“Mum! Mum!” I squalled, grabbing for her and heaving her over into my arms, my arms that could completely encircle her huddled body, hideously fragile and light. She was breathing, and when I’d got her over, she opened her eyes and looked at me, glazed over with exhaustion. She didn’t reach up and touch my cheek, but her arm twitched a little as though she wanted to and just couldn’t quite manage it, and then she tipped her head against me and sank into something between sleep and unconsciousness. I clutched her to me and tried to manage my breathing, and then I looked over at the one small place still shadowed by the lattice of dying branches, and Orion was standing there with his back against the wall.
Orion was standing there: it was him. Mum had done it. I could have screamed, I could have burst into tears; instead I reached out my hand to him, in joy, in longing, in the first moment of believing that the miracle might actually have happened, that I might actually have got him out, and he said, his voice hoarse and ragged, “You should have left me there.”
I could have torn him limb from limb, honestly, but instead I heaved Mum up and snarled at him, “Then stay in here and rot if you like,” and marched out of the hut.
I wanted to go straight home, but I haven’t been raised by wolves, so even though I was blazing up with all the anger I hadn’t been able to feel until relief had let it out, I didn’t keep going; I stopped outside in the clearing and turned to face the broken doorway and the yew and said, “He might be an ungrateful git, but I’m not. Thank you.”
I wasn’t sure of anything else to do. I felt deeply that I ought to do something: the poor yew was still shedding withered leaves in a small grey rain, and I was sure Mum would have told me what to do if she’d been conscious. But I didn’t have any ideas, and if I’d had one, I would have been suspicious of it doing more harm than good. I looked down at my pocket. “Any ideas?”
Precious climbed down me and scampered around and over the tree, sniffing along the bark with her pink nose, until she found a place she apparently liked, low on the trunk, just by the largest forking. She put her paw on the place and looked up at me. I was more than a little dubious, but she squeaked at me firmly. “If you’re sure,” I said. I put Mum down carefully in a mossy spot, pillowing her head on some dried leaves, and then I laboriously transmuted a fallen branch and a stone into a small hatchet.
I whacked away at the trunk for the better part of an hour, the sun gradually creeping up into the sky, until finally, with a creaking groan, the whole massive forked section cracked and fell, shattering like wood that had been dried and seasoned for a decade. Where I’d chopped it off, though, a tiny trickle of living sap oozed from the trunk.
Orion still hadn’t come out of the hut, but once I’d cut down the big section, most of the branches shading him had come down, and he was just left there standing behind the half-height stone walls, almost completely exposed in all his dubious glory—and more of it likely to be on display soon, given the precarious state of his rags.
“Are you going to help me, or do you fancy just standing there being useless?” I said to him coldly. I pushed away the loose broken chunks of the lintel, clearing off the threshold, and then I started going round the hut, clearing the brush back a bit and picking up any fallen stones and putting them back up. I wasn’t going to find a new lintel just lying on the ground, but at least I could firm up the walls. After a little while, Orion did start helping, but from the inside, as if he still didn’t want to risk coming that near to me.
When I’d done as much as I could see to do, I went back to Mum, who’d got a bit of color back in her face, thankfully. Orion got over himself enough to come out, but he stood off to one side watching me work out some way to carry her, twitching forward a few times as though he wanted to help but couldn’t, presumably because he was so horribly contaminated that I should have left him there, and with every twitch he made, I grew furiouser and furiouser, because Aadhya was bloody right, it wasn’t my fault, none of it had been my fault, it had been his fault, he’d shoved me out, he’d done all this to me, and he was still doing it to me, and I stood up and snarled at him, “You take her, and mind you don’t drop her.” After a moment he came jerkily towards us, and I stood with folded arms, glaring until he got Mum up in his arms.
It took much longer for me to get us back to the yurt than it had taken Mum to take us out. Precious sat on my shoulder and gave me nips to the ear to make sure I didn’t go the wrong way blundering through the woods, but her vigilance wasn’t sufficient. Orion didn’t drop Mum. He didn’t even ask for a pause until we finally straggled out two hours later, at midmorning.