The wagon reached the junction and turned toward Briartown. Jack watched it through the ferns. Its single horse had white stockings and a tail braided with strips of green cloth. Two women sat beneath the canvas roof among baskets of wet flowers, talking about the price of salt. The wheels passed close enough to spray the ditch with muddy water. He waited for them to go.
"What a beautiful flower," someone said behind him. "I don't imagine you'll fit in my bag."
Jack turned with a high-pitched yelp. His supporting foot slipped in the leaves. He tried to rise, found a fern stem instead of a branch, and went backward onto both hands. His legs spread to keep him from rolling down the shallow bank. His cock and low-hanging balls settled into the damp dirt between them, fully exposed to the stranger standing three paces away.
The stranger was young. Jack's age, perhaps a year older. Sun and weather had browned him everywhere except beneath the frayed legs of his shorts. Near-white curls crowded his head and caught gold where the light reached them. He wore no shirt. A faded brown cloak hung open from his shoulders, and a canvas bag rested against one narrow hip. His pale blue eyes went down.
"I can explain," Jack said. "I woke up back there and I don't know where I am or what happened to me, but somebody left me in the ditch and I think they thought I was dead, so please don't call anyone until I can figure this out."
The boy's expression changed from amusement to complete confusion. Jack heard his own voice. English. Every word had been English.
Everyone Jack had heard on the road had made sense. So did the stranger when he raised both hands and spoke slowly.
"Slow down, slow down. First, although I really enjoy the view, we need to get you covered up."
Jack understood him. The stranger plainly had not understood Jack.
"Why can I understand you?" Jack asked in English.
The stranger's brows drew together. Jack pushed himself more upright. The movement dragged his balls through cool grit. He stopped, acutely aware that panic had not improved the presentation. The boy continued looking, but the appreciation had left his posture. His attention moved over the raised cut on Jack's cheek, the dirt in his hair, the new seam at his hip, then returned to Jack's face. He unfastened the cloak. Jack flinched before he could prevent it.
The boy halted with the cloth in both hands. He lowered it to the ground halfway between them and stepped back. His arms remained loose at his sides.
"For you," he said. He touched his own hip, then pointed to the cloak and made a wrapping motion. "Covered."
Jack knew what the gestures meant. More unsettlingly, he knew what the words meant. He checked the road. The wagon had gone. No voices followed from either direction.
This boy could have shouted. He could have run back to the travelers or whatever patrol kept the road. Instead he had surrendered his cloak and moved out of reach because Jack was frightened.
Jack drew one leg beneath himself, then the other. He picked up the cloak and stood.
The cloth was soft with age and smelled of sun, green leaves, and the clean salt of the body that had worn it. It was also shaped like a cloak. Jack held the broad middle across his groin and discovered that the ends did not know what he expected from them. The boy watched him try once.
"May I?"
Jack understood that too. He nodded.
The boy approached without haste. Up close, he was slighter than Jack had first thought, narrow through the chest and waist, with fine golden hair bright across his forearms. He took one corner of the cloak, passed it behind Jack's hips, and brought the opposite edge across the front. The ring remained uncovered at the root of Jack's cock. The boy's hands stopped.
His gaze fixed on the dark band and the shallow symbols circling it. Recognition moved across his face before caution could catch it. He leaned closer and reached down. Jack jerked his hips back. The boy's hand recoiled as if the ring had burned him.
"Sorry! I think I recognize some of the symbols on it, sorry."
His hands rose again, palms open. The apology came quickly enough to trip over itself.
Jack's heart struck once against his ribs. The ring stayed warm and still. The boy had not touched it. When Jack moved away, he had stopped. Jack pulled the front of the cloak over himself.
"Finish," he tried to say.
English came out. The boy waited.
Jack thought of the word he had heard. Covered. Its sound existed in his mind beside its meaning, two things he had mistaken for one. He remembered how it had occupied the stranger's mouth and moved his tongue deliberately.
"Finish," he said again.
This time the word was not English. The boy's pale blue eyes widened.
"You understand me."
Jack searched for each sound before allowing it into his mouth. "I understand you. I wasn't speaking your language."
The words felt wrong and familiar together. His tongue knew where to strike his teeth. His throat knew how to soften the final consonant. Jack had not learned any of it, but the body had. Speaking was less like translation than reaching into a drawer in someone else's room and finding what he needed arranged inside.
"What were you speaking?"
"English."
The boy attempted the unfamiliar word and produced something close enough to make Jack's chest tighten. "Is that a country?"
"A language." Jack swallowed. "From very far away."
The answer did not satisfy either of them. The boy glanced again at the scar on Jack's cheek but did not press.
"May I finish the cloak? Only the cloak."
Jack nodded. The boy wrapped it around Jack's hips, folded the upper edge twice, and tied two narrow corners at the left side. The result fell to just above Jack's knees and overlapped enough that walking should not expose him. It resembled a rough sarong more than anything the cloth had been made to do. Jack inspected himself.
The faded brown sat low on his narrow hips. The improvised garment left him bare from the waist up, but after watching half the road travel dressed much the same way, that no longer felt entirely naked. He cut a dashing figure.
The thought surprised him. So did the small return of vanity required to have it.
The boy leaned back to inspect the knot. "Better. I'm Caleo." It took Jack a moment to understand that this was not another word he had inherited.
"Jack," he said. "Thank you."
Caleo smiled. "Jack from Very Far Away."
"It seems so." Jack's attention returned to the road. "I woke in a ditch with those cuts. No clothes. Nothing except the ring."
Caleo's smile disappeared without taking the warmth from his face. He considered the thinning trees, the traffic, and the direction Jack had come from.
"I'm from Briartown," he said. "We're close. I know somewhere you can eat, and somewhere you can wash without paying for either."
Food answered inside Jack before caution could. "The people who did this might be there."
"They might." Caleo did not insult him by denying it. "But out here you have a cloak that isn't yours and fruit juice in your hair. In Briartown you can have a door between you and the road."
Jack touched the sealed line on his cheek. "You don't know me."
"No." Caleo bent and recovered the canvas bag. "You are beautiful, lost, and either telling the truth or committed to an extraordinarily inconvenient lie. I can work with all three until breakfast."
He turned toward the forest, then glanced back when Jack did not immediately follow. "I have to finish gathering. Half an hour, perhaps less if you help. Then Briartown."
Caleo had work, and Jack chose to follow him.
The collection bag was patched canvas, darker at the bottom from whatever damp things it had carried before. Caleo gave it to Jack after they crossed the drainage channel, not as a burden imposed but as if Jack's agreement to help had made the division obvious.
"Moss first," he said. "The silver kind beneath roots. Not the green sheets on the stones. That holds too much water and rots when you dry it."
Jack adjusted the strap over one shoulder. "What do you use it for?"
"Wards. Poultices. A woman near the dye market puts it beneath loose floorboards to keep biting ants out. She swears at me when I bring the wrong kind."
"Does the right kind keep ants out?"
"No. But it holds the ward that does."
Caleo moved through the forest without behaving as though it were an obstacle. His bare feet found dry roots and patches of stone beneath the leaf mould. He ducked vines without breaking stride. When the way narrowed, he turned sideways and let the plants pass across his skin rather than fighting every leaf.
Jack's longer legs helped. The body knew how to balance on wet ground even when Jack did not know which foothold it had chosen until his weight was already there. He kept one hand near the knot at his hip for the first several minutes. The cloak held.
Caleo found the silver moss beneath the northward curve of a fallen tree. He used a small knife to lift a strip without cutting into the root, rolled the moss loosely, and passed it to Jack. "Keep it whole."
Jack laid it in the bag without crushing the delicate fan. Caleo gave him a small, satisfied nod before leading him to a log so softened by rot that his fingers sank into the wood. Broad grey mushrooms grew along its length. He took two from a cluster of seven.
"Always leave more than you take," he said. "Otherwise you have performed theft against next week."
At the next fallen tree, Jack spotted the grey caps first. He crouched, counted six, and twisted two free at their bases.
Caleo turned each one over in his hand. "You did that exactly right."
Jack had braced for a correction. "I watched what you did."
"I can tell. You learn quickly."
Caleo smiled at him through the green light. With his near-white curls, bare brown chest, and little knife still in hand, he looked less like someone Jack had met beside a road than some strange forest nymph who had decided to test him. Jack remained lost, half dressed, and thoroughly intimidated by him.
The praise eased something anyway. Jack placed the mushrooms carefully in the bag.
The pale-rooted plant took longer. Its leaves grew close to the earth in sets of five, nearly hidden beneath taller ferns. Caleo found one and loosened the soil around it with his knife.
"This one we take whole," he said. "Leaving the root does nothing useful."
He pulled. The plant did not move.
Caleo shifted his grip and set both feet. Muscle appeared along his narrow back and shoulders, finer than Jack's but sharply laid beneath the skin. The root came free all at once with a wet tearing sound and a clot of red earth heavy enough to make Caleo step backward.
"That," Caleo said, holding it up, "was needlessly dramatic."
He shook away the soil and wrapped the pale root in a damp scrap of cloth. Jack watched the hands doing it. They were small, scarred across the fingers, and much stronger than the rest of Caleo suggested.
"The ring," Jack said. "What did you recognize?"
Caleo's fingers slowed against the knot in the cloth. "One mark means the body. Or flesh. The old books disagree depending on whether they want to sound respectable. Another has to do with returning something to its source." He glanced at Jack's hip. "The scars are new?"
"Yesterday. Both of them."
Caleo went still. Jack wished immediately that he had lied.
Caleo glanced toward the road as though someone might be standing there listening. "Then we're done. We should get you inside."
Jack held on to the collection bag. "Show me the next thing."
Caleo studied him for a moment, perhaps deciding whether this was courage or head injury. He handed Jack the wrapped root.
"Blue-veined leaves. They grow where the ground stays wet but the sun reaches it."
Jack found the clearing first. It opened where a tree had fallen years before, leaving a wound in the canopy that younger growth had not yet closed. Sun poured through. Water shone among low plants at the clearing's edge, and blue veins threaded the leaves nearest the mud.
Caleo showed him how to pinch each leaf at its stem without bruising it. Jack worked down one side of the patch while Caleo took the other. By the time the bag held enough, the sun had warmed the back of Jack's neck and sweat traced the center of his thin chest.
Caleo straightened and stretched, both arms reaching overhead. His ribs showed beneath brown skin. He scratched absently through the pale hair below his navel, faced a broad tree at the clearing's edge, and continued explaining how the leaves were dried.
"Never over a stove. Too fast ruins the oil. A shaded window is better, unless the rain comes sideways, which it will as soon as you trust the window."
He hooked his thumbs into the frayed waist of his shorts and freed his cock. Jack's attention followed before modesty could invent somewhere else to look.
A small mound of golden pubic hair showed above the lowered cloth. Caleo's cock hung long and thin while soft, pale where the rest of him was tanned. He took it in one hand and pissed against the tree without interrupting himself.
"If you tie them in pairs, you can move the whole line inside quickly. Three leaves to a knot. Four traps water between them."
Jack's face heated. He could have turned away. Caleo had not asked him to watch, and nothing prevented Jack from becoming fascinated by the canopy for half a minute. He wanted to see. So he did.
The stream darkened the bark and stirred the leaf mould at its roots. Caleo's hand rested easily around the soft shaft. There was no performance in the act, no hesitation, and no suggestion that a body required apology merely because someone else stood nearby.
Caleo finished, gave his cock a careless shake, and tucked it back into the frayed shorts. When he turned, his eyes found Jack's before Jack could arrange his face into innocence. Caleo smiled.
He said nothing about it. That made the smile worse.
Jack tightened the collection bag and stood. He had retained the lesson despite where his attention wandered. Caleo's lingering smile made clear that he knew both.
They returned to the road with the bag full enough to pull at Jack's shoulder. Traffic had thickened again. A line of carts moved through the last trees toward open daylight, and beyond them Jack could see the upper courses of a stone wall.
Briartown appeared gradually rather than all at once. First came smoke above the trees, then tiled roofs rising beyond the wall, red and moss-dark green. The road widened. Ditches became fitted drains. The deep bell sounded again, followed by two lighter answers from somewhere farther inside.
The main gate stood beneath a square tower. Guards in pale sleeveless coats checked carts beneath the arch. They did not stop everyone, but they opened bundles, lifted tarps, and made one driver unload a stack of baskets while the line complained around him. Caleo saw them and left the road.
"This way."
Jack followed him onto a narrow path running beside the wall. "Is there a reason we aren't using the entrance built for entering?"
"The man on the left enjoys searching my bag."
"Why?"
"Because the things in it are for people he doesn't like, and because he knows I dislike him. We have a rewarding relationship."
Jack checked the guards. None had noticed them leave the road.
"Is climbing the wall legal?"
Caleo considered. "It is an old wall. Perhaps the law has forgotten it."
The path narrowed between stone and thorny growth. Caleo knew exactly where to stop. Here the wall sagged outward by a fraction, its older blocks broad and uneven, the mortar recessed deeply enough to leave holds. On the far side came the slap of wet hides and a smell sharp enough to sting Jack's nose. Caleo took the collection bag from him and slung it across his back.
"The yard belongs to a tanner who doesn't ask questions before breakfast," he said. "Watch the pale stones. They crumble."
He climbed. Three quick steps carried him to shoulder height. His fingers caught a seam Jack would not have trusted. One bare foot pressed flat against the stone, calf tightening; then Caleo pulled himself upward with a smoothness that made his narrow body briefly horizontal. He hooked an elbow over the top and disappeared. The full bag followed a moment later, lifted above the wall in one hand. Caleo was quite strong. His empty hand appeared over the edge.
"Come on."
Jack considered it, then the wall. Old Jack had used ladders. Ladders had rungs, level feet, and instructions printed along one side. Gym class had offered painted floors, padded equipment, and teachers waiting to shout when someone used either incorrectly. They had not climbed walls at school.
He did not want to begin this new life by being hauled over every obstacle by the first beautiful boy who found him. He set his right foot into the lowest deep seam and reached.
The inherited body understood climbing better than he did. His left hand chose a hold. His weight shifted close to the wall. Long arms gave him the next stone before his feet seemed high enough to earn it. The sarong pulled across his thighs but held at the hip. Jack reached the upper course. A pale stone broke beneath his foot.
His body dropped. His right hand scraped down the wall, finding nothing. Before he could fall, Caleo caught his left wrist. The stop jarred Jack from shoulder to hip.
Caleo lay braced across the wall with one hand locked around him and the other gripping the far edge. The collection bag remained on his back. His arm trembled but did not open.
Jack's feet swung less than three feet above the leaf mould. If Caleo released him, he would land upright. He might scrape his palms or sit down hard if the unfamiliar body betrayed him, but the wall was not high enough to do real harm.
Jack found another foothold.
"I have it," he said.
"Good. Climb."
Jack pushed. Caleo pulled only when the next stone put Jack within reach, adding force rather than replacing his. Jack got one forearm over the top, then his stomach, and swung a leg across. For a moment they sat together astride the old wall, breathing hard above a tannery yard full of vats, stretched hides, and workers pretending not to watch. Jack's attention dropped to Caleo's hand still around his wrist.
Caleo released him only after Jack had settled securely across the wall. On the outer side, the pale stone lay in fresh pieces beside the path. Jack laughed, breathless with relief and a little embarrassed by it.
Below them lay Briartown: close roofs, narrow lanes, smoke and steam lifting into the brightening day. Somewhere beyond the tannery, bread was baking. Jack could smell it beneath the lime, hides, and forest damp. Caleo dropped lightly into the yard and tilted his head up.
"Breakfast," he said.