Chapter 71: The Old Woman

Azura’s POV (in Rhydor’s body)

I noticed it about halfway through the walk.

His body was not getting tired.

Apart from the shoulder that kept burning no matter what I did, everything else just kept moving. Strong and steady, like this body had been built specifically to walk through cursed forests forever and had no plans of stopping. I had never felt anything like it. My own body gave up eventually. It always did. I had made peace with that a long time ago.

This body did not give up.

I looked back.

Rhydor was struggling.

My legs were shorter than he was used to, and my stride sat differently, and my center of gravity was lower than he expected. Every few steps he lurched slightly, my body correcting for a balance he had not figured out yet. He was breathing harder than the pace deserved. I knew exactly what that felt like. Those were my lungs. My smaller lungs are working twice as hard to keep up with someone else’s pace.

Something warm and deeply satisfied settled inside my chest.

Good, I thought. Now he knows.

I did not say anything out loud. I just kept walking and let him struggle a little and smiled about it quietly inside my head where he could not see it.

He would learn.

We had been walking for a while. The smoke was closer now. I could still see it above the trees, that thin pale line rising steadily into the grey sky, pulling us forward like a thread tied around something important.

Then we heard it.

A scream.

Female. Sharp and desperate, cutting through the quiet of the Wraithfen like something tearing. Coming from somewhere close in the trees to our left.

I stopped walking immediately.

Rhydor stopped behind me.

We looked at each other. His expression on my small face was the same thing I was thinking. Neither of us said it out loud. We just turned toward the sound and moved.

We found her maybe two hundred feet off the path.

An old woman on the ground with a rock the size of a barrel pinning her leg to the earth. She was crying and sweating and pushing against the rock with both hands and getting absolutely nowhere. When she saw us she stopped pushing and threw both arms in the air.

"Please," she said. "Please, I cannot move it. Please help me."

I stood there and looked at her.

My first thought was what is an old woman doing here. This was the Wraithfen. This was the place that ate people. This was not somewhere you would find a small, hunched woman with white hair and a mended dress lying on the ground next to a rock.

Nothing about this made sense.

But her face had real tears on it. Her forehead was shining with sweat from trying to move the rock herself. Her hands were shaking. Whatever this was, her pain looked real.

Something in me moved before I finished deciding to move.

Beside me, Rhydor stepped forward first.

I watched him reach down toward the rock, gripped it, and tried to pull it up.

Nothing happened.

He tried again. His hands strained. My face went tight with the effort. Still nothing.

He looked up at me.

I looked back at him with his own face.

Then I shook his head slowly. One long shake that said everything I needed to say without using a single word.

He straightened up and stepped back.

I walked over, reached down with one hand, lifted the rock, and moved it aside.

The old woman made a sound like the air had been let out of her. She grabbed her leg immediately, checking it, pressing her fingers against it carefully. It was hurt. Bruised badly and maybe something worse. But she could move it slightly which meant it was not completely broken.

She looked up at me with wet eyes.

"Thank you," she said. "Thank you. I do not know what I would have done. I have been here since morning trying to move that thing, and I thought I was going to be there until dark, and in this place after dark is not something I wish on anyone."

"It is nothing," I said. His voice came out softer than I expected. "What are you doing out here? This forest is not safe."

She looked at me for a moment. Then she said something that stopped both of us completely.

"I live here."

I looked at Rhydor.

He looked back at me.

I looked back at her. "You live here?"

"Yes." She pointed through the trees, toward where the smoke was still rising thin and pale above the branches. "My home is just there. But I cannot walk properly right now."

I did not think about it for long. I crouched down and lifted her. She weighed almost nothing in his strong body. She made a small surprised sound and then settled against his chest and held on carefully.

Rhydor picked up the basket she had dropped on the ground when she fell. He held it with my small hands and walked behind us without saying anything. My short legs carrying the basket. His large body carrying the woman.

Neither of us commented on how this looked.

****

The cabin appeared through the trees a few minutes later.

I had been expecting something small and falling apart. Something that matched this forest. Something dark and wrong and held together by rot and bad decisions.

What I found was none of those things.

It was a cabin. Simple and sturdy and surprisingly well kept. The walls were clean. The roof was intact. Smoke rose from a small chimney in a thin steady line. Around the outside ran a small garden, neat rows of plants growing in dark soil, herbs and vegetables, and a few things I did not recognize but that smelled alive and green.

It looked like a place a family could live.

It looked completely normal.

I set the old woman down gently near the door. She steadied herself against the wall and looked up at both of us with warm brown eyes that were still wet at the edges.

"Please," she said. "Come inside. Let me thank you properly. It is the least I can do."

"We should keep moving," I said. "We are looking for something."

"I know, I know." She waved her hand gently. "Just a little while. Rest before you continue. Eat something. I insist. You helped me. Please let me help you."

Rhydor hesitated beside me.

I looked at him. He looked at me with my grey eyes. Something in his expression was thinking about it.

Then he nodded.

Inside the cabin was warm.

That was the first thing I noticed. Warm and dry and completely ordinary. A table with two chairs. A small fireplace with something bubbling over it. Shelves along one wall with jars and dried things hanging from the ceiling. A window that let in the grey Wraithfen light and somehow made it look softer than it was outside.

It did not feel like a place that sat in a cursed forest.

It felt like a home.

The old woman moved slowly but steadily, pulling things from shelves, setting cups on the table. She brought us something warm to drink. Dark and rich smelling, steam rising from the cups in thin curls.

I looked at mine. Picked it up. Brought it close and breathed in.

Nothing wrong. Nothing sharp or off. Just warmth and something herbal underneath.

I drank.

Rhydor drank beside me.

The old woman sat down at the table with us, folded her hands, and looked at both of us with that warm expression.

"Ask me what you want to ask," she said. "I can see it on your face."

I set down the cup. "Why do you live here? How did you end up in a place like this?"

She was quiet for a moment. Her eyes went somewhere else for just a second. Then she came back.

"My husband, my son, and I were from a village. A human village, not far from the edge of what this forest used to be." She smoothed her dress over her knees slowly. "Our village was attacked. We ran. In all the running and the fear and the dark we ended up here."

"Here," I said.

"Here. We thought we had found somewhere safe. We were wrong." She stopped. Her hands went still on her knees. "This forest took my husband first. Then my son."

The warmth in the cabin felt different suddenly.

She looked at me. At Rhydor’s large body sitting across from her. Something soft and sad moved across her face.

"My son was about your size back then," she said quietly. "About your age."

I did not know what to say to that. Something heavy settled in his chest and stayed there.

"After I lost them both I thought about leaving," she said. "But this is the last place that has their memory. This garden. This cabin. The trees they walked through." She looked at the window. "So I stayed."

The fire crackled.

"You have been here alone ever since?" Rhydor asked with my tiny voice.

"Yes. Since then I have not seen another person. I began to think I was the only one left alive in this place."

I looked at her sitting there with her hands folded, her warm eyes, and her sad story sitting around her like a coat she had been wearing for years.

"They would be proud of you," I said. "Your husband and your son. Surviving here all this time alone. That is not nothing."

She smiled. Small and genuine.

Then she stood up and brought us food.

We ate.

The food was warm and real and my body, his body, responded to it immediately. His stomach settling. The shoulder pain pulled back slightly, the way it always did when the body got something it needed.

After we finished the old woman showed us a small room at the back of the cabin. Simple. A bed, a window, and enough space to breathe.

When she closed the door behind her I turned to Rhydor.

"She is genuinely kind," I said quietly. "It is hard to find that anywhere. In a place like this, it is almost impossible."

He was quiet for a moment.

Then he said, "Nothing in this forest that looks nice actually is."

I stared at him. "You cannot just decide everything good is actually bad."

"I am not deciding anything. I am observing."

"You are being suspicious of a lonely old woman who fed us and gave us somewhere to rest."

"I am being careful."

"You are being..."

Something clicked inside my head.

I stopped talking.

He looked at me. "What?"

I went back over everything she had said. Sitting there at the table with her hands folded and her warm eyes. After my husband and son died I have been the only one here. The only person. Alone. I thought I was the only one left alive in this place.

The only one.

"Rhydor," I said slowly.

"What?"

"She said she has been the only one here since her husband and son died. The only person in this forest. Alone for years."

"Yes? So."

"Then why was she screaming for help?"

He went completely still.

"If she is the only one here," I said, "she knows that. She has been here long enough to know there is no one around to help her. She knows this forest. She knows what lives here." I looked at him. "So why would she scream? In a place she knows is dangerous. Screaming only tells everything nearby exactly where she is."

The silence in the room was enormous.

"Unless she already knew someone was nearby," he said.

"Unless the scream was never for help."

We both stood up at exactly the same moment.

I took one step toward the door.

My legs stopped working.

Not slowly. Not with a warning. They just stopped completely, like something had cut the connection between my brain and everything below it. I felt myself going down and could not stop it. The floor came up fast, and then I was on it, lying on my side, my eyes open and moving, but my body completely still.

I looked toward where Rhydor had been standing.

He was already on the floor.

Both of us were down and awake but unable to move a single thing except our eyes.

The door opened.

The old woman walked in.

She was not hunching anymore. She was not limping. She walked in straight and steady and easy, like her back had never curved a day in her life and her leg had never been anywhere near a rock. Her warm brown eyes were the same. Her face was the same.

But the smile was different.

It was not warm anymore.

It was the smile of someone who had been waiting for a very specific moment and had just watched it arrive exactly on schedule.

She looked at both of us on the floor.

And she smiled wider.

Just then, my eyes started getting heavier until everything went dark.