Messenger - Lois Lowry [40]
She dipped the hem of her dress into the bowl of water they had set out for Frolic, and wiped the wounds. Watching her in the firelight, Matty could see her wince.
"How bad is it?" he asked.
"It will be all right. I've brought some herbal salve and I'll rub it in." He watched as she opened a pouch she took from her pocket and began to treat the punctures and cuts.
"Is there something wrong with your shoes?" he asked, glancing at the soft leather sandals set side by side on the ground. They had firm soles and she had seemed to walk comfortably in them.
"No. My shoes are fine. It's strange, though. While we were walking, I kept having to stop to pull twigs out of my shoes. You probably noticed." She laughed. "It was as if the underbrush was actually reaching in to poke at me."
She rubbed a little more ointment into the wounds on her feet. "It poked me hard, too. Maybe tomorrow I'll wrap some cloth around my feet before I put my sandals back on."
"Good idea." Matty didn't let her see how uneasy this made him feel. He fed the fire again and then arranged some rocks around it so that it couldn't escape from the little cleared space where he had built it. "We should sleep now, and get an early start tomorrow."
Soon, curled on the ground beside her, with Frolic between them and the blanket thrown across all three, Matty listened. He heard Kira's even breathing; she had fallen asleep immediately. He felt Frolic stir and turn in his light puppyish slumber, probably dreaming of birds and chipmunks to chase. He heard the last shifting of the sticks in the fire as it died and turned to ash. He heard the whoosh and flutter of an owl as it dived, and then the tiny squeal of a doomed rodent caught in its talons.
From the direction toward which they were traveling, he perceived a hint of the stench that permeated the deep center of Forest. By Matty's calculations, they would not reach the center for three days. He was surprised that already the foul smell of decay drifted to where they were resting. When finally he slept, his dreams were layered over with an awareness of rot and the imminence of terrible danger.
***
In the morning, after they had eaten, Kira wrapped both of her feet in fabric torn from her petticoat, and when the wrappings were thick and protective, she loosened the straps of her sandals and fit her bandaged feet carefully into them.
Then she picked up her stick and walked a bit around the fire to test the arrangement. "Good," she said after a moment. "It's quite comfortable. I won't have a problem."
Matty, rolling the blanket around the remains of their food, glanced over. "Tell me if it happens again, the sticks and twigs poking at you."
She nodded. "Ready, Frolic?" she called, and the puppy scampered to her from the bushes where he had been pawing at a rodent's hole. Kira adjusted her wrapped bundle of embroidery tools on her back and prepared to follow Matty as he set off.
To his surprise, he had some difficulty finding the path this second morning. That had never happened before. Kira waited patiently behind him as he investigated several apparent entrances from the clearing where they had slept.
"I've come through here so often," he told her, puzzled. "I've slept in this same place so many times before. And I've always kept the path clear and easy to find. But now..."
He pushed back some bushes with his hand, stared for a moment at the ground he had revealed, then took his knife from his pocket and pruned back the branches. "Here," he said, pointing. "Here's the path. But the bushes have somehow grown across and hidden it. Isn't that strange? I just came through here a day and a half ago. I'm sure it wasn't overgrown like this then."
He held the thick shrubbery back to make it easier for Kira to enter, and was pleased to see that her footsteps, despite her injured feet, seemed firm and without pain.
"I can push things with my stick," she told him.
"See?" She raised her stick and used it to force up a thick vine that had reached from one tree to another on the other