Baring the Thorn (The Mountain Tribe #3)

Chapter 18

T he trail falters over the course of the next few days, winking in and out of existence.

There are many times where I have to go back, retread old territory, head in a new direction only to discover it was the wrong one.

Despair is like a cloud at my back, hovering, darkening the ground, and I’m constantly trying to outrun it while dragging a grown man behind me and a huge pack on my shoulders.

Thorn doesn’t wake much during the journey, and when he is awake, he barely has the strength to speak, let alone direct me.

I stop often to check on him, and that despair pulls closer every time we do.

I see the blood seeping through his wrappings, when I’m forced to change the herbs and packing on his arm again and again, his skin paler and his eyes more delirious each time.

The fever comes next, and it’s one thing that even I can’t outrun. His body tries to burn away the infection that spreads through his bloodstream, even despite all my efforts, even despite how single-minded Thorn is.

He could succumb to it, just like anyone else.

That’s what seems so unfair about all this.

How could this happen to Thorn, of all people?

Thorn who is so strong, so singularly powerful and dominating that he is a force unto himself, a fixture in the camp as constant and reassuring as the roaring lake behind us.

It seems so cruel and unlikely that he would be brought down by a bear. That the very wilderness he knows so well would turn against him.

It would make sense for me to be mauled, Samara who’s from a civilized time, who struggles to follow clear tracks and hates wearing these stiff animal skins and longs for home.

It should have been me.

He was the one who didn’t allow that, who engaged the bear and fought it off just to give me a chance to run. And now he’s the one dying for doing something so utterly reckless and romantic and selfless.

I want to rage at any and all Gods, I want to scream and cry and curl up in the freezing earth.

I want to suck the poison out of his bloodstream and drink it into myself.

Anything to not be left alone without him, anything to not lose him to this.

I cry as I walk, or in the dead of night, when I know Thorn won’t see or is too delirious to even understand.

Silent droplets of tears that pour down my cheeks, carving salty paths in the blood and grime on my face.

I just can’t accept that this is happening, that he’s going to be taken from me before I even have the chance to be with him.

The frustration is like a fever, an illness of my own that spreads with each day he weakens and sickens further, with each hour that passes when we don’t find the cache.

I’m furious at fate, at nature, at bears, at Thorn for defending me, at the very world for tossing us together only to rip us apart.

All that time we wasted on a lie, on bickering about trust and about choices and about feelings. If I had known what would happen, would I have still been so upset? Or would I have enjoyed the time I had with him, just like he said, in a time when anything could happen? Would I have ignored what he did so that I could be with him for as long as possible?

It’s impossible to say.

If I had known, I never would have walked up this hill, or looked for the medicine, or even left camp.

I would have begged him to stay, as I do now, in my own way.

With each gentle press of my hands on his wounds, each caring force of tea or water down his throat, each soft caress over his head, his skin hotter every hour, I beg him now.

“You can’t leave me,” my hands say as they work on his torn, bloodied body.

“Stay with me,” my arms beg as I drag him through the wilderness, racing against the clock, knowing that the medicine is the only chance we have now.

“Stay,” I whisper into his hand, when he’s unconscious and can’t hear me.

I whisper it like a secret, a prayer, between me and him.

I pray to the earth and the wind and the medicine and the fever that worsens in his bloodstream to let me keep him, let him stay with me and be whole and let us have a century more of fighting and loving and bossing each other around and protecting each other fiercely.

There is no one to listen, and no one to answer, and my voice fades with each day that I desperately search for the medicine, until the sun falls again, and I have to give up.

Nights pass in a blur as I lie beside Thorn in the darkness, sweating from the fever that pumps off him in steaming waves, listening to his delirious murmurings.

There is nothing more I can do for him.

The wounds are as clean as I can get them, wrapped and secured, he wears only his leather bottoms against the heat of his skin.

The forest around us is cold and the wind bites at my nose, yet still he’s like a furnace beside me.

Any broth I coax into him just comes back up, and I resort to pressing soaked cloths to his parched lips to get him to drink.

Thorn’s head thrashes from side to side at the worst of times, when my tears are cold on my hot cheeks, and I cling to his side and sob into his burning neck.

“Don’t you dare do this,” I rage at him, my voice broken and hollow, exhaustion weighing on my sore body and misery choking my throat. If I could heal him with desperation, by begging him fiercely and despairingly, he would be whole. “Thorn… I will never forgive you if you leave me like this. Do you hear me? You have to keep fighting, you have to-… You can’t make me care and then…God, and then just die. Like all that we wanted doesn’t even matter. You can’t leave when I’m still angry at you. You just can’t. I’m not done with you, not even close…God. I need you to stay… Thorn…I need you to stay.”

I can find the medicine on my own, I can figure something out with the stranger who took it and bring it to the others.

I can find my way to the camp by coming back the way we came from and climbing up that same mountain range that the camp sits in the valley of. And I can survive in this world, in this time, on my own. I have the other girls, I have the skills I’ve picked up from watching the hunters and Thorn’s teachings, I have a community here that I care about.

But I know myself, and if I’m being honest, it's all empty without him. It would be purposeless.

Thorn is the first person who’s mattered to me this much.

I had dated men and I had cared for them in small, insignificant ways and I had always had a strained, distant relationship with my family, but Thorn is like a revelation in this future.

Everything I thought I could have felt for another is a droplet of rain and Thorn is a violent, torrential hurricane sweeping me off my feet and tossing me about.

It consumes me.

It feels both like terrible luck and divine fate that we found each other in this wilderness, in this time, only to have such a brief, tiny glimpse of happiness together. How can it be over so quickly?

The truth is that I can live here without him, that I can go through the motions of surviving, but I don’t want to if he isn’t by my side. And how unfair that it took getting mauled by a bear for me to realize this, that I couldn’t have realized it a month ago when we bickered and I avoided him in the camp, or even days ago when his lie felt like the worst betrayal I could have imagined.

Now I realize that it’s only because I cared so deeply that it stung so much.

I would always be upset with him for lying, but what does it matter if there’s another man in this wilderness? It wouldn’t matter if there was a thousand more men out somewhere in the forest, because I would pick Thorn, out of anywhere, out of anytime, out of a crowd of thousands.

I would pick him again, and again, even knowing he lied, even knowing his faults.

And if there is an afterlife that Thorn races too with the rate of his starving fever, then I will just have to find him and pick him there too.

Thorn only gets worse.

He turns ghastly white, his eyes roll back into his head, his fever so hot that I swear the water I pour over him sizzles.

In the morning light, I peel back his wrappings to clean them and pack them again and the smell of festering flesh makes my eyes sting.

The wounds are angry, hideous red, pumping out fluid filled with infection, and little pink lines crawl away from his arm and chest like spiderwebs under his skin. The infection will spread to his heart, given enough time, and eventually it’ll stop beating.

I’m past despair at this point, and my body feels like one long bared nerve, raw and sensitive.

I want to scream and cry and tear apart the forest with my bare hands, but I know it won’t help, so I apply the same useless herbs I have for almost a week - knowing that it makes no difference - and wrap him back up for travel.

Thorn jerks listlessly as I drag him onto the stretcher, and in a moment of startling strength he reaches out for me, his chapped lips forming my name in slurred, hazy fear.

The terror in his voice grips me, like he’s reached his fist into my chest and closed his big, hot fingers around my heart.

“I’m here,” I tell him, holding him back tightly while my other hand presses to his cheek, his face. Thorn sighs, and I have to assume it’s because of my chilly fingers against his burning skin. “I’m right here, Thorn. I’ve been here the whole time.”

But he’s too delirious to even register my presence, to even know where we are or what’s happening.

I’ve seen it in far gone patients, but I push the thought from my mind.

He needs me, so I stay with him for the moment of terrified wakefulness, as he murmurs in words and phrases and feelings that I don’t understand.

I don’t need to know what he’s saying to react to it, to feel the dark stab of sympathy and be sickened by the storm of misery his subconscious wrecks on us both.

Thorn alone.

Thorn scared.

Thorn fighting to survive. Thorn despairing.

The glimpse into his inner mind, though his language is nonsensical delirious sobs, binds us, and I couldn’t move even if I had the strength.

It’s more than just hearing about how hard it was in the camp before, how these men were cast into the wilderness as boys and thrust together with no real understanding of survival. How they fought to hunt and build and continue on in a world void of purpose, in a world with no future.

It’s more than seeing the burden on Thorn’s shoulders from afar, than trying to understand him after a conversation.

I’m there with Thorn now, through cold winters and blistering summers and hunger that keeps him up at night and worry that the end could come at any day.

I’m beside him while the people he came from die, one by one, while he stumbles as an adolescent through unfamiliar landscapes, hunted by wolves that await his collapse into the mud.

We feel everything together, his ramblings speaking to something deeper than language within me, deeper than any despair I’d ever come close to before the bunker.

We cry together, we mourn, we rage at the wilderness, and we harbor that tiny hope that we will be found by someone, or find them, and the suffering will end.

It’s real in a way that a story never could be.

But the flame of Thorn’s consciousness flickers and dims, and in time his hold on my hand goes slack. I owe it to him to keep going, even if he wants me to just stay at his side longer and smooth the sweat from his scalding brow.

I lift the stretcher and start walking.

We make it over the mountain range that we’d begun on before the bear attack, but the other side is merely a valley of more mountains, and I have to rely on my last reserves of strength to pull Thorn up steeper and steeper terrain.

By the late afternoon, I lose the trail again entirely, and the wind whips at us. I’ve wrapped Thorn up again because of the cold, but he pants and thrashes under the furs from his fever, and I know he’s uncomfortable.

This high up, the wind seems to push me back a foot for every I put forward, and tears sting my eyes as I drag us forwards.

In a moment of carelessness, I stumble over some rocks, and lose my grip on the stretcher, and Thorn slumps over the side in such a sudden movement that snaps the branches.

I drop to my knees beside him, pulling him up and surveying the damage on my makeshift pallet, but it’s been totaled by the fall.

I’ll need to completely rebuild it before we move on, and I only have a few hours of light left.

Something in me snaps, and I fling the broken branches away from me, shrieking with the frustration and despair and anger that burns in my belly.

I toss back my head and scream, “FUCK! Why? Why is this fucking happening? Why did it have to be Thorn? Shit! Goddamn it! Fuck!”

It feels good to rage, so I scream until I’m out of breath, before I collapse back over him, the tears flowing freely now. There’s no reason to fight down what I’m feeling, how exhausted and scared and furious I am at our predicament, and if Thorn was conscious, I wouldn’t have the energy to keep it from him anyways.

I cling to his chest, the fluid from his bindings soaking through and wetting my cheek, his skin like fiery embers under my hands, and cry so hard that it steals my breath, that each ragged tear shreds my throat until my voice is hoarse.

Maybe it’s because I’m crying so hard that I don’t hear the snap of twigs and crunch of leaves until it’s too late, until the hunter breaks through the wall of trees beside us.

When I look up, in weary shock, it’s into the sharpened tip of an arrow.