Page 52 of The Quiet
Baker exhaled her anxieties and tried to avoid focusing on them, looking around at the trees and noticing how massive they were becoming as the ride continued.
“White pine tree,” Peter said, gesturing to a tree she’d been staring at behind him.
Wide-eyed, Baker pointed to another.
“Cedar. Back through those woods you’ll see a palm tree,” he said, “ever since Madness came into the world, nothing grows with any real predictability with climate.”
Baker pointed to another, and another. She gestured to plants and trees and stones. He could name them all, without so much as a pause to think.
How did he know so much? The thought bloomed as she watched him in awe.
“I’ve been around for a while,” he replied with a soft smile.
A strong and dormant curiosity came alive in her soul, one that had been buried under years of witnessing pain and asking the same unanswerable questions over and over again.
She began to ask him questions, one by one, filling her mind with them. He could see them, and he could see other questions she’d never known how to voice or express, things she’d thought about all her life.
His answers were clear, decisive, but kind in a way that invited more. She no longer cared in the moment what kind of person he was, only that in doing her this kindness he was giving her something to drink in a desert she’d been dying in for a long time. At last, feeling silly but nostalgic, she asked about love, if it existed, and where it was. Along the ride, he’d never seemed to tire of her questions, but seemed to enjoy well-crafted explanations as much as she did.
At this question, he finally paused.
“Love,” he repeated aloud and she felt suddenly unsure, carried away by the ease of talking with him through the day, she realized she’d forgotten that wall that often kept her buried inside herself and safe.
“The kind you’re asking about,” he said, “there should be a better word for it, but what you’re looking for is fundamental, not romantic. It’s the quiet fabric of life, and it’s everywhere. Some Strike, the sloppy, impulsive ones, tear that fabric. That’s what you call Madness, but I suppose that’s why we’ve been put together,” he said, “in a way, we’re looking for the same thing. Love, life, there isn’t a perfect word for it. I like to think of it as reality itself, beneath all of the mirages of the world.”
The wagon stopped around noon and they hopped out into a small town. Baker slipped out of the wagon in disbelief that she and Peter might have anything in common.
“I’m learning how to create life, but I’ve hit a stalemate,” he said as they approached a tavern. Before he pushed through inside, he added, “I think your fresh perspective will help me return to the right questions.”
They walked into the tavern as music started to play. The rest of the afternoon dissolved in a strange blur. Peter approached a full table in the back, flashing the tattoos on his arm, before taking a seat and supplying a code that seemed to confirm to them that he was somehow familiar. In minutes they were at a table of ROSE, Peter announcing with some pride that Baker had a great love for them, which the ROSE accepted with a smile.
For the rest of the afternoon and night, they mingled with people and by all appearances, Peter seemed to enjoy every conversation, no matter how simple. Dancing filled the night, and Peter urged her out to dance with one person or another. When Baker returned to the bench, she was next to several women who teased her about her brother’s handsomeness and charms. Baker didn’t understand it, until she realized the assumptions they’d made. It was a strange world she’d fumbled into, but compared to what life had been, she didn’t quite mind it.
Peter’s effect on people was clearly magnetic.
Baker had heard stories all her life of the Strike’s cruelty. In a world of mythical proportions, they were dragons to be feared if not slain. Peter was Death, king of the dragons, with a smile likespring sun, and eyes that saw everything with the wholeness of a full moon.
In the presence of his abundant generosity there was an eerie sense that she sat between his open jaws. More surprising was his ability to coax out some desire to stay.
Even in the highest rooms of the Bleeding Grin, he’d been cordial and polite to the other Strike, several more entering the room during the short duration of their conversation to welcome him on his return to the Grin. Strangely, there, no one seemed at ease in his kindness but no one seemed able to reject its warmth. There was no doubt that he was Death, but to Baker’s surprise and undoubtedly the chagrin of everyone else, Death was a likable man.
On the way back from the festivities, Baker was exhausted and abuzz all at once. Riding under the late sunset, Peter closed his eyes against the redness of the sunset and in such a way he looked feminine and beautiful. His skin was luminant, his features refined, and even in the tavern Baker had thought him a woman on more than one occasion from the corner of her eye. His mannerisms carried either his strength or his gentility. For now he looked like a red flower, but in some expressions and teachings he reminded her of the strength of the mountains.
As they reached the Bleeding Grin, Baker paused on the path to the slave quarters. She didn’t want to go in.
Peter stopped at the start of the opposite path, watching as she glanced at him and looked over at the back entrance for the slaves. There was nothing missing in the symbolism of it.
“Following me will be harder,” Peter warned, but did not wish her farewell or encourage her to go back to the slaves.
Baker remembered what it had felt like before leaving Valentine, and now the slaves’ quarters was again like a silent casket where she would eventually go to die. She didn’t know what it meant to follow Peter, a force as blinding and intense as the sun.
She stepped toward him, and he started walking forward again. She strained to walk alongside his long strides as they entered the main doorway and ascended the stairs. Watching the town from a higher view with each passing staircase she felt a surge of fear and the strangest sense that she was untouchable in a completely different way than she had been before.
Peter stopped by a room, tapping the door with a gloved fingertip.
“You can have this one,” he said. “I’ll send Perilous to come see you tomorrow. It will be good for you to get to know each other.” Offering a final smile, he walked offand Baker entered the wonder of her new room.
It was a small, but beautiful space, set with its own bed, and simple but delicate clothes that materialized as if from nothing. Baker ran back out of the room to thank him, but Peter was gone, and in his absence, the hallways seemed dark and unexplorable. She eased back into her room, turning her head down the opposite hallway.
