He seemed almost desperate to prevent this from happening, to change the boy’s mind. It was more than wanting to preserve their relationship as protector and ward. It was a fear that their friendship, whatever stage it had reached, would shatter like glass. Bek could understand, and yet he knew he could not back away, not if he wanted to save Grianne.
“Don’t ask again,” Truls Rohk warned.
Bek shook his head. “Show me your face.”
“All right, boy! You want to see what I look like, what I keep hidden from everyone? Then, look! See what my parents made of me! See what I am!” the other said with such venom that Bek flinched.
In a single, frenzied movement, he ripped away the cloak and stood revealed.
At first Bek saw him only as a vague shape outlined against the dark; the moon and stars were screened away by clouds, leaving the forest little more than a gathering of shadows. Truls Rohk’s cloak lay in a dark puddle on the ground, and the shape-shifter had dropped into a crouch, looking feral and dangerous. Poised neither to flee nor to strike, he seemed instead caught in a spiderweb of tree limbs that formed a backdrop behind him, pinned against the distant sky.
Then Bek saw the beginnings of movement. The movement did not come from a shifting of limbs or head, but from within the dark mass of his body, as if the flesh itself was alive and crawling. The movement had a liquid appearance and Truls Rohk the look of glass filled with water. It was so unexpected that Bek thought his eyes were deceiving him. He thought so, as well, when parts of the shape-shifter faded then reappeared in ghostly fashion.
But when the moon slid from behind the clouds and flooded the clearing with milky brightness, Bek understood. Truls Rohk looked like something cobbled together from stray parts of human debris, some of it half-formed, some of it half-rotted, all of it shifting like a mirage that might not be there at all. The watery look came from the way in which pieces of him constantly changed from flesh and bone to mist and air. There was nothing permanent about Truls Rohk. He was only a half-completed thing, some of him recognizable as human, but not enough to call him a man.
It was easily the most terrifying sight Bek had ever witnessed—not simply for what it was, but for what it suggested, as well. It whispered of the grave, of death and decay, of what waited to claim the body when it began to decompose. It screamed of what it would feel like to have your body disintegrate about you. It suggested unimaginable pain and suffering. It reminded of nightmares and the creatures that came out of them to drive you from your sleep. It was surreal and ugly. It was anathema to any human concept of life.
He said nothing, but Truls Rohk saw the look in his eyes. “This is what happens when a shape-shifter mates with a human,” he whispered in barely contained fury. “This is what comes from breaking taboos. I told you my father tried to kill me after killing my mother. He did so when she showed him what he had made with her. He did so when he saw what I was. He couldn’t stand it. He couldn’t abide me. Who could? I am trapped in a half-formed body. I am bits and pieces of flesh and bone on the one hand and nature’s elements on the other, but not fully formed of either. I shift back and forth between them, trapped.”
Bek could not speak. He stared wordlessly, trying to imagine what it must be like to be Truls Rohk, unable to do so.
The shape-shifter laughed dully. “Not so eager to look on me now, are you? Too bad. This is what I am, boy. I have strength and power at my command. I have a presence. But I lack a true shape-shifter’s ability to change forms smoothly. I cannot hide the truth of myself. It’s why I live apart, why I have always lived apart. No one can stand to look on me.”
He came forward a step, and Bek shrank back in spite of himself as the bits and pieces of the other’s body rippled and shifted, exposing ends of bones and runnels of blood and strips of torn flesh amid the shifts of air and water, of light and dark. An eye protruded and disappeared. Teeth gleamed out of a half-stripped skull. Hands showed the ends of finger bones and bare tendons. Hair and skin grew in patches, split and torn. Nothing seemed designed to hold together, yet hold it did, though everywhere with the look of something about to collapse into itself.
“Huh!” Truls Rohk spat out the sound with such venom that it caused the boy to flinch. The ravaged face turned away. “You were right, boy. I am a monster. Are you satisfied now?”
He started to turn away, but Bek leapt forward and grabbed his arm, holding on tight through the wasteland of crumbling bones and shifting flesh.
“You said it yourself,” he said. “Your face is not who you are. You might appear a monster, but you’re not. You’re my friend. You saved my life. But you wouldn’t trust me with the truth about yourself. You hid that truth because you deceived yourself into thinking that it was something else. I would rather know you this way, terrible though it is, than have the truth hidden.”
“Pretty words,” the other growled, but did not pull away.
“The truth, Truls Rohk. I know you hate yourself for how you are. I know you hate how you look and how you know others will look at you if you reveal yourself. But sometimes, with people who matter, you have to reveal even the worst of what you believe yourself to be. You have to have faith that it won’t make a difference. I would never judge you for how you look. Who you are is what matters, and who you are is always buried deep inside. The shape-shifters in the mountains knew this. They asked me how I felt about you because they wanted to see if I thought you mattered. Could there be a friendship between us? How deep would that friendship go? Did I think there was a place for you in the world? Would I give up my own place so that you could have yours? Would I give up my life for you? I gave them answers that had nothing to do with how you look and everything to do with who you are.”
“So what have you accomplished by making me show you how I am? What purpose has it served?” Bitterness and suspicion laced the other’s words. “The truth helps no one here.”
Bek tightened his grip on the other’s arm and plunged ahead. “Don’t you see? The truth helps everyone. The chance at life that the shape-shifters gave you when you were attacked by the caull is the same chance you must give Grianne. Everyone thinks she’s a monster, too. But the truth is something else entirely. She just needs someone to help her see it. She needs someone to help her strip away her deceptions and lies. She needs someone to believe in her, to believe there’s something more to her than what everyone sees. She needs someone to speak for her.”
Bek leaned close. “There isn’t anyone else but you and me. We’re her last hope.”
There was a long silence when he finished, a freezing of time and space as the boy and the shape-shifter faced each other in the darkness, one human, one something else. All the air had gone out of the world, leaving it empty and suffocating. Bek did not know what else to do or say. He refused to let go of Truls Rohk, keeping hold of his arm, as if by doing so he might keep him bound to his cause.
“You and me,” the other said at last, his rough voice strangely soft. “But mostly you.”
He freed himself so quickly that Bek did not have time to stop him, reached down for his cloak and pulled it on again, becoming once more a dark, faceless apparition in the night. All of the pieces of him, all of the ruined, shifting parts, forever fading and appearing like half-formed visions, disappeared.
“The Druid was right to choose you,” he said.
Bek saw his chance. “I have a plan.”
Truls Rohk grunted. “When didn’t you? You are a match for your sister in more ways than one. Come. I make you no promises, no assurances of what I will or won’t do about her. Talk to me some more and we’ll see. But let’s not delay. The rets will be coming, and the ruins wait. Walker needs us.”
“But listen to what I have to tell you—”