Free The Fecund's Melancholy Daughter by Brent Hayward

last, the chatelaine held her hands together in front of her, to remove them from the situation. Tears were coming now. She did not want to cry in front of this girl. “Of course, we will find who took her. We will have the city turned upside down. Now go. Please, go. I don’t want to lose any more time. We’d best begin.”
    Octavia bowed.
    The chatelaine watched the girl as she walked the Great Hall in retreat. “Come see me after,” she called, blurting the words out. “So long.” And then she chastised herself for sounding too desperate and adolescent. The chatelaine wondered if, of all things, she might be falling in love.

    Up from the shallow valley, as if regurgitated in desiccated forms of sand and the harsh battered shapes of burnished wood and tin and other detritus—perhaps even imagined by the lakebed dry these many seasons—there rose piecemeal into view a series of what could only be the dwellings of people. Dull, scoured from rocks and desolation, all bespattered with dust and shit and pocked by endless storms, these were nonetheless homes. Homes . Perhaps two dozen or so of the structures clustered together, extending into the near distance where mists began to claim their details.
    So incongruous and shocking was the sight of this ramshackle village—after travelling two full days now through deserted and unchanging badlands—that path’s father stood silent atop the hillcrest for a full minute, perfectly still, regarding the apparitions while hot winds plucked and pushed at his own tatters, urging him onward, and down.
    His son, path, groaned and craned his neck just then, grumpily peering past the fabric ridge of the sling he rested in to see his father’s face; the boy had been dozing and felt shudders pass through the familiar, skeletal body that supported him, a trembling in the sternum always pressed to his own spine. This shudder had been followed by the cessation of movement; he woke from sleep to see tears streaking the grime on his father’s cheeks.
    “Now what?” He ground his little teeth together. “Father? Are you listening? Will you please keep moving?” But by then the boy had also seen the structures out the corner of his eye and, as he turned his head, implications of what they might mean settled over him. A few moments passed before he found words again.
    “All right,” he said, finally, reverentially, more like a breath than true words. “We can start here. Maybe this is what we’re looking for.” Path’s small heart pounded in his ribcage like that of a bird.
    His father wiped at the dampness on his face with a shaky arm and, abruptly, as if suddenly disgusted, removed the sling from around his neck. He held the contraption away from his body, suspending path mid-air. He turned to the boy, to look into his eyes. “You told me you wanted people. I see lots of houses, son, but no people.”
    This was true. Path frowned.
    “Or it could be,” his father continued, “that they ain’t no people alive here. Could be something else. Not people, I mean. Other things. Hiding in the buildings.”
    “Put me down.”
    So path was placed, unceremoniously, onto the hot ground.
    The sling had a rigid frame, clamped to path’s torso, and three short, strong legs that locked into place, enabling him to rest in an almost upright position. He could look around, at least until his neck became too sore to hold up his heavy head. More or less propped upright, he peered over the top of the sling, watching eddies of sand dance with the silent structures.
    “Goodness knows what could live here.” His father held a hand over his eyes as a visor, though there was no sun and had not been any sun in his life or even in his father’s life. “I’ve heard stories.”
    “Will you just go down there? Find out.”
    “Likely kill us for trespassing just as soon as give us water or listen to any words you got to say.” Path’s father licked chapped lips. He was haunted by this