[pressing on with this for a while - still not sure if it's going to be my next project - so feedback valued!]

Chapter 7

Jac led the way back toward Renstown. He aimed to cut across country and retrace their path through the Wendelve Hills. It would take longer than the track to the Stonewash but the word would be out and any travellers on those routes would know there was coin to be made from reports of a child with a marked face.

"We'll shelter in the woods where we stopped before," Jac said. "It won't be too bad now we have coats."

"There's not much food left." Gaia lifted the sack and gave it a shake.

"In Renstown they sell whole roast chickens in the street." Rula licked her lips at the memory.

"We'll buy three." Jac grinned for the girl, though inside he felt hollow.

They walked on in silence save for the occasional question from Rula. Farm life is busy with chores from dawn to dusk and travel was still something new for her, the world unfolding its secrets before her endless curiosity.

Jac had felt that he knew what the world had to offer. Not in the hot lands over the southern ocean, or in the golden courts of Jalastan, but in the everyday world about him he'd felt grounded. He had travelled, visited villages and towns, even sailed on a fishing boat once. He had run the paths of his childhood and found out who he was, how he fitted into the wider life about him. At least as much as he imagined anyone could. Who a person is had always seemed a complicated question, the very act of trying to pin the answer down made it slide away, divide, change shape.

And now the hermit was telling him he was two people, one powerful and god-born, the other a child swept up in that story. Jac could feel Errobor, pacing behind his thoughts, raging for control. But Errobor had always been a patchwork of stolen lives, a collage of skills and memories looted on a bloody journey across years and miles unknown. That made him deadly, but in the face of Jac's singular purpose, against his need to find Catalin and Baya, Errobor's scattered strength could find no way to prevail.

The trio crossed heath and hill beneath a wide and empty sky. The land on the kingdom's edge was wild, hard to tame, and scoured by cold winds. The border lay many miles north but no one lived there, only the Forgotten hunting deer and elk, living in their yurts or between shelters set among the ruins of their forefathers' cities. Jac supposed that the northlands had been fertile once, but the years had stolen something from the soil, or perhaps it was just that the wind had changed and it had grown too cold for farmers. Civilisation stands on the farmer's shoulders. Elder Ethan had said that. Though in the end he had been killed by uncivilised men and no one came to save him.

The sun had hidden itself among the rounded hilltops of the Wendelve and the sky had taken on a deep blue, shading toward a black from which the stars could peep.

"It'll be a cold night." Gaia hugged herself and turned to urge Rula to keep up.

"Here is as good as anywhere." Jac nodded to the trees below them. They had stuck to the higher ground to make progress but Renstown lay too far to reach before dark.

A short while later all of them were occupied in the business of gathering branches and bracken for a shelter. Jac gave one of Rennor's knives to Gaia to cut the bracken stems.

"No tinderbox, I suppose?" Jac wasn't sure they could risk a fire but he would have liked the choice.

"No." Gaia dumped another load of bracken fronds, ready to heap onto the branches once Jac had made a wall of them.

Jac shrugged. Among all the destruction wrought by fire there had been no means to start one. Was that irony? He paused, suddenly aware that until Rennor had killed him Jacob Summer had never heard the word "irony" or known its meaning.

They settled down as the darkness thickened among the trees. The light had always ruled Jac's life, rising and falling with the sun. It seemed a strange way to live now that Rennor's memories of lantern lit taverns shone out amid his own internal darkness, candles burning in elaborate holders, filling every niche of Gostle's mansion with scarcely flickering illumination late into winter nights. Jac saw his years as a muddy handed peasant, in a cruel, judgemental light not born of flame. What would they have done within their hovel in any event, had they the means to keep the darkness from seeping beneath their door? Illiterate. Jac realised with a shock that Rennor had been able to read. He had owned two books, that he had read many times by candlelight, running a narrow finger beneath the lines to keep his place, mouthing the words as if their elusive meaning might find a better path to comprehension if absorbed through the ears rather than the eye.

Gaia pressed less close now they had coats, and Jac was both missing the comfort of contact and grateful for the space at the same time. He fell asleep still puzzling over the riddle of his life, a life now seen from new angles and somehow smaller than it had seemed even as the wound of its loss still gaped and bled.

Jac woke to screams. Awful, terrifying screams, and screams that were merely terrified. The shelter was in pieces around them, the darkness intense. Something was dying next to him, someone, and even as he scrabbled away on his backside across the damp forest floor he felt the warmth of blood on his hand and understood that his fingers clutched the hilt of a knife.

Above the clotted sounds of death close at hand, a high pitched shrieking still pierced the night. A child.

"Baya!" In his confusion Jac found his daughter's name on his lips. "Rula!" He shouted with more force. "Rula!"

The shrieks were losing volume as if the girl were being dragged off into the blindness of the forest. For a moment Jac imagined her over the shoulder of a Sverland raider.

He stood spearing himself on dead branches that fractured around him, banging his head against a more sturdy example. "Rula!" His voice a bellow now.

The girl's cries shut off suddenly, leaving only the fading gurgles of the blood's owner and the brittle snapping of the branches that opposed his every move.

"Rula?"

Nothing. Not even dying.

Slowly, fearing attack from any angle, Jac returned to the body, patting around the forest floor to find it. Immediately the bulky coat all but confirmed his worst fears. "Gaia?" It could still be someone else, any attacker would have come warmly dressed into the chill of midnight in the wilderness. "Gaia?" His hands explored, hunting for a face.

When his fingers found warm flesh Jac recoiled, then steeled himself and returned. No beard. Long hair. A desolate gasp escaped him, a sound he didn't recognise as his, or even human. His left hand opened convulsively, releasing the knife. "I didn't..."

You did.

"No." Jac shook his head, drooling from slack lips, close to vomiting up the contents of an empty stomach. "I would never."

I? Who is I? You're a broken thing, and broken things have many parts. Many parts and many sharp edges.

Jac, coiled on knees and elbows in the great darkness huffed out his pain, trying and failing to push away the image and the idea that it was Catalin who lay beside him, murdered, and Baya who had run from him into the night. The fact that it was Gaia who had bled out upon the cold ground rather than Catalin offered no comfort.

Perhaps you didn't do it...

A pressure built, inexorable, undeniable.

Perhaps it was me?

Some force seemed to be pushing Jac to the corners of his own mind, absolving him of responsibility. A different person constructing themselves around the core of his being, a person ready to take the blame. From the shadows of his mind figures resolved, half-seen, a silent horde, and at their fore, a lean man and a fat one, the latter lacking half a leg. Rennor and the Beggar Bully waiting to welcome him to their ranks.

It's too much guilt for any man to bear. A mother first. And if the child hadn't run away ... what then? What next Jac? What would you have done with the little one? How much more could you take?

The thoughts had seemed to be his own, but when they spoke his name the thoughts became a voice, a stranger speaking inside his head ... a female voice...

"Errobor?" Jac straightened, kneeling now, hands pressed to both temples. "Child of Caenor?" He had assumed it was a son of the God Below that the hermit had named within him, but the old man had said 'child', nothing more.

A silence followed, both within Jac's skull, and among the trees where the soft stealth of the forest held its tongue, waiting for an answer.

"Errobor?" Jac repeated. "You did this?" He lowered his arms as anger blew through him. "With my hands?"

With whose hands? Those were not Jacob Summer's hands last time I looked.

"Why?" Jac ignored the demon's insinuations. "She was innocent. Good." He tried to say Rula's name but choked on it, imagining her terror. "The girl's alone in the wild."

Jac's shoulder's almost shrugged for Errobor. "The Sverlanders would have done worse to both of them. Much more horror before they died. Your woman and brat will be finding out all about that if they haven't already." Her voice became something definite now, not just thoughts bubbling from the depths, but a sound that was almost in his ears.

"But why?" Jac might ask the same question of the Sverlanders but something in their eyes had answered it for him on the day he'd faced them in the lane beside his farm. They looked at the world from a different place, they didn't value what he valued. Their mindset was so fundamentally different that it was hard for him to think of them as human. And yet by all accounts they loved their children, were kind to their dogs, and felt proud of themselves. Even so, he asked the question of Errobor, partly to keep his mind from the nightmare he'd awoken to, but also because he wanted to understand her.

"I've been trapped under the banal nonsense of your life for twenty years, Jacob Summer. Drowning in the repetition, buried beneath the collapse of your dreams. Even now when you're free, floundering around and wielding my power without understanding or skill, you still hem me in with your pointless purpose."

"You invaded me!" Jac shouted, a madman ranting in the woods. "This is my-" My body, he wanted to say. But of course it belonged to neither of them. It had been a vehicle for callous ambition, a small cog in an evil but perhaps inevitable machine.

"We're both uninvited guests," Errobor said. "But your time is over. Sometimes there's a struggle for control. Neither of your two rides put up a fight. They were neither of them invested in their lives. Not in ways that count. But sometimes I meet a host who fights like a wildcat. They always break. You will break. And the easiest way to prise them free is to destroy what they love. To undo their sense of self. To make a kind man cruel. A strong man weak."

"That's why you killed her? To take this body? Reduce me to memory like the rest? Well, it didn't work, did it?" Jac's anger flared again. He wasn't sure if it helped him keep his place or not. Jacob Summer wasn't an angry man, at least he hadn't been, had he? "It didn't work."

"It didn't," Errobor conceded. "Think what I'll have to do now. How deep will I have to take you before you let go and strike up towards the light and the air?"

Caenor's daughter fell silent then, leaving Jac to the torment of his thoughts and the judgement of the trees.

He knelt, shivering, beside Gaia's body, waiting for the dawn to show him what he'd done. One blood-sticky hand clasped the other, wrestling with it through the slow march of the night, two sides of the argument raging through his skull. He hadn't done it. Errobor had stolen his sleeping body. She'd said as much. Jac had liked Gaia. More than liked her. She'd saved his life, risking her own to haul him from that pit. He would never have- And yet he had. The drunk might reject his guilt. He might say he remembers nothing of the previous night. And yet his wife lies bruised and beaten, his knuckles skinned. Who else is to blame? The demon who made him raise that flagon to his lips time and time again, until the flood of ale washed away both reason and responsibility?

The only difference here was that Jacob's demon had a name. He had opened his flesh to her – it had been his act of violence that spilled the poisoned blood and brought him to this end.

A child's act.

My act.

And here he was, arguing with voices in his mind again. Errobor was just another voice, stronger, older, but why should that spare him the blame of his deeds? It certainly didn't spare him the consequences. The morning's grey fingers traced those for him with ever-increasing clarity.

"Gaia..." Jac choked out her name as he had so many times in the dark. Her suffering had been short-lived. Was there comfort in that?

Daylight brought choices. Rula had run away. Doubtless she was lost in the woods. The Rope would never find her. The wilds would kill her and hide her body beyond the skills of even the Rope's most tenacious agents of revenge. Of course Jac should go look for her, but how would he explain himself? How would he find her? And if, against all the odds, he both found the girl and won her trust, he could no more guarantee her safety than he had been able to save Gaia. He might wake on the next night to find Errobor had plumbed new depths with the flesh they both inhabited, and committed crimes that would break both Jac and the child forever.

"Better to leave her." Jac patted through Gaia's gore-stained clothing until he recovered Rennor's riches from an inner pocket. He placed the money on her chest where Rula would find it if she had the wits about her to have hidden nearby and to find her way back. A faint hope but a hope none the less. Fainter still the hope that she could spend the coins without losing both them and her freedom. "But what can I do?"

Jac stopped talking to the greenery. He invited answers that he didn't really want. Errobor's silence unnerved him, but he didn't want it broken by her voice. Rula's chances, however slim, were better without him.

Jac straightened, checked his knives, and chose his direction from the morning shadows. He had no interest in Renstown now. His business there had been the business of keeping his companions alive. Catalin and Baya had been taken to Sverland. Jac's path lay north and west, to the coast where the Forgotten watched the sea, their eyes filled with such strangeness that the raiders turned south in search of easier pickings.