It was their first night in the Silent World, and Emil was frankly terrified, which was as it should be: their little band was trying to scramble back to Mora in the wake of the Dalahästen’s derailment with no shelter, no supplies, no vehicle, no radio, and no one who knew that they were still alive to expect them. Terror was to be expected; not simply from Emil, but from Reynir and Tuuri as well.
They had made their first camp in a house that would have served well for a grossling’s nest, if only the inhabitants hadn’t died from the Illness instead of trollifying. The three cats with them, Ola, John and Nils, had prowled around and into every crack and crevice they could find before returning to declare the house cleared. Lalli backed them up, which was good enough for Emil, since the thin Finn had somehow sensed the derailment even before the cats.
Lalli had vanished into the night long since, leaving Emil and the cats on their lonely watch. Ola was resting in Emil’s lap, trying to calm him with sustained purring; Nils was patrolling; and John was watching over the two non-immunes, to whom Sigrun still referred as “helpless babies”.
A single candle lit the little hall in which the party slept; even though there were no vulnerable windows to betray their presence through light or heat, Sigrun still demanded that precaution, and the others readily agreed. Still, the feeble, flickering light only made Emil’s watch that much more anxious.
Emil was to wake Sigrun as soon as he swapped out the candles; hopefully, Lalli would be back before that, easing Emil’s mind about one thing, at least.
As Ola purred on, Emil’s mind turned to the journey ahead. During the forced march, he’d been too busy trying to live up to Sigrun’s expectations of him to mull over anything else; now, he had nothing to do but mull things over—or at least, he hoped so.
Despite the foreshortened span of daylight (which would only grow worse as Winter approached, of course), their little band had covered quite a distance, which was good. Remarks from Tuuri and Reynir indicating how grueling they’d found the march were less good, as those two were the weakest link of their group, even if Emil thought “helpless babies” was going a bit far.
The rain and snow had sporadically returned, both adding to the march’s difficulty and yet easing it by ensuring their water supplies were still topped up, and Lalli had managed to bag a few small woodland creatures unlucky and unwary enough to cross his path. Sigrun had seen a deer in the distance, but it had seen her as well, so nothing came of that.
A series of loud rattles on the ceiling above him brought Emil back to the present. As Nils and Ola were still unconcerned, he knew it was simply that the rain had turned to hail, but would the structure that had seen a century or more of such weather choose to yield to it now, or would it hold out until the party sheltering in it left with the dawn?
SCRITCH SCRITCH SCRATCH
The sound was louder than Emil had expected; he jumped to his feet, unceremoniously ejecting Ola from her comfortable perch, and went to the door. Softly, tentatively, he scratched across the door in the countersign Lalli had shown him before leaving, and then Emil waited. The cats waited too, all three of them staring at the door in that intense, unblinking way cats had.
The silence seemed to thicken and stretch on interminably as Emil waited for Lalli to respond…
