Chapter 15

Seth had always felt a touch out of step with the world around him for as long as he could remember. The expectations that such an eligible gentleman, the heir to a title particularly, would know how to flawlessly navigate a ballroom or a drawing room had never been anything but a proverbial millstone about his neck. The noise had always been borderline overwhelming, conversation and music melding into one dull, grating roar in his ears.

He had thought that he already understood and appreciated silence; he sought it out whenever he could, frequently in the corners of forgotten barns, or mills creaking slowly in the wind. Seth had thought he knew what total silence was.

He was quite wrong.

From the moment he passed the last border of a world that had even a glimmer of something recognisable, the nights drew close around him, endless and claustrophobic all at once. He had never even considered the possibility that there were variations of silence, degrees of silence. He had never heard a silence so deep that he fancied he could hear his own body, simply existing in a dark so deep as to be comparable to the Void.

The days were so long that Seth rarely had the energy to do much when the work was finally done. He had arrived at the small logging camp that had been established by a man in his father's employ. Unfortunately, the moment that funds had stopped arriving, the former foreman had scarpered, taking as much of the equipment with him as he could carry. It was barely even a camp at Seth's arrival; it was more of a speck in a primaeval forest that had been cleared enough to turn a pair of wagons about in.

The Scandinavians had proved themselves to be good, hard-working fellows, and without a second thought, Seth had decided to hire them. He had little in wages that he could offer them, but they were quite happy to be made partners, taking a percentage of every piece of timber cut. This turned out to be a wise investment, for though they sported questionable moustaches, they proved to be adept timbermen.

The oldest (or perhaps simply the tallest) of the trio wielded an axe as easily and casually as if he were a fashionable man in London twirling about a walking stick. Sven, as he answered to more often than not, seemed to not have a care in the world for the sharpness of the blade as regarding his own safety. Because of the inconsequential way that he would lug it about, the first time he set to work felling, Seth was so startled by the sudden ferocity and pinpoint precision that he jumped backward.

Otto, the shortest of the brothers, would then crawl all over the tree once it was felled, muttering and measuring with a length of string. Karl would listen to the incomprehensible Nordic words, taking meticulous notes with a pencil in a small, worn notebook. Over the course of a couple weeks, Seth learned that they were calculating—with startling accuracy—the amount of usable timber in any given tree. As they had no mill to speak of, this was imperative information, as it would have been easy for the miller to short them on payment.

"We need a mill," Seth said, and the brothers had all nodded gravely in agreement. There was a good source of water, a creek that had ambitions of being a river during the spring thaw. They used this to float the logs downstream, but Karl seemed convinced that it could be turned to powering a bandsaw.

The family of Germans had stayed as well, and Seth was glad of this. The father was an able driver, and showed great skill at training the plodding wagon horses in the art of tushing . The ladies set to work immediately transforming the little clearing into a liveable space, and Seth couldn't help but wonder at their industry. Already, they spoke of writing to more of their relatives, and soon there would be the littlest seeds of a town planted.

Seth had little to pay them with, but instead granted them lots along the thin strip of dirt that was quickly forming into a sort of main street. It was the strangest thing that Seth had ever witnessed, tents and makeshift lean-tos slowly giving way to clapboard buildings and log cabins. There was talk of digging a well, and Otto, his moustache fluffing with excitement, seemed to think that it would be worthwhile to sink a mine for copper deeper in the forest.

All of which meant that Seth's days were full, fuller than he could have ever imagined. There was scarcely a moment in the day that his hands were not turned to some industry or another; he, too, had taken to carrying an axe about with him, for there was always wood that needed chopping, limbs to be hacked off of trunks, rails split for fences.

He fetched water, learned to start a fire from nothing, even the basics of tushing , driving the horses as they dragged logs from the forest. One of the German boys, a lad of no more than twelve, showed him how to set snares for rabbits, which were plentiful. Seth had never been in a position before where if his hands failed, he would go hungry. It was terrifying, and exhilarating all at once.

When he laid down at night, and the dark curled around him like a second (or third, or fourth) blanket, he knew a kind of tiredness that he'd never known before. He had no bed, merely a pile of skins and blankets over a scattering of straw on the bare wood floor of a hastily thrown up cabin. Given that all his body had known to this point was downy feather mattresses, he could never have considered that he would sleep so easily in such humble surroundings.

The only real trial was in those few, fleeting moments before sleep descended on his eyes. He would float, neither awake nor sleeping, too awake to be fully dreaming. It was then that the loneliness would set in. He had companionship, more true friendship than he had ever known in his life, really, but he could not deny that at the end of the day, he was utterly alone. Everyone else had friends, family, smiling faces awaiting them; Seth retired to his cabin to listen to it creak and shift in the wind and cold.

One of the young ladies, Gretel, a girl with hair so blonde it was almost white, practised a sort of singing that seemed to encapsulate all their isolation. It was unlike anything Seth had ever heard before, a kind of wordless keening that echoed around the hills of the camp. He would lay in bed, and she would begin her song, causing a strange, cold, prickling sensation to crawl up the back of his neck, and his eyes to burn with tears.

He did not know her story; she, like many of them, treated Seth with a kind of deference, clearly seeing that in spite of his unshaven face and unkempt hair, he was the lord of the castle—nevermind that the "castle" was a log cabin held together mostly with hope and crooked nails. She rarely met his eye, ducking her head and stepping backward out of his path at every turn.

On the rare occasions that her eyes, so light as to almost be colourless, met his, darting away furtively, there was such a quiet, abiding sadness there that Seth became more aware of his own pain. It was impossible for him to know what she pined for, for whom she longed, but Seth could recognise her own suffering. When she loosed her song, it felt as much for himself as for her own need to give vent to her broken heart.

It would have been a fool's errand to bring anything of value with him as he crossed the wilderness; moreover, anything of any remote value he had sold in order to fund his expedition. There was one, single thing he had kept, one little trinket he could not bear to part with. In a small velvet box lay a small gold band, a diamond set into the top in such a way that it resembled a gleaming star, little sapphires around it. Seth had known that it was for him, to proclaim his love and devotion to the one that illuminated his heart and kept him tethered to him, in a shock of recognition.

In the near total blackness of his cabin, one small candle wavering and sputtering on a little plate near his head, his hand would find the little box that he kept ever safe in the inner pocket near his heart. His thumb would find the little brass latch, worn from how many times it had been opened without even needing to see it. As Gretel's strange, banshee-like song warbled about in the little camp, he would hold the ring up to his eyes, turning it this way and that so that it sparkled and caught the light, taking on the aspect of a real star.

"Don't give up on me," he whispered, like a prayer. "Guide me back home."