Despite the fact that the sun hasn’t quite set yet, the forest is so thick that the dark canopy of foliage overhead blocks out almost all light from the fading day. I could hardly see the path under my feet, but Erik didn’t seem to have any trouble following it, so I just focused on keeping him in sight. That wasn’t too hard, since the path was rather overgrown, and he had to slow to a snail’s pace to navigate it on one foot and a crude crutch.

We stumbled in the darkness for god knows how long, unpleasantly aware of every snap of a twig or rustle of a leaf.

Okay, so Jack and I stumbled, Despite his lame foot, Erik seemed perfectly at home in the near blackness of the forest, even as slow as he was, traversing over half-buried roots and avoiding thickets of bramble with a sort of sixth sense, while Jack and I hissed in pain every time we collided with a particularly low hanging tree branch.

I’d thought it couldn’t get much darker in the woods, but it turns out I was wrong. The sun set quickly now, and within half an hour, the darkness was dangerously oppressive.

Erik kept pressing us onwards, but it finally got to a point where I could hardly see his back despite the fact that he was only a few feet away from me and I stopped dead right there on the path.

“We can’t keep going,” I said. “It’s way too dark, one of us is going to trip and break a leg or something.”

“Been there, done that,” Erik grumbled.

“Your ankle isn’t broken,” I reminded him. “And we were more desperate then. We can afford to stop for the night now. Unless the wayhouse is like, five minutes from here, I say we call it a night.”

“I have to agree,” Jack added, “Plus, it’s getting cold, and we should eat.”

Erik muttered something about us being pansies who weren’t cut out for “serious” adventuring, but us pansies carried the vote and he conceded.

We settled down right in the middle of the path, and Erik set about making a small fire while Jack cleared the ground of the worst of debris, so we wouldn’t have to sleep on too many rocks and sticks.

“Is a fire really a good idea?” I asked warily as I pulled out the bread and cheese that our meager supper consisted of. “Won’t that just attract attention? The bad kind of attention?”

“Well,” Erik said as he continued to stoke the tiny smoking flame he had encouraged into existence, “On one hand, a fire could alert intelligent threats to our presence, like robbers or ogres. On the other hand, things like wolves and giant spiders fear fire, so sleeping beside one should encourage them to keep their distance. I could put it out if you want, but you have to decide which seems like a worse way to die: stabbed in the night by bandits, or eaten alive by giant spiders? Oh, plus, you’ll be cold all night before the giant spiders eat you.”

“Uh… I guess… the bandit thing is less… horrible. Slightly,” I admitted.

“My thoughts exactly,” Erik agreed, and with one more handful of dry grass, the fire burst into licking tongues of hungry flames.

The fire was nice and warm, and I huddled close to it while gnawing of my hunk of stale bread. It was almost pleasant, sitting there between Jack and Erik in silence, watching the spitting, crackling campfire and listening to the evening breeze rustle through the trees that surrounded us. As long as I didn’t let my thought drift to bandits or spiders, at least.

Unfortunately, the relative peacefulness of the moment was being slowly ruined by my increasing need to pee.

I squirmed where I sat in the dirt, trying and failing to ignore the mounting pressure in my bladder. I’d been holding it since we first left town earlier that morning, since there had been no cover along the road in the farmland portion of the walk for me to hide behind. It had been a hot day, and I’d drunk a lot of water from the leather waterskins that Erik had brought along.

At first, my plan was to wait until we decided to go to sleep, and then I’d offer to take the first watch. Once the boys were out, I’d walk a little ways down the road to relieve myself without having to leave the safety of the path. One look towards the deep darkness of the forest beyond the path was enough to convince me that I really didn’t want to go wandering out there in search of a private place to pee.

But as the night wore on and neither Jack nor Erik showed any signs of settling down for the night, It was either admit my embarrassing biological weakness—for shame—or risk the boys asking what that wet spot that seemed to be spreading out around me was.

“Um,” I squeaked, my voice a barely audible falsetto. I cleared my throat and tried again, this time making an effort to sound like I wasn’t embarrassed by having to do something all living creatures did multiple times a day. “Um, I have to… use the restroom.”

“What?” Erik and Jack asked at the same time, looking utterly nonplussed.

“Bathroom, I have to go to the-” I started, and then broke off as I realized my error. This was a land of chamber pots and outhouses, polite euphemisms like “use the restroom” were just gibberish here. My face flushed so deeply that I knew it had to be visible even in the washed out, orange-y light of the fire, and I said, “Pee, I have to go pee.”

Both Jack and Erik flushed as well, and Jack gave an awkward cough while Erik quickly pretended to be tending to the fire. They had been relieving themselves on the side of the road all day, not bothered in the slightest as long as my back was turned, but obviously the thought of the same situation in reverse filled them with almost as much embarrassment as it did me. I briefly considered being offended by this inequality in the freedom of public urination, but a sudden pang from my bladder reminded me that I didn’t have time for such things.

“Should I just…” I trailed off, jerking a thumb towards the dark line of trees behind us.

“You shouldn’t leave the path,” Erik warned me.

I raised my eyebrows at him, and realized that I did not give a hoot about the inequalities of public urination—at least not how they applied to me, personally. I just couldn’t take a squat in front of these near strangers, not without at least one tree between us. “I won’t go far,” I said.

Erik looked uncertain, but then he shrugged. “Stay close enough that you can see the light of the fire, or that we can hear you if you get turned around and call out. And don’t be long.”

I jumped up to my feet, leaving my backpack on the ground where I’d been sitting, and dashed off into the woods as fast as I could manage while waddling.

Blissful relief. I felt a million times better by the time I stood up and inspected the hem of my dress, just to be sure that I hadn’t accidentally peed all over it in the darkness. I had gone a little deeper into the woods than I had originally been intending to. I had stopped at first only one or two trees in, the light of the fire still a clear beacon back to the path, but Jack and Erik had taken up a conversation to fill in the awkward silence I’d left them in, and I could still hear there voices. That meant that they’d probably be able to hear the sound of me doing my business, which was not a bonding experience I was particularly eager to have.

I went a little further until the sound of their voices dimmed to almost inaudible, and by then, the glow of the campfire was hidden behind the dense wall of trees. It was fine though, I’d gone pretty much in a straight line to find this secluded spot. I turned about face, and trekked back the way I had come.

After about three minutes of walking, I stopped.

It definitely hadn’t taken me three minutes to walk from the path to my pee spot.

I looked around to see if anything looked familiar, but it was so dark, and all the trees looked pretty much exactly the same.

This was fine. There was nothing to worry about. I’d just backtrack a little, reorient myself, and try again.

I retraced my steps to lead me back to the stump I’d relieved myself on.

I didn’t find it.

I froze, cold and utterly alone in the middle of the forest, and listened hard.

Nothing. No sound of conversation, no voices from either of the boys carried on the cold night air.

My mouth went very dry, and I struggled to swallow the lump that was rising in my throat.

“It’s fine,” I said out loud. “This isn’t a big stretch of forest, remember? It can be passed through in a few hours. You’re not that lost.”

If worst came to worst, as long as I picked a direction and stuck to it, I could find my way out.

Probably.

Except I’d heard stories of hikers who had become lost in the woods, their bodies found days later just half an hour from a town or a road. They’d died after walking in circles for days, exposed to the elements without food or water.

Fear threatened to overwhelm me, but I shoved it down hard.Don’t panic, panicking is how people die, I told myself in the firmest internal voice I could muster. I just had to find the path, that was all. I didn’t even need to find my way back to Erik and Jack, I just needed to find the path again, and then I could get out of here and figure out the rest later.

I slowly began to pick my way through the undergrowth, heading in the direction I thought I had come from.