Chapter 3: The Girl in the Mud
The bliss was a fleeting thing, a thin crust over a deep, hot well of shame. It broke apart as Eden lay panting on the fouled floorboards, the stink of her own waste rising to greet her like a taunt. The fire’s warmth felt accusatory now, highlighting the brown smears across her belly, the cooling urine plastering her hair to her scalp.
“Gods,” she muttered, the word a puff of foul air. She pushed herself up, her body feeling heavy and used. The evidence of her ritual was everywhere—on her skin, on the floor, in the very air she breathed. Bartholomew was gone from the window. Even he, it seemed, could not stomach the aftermath.
She moved on unsteady legs, the stickiness pulling at her skin with every step. The storm still raged, its violence a welcome distraction from the silence in her head. She unlatched the door and stepped out into the deluge.
The cold rain was a shock, a thousand tiny needles on her overheated skin. She tipped her head back, letting the water sluice through her piss-soaked hair, over her face, across her breasts. She opened her mouth and drank, gulping down the clean, cold taste of the sky to wash the memory of her own bitterness from her tongue. She scrubbed at her skin with her hands, scraping the caked filth from her nipples, the curve of her stomach, the coarse hair between her legs. The brown water pooled at her feet and ran in rivulets towards the garden, returning to the earth in a more conventional way.
She was shivering violently when she finally stepped back inside, her skin puckered and clean, the shame scrubbed raw but not erased. She pulled on a heavy, woolen robe, its rough texture a comfort, and tied it tightly around her waist. The hut still stank. She’d also have to scrub the floor. The thought was a weary weight.
A frantic tapping came at the window. Bartholomew was back, but he wasn’t perched. He was beating his wings against the glass, a black, chaotic flutter against the dark.
“What is it?” she asked, her voice hoarse.
Kraa! Kraa! He jabbed his beak toward the forest, then took flight, disappearing into the sheeting rain.
This wasn’t his usual cryptic commentary. This was a demand. A pull. Eden hesitated for only a moment, her hand on the latch. The forest at night in a storm was no place for anyone. But the raven’s insistence was a hook in her gut. She grabbed her woolen shawl, threw it over her head, and plunged back out into the night.
The path was a stream of mud, sucking at her boots. The wind tore at her shawl, and the rain blinded her. Bartholomew led her on, a fleeting shadow just ahead, his croaks swallowed by the gale. They moved deeper, away from her familiar trails, into the dense, ancient part of the wood where the trees grew close and the air felt old.
Then she saw it. A splash of color that had no business being there. A muted, waterlogged red against the dark brown of the leaf litter.
Eden slowed, her breath catching. It was a person. A young woman, lying twisted and still at the base of a giant oak, her clothes soaked through and caked in dark mud. One arm was bent at an unnatural angle, and a gash on her forehead seeped a thin, pinkish trickle that the rain immediately washed away.
Eden stood over her, the storm howling around them. The girl’s face was pale, freckles standing out like scattered grains of sand. Her hair was a brilliant, fiery red, even darkened by rain and mud. She was maybe twenty, no older.
Every instinct, every carefully maintained boundary screamed at Eden to turn back. This was a complication. A dangerous, unpredictable variable in her ordered world. She could fetch help from the town, miles away. She could leave her. The forest would take care of it.
But as she looked down at the broken girl, something older and more stubborn stirred. The same part of her that nurtured seedlings in her garden, that spoke to a bird as a friend, that sought a brutal kind of grace in her own filth, refused to obey.
“No,” Eden said aloud, the word firm against the wind. “Not alone.”
She knelt, the mud soaking through the knees of her trousers. She brushed the wet hair from the girl’s cold forehead. Her breathing was shallow, but it was there.
“Alright,” Eden murmured, more to herself than the unconscious form. “Alright, you’re not dead yet.”
She worked quickly, her movements efficient and strong. She straightened the girl’s limbs as best she could, fearing the broken arm. She used her own shawl to fashion a rough sling, tying it tightly to immobilize the injury. Then, with a grunt of effort, she slid her arms under the girl’s shoulders and knees and lifted. She was heavier than she looked, a dead weight of sodden wool and limp muscle.
Eden staggered, her back protesting, but she found her balance. She turned and began the slow, arduous trek back to the hut, Bartholomew circling silently overhead, a dark guide in the drowning night. The girl’s head lolled against Eden’s shoulder, her breath a faint ghost on Eden’s neck.
“You’re in my house now,” Eden panted, trudging through the mire, each step a battle. “You’ll follow my rules.”