t take these,” she’d warned him, waving a bejewelled bracelet in his face. “Food, I get. They don’t give ya enough.” He worked harder than half the hive, and he still only ate what he could steal and squirrel away. They wanted to keep him small. Useful. “But what would ya even do with this?”

She’d laughed. It was always kind of funny, the first time. The first few times. They tried the bracelet on his slender wrist and it looked silly, hanging there like a loose, shimmering shackle. He didn’t know what to tell her, so he just shrugged. He hadn’t even remembered picking it up or where he got it. Violet knew whose it was, so she took it back before it was missed. But it wasn’t the last time she had to cover for him, and even her patience started to wane.

“D’ya want t’ get into trouble? I’ve told ya before. Y’don’t steal from yer fellow wasps. They’re not playin’ around, Os. They’ll have ya fer this if they catch ya.” He stared at her, like he always did. It was like he got it, but if he got it, why’d he keep doing it? Her face changed. “This is why yer mother got shut of ya. En’t it.”

It hurt. He could tell she was only angry because she cared. Violet’s anger was different from his mother’s. She didn’t want to see him hurt, or tossed out to fend for himself.

“Won’t happen again,” he swore. She hit him, and he fell back into the grass. He lay there, stunned. But he understood why. It was her way of saying she didn’t believe him. Because he broke his last promise, and he was going to break this one too.

They went fishing as the colder moons set in. She taught him things he didn’t know, like how to fashion together a makeshift rod, and the kinds of bugs that were better as bait for this or that kind of fish. He didn’t have much patience for it, and he usually ended up in the river, fishing for crayfish with his bare hands.

Violet showed him how to cook their catch, starting with how to make a fire. The rocks that made the base, first. “It needs t’ breathe,” she told him. Then the right tinder, and finally how to make a spark by striking firestone. “Cook it through,” she scolded. “Fish’ll make ya sick if the middle’s not done.”

She taught him how to set snares for small game, and the mechanism for basic traps. He wanted to learn how to hunt with a bow like she did, but he wasn’t strong enough to draw back the string. His arrows nicked off the outer bark of the tree they used for target practice while hers lodged themselves ilms deep. It made her laugh until she cried every time his shot went wide, and he started doing it on purpose just to see her smile.

He didn’t get it back then; why she did all that. He figured they were just having fun together. That she was proud to teach him all the things she knew and show him how clever she was—and she was.

The take got harder. It always did through the winter moons, Violet told him. This one was leaner than most, though. Bad weather set in and buried the roads in fulms of snow. They had to travel further, and the risks were greater.

Osric was sent out to scout. He didn’t mind the cold much and it meant he got lucky finding something to eat every once in a while. A warm glow amidst the trees alerted to him to a camp’s presence. The guards were few in number and half-asleep. He snuck in, clambering onto the back of a cart laden with salted fish and meat. He ate until he felt sick, then more, until his stomach hurt. It was tempting, too tempting to doze off right there in amongst all the bundles when he was done, but he willed himself to retreat—pockets stuffed with as much as he could carry—back to the nearest outpost.

He hid his haul before reporting in, but he smuggled some mackerel for Violet. Her favourite.

The ‘stingers’, they called them, were assembled. Archers all, and Violet was among them. Following Osric’s lead, they retraced his steps back to the camp to assess numbers and the viability of their task.

It was near dawn by then, but it wouldn’t get light until late morn this season. The boy had an idea of what was going to happen when he reported in, but he’d never been there for it before. They hadn’t needed to mobilise the stingers since he was taken on. His talents had helped to keep them well-enough supplied.

But they’d missed too many meals.

They took to the trees, found their positions: Clear sight of the guards and the tents they watched over. The boy stayed on the ground, with Violet. She was down there to give chase if they sought cover. A body dropped, its fall softened by the snow. Osric watched it turn red with clinical interest.

The next shot must have missed its mark. A man’s scream pierced Osric’s ears. He sounded so pained that it made his stomach lurch, and he regretted his earlier gluttony. Figures poured out of the tents, more than he’d banked on. They were in their smallclothes but had bows in their hands, and were in various stages of hastily slinging quivers over their shoulders.

A woman dressed in a long, woollen robe with a wooden staff took stock and said—

“Leave this to me.” The staff spun, palm over wrist, and Osric flinched back and ducked low as a fierce gale billowed out from her position, scattering supplies and raising up the snow off the ground into a whirling blizzard.

“Fuck!” he heard Violet cry, but he couldn’t see her. Cold winds blew right through him, chilling him to his core. He heard dull thuds and ivory cracks from the west and north, where the stingers had been poised to strike. Blinded and panicked, he pulled up his hood to shield his head and ran.

“Violet!” he bleated, but he heard his own voice die in the gale. He leant against a tree to gather his bearings, and a whistling thunk carried an arrow deep into the bark, ilms from his ear. Peeling away, he scrambled through thick brush that snared and scratched bare skin. He grabbed a skinny sapling for support and doubled over. Each panicked gasp was being stolen from him. I can’t breathe, he realised, cold dread pouring down his back.

He couldn’t muster a scream when a powerful arm closed around his torso, thrashing in vain against their strength. He was thrown over a shoulder, and jostled as his captor ran. Drifting in and out, Osric felt the winds die, watched the snow start to settle.

“Yer safe,” was the next thing he heard, and he trusted the voice that told him so. She set him down in a snowdrift and knelt over him protectively while she surveyed the woods. “Can’t say if we lost any. We’re s’posed t’ regroup at th’ outpost if somethin’ happens. But only if we’re not bein’ followed.”

Shivering, Osric sat up and buried his face in her chest for a moment, gripping her shoulder. Fear still prickled the inside of his skin, and he shook from the itch. “I dun wanna do this again, I hate it,” he choked, breath shuddering. “I wanna go home.” He didn’t know where home was. Just that it wasn’t here.

“I know, pup.” Taking his hand, Violet rose. “C’mon. Stick with me.” Osric climbed to his feet, unsteady as a fawn. He registered the whistle too late. The arrow’s path scored his cheek and struck her chest.

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