“Where are your guards?” The Man asked.
Willian squeezed me against his chest. “I sent them to the east wing.”
“Willian!” The Man scowled in his disapproval. His exotic makeup made his expressions all the more intense. He frightened me. “They should be with you. You have guards for a reason.”
“I will not be responsible for their deaths.”
“Willian—” The Man’s frustrated response was cut short when my protector dumped me into his arms. I bawled with pain as my skin touched his and felt that familiar burn.
“Careful!” The Man said. He wrapped my blanket tighter to separate my skin from his. With awkward chubby arms, I wrestled the blanket away from my face.
“Take him,” Willian said.
“Take him? But Willian—”
“We don’t have time for this, Roth-Scheen. Go quickly and take him with you.”
“It doesn’t have to be this way.” The Man — Roth-Scheen — trembled as he held me. “I can save you from this.”
“I will not leave her,” Willian said. “You wanted a wish from me, Roth-Scheen.”
The two men stared at each other over my head. I sensed that something important was happening. When Willian spoke again, his voice was tired. “Well, here is my wish: Protect my son. Roth-Scheen, please. Protect him.”
Roth-Scheen clenched his hands so tightly that his nails bored into my skin through the blanket. His eyes flashed with a golden light that scared me. I cried.
“I could have saved you,” The Man said.
Willian bent over me and kissed my forehead. I felt the wetness of tears in his beard. Were they mine or his?
“Protect my son, Roth-Scheen,” Willian said, “and he will save us all.”
Wood cracked and chaos burst into the big stone room. Men shouted, waving torches and weapons. Roth-Scheen covered my face with the blanket and ran — ran on both of his legs — away from the chaos and into the fire.
“You’re hurting him!” As if from a great distance, I heard my sister Lily’s voice. I struggled to cling to the present, but my mind took off without me again.
This time, my life went forward. It sped by so quickly that I couldn’t pick out any details. I could only identify feelings: excitement, dread, anger, sadness, something that might have been love, triumph, confusion, and fear. So much fear. My life was soaked in fear.
And then sudden clarity.
I blinked tears from my eyes as I tried to catch my bearings. I was running. Why? Where? My nostrils filled with the smell of smoke and death. I slipped and tumbled down a hill, landing hard on my bottom. My face was wet with tears. Why was I crying? I moved to wipe the tears away and froze at the sight of my hand.
My hand was covered in blood.
I gasped and almost screamed, but the noise caught in my throat when I heard another sound. A low, inhuman moan bubbled from the throat of a creature who stood uncomfortably close to me. I saw its shape moving through the fog not far from where I sat.
But no, this wasn’t fog. This was mist. Deadmen mist.
I was staring right at a deadman.
I stopped breathing altogether as my eyes adjusted to the haze. The deadman was not alone. There were several of them, as far as I could see. And they were all staring directly at me.
I gasped when the seer pulled her hands off my face and the image of the deadmen faded from my mind. She stumbled away from me.
“What did you see?” Pa asked.
The seer’s voice trembled. “Deadmen. So many dead.”
My family fell silent.
The seer closed her eyes. She began to sway. The markings on her face caught the firelight and reflected the gold as if they were glowing.
She spoke.
“This child is not what he seems. He belongs to death.” She smacked her lips, searching for the right words. “He is the last and the first, the enemy of Alaudrin. The dead will rise and fall at his command, for he is their prince. He is the Prince of Death.”
Everyone was still for a long moment. Then they all talked at once. Pa declared that the seer was out of her mind. Mum argued. My sisters shouted.
“Oh, poor Don. Look at you. You’re shaking!” Over the sound of Dove’s cooing voice and my own ragged panting, I heard the seer speak again.
“I have seen his future, and it is terrible,” she said. Her voice rose above my family’s in a dreadful declaration. “Death surrounds him. He must not be allowed to live!”
What?
Trembling, the old seer shoved past my parents and dived toward me. She jumped onto my bed, jostling one of my tender legs, and touched me again with those hot, awful hands. But this time, she wasn’t stroking my head or kneading my eyebrows.
She went straight for my throat.
I squirmed hysterically as her fingers dug into my flesh. I couldn’t even move to push her off of me. Would The Man save me from this? Was this my punishment for trying to prove that he existed?
Pa grabbed the seer by the hair and yanked her off of me. She held on tight enough that I was lifted off the bed as Pa pulled her away. When she released me, I fell back onto my sheets with a cry of pain. Lights flashed behind my eyelids.
“Kill him!” I heard the seer shriek. “Kill him while you have the chance!”
“GET OUT!” Pa shouted.
“If you let him live, the blood of his victims will be on your hands!”
That was the last I heard before I sank back into the welcoming dark of unconsciousness.
We never spoke about the seer’s visit. It was easier to pretend it never happened than to try to make sense of her cryptic prophecy. I once tried to talk to my sister Lily about it, but she broke down into tears and yelled at me. So I kept my mouth shut and let the unanswered questions torture my dreams.
Besides, I had bigger problems to worry about: I had to learn to walk again after the accident.
“It’s not an accident if you did it on purpose,” my sister Lily liked to remind me.
Learning to walk again was a special sort of pain, but it was all worth it because in the midst of my suffering, I met Meleya Holstead.
Mel was two winters older than me. She had lived most of her life on the mainland, where all the adventure happened (where I, of course, had never been). My pa found her one night hiding in our barn. When my parents learned that she was the child of safeguards and recently orphaned, they chose to let her stay. I met her the morning she appeared in my doorway wearing one of my sister’s dresses.
“Get up,” she said.
“Who are you?”
“Name’s Mel.” She scratched her chin where the lace at the collar of the dress irritated her. “Short for Meleya. But you call me Meleya and I’ll break your other arm, understand?”
I loved her instantly.
“I’m supposed to take care of you,” she said, “so get up.”
“I can’t get up.”
“Why not? You weak?”
“No.” I said. “Both of my legs are broken.”
“Well, whose fault is that?”
My parents had told her why I was bedridden. I felt betrayed.
Mel had wavy brown hair that looked red in the sunshine and sharp features covered in so many freckles that it looked like her face couldn’t decide which color it wanted to be. Her green eyes were intense and captivating.
And she was the meanest girl I had ever known.
Every day, she materialized beside my bed, forced me to my feet, and jabbed me in the side as I limped in circles around the cottage. She shuffled along beside me, shoving furniture out of my way and smacking me on the head when I stumbled. When I tried to lean on her, pretending to be overcome with weakness, she thrust her sharp elbows into my ribs and made me stand up straight. She had no pity for me. She pursed her lips in disgust when I whined, rolled her eyes when I complained, and stepped on my feet when I resisted her help.
In the evenings, while my family cooked and cleaned, Mel sat beside my be
d with the mending and told me stories. She was full of tales of adventure on the mainland, the daring life of a safeguard, and terrifying encounters with the deadmen they hunted.
“On the mainland,” she said, “the deadmen are everywhere. The cities build their roads up off the ground to avoid the mist because it’s always there. No one travels without a safeguard or two for protection. Outside the town walls, no one can hear you scream.”
I shuddered.
“Sometimes, you can smell the deadmen before you see them. They stink like rotten meat. And they walk funny, like this.” She dumped her mending on my chest and stood, showing me a stiff, shuffling walk that made the hairs on my neck stand on end. I remembered that walk from the experience that felt more like a nightmare than a memory.
“They can’t speak,” she continued. “They just sort of growl and groan. And when they’re really excited, they scream.” She plopped down on the chair beside me. “But the worst part of all is the mist.” Her eyes opened wide. “They belch it up, and it stings your skin and your eyes. And you feel like all the air has gone out of you. You struggle to breathe, and you kick and you fight, but your lungs still hurt. Next thing you know, those deadly fingers are wound around your throat. And if they get a hold of you, they suck the life right out of you. Then you become one of them.”
“Is that what happened to your parents?” I asked.
“Shut up,” she said.
I was pretty useless to my family while I recovered. With two broken legs and a broken arm, I couldn’t help in the garden or go out into the fields to harvest. I couldn’t even clean. When my boredom began to overwhelm me, Mel taught me things she had learned from her parents. She taught me to sew so I could help with the mending. And when the mending was done, she plucked charcoal from the hearth and taught me to write my letters on a smooth chunk of bark.
Letters were hard for me. I hated the way one letter could make multiple sounds or appear in a word without making a sound at all. It felt foolish to me. So Mel gave up on letters and taught me numbers, and we challenged each other to problems.
“Mel,” I called from my bed as she helped my mother stuff a pillow with chicken down, “what is four fifteen times cut into thirds?”
“Don’t ask me dumb questions,” she said. But later, she wandered by my bed and whispered, “Twenty,” and winked at me.
I was more certain than ever that I would marry her someday.
As she neared the marriageable age and I straggled two winters behind, I started to panic. One night, I awoke with a cry from a nightmare of her marrying my friend Jagger just to spite me. I bellowed her name into the darkness.
Mel was a light sleeper. “What do you need, you big wuss?”
“Don’t marry Jagger. Please.”
She laughed. “Why would I marry Jagger?”
“I want you to marry me.”
She made a noise halfway between a snort and cough. “What?”
“Will you marry me, Mel?”
I couldn’t see clearly in the dark, but I was pretty sure she smiled.
“You’re too young to ask for a wife, you deadbrain.”
“But will you?”
She was quiet for an excruciating minute. I thought I would die if she didn’t speak soon.
“If you can kill a deadman,” she said at last, “then I’ll marry you.”
“But I can barely walk!” I cried.
“Then I guess you had better start working harder,” she said. She kissed me on the cheek and went back to her bed.
From that point forward, I focused on healing with the intensity of a raging bull. I was always on my feet, reaching, bending, walking. I moved until Mum forced me to lie back down; she was terrified for my safety. Then I lay in bed and complained until Mel was allowed to sit beside me.
“You crazy old pond-larker,” Mel grumbled, wiping sweat from my face with a cool cloth. “You’ll kill yourself.”
“Nah, I can’t die,” I said with easy confidence. Mel gave me a questioning glance. I laughed nervously.
I hadn’t told her about Roth-Scheen. She would think I was a fanciful fool and decide not to marry me. If my parents heard me mention him again, they might bring that seer back to torture me.
“I mean,” I said, “that I can’t die until you marry me.” I gave her my biggest grin. She swatted me with the wet cloth, but I swear I saw her blush.
My hard work eventually paid off. Before long, I was able to go outside to work in the garden. As moon phases passed and my strength increased, I was even able to help with the harvest, though I had to go everywhere with Mel or one of my siblings. Mum was afraid that if I left her sight for too long, I would be possessed by demons and try to kill myself again. But I had learned my lesson. As much as I would have loved to pin Roth-Scheen down and force some answers out of him, I was not willing to risk my health for it. I have Mel to thank for that, I suppose. She gave me something to live for.
“Mel?” I asked one day as we worked in the barn spinning fresh rope. She stood across the way from me, leaning her weight on the clamp that secured the tips of the fibers. I stood at the other end, cranking the wheel that spun the fibers together. “Where did the deadmen come from?”
I was sizing up my opponent. One day, I was going to kill a deadman, and Mel was going to marry me.
Mel frowned. She always frowned when she thought. I imagined there was a line of possibilities marching through her mind like so many little ants, and she had to scare them away with her frowns to get to the best one.
“No one really knows,” she said at last. “I suppose they weren’t always around. My parents always said they were a curse from the Delaren family.”
“Who?” I asked, grunting as I turned the crank again.
“The Delarens were the family who ruled Aldrin before the Saffords.”
All of this went over my head. No one in Hazeldown really cared all that much who the king was. The political intrigue was too far away to affect our everyday lives. Hazeldown belonged to Lord Brenden. If he answered to one king or another, it didn’t make any difference to us.
“People say the deadmen just showed up the night the Delarens were killed,” Mel said, shifting her weight on the clamp to her other arm. “That’s why no one will go anywhere near the Old Capital. They say if you set foot in the palace, you die instantly and become a deadman — Spend the rest of forever seeking revenge on the Saffords.”
I snorted. “That’s ridiculous.”
“Yeah,” Mel mused.
I cleared my throat. Finally, a chance for the big question. As casually as possible, I asked, “How exactly do you kill a deadman?” This question had been haunting me ever since my midnight proposal.
How do you kill the dead?
Mel blinked rapidly. She did that when she was trying not to remember something. “You kill them the same way you make sure they were dead in the first place” she said. “You burn them.”
Hold it.” I strained under the weight of the bale of hay my brothers and I were lifting into the loft. “Careful, Marcus…”
Marcus stood several paces away, holding onto the end of a rope that was strung up through the rafters and tied around the bale I held. Our brother, Ken, waited in the loft with a pair of shears, ready to receive the bales when Marcus pulled them up.
Marcus tugged, and the bale lifted out of my arms. I guided it upward until my fingertips could no longer reach it. Then I crossed to Marcus, who was ten winters younger than me, and helped him yank it up the rest of the way. Behind us, I heard my mother’s voice at the door.
“Don?”
She was accompanied by several men dressed in matching leather armor and shiny metal breastplates. They were soldiers, a rare sight in Hazeldown. Soldiers worked directly for the king, and he never had any business in the outlands. Usually they left the outlying islands alone to be governed by their ruling lords. So what were these soldiers doing here — in my parents’ barn?
“They’re her
e for you,” Mum said.
“What?” I cast my mind back to anything I may have done wrong lately. The craziest, stupidest thing I could think of was my leap off the barn roof, but winters had passed since that exercise in faith had gone so wrong. That certainly wasn’t a big enough deal that King Reynold would send his own soldiers after me.
“Donald Baines?” The soldiers parted to let a man with a red plume on his helmet through. He wore a cape in rich purple. I had never seen purple fabric before.
“Yes, that’s me.”
The richly dressed man removed his helmet and held it under one arm as he and two of his soldiers approached me.
“I am General Canron,” he said. “But I’m sure you know that already.”
“It’s an honor to meet you, sem,” I said with an awkward half-bow. Was I supposed to bow to a general? Or was that just for royalty?
“Yes, it must be a true delight to finally look me in the face, you filthy coward.”
Coward? That was harsh.
Canron scowled at my look of confusion.
“Don’t act so naïve, Izayik.” The general swaggered up to me while his two companions circled behind me. I felt like a trapped rabbit about to be torn to pieces by a pack of hungry wolves. “You’ve been caught. No amount of acting will save you now.”
“With all respect, sem, I think you have the wrong man,” I said. “My name is—”
One of the soldiers drew his sword from its sheath and clubbed me across the shoulders with it. Mel gasped, and Mum screamed. I fell forward onto my knees, choking on the words that had been halfway out of my mouth.
“What in the name of the seraphim—?” Pa elbowed his way through the soldiers crowding the doorway. Someone must have fetched him from the fields when they saw the soldiers approaching our cottage.
I remained as still as possible, trying not to provoke another outburst. What had I done to deserve this? I must have done something. Was this about the time I sneaked into Lord Brenden’s stables to see his horses? I knew I should have stayed away from his animals, but they were so beautiful. Sure, I deserved to be punished for trespassing, but this seemed like overkill.
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