“There are still a good many old-world weapons out there,” she told him at one point.
“Deladion Inch had some of them, all in good working order, all deadly. He had vehicles that ran on solar power and explosives that were no bigger than my hand but could destroy whole buildings. If he had them, others will have them, too.”
“But not so many maybe.” Pan was peering off into the forest, always paying attention to his surroundings. “Besides, they weren’t enough to save him, were they?”
“They might have been, if he hadn’t chosen to rescue me.”
Pan nodded. “For which I will always be grateful. It says something about him that he decided to come at all. He didn’t know you, didn’t have any reason to make rescuing you his business. He did it for Sider.”
“Oh, I think he did it for himself, too.” She gave him a quick smile as he looked over.
“No, it’s true. He liked challenging himself. I think that’s what made life worth something to him.”
He nodded and looked away. She wondered if the look of her eyes troubled him. He didn’t seem to want to focus on them. Maybe he found her ugly or a little less human now. She didn’t like to think that he would be this way, but she would understand if he were. She didn’t like it any better than he did. She didn’t want to look at herself anymore, either.
“I want you to know …” He stopped midsentence, shook his head, and kept walking.
For a minute, he didn’t say anything more. Then he looked at her anew, and said, “I just want to say again how sorry I am that this happened.”
She gave him a fresh smile. “I know. But I like hearing you say it. It makes it all a little easier.”
“Do you think that what he did—the King of the Silver River—that it sharpened your instincts?”
She thought about it. In the time since she had returned from wherever the Faerie creature had taken her and resumed her trek home, she had been given ample opportunity to discover if she had been helped or not. It seemed to her that her instincts were fully restored. More than once, they had warned her of dangers she could not see, of creatures in hiding, sometimes directly in her path. When she changed course, the feelings would diminish.
“They are much stronger,” she said finally. “I could tell coming back to Glensk Wood.
Are they strong enough to warn me consistently and accurately? I can’t be sure yet. I have to wait and see. I have to trust in what he told me. And I do trust him, Pan. I still think the exchange was a fair bargain.”
She had noticed something else, too, although she didn’t choose to talk about it just yet. As they walked, traveling through the gloom and shadows of the woods, alone amid the trees save for those things that lived there, she found she was able to detect, identify, and isolate almost everything that drew breath. She couldn’t always tell exactly what she was sensing, but she could tell if it was big or little, safe or dangerous, lying in wait or sleeping, hunting or simply moving about. It was a subtle thing, filled with nuances she had not recognized before, and it gave her insights that filled her with unexpected confidence.
“How far do you want to travel today?” he asked.
She shook her head dismissively. “As far as you want.”
“But you’ve already traveled several days just to reach me. You haven’t had time to rest. You haven’t slept in how long?”
“Not so long, Pan. I can keep going. I feel all right.” She saw the way he was looking at her, and she could see the doubt in his eyes. Apparently doubt wasn’t a color. “Really, I do.”
They walked through the remainder of the morning, climbing out of the valley floor and onto the higher, more open expanses of the lower slopes while staying below the snow line. They passed isolated homes and farms, and once or twice they saw people and exchanged waves. The sun rose and the day brightened, and the heavy mists receded far enough up into the mountains that the air warmed and dampness of the dawn’s dew faded. Hunting birds circled in the skies overhead, and patches of paintbrush and avalanche lilies appeared amid the rocks.
“It could almost be like it used to, couldn’t it?” she asked him at one point, gesturing at the countryside. It could, she added to herself, but not so long as I can’t tel the colors of the flowers.
“This is like it used to be,” he said after a moment. “You and me, doing what we’ve always done.”
You and me, she repeated to herself, and the words were comforting.