by Rita Woods
Winter closed her eyes and fought to keep the water down. She ground her teeth and breathed slowly through her nose, willing herself not to think about the slime and grit she felt inside her mouth, about the wiggly creatures she had just swallowed.
“Here.”
Winter opened her eyes. Louisa held out a piece of hardtack and Winter took it. The biscuit was tasteless, but after the gritty moss water, she was grateful for that at least. Her stomach growled angrily. The biscuit was hard as a stone but, cramped with hunger, she bit down in desperation, gasping as pain shot through her teeth. Snarling in frustration, she threw the hardtack. The biscuit hit the top of the shelter and bounced, landing back on her chest with an audible thud. Winter glared at it in silence.
“Well,” she said finally. “You sure do throw one fine dinner party, Louisa.” She sniffled. “I sure hope that was a piece of hardtack I just swallowed, not a tooth.”
At first, in the silence of their little shelter, there was only the sound of their breathing. Then Louisa snorted, and snorted again. Winter turned her head and the two girls locked eyes.
Louisa let out a soft whoop and then they were laughing, both of them, struggling to muffle the sound, laughing until tears ran down their faces, mixing with the mud.
When they could catch their breath again, Louisa said, “I still hate you.”
Winter wiped her face and struggled onto her side, her back pressed against Louisa’s in the small space. “I know. I hate you, too.”
And then she was asleep, dreaming of warmer places and happier times.
* * *
Winter was dreaming of the spring that ran high up near the smokehouse in early summer. The water there was so cold that if you gulped it, it caused a pain like a hammer between your eyes and chilled you to your toes. Bright jays flitted high in the branches of an old buckeye, and the whole world smelled like apples, the apples that had fermented the whole winter in the root cellar. She heard voices, but when she turned toward them, the figures approaching her were lost in the sun. They were familiar, those voices, familiar and wrong. They didn’t belong in Remembrance.
Winter jerked awake.
Her body hurt and there was a weird, moldy taste in her mouth. She blinked and it all came rushing back, the pattyrollers, the chains, the barn, Colm.
She was lying in a hole somewhere in an Ohio forest, and that odd, buzzing sound at her back was Louisa snoring. Winter squinted up at the roof of the shelter. The icy rain had finally stopped and she could hear birdsong. She thought it might be midday, but in the feathery light of their shelter it was hard to tell.
The muscles in her legs seized and Winter stretched as best she could, wincing as the now-soggy straw inside her clothes shifted across her skin. Carefully rolling over so as not to disturb Louisa, she tried to reach the sack where they’d stored the small amount of food they’d brought with them. She was hungry … and thirsty, but her stomach clenched at the thought of drinking water squeezed from the moss again. Her hand had just landed on the tiny food bundle when she heard them again—voices. She froze, her hand clutching the bundle.
She heard horses. Two, maybe three. And voices fading in and out.
“Damn it to hell!” she heard, then laughter.
Frank!
She recognized the big pattyroller’s voice and pictured him: tall and broad and covered all over with coarse black hair. She could almost smell his hot breath inside the shelter and tried to push herself deeper into the pine-needle-covered dirt.
“Well, ain’t we just between shit and sweat!”
Frank’s voice again. Winter couldn’t tell where it was coming from. He could have been far down the hill, across a gully. Or standing right above them. His voice seemed to bounce off the pine-and-leaf covering of their hiding place. Were Colm and Paddy with him? Was Dix? Beside her, Louisa stirred, and Winter clasped a hand over her mouth. She felt Louisa’s eyes on her, but it was the sounds outside their makeshift shelter that gripped her attention. She listened so hard that she trembled, but the voices finally disappeared.
“They gone?” Louisa whispered next to her ear when Winter moved her hand.
Winter nodded. Yes, they had moved on. All around her, she could feel the forest settling back into its quiet murmuring. They were alone again.
“Then they not comin’ back this way. Best get some sleep.”
* * *
Winter pulled a wedge of potato from their pack, cold now and sickly gray, and popped it into her mouth. She chewed for a minute, then closed her eyes. As soon as the slavers had moved away, Louisa had dropped immediately back to sleep, but Winter, tired as she was, was wide awake. She huddled under the roof of mud and branches, straining to hear, worried that Frank and Colm might find their trail at any minute and double back.
Winter opened her eyes and peered at the herbalist. The swelling was nearly all gone from Louisa’s face, and most of the bruising as well. All that was left were the horrific scars, the first thing Winter had noticed on the day Louisa arrived in Remembrance, the deep, shiny furrows that ran from one eye to the corner of where her top lip should have been … and wasn’t.
“Louisa? How…? Where did those scars come from?”
Louisa’s eyes flickered open. Winter realized that she had never really looked at the other girl before, not really. And as she examined her, she was astonished to realize that except for her horrific wounds, Louisa would have been beautiful.
“Back on the … plantation, I forgot my place,” said Louisa finally, her voice barely above a whisper. “My master reminded me with a sledgehammer upside a’ my face.”
Winter felt the spit curdle in her mouth and tried to swallow.
She stared at the other girl, horrified. “He … hit you with…?” The thought was too unspeakable to complete.
Louisa closed her eyes again and turned her face away. “Go to sleep. We can’t go nowhere ’til it gets dark again, so you best get rested up.”
“What if they come back?” She could almost see it, the arc of the sledgehammer as it whistled through the air, hear the muffled crunch of bone as the sledgehammer connected. She could see the spray of blood as it flew from Louisa’s face. Her mind began to fill with the images of things that might happen to them if they were caught, shocking things that had never occurred to her before.
Louisa sighed irritably. “Then they come back. But they ain’t here now, so may as well wait ’til if and when they shows up to fight that fight.”
Reluctantly, Winter closed her eyes, but every fiber, every inch of her skin was tuned to the outside, listening, waiting. She tried to focus, to calm herself, but after just a few minutes would forget and start to panic, her breath coming so fast she made herself dizzy.
They hit her in the face with a sledgehammer.
If they found them … what would they do if they found them?
“Louisa?”
Winter struggled to turn in the cramped space. She had to get out of there. She couldn’t breathe. The shallow hole was like lying in her own grave. And the slavers. Where were the slavers?
“Louisa?”
The only response was Louisa’s soft snoring.
43
Winter
She fought the urge to kick Louisa awake.
Squinching her eyes closed, she tried to sleep. Louisa was right. She had to get some rest. She was so tired even her eyes ached.
Time dragged on, and the light inside their shelter turned the color of scorched butter as sunlight filtered through the makeshift roof. And still she found herself fidgeting this way and that, trying to turn her thoughts to something, anything but the small space, the cold, the slavers that were somewhere in the woods hunting them down. But there was just no sleep to be had.
The ground beneath her was lumpy, damp. And there were things, biting, crawling things, moving around inside her clothes, feeding on her, tormenting her. The straw they’d stuffed inside their blouses and drawers to fight off the chill had come ali
ve in the night, and now every inch of her skin was itching to drive her mad.
Breathe. It’s just fleas … or lice. Just breathe.
She took slow, deep breaths through her nose. She ground her teeth. She counted slowly backward from fifty once and then again. But sleep moved further away, as the mud walls moved closer.
She couldn’t breathe. She was going to die in that mud hole. Only Louisa knew she was there and she was probably going to die, too.
With surging panic she began to claw her way out of the shelter. But getting out proved to be much more difficult than getting in. In the tight space there was little room to move, nothing to grab hold of for traction save the bent twigs of the roof, which would have brought the shelter crashing down on their heads.
Grunting, groaning, she twisted and bucked her way free, sweating with the effort, praying that when she popped out of the ground, it wouldn’t be right under Colm or his brother.
Finally free, she sprawled on her stomach, gasping for breath. As her breathing slowed, she pushed herself up and crawled to a maple tree, collapsing against it. The sharp air felt clean and fresh, heaven against her sweaty face.
It was warmer than the night before, and though the ground was soggy, the rain had finally stopped. Winter peered into the trees. The late-afternoon sun was low against the horizon and sparkled through the branches like jewels.
She must have slept some, though she felt no better for it.
Winter clawed at her skin. The itching was worse and she yanked at the straw poking from the cuffs of her blouse. It was damp and had begun to rot. She pushed up one sleeve, sucking her teeth at the sight of the angry red welts that ran from her wrist to her elbow. She considered pulling the rest of the straw from her clothes—being cold had to be better than being bitten to death by vermin—but where would she put it all? She settled on emptying most of it from her sleeves and a bit more from her bloomers, sighing with relief at the little speck of comfort that brought her, then buried the moldering straw beneath a thick mound of leaves, out of sight of those who were tracking them … she hoped.
The sun was setting fast, as it always did at that time of year, and Winter’s stomach growled. She glanced toward the shelter, but even this close by, even knowing that it was there, it was hard to see. It blended seamlessly into the steep, leaf-strewn hillside, and Winter marveled once again at Louisa’s cleverness.
It would soon be time to wake Louisa, but not yet. She would let her sleep as long as possible. It was going to be a long night, and at least one of them needed a clear head.
She folded her legs up under her chin and watched the setting sun turn the forest a golden yellow, then brilliant orange. She was tucked in the space between the wide maple tree and the mounded shelter, and it was growing colder. A small herd of deer made its way along the gully a short distance downhill from where she sat. A black squirrel materialized from beneath a wild rosebush and sat up on its hind legs, studying her before dashing up the maple and vanishing into shadow. Everything seemed so … normal.
Sitting quietly against the tree, as the world began to fall asleep, Winter felt her heart slowing into a calm, steady rhythm. She unfolded her hands and placed them flat on the cool, wet ground. She closed her eyes.
She felt the ground vibrating beneath her palm, the individual particles of dirt spinning around each other, the slight change in speed when an animal skittered in the underbrush nearby.
The itching faded away, and the bone-crushing exhaustion. She was warm. She felt herself sinking and she was warm and safe.
Suddenly she felt a shift in the vibration against her palm, something moving against the earth. Not a deer. She knew that sensation from her hunts with David Henry. This was different. This was …
The slavers.
She felt it with absolute certainty.
They were moving away, but they were still out there, hunting for her and Louisa.
And there was someone else too, coming from a different direction.
She felt a touch on her shoulder, and her link with the world abruptly vanished, the sense of falling into the spaces inside the earth jerked away. Louisa, her face pinched with anger, or maybe it was fear, was squatting beside her.
“What the devil you doin’ out here?” she asked.
Winter tried to swallow. Her tongue felt thick. She was dizzy, and it took a moment to orient herself back to the cold forest floor. “The slavers have moved off, just like you said.”
“How you know that?”
Winter pressed her lips together and met Louisa’s gaze.
“Lord have mercy,” cried Louisa. She crossed herself. “You work some of your juju finally? Is that it? You have a vision? You had a vision, didn’t you?”
“Sssh!” Winter was shaking her head trying to stop Louisa’s questions. It wasn’t a vision at all. It was more like falling into the world and being a part of everything.
“Yes,” Winter said finally. She sighed. “I had a vision. And there’s somebody else out there, too.”
“Who?”
Winter rubbed her eyes, light-headed with hunger. “I don’t know.”
Louisa stared at her, the light from the three-quarter moon reflected in her eyes. She sighed. “We’ll wait for the deepest part of night to move.”
Silently, she divided a potato and half a shriveled apple. When she offered Winter a chunk of moss to drink from, Winter managed, this time, to not retch on the thick, brackish water. Still hungry and aching with exhaustion, she dropped her head onto her knees.
“What’s it like?”
Winter raised her head. Louisa was staring at her, her expression unreadable.
“What’s what like?” asked Winter.
Louisa waved a hand back and forth between them, as if trying to feel for the right words. “That thing you do. That thing you and Mother Abigail do. Workin’ magic.” She waved away Winter’s protest. “What’s it like?”
Winter twisted a tangled, gritty strand of hair around her finger. What was it like? She didn’t know what it was like for Mother Abigail, wasn’t sure she could explain what it was like for her.
“It’s like…,” she said slowly, “just paying attention.”
Louisa frowned.
Winter thought for a minute. “Like a leaf. You pick it up but stop looking at it as a leaf. You start seeing the things that make it a leaf. The veins, the stem. And then you look closer and you see all the shapes inside the veins. And the shapes inside those, until what you’re looking at’s not even a leaf anymore.”
She shrugged, not sure she was making any sense. But Louisa was watching her intently, listening.
Winter was quiet for a moment. “It feels like … like something anybody could do if they just concentrated hard enough.”
Louisa made a face.
“No, listen.” Winter waved her hands, trying to get her to understand. “Like you and your plants. Your bees. How you know just what they want and need. How you know which plants’ll cure a cough and which will kill you.”
Louisa seemed to think this over. “When’d you know you could do it?”
Winter shrugged again. “When’d you know you could breathe?”
Louisa’s lip twitched upward. “Humph.”
The two girls sat in the deepening night listening to the forest. High up in the trees, an owl hooted. Now and then, flying shadows crisscrossed the face of the moon, dropping low to search for mice in the underbrush.
“And when you do … that other thing. That thing you did to the slaver … and … me, is that like breathing, too?”
Winter looked away, ashamed again, not for what she’d done to Colm—she would have turned him inside out if she’d known how—but because of the horrible things she’d said to Louisa back in Remembrance, and the “touch” that had sent the girl flying. That felt like a dozen lifetimes ago. She could barely remember now what she’d even been so angry about.
She shook her head. “No,” she whispered. “That’s f
eels like something different. Like a kettle set to boil. The steam just building and building until I feel like I’m going to bust. I see the little bits that make up something and they’re all spinning and everything. And somehow, I can touch them, make them spin faster or slower or let go of each other altogether and then…”
She swallowed hard. “A thing becomes a different thing. Not what it was before.”
“The leaf becomes…”
“Not a leaf.”
“Like the chain,” said Louisa.
Winter nodded. Yes, like the chain.
The two girls stared at each other a long moment.
“And does it feel … good?” asked Louisa, finally.
“It doesn’t,” said Winter. She looked into the trees. “And it does. Like nothin’ in the world could stand in your way.”
She thought about Mother Abigail’s chickens and chuckled mirthlessly. “Course, I don’t always get it right.”
“People scared a’ you.” Not a question.
Winter looked at her sharply. “Some,” she acknowledged, surprised at how hurtful the admission was.
“Folks can be funny. Judgy.” Louisa stroked the scars on her face with one finger and met her gaze. “In any case, magic or whatever you call it seems like a useful thing to have.”
Winter snorted. “Not so useful.” Louisa frowned and Winter grinned crookedly. “I’m still stuck out here with you, sucking mud out of moss.”
To Winter’s surprise, Louisa returned the grin. “Yeah, you are, aren’t ya?”
* * *
The light from the moon helped them move more quickly than the night before, if not more quietly. The two girls hurried through the forest, stumbling over tree roots and fallen trees, pushing their way through thick brush. Louisa seemed to be following some sort of trail, but, for the life of her, Winter could see no trace of it. Every tree looked like every other tree, every hill like the one they’d climbed the hour before and the hour before that. With the sun down, the air had become frigid again and each breath formed a cloud in front of their lips. Winter’s lack of sleep soon caught up with her. Her head pounded and her chest burned. There were long chunks of time when she thought she must have fallen asleep while still running.