Blood?!

Nevin shook his head, groaning as the motion woke the pain in his skull. He had to be mistaken. The canteen was all the way up there, stuck on a branch. How could he have gotten blood on it?

He performed a quick mental examination of his body, but the only injuries he detected were the ones he'd sustained in his clumsy encounter with the silver maple: a strained shoulder and a scraped-up scalp. Both had to have occurred after he had obtained the canteen, so they couldn't be the source of the blood.

He tongued his lower lip, wincing. His fingers grazed his mouth, his left cheek. Slight swelling, tenderness. No blood though. Had he hit his face on a branch in the fall?

The final moments of the strange nightmare nagged at him. It felt like more than just a dream. He had a vague impression of a fight with the old drunk that morning, but the nightmare had been so real and disconcerting, he was having a hard time separating the two. Considering his current state - hanging from a leather strap - he wondered how much more of the nightmare was a result from his fall, and how much had really happened.

He closed his eyes again, directing his thoughts back through the morning, thinking past his climactic collision with the silver maple, past his head-long sprint through the Traagen, past thoughts of the canteen bouncing off his thigh and the hopefully imagined streaks of blood decorating its foggy exterior. With each step backward in time, the pounding in his head grew exponentially, sending wave after wave of stabbing pain through his addled mind and causing his empty gut to chew on itself in agitation.

“No good.” Nevin grunted, releasing the breath he was holding.

Before his run through the forest, the last thing he could remember was settling down in the barn after a late night walk with Aidux, falling into a restless sleep, his head reclining on worn-out burlap pillow. He'd lost nearly twelve hours of time since then, and the answer to what had happened in those missing hours could spell the difference between being the victim of a vicious beating...and being killed.

Dalen was not a man he wanted to upset.

Over the past decade, Nevin had learned how little it took to earn the ire of the man who raised him. A bad harvest, a broken tool, even an interrupted nap...Dalen frequently turned his temper on Nevin, and when he felt unable to eloquently express his displeasure in a verbal tirade of insults, he expressed it with the back of his hand or the heel of his boot. Few were the days that Nevin hadn't hidden bruises from either Ishen or Aidux, and he'd grown quite adept at silently bearing the pain – both mental and physical alike.

Somewhere nearby, a dry stick snapped, and the raucous banter of songbird gave way to a pair of muffled voices.

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“Watch your step, oaf,” the first voice barked. “Twist your ankle and I swear, you can crawl your clumsy arse out of this bloody forest, you hear me?”

“Sorry, I jus-OW!” the second started, interrupted by the sharp crack of wood. “How are you so good at this? I feel like the ground keeps moving around on me before I can get my foot on it.”

Nevin straightened and looked about, but the tangled web of leaves limited his field of vision to the five feet surrounding him. He opened his mouth to call out for help, but a strange thought stopped the words before they reached his lips.

It wasn't exactly unusual to encounter one of the townsfolk out in the woods. Trappers, mostly, though they generally set their snares farther north to both take advantage of the unsettled wilds of the foothills, and reduce the likelihood of a local accidentally stumbling into their traps. Running into someone in the woods this side of town was rare, but it happened.

Still, the timing of it struck him as eerily coincidental. He makes off with Dalen's prized canteen, damages it, possibly even hurts the old drunk in the process, and randomly runs across two men stomping through the woods later that morning? Is it possible that Dalen had sent out a handful of his drunk friends to find him?

“It's not magic,” said the first dismissively. “Just use your bloody eyes.”

Nevin's eyes followed the sound of rustling underbrush, trying to get an idea just how far off the men were. Sound traveled strangely in the woods, the uneven ground and haphazard arrangement of plant life gathering noise in stagnant pools and churning streams like stones in a river. The dense foliage made for effective camouflage, but its effectiveness was a double-edged sword. He doubted the men would be able to detect him easily without actively searching through the fallen tree, but the relative dryness of the leaves also meant that any movement on his part would be broadcast through hundreds of natural wind chimes.

He rubbed his aching shoulder. For the moment, he was married to his uncomfortable perch.

“How am supposed to finda ground through all these blasted ferns?!”

Nevin chewed his lip. The second man sounded much closer now. He could hear each careless footfall through the brush.

“I still don't see whatever you're going on about.”

“I swear...I just saw it. A flash of color. Like metal.”

Nevin's stifled a gasp with his hand. The canteen. While his hiding spot made him practically invisible to passerby, that bulky bronze container would stand out like a storm cloud on a clear day, and in his current position, stumbling upon the canteen was the same as stumbling on him. He carefully stretched his right arm upward in an effort to loosen the strap's grasp on his wrist, feeling the muscles in his shoulder cramping up.

“There!” said the second voice. “On topa that log!”

“That's not a log, you twit. It's a fallen tree.”

“Oy, get off it, ya ponce. It's right over there, right at the top!”

The steps shuffled to an abrupt stop. Nevin froze. The men in question stood no more than fifteen feet in front of him.

(Continued in part 2)