Crecheling by D. J. Butler

let her face lie in her own vomit. “He didn’t have a choice. He never had a choice.”
    “Neither do I,” Jak spat. “But I still have to deal with the consequences of my actions. And so did he.” He pulled Dyan to her feet.
    “Ah, look, you’re a sight,” Eirig chided her. He dug into Wayland’s saddlebags and found a water flask. Holding it to Dyan’s mouth, he helped her rinse and spit into the sand several times.
    “I won’t gag you again now,” Jak told her. “The others are miles away, so there’d be no point in screaming. Let’s get back to the cave and collect your friend.”
    “She’s not my friend.” Dyan felt numb.
    Jak nodded slowly. “Let’s get her anyway.” He turned and took a step towards the dead horse, bending to collect its saddlebag.
    Dyan ran.
    She lurched and staggered, almost falling at every step, but she propelled herself forward with all the force she possessed. Not to escape, not to get away—
    she ran towards the whip.
    “Jak!” Eirig yelled. The one-armed boy dove for Dyan, his hand outstretched. He almost grabbed her, but his fingers managed only to hook into the big hip pocket of her coat, tearing the threads and ripping the pocket clean off. His hand banged into her ankle, knocking her slightly sideways, but Dyan stayed focused on her goal. She couldn’t see the line itself, of course, but she stared at the whip handle, willing herself to pass it, to end her own suffering.
    This was a choice she could make, and a consequence she was willing to suffer.
    Jak slammed into her from behind, pounding her face down again into hard sand.
    “Blazes!” she cursed him.
    “Yeah,” he agreed, breathing hard. “And worse.”
    “You’re just going to kill me anyway,” she mumbled into the sand.
    “True,” he admitted. “But not right now. I might need you still.”
    The boys dragged Dyan to her feet together, gripping her tightly so she couldn’t run. Her will was spent anyway, and she didn’t try. Not even when Eirig stooped over Wayland’s body, picking up his saddlebags and hat and kicking off his own tattered shoes in favor of Wayland’s boots.
    He saw her looking at him and shrugged apologetically. “My shoes are in bad shape,” he said. “And the walking’s rough around here.”
    Dyan nodded. Numb.
    He put Wayland’s hat on Dyan’s head. “And your skin’s already turning red.”
    Jak led them back up the canyon onto the mesa and Dyan didn’t look back. She stumbled, trying to collect her thoughts and feelings while her legs marched mechanically. Jak walked a meandering path, sticking as much as possible to the top of large stretches of slickrock, and out of the sand.
    To avoid leaving tracks, Dyan realized, and she looked down at her feet.
    Her trousers were soaked in blood. Wayland’s.
    She started to cry.
    “It’s not that bad,” Eirig said at her shoulder, and then he laughed. “Ah, who am I kidding? How could it be any worse?”
    Jak stopped and squinted at both of them. With his eyes mostly shut against the sun, his brown skin looked like the bark of a tree. He looked like he fit into the desert, like he was a wild thing, like if he just lay down he’d disappear into the sand and she’d never see him again.
    She stopped crying. To avoid seeing her bloody legs, she turned and stared at the rolling red-brown horizon.
    “We passed a spring on the way out here,” Jak said slowly. “Let’s stop there and clean up.”
    They crawled around the skirts of an immense knobby tower of stone, and at the far side of it, as Jak had promised, a trickle of water seeped from its base. The water ran through a series of sinkholes, each large enough to swim a pair of horses, towards a gap in the slickrock that Dyan guessed must be the canyon through which the river flowed.
    “I’ll untie you,” Jak told Dyan, “if you promise you won’t do anything stupid.”
    “If doing stupid things is the test,” Eirig quipped, “you’d better tie me up. I