He shrugged, unbothered. “I don’t remember.”
Greer thought of the hares she’d eaten, the eel Martha had baked into a pie. Cuts of venison, rashers of bacon. She wouldn’t have bothered to remember them, either, and her gut twisted with shame and disgust.
But when I eat a slice of ham, I don’t slaughter every hog in Mistaken.
She spotted a pale length of bone curving down from the remains of a rafter, and winced. It was part of a rib cage. Greer looked away, not wanting to imagine how it could have ended up there.
“We’ll need to get to that,” Finn said, pointing toward the hill on the other side of the village. Greer could just make out the remains of a road, still traced faintly into the earth like a nearly healed scar. It led up into the mountains, up to Sandry.
“This was where the miners lived,” she murmured, piecing everything together. “With their families…”
She studied Finn, wondering if he’d had a family then, a mother and father or a wife and children. He shrugged again, unconcerned, and his lack of interest made her heart ache.
“Were you a miner?” she pressed.
“I don’t remember.”
“You lived here. Surely, there must be something.”
Finn frowned. “I…I probably was. My feet…There must have been an accident, before I turned. Some of my toes were crushed. They still are.” His gaze flickered up to the mountains before them. “Do you think the mines could have done that?”
She thought about his two-toed prints. “It’s possible.”
He nodded, as if the matter was settled, then reached out his hand. “It’s steep.”
Greer stared at his proffered fingers. They were long and thin, rough with calluses, and looked so terribly human.
She considered her own. Ailie, in a fit of bloodlust, had torn apart an entire town. That same blood flowed through Greer’s veins. She remembered the entirely too-still form of Lachlan Davis, laying in a broken heap at Mistaken’s border. She’d done that, with just the power of her voice. What would her hands be capable of?
She studied the stitches of Ailie’s ribbon and the tight series of knots she’d tied with her own hands, overwhelmed by a sense of bewilderment. She felt too human to side with what she knew lurked beneath Finn’s exterior. But she herself was too monstrous ever to return to Mistaken. Where did that leave her?
“Greer?” he prompted, stirring her from the tortured reverie.
She glanced behind her, staring down the hill they’d climbed as if she could see all the way back to Mistaken, and then Greer slipped her hand into his and followed Noah Finn into the remains of Laird.
35
They traveled alongthe center of the road. Burnt-out shells of buildings rose on either side. The ground was littered with shards of glass and the broken bits of so many lives. Greer spotted the cracked face of a porcelain doll. Its body was long gone, and the toy seemed to regard her with an accusatory stare, as if Greer were personally responsible for its missing limbs.
In a way, she felt she was.
“It’s so quiet here,” she murmured, and her voice seemed to hang too long in the untouched air.
She’d expected the town to have the same white noise as the forest—claws scurrying up trees and feathers flapping, birdsong and pattering from the game trail—but there was nothing here. Even the wind seemed far away, shying high above them, unwilling to touch the forsaken remains.
“You look troubled,” Finn said, watching her from the corner of his eye. Greer had dropped his hand the moment they were on level ground, but he kept finding ways to reach for her, helping her around rubble, steadying her on a slippery bit of ground. Like a lover. Like a consort. “These people would be long dead, even if Ailie and Elowen hadn’t come.”
It wasn’t exactly true. The original miners would be gone, but therewould have been others, descendants and new settlers. This town would have been thriving had it not been for the Gathered. There would not be this wide and gaping nothing.
They passed by the remains of a small cabin. A crumbling wall held up a column of bricks that had been a hearth. From the shadowed depths came a crack, the sound of weight snapping a branch in two, and Finn and Greer froze, their heads swiftly turning in unison to the source.
A pair of dark, limpid dots stared from the gloomy mess. They were wide and unblinking, the eyes of a white-tailed deer. A doe.
Finn’s stomach let out a gurgle of emptiness, breaking the moment.
In a flash, the doe sprang from the ruined cabin and bounded away. Finn started after it, then stopped short, glancing to Greer. She could feel his expectation, but he said nothing.
“You’re hungry,” she realized. Still, he waited. “Don’t let me stop you.”
