Inktober Day 1–The Old Man

eirenical:

HI, everyone!  *waves wildly*  I make no promises here, but I thought I’d try my hand at this, this year.  ^_^ 

From this post, Characters of the Forest set: Inktober Day #1 – The Old Man

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“I know a man who stepped off the path and didn’t find his
way home again for ten years and a day.”

“I heard that an entire legion of soldiers lost their way in
there and became so confused they slew each other.”

“Don’t forget the old man!”

“Who could forget the old man?  Isn’t that how LeClerc busted up his leg last
month?  Looking for that cursed treasure
of his?”

“And we all know what happened to the miller’s boy.”

Sage nods all around.

Cosette had inched around the knot of travelers huddled
around their watered-down wine in their rickety chairs, sharing stories none
were present for as though they were experts.
Everyone in these parts had their stories.  The children knew them all by heart, told
them in hushed whispers behind their hands at their lessons or in bold dramatic
renditions around their hearth fires while the adults were busy with more
important things.

Yes, everyone had their stories.  Everyone knew someone—a cousin, a friend, a
third cousin twice removed—who’d been lost, or changed so irrevocably that they
may as well have been, on a journey through the woods.  So, anyone with any sense knew you didn’t go
into the woods alone, you didn’t go unguarded, and, above all else, you didn’t
go at night.  Mothers in these parts were
less afraid of their daughters going off to canoodle with the boys under the
moonlight because they more afraid that those daughters would wander into the
woods and come back as someone very, very different.  Something different.  If they came back at all.

Then again, Cosette had a story of her own.  For if Cosette’s mother had heeded those
stories instead of dismissing them as they’d passed through all those years ago,
Cosette would have a family, still.  But
her mother had gone into the woods—Cosette had been too young to understand why—and
never come back out again, leaving Cosette all alone.

Alone.

You didn’t go into the woods alone.

The fairies, the wolves, the hermit, the dark spirits of
soldiers still fighting a lost fight, one of them would get you in the end.

Cosette’s hands began to shake.  The bucket.
The bucket had been so heavy, and she’d been so tired.  She’d only sat down for a moment, just to
rest her arms.  She’d sat down in the
middle of the path.  It had been dusk,
but still light enough that she should have been safe.  If she hadn’t sat down.  If she hadn’t fallen asleep.  And now… and now…

Cosette was no longer alone.

There was a man in a yellow trench coat crouched just off the
path… and he was lifting her bucket, turning it this way and that, as though it
weighed nothing.  

But Cosette was more afraid of returning to Mme. Thenardier
without the water she’d been sent for, or worse, without the bucket, than she
was of the old man of the woods.  Hiding
her shaking hands in a skirt so threadbare it barely hid her legs on a good day,
Cosette cleared her throat.  “If you
please, sir, I’ll be in terrible trouble if I come home without the water in that
bucket.”

The man slowly lowered the bucket to the ground and turned to
face Cosette.  The hand he reached out to
Cosette with was large, callused, and terribly rough, but it was gentle when it
cupped her cheek, a touch so light even a baby bird would have felt safe in its
embrace.  And it was warm.  He was warm.
Cosette didn’t know how she’d missed that before.

“I think it is rather your mother who should be in terrible trouble
for sending you out with such a burden so close to dark.”

Cosette drooped, all the warmth leeching out of her with those
words, as her mother’s loss still leeched the warmth from every thought it
touched.  Her voice barely a whisper, she
said, “Begging your pardon, sir, but the Thenardier is not my mother.  My mother was lost in these woods, herself,
when I was still very, very young.  She
walked into them one night and never walked out of them, again.”

The old man froze for a moment, stilling in his place like a
creature startled by a loud noise.  Thenardier.  The magic word that had frozen him in his
tracks.  The old man’s mouth worked
around the syllables, testing them, drawing them out.  Finally, he let out a deep, juddering breath
and turned to look upon her once more.  “Your
name is Cosette, then, is it not, child?”

Cosette’s eyes widened, fear creeping in around the edges at
that pronouncement, for who but a spirit could distill such information from
simply conversing with her?  All she
could do was nod in response.  No words
would come.  But, at that nod, the old
man’s face broke into a smile, bringing back all the warmth that had been lost
from the conversation moments hence.  “Then,
Cosette, it is glad that I am to have found you.”  And as warm as those words were, they were
nothing to the beauty of the ones which came next.  “You need not mourn your mother any
longer.  It is she who sent me to find
you.”

You didn’t go into the woods alone, you didn’t go unguarded,
and, above all else, you didn’t go at night… but as Cosette felt herself lifted
to perch on the broad shoulders of the old man as though she weighed as little
to him as her bucket, she realized: she was not alone, she more well-guarded
upon these great shoulders than she had ever been before, and the old man’s yellow
trench coat was warmer than any sun.
Certainly, though, this night in the woods had changed her.  That much was as true for her as it had been
for the miller’s boy.  But for Cosette,
it had changed her for the better.

She was no longer afraid, nor, she thought as she curled
into the old man’s warmth, would she ever be, again.