Chapter Fifteen

For immeasurable moments, Ben and Tess could do nothing but stand staring in awe at the other’s unexpected presence, a feeling they always had when they met up randomly, though it was augmented this time by the gravity of their mutual purpose, and the pain both still carried from the last time they were together in the very same clearing.

Gus cleared his throat from his position standing a few paces back from Ben. Martha “shh”ed him. But the silence was already broken, and Tess had already reacted by giving a little yelp and jumping a few feet backwards.

“I... didn’t realize this was a... a... group outing,” she said, so quietly only Ben could really hear it; Gus and Martha had to perform a combination of reading her lips and guessing. She looked very confused and conflicted, two feelings obviously exacerbated by the appearance of two people she’d only ever heard stories about.

“You’re different than we’d imagined,” Martha said. “Prettier,” she clarified, and winced and tried to backpedal. “I mean, we imagined you’d be pretty, we just didn’t think you would be so pretty. Ben always described you as pretty, we just thought—”

“We’ve just never held much stock in his taste,” Gus salvaged. “He once told me he thought a Raven’s croak was ‘pretty’ too, so I kind of imagined you to be the personification of a Raven croaking.” He smiled broadly, and Tess blushed.

Ben hadn’t taken his eyes away from her yet. He was still looking for something in her face. A sign of forgiveness, maybe, or even an assurance of her happiness. Regret for having ever even considered letting him leave without her? He didn’t know what, but he didn’t find any of that. Even though all signs pointed to yes, she was coming, he felt like there was still a chance she would stay behind and force him into life without her.

“You’re about what I imagined,” Tess told Gus.

“That’s because there’s only one word anyone could use to describe us,” Gus said.

“Average,” Martha conceded with a sigh. “If Medias had a brochure, we’d be the poster children for mediocrity within the borders.”

“No, no. Ben didn’t say that,” Tess said, smiling a little. “He... well... you just... make sense.”

Gus looked mockingly startled. “Do mine ears deceive me or did someone just accuse me of the foulest curse of fundamental boringness ever conceived?” he asked, putting his hand dramatically to his chest to check for a heartbeat.

“The fellow dost protest too much, methinks,” Martha retorted. “She said we look like we make sense. No one’s accusing you of accurately playing the part.”

“I meant you... you fit... the descriptions... you’re...” She flushed even further.

“Eventually*** you’ll structure a sentence successfully,” Gus said reassuringly. Martha slapped him on the shoulder. Tess laughed.

“Are you mad at me?” Ben asked, miscalculating the approximate volume of his voice, practically yelling across the pond at her.

Her eyes moved slowly from Gus and Martha to his eyes where they rested and bored into him. Burning pain seared across his face.

He felt his knees hit the ground and his hands fly to cover what he felt had to be deep and oozing cuts across his eyes and cheeks, and he heard Martha gasp, but he didn’t have time to make anything of it before everything went brown and fuzzy and he was curled in a pile on the ground, unable to hear or see anything about what was going on around him.

He felt someone shaking his shoulders, someone with large, rough hands. And he felt a pair of frantic feet prancing anxiously and almost comically around him. But then he felt the cold touch of tiny shaking fingers prying his hands away from his eyes. They held his face, jolting energy through to his brain until he could almost feel words coming through them.

“Ben! Ben! Please tell me you’re alive! Please tell me I didn’t do this to you! I don’t know what happened; I just wanted you to know without me having to say... oh, Ben, come back. Come back! I’m not mad anymore. I’m fine! I want you to come back! I want to leave Medias with you. I need to leave! I need you! Come back!”

Over and over this litany against his growing urge to fade ran silently through his mind several times before he realized that the words were growing louder, clearer, and more obviously audible. Someone was actually saying them, or at least he was actually hearing them. They sounded far away, like someone yelling from across a large clearing, but as he grew more aware of the reality of his surroundings, he deciphered that they had to be coming from Tess, who couldn’t be too far away from him, since it had to be her hands that were holding his face, even though they seemed to be meeting with some resistance from an outside force.

Then all of a sudden, Ben felt the familiar and unwelcome sensation of prickling vines shooting up through his body from the ground, through his back, wrapping painfully around his spine and ribs. As quickly as it had come, though, it was gone, and he was blinded by the sunlight in his eyes and deafened by the instantly loud voices around him. He sputtered as if coming up to breathe.

“Get away from him, witch!” Gus was yelling.

“Ben, are you all right? Please talk to me!” Tess screamed, her voice uncharacteristically taught and shrieking.

“Gus, don’t hurt her,” Martha pleaded, her voice quietest of the three.

When the blurry and highly contrasted shapes came into better focus, he was internally horrified by the scene, even though he was not reacting quickly enough to do anything about it externally.

The hands on his face were indeed Tess’, and the hands on his shoulders were Gus’, and the two people, those four hands, were battling against each other, each trying to take sole possession of Ben as he lay there uselessly on the ground. They were nearly attacking one another to get to him. Martha was dancing ditheringly around behind them, trying half-heartedly to restrain Gus.

Then all at once his strength and presence of mine came back into him, like it was an entity being shot directly at his chest from a cannon at short-range.

“Get off me!” he yelled, sputtering again, taking gasping breaths and shunning all three of them away. He rolled over and pushed himself onto his knees. He could feel the silent presence of them all hovering behind him, but he didn’t acknowledge it as he tried to wrap his mind around the past ten minutes of his life.

“What... just happened?” he asked with his back to them, struggling to keep his breaths even while his heart was still racing.

“Tess tried to kill you,” Gus said coldly.

“Shut up, Gus,” Ben said.

“Me shut up?” Gus said in disbelief. “She’s the one you sent you writhing to the ground in pain and you want me to shut up?”

“She didn’t do it on purpose, Gus,” Martha said.

“She can explain it,” Ben said.

All four of them sat in silence for a minute before Tess began talking. When she did, her voice was timid and quiet again, like usual, but also scared.

“You asked me if I was still mad at you,” she said, “and I wanted to tell you that I was without saying it out loud, so I tried... I tried to... give you a sort of angry look. And, I don’t understand what happened then; my eyes got all hot and stingy, and then you fell down screaming.”

“It was like you shot something at me,” Ben said, remembering the pain as it had whipped across his face. “And then I couldn’t see or hear anything until...” He turned his head around and looked at her, “until you grabbed my face. You started talking to me and I... I could hear you.”

“Was she saying, ‘Get off him Gus, you’re going to hurt him’?” Gus asked angrily. “That’s what she was saying to me. It’s ridiculous.”

“No,” Ben said. “You were telling me to come back.”

The four stood in stillness — no movement, no noise, save for the orange leaves falling from the trees and the occasional croak of a nearby raven. Ben was looking at Tess, who was glancing between him and her shoes. Martha was staring at the back of Gus’ head, who was staring obstinately into the empty space beyond Ben’s left ear.

“Maybe we shouldn't leave,” Martha said. “Not today, anyway.”

“No,” Ben and Tess said together.

“You two can go home,” Ben said to Gus. “I should have told you yesterday what Medias said about not being able to come back. I should have realized you wouldn’t want to—”

“I can’t leave you alone with her,” he jerked his thumb at Tess. “Who knows when she could accidentally blow you up with her mind.”

“I’m sorry, Gus,” Tess said. “I swear; I would never want to hurt Ben like—”

“Well, you already have, and you evidently had no control over it, so someone’s got to keep an eye on you,” Gus said. He turned to look her coldly in the face. “I’m not going to call you sister, let’s just put it that way.”

“Gus, don’t be stupid,” Ben said. “It was just an accident.”

“One that can happen again,” he said. “I’m coming with you.”

Ben looked up at Martha, who gave him the same look she had when she had finished her story about the Monk E Paw. “And you?”

“Of course I’m coming,” she said without hesitation. He couldn’t tell if she actually wanted to, though. Maybe he didn’t understand the real power of the lash, after all.

He stood up and brushed the dead leaves off his back. “Okay. We’re going west,” he said. “We can’t be too far from the edge now.”

“Maybe that’s why all this happened in the first place,” Tess said as they turned and began walking, leaving the catfish pond, the forest, and everything they could remember behind them in the pile of dried leaves dried wood that were the hills of Medias.

___________

***For Jared

P.S. As my life gets gradually more hectic, I do a lot more dirty things to reach my word count. You may notice this eventually.