“What if we run out of cloths?” Lon whines. “They haven’t cleared the Hil in years. There’l be obstacles everywhere! We might as wel mark every tree we see.”
“If you run out of cloths, use rocks to make cairns,” the Officer says. He turns to Ky. “Do you know how to make a cairn?” There’s the briefest of hesitations before Ky answers. “Yes.”
“Show them.”
Ky gathers a few rocks from the ground around us and stacks them, largest first, in a smal pile. His hands are quick and sure, the way they are when he’s teaching me to write. The tower looks precarious but does not fal .
“See? It’s simple,” the Officer says. “I’l blow my whistle later and that means you need to start making your way back. You blow your whistles if you get lost.” He gives us each a standard-issue metal whistle. “It shouldn’t be hard. Just head back down the mountain the way you came.” The Officer’s thinly veiled disgust for us used to amuse me. Today, I understand it. I feel disgust when I think of how we climb our little hil s when the Officials say the word. How we hand over our most precious items at their bidding. How we never, ever fight.
We are barely out of view of the others when Ky turns to me and I turn to him and for a moment I think he is going to touch me. I sense, more than see, his hand move slightly and then drop back down. I feel a disappointment deeper than the disappointment I felt this morning when I opened my closet and did not see the compact resting there.
“Are you al right?” he asks. “Last night, when they searched the houses—I didn’t know until after I came home.”
“I’m fine.”
“My artifact ...”
Is that al he cares about? I whisper fiercely, “It’s in your flower bed. Buried under the newroses. Dig it up and then you’ll have it back.”
“I don’t care about the artifact,” he says, and although he stil does not touch me, I am warmed at the fire in his eyes. “I couldn’t sleep al night, worrying that I’d gotten you in trouble. I care about you.”
Those words are quiet here under the trees but they sing loudly in my heart, louder than al the Hundred Songs caroled al at once. And his eyes are shadowed underneath, from thinking about me. I want to reach up and touch that skin under his eyes, the one place I’ve seen any vulnerability in him, make him feel better. And then I could run my fingers there, across his cheekbones, down to his lips, to the place where his jaw meets his neck, where his neck meets his shoulder line. I like the places where one part meets another, I think, eyes to cheek, wrist to hands. Somewhat shocked at my own thoughts, I take a step back.
“How did you—”
“Someone helped me.”
“Xander,” he says.
How does he know? “Xander,” I agree.
Neither of us speaks for a moment; I stand back, seeing him whole. Then he turns and begins to walk through the trees again. It is slow going; the underbrush grows so tangled here that it’s more of a climb than a hike. Trees that fel have not been cleared away and lie like giant bones across the forest floor.
“Yesterday ...” I begin. I have to ask, as inconsequential as the question now seems. “Were you teaching Livy how to write?” Ky stops again and looks at me. His eyes seem almost green under the canopy of the trees. “Of course not,” he says. “She wanted to know what we were doing. She saw us writing. We weren’t careful enough.”
I feel stupid and relieved. “Oh.”
“I told her I’d been showing you how to draw the trees.” He picks up a stick next to me and starts moving it around to make a pattern that does look remarkably like leaves. Then he places the stick down as the trunk of the tree. I keep looking at his hands after he has finished, not sure what else to do.
“No one draws once they’re out of First School.”
“I know,” he says. “But at least it’s not expressly forbidden.”
I reach into the bag I carry for a piece of red cloth and tie it on a fal en tree near Ky. I keep my eyes down, looking now at my fingers as they twist the fabric into a knot. “I’m sorry. About the way I acted yesterday.” When I straighten up, Ky has already moved on.
“Don’t be,” Ky says, pul ing a tangle of climbing green vines away from a shrub so that we can pass through. He throws the vines at me and I catch them in surprise. “It’s good to see you jealous once in a while.” He smiles, sun in the woods.
I try not to smile in return. “Who said I was jealous?”
“No one,” he says. “I could tel . I’ve been watching people for a long time.”
“Why did you let me hold onto it, anyway?” I ask him. “The case with the arrow. It’s beautiful. But I wasn’t sure—”
“No one but my parents know that I have it,” he says. “When Em gave me the compact to give back to you, I noticed how much alike they were. I wanted you to see it.”
His voice sounds lonely al of a sudden, and I can almost hear another sentence, the one that instinct stil keeps him from saying: I wanted you to see me. Because isn’t this what it’s al about, the golden case with the arrow, the bits of story offered here and there? Ky wants someone to see him.
He wants me to see him.
My hands ache to reach for him. But I can’t bring myself to betray Xander in that way after everything he has done. After he saved us both—Ky and me—just last night.
But there is something I can continue to give Ky that is purely mine, that doesn’t belong to Xander. The poem.
I only mean to tel him a few more lines, but once I start tel ing him it’s hard to hold back, and I say the whole thing. The words go together. Some things are created to be together.
“The words aren’t peaceful,” Ky says.
“I know.”
“Then why do they make me feel calm?” Ky asks in wonder. “I don’t understand.”
In silence, we push our way through more undergrowth, the poem heavy in our minds.
Final y, I know what it is I want to say. “I think it’s because when we hear it we know we’re not the only ones who ever felt this way.”
“Tel it to me again,” Ky asks softly. His breath catches; his voice is husky.
Al the rest of the time, until we hear the Officer’s whistle, we move up the Hil repeating the poem back to each other like a song. A song that just the two of us know.