Jack came back unable to breathe. Mud sealed his mouth. It packed one nostril and gave beneath the other in cold, sucking grains. Something crushed his chest against the earth, although afterward he understood that it had only been the weight of his own body and the blind terror inside it. He clawed at the road. His right hand struck farther away than he meant it to, found no purchase, and raked four useless lines through the mire. The need for air took him before thought did.
He wrenched onto one shoulder. The road tilted. Loose stones went from beneath him. He rolled over its broken edge, through nettles and wet fern. A root struck his ribs. Another caught him behind the knee and turned him once more, so that he arrived in the ditch on his back with black water closing over his ears. Air tore into him.
He coughed it out again, along with mud and a rope of bitter spit. His heels dug at the bottom of the ditch. Dead leaves slid under them. He tried to rise and succeeded only in driving himself backward beneath a shelf of moss, where the water ran colder and the stones had not known the sun. For several breaths he could do nothing but choke. Then he screamed.
The sound flew thin and ragged among the trees. Birds broke from the high branches, though he saw them only as a scattering of shadows across a pale strip of morning. His voice came back from somewhere deeper in the wood, smaller than it had left him, and then there was only dripping water and the long complaint of boughs moving overhead.
No brakes. No horn. No one shouting that an ambulance was coming.
Jack pressed both hands to his face. One palm covered too much of it. He had been walking home from school.
That fact returned first, ordinary and useless. He had turned eighteen a few months before. Graduation was close enough that teachers had begun counting the remaining weeks aloud, and an apprenticeship waited for him when it was done. He had been good with his hands for as long as he could remember. Give him a broken plug, a loose hinge, a stripped screw, and he could usually understand the failure by touching it. The apprenticeship was supposed to make a life from that.
He had been on the pavement with the road to his left and a row of darkened shop windows to his right. The traffic light ahead had changed to green. An engine had risen above the evening noise, not louder at first, only wrong, climbing when it should have fallen away. Someone across the street had shouted. Jack had turned toward the sound and seen a wash of white headlamps jump the curb.
The last few seconds came in pieces after that. A silver hood slewing sideways. His own hand opening. The small paper sack he had carried striking the bricks before he did, an orange rolling free beneath the green light. The hard white flare of pain. Then nothing. He dragged his hands down his face. "I wasn't in the road."
His voice was wrong even when it whispered. Lighter than he expected, raw from the scream, with none of the familiar weight in it. "I wasn't even on that side of the street."
There was no street. There was only a ditch beneath a broken road and ranks of wet trees beyond it. Nothing mechanical answered him. The ditch water hurried beneath his body over amber stones, clear where his panic had not clouded it. Its smell was of moss, wet bark, and iron-rich earth. It ran under his ass and pooled, shockingly cold, around his balls before slipping away between his thighs. Jack went still. He lowered his hands.
He was naked. Not stripped down to his underwear, not missing a shirt or one shoe after whatever had happened. Naked. Mud streaked him from shoulder to ankle. Fern fragments clung to one shin. There was no phone within reach, no wallet, no coat caught in the nettles above him. He could not see so much as a torn thread of his own clothes. The thighs framing the stream were not his.
They were longer first of all. That was the fact his mind accepted before it would consider anything else. His knees lay farther from his hips than they belonged, lean and sharply made beneath the mud. Muscle drew clean lines along them when he tried to bring his feet closer. His arms had the same impossible length. The hands at their ends were narrow across the palms, long in the fingers, with hard ridges beneath the skin where a weapon or a tool had worn it. He looked down the rest of himself.
The body was lean enough that every division showed. The paired muscles of his stomach drew inward toward his hips; his ribs were visible when he breathed, and the wet skin shifted over a chest built in long, spare planes rather than bulk. There was beauty in it, an almost deliberate severity, as though someone had labored over the shape for years and refused to permit it one unnecessary ounce. But it was not an ornament.
Jack planted a hand against the bank and pushed. His shoulder locked beneath him with a strength he had not prepared for. He rose too quickly, nearly pitched face-first into the road, and caught an exposed root in his other hand. The root was thick as his wrist. His fingers closed around it and held his whole weight while his feet scrabbled for the ditch bottom. He stared at that hand.
The arm shook, but it did not fail. With one pull he brought himself into a crouch above the water.
Whoever had owned this body had trained it past prettiness. The narrow waist and cut stomach belonged to the same design as the callused palms and the strength hidden in the shoulders: reach without wasted mass, speed with enough force behind it to matter. It was the body of a dancer, perhaps, if dancers were taught to hurt people. Jack's breath shortened again.
Below the sparse dark hair at his groin hung a cock markedly larger than his own had been, soft from cold and still impossible to overlook. The balls drawn tight beneath it were heavy enough to pull a physical awareness from him that felt obscene only because none of it belonged to him. Around the base of the shaft sat a ring.
It was made of dark metal without jewel, hinge, or visible seam. Shallow symbols ran around its otherwise plain face, none belonging to an alphabet Jack knew. The band fitted close against the pubic bone. Mud had gathered along its lower edge, but the metal itself was unstained, and when Jack touched it he found it warmer than the flesh around it. He snatched his fingers away. The ring remained warm. "No."
He took hold of it again, this time with both hands. There was barely room to put his fingertips beneath the band. He twisted. The ring moved perhaps the breadth of a nail and stopped. When he pulled harder, it seemed to draw tight around him. The pressure did not injure him, but the warning was unmistakable. Jack released it. The pressure eased at once. He crouched naked in the ditch, water whispering around his feet, and stared at the first impossible thing that had answered when he touched it. Then pain opened across the back of his skull.
It came so suddenly that the trees folded toward him. Jack dropped to one knee and caught himself against the bank. His empty stomach heaved. Nothing came up except a thread of muddy water and the taste of metal.
He put a hand behind his head. The hair there was black, thick, and much longer than his own. Beneath it, his fingers found a swelling broad enough to fill his palm. The skin had closed, but the bone beneath seemed to pulse with each beat of his heart.
Another pain burned along the left side of his face. He followed it from beneath the eye toward the jaw and found a raised seam, wet and tender. His fingertips came away pink. The cut should have been open. He could feel where its edges had drawn together unevenly, leaving only two short places that still wept. There was more blood on his left hip.
It had dried down his flank, across the sparse hair at his groin, and onto the inside of his thigh before the ditch began washing it away. At its source lay a wound long enough to admit two of his fingers and deep enough that he did not dare test it. Yet that, too, was closing. New flesh shone dark red between swollen edges. When he bent, it pulled but held. Jack sat back on his heel.
Everything he still possessed belonged to somebody else. Not quite everything. Thornfield.
The word rose without warning, carrying no image with it. Jack held still. The water passed his ankle and divided around a pale stone.
Thornfield Academy. Briartown. Drake.
The last was not a place. It was a name, and some hidden part of him knew it belonged to this body. A Drake. Expected at Thornfield. Sent there by... Eomer.
Uncle Eomer, though Jack could summon neither a face nor the sound of his voice. The name brought a small correction to his spine and a tightening low in his stomach. Respect, perhaps. Or caution. When he reached after it, pain drove a white bar through the back of his head. Other things moved behind it.
Rain rattling against shutters. The silver-edged fall of a fine blue coat. Sour beer sharp in his nose. A fair-haired serving boy with one hand raised between them, his face frightened and furious. The images came apart as Jack tried to hold them. He found no beginning, no order, and nothing that explained the mud, the wounds, or why he had been left naked in the road. "Thornfield," he said.
This stolen voice knew the word. His mouth shaped it without hesitation.
Jack waited for more. Nothing came. The memory had left facts behind without the life that joined them together, like road stones after the earth between them had washed away. The forest waited around him.
It was not empty. Small things stirred beneath the bracken. Water spoke over stone. Somewhere far off, beyond the ranks of ancient trunks, a call rose that was too deep for any bird Jack knew and too measured for a beast crying without purpose. Another answered from farther north.
He looked up at the ruined road. Its two directions vanished alike beneath the trees.
"All right," he said, although nothing was. He set both hands against the bank and began to climb.