Matthew's walk into the snowy woods in December brought him to the small frozen
pond in the clearing. There was a girl there; a blood eater, he could tell.
Her black hair fell in a slick black mess over her shoulders and the collar of
her scruffy, olive-colored coat. Her face was the same smooth, unmarred
silver-white of the frozen water. She was hunched down, snail-like, on the very
edge of the pond, her bead bowed.
He tugged thoughtfully at his full, black beard. which was stiff with the cold.
Her presence made no sense at all to him. He was a woodsman, a seasoned hunter
acquainted with all the forest people and their ways better than did all the
ignorant people back in town. Three things were very wrong: for one, sunset was
many hours away, although the winter sky was a low, steely gray and pregnant
with snow. But besides that, the girl's fellows were all dormant in their earth
dugouts well in the heart of the forest, where they waited in hibernation for
the wet thaw of spring. Lastly, this pond was a kilometer at most from the
outskirts of town, where the blood eaters would be hard pressed to go regardless
of the season.
She looked up and saw him, her large dark eyes full of the fearful black light
of those of a rabbit or a doe. But she didn't move, which was also wrong; the
blood eaters were skittish people who had as few dealings as possible with the
flesh eaters outside their woodland jurisdiction.
With good reason, God knew.
He didn't always care for them himself, he supposed. Which is why he was a
woodsman; and though accountable as well, he had asked for the district closest
to the woods, and wasn't always overly keen on incidents actually happening in
town.
Here, however, was a different matter. He said, "Don't be afraid," aware of the
sonorous boom in his deep voice across the still, frigid air. She blinked. Her
lashes were long and dark, and a few stray snowflakes perched on them.
"Are you hurt?" he asked, though he doubted a smart blood-eater would have
divulged that if it were true.
She shook her head, and her look now suggested neither fear nor welcome. A
peculiar, affable indifference, actually..
Matthew didn't need to be invited He was possessed, he supposed, of a sense of
stewardship about the whole woods; anything wrong or irregular with one of its
inhabitants gave him a need for accounting, as though anything extraordinary
might be symptomatic of something going on with the rest of the creatures in the
forest. Especially the ones which affected his livelihood.
He advanced through the calf-high snow, which covered entanglements of long,
thick grass. He came to the edge and sat down beside the girl, on the frozen
soil jutting in a hard jaw over the ice.
She didn't flinch, only sat back on her ankles, her gloved hands on her knees.
Her gloves were very torn; it wasn't unusual for blood eaters to have mostly
second hand things, he knew; they were salvagers and scavengers as much as they
were anything else. Through a large hole in one glove, a blue vein flexed and
pulsed In spite of himself, he found it distasteful to look. "I hope you don't
mind my asking this, but I want to know if you are well. This is odd, finding
the likes you here, now."
"Oh, that would be true, I guess, if I were more like them." she glanced rather
contemptuously at the woods beyond the pond. "But I can't, and they know it. I
live in the winter. They don't care for it much, but I can't do without it They
are not quite sure I'm fully one of them, but I don't see what else I could be."
"I can imagine this is a very hard time of year for your people," he said. "The
deer are very scarce. Most of the animals are asleep. Food"- that was what he
called it, food-"would be hard to come by.
"True," she said, "unless you know where to look."
There was a long stick lying next to her on the ice. The stick was the thin but
solid and prickly wood of blackthorn. She picked it up in the hand with the
holed glove, raised it and struck its tip hard against the ice.
From the point where the tip struck, a thin white line budded in the ice, grew
out like a badly done drawing of a large bare tree.
In another moment, he watched with horror as a thin tongue of red slithered
through the original crack and into every offshoot of it, until a great scarlet
riverwork emerged in front of him on the frozen surface.
He grabbed the girl angrily by the arm. "What have you done?" he shouted. "Tell
me now and you might save yourself some trouble. I could make things a little
easier for you once you get hauled into town for your trial."
"Oh, stop," she said, in a breathy sigh of aggravation rather than anger or
fear. She pulled her arm away in one swift, liquid gesture. "If you're a
constable, you ought to know better. I think the charge was witch craft. Or
stealing bread. Both, for all I know. There's usually quite a few, right before
the water begins to freeze, and I am guessing that it's so the jails don't get
too crowded over the winter. No sense having a lot of witches or bread stealers
bottled up behind bars until spring."
Then, as if he had suddenly vanished, she picked up her stick again. This time
she used the hewed end to gouge at the ice, until one large, nearly triangular
piece jutted up. Water splashed red, reflecting on its ripples the inert,
sunless winter sky overhead. The blood water clotted in blushing spots around
the edge of the ice, where air had now filtered under the ice and was trapped.
She bent down like a child bobbing for apples, and when she sat upright
again-which was not for several minutes-she pulled a ratty bit of cloth out of a
pocket in the coat and scrubbed vigorously at her face. Then she took a handful
of snow out of the grass and scoured herself with it. They were meticulously
clean, whatever else might be said about them. Incongruously so, in a way that
would have made him laugh if it didn't make him feel sick first.
"See," she said, to him, a strange, angry light dancing in her eyes. "You. Me.
The good people in town. Now we are all safe. Until spring, I think."