I passed much time with Luchóg and Smaolach, who taught me how to fell a tree and not be crushed, the geometry and physics behind a deadfall trap, the proper angle of chase to catch a hare on foot. But my favorite days were spent with Speck. And the best of all were my birthdays.
I still kept my calendar and had chosen April 23—Shakespeare’s birthday— as my own. In my tenth spring in the woods, the date fell on a Saturday, and Speck invited me to go to the library to spend the night quietly reading together. When we arrived, the chamber had been transformed. Dozens of small candles suffused the room with an amber glow reminiscent of the light from a campfire under the stars. Near the crack at the entranceway, she had chalked a birthday greeting in a scrolled design of her own devising. The general shabbiness—the cobwebs, dirty blankets, and threadbare rugs—had been cleared away, making the place clean and cozy. She had laid in a small feast of bread and cheese, locked away against the mice, and soon the kettle boiled cheerfully, with real tea in our cups.
“This is incredible, Speck.”
“Thank goodness we decided today is your birthday, or I would have gone to all this fuss for nothing.”
At odd times that evening, I would look up from my text to watch her reading nearby. Light and shadow flickered across her face, and like clockwork she brushed a stray lock from in front of her eyes. Her presence disturbed me; I did not get through many pages of my book and had to read many sentences more than once. Late that night, I awoke in her embrace. Instead of the usual kicking or shouldering away when I woke up with someone all over me, I nestled into her, wanting the moment to last. Most of the shorter candles had burned down, and sadly I realized that our time was nearly over.
“Speck, wake up.”
She murmured in her sleep and pulled me closer. I pried away her arm and rolled out.
“We have to go. Don’t you feel the air on your skin changing? The dawn’s about to begin.”
“Come back to sleep.”
I gathered my things together. “We won’t be able to leave unless we go right now.”
She lifted herself up by the elbows. “We can stay. It’s Sunday and the library’s closed. We can stay all day and read. Nobody will be here. We can go back when it’s dark again.”
For a fleeting second, I considered her idea, but the very thought of staying in town during daylight hours, chancing discovery with people up and about, filled me with a holy terror.
“It’s too risky,” I whispered. “Suppose someone happens by. A policeman. A watchman.”
She dropped back down to the blanket. “Trust me.”
“Are you coming?” I asked at the door.
“Go. Sometimes you are such a child.”
Squeezing through the exit, I wondered if it was a mistake. I did not like arguing with Speck or leaving her there by herself, but she had spent many days on her own away from camp. My thoughts bounced back and forth between the two choices, and perhaps my worries over Speck affected my sense of direction, for I found myself quite lost soon after abandoning her. Each new turn brought unfamiliar streets and strange houses, and in my haste to escape, I became more hopelessly disoriented. At an edge of town, a grove of trees invited me into its warm cloak, and there I picked a trail from three options, following its twists and turns. In hindsight, I should have stayed put until the sun had fully risen, so that it could serve as compass, but at the time, my thoughts were clouded by questions. What had she been thinking, planning, doing for my birthday? How was I to grow older, be a man, stuck eternally in this small, useless body? The waning sliver moon dipped and disappeared.
A small creek, not more than a trickle, bisected the path. I decided to follow the water. Tracing a creek at dawn can be a peaceful experience, and those woods had appeared so often in my dreams as to be as familiar to me as my own name. The creek itself ran beneath a stony road, and the road led me to a solitary farmhouse. From the culvert, I saw the roof and circled round to the back as the first sunrays bathed the porch in gold.