Page 121 of Cursed Shadows 5

Hedda needs no coat, not with her natural one; the rain merely slides off of her.

She gallops ahead, and any time she gets too far, she stops herself, runs back to me, circles me as though to herd or rush me, then chases ahead again.

The hour it takes us to reach the watering hole is long and yet short. Time feels strange to me now. Suppose time has always been a strange concept to me, but especially now—as though it doesn’t exist at all.

But that time does exist, and it is one hour of it before we reach the watering hole for the ox and sheep farms.

It is something of a small lake or a large pond, but it isn’t natural. The earth doesn’t provide this to us, farmers dug it out themselves for their animals.

I feel little these phases, since Eamon took my heart to the afterlife with him, but I do sense a distant echo of wonder as we reach the water, and I see the flickers beneath the surface. Flickers of fish swimming. Fish that don’t belong in this water but rather came from the scat of birds who had eaten fish eggs.

Like time, nature is a strange thing.

Hedda pounces on the muddy shore.

I sit on the mud, cross-legged, and watch as she starts to hunt the fish. It was Kalice who bloomed the idea in me. A distant, faint memory of her faerie hound hunting fish in a pond. A small activity, but one that Hedda in her youth needs.

I neglected her.

But I need her.

So I drag myself out here, each phase, and let her play until she starts to slow—and then we eat the sandwiches from the satchel before we head back to Kithe.

This phase is no different.

An hour trek to the watering hole, two hours in the mud, then an hour journey back.

By the time we’re closing in on Kithe’s cobblestone, the scent of bakeries and ale wafting through the air, the distant calls of drunkards, I am frozen to the touch.

Beneath the coat, my flesh is pebbled and prickled, as coarse as the wool itself, and Hedda has transformed from white to brown.

My thoughts tangle around how to best wash her before returning to the dwelling, otherwise she will track her mud everywhere, all over the floors of course but also the armchair and the bed.

The washroom is communal between four dwellings, and it is a pain to cart the buckets of water back and forth between the well and the washtub itself, and I just can’t be bothered boiling the water.

The washroom in the tavern has a tap…

I flinch at the thought.

The tavern.

It is something I push out of my mind each time it dares flicker through my thoughts. I cannot afford to consider it, not even for a moment.

The tavern is his.

I haven’t stepped foot through those doors since Eamon died in my arms. That tavern was our dream, we worked on it down to our callouses and aching knees.

It was ours.

It took us a month, together, to build the foundations of our new life in Kithe.

It took one moment to destroy it all.

I am not ready to face the tavern, so for now, the well water will suffice.

Hedda often struggles a little in the cold washtub. She is first to dive into the stagnant, cold watering hole, but a bath is something else, a torture she squirms against.

I throw a huff down at her, trotting beside me, panting from her weariness. As though she reads my mind, her gaze cuts up, but her head doesn’t, and so it is an unkind side-eye she throws back at me.

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