"I will," Zoe answered in a hush, ticklish of the doctor's eyes on them. It was when Corinne kissed her so, that her guard dropped. There was a deliverance in the raw emotion of Corinne's lips which neither rescue nor landfall had brought. Her eyes shut, and it would not be difficult to imagine a different place, the pristine white beaches of paradise, in a place of one's own.<br/><br/>When the last pine box loaded, Zoe took her place with the wagons. Four laborers went with them, driving the horses up switchback muddy slope into the rutted path through shaggy forest. As the animals labored and the wood groaned and tethers strained taut, Zoe regarded Corinne shyly from the passenger seat, as though too long a gaze might hex their rendezvous.<br/><br/>What hospitality the sailors provided folded abruptly once the wagons were underway. No more goods were exchanged, and the Common tongue was refused with the same coarse phrase, no matter the speaker.<br/>"Utazik mezze!"<br/>It was a black phrase, no matter the meaning, uttered like a curse with the emphasis of a clenched fist. The<em>Charlotte's </em>castaways were not meant to be here. No outsider was meant to be here.<br/><br/>Still, Sage Laporte placed herself in the hands of those unwelcoming sailors. Her fate seemed grim indeed when she set foot upon the ship which had cast all of them out, but there was no dissuading her now.<br/><br/>There was nothing more to be gained on the tense shore. Margaret Hotspur and Michelle accompanied on the walk up the muddy path, among the crisp evergreen and prickling moss raised like hackles from warped trunks.<br/><br/>The journey up onto the hill, where Medb's shelter squat watchful over an undisturbed stretch of old forest, was mercifully brief. It was there shelter could be found for the second night.<br/><br/>~ ~<br/><br/>Mist overtook the camp that night. The moonlit hours where a body run to exhaustion from its circadian rhythms first awoke were difficult to distinguish from dream. A curious sort of wolf stalked those jagged trees under cover of darkness. If one were not careful, venturing too far from waking dream into the grey gloom, one might meet the eyes of one of their kind, through the thicket of warped trees. Yellow eyes, the height of a man's throat, and the growl of a territorial beast.<br/><br/>In the morning light there were no more sightings of wolves. There had been rain, somewhere off the coast, and a sleepy drizzle still visited on the island, rendering the unpaved road in a sheen of mud.<br/><br/>A spacious wagon was waiting there on the road, with two jet-black horses stabled at the shore's overlook for the taking. It was clear what was expected of the island's visitors.<br/><br/>Those black-eyed beasts knew only one labor in life: to pull a laden wagon along the same muddy road, to and from the doctor's asylum. The drudgery of it had deadened their noble souls into crude tools, and they took the familiar road expertly with very little coaxing. Having no cargo but seven ladies and the lightest of accouterments, the ride proceeded briskly, unbalanced, and shimmying from wheel to wheel.<br/><br/>Wind from some distant storm's abating sigh rustled through the broken forest. The trees whispered secrets to one another in absolute desolation of another civilized soul in the overgrown old forest between coast and high apex. Up, up the island's contour, toward the eye-catching manor at its crown, a waking wilderness unfurled and vanished in the wagon's wake in shifting, bristling kaleidoscopes of loden green and nutmeg.<br/><br/>At last, after twenty minutes of riding, the mists receded.<br/><br/>A bright tropical summer sky shone through thin canopy where the beasts slowed, and the wheels burbled in muddy grooves. Straight ahead beneath rising ground the road cleft, straddled by gradual retaining walls grown over in dark, broad-leaf ivy. Overhead the asylum's wall crossed, dark stone and so forbiddingly high the sharp spines atop could not be seen.<br/><br/>Beneath the wall, where the road's mud ran aground on fieldstone, there was a black gate plenty wide enough to accommodate the wagon. Wrought iron lines like elegant calligraphy barred against trespass, but allowed the curious a peer down a long cellar corridor's plunge into darkness.<br/><br/>Dead center, the gate's swerving complementary halves joined in a heart-shaped lock. It was a large and decorative lock, meant for an equally oversized key, such that the tumblers might be worked even with the improvised tools at hand.