It was the loneliness that came closest to ending me. On the fourth day of loitering close to Aro, I finally understood that this was real, this was my life now. I had lived all my life in a community of hundreds, and one of them Melory who had always been there. That fourth morning, waking up before the dawn, starving and cold, I finally accepted that things were not going to change. I would never have it back, not even the half-life I’d clung to after my accident. I got up in the dim grey light and thought about gashing my veins open with a stone, or going to pick a fight with an Arraclid until it would have to kill me in sheer self-defence. I thought about finding a height to throw myself off. Even a drawn-out death seemed better than this drawn-out life.
If I had stayed near Aro, if I had stayed near Melory, I would have found a way to end it. I could not have borne knowing she was right there and would condemn me to full Severance if she so much as saw me again. And so I left.
There were other communities out there. I would just have to find my way to one. They would know me as outcast and be no friends of mine, but at least I would be driven away by strangers rather than by former friends.
Except I had no way of finding those paths. I had never learned woodcraft from my mother. I just blundered through the trees like a blind man, missing every clue. Strange to say, it was Kalton who saved me. Kalton, my childhood friend who had not said a word to me, or even looked straight at me, since the accident. Kalton, who had been chosen for a fate oddly comparable to mine.
A day after resolving to leave, I saw people moving through the woods. I dropped to the ground in a flash of fear, convinced they were hunting me. Why else would such a large party be on the move, after all? There were far too many of them to be hunters and every decent-sized animal around would be making itself scarce, even the Arraclids.
I hid myself in the trees and watched, seeing that this was a party well-provisioned, at least twenty people on the move, some armed to ward off beasts but others carrying drums and pipes, and a couple lugging along a heavy box between them, and in the middle was Kalton, not carrying anything or doing any work, but clearly the point of this entire venture. He looked nervous and a bit afraid. Just like me, he was only sixteen years as we counted ages in Aro, meaning that many short winters or four long ones if your village counts those instead.
When I saw him just shambling along in the middle of them, a bit like a hero and a bit like a prisoner, I understood. Kalton was going to be a gift to the women of some other village. There must have been a traveller from somewhere where the Lawgiver had told them they needed fresh blood, and Kalton had been chosen. He was going to end up just as cut away from Aro as I ever was, though in a far more comfortable way. All the girls of wherever he went would be eyeing him up the moment he arrived, and he’d probably not have to do a day’s work for the next three years other than lie on his back. To some that might be a dream, but Kalton just looked scared and miserable because, like all of us, he’d only known Aro.
I couldn’t find much sympathy for him in my heart, but I could follow where they led. People didn’t travel much, around Aro. We were at the edge of the world, right up where the wilderness proper took up, where nobody lived at all. After loading me with so much, the world had finally given me a sliver of luck to clutch at.
I came so close to showing myself to them on the road. I would crouch at the very edge of their firelight, gripping my shrunken stomach and listening to familiar voices talk about nothing very much. How bad would it be if I just walked from the night like a ghost and took my place before the blaze, warming my hands, smiling like people smiled at each other? Except they might kill me like they’d kill a beast that, impossibly, tried the same trick. Or they would just hurt me and drive me off, more likely, which would be worse: a continuation of my life but with more pain. But most certainly they would turn away from me, even if nobody so much as raised a fist. I had to stop yearning for the things I couldn’t have.
And I had to eat, as well. I spent half the night foraging for some kind of tubers or berries or flesh I hadn’t eaten, novel enough to fool my stomach for a night, maybe two, before that particular brand of poison built up inside me and made me sick. Perhaps you’re tired of my hunger now. Not as tired as I was, but when you’re starving, that starvation sets up a big camp right there at the front of your mind and won’t let you forget. It’s not some pastime you can put down and take up again later when you’re at liberty to do so. It’s your life until it kills you.
I almost braved their sentries and their fire just to go through their bags for bread. The hard, burnt loaves Melory had got from the baker were golden in my memories. A few days later, they actually threw away some old crusts gone too stale for their comfortable, well-fed tastes, and I gnawed them until my gums bled and felt myself the luckiest man in the world.
The place they were going was called Cro, so I gathered from their fireside talk. I’d heard the name before, as one of Aro’s neighbours, but people back home weren’t curious, for what would other places have that we didn’t? Cro, when we came in sight of it, was much the same as my home, though maybe twice the size. Its tree grew in the midst of good flat farming land and the forest had long since been cut far back. The houses were spaced wider apart and some past artist had put up a ring of stones, man-high, to mark their gathering grounds. They grew flowers on either side of their doors, too, which I’d never seen before. These were a bright orange with green veins, hand-sized petals strung in spiralling trails along tendrils that twitched sluggishly when touched. They didn’t do anything, as far as I ever knew. They were just something people in Cro did, to make their homes brighter.
The deputation from Aro was at Cro five days. They were met by a great big gathering of people come to look Kalton over, and their own doctor came out to examine him and make sure he was fit and well. She was Corto-old but she still seemed sharp, and she prodded him hard enough to make him yelp, which I meanly enjoyed. I had done a lot of thinking about our respective exiles, and I didn’t reckon he was owed any sympathy from me.
After that, they had a bit of a festival to welcome Kalton to his new home, and there were certainly plenty of women there who had their eye on that fresh blood. Nobody ever knows their own father, not for sure, but there would be plenty of babies in a year’s time who would grow up to look like Kalton.
And then the rest of them left, rested and reprovisioned and heading back to Aro, a place Kalton and I would likely never see again. My childhood friend had settled in, by then, moving in with a couple of young women and their two-year-old child but spending plenty of nights away with other new friends. I watched the other Aro folk head back down the road with the pride of a job well done, cracking jokes about the sort of life Kalton would be enjoying. I let them go, knowing that I was finally cutting my old life away and accepting, for then and forever, that I was an outcast.
Back when I was young, I remember a couple of times when outcasts had been near the village, once a lone woman and once a band of three or so starving wretches. Everyone had been on alert, and we kids had told each other that the one thing that wouldn’t make outcasts sick and die was human flesh. It had been halfway between a silly game and a real danger. I remember hunters going off to drive them away, though I couldn’t tell you what had actually gone on, just that soon enough nobody was talking about it anymore. I never saw them myself, though I think Ma went with some of the hunting parties. Outcasts were just like dangerous animals, except they looked like people and that made them horrible.