“Enough,” said Shilara. The word was not particularly loud, nor especially hard, but she said it with a force that stilled Jasen’s vocal cords. The silence that followed seemed even louder.
“That’s it with the questioning,” she said. “Both of you.” She wagged her finger, which was hooked through one of the loops alongside the neck of the ceramic flask. The subtle waft of whiskey floated in the air again, sweeter than it had any right to be. “My business is my business. As for what’s beyond—it does not concern you, nor should it interest you. You’ve had a lucky escape tonight—yes, lucky—and you’d do well not to question it or pursue that snake so he might take you out into the wilds.”
“But the seed—” Alixa started, voice a high squeak.
“It’ll be fine,” said Shilara gruffly. “It’s about time this village figured its situation out. Chew up these fields, for crying out loud.” She swept an arm over the expanse of grass that led down to the boundary, invisible in the night. Everything was out there. Only the mountains could be picked out, and then simply because they blotted out a jagged portion of the sky. “Plant seed in them. Adjust our staples. Find efficiencies.”
“How’s that any good this year?”
Shilara huffed through her nose. “It will be fine. And if you’re thinking of leaving—both of you; yes, I can see it in your face, girl, though you’ll deny it—”
“My name is Alixa,” she grumbled quietly.
“—then put it from your minds. You’ve been saved from a cruel death today. Do not be fools and seek to embrace it.”
“But the seed—”
“It will be fine. It has before, and it will again.”
And without another word, Shilara turned and stalked off, leaving Jasen and Alixa alone and quiet in the chill grip of a summer night.
12
“It’s not going to be okay.”
These were the words Adem spoke to Jasen three nights later, in a house that felt even more unwelcoming than ever. His voice was quiet, but the words filled Jasen with dread.
A fire burned in the hearth. It was futile, really; the cold that seemed to inhabit the room, all the rooms in this house, was not displaceable
For the past few days, Jasen and his father had barely seen each other. Except for the night when Baraghosa left, they’d barely crossed paths with each other. Intentionally? Perhaps. Jasen had wished to avoid him. When he’d returned home that night—the next morning, really, because it certainly must have been long past midnight when his weary legs brought him back to the stoop of his home—Adem had exchanged scant words with him.
“Did you find Baraghosa?” he’d asked.
“No,” said Jasen.
A jerk of a nod. Then: “Good.”
Little more was said. They bade goodnight, and momentarily Jasen thought that his father would reach out and embrace him. Maybe not the full-on kind like his mother used bestow upon him, but perhaps a one-armed clutch. Yet he hesitated at the last moment, and both retired to their rooms. Jasen didn’t sleep. In the room next door, he wondered how his father fared.
Since the night Baraghosa left, Jasen had kept busy. He did not do so in the village itself, for he quickly learned that he attracted attention there. It wasn’t the sort of attention that Shilara garnered on her rare trips through the village. She was regarded with a kind of fear, people stared at her, but kept their words low and muttered as though afraid she would hear, and drag them out to be outcast with her.
To Jasen, however, they spoke openly. The scorn drenched every curse word they directed at him. They talked as if he were the lowliest of insects, dwelling in dirt not remotely deep enough. Others, those who weren’t angry, cried. On that first day—that was how Jasen thought of it already, the first day after Baraghosa had gone, after Jasen had failed to find him, thus sentencing Terreas to starvation—he had seen two parents with young children catch sight of him and burst into tears. The first was alone, and a handful of onlookers rushed to console her, biting off snide remarks at Jasen. The second was with her husband, and he turned her away, clutching their babe close between them.
After that, Jasen had directed himself to the outskirts of the village. Although he considered stopping by Shilara’s, he opted not to; she’d never before lost her temper with him the way she had on the night of Baraghosa’s visit, and though it hadn’t been a very violent outburst, there was no denying the tone or the way she had broken off their conversation. She might not hold a grudge the way the townsfolk did, but Jasen did not wish to know for sure.
Instead he loitered at Terreas’s outer bounds, killing time as best he could, which was not very well when Alixa wasn’t around. Jasen didn’t think her absence was any more frequent than usual—Sidyera demanded long hours at weaving, after all, and stretched them yet longer with her rambling. But he felt the times without her acutely. And strange as it might be, he had come to look at those scarlet crescents dug in his wrist with a kind of affection—a reminder, he supposed, that at least someone here still wanted him.
When he was home, it wasn’t usually until late, but Adem wasn’t there. He often arrived after Jasen had climbed into bed, eyes closed, willing sleep to come. The first night, Jasen had stepped out to say hello. Adem’s words were short though, and Jasen had gone back to bed, wishing he could bring himself to say something more.
Was his father avoiding him, the way Jasen had long tried to steer clear of his home until the latest possible moment? Perhaps.
Perhaps he was simply engaged with assembly business.
Tonight, though … tonight they found each other, in a house filled with sad quiet.
Jasen picked at the material under his backside. It felt dusty, though he knew it wasn’t. Smearing his fingers together, he tried to dislodge the tacky feeling, but gave up.
It wasn’t going to be okay. That was what his father had said.
“Father …” Jasen began, but what could he follow it with?
Adem leaned forward. A low sigh came from him, as if the act of bending forced it out rather than any conscious use of his muscles.
He gripped his temples. Skin bunched into rises around his fingers.
A piece of wood popped in the fireplace.
“We’re in trouble,” Adem said into the vacuum that followed.
He sounded so resigned.
Jasen bit his lip. “Are you sure there’s not …”
Adem shook his head. “No.” He sighed again. “We’ve inventoried the seed, tried our best to see where and how we can make it stretch, but … it’s just not possible.”
“What about the fields between the village and the boundary?” Jasen asked, recycling Shilara’s words from the other night as if they were an original thought. “That’s all grassland. Can’t it be turned into …” He trailed off as Adem gently shook his head. The motion was tiny, the barest shift from side to side in his hands, but it killed the words coming from Jasen’s throat.
“Why?” he finally asked.
“Sightlines,” Adem said wearily. “If the scourge ever cross the boundary, we need to be able to see so that we might mount a defense.”
Jasen wanted to ask, What defense? If they flooded into Terreas in droves, no amount of armed guards could fight them off. One on one, maybe, with a lucky sword strike to the neck. But against an invading army of the monsters?
No chance.
Unless maybe he stood at their fore.
What had Alixa called him?
Immune. That was it.
Jasen Rabinn, human shield. That was something he could do.
It might, just maybe, make up for him failing to leave with Baraghosa.
“The farmers and the guards have talked it over at length,” said Adem softly. “We grow crops out there, we endanger ourselves yet further.” Sliding his head down farther, he rested the heels of his palms against his temples. “Besides, even if we turned every inch of available earth into farmland, it doesn’t help us this year. And Baraghosa only assi
sts for the year ahead, not beyond.”
And so died that slim chance that Terreas might scrape through, even if it did mean this year they would struggle.
Jasen once again stopped himself from fiddling with the fabric of his seat cushion. He turned fingers to his breeches instead, pulling at them where a line of stitches ran down each side. He kept finding stray ones, and he wondered if they’d been loose for some time, or if perhaps the rye’s assault as he stumbled through its clutches had been what dislodged them.
Better not fiddle. This would only damage them worse, cause them to need mending sooner. If Sidyera were here and could see him, she would lecture him for a half-hour on the importance of taking care of his clothing.
“Even Margaut is having second thoughts,” Adem said, his voice barely audible.
Jasen’s stomach dropped, leaving a hollow behind. Margaut was one of the stauncher voices opposing Baraghosa’s deal with Terreas. That she had come to reconsider, even in the short time that had followed, spoke to how dire the village’s situation was without the year’s annual trade.
He licked his bottom lip, then the top. “Maybe—” he began. His voice came out very quiet, and croaky, as though he had not used it in quite some time, and his vocal cords had half-forgotten how to produce sound.
“Maybe,” he said again, and the word was clearer now, although he spoke in the same subdued tone as his father, and it only felt loud in the smothering quiet that wished to settle between them, “I should try to follow Baraghosa. Beyond—”
“No,” Adem said.
“—the village—”
“I said no.”
“He can’t have gone far,” Jasen said. How quickly could Baraghosa and his strange lights entirely disappear from sight?
Perhaps he simply snuffed them out, Jasen thought, so as to leave undetected. He was a magician, was he not? Magicians could do that.
But if he were a magician, surely he could evaporate himself entirely, disappearing from Terreas and conjuring himself into being some place a hundred miles away. Maybe on the continent to the west, if the scourge did not roam there too. Or even if they did. Jasen supposed it did not exactly matter; the man could slip through them with ease.
Was he immune too?
“You’re not going,” said Adem. He spoke with finality. He’d lifted his head now, and his eyes were on Jasen, hard. Anger seemed to fill them, fury the like of which Jasen so rarely saw, yet which was coming out time and again this week. “I won’t have you going with that … that sorcerer.”
“But what about the seed?”
A pause. Then: “We’ll have to find a way.”
“How?” Jasen asked.
This pause was longer.
When Adem broke the silence, the hardness had trickled out of his voice. “I don’t know.” Now, there was only desperation in it, a solitary note.
He’d have heard talk of it these past few days. That would have been all the assembly had been dealing with. Meeting with the farmers, evaluating the seed stores, going over census data, making calculations … all of this would have occupied almost every waking hour for Adem and the rest of the assembly since Baraghosa’s departure.
That he did not have an answer now, even the barest ghost of one, after so long assessing their options, confirmed Shilara’s immediate view of their situation the night Baraghosa had left. It was difficult to extend their grain supply beyond their current fields without impacting food availability, creating the same problem they were ultimately hoping to mitigate. The gradual loss of their fields to the slow, syrupy stream of dark basalt from the mountain, which ate away at more of their arable land year after year, only made matters worse.
And the population’s growth … Jasen thought back to when he was young. Terreas had not grown a great deal in the ten or eleven or twelve years he could remember, at least when he thought over the streets, the places where new houses had been built. Matter of fact, the number of houses in Terreas had hardly changed. Shilara’s, after all, was right on the outside where new homes were constructed—yet it was an old place, certainly older than her, and it looked it.
From the skies, Terreas might not have increased its size at all.
Yet when he thought back to when he was a boy of four or five, he recalled fewer children of his age. Now, everywhere he turned he seemed to spy mothers and fathers with young babies. A family with a boy or girl of his age might then have three children all under five, and a growing stomach that indicated another on the way. Homes were rapidly filling, and though those outer reaches of Terreas had only been added to slowly throughout Jasen’s life, in another ten or twenty years he thought he’d see a runaway expansion, chewing up the grassy space between village and boundary.
At least, that would happen if these kids would survive to adulthood. With Baraghosa’s deal nixed, half their futures hung in the balance.
A dark cloud of guilt settled over Jasen’s shoulders.
Damn it. Why had the man left so quickly?
Adem must’ve caught the distraught look on his son’s face, for he said, “Solutions will come from those of us in charge. For you, it does not bear thinking of—finding an answer to our seed conundrum, or trying to locate Baraghosa, wherever he now treads. Understand?”
Jasen did, although he felt no better for it. He wished to do something. And he could have done something, if he’d found Baraghosa. Short-term, it would have prevented the tense conversations the assembly had been conducting, as well as dispelling the stormcloud that had settled over Terreas. Longer-term …
Children won’t die, he told himself.
One life in exchange for many.
It had seemed so terribly unfair, last year more than ever, after Pityr was taken. But now …
“Do not trouble yourself to think of it,” Adem said softly, tugging Jasen from his thoughts. The corners of his lips rose in a smile—but it was so awfully weak, and the shadows thrown by the dying fire in the hearth turned it into a grimace. “Go to bed.”
“Yes, Father,” Jasen agreed—because what else could he do?
He pushed onto his feet and walked stiffly past his father’s armchair to the doorway. Partly he hoped Adem would catch his wrist as he went by, the way Alixa did. That he would press his son tightly to his chest, and in that embrace the pain would disappear, running out of his legs the way water was drawn to the earth to pool and vanish into the dirt. Yet Adem did not, did not even say, “Goodnight,” and so Jasen left without words of his own either, and after shutting his door and stripping down to his under-things, he clambered into bed and stared at the ceiling.
How he wished he’d been able to say something, anything. That it would be okay, that everything would work out.
Empty words. That was all they would be. Emptier, from Jasen; he was a child, had none of the expertise his father held, had been privy to precisely zero of the conversations that more educated people had shared these long three days. How could anything he said be more than a polite banality?
Still, that did not stop him from wishing he could do something, anything at all.
He turned it all over for a long time, and it all came back to one thing: finding Baraghosa. Yet he was gone, could be anywhere in the world right now—and the world outside was filled with scourge.
Alixa’s description for him came back: immune. That was what he was. He could walk through them unharmed, like Baraghosa, and find him, offer himself up for the trade.
That simple fact returned: Baraghosa could be anywhere by now. Jasen could walk Luukessia’s wilds for his whole lifetime, and never, ever come close to finding him.
Nothing. There was nothing he could do—for Terreas … or for his father, whose pained face, clutched tight in his hands, Jasen saw in his mind for long hours after his ruminating had come to its end.
13
When Jasen tried to model, in his head, what the aftermath of Baraghosa’s departure would look like, he had only one thing to draw on: the death
of his mother.
Those first days had been awful, so bad he was convinced his heart had been ripped out, leaving a wound that would never heal. He’d cried with more than his body had to give, racking sobs that left his eyes red as blood, agonized his lungs and stomach as he heaved, over and over, then finally left him an exhausted heap.
Eventually, that had subsided. The pain hadn’t gone, though Jasen was ashamed to admit that in the years since it had eased, much as he wished to be broken forever out of loyalty for the woman he’d loved so dearly.
Maybe it would be the same for Terreas too; that the tension that had started so high would diminish as time went on.
He knew every time he considered it, though, that there was no way it would work that way. Maybe to begin with; after all, Baraghosa’s seed was useful for the following winter and summer, meaning there was no change to Terreas’s fortune immediately after the failed trade. So perhaps in these months, some of the village’s disquiet would ease off. However, come planting season as the summer’s harvest was taken and the fields replenished for autumn, the shortfall would be apparent—and then return to the forefront of the village’s collective mind over and over for the next year, as families found themselves without enough to share among themselves. Parents would give up meals for their children, wasting away to nothing themselves … but those children would not be well fed either, even as their guardians sacrificed their small rations, and they would die.
Anguish would strike again, and again, and again.
And anger would come hot off the back of it, fiery rage that would tear Terreas apart.
But it turned out that even Jasen’s modest hope that the Terreas’s anxiety would diminish, at least until the issues became more pressing, was misplaced. Over the next two weeks, the tension only mounted. It was like an axe hung over the village, bladed end polished and sharp, ready to drop at a moment’s notice—and over Jasen’s neck it hung closest of all, filling his stomach with a black, crawling sense of dread. The dread was always there, coiling when he woke and slithering into the night, lurking in the shadows of his dreams.
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