Jacob squatted and repositioned a stone on the grave. The grass rippled around him, his auburn hair bright against the gray sky. He shook his head and went on. “The epidemic wasn’t over like we thought. They didn’t let me . . . have her body. They burnt it with the others. I buried a few of her favorite things.”
I stood up, shocked. Pearl stood up next to me and dusted off the front of her pants. She hated dirt. She wasn’t used to it. Everything seemed to smell of dust and earth and the misshapen underground things that dug through soil.
“You weren’t with her?” I asked.
“They took her from me months ago. They took all the girls around her age. They kept them in the holding cell,” Jacob looked down the hill to small stone buildings near the middle of town. “They let me visit her there at first, but then they said she got sick and needed to be contained. I didn’t even know she’d died until after they burnt her body. I tried to fight them when they took her and was beaten so badly I almost died. I tried, Myra, I tried,” Jacob said, spreading his hands in a pleading gesture, creases forming between his eyebrows.
“If you tried you wouldn’t still be here,” I said. Row had no one to care for her in her last days. No one to hold her hand. A cold wind shook the grass. “Why are you still here?”
A flicker of hurt crossed his face.
“How do you know—” I started.
“No breeding ships docked here. I kept watch.” Jacob jerked his head toward the cliffs, from which you could see the entire southern shoreline. “One morning smoke clouded the sky from a funeral pyre and the holding cell was almost empty. Row and another girl had died overnight. They had no reason to lie to me.”
I imagined her lying on some dirty pallet in one of the buildings I’d passed. Perhaps a cinder-block one-room building or a stone cottage with too few windows. I imagined her thirsty for water, chills shuddering through her small body. Guards at the door, food delivered on a tray slid across the floor.
No, I thought. It can’t have ended that way for her.
I wanted to reach for my knife, but I kept my hands free. Wiped them on my pants and tried to breathe past the red. I had known Jacob could be ruthless in his weakness, but I never imagined what shape it could take, how much it would affect me.
“They told me I’d make it worse for her if I kept fighting them on it,” Jacob said. “Don’t you see?” Jacob raised his arms and turned, gesturing to the valley below, the cliffs, the sea beyond. “We’re all alone now. It’s not like it was before.”
I could have told him what I knew now: that you could choose to be alone like you could choose anything else. Nothing out in the world ever changed it being your choice. Hope would never come knocking on your door. You had to claw your way toward it, rip it out of the cracks of your loss where it poked out like some weed, and cling to it.
But I didn’t tell him; I could barely speak past the rage crowding my throat. “You never believed in Pearl and me. In either of us,” I said, my eyes narrowing and my body tensing like a rope pulled through a block. “So you left us to die.”
The golden grass swayed in a gust coming over the cliff and down the hill. The smell of vegetation drying out in the winter cold rose off the ground and swirled past us. Soon this hill would be covered in snow.
Jacob squeezed his eyes shut. “There wasn’t room.”
“Wasn’t room?” I asked, my voice almost inaudible.
Jacob dropped his head in his hands and then let his hands fall away. When he spoke, he spoke like he was reciting a story he had memorized a long time ago. “It was Davis’s boat—I met him a few weeks before the dam broke. He and his family were planning to flee and he said there was only room for two more people. I asked him—I asked him if I could bring just one extra person, so I could bring both you and Row, but he said no; he threatened to not let us come at all. Especially once he found out you were pregnant . . .” Jacob’s voice cracked and he looked at Pearl. She stared back at him, her face expressionless, her arms limp at her sides. A faint stirring came from her burlap sack. “And besides, I had asked you about it that day you were weeding the vegetable patch and you refused to come. I couldn’t wait for your grandfather to finish the boat; I was going mad. Losing my nerve. I knew that dam was going to break.”
Waves crashed against the rocks below, a steady thrashing, the lull between each collision filled with a low moan from the wind.
“You could have waited. You could have said something more,” I said.
“You never listened to me, Myra!”
“You’re trying to put this on me now? You planned to leave. You followed through with that plan and abandoned us, but it’s my fault?”
“It’s not your fault. It’s just . . . you always were waiting on me to become your father.”
I tensed at the mention of my father. Hair stood on the back of my neck and sweat lined my palms. The shriek of a small animal came from farther down the Valley; something was hunting it. Perhaps a hawk, talons in the prey’s belly. I shook my head at Jacob, but I knew what he said was true.
Jacob hurried on. “You were always treating me like I was weak and couldn’t be trusted. Always giving me that look you’re giving me now.”
“What look?” I asked.
“The look that says you’re expecting me to disappoint you.”
“You’ve always fulfilled that expectation.”
Jacob closed his eyes and sighed. “The guilt almost killed me after I left you,” he said. “I wanted to die. But I stayed, to take care of Row.”
“You did a great job of it,” I spat out. Self-loathing curled within me. How did I ever love him?
“I’m sorry, Myra. I’m sorry, but . . . I couldn’t have done it any differently.” He shrugged, spread his arms wide, and then dropped them at his sides. “There’s not one right thing left in this world.” Jacob’s chin trembled and he blinked back tears. A bird flew low over us and landed on the cross atop Row’s grave.
“You did what was easy. You’ve always done what’s easiest for you,” I said.
Jacob shut his eyes, and when he opened them I saw panic. He dropped his head in his hands, knuckling his eyes. He looked down the hill, over the Valley, as though searching for something. I suddenly had the odd feeling that he was waiting on someone to arrive.
The bird stamped its feet and clawed the wood cross, impatient. I glared at it. It bobbed its head at us like it was waiting to be given something, a treat for a job well done.
There was a metal clasp around its ankle. The world narrowed.
“You told them,” I whispered, looking back at Jacob. He had sent a message to the Lost Abbot guards that strangers had landed in the Valley. To alert them to come for us.
Chapter 56
My knife was in my hand before I realized I had grabbed it. I lunged at him, and he stumbled backward and turned and ran up the hillside.
I ran after him. He looked over his shoulder at me, his legs pumping furiously, his hair shaken loose behind him. The fear in his eyes mirrored my own terror, the half knowledge of what I was doing fluttering through my mind. I caught up to him after a dozen strides and leapt at him, catching the tail of his shirt, both of us tumbling to the ground, rolling over rocks and dry grass. In a fleeting image I remembered wrestling on our bed back home in Nebraska over a letter he didn’t want me to see, our limbs tangled, our faces close.
I rolled out from beneath him and struck him hard in the back with my elbow. I lodged my knee into his back, pushing all my weight into it. He choked for air and tried to claw at my leg but couldn’t reach it.
I grabbed a fistful of his hair and yanked his head back and set my knife to the side of his throat. This was also what I had wanted, I discovered with a shudder of horror. I had wanted this almost as much as I’d wanted to see Row again. To reverse the past. To not be the powerless one.
“Don’t,” Jacob rasped.
My hand tightened around the knife and my body constricted. His eyes were f
ixed on something down the hill, and I followed his gaze.
Pearl stood below us on the slope, to the side of her sister’s grave. She took a few steps toward us, her chin tilted upward, the grass rippling around her ankles, her form the only moving thing against the gray sky.
I felt like I was hurtling toward shore again on a broken ship. Airborne. Several strands of Pearl’s red hair lifted on the wind. The perfect curve of her chin. The voice in that small throat.
She didn’t deserve any of this. To see her mother kill her father. How much had she already seen that she shouldn’t have? A sob built in me and I let out a guttural wail, short and brief, a burst of darkness. Like expelling bloodlust, with only grief flooding back into the emptiness it left.
“Let me help,” Jacob whispered. He tried to lift a hand from the ground, but it shook so badly, he dropped it again. “Let me deal with them so you can run.”
“I don’t trust a word you say,” I growled. I rolled him over so I could see his face but kept my knife pointed at him.
“Myra, when she came to my house I didn’t know . . .”
“Didn’t know she was your daughter? But you’d send another child to them? Is that what you do? Summon them when people land on these shores?”
Jacob closed his eyes. “I’m proud of nothing I’ve done. When I realized who she was . . .” Jacob’s voice broke and he bit his lip. He explained how he first saw her in the distance and sent the message to the guards. “They torture me if I don’t keep watch. That’s why they let me live out here. I keep watch from the hillside and from the cliffs for any approaching ships. When she came up to my house it was like seeing a ghost. She’s haunted me for years.” Jacob shook his head. “Just let me do this one thing. So you both can get away. Since Row passed, I’ve been needing to do something. I think this whole time I was waiting for you.”
I looked into his eyes and saw that he meant it. Jacob had often hidden the truth from me, but he couldn’t lie outright to my face. He lacked the courage and certainty to be convincing and false.
Instead of gratitude I felt a rush of power. I could deny him everything, just as he had done to me. I remembered back when I was on Sedna, how I wanted to find something between revenge and absolution, but I didn’t want that now. I didn’t want to give him anything. I wanted to take every choice from him and to cut him down.
“There is no redemption for you, Jacob,” I said.
Jacob eyebrows pulled together. “I know,” he murmured. “I can’t save you. But you can save yourself. They’ll be here any minute, Myra.”
The seabirds on the cliff suddenly took to the air, their wings a frenzy, as if in answer to some inaudible call. White chests, black wings, a stripe of orange above their beaks. Beating the air, necks outstretched, eyes on something beyond.
You do the hardest thing.
Pearl was walking up the hill toward us. Small purple flowers fluttered amid the tall grass beside Jacob. I now noticed that they looked like the flowers he’d set on the tray that morning he made me breakfast in bed. I had forgotten them, the way they smelled like honeydew, the soft purple when a sunset disappears into darkness. I had forgotten also how we’d fought the night before, about what I couldn’t remember. Some disagreement about rations or Row or how to deal with migrants passing through.
He had been trying to reconcile, I thought. Trying to help us move on from whatever we’d fought about. He hadn’t been good at a lot of things, but he’d been good at that. At reaching out and trying to rebuild.
I needed to move on. Pearl and I both needed to. And cutting him down wouldn’t help with that. Pearl stopped beside me, waiting to see what I’d do. I released Jacob and leaned back on my heels but watched him warily and kept my knife trained on him.
“This doesn’t change what you’ve done,” I said.
Jacob crawled backward from me. He pointed to a cluster of bushes and saplings about twenty feet down the hillside.
“Hide there. I’ll tell them you already escaped in that direction,” he said, pointing in the opposite direction of the bushes. Voices came from his house and he glanced down at it and swore. “They’re already here. Shit. I can’t take down three of them, but I’ll try to buy you time. If they kill me, you need to run. Down into the Valley. Hide in empty houses. Now go.”
I grabbed Pearl’s hand and pulled her toward the bushes. We crawled through the saplings, tucking ourselves low to the ground, behind a bush heavy laden with berries.
Jacob started walking down the hillside toward them. All three of them had come. A bald woman led the pack and two men followed her, one scrawny with a limp, the other tall and barrel chested. We could see them between the berries and branches, but we couldn’t hear them when they began to speak.
The woman swung a small ax in circles. Irritation knitted her brow. She said something to Jacob and jerked her head up the hillside to where I’d attacked him. She’d seen us, I knew, with a drop in my stomach. She’d likely been able to see us from the house when we were exposed on the hillside.
Jacob gestured, waving two flat hands back and forth, disagreeing with something she was saying. Her face remained impassive, her mouth set in a firm line. Nausea swept over me.
The large man shifted impatiently, wiping his knife on his shirttail.
The scrawny man swiped his knife at Jacob, but Jacob jumped back, pulling a knife from his belt. Jacob flung the knife at the scrawny man and it stuck in his chest. The man stumbled backward and fell to the grass.
His two companions stared in surprise at Jacob. Even I was surprised by his change. The Jacob I’d known was the kind of man who ran from a fight. For the first time he seemed like Pearl’s father. He was standing the way Pearl sometimes did, feet apart, shoulders squared, as if he knew the world would never belong to him, but he’d stand straight regardless.
The woman swung the ax at him and he ducked and lunged at the larger man, arms around his chest, trying to wrestle him to the ground.
Pearl found my hand and squeezed it. When I looked into her eyes I saw what we both knew: that we’d watch him die here. Beyond that knowledge, her eyes were dark and unreadable, as though shutters had been pulled shut over windows. My breath went short and shallow and I tried to swallow, but my mouth felt stuffed with wool.
This isn’t going to work, I realized. Jacob was right; he couldn’t take them all down alone.
I couldn’t think straight without the movement of the sea. The smell of the earth, the branches overhead, all pushed down on me, making me feel caught and helpless.
I remembered the way Jacob had looked at me as I walked down the aisle on our wedding day. Adoration on his face, anxiety in his hands as he squeezed them together.
I remembered how sometimes I could feel like I was in his skin, beset with uncertainty and burdens. I’d watch the way he stood in the light from the window and know the whole world felt different to him than it did to me.
I remembered how he wouldn’t look at me when he loaded Row onto the boat. I still held all the same rage in me, still could not forgive him, could not even think it. But that didn’t change how we’d all die if I didn’t do something.
Jacob grappled with the larger man, trying to wrestle him down, but the man punched Jacob, who fell to the ground. He scrambled to his feet again as the woman swung her ax at his belly. I squeezed my eyes shut and when I opened them Jacob was on his knees, blood pouring from his stomach.
I felt gutted myself. I squeezed a fistful of grass and yanked it up, a burst of earth smelling fragrant and foreign. I bit my lip so hard I tasted blood. Hide in empty houses, he had said. But until when? Until they came looking for us. We were only a few dozen feet from them. They’d search these bushes first, the only shelter on this otherwise bare hillside. If we ran for the Valley now, they’d see us. I needed to end this now.
Chapter 57
“Stay here,” I told Pearl.
“No,” she said, beginning to stand.
I grabbed
her shoulder and shoved her down. “Do as I say,” I growled.
They turned in circles, searching the hillside for any sign of us. I crept between the trees and stepped out between the bushes into their view. They saw me and began to walk toward me, and I turned and walked up the hillside, away from Row’s grave below, closer to the cliff’s edge.
I stopped a few feet from the edge. The grass was so dry, some of it broke where I stepped, and it lifted away on the wind coming up off the sea. I smelled wood smoke from our camp below. The smoke made me think of what the Valley must have smelled like when the Lost Abbots first invaded, how everything goes dark and dirty when you’re being cut down. The fire, the cannons, the bodies on the ground. Your life a cloud you can’t see through.
I was shaking. I hunched my shoulders up to my ears, tucked my head forward, lowered my eyes. Made myself small.
“My daughter,” I gasped once they were close enough to hear. “She fell.” I looked over the edge of the cliff, as though peering at a body below.
The man had a cut across his forehead and he wiped his arm over it to clear the blood. The woman’s face was creased and pale. Her ax swung loosely from one hand. She set her mouth in a firm line and her eyes flitted impatiently between me and the edge of the cliff.
I clutched my chest as though in grief and swayed closer to the edge of the cliff.
“Hey,” the man said, stepping forward to grab me from the edge.
I twisted my wrist from his grasp, stepped behind him, and pushed him over the edge. I heard the woman gasp. He didn’t fall as I expected, something I could see moving from one place to another. He simply disappeared and then reappeared on the ground below.
I took a few steps away from the edge, facing the woman. The air was a weapon that could only be used once, now that she knew my intentions. I pulled my long knife from its sheath. The woman raised her ax and held it with both hands as though ready to swing it like a baseball bat.
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