Soldier at the Door(212)

He shouldn’t have to be here, he thought bitterly. Something had gone very wrong for him to be taking such a risk again. The stories he had to come up with . . .

There was too much moons’ light. That was one of the problems. And the forest was too quiet. Usually it was rumbling and gurgling louder, but the world went in cycles like the seasons, and it was a bad time for the forest to be napping. A little bit of ground moaning as cover would’ve been most welcome right now.

That’s when he saw him, where he shouldn’t be, cowering like a distracted porcupine.

“Ah, no,” the man in the black jacket whispered, and crept over to the large rocks where the man in a black cloak was clinging to the shadows and looking in the wrong direction.

“You’re not supposed to be here,” the man in the black jacket whispered in his ear.

There are many rules of the forest, and the most important is always the one neglected at the moment. And at that moment, the rule of “Never startle a preoccupied porcupine” shot up to the top of the list.

The porcupine-in-a-cloak nearly jumped out of it in surprise, swung blindly behind him, and smacked the face of the man in the black jacket. Then he took off running directionless, probably spooked because the boulder he’d been hiding behind developed a mouth and a sudden need to communicate its opinion.

But the smack wasn’t hard enough to faze the black jacket man.

“No!” he whispered urgently, and was immediately in pursuit. “Go left! Go left!” he hissed, but the man in the cloak veered right instead.

The second rule of the forest always seems to be, whenever someone’s being chased, he’ll always run towards the worst possible obstacle.

The porcupine man, for someone who had never been in the forest before, was following the rules perfectly.

“Naturally—the wrong way,” the jacketed man grumbled as he sprinted to catch up to him. “What more can go wrong tonight?”

The cloaked porcupine man realized, in his maddened dash, that the trees and shrubs he was dodging abruptly ended. Fortunately he still had enough wits about to recognize he likely should as well.

He skidded to a stop right before the deep crevice in front of him, but his momentum still swayed his body towards the gap.

The man in the jacket reached him just in time to yank him back, throwing him into the relative safety of a prickly bush.

“That was close! So what do you think you’re do—”

The cloaked porcupine didn’t even thank his rescuer, but was off again in a scrambling dash. The cloth of his covering snagged on the thorny bushes and tripped him up, but he kept running without a plan or a clue.

The jacketed man was right behind him. “You have no idea where you’re going, do you?” he tried to yell in a hush. “Think about it—this is NOT a great place to run blindly in, now is it?!” and he leaped on top of him, knocking him to the ground in front of several boulders. “Now if you’ll just—”

“No! Get off me!”

“I can’t do that,” the jacketed man told him, pushing a knee into his back and twisting one of his arms behind him. “You’re going to get yourself killed!”

“Only saving you the bother of doing it!” his caught porcupine gasped, trying to free his arm. “That’s all you do out here, isn’t it?”

“Not me, my friend. That’s not what I do.” The man in the jacket—larger and stronger—twisted the cloak around the porcupine to avoid getting smacked again. Then with a grunt he flipped him over onto his back.

The porcupine man, rendered helpless on the dirt, noticed the man’s open jacket and the silver buttons concealed on the inside. He glanced down at his captor’s trousers, then up at his face dimly lit by the moons.

“Wait a minute,” his voice thick with anger, “You . . . YOU! How could you?!” While his arms were bound, his legs weren’t. He sharply raised his knee to knock his captor off of him.

“Be quiet!” the man in the black jacket hissed as he tumbled off, but it was too late.

His hostage had already wriggled free and was on his knees, his hands out ready to strangle him.

“I told you to stop him, not kill him, Zenos!”

Shem was prepared. He quickly got to his feet, and in a flash Dormin, far less practiced, found his arm twisted and held behind his back again. Then he felt the cold steel of a long knife held against his throat, the flat of the blade pressed on his flesh.

“Dormin, I’m so sorry. It was me that killed Sonoforen, but there was no other choice. He was standing in front of the Shins’ door, his long knife out, and his hand on the door handle. I had only seconds to act. I didn’t want to do it, I promise you. I’ve never taken a life before, and that night I took two.”