The village healer called it a fever. Said the braid girl needed willow bark tea and a damp rag on her brow. But Rafi knew better. Fever did not rattle your ribs like sticks in a cage. Fever did not make you cough up splinters.
He sat by her side on the creaking bed while dusk cracked open the sky outside. She lay curled, braid tangled like a black rope around her throat, breath hitching every time she swallowed.
She looked at him through half-shut lashes. "It's inside me," she rasped, voice rough as bark under fingernails. She turned her head and spat into a tin bowl beside the bed. Rafi flinched when he saw it: a small shard of wood, slick with blood.
He pressed the back of his hand to her cheek. Burning. Beneath her skin, the hush was threading itself through muscle and marrow. He'd heard the old campfire whispers: Once the hush roots you, you belong to it forever. He'd told himself they were lies. He'd believed the fire had made them ashes, not soil.
But the braid girl's bones said otherwise.
Outside the room, villagers argued in tense murmurs. He heard Marnie's shrill voice carrying through the thin walls: "She's cursed. He brought it back with him. We should turn them out before the whole village rots!"
Rafi clenched his fists until his knuckles cracked like dry twigs. He had no words for them. Only for her.
"Hold on," he whispered, leaning closer so she could see him clearly through the fog pressing her eyes. "I swear to you — I'll cut it out. Burn it again if I have to. You won't belong to it."
She cracked a broken smile, teeth flecked pink. "You'll burn yourself too, Rafi. You always do."
He almost laughed — almost. But the fear in his throat made it curdle. He brushed hair from her damp forehead. Her braid was heavy with sticky sap.
Outside, a goat screamed again — the same strangled cry he'd heard nights before. But now it didn't stop. It rose and rose, wet and choking, until it cut off sharp as an axe swing.
Rafi stiffened, staring at the door. He felt the hush hum in his skull, a low music made of rustling leaves and bones knocking hollow in the wind.
He turned back to her. "Stay awake. Promise me."
Her eyelids fluttered. "Roots cracking… stone splitting open…"
He didn't wait for more. He stood, grabbing the rusted hunting knife from Marnie's cupboard. If the hush wanted her, it would have to claw through him first.
And Rafi — burning from the inside out — would greet it with a blade and a prayer made of ash.