Young Writers Society

Chapter 13.2 - yOU wAnNa knOw How I gOt thEsE ScArS?

The water of the murky creek trickled gently down the gradual slope of the land. A cool breeze blew against their backs from the south, carrying the fresh smells of the forest through the air. At the edge of the water, James sat with his legs crossed, holding bandages, and Laura's jar of healing salve that Clandestine had held onto.

He'd finally stripped himself of his muddied, bloody shirt and sat by the water uncomfortably aware that Clandestine was watching him from afar. With neither of their trust wholly earned, Clandestine wasn't giving him space. Though in all fairness, he was sure it was her curiosity keeping her eyes pinned on him at all times as much as it was her fear that he would leave at any moment.

James slowly and tediously cleaned his shoulder, his arm, his chest; everywhere the blood had dried and caked and mixed with sweat and the nature he was dragged through. He was wary of moving his shoulder too much or stretching it too far, for fear of opening the wound again. The last thing he wanted was to have to seal it that way again, and he didn't have supplies to stitch it up.

He was fortunate that the stab wound had been his only piercing blow. The bruises from bumping into things and being kicked would heal in time, and there was little he could do to aid them in that natural process apart from taking it easy.

When he was sure his wounds were clean, and his hygiene was remedied, he gingerly applied the salve to his shoulder with two fingers, and then slowly began to wrap the wound.

Admittedly, the task might've been easier for someone else to help him with, as it took longer for him to one-handedly twist up and around his arm, but he still wasn't comfortable with Clandestine getting that near to him. Were he pretending to be Matt, he would've tolerated it, but he eagerly seized the opportunity to establish new boundaries as James. As himself.

He tied off the bandage and ripped off the roll that remained. As he set the roll down on the ground he slouched forward and let out a deep, long sigh.

Clandestine was approaching from his left. He could hear her boots slide down the slope in the mud. His eyes flickered to his clean shirt, folded up on a rock to his right, eager to cover himself up and hide away. He reached for it and brought it to his lap as he undid the buttons. Clandestine sat beside him, only a foot or two away. His back and shoulders tensed. From the corner of his eye, he could see her.

She wasn't looking at his face. She was scanning his body, with a pained sort of pity in her eyes. The look made him want to cringe and straighten up at the same time.

"I thought... maybe the scars were from some freak accident in childhood," she started to say, her voice soft as if she were afraid of scaring him off. Like he was a frightened animal. "But they're not, are they?"

James just glanced at her from the corner of his eyes, thinking over his answer. She seemed to already come to a conclusion, so he didn't know why she was asking.

"I know it's - I know it's rude to like, ask," she added before he could reply. "But I just..."

Her eyes lingered on his back. Where the worst ones were. The three streaks across his back, when he had his closest brush with death, and then the encircled "B" seared into his lower back with scalding iron.

"The brand was from a bounty hunter," he said stiffly. "A lot of them are."

Clandestine looked up at him, but he kept his eyes on his shirt. He undid the last button and slipped his injured arm in first.

"I thought you were wanted alive though?" she asked.

He pulled the shirt around his back and slipped his other arm in the next sleeve.

"Alive and dead are two different things," he said as he brought the bottom buttons together.

Clandestine paused. He wondered if the implications of that statement were sinking in, and how mild or extreme her imagination was in comparison to reality. Her voice came back with a timid question.

"So you've been caught a lot?"

He finished buttoning his shirt, leaving the top two undone.

"Enough," was his one-word answer.

"And you escaped?"

"Well, I wouldn't be here if I hadn't."

Clandestine twisted her lips into an awkward frown and folded into herself. She leaned forward and grabbed her legs, tucking them under her chin. As she looked away, they fell into silence. The sound of their voices was replaced by the trickling of slow-moving water and the occasional tweets of birds overhead.

James leaned back on his good arm.

The peace of the forest - largely uninhabited and untouched by human civilization - was calming. It also made it easier to pick out the sounds that he knew could only belong to a person, or Alexander. As it stood, Alexander hadn't shown any signs that he was following them, but he knew that Alexander had to be tracking them from afar. Why he hadn't struck already, while James was still wounded, he couldn't be sure, but he knew they weren't in the clear yet.

He was itching to get to Ruddlan. Then he could leave Clandestine, and hopefully, she would be able to disappear into the crowd, and her connections to him would be forgotten in time. As much as she made for good company, things would be simpler without her, and without all of her questions. No one had ever stuck around with him after knowing him as one alias and then discovering his true identity anyway. The amount of effort it took to remedy such broken trust was never spent, and he'd long since given up on the idea of living a life attached to anyone at all.

Sooner or later, Carter was going to catch up to him. It was just a matter of time.

Clandestine shifted and sat up, and started rolling up the sleeve of her jacket up her arm. He glanced in her direction.

Seeing he was looking over, she held her arm out towards him, revealing a long, thick scar that ran up the side of her arm from her wrist to her elbow.

"Most of my scars are from monster hunting," she said, with a small smile tugging at her lips.

"This one's from a tusked wolfbear that was getting into a blacksmiths' shed. Did you know they like to eat coal?" Her smile fought its way through and she started chuckling. "Monsters are weird sometimes. That one I ended up finding just as it snuck in the shed. Now let me tell you, you don't want to get stuck fighting a tusked animal in close quarters. Makes a big mess."

James blinked, looking up from her arm to her eyes, green and lit up with fondness as she looked at the scar and relived the memory.

His reply was a hum, barely audible. She turned her arm around to reveal a few small nicks that she started pointing out.

"This one was from a darting squirrel - not nearly as friendly as a flying squirrel, though they can still fly. They're just a class C monster, but their claws are like tiny little daggers. It's like fighting a smaller, stronger, faster cat that is also more likely to carry a disease," she went on, chuckling again at the thought.

James looked at the tiny claw marks as she poked at them with her finger like each mark was a trophy of a successful hunt. For the briefest moment, he wondered if he would ever think of his burn from the goblin in that way, but the thought left as quickly as it came.

The goblins weren't equivalent to a rabid squirrel and they never would be. There was no pride to be found in their defeat.

James caught movement from across the creek out of the corner of his eye. Clandestine went silent. His head jerked up, and Clandestine and James looked across the creek simultaneously.

Standing on the other side of the creek, two young goblins were peering over a fallen log. The couldn't have been older than twelve. They were still so small. One seemed to be the average height of a ten-year-old human child, but the other was only a little larger than a small dog.

The youngest crawled on top of the log with its head stretched forward in curiosity, with the rest of its body holding back. Its shoulders scrunched up around its head, pushing its long droopy ears up on the sides on its head. The older, taller goblin child gawked with wide eyes, holding the top of the log as if ready to flee at any moment. The two of them looked like they might be siblings. They shared the same short, shaggy dark hair cut close to the shape of their heads, and they both had small, round noses poking from between their yellow eyes.

James had to admit, he was a little confused as to why the young goblins were alone or had wandered so far from their parents. He wondered how close their parents were, and he felt a chill of trepidation rush down his back. He began to search the forest behind the goblins for signs of anyone else, but he saw nothing. Clandestine sent him a confused look from the corner of his eyes.

He barely looked at her, keeping his focus on the goblins. She slowly propped herself up into a squat and took a hesitant step forward.

"Uh, hello?" she greeted with a small wave.

At the wave of her hand, the two jumped back behind the log. The oldest popped its eyes back up for a moment, eyes fixed on Clandestine's hands. It held its stare for but a second before it darted away into the forest with a fearful squeal, with the small one on its back.

Clandestine's gaze drifted over to him again, her mouth hanging open and her brows furrowed together in confusion.

"What were they doing out here?" she asked.

James shrugged with his good shoulder. "Getting water, probably."

Clandestine's eyes fell to her hands. He watched as something like a mortified fear passed over her countenance. He waited for her to say something, but when she didn't, he hesitantly leaned forward to catch her attention.

"What is it?"

Clandestine's eyes fluttered for a moment and she shook her head as she looked up at James. She attempted to force a smile, but it quickly faltered when they met each other's eyes. She stared back down at her hands.

"Do you think they were scared of me?" she asked.

"You mean, more than they would be of any human?"

Clandestine stammered. "No, I-I guess I just thought..." She pushed a stray hair behind her ear. "I don't know, just that, maybe they knew I had magic somehow."

James stared at her.

He was used to mages being secretive about their magic, and afraid others would see. But goblins weren't like humans. Goblins openly used magic in their culture, and they did not despise it. Were they to see her magic, they wouldn't have feared her for being a mage, only that she would use her magic against them.

That was when it clicked.

Was she scared of her own magic? He wondered how much she'd been taught, or if she'd been taught it at all. He wondered how much she understood her own abilities.

Clandestine was born in a different era, a different culture. A time before magic was outlawed, before propaganda and world disasters brought blame upon the things humans didn't quite know how to explain. He couldn't remember if she'd said how old she was when she woke up in their current time period, and he didn't know how long she'd been living in it, but he had a feeling her magic was different, and it wasn't just because she was a mage from another age.

He didn't know how, but he just felt it in his gut.

"That is possible," he said. "Maybe word travels fast between the goblins. I don't know how much trouble we caused for them, or how much our defeat of the chief and his troop caused ripples among their people. Goblins have skirmishes and run-ins with humans all the time - though usually, it's more evenly matched. And both parties are actually seeking to fight, rather than negotiate or retreat. Or at least, that's been our perception them."

It was possible he was wrong. He didn't know enough to say anything with 100% certainty, but Clandestine was nodding her head in agreement, if only barely. She looked at the ground in thought.

"You don't think any of them died, do you?"

This time, James was the one to furrow his brows together.

Clandestine didn't make sense to him. As a monster hunter, it didn't make sense for her to express remorse for fighting goblins, when she herself had (if indirectly) classified them as monsters and said nothing to defend their personhood or intelligence. He almost hoped she was only asking to reach for a logical reason to explain the goblin children's fear of her hand. Of her magic. And it really was a reach.

"We can't know what happened after they fled," he said with a carefully managed indifference. "For all we know, they were just afraid because we're humans and they didn't expect to run into any of us this deep into the forest. But if they saw us and are returning to their parents or a larger group, it's best we get a move on. Regardless if they know who we are or not, we don't want to run into a bunch of goblins, and they won't follow us into a human city."

James stood up, tucking the medical supplies in one hand against his stomach.

Clandestine looked out across the water. He couldn't quite read her expression. She looked sad and conflicted, but he couldn't tell over what.

"You're probably right. It's probably nothing," she mumbled as she got up.

"We also still have Alexander to worry about," he reminded her. All the more reason to hurry to Ruddlan.

Clandestine's face contorted with a comically exaggerated expression of disgust and displeasure.

"Ugh," she grumbled. "Yeah. That guy."

A ghost of a smile passed over James's lips. He gave a nod towards the horses, roped to a tree.

"My thoughts exactly."