The bank was not high. Jack climbed it badly.
His first handhold tore loose, releasing a mat of roots and black soil into his face. He caught himself with the other hand, drove one knee into the bank, and discovered that the new leg could lift him farther than he expected. His foot cleared the lip of the ditch and struck the road beyond it. The rest of him followed in an ungainly rush.
He landed on both hands and his right knee. Pain flashed through the wound at his hip. The long cut on his cheek pulled tight. For a moment he stayed as he had fallen, naked on all fours in the middle of an unknown road, waiting to learn whether anything inside him had torn open. Warm blood traced one short line down his left side and stopped. "Still alive," he said.
The forest gave no opinion. Jack stood carefully. Even careful was too fast. He rose through more height than his balance expected, swayed, and put one foot forward until the road ceased moving beneath him.
It was older than it had looked from the ditch. Flat stones remained beneath the mud in places, fitted together once and lifted now by roots thick as arms. Two wheel ruts passed around them and continued under a shallow sheet of brown water. Down the middle, grass bent beneath the weight of the rain and raised itself again by slow degrees. The road went left and right.
He faced left first. The road descended a little, curved around the grey foot of an immense tree, and vanished. To the right, it climbed a little, curved around another immense tree, and vanished. "Helpful."
He crouched beside the nearer rut. Water had softened every mark until hoofprints, bare feet, wheels, and falling branches were only dents within dents. A narrow stream ran along the road's lower edge, but that told him where the ground fell, not where people lived. Moss covered the north faces of the trees. It also covered the south faces, the fallen limbs, the stones, and one another in soft green layers.
Jack searched the canopy for the sun. It admitted brightness without direction. Even if he found north, Briartown might lie anywhere.
He waited for one of the dead boy's memories to answer. Thornfield. Briartown. Drake. The names remained where he had found them and opened onto nothing. There was no sensible reason to prefer either direction.
Jack was already facing the left-hand road. He went that way.
The choice felt too small to carry a life, but it did. His first bare footprint filled slowly behind him until the water made it part of the road again.
He kept to the grassy crown when he could. The mud there was thinner and the buried stones less likely to turn beneath his feet. Where roots crossed the road, he tested them before trusting his weight. He had always understood things better through his hands, and touching the road gave him what looking could not: which bark would peel under pressure, which stone rocked, where the grass concealed a hole deep enough to break an ankle. That did not make him a woodsman.
He knew how to replace a wall socket, mend a lamp cord, free a rusted screw without stripping it, and make an old hinge hang true. None of that told him which distant call belonged to a bird and which belonged to something waiting for an answer. He walked.
Water descended through the forest though the visible scraps of sky were pale blue. It gathered at the tips of long leaves and struck his shoulders in heavy drops. It ran down his back, followed the cleft of his ass, and cooled the ring where it sat close around the base of his cock. Sunlight touched the highest branches in brief gold fires, but little warmth reached the road.
Jack had read about places like this. Semi-tropical rainforests where the trees held mist and storm long after clouds passed. Water rose, gathered, fell, and rose once more. The forest kept yesterday's weather beneath a clear sky and made tomorrow's among its leaves. Knowing that did not make him less wet.
The trees were greater than any he had seen outside photographs. Some rose straight and pale through the lower growth before opening far overhead. Others divided close to the ground into buttressed roots broad enough to shelter a man between them. Vines descended in cables. Ferns stood taller than Jack's shoulder. Pale flowers grew in the forks of branches without any soil he could see, holding rain in waxy cups.
There were no wires, roofs, aircraft, or distant engines. Once he stopped to listen for them and heard only water traveling through leaves, insects working invisibly in the heat, and a slow wooden knocking from somewhere beyond the road. He began walking again before whatever made the knocking came closer.
His feet suffered first. The road's buried stones bruised the balls of them, while gravel opened small cuts along the softened skin beneath his toes. He adjusted his stride and discovered another difference in the body. The legs wanted to carry him. Once he found their pace, each step passed cleanly into the next, long and efficient. He could cover ground this way. He could not do it forever.
The wound at his hip tightened whenever his left leg reached forward. The ache behind his skull thickened until turning his head too quickly made white motes cross his sight. His stomach had begun as an empty pain. By the time the road rounded its fifth or fiftieth bend, it had become something larger, a hollow weakness reaching into his arms.
He drank where clean water fell directly from a shelf of stone beside the road. It tasted of leaf mold and minerals and was cold enough to make his teeth hurt. He cupped it in both hands until his stomach sloshed and the thirst stopped pretending to be hunger. Then he walked again.
The ring had remained warm all morning. Near midday it began to pulse, stopping Jack in the road. His attention dropped to the dark band at the base of his cock. "Don't."
His cock hung soft between his parted thighs, the shaft low in the heat and his balls loose and heavy beneath it. Nothing had changed except the beat of warmth at its base, slow and regular, with a faint pressure that spread into his pelvis each time.
He resumed walking. The pressure followed. An hour later, perhaps less, he found the fruit.
The tree stood close enough to the road that its lowest branches reached above the ditch. Broad leaves hid most of what grew there, but fallen fruit lay among the roots: oval things somewhat larger than plums, green-gold beneath a bloom of silver. Several had burst upon the stones. Their flesh was a deep orange, threaded around flat black seeds, and their smell reached him warm and sweet through the wet earth. Jack's mouth flooded. He did not pick one up.
Hunger was not evidence that something was edible. Neither was sweetness. He searched the branches and found small dark birds moving among them, each with a red patch beneath its tail. One drove its beak into a ripe fruit, swallowed, and remained alive. At the roots, a gnawed rind showed paired tooth marks from something larger.
Animals ate things that poisoned people. He remembered that much from somewhere.
He selected a fruit that had fallen without splitting. The skin yielded beneath his thumb but had no punctures, mold, or sour smell. He washed it under the nearest run of ditch water, tore it open with his fingers, and touched the orange flesh to the inside of his wrist. Nothing burned. He waited as long as hunger permitted, then put the smallest piece against his tongue.
Sweetness came first, followed by an acid sharp enough to tighten his jaw. The texture was closer to a peach than anything else he knew. He chewed once, swallowed, and waited again. The ring pulsed hard.
Heat climbed from the base of his cock through his stomach. The empty cramp there loosened for a breath, not because the bite could already have fed him, but because something had recognized it. Jack stared down at the ring. "You know what this is?"
Warmth answered. Or digestion did. Or his concussed mind found intention because intention was less frightening than magic without one.
He ate half the fruit slowly. When no numbness, cramping, or dizziness followed, he ate the rest. He chose another from the tree itself, then a third. The juice ran over his hands and down his wrists. He licked it away because wasting any of it felt impossible.
The fruit filled his stomach without satisfying it. The desperate edge withdrew, leaving behind a deep demand that seemed to come from the wounds rather than his belly. Beneath his fingers, the seam in his cheek had closed another fraction. The blood at his hip had dried. Healing was costing him. The ring pulsed again, stronger than before. His cock began to thicken where it hung free between his legs. Jack nearly dropped the last fruit. "No. Absolutely not."
There was nobody to hear him, but he lowered his voice anyway. The erection did not arrive like desire. He was cold, frightened, bleeding, and too hungry to mistake his state for arousal. Yet blood gathered all the same. The shaft lifted by slow degrees until its weight drew it outward from his body, heavy and unfamiliar. The ring held tight at its base, not painful, but firm enough that the pulse of his heart remained trapped there.
By the time it stopped growing, it was easily seven inches long and thick enough to fill one hand completely. The shaft throbbed with each beat caught behind the ring.
He looked because it was impossible not to look. Then he kept looking.
He could not remember ever being turned on by a penis. He had seen them, including his old one often enough, without thinking any of them beautiful. This one was something special: long, heavy, proportioned so well that even the size looked elegant rather than ungainly.
Admiring it felt voyeuristic. Alien. As if the boy who owned it might catch Jack staring and demand an explanation. Except there was no other boy. It was his cock.
The realization did not make the body familiar. It did send a quieter pulse of appreciation through him that had nothing to do with the ring. Jack resisted the urge to close his hand around the shaft and find out how its weight felt in his grip. A clear bead appeared at the slit. Jack wiped it away with the heel of his hand and kept walking. The ring produced another.
Curiosity stopped him before obedience did. Jack caught the shaft loosely and drew the foreskin back with his thumb. It moved without resistance. The glans beneath was moist and clean, perfectly shaped, with the clear bead bright at the slit. He rubbed it away, let the skin slide forward again, and removed his hand.
The ring produced another bead while he walked. Movement spread the wetness beneath the foreskin. Warmth traveled through his groin, up his spine, and settled behind his ribs. With it came an urge too simple to be mistaken for a thought. Taste. Jack stopped in the road. "No."
Taste. The ring had no voice. The demand lived instead in his mouth watering, in the sudden knowledge of the wetness cooling against him, in the way his hand kept wanting to rise from his side. It did not seize his arm. It did not bend him. It made refusal feel like standing beside water while dying of thirst. He closed both hands into fists and walked.
The pressure eased after a time, but his cock remained half-hard and leaking. Whenever hunger sharpened, the ring warmed. Whenever the wound at his hip pulled, another drop gathered. The pattern followed him through the afternoon. The forest grew dim long before the sky changed color.
Jack began looking for shelter without leaving the road. Hollows beneath trees were plentiful, but many held standing water, dung, bones, or tracks. One root cave smelled sharply of an animal he could not see. He gave that one the whole width of the road.
At last he found a windthrown tree lying parallel to the verge. Its roots had lifted a wall of earth and stone taller than he was. Beneath the leaning trunk, two great roots formed a narrow wedge roofed by packed soil. The ground inside was damp but not flooded. More importantly, the pale run of the road remained visible through the ferns.
Jack collected three light-colored stones from the roadside and stacked them where he left it. The marker was unnecessary while he could still see the ruts, but darkness changed distances. He counted nineteen steps to the roots.
He found a fallen branch longer than his arm and pushed it into the shelter first. It disturbed beetles, a small grey lizard, and nothing large enough to object. He scraped away the worst of the dead leaves, checked the overhead earth for loose stone, and crawled inside.
The space had been made for a smaller creature. Jack folded one long leg beneath the other and rested his back against the root wall. Damp earth chilled him wherever it touched. The air remained warm beyond the shelter, but his skin had not been dry since waking, and a faint trembling had begun in his thighs.
By every measure available to him, he had done enough to survive the night. The body was still failing.
Darkness gathered beneath the tree. The wound at his hip throbbed. His empty muscles seemed to draw inward around the small amount of food, taking it before his stomach could claim any comfort from it. The ring became hot. Jack's cock hardened fully.
There was no gradual confusion this time. The ring tightened and blood drove into his cock hard enough to make him gasp. A clear thread slid from the tip and broke across his stomach.
He tried to force the erection down with both hands over his face and his thoughts fixed on the road, the wounds, the things calling in the forest. The ring answered each fear with another pulse. Fluid welled steadily from his slit. "I ate," Jack whispered.
The ring burned. Taste.
This close, the fluid had a scent: salt, skin, and something faintly sweet beneath both. Jack wiped it away with one finger. Warmth leapt from the ring into his hand so sharply that his wrist flexed. He held the shining fingertip before him. "This is insane."
The forest had already supplied evidence for that. Jack touched his finger to his tongue.
Warmth spread through his mouth. The taste was lightly salted and sweeter than it should have been, but the change in his body mattered more. The cramp beneath his ribs eased before he swallowed. When he did swallow, heat followed the fluid down his throat and opened behind his sternum like a small second breath. The ring pulsed once. The ache in his hip receded.
Jack pressed his fingers to the wound. The flesh remained swollen and hot, but the deep pulling pain had loosened. Even the pounding at the back of his skull withdrew a little from his eyes. "Oh," he said as another bead formed. The ring was keeping him alive.
Jack gathered the next drop with his fingertip and swallowed it.
The ring did not ask permission. It did not care that his hands shook, that the erection frightened him, or that the act turned his stomach for reasons hunger could not overcome. It cared that the body lived. For tonight, perhaps, that was enough.
Jack drew his knees toward his chest and listened to the wet forest settle around him. Through the fern he could still see the road, a pale strip fading beneath the trees. Water fell from leaves though stars had begun to appear in the scraps of sky above them. At the base of his cock, the ring cooled from burning to warm. Something in this world wanted him alive. He wished that felt kinder.