“No!” Sharskin hissed, his pincer grip tightening until I squirmed. “That’s their lie, Handry. We’ve not been made less, we’ve been restored. We are finally how we’re meant to be.” His wide eyes pinned me, cutting past my incredulous gawping. “There’s a place we can go, Handry. Those who are strong and resourceful enough to go there. We can live there. There’s food and shelter. There are others like us. A community of those who’ve been cast out. How does that sound, boy?”
“Impossible,” I blurted out, and he laughed.
“Well, no wonder, with that attitude! But it’s true. Come with me and do what I tell you, I’ll take you there. You can be one of us.”
“One of what?” My mouth was still making words even though my mind was already convinced. Of course I would go with Sharskin. I would follow him forever, because he had answers and confidence and vision, more than anyone else I ever met. Sincerity blazed in his face like ghostlight.
“This,” he told me, raising his red-stained hands, “this is the Mark of Cain. That’s what our ancestors called it. But because of this mark, it means we’re restored to the Original Condition.” He said the words with weight, making them names for great invisible things I couldn’t guess at. “We’re the real people, Handry, now all that ghost-taint is stripped from us. Don’t think of yourself as broken or wrong. You’re how a man is supposed to be.”
I felt something inside me, swelling until it hurt, as though I was Sethr with his bloated stomach. It was my heart, though. It was my pride. Here was this man, so impossibly healthy for an outcast, so in control of his own journey, telling me I was special. He was saying the things that marked me out, made me better, not just a reject abandoned to die. Of course I’d go with him. How could I not? Tell me you wouldn’t, if you’d lived like me, and I’ll call you a liar here and now. A little kindness, that was all it took to make me his; kindness, and the fact that he understood what it was like. Even Melory couldn’t know that, not since the ghost came to her, despite all the years we’d spent in each other’s shadow.
Next morning, along with Ostel and Menic, I left Orovo in Sharskin’s company, striding out into the wilderness with a direction and purpose I’d long been lacking.
VI.
OSTEL WAS A TALL, skinny man—skinny before they had Severed him, even skinnier now. His village had been some place called Pavo that I hadn’t been to, and their Lawgiver had got creative with the Severance, daubing it in patterns on his face and chest so that he wouldn’t ever be able to hide what they’d done to him. As though any of us ever could. As though, even wrapped in thick hide from head to foot, it wouldn’t scream out at every normal person that we weren’t one of them. But that artistic streak was probably why Ostel was still alive, seasons after being cast out, because the Severance hadn’t quite taken, just like with me. Even though—unlike me—they really had meant to cut him off forever. Just what he’d done that they’d Severed him, he never said. It wasn’t a question most people would answer. We liked to think of ourselves as the wronged, the rebels. I really was blameless, but it was a story borrowed around all of Sharskin’s followers, and they couldn’t all of them have been mistakes. Nobody wanted to remember that they’d brought it upon themselves.
Menic was shorter and broader. He’d been strong before they Severed him and not been outcast long, so he’d kept most of that muscle. A man like that, fit and well, you’d think I’d remember him from the fighting, but somehow I couldn’t recall him at my shoulder as we drove the animals out of the tree. I began to have my suspicions about just why he’d been thrown out of wherever he came from, and they were confirmed soon enough.
It started the first night after we left Orovo when Sharskin asked him to build up a fire while Ostel and I went foraging for what we could find. Feeding the four of us was tricky because we all reacted to different berries and roots and grubs in different ways, which meant whoever went out had to gather a bit of everything those parts had to offer and hope there would be something everyone could stomach. The two of us got back in the dark to find Sharskin asking Menic where the fire was. Menic made himself look simple and just muttered that he wasn’t any good at building fires, never had been, so very sorry. So Sharskin made the fire, and lit it, too, through some trick of his that wasn’t anything like the fooling with sticks and stones that hunters did. Menic was good at eating, and he’d chew over just about everything even if he spat it out, and I remember Sharskin watching him across the fire, expressionless. Ostel and I could see just what was going on and we expected some sharp words from our guide and leader, but Sharskin said nothing. We didn’t realise he was counting, inside his head. That was one.
The next day we set a punishing pace through the forest, interrupted only when we had a face-off with a big Sevner, the largest I ever saw. It had been stripping a tree with its pincered trunk, but it obviously decided we were bad news when we broke through some undergrowth behind it. It was large as the house I’d lived in with Melory, hump-backed and solid on its six tubular legs, with its fat tail curving down to make a seventh. It tossed its head in the air, brandishing the forked horn that jutted an arm’s length from over its top eye, and trumpeted at us from the slits in its flanks.
Sevners look slow, but they can chase a man down when their blood’s up, and this one was plainly in no mood for us. Our Severed smell, that most animals would rather avoid, had obviously riled it; we had no choice but to scare it off. We set up a-hollering and a-hooting, and then Ostel and I started throwing stones, aiming at whichever of its eyes was turned towards us. Sharskin himself just strode forwards, arms out wide with his big sleeves flapping, waving his shining staff so that the sunlight glittered and dazzled across its big, dumb-looking face.
I thought he was going to get stomped flat because for a moment the Sevner was bunching up its legs to charge him down. Then it changed its mind and shouldered off into the trees, squealing in panic and cracking the trunks with its weight.
I remember Menic had been at the back, though he’d done his share of the hollering at the start. It hadn’t come to a fight and Sharskin said nothing, but he was counting and that was two.
That evening, though, he had Ostel build the fire and told Menic to go gather for us, and that was apparently too much.
“Go gather yourself,” Menic told him, sitting down and warming his hands. “You wanted me to come with you. Wasn’t my idea. So, here I am. You got what you want.”
Sharskin stood very still, and that was three and enough. Ostel and I took a prudent step away, because we both reckoned Menic was going to get a slap, and then maybe the two of them would end up scrapping because Sharskin was strong, too, and he’d want to beat some sense into our travelling companion. We were slightly right but mostly wrong.
Sharskin hit him with that silver staff, just flourished it in the firelight and whacked Menic in the side of the head with it, with all his strength. I heard the man’s skull crack like a pot and he had a heartbeat and a half of rolling on the ground and screaming before Sharskin rammed the end of that staff through Menic’s eye, pinning his spasming body to the ground and turning the scream into a deflating wheeze of breath that soon became nothing at all.