“He has a temper, but you mustn’t take it to heart,” Bess said, holding Molly’s hand while Benjamin reexamined her pupils, pulse, and ears.
“How long was I unconscious?”
“Thirteen minutes!” Bess said, and she explained how they had dragged her and the boy inside, the latter recovering quickly when his mother arrived in a panic, having witnessed the event from a nearby house. Ichabod had ridden off and hurried back with Benjamin, who gladly braved the storm amid the luminous display.
“And here you are, right as science,” Benjamin told her with a wink. “You must describe it to me in detail this evening after dinner.”
Molly’s hearing had improved, the ringing had decreased, and although her tingling pain had given way to aches, she cozied into her chair, thankful for the fire and the sweet warm cider. Even the ire of Tom and Mrs. Downs couldn’t mar the tavern’s atmosphere of venerable wood, kitchen fragrances, and safety. She would have gladly spent an hour in the taproom with Bess, but Abigail arrived. Molly ducked her head.
Mrs. Downs leapt up and flounced across the room. Abigail, drizzly and besmirched from the weather, showed inimitable control when Mrs. Downs blocked her at the entrance of the taproom and said, “Here at last! She nearly killed my boy and shows remorse by disrespecting me and Tom. If I cannot go to the sheriff, you have all the more to answer for, Abigail Knox. She is yours. You took her in and she is yours to mind and govern!”
“I will not respond to raving,” Abigail said.
She passed Mrs. Downs, who turned a dumbfounded scarlet, and walked toward Molly with the same cold poise.
“What has happened?” she asked Benjamin.
Mrs. Downs began to answer very shrilly from the door.
“I will thank you for your silence,” Abigail told her, “while I hear it plainly told.”
Mrs. Downs was so incensed she took the boy and left, grumbling all the way, while everyone in the tavern—Molly, Tom, Bess, and the patrons—listened patiently to Benjamin’s meticulous account. Abigail stood and watched Molly through the telling. Tom lit a pipe but then forgot to smoke it. Finding it dead when Benjamin finished the story, he put it down, poured himself a rum, and drank with a frown. He hadn’t looked at Molly since her challenge from the floor and seemed to avoid doing so now.
“The boy is well enough, it seems, to be dragged from the tavern,” Abigail said. Then, to Molly, “Are you hurt?”
“No,” Molly croaked.
Abigail inquired what had brought her to the tavern, and Molly explained about the nyx she’d tried delivering for Benjamin.
“Without informing me.”
“I thought you wouldn’t let me.”
“Take her home,” Tom said.
He spoke it so indifferently, it drained Molly’s breath and the words sank darkly to the bottom of her stomach. Abigail turned to look at Tom without reply. Her customary edge at being told what to do was blunted by the fact—as Mrs. Downs had pointed out—that Molly was hers to keep. She had to take her home.
Bess retrieved Molly’s shoes from the bedroom upstairs. Molly put them on and Benjamin helped her stand. Abigail reminded him he was likely needed elsewhere following the storm, and then she blinked once at Molly, pivoted in place, and walked toward the door, expecting her to follow.
“Bess,” Tom said. “Help Nabby in the kitchen.”
She squeezed Molly’s hand, reluctant to abandon her, but Molly turned away from her new friend’s attention, fearing sympathy and tenderness would only make her cry.
“Come see me again,” Bess said before retreating to the kitchen.
And what could Molly do but follow Abigail home when there was nowhere else to go and no one else would have her?
* * *
The Knoxes’ cleanly painted walls and uncluttered rooms looked spartan, even stark, after the warm and motley palette of the tavern. Benjamin sent word that he had bones to set, an adze-wound to dress, and a baby to deliver before returning home. Molly helped with chores without being asked and Abigail allowed it, neither lecturing nor guiding. The women supped without speaking, and once night had fallen and the major work was done, they sat making candles in the firelit kitchen.
A cauldron of water and candlefruit had simmered in the hearth throughout the afternoon. The air was swampy damp, the windowpanes wet. Abigail arranged the molds, explained the process to Molly, and sat in a corner rocking chair to mend a yellow stomacher. Molly tied the wicks and hung them in the molds, and she had begun to pour the tallow with a small tin dipper when Abigail, immobile in the rocker, spoke her mind.
“That was a brave and reckless thing you did today,” she said with a tug of her thread. “I cannot fault your good intention. Even your willfulness with Tom should be excused. You followed conscience. Your docility and work today are also to your credit. It is all that I have hoped since we opened up our home.”
Molly focused on the candle wax filling up the molds.
“Home is duty,” Abigail continued, looking around the kitchen at the cabinets and the cauldron. “A duty to our own and to anyone who enters. Root is home, too. Floria is home. The world is home, and all of us have duties. We have bonds.”
Molly tugged on one of the wicks. It moved within the wax, which was softer than it looked and almost liquid down the center. The fragrance of the candlefruit reminded her of snow and Molly shivered in the heat, remembering the cabin she had last called home.
“Threats are ever at the door,” Abigail said. “The proverbial wolves of hunger, sickness, grief … to say nothing of actual wolves, summer storms, and killing cold. We have had hostile natives and brigands on the road. Some believe the devil himself lurks within our woods.”
Abigail seemed to be unbosoming a day’s worth of thought. It might have sounded maternal in a more maternal voice. Molly watched her sew, pretending she was Frances, but the needle-bright words recalled Mrs. Wickware.
“A savage place, our little town, hard enough to break the hardiest of spirits. Fewer would endure it if not for the singular blessings God bestows on us in balance. Our crops are abundant, our animals are hale, and the seasonal bounty gives us more than we deserve. But nothing comes for free. Nothing is taken for granted.”
Molly turned away to face the cauldron at the fire, where she stirred the floating wax into spirals with the ladle. Bubbles bulged up, thick and hot, and didn’t pop.
“With threats from every side,” Abigail concluded, “we are very sorely tested when we harbor more within.”
Molly slapped bubbles. “Do you see me as a threat?”
“How can I know?” Abigail said. She laid the stomacher aside and held the needle in her fist. “You may be blameless as a lamb. But I have rarely known an innocent who shrouds herself in lies.”
Molly filled the ladle with a fresh load of wax. She poured and skimmed it up again, watching how it flowed. “Such an effort,” she replied, “to wheedle out my secrets. Have you kept me out of kindness or to stifle me with lectures?”
Abigail stood and set her empty chair rocking. “You have lived with us a month and yet remain a perfect stranger. Were you always such a creature in your own lost home? Have you ever trusted anyone?”
“My brother—”
“Oh, a brother!” Abigail shone. “And what’s become of him, now that you remember? Did you burden him as well until he finally cast you out?”
“He’s dead!” Molly cried. “He’s dead and I’m alone! You talk about trust and safety in a home, and then you hector and belittle me and label me a liar. If you want to drive me out, go ahead and say so!”
She flung the ladled wax far across the room, splattering the table and the wall pearly green. Abigail blenched and landed in her chair, as shocked as if the wax were St. Verna’s Fire.
Molly fled the kitchen into the starlit night. She hurried through the garden, swatting at her tears, and then she ran unseen down the road toward the ferry, and the river, and the unknown dark that lay beyond.
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Chapter Fifteen
The street was dry but held the morning’s rain beneath its crust, giving it the unpredictable slipperiness of clay. Most townspeople had already gone inside, and half the houses Molly passed were quiet, dark, or shuttered. But in the lack of talk and bustle, night awakened like an owl. Something filled the shadows, even here between the homes, just as animals and doubt filled shadows in a forest.
Molly felt alert: feral and nocturnal. She was keyed to smell and sound, aware of every dung heap and after-meal aroma, hearing scraps of conversations, night birds, and frogs. But no one stopped her as she ran—a threat she dreaded and desired—and when she came again to the edge of the Antler River, her heart kept thumping and her legs kept moving. She jogged along the riverside, following the berm. She was tired, so tired from her day but too awake to think of resting. There was nowhere left to rest.
“He’s dead!” she’d yelled at Abigail. The night yelled it back. It answered every question, every momentary hope. Go back to Abigail. He’s dead! Return to Grayport. He’s dead! Sail for Bruntland, back to Father. Write to Frances. No, he’s dead. Root would never let her be until she finally told the truth, and then the truth of what had happened would destroy her altogether.
Dampness hung around the riverside. She sweated a musky vapor that reminded her of flesh—the flavor of a kiss, a body on her body. Being filled. Growing round. Pushing out and falling empty. So much life, full and floral, now as inky as the river. Molly stopped and held her stomach, thinking she would vomit, but the feeling stayed within her like nausea under nausea.
She was standing by the ferry. Up the road, very near, stood the tavern in the night, warm and solid with its window lights amber on the ground. There’d be patrons in the taproom talking over beer, smoking pipes, eating chicken or a fresh-baked pie. Any stranger from the road was welcome to a bed but even there she wasn’t wanted. Tom would send her off again.
The road through the forest ran in two directions. Behind her to the west, the way led to Grayport, a place she couldn’t possibly return to alone. Opposite the river it would lead her to Liberty, an unfamiliar city but her only clear option if she meant to leave Root.
Molly crept toward the ferry, loosed the tether, and grabbed the pole. The ferry was essentially a raft on canoes. It was six feet wide and twelve feet long, big enough for horses, difficult to tip. She drove the pole underwater, jammed it into the riverbed, and walked front to back so the deck moved beneath her. Once she reached the back, she raised the pole and did it again.
Ropes from either end were fastened to a ring. The ring rode the anchor line, the bank-to-bank rope Tom had hooked the day he rescued her, and all that kept the raft from drifting in the current. The farther out she went, the more the line bowed until the ring ropes creaked, seeming taut enough to break. She felt petite, so alone on such an oversized platform, especially once she made it to the middle of the river and the pole was barely long enough to reach the lowering depth. Benjamin had told her of the falls to the south and she imagined going over in the great misty roar, being buried underwater, floating onward to the sea.
Panic swirled inside her but she forced herself to move again, remembering the courage she had summoned back in Umber when she stood before the harbor, reassured by her brother, and climbed aboard the skiff and into the Cleaver off to Floria. But where did courage lead me? Molly wondered as she floated and the ferry, and the current, and the world moved beneath her.
Soon the water flowed more gently and the anchor line rose. She smelled the great, green pines and the moisture of the forest. Once the ferry bumped the dock and Molly tied it to the post, she stared across the clearing that would lead her to the woods, where the road disappeared into a chasm in the trees.
A universe of trees in a universe of night, a million dark spires, an infinity of leaves—even eagles in the day would fail to see the limit of the forest, with the town, like a dimple, in the center. That the cities lay beyond it seemed an element of faith. All a traveler could do was trust in one direction.
Silver-blue lights hovered in the clearing. They were wisps of flame, smaller than her hands, and Molly felt compelled to see one up close. She stepped toward the nearest wisp and watched it bob away; she tried again, and then again, until it led her into the reeds and both her feet were in the water. Molly blinked her eyes. The wisp glimmered beautifully, as if to lead her on—as if to draw her into the current where the flow would drag her down.
She saw the house lights a quarter mile off beyond the river, much fainter than the phantom lights hovering around her. She regretted leaving Benjamin behind without a word. A passing whiff of candlefruit she’d spilled upon her sleeve made even Abigail a person she was hesitant to leave. She wondered what would happen when they found she’d taken the ferry. Nothing, she decided. Nobody would care.
She left the river and the wisps and crossed the clearing, walking briskly to outpace her fear of entering the woods, which rose above her in a great dark wall as she approached. The way had not been cleared so much as woven through the trees. Creeping vines snared her feet. Thorns caught her skirts. The farther in she went, the more the forest closed around her till the road veered left and she was thoroughly surrounded, feeling as far away from Root as anywhere on earth.
Long, twisted branches seemed to grapple overhead. There were nuts the size of apples, pine needles stiff enough to penetrate cloth. She passed an evergreen with sap oozing audibly out of the trunk. Stones and lumpy roots protruded from the ground, and there were holes and ferns and mounds of grass, moss, and tangling weeds. She listened tensely as she walked, hearing snaps and rustling swishes. Several times she turned, sensing movement at her back, and lost her sense of direction when the road seemed to vanish in the dark.
The smell of skunk grew alarming, strong enough to gag her. She trampled a prodigious heap of scat, maybe a bear’s. There was eye-shine, there behind a dense mass of bracken, but from what breed of creature, and from what source of light?
“Man is the dominant animal,” she told herself aloud, recalling a thing that Nicholas used to say upon his horse.
She heard an echo overhead and stumbled backward in surprise. A scruffy black bird shifted on a branch, peering down at her intensely with its unblinking eyes.
“Man is the dominant animal,” it said to her again, croaking in a crude imitation of her voice.
She hurried on, and walked and walked, and jogged until she panted. It was two days to Liberty by horse. Maybe three. Benjamin had told her there were inns along the way but it was possible she wouldn’t reach the first till after dawn. She needed money, needed food. She would need another name. But then in Liberty she might begin again and get it right. Another full city for another new life, unless her secret sprang a leak or someone found her, someone who knew.
She thought her eyes were getting tired or the woods were growing thicker. The way was growing more and more difficult to see. Her vision blurred and clarified every other minute and the darkness had texture, pooling on the ground and rising like mist. There were drifting clouds of blindness, more than ordinary dark. She entered one of these, lost her sight completely, and was forced to raise her arms to keep from crashing into trees.
She moved through several patches of the terrible miasmas till they finally disappeared and normal dark returned. The night chilled her skin and clung to her like dew. The earlier sounds of wildlife had given way to stillness, total and uncanny, sprawling out forever.
Then a shadow moved, thirty paces ahead. She thought it was another of the strange, drifting clouds until it gradually resolved. She almost yelped, almost ran.
It was a man upon a horse, motionless and tall. He wore a tricorne and cloak, and Molly couldn’t see his face. The shock of his emergence turned to terror of his silence. It was one thing for Molly not to speak in her surprise, another for a rider who had sat and watched her coming. He moved the horse a quarter turn to view her more directly while a second horse app
eared and blocked the way behind her. How could she have missed him, having walked straight by? She was caught between the riders now, with woods on either side. They moved to close her in, still without a word.
They were dressed all in black. The rider at her rear wore a tricorne, too, but it was spoiled out of shape as if he’d ridden in the rain. Both riders wore masks that hid their eyes and noses, and it might have looked absurd—too sincerely evil—if not for the savage desolation of the forest and, conversely, the politeness of the first rider’s voice.
“What are you doing here,” he asked, “alone without a horse?”
Molly tried to speak but didn’t have the air. She paused to take a breath. It filled her up but dazed her head.
“I’m traveling with others, five together out of Root. We’re making our way to Liberty. I walked ahead to gather my thoughts. Listen,” Molly said. “I hear them coming now.”
The rider at her back made a low, chuckling moan. The man in front of her, apparently the leader, cocked an ear.
“I hear nothing but a lot of sunny talk,” he said at last. “Do you know who we are?”
Molly felt the answer in her mind. Just a word, and yet it fluttered like a bat wing, shuddering her vision. Benjamin had told her, and she’d thought of it at night, in the dark before sleep, until it seemed to her that speaking it would cause them to appear.
“Maimers,” Molly said.
She smelled the horses, heard the swishing of the first rider’s cloak. Her fear did not diminish or increase but rather sharpened.
“Do you know our reputation?”
“That you’re bloody-minded thieves.”
The leader laughed but it was odd, as if the mask pinched his nose. His partner creaked his saddle and dismounted with a hop. She would have watched as he approached her, but the leader spoke again.
“Maybe you think the tales are fanciful.”
“You’re real enough that everyone in Root wants your skin. I heard that there were more of you.”
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