The Light of Hope

by Ernie Lindsey

  Only if you fail.

  Merrin is asleep in seconds. It’s a miracle she’s made it this long out here on her own, but the one thing she’s been missing is the comfort of human touch. She breathes softly and snuggles into my side. I can’t stand the thought of one of those blackcoat bastards putting chains around her wrists, but I’m not going to leave her behind either. With me, she has a chance. Here, alone, by herself, her time is limited.

  I’ll figure out what to do when the time comes, but for now, my full belly and her rhythmic breathing might as well be a cradle, rocking me to sleep. I shut my eyes, and it’s not long before I’m out, too.

  Sleep is good. My body needs the energy before going into war.

  Merrin is hesitant to leave the encampment. It’s all she’s ever known, and she doesn’t want to leave her parents behind. It takes me an hour to convince her that it’ll be okay, that we’ll come back one of these days when we can bring more people with us and start our lives over again. I have to promise her until the words “I promise” don’t sound like themselves.

  Eventually, she relents, and we scour the remains of our little village, hunting for things we can use that the blackcoat soldiers left behind. I find a couple of backpacks and some small knives that we can tuck into our wet boots. They’ll be good for emergencies or skinning game if we need to.

  With all the cured meats and dried fruits that we shove into these packs, we shouldn’t have to worry about meals, but you never know. I’d rather have too much than not enough.

  We’re still a few days away from Blackvale, but we’re bringing more than enough food to last us for weeks. We fill canteens with water from the filtering cistern at the south end of town, but it smells foul. When I lift the lid and notice a bloated face staring back at me, I retch and toss both canteens. It takes another thirty minutes to find two more.

  The lake water is safe, mostly, but we can’t risk getting the bubble-tummy, so we spend another hour hiking up, hauling water back, and then boiling it.

  Through all of this, Merrin doesn’t complain a single word. She’s such a good kid. Always was, and it’s good to see that the devastation of our camp didn’t damage her, at least not much. The only sign I can see of instability is the way she mentions talking to Brandon at night. On the days he was off duty from scouting, they were inseparable. He loved teaching her new things and making sure she practiced tasks she already knew how to do.

  She insists she sees him around camp sometimes, says she can see through him, but he’s there, and when I try to play around with her, thinking it’s the overactive imagination of a child, she tells me things that only Brandon could’ve known.

  “There’s no such thing as ghosts, Merrin,” I tell her. Do I really believe that? I’m not sure. The Elders claimed it to be true, and I hate to take something fun away from her, but I’m going to need her focused and alert until we get to Blackvale.

  As I stir the pot of boiling water, she giggles and says, “Yes, there is. He told me a secret.”

  “Oh yeah? What’s that?”

  “He wanted you to be his wife so you could make kissy faces at each other.”

  I smirk and shake my head. That wasn’t public knowledge, but Brandon could’ve easily told her that in jest one day. “Mmm hmmm. Right.”

  “He did! I promise.”

  “Merrin—”

  “And he said if you ever had babies, you were going to name them Daniel and Emma, after some of our great-great-great grandpeoples.”

  I drop the large spoon into the water. The bottom is almost glowing orange from the heat, so I don’t dare reach in to grab it. Forget the spoon, he said what?

  “Merrin, who told you that?”

  “Brandon did.”

  “Please don’t play games with me. I’ve had such a horrible time lately and—”

  “I swear!”

  “You’ve really seen him? Like seen Brandon’s ghost walking around here in the encampment?”

  She nods.

  “When was the last time?”

  “Um,” she thinks, tugging on her earlobe. “Two days ago, maybe? He said you were coming and that I didn’t have to be afraid anymore.”

  I’m beginning to wonder if maybe she’s simply having prophetic dreams like me and she’s confusing the sleep world with the real world. If I believe that it’s possible, then why can’t she be experiencing the same thing?

  She continues, “I didn’t come see you right away because he said you’d need some time to bury your grandfather. He made me promise, and I keep ‘em.”

  It’s… I don’t have the words. If it’s true, then maybe there’s someone watching over me after all.

  I’d like to believe it, but I’d need to see Brandon’s ghost walking around here before I actually do. For now, I’m going with dreams, or maybe the fact that Brandon told her some of this stuff before he died.

  We finish packing, fill our canteens with clean, boiled water, and head north, leaving the encampment behind.

  Once we reach the edge of the forest, right at the mouth of the trail that skirts the lake, Merrin tugs on my sleeve and asks, “Aren’t you going to wave goodbye?”

  Thinking she means the village, I turn and lift my arm.

  Down the hillside, I catch a flicker of something, a person, and maybe it’s my imagination, but I swear it looked like Brandon, smiling and saluting me. A trick of the light, a speck of dirt in my eye, whatever it was is gone in an instant, and I blink hard to clear away the confusion.

  Merrin says, “I’ll miss him the most.”

  11

  I’m having a hard time believing what I saw, and Merrin doesn’t make the situation any better by going on and on about what they would say to each other whenever he came to visit.

  “I know you saw him,” she says. “You can’t lie.”

  “Yeah, maybe.” And at the risk of stretching the sensible nature of our discussion, I ask her if she thinks he’ll come along with us to Blackvale.

  She shakes her head and pops a slice of dried banana into her mouth. “Nope,” she says, chewing around it. “He always said that he was a scout, and a scout’s job is to protect the village, so that’s what he would do when I left.”

  “He did, huh?” Sounds like something Brandon would say. Ever loyal, he was.

  “Yep. Brandon said he would keep the place safe until we got back from wherever it was you were going.”

  “How did he know I was going somewhere?”

  “I don’t know. He just did.”

  “Fair enough.” I have to let this conversation go. It’s tearing me apart inside knowing that the boy I should’ve loved from the beginning, instead of allowing Finn the Betrayer to catch my attention, is back there haunting the place where we grew up. Not trapped, really, but feeling obligated. If I ever make it back—if I ever bring my village mates back—maybe we can have a service for the dead and put everyone to rest. I’ll be able to tell Brandon that he’s free to leave, that I’m on duty and he can go rest in the Great Beyond we call Heaven.

  Merrin does a good job keeping up. She’s strong of leg and determination, but the heavy pack and canteen she’s carrying prove to be a little too much for her after a couple of miles. I take over carrying both for her, and though my load is doubled, we’re making good time because the path is clear.

  We reach the top of Rafael’s Ridge to the north a few miles from camp. We stop to catch our breath and have some water. I don’t really know how far the path goes from here because I’ve never been past the wooden marker. If I take one more step, I’ll be as far north as I’ve ever gone.

  Merrin and I need to climb another hundred yards or so before we get to the highest apex. We’re up high enough that the clouds seem like fog drifting around us. We can’t see too far straight ahead, but we don’t need to. From here, it drops into a long, slow, gradual slope.

  Merrin grinds her teeth together, ripping a bite of dried meat free and chews noisily. “What’s down there?”
she asks.

  “I really don’t know,” I answer. “I’ve never been this far before.”

  What I can see is the path carving through a wide-open swath of forest an acre across. Tall green grass that’s only begun to right itself after the blackcoat army stomped it all down on their way through.

  There are no stumps or thick bushes. It’s as if someone went through and mowed it down on purpose. I know it was easier for the blackcoats to march where space had been available, but this is an old, old clearing. Or at least it was originally. From what I can tell, the new growth is fairly recent, which tells me that a working crew from DAV was here in the recent past, getting it prepared.

  They were this close for who knows how long, and we didn’t have a clue.

  It feels so creepy realizing that some of them were in our backyard.

  “Let’s go,” I say, trying to shake the feeling. There’s nothing I can do about it now, though I do wish that we could’ve learned this months ago. Perhaps I would’ve had the guts to hide up here somewhere and take out a few of them with poisoned arrows.

  I say that now…but I don’t know that I would’ve had the courage back then.

  Still, it leaves a foul, bitter taste in my mouth—I think it’s regret—as Merrin and I trudge down the grassy hillside, slippery from the rain. We both turn our ankles at least once and Merrin giggles when her feet slip out from under her and she plops on her bottom. If I were by myself, I would’ve loosed a few curse words into the sky if that had been me. Instead, I chuckle with her, not at her, and it occurs to me just how great it is to have this positive outlook in my presence.

  That’s not to say that I didn’t joke around with James, Marla, and Squirrel, but it’s different with children. Most wouldn’t consider me an adult, yet I was a leader, if only briefly, and I talked about adult problems with people who had twenty years on me. We talked about troop movements and where we’d find the next meal. We’d strategize about how best to take out blackcoat guards in secret, or like with Hale, how we would go about defending the capital from the DAV army.

  With Merrin, it’s different. I have a mission and I’m marching toward it, that’s not forgotten, but having her along allows me to set it aside briefly. She points out rabbits and beautiful flowers. She’s fascinated by a tree that’s grown in an odd, twisting shape. She picks up a rock the size of her head and rolls it down the hill, watching it clatter, bounce and fling sideways where it disappears into the woods.

  This is what I have missed since this tragedy beyond tragedies began—the innocence.

  I have changed in many, many ways. No doubt about it. I’ve seen things, and done things, and plan to do things that I never thought would happen. I’ve grown up so much—I’ve aged a lifetime in weeks—and yet I’m barely fifteen. I get it. I get that I’m a child…but not in the way that Merrin is.

  Eight years is a big difference when it comes to the age range between children, but the definition of the word takes on an entirely new meaning.

  I’m a child by age. I’m an adult by nature.

  Merrin is a child both in age and how she sees the world.

  She knows bad things have happened, and I think she understands how horrible it is, was, and will be if I fail, yet she still holds a field poppy up to me and asks if I’d like to tuck it behind my ear.

  “Absolutely, Merrin. It’s beautiful.” I hook my hair around my ear and use it to help hold the flower in place. I grin at her sideways and ask what she thinks.

  “Cute,” she says, nodding her approval. “I bet all the boys would chase you.”

  “Right. If there were any left.” I realize how negative that sounds as soon as the words come out of my mouth, and I stammer, trying to think of something positive to cover it. “Well, I mean, you know, around here. There’ll be more one day when we get where we’re going, but then they’ll be blackcoats, and, um, and then—hey, is that a fox?”

  Merrin doesn’t seem to react to my negativity—again, the innocence—and instead, she’s craning her neck, bobbing her head back and forth, looking for the fox that isn’t really there. I lied. I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  “Looks like he’s already gone.”

  “Shoot. I missed him!” She shrugs and picks up a stick lying on the ground. It’s as tall as she is, about to my waist, and she uses it as a walking cane. “There was a fox that came around the encampment a few times. He was nice and let me feed him some of the meat right out of my hand.”

  “Merrin, that’s amazing. They’re usually so sneaky and shy.”

  “I had to shoo him away though when he started nibbling on Elder Black’s ear.” She says this without a hint of disgust, and I feel so awful for her that she has accepted things like this as a normal reality.

  My stomach churns, and I try to get the image out of my head. It doesn’t work until we reach the bottom of the hill, and my legs are throbbing from balancing myself against the decline. “Maybe we should rest, huh? Stop here for the night? It’ll be dark soon. What do you think?” I ask her opinion because I want her to feel like she’s a part of this journey. She’s been living on her own for weeks, and if she’s survived this long by herself, she deserves to have a say in our situation, child or not.

  Merrin glances around, looking at the thick forest on either side of us. “Yeah, I guess so.” She scrunches up her nose as if she’s not impressed by our options. “It’s probably okay, but maybe we shouldn’t let that man behind us know where we’re stopping.”

  At first, this sends my heartbeat into a rapid pitter-patter like the sound of a downpour on a tin roof, and then it occurs to me that she may be playing around. After all, she did just spend thirty minutes telling me about how she talked to Brandon’s ghost. I relax a little, feeling the tension in my shoulders let go, and ask her, “Who was it this time? Elder Brenwen? Elder Lonn?” I grin and pinch her cheek, but on the inside, it bothers me to mention those names since they were both corpses lying back there in the middle of The Center.

  She shakes her head. “Nuh-uh, not a ghost. He’s real. He had on a black coat with red stripes on his shoulders. I’m positive.”

  “What?” I whip around and look southward, up the hill and back the direction we just came. I don’t see anyone. I grab her hand and pull her toward the thick grove of pines to our right. “Where, Merrin? Where is he?”

  “Ow, you’re hurting my arm.”

  “Sorry. Sorry.” I let go and point. “Can you show me?”

  “I don’t see him now. He was back there.”

  My cheeks are hot and my hearing is muffled with a sharp ringing underneath it. “When did you see him?”

  “Um,” she thinks. “He was coming up the ridge when we were at the top.”

  “Merrin!” I kneel down and put my arms on her shoulders. I squeeze gently but firmly, looking her right in the eyes. She’s not understanding how dangerous this is. Instead, she stares at me with confusion and a little fear at my reaction. “Sweetheart, listen. I’m not trying to scare you but those men with the black coats and the red stripes, they’re bad, remember? They’re the ones who killed everyone back home. You remember that, right?”

  She shrugs. Of course she remembers, but at the moment she’s more worried about being in trouble.

  “Why didn’t you say something when you saw him?” We’re in this thicket of pines but are still too exposed. Anyone with a bow and excellent aim, not to mention a blackcoat with a rifle, can put a bullet into our chests where we’re standing. “Come on.” I pull her with me and find a fat white pine with low-hanging bows to hide under.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispers.

  “It’s okay. It’s okay, but listen, why didn’t you say something?”

  “Because he waved. I thought he was friendly.”

  The childish innocence I was admiring earlier may get us killed. “Then why did you say maybe he shouldn’t know where we were going to camp, Merrin? You knew something was wrong about him.”

>   “I-I-I’m sorry, Caroline. I didn’t get a bad feeling in my tummy until later, and then we were talking about the trees and that bunny rabbit and—and I just forgot.”

  I was seven once, and it wasn’t that long ago, really. I remember the angriest Grandfather ever got was the day I carried a rattlesnake into our hut. I had it wrapped around my arm and giggled when it’s tongue flicked against the back of my hand. To me, it wasn’t dangerous at the time. It was just there, and I recall that I had no answer for him when he asked why in the world I thought it was a good idea to play with a dangerous rattlesnake. “I don’t know” was the only real response because I didn’t have an answer.

  This same lack of understanding is the reason I don’t shake some sense into Merrin. I understand how—in the mind of a child—something harmful is simply a thing until it hurts me, but now I also understand what a parent or grandparent feels like.

  I whisper, “It’ll be okay. I promise it will,” and put my arm around her. I whisper this again and again until the gun blast fills the valley, and things are definitely not okay.

  12

  The tree trunk in front of us explodes in a shower of bark and pine wood. At the same time, the boom coming from a long-range rifle echoes throughout the valley. Merrin screams and covers her ears. I duck and pull her in close to me, using my body as a shield.

  Another spot in the tree erupts and wood chips fly. That one was closer to my head, and I quickly calculate the angle. He’s across from us, on the western side of the open swath and almost directly at our twelve o’clock position. I squeeze Merrin tighter and throw our bodies to the side, taking full cover behind the pine’s thick trunk.

  Pow!

  The bark splinters where we were. A second of hesitation and one of us would be dead. “Down,” I command. “Flat on the ground. As flat as you can get. Make yourself small, okay?”

  “Okay,” she whimpers.

  Pow! Pow!

  Those two shots zip past harmlessly, disappearing among the trees behind us, bullets slamming into distant trunks.