Today was the worst morning yet.
Jasen and Alixa ambled through the village’s outskirts together. She’d taken to sticking by his side, close enough that she might reach out and grab him by the wrist if she needed. A month ago, Jasen would have told her to step away, to give him some space. Now he was glad for her presence. She clung to him for the same reason he was happy for her to cling: to feel less alone.
Out here, the villagers were fewer. But around they were, meandering to and fro, heading to fields for their work, or taking care of chores in and around their homes.
Near every one spied Jasen, and each affixed him with a deathly glare.
This morning, Milton Haynes, a man who was not much past a boy, was out on the stoop of his house. He sucked on an empty pipe and his brow was furrowed as he looked down at a small, leatherbound pocketbook he held in his left hand. His right raked through dark hair, making it stick up in odd tufts.
When he caught sight of Jasen and Alixa, he rose with a start.
“Poxy little blighter,” he sneered. “Traitorous little rat.”
He looked like he was readying for a fight; his body was tensed, ready to spring. One wrong word, and Jasen was sure he would leap to the path and sock him across the face. Yet he only bobbed there, on his toes, his beady eyes pinned on Jasen and his cousin.
Alixa held her breath. On Jasen’s left, she was blocked from Milton. Even so, he felt her hand hover very close to his wrist.
Jasen glanced at Milton and then trained his eyes to the ground.
Keep walking, he told himself. One step after another till you’re past.
“You’re a bleedin’ waste of skin,” Milton called from behind him. “And a coward!”
The door slammed, hard enough to probably rattle not just the hinges but the entire house, and Haynes was gone.
Alixa loosed a low breath.
“It’s okay,” said Jasen. “It’s okay.”
She did not reply.
This had been the way the last fortnight had gone: people shouted abuse at him, and Jasen kept his mouth shut. Why bother to point out that he’d gone after Baraghosa himself, attempting to override the assembly? There would only be a new complaint then: that he had a poor eye, hadn’t been quick enough, hadn’t tried hard enough. Hell, he’d been accused of purposefully sabotaging the village by offering to find Baraghosa, and then fleeing to a dark alley and whiling away the time until the sorcerer had left.
“I ruddy well saw you, you backstabbing little cretin, and I’ll let everyone I see know it for every day till I die!” one particularly animated old woman had screeched into his face. Some eight inches shorter than he was, she’d more than made up for her diminutive stature with a barbed tongue. That she’d followed him, screeching, for almost fifteen minutes had made her even harder to ignore.
There had been a change since those first few days, though. The shouted insults were diminishing. At first, Jasen hadn’t really noticed; the slight decline day by day was difficult to appreciate when he was still being chastised at every turn. But at some point it became obvious: most of the people who saw him did not shout, not anymore.
Instead they clustered together, whispering, keeping a close eye on him until he passed. They turned their backs to him to obscure their words, looking back over their shoulders with steely gazes, as if daring Jasen to approach them.
This, Jasen thought, was worse.
When someone was hurling curses at you, you knew exactly how they felt.
Now, they might be talking about anything.
“Something is going to happen,” he’d said to Alixa on the mossy rock by her family’s vineyard two nights ago. The sky had been streaked with orange and purple, the mountains forming jagged grey shapes in front of it. Little clouds had puffed in the air that night, but the nearest mountain coughed a steady plume of dark smog into the approaching night.
“Don’t say that,” Alixa had muttered back. “You don’t know it will.”
“It will,” Jasen said softly. “I’m certain of it.”
“Like what?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. Just … something.”
Did the adults know better? He wondered late at night, when he felt most powerless—and most afraid to sleep. Could they forecast what might be about to occur?
He longed to ask his father. Assembly hours were long though, growing ever longer since Baraghosa’s visit, and Adem’s struggle was wrought upon his face every time Jasen saw him. Better to wonder to himself than add more weight to his father’s shoulders. They sagged as it was.
Alixa looked back toward Milton’s house. She shuddered, and inched closer to Jasen’s hip. “I never liked him,” she said.
“That’s not very proper of you to say,” Jasen replied.
“No.” She sniffed. “But it’s true. Always sitting there on his step with that book. He thinks he’s intellectual.” Rolling her eyes, she added, “Pityr always said—” And then she cut herself off, falling into silence.
Jasen didn’t need her to finish. He’d spent just as much time with Pityr as Alixa had; more, really, just by virtue of being a year older than she was. Pityr’s departure with Baraghosa had served to imprint many of his words in Jasen’s mind, where they’d surely stay forever.
Milton Haynes, Pityr had said, thought himself better than the rest of the village. He was too intelligent for work in the fields, too smart for menial tasks such as patrolling the boundary, grinding grain, or mending clothes. He was simply better.
And sitting on the step with that book in hand was a grand show of it, a reminder.
Pityr hadn’t mocked him, nor had Jasen. Haynes was just another member of his village, another “character,” as some of the elders liked to put it.
Today, Jasen despised him for it. And though he would never admit it to himself, he added Milton’s name to a mental list he’d been keeping—those citizens of Terreas he would be happy to let starve. Not that he would, if he had a say—though maybe Baraghosa’s magic …
No. He swept the thought away before it was allowed to bloom. Spite was not a positive quality, and these people were hurt and upset and afraid for their lives. They oughtn’t be punished for that.
Still, the smallest kernel of it remained in the back of Jasen’s mind.
Abel and Maude Stanhoe rounded the bend toward them. Jasen didn’t know them very well; he knew their names from his father’s mentions, but little more. They were older, and kept to themselves, and were notable only in that they had a peculiar smell about them every time they passed, sort of musty.
They were looking behind themselves, walking quickly.
“Well, I never,” Maude mumbled quietly. “Woman shouldn’t—”
She turned and caught sight of Jasen and Alixa.
The harried expression upon her face intensified. Tugging at Abel’s arm, she brought his attention forward so he could see too—and then, with a huff, they pressed close together and gave a very wide berth around Jasen and Alixa as they passed, trotting as quickly as their little, aging bodies could manage. Abel muttered something in Maude’s ear on the way round—he had to lean up to do so, because he was at least two inches shorter—and she nodded. Never once did her eyes veer from Jasen’s face.
Alixa cast a look over her shoulder. It was short, and her head snapped back around almost immediately.
“They’re still looking,” she whispered.
“I don’t expect they can hear you.”
Jasen twisted himself to look after the old couple.
“Jasen,” Alixa hissed. “Don’t!” Then: “Are they …?”
“Still looking, yes.”
Alixa groaned.
“What’s got into them?” Jasen wondered. “Who—?”
And then, swinging around to peer ahead again, he locked eyes with the person who had so offended Abel and Maude. Shilara Gressom was making her way around Terreas’s edge, on the way back from the village center, it looked like: althoug
h she carried her usual flask of grain alcohol, she also carried with her a ceramic milk jug. Very large, it had been stoppered with a mismatched lid, and twine was wrapped from top to bottom of the jug to keep it in place. Shilara carried it loosely by the handle; it swung back and forth on two fingers like a pendulum.
“Morning,” Jasen said as they met in the path. He tried to sound cheery. He was fairly certain he didn’t manage.
“Hello,” Shilara said, somewhat flatly.
“Getting milk?”
“Aye,” she answered. “Where are you off to?”
Jasen shrugged. “We’re just walking. Right, Alixa?”
Alixa nodded. She had a wary look about her, half an eye on Shilara. She’d tucked herself just behind Jasen, falling back only a couple of inches, but enough to put him between her and Shilara.
“Wouldn’t recommend going into the village proper,” Shilara said. “They’re not a happy bunch.”
“Oh,” said Jasen.
“I’ve not seen it like this,” Shilara went on, shaking her head, “not for a long time. Tension is the worst it’s been since … well, days before and after the war, I reckon, when the scourge came. Way this is going, someone is going to get hurt. Maybe a lot of someones.”
Jasen’s stomach dropped.
“Oh,” he said again weakly. What else was there to say?
Alixa took hold of his wrist, gave it a tug.
He turned to her.
“Maybe,” she said—and though she bowed her head closer to Jasen, almost whispering, she had her eyes fixed firmly upon Shilara now— “maybe we should go somewhere to get seed.” She took a deep, steadying breath. “Maybe that’s what we should do.”
Jasen hesitated. He glanced at Shilara. If she was aware of Alixa’s gaze on her—and Jasen thought she was; it was hard to miss Alixa’s dark eyes boring holes like they were—Shilara did not show it, for she had turned her head halfway toward the direction she had come.
Alixa continued: “If only there was someone—” She stopped for a breath, another great one that she drew into her chest, filling it before blowing it out in a single gust. When she spoke again, the quaver that had threatened was gone. “If only we knew someone who knew how to avoid the scourge … and also knew, say—” another pause to swallow; her throat shifted visibly, “—where we might find seed.”
Now Shilara did turn her way.
Her expression was icy. “And who do you suppose would go and retrieve it?”
“I would,” Alixa said. She caught Jasen off-guard; his head snapped around.
Apparently Alixa had taken herself by surprise too: her words came out a squeak. She clapped her hands to her mouth. Her eyebrows rose, and her eyes flew wide. She looked like she had out by the boundary.
“You would,” Shilara repeated, half a question, entirely doubtful.
“Yes,” Alixa said fiercely.
“Alixa,” Jasen said. “You can’t be serious.”
She stayed utterly still. “I am.”
“But …”
“But what?” she asked.
“It’s … it’s the boundary, Alixa,” Jasen said. “You’re terrified to go near it. And you should be,” he added quickly, fully aware that he sounded exactly like Shilara and his father and mother, and Hanrey and Eounice and Griega, and every other person who had ever dispensed this piece of advice to him throughout his life, and which he had longed to ignore.
“Yes?” Alixa asked, her face blank now, as though listening to something that didn’t involve life and death.
“Remember what happened when you climbed over to help me?” said Jasen. “Think about that. That’s what it’s all like out there.”
Shilara remarked, “So you do listen.”
“It’s dangerous,” Jasen finished to Alixa.
“Maybe it is,” she said. “But she knows how to navigate out there, and to stave the beasts off.” She thrust a finger at Shilara, over Jasen’s shoulder.
“She has a name,” Shilara snapped.
But Alixa’s fury had been roused, and there was no stopping her from pouring out everything she’d held in these past two weeks.
“Someone has to do something,” she said, voice high-pitched yet hard, like the sound of a hammer. “If no one does, Terreas is in danger. The people here will wither and die, and on the way they will tear themselves apart. That affects all of us. It affects our families. It affects our future.”
Jasen began, “Alixa …”
“Someone needs to go out there and find Baraghosa—or better yet, find seed another way, so we never have to deal with him again,” she said, talking right over him. A tinge of pink had kissed each of her cheeks, darkening with every frantic sentence she spilled. “Whoever needs to go, they need to know what to do out there—where to go.” She looked pointedly at Shilara. “They need to know how to survive the scourge.” A look now to Jasen.
“I don’t know how—”
“You have some kind of immunity to them,” she said quickly.
Shilara scoffed.
“And even if he didn’t, you know how to fight them,” Alixa said. “You’ve done it before, you can do it again.”And someone,” she said, and here her throat warbled, “someone has to be brave.”
“Well, that rules you out, chickenheart,” Shilara said.
Jasen clenched his teeth.
But Alixa wasn’t cut down. Instead, she took another steadying breath. Schooling her features into a look of sheer determination, she stood ramrod straight. She met Shilara’s gaze head on. “Have you ever noticed that this boundary is drawn around us like a fence around a herd of goats?”
Shilara pulled back slightly. “Some of us don’t take kindly to being compared to goats.”
“I am going,” Alixa said. “No matter how afraid I am, or any of us are, it is time someone in this village stands up, is brave, and does the right thing—and chooses not to be penned in here to die in fear like a goat. Otherwise we’re all ruined. So I am going,” she repeated. “I have decided.”
Shilara’s eyebrow drifted up. She did not say a word; just affixed Alixa with an assessing eye—or maybe this was simply the stare of a woman waiting for an opponent to crumble, to break under the force of her gaze alone, and to cede that Shilara was right.
Yet Alixa did not move.
Jasen gave her a troubled look. “Alixa …”
He wanted to ask how long she’d been thinking on this. When had she come to these decisions? What had that process looked like? When had she decided to bury her need to be proper and speak to this outcast? Why had she decided that it must be her to go, Alixa Weltan, fifteen years old, petite and prim, who could not bear to have a single strand of hair out of place? Why her, when it could be anyone else?
All of these questions bubbled up in the face of Jasen’s doubt. But he had time to ask not one; for that moment, back from the way they’d come, they heard a scream—
Jasen jerked around to Shilara in alarm. “What’s—”
Then more came, all from that same direction.
Shilara broke into a run, pushing past Jasen and Alixa. She thrust her flask into a pocket as she went, stowing it by her leg, and tugging out—was that a knife she had, blade concealed in a compartment sewed along her hip and the handle obscured beneath her smock?
“What do we do?” Alixa asked.
“Follow,” said Jasen.
He broke into a run—
And then realized:
“Fire.”
In the confusion, he hadn’t seen it, hadn’t picked it out against the dark color of the distant mountain. Now, though, he saw a billow of smoke in the distance, growing thicker by the second.
Something was burning.
A second realization followed immediately on the heels of the first one:
His house was that way.
Jasen’s run turned into a sprint. He touched a hand to the pendant at his neck to make sure it was still there—yes, accounted for—and then pumped his le
gs as fast as they’d go.
Alixa was pounding behind, not keeping pace—but right now that didn’t matter; all that mattered was getting around this bend, following that cloud of smoke—
Closer, closer—
His heart raced.
He could hear it now, over the screams, hear flames as they ate at wood, at the thatch of a roof—
Don’t be my roof, he sent up the prayer to his ancestors, to his mother. Do not be my roof …
“Get back!” someone cried—
“—might be inside—”
“I said to get back!”
Shilara hit the junction, forking right—in the direction of Jasen’s house, where a building burned, because it certainly had to be a building, going by the size of the black cloud rising heavenward—
She stopped and turned, panicked eyes finding Jasen as he hurtled in her wake—
No, no, no …!
She reached out to grab him, but her hands were full, and Jasen dodged, going wide but feeling her fingers graze his skin anyway—
And there it was.
The bottom fell out of his stomach. His vocal cords constricted, cutting off the scream that he wanted to cleave the air with. His lungs tightened, and a black wave of adrenaline surged through him as flames tore through the only home he had ever known.
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“Fire!” he yelled.
Damn it, why were people just standing there? Why weren’t they doing anything?
As Jasen shouted it, the small gathering of onlookers jumped into motion. They sprinted away—to where? He wanted to scream at them to come back, to help him, because the sight of the fire had robbed him of his ability to move, to do anything—what could he do? How did he stop this?
Then he realized where they were headed: the well.
Water, Jasen thought. I need water!
Another thought hit him at the same moment, ignited by the crash of a beam in the roof crashing down beyond a smoky window—
What if my father is in there?
He made for the door—
Shilara grabbed him by the shoulder, whirled him round.
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