A Haven in Ash

by Robert J. Crane

  Jasen twisted, eyes almost all whites—

  A scourge.

  Up close, it was worse than Jasen could have imagined. Lumpy and grey and wrinkled, it was like the worst parts of a frail old man combined them with an ill, oversized, hairless dog.

  It yawned a roar, black eyes like endless pits on Jasen and Tery—

  “Run!” Jasen instructed and muscled the kid around.

  Tery cried something Jasen didn’t catch. It was lost to Alixa’s scream from the boundary, a scream that maybe someone might hear back in the village proper. But even the closest houses were two miles away; the fastest among the villagers would never get here in time.

  It was up to Jasen alone to save the Malori boy—and himself.

  And he had scant seconds to do it.

  He shoved through rye, hand clasped as tightly as it could on the boy’s tunic. Tery’s legs to barely seemed work, and he tripped and stumbled, gasping strangled breaths. Jasen tugged him up every time, dragging him desperately through the grass—

  The scourge bounded behind.

  Ancestors, the smell of the thing. Like an old carcass, it came straight for them—

  We’ll be corpses too, Jasen thought, and then smashed the image down. He just had to focus on the boundary, had to push, one foot after the after, closing in on Alixa’s screaming face—

  The scourge loosed another of its awful noises, and Jasen twisted. The thing seemed so large, larger than its true size surely was—they weren’t much taller, wider or longer than big dogs. But it was ungainly too, and where Jasen and Tery could slip through a channel in the rye, the scourge was tangled every leap—

  Good. Let it get stuck and die in it.

  It snarled as if hearing his thoughts, and careened forward in a renewed mad burst.

  Jasen yelped—

  The rye parted. Grass. A few yards of it. Then the boundary, Alixa—

  Jasen twisted, gripping Tery in both hands. He swung him up for the boundary, shouting to Alixa, “Take him!” Then, Tery released, he planted a hand on the wall and vaulted—

  Cloying death hit the back of his throat, and he felt the scourge mere inches behind—

  Then he was over, landing hard with a thump, and the scourge did not follow.

  Alixa had collapsed under Tery’s weight. She lay sprawled under him, but thrust herself up, kicking backward from the boundary with terrified eyes. One arm clung around Tery’s waist, and he gripped her like he’d gripped Jasen in the field, as though he might never let go again. Alixa did not look as though she were likely to let go any time soon, either.

  Dirt had caked Tery’s face in the sprint, and tears cut tracks through it.

  Alixa wiped at his face. “What were you doing out there? Are you okay?”

  “I-I got lost,” Tery whined. “I couldn’t find my way.”

  She fussed, checking that he was not hurt.

  Jasen remained flat on his back, panting up at the sky. There were breaks in the clouds now, gaps where Alixa might hope to see sun should they be back on the rock by the vineyard.

  Ancestors, if they’d stayed … If Alixa had declined to come …

  Jasen shut the door to those thoughts. The only thing to focus on was the way things had actually gone. No what-ifs or pretend histories or presents or futures. They’d come out here, and he’d saved Tery from that thing.

  He eyed it, pushing up. The scourge remained on the other side of the boundary, dead black eyes looking in. Its mouth was wet and hung open as it breathed.

  It could scale the boundary easily. Yet it stayed.

  Why did it stay?

  “We should go,” Jasen said, clambering unevenly to his feet. He stuck a hand out to Alixa. “Come on.” His voice was rough.

  “Yes,” Alixa said shakily. “Yes, we should. Come, Tery.” She hoisted him up as Jasen helped. He clung, making it difficult; some seven years separated them by age, but Tery was tall for his age, and Alixa was short. His head came most of the way up her chest.

  As one they made their way back to Terreas. The walk was mostly quiet, Alixa fussing with Tery, his cries growing softer as they put distance behind them.

  Jasen was silent. He couldn’t keep from looking back over his shoulder, at the scourge standing just beyond the boundary, watching them disappear until, finally, when Terreas was closer than the wall, it slipped back into the rye and disappeared.

  2

  “This breach of tradition is an outrage!”

  Hanrey Smithson slammed his fist hard down on the thick wooden table he was seated at. Old and stubby, he had a dwarfish look to him, almost as broad as he was high. Alixa had sometimes said that if ever a scourge were to attempt to eat him, it would spit him out for being too tough and leathery.

  Cowering from the crack! delivered via the table, Jasen couldn’t help wishing a scourge were here now to at least attempt it.

  “Oh, take that stick out of your behind, Hanrey,” said Eounice Bevers. Perched across from the grumpy codger, just as old but somehow even stouter, she punctuated her words with a dramatic eye roll.

  “There’s no stick up my backside, Eounice!” Hanrey barked back.

  “There most certainly is.”

  “It has been understood since this menace invaded our lands—”

  “And it rides up farther every bloody year.”

  Hanrey raised his voice to speak over her, “—that passing beyond the boundary is forbidden. And so for this boy—” He jabbed a gnarled old finger out at Jasen, “—to cross it so brazenly—”

  “This boy has a name,” growled Jasen’s father.

  Hanrey rounded on him. “Your boy—yes, boy—failed to honor one of Terreas’s most key tenets.”

  “He crossed a wall, you barmy old goat,” snapped Eounice.

  “To save a child, if I’m not mistaken?” That was Alixa’s mother, and Jasen’s aunt, Margaut. The resemblance between mother and daughter was uncanny, even down to the clothes; the same blanket of hair, the same tight expression, identical probing eyes. Rushed to this meeting, as they all had been, her hands were still caked with dirt well past the wrists, and she gripped Alixa’s shoulders at the sidelines. Alixa, looking somewhere between tense, ashamed, and petrified, was still as a post. Jasen wondered if she’d even noticed the soil upon her clothes. Probably not; she’d have been much more fussed if she had.

  “Another breach,” Hanrey grumbled. “That boy let our village down too.”

  “He’s a child, Hanrey,” Eounice retorted. “Remember that? About seven centuries ago?”

  “Don’t you spit barbs at me, Eounice. Crossing the boundary will only invite scourge. That these children trampled over something so sacrosanct—”

  “The Rabinn boy went out to save Malori!”

  “That boy should never have been out there in the first place.”

  “But he was,” Eounice said. She leaned over the table, threatening to shunt it forward. “And this one here went out to rescue him. Successfully. He saved a life today.”

  Hanrey harrumphed.

  Eounice puffed up. “Oh, that’s the attitude then. And what would you have done? Let me tell you now, Hanrey, if you say that the Malori boy should’ve been left in that field to die, I will come over there and slam this stick of mine right across the back of your head. Knock some sense into that bony skull of yours,” she added, muttering under her breath.

  Hanrey’s cheeks flooded with red heat.

  “Listen here, you old battle axe,” he started, and he shoved up to his feet—not much of a change in height—and turned that knobbled finger toward Eounice instead.

  He opened his mouth to spit something suitably vile—Eounice was already clambering up, drawing her small frame to the most its feeble height could muster—

  “That is quite enough.”

  This came from the last person in the room, and thus far the most quiet, except for perhaps Alixa, whose few utterances had been fragmentary and strangled. Griega Marks rose from the mid
dlemost, and farthest back, table in the dimly lit room where the assembly had gathered for this emergency meeting. Younger than both Hanrey and Eounice by at least two decades, but still greying, Griega was a severe woman who observed constantly and spoke rarely. She was thin and tall, and as head of Terreas’s assembly, her position was denoted by a rather shapeless dress dyed the dull purple of beets, and a headdress in the same color, speckled with polished ore fragments. With the shutters drawn and candles lit, those tiny stones twinkled gently.

  Jasen and Alixa and Tery had been accosted quickly after their return to the village proper. They had told their story over Tery’s bawls—although he had done most of the job, shouting and crying for his mama and papa between wails of the scourge stalking him in the rye—and before Jasen knew what was happening, his father and Alixa’s mother had been summoned, and everyone had been bustled in here for this meeting, which was on the verge of turning into a full-on altercation, the way Eounice and Hanrey were going.

  Jasen and Alixa had told the story, not that it had felt like much of one. And since then, Jasen had quivered, directly in the crossfire of these two warring elders—it was he who had passed the boundary, after all—awaiting judgment.

  His head spun.

  The noxious scent of candles—why did they have to be so pungent? In fact, why did the shutters have to be pulled closed at all?—made it worse.

  And now Griega’s eyes were on him, and oh, he was going to be so sick.

  “I have heard your story,” Griega said slowly. “Both of you.” A brief flick of the eyes toward Alixa. Though Jasen didn’t look around, he could feel her flinch, even positioned on the sidelines as she was.

  And Griega said no more.

  Fortunately, Eounice was there to pick it up.

  “This boy should be commended,” she said, directing a pointed glare at Hanrey. “If this one hadn’t been there, I dread to think what would’ve happened to the Malori child.”

  “It’s a damned good thing the fool didn’t let an army of scourge inside,” Hanrey growled.

  “That fool is my son,” Adem said.

  Hanrey rounded on him instantly. “And he is a fool! Traipsing out into scourge territory. It’s a wonder he didn’t get himself—and the rest of us—killed.”

  “He saved the Malori boy!” Eounice cried. “Are you too dim-witted to wrap your meager brains around that?”

  “The Malori boy shouldn’t have been out there either. In fact, why aren’t his parents here now? They ought to be reprimanded for their short-sighted, imbecilic—”

  Eounice snorted.

  “—failure to keep an eye on their boy. And let me tell you, Eounice, if you think that I am out of line—”

  “Before you disappear up your own backside with the stick, like you’ve been threatening to the last fifty years,” Eounice cut over, “on this, and for once, I actually agree with you.”

  Hanrey hesitated.

  “Don’t look so surprised,” Eounice muttered. “The Maloris failed to adequately safeguard their child. I trust—” she looked to Griega “—that they will be brought in for a discussion once the shock of this morning’s events has settled.”

  “They will,” Griega confirmed. “As for these two …” Her gaze had not shifted from Jasen’s face—he had been terribly aware of it, and desperately avoiding it—and now that he met eyes with her again, her look seemed to grow only more piercing.

  Adem had stood just behind and to the side of Jasen, much as Margaut was stationed behind Alixa. A heavy hand lay across Jasen’s shoulder. Now that Griega seemed to be preparing her judgment, the fingers tightened. Later, Jasen would find a row of red marks still lingered there. For now, he barely felt it, so unable to move was he under the assembly matron’s stare.

  “Our rules and traditions bear remembering,” Griega began slowly. “The boundary clasping Terreas’s rim exists for a reason. The scourge do not cross it—”

  “Haven’t yet, anyway,” Hanrey muttered.

  Eounice picked up her stick and thrust it at him. She was just long enough to whack him in the side of the leg.

  He began a retort, but was silenced by an icy look from Griega.

  After ten long seconds, Griega turned back to Jasen, and picked up as though she had not been interrupted.

  “—and in return, we do not cross it either. In remaining on our side, we keep ourselves safe: the individual, and the collective.”

  “What the Matron of the Assembly means—” Hanrey began.

  Another dramatic eye roll from Eounice. “Oh, here we go.”

  “Is that such traditions are not to be trampled on. To spit in the face of this rule—to endanger all of us—is cretinous, moronic, dim-witted, short-sighted—”

  “That’s my son,” Adem repeated.

  “Consider yourself lucky you have a son left,” Hanrey snapped. “Crossing the boundary is asking to be devoured by scourge.”

  “Jasen did wrong,” Adem muttered. “I am aware. I will be reprimanding him myself, thank you very much.”

  “He needs more than scolding,” grumbled Hanrey, but he didn’t elaborate on what Jasen did need, exactly.

  Jasen bit his lip and frowned down at his feet. How had this happened? He should be feeling exuberant. He had longed for adventure, wished for it with all his heart. Today, he’d come as close as he had ever been. And all right, he had only run partway into a field and back—but Eounice was right: he had saved a life! There was no doubt of that; he’d seen the scourge burst from the rye with his own two eyes, felt its thundering behind him as he muscled Tery back to safety.

  He should be ecstatic.

  Yet here he was, in this dark room, throat choked by those overpowering candles, under attack from all sides.

  All he felt was hollow.

  And, like Alixa, pricked with guilt … and fear.

  This was not how he’d pictured today going.

  “This has gone on long enough,” Eounice pronounced before Hanrey could begin another repetition of his spiel. “They’ve heard enough: do not cross the boundary. We have more pressing matters to occupy us today. There are … accommodations to be made.”

  Jasen swallowed the hard lump that had suddenly formed in his throat. He knew this time of year well; knew exactly who those accommodations were being made for.

  Baraghosa. Just the name sent a shiver up Jasen’s spine.

  “This is a pressing matter,” Hanrey said.

  “Disciplining children who do not need disciplining is not a ‘pressing matter,’” Eounice answered snippily. “It’s a pointless exercise.”

  “It is not—”

  “Oh, shut up for once in your life, for goodness sake,” Eounice cut across. “You’ve said your piece. Four or five times, if I recall correctly. This young man has heard. Now, unless you’ve got something new to say, can we dismiss these children and address the issue of Baraghosa’s arrival?”

  Hanrey muttered something, but Griega held up a hand. “We ought to attend to Baraghosa.” To Jasen, though Griega’s eyes had not left him: “You may leave. And Miss Weltan.”

  “Um … thank you,” Jasen choked.

  Aunt Margaut relaxed. She guided Alixa toward the door, murmuring. Jasen caught, “You did well,” before his father’s grip shifted to bring him around, and he was forced to come eye to eye with him.

  His father’s gaze was something else entirely. Jasen had only met it once today, when he and Alixa had been brought in for questioning. Then Adem had seemed angry. Now he looked positively enraged. His entire face was hard, impenetrable—but then, what did that matter? There would be nothing behind it but more of that same anger. Like an onion: the same at every layer, right to its core.

  Jasen fought not to cower from him.

  “I’ll speak to you tonight,” Adem said gruffly. “Now go.”

  Jasen nodded, and turned.

  As he neared the door, open now where Alixa had been let out by Margaut, who waited on the sidelines for th
e next stage of the council’s meeting, Adem called, “And don’t stray from the village today. If I hear you’ve been anywhere near the boundary …”

  He didn’t say more, nor did he need to. Jasen had heard loud and clear.

  He exchanged a meek smile with Aunt Margaut, then exited the building.

  Twisting at the last moment, he got one last view of his father’s stony eyes on him before the door closed.

  3

  Alixa lit into him immediately.

  “You!” she cried, and she jabbed him sharply in the chest before he’d even fully turned in her direction. “You are—you are—argh!!”

  Jasen caught her hand before she prodded him again. “Hey, hey, stop it! For someone so small, you have a lot of punch.”

  Alixa’s eyes grew wide. “We just had to face up to the assembly!”

  “You think I don’t know that?” Jasen said.

  “We were just on trial, Jasen!”

  “Stop being so loud. People are starting to look.”

  They were. Would’ve been anyway, of course; the assembly hall was close to Terreas’s roughly constructed square, and as midday approached villagers had been going about their business when the whole affair had been kicked into motion. Plenty had heard Tery’s cries, plenty more had seen Jasen and Alixa marched in for their hearing—and now Alixa was doing her part to make sure that every man, woman and child who hadn’t previously known were now aware that the Rabinn and Weltan kids had been called in for questioning.

  “Perhaps leave off for a bit,” Jasen added, glancing back at a shuttered window. “Let’s get farther away before you tear me a new one, why don’t we?”

  Alixa blustered, but allowed Jasen to lead her off. She muttered ceaselessly, one hand tugging at her clothes, as though straightening them might undo the past half-hour. Jasen had seen wild cats once, bandy-legged little things that fought far more dramatically than seemed necessary. The victor had skulked away, leaving the loser parked upon its backside for close to an hour, cleaning every inch of its fur. If not for the novelty, Jasen would have grown bored long before it slunk away, disappearing—probably to be snapped up by one of the scourge.