“It was the mites or us,” Pelufer said. She was trembling with rage, while her mind sang in silence, Too late, too late. She couldn’t yell at Caille, but she could yell at Elora about her. “Why did she have to be so bleeding stubborn?”
“Don’t be cruel,” Elora snapped, whipping around. Caille eeled free, of Elora and the inevitable row, and started across the clearing.
“She didn’t have to kill them!” Pelufer cried. “She could have just made them itchy or ill or something so they’d go chew on dead trees instead!”
“That’s not something she would do.”
Elora’s words were calm. But she dropped slowly to her knees, staring at the end of her world.
Caille had come to within a threft of the collapsed shed. With an oath, Pelufer ran to pull her back.
“Leave her, Pel. She only wants to look.”
Pelufer grimaced. She had seen the kind of looking Caille did. Late in the winter of the six fevers, when droplimb had afflicted all who’d partaken of the flour tithe, the keepers made holes for the fallen arms and feet and hands and legs and buried them, but the first hole wasn’t deep enough and starving dogs dug it up during the night. They’d happened by the scene at dawn, before the keepers found it. Elora had been off protecting the pitch. Caille had watched the dogs gnaw the human limbs without emotion. Pelufer, unable to chase the dogs off, had doubled over retching, and come up to find Caille fascinated by the teeming white lives that had grown in the decaying flesh of a man’s arm. She had dragged Caille away and said nothing of it to Elora. Now, at Pelufer’s feet, with Pelufer poised to snatch her away should the pile of boards shift, Caille squatted down and looked intently at the insects scrambling around the ruined shed. It was their home, too, Pelufer thought, randomly, strangely, watching her unfathomable sister. They had only been doing what mites and grubs do.
“Broken,” Caille said, and pointed.
[58] Pelufer followed the angle of gesture and saw it right away. The round impressions of a hammer on one of the boards.
“We’ll build it up again,” Elora said, rising. “We have some nails. We’ll get more somehow. And a hammer.”
Pelufer snorted. A whole box of nails wouldn’t be enough to put this right. “Maybe whoever knocked it down will let us borrow the hammer they used.”
Elora came over and looked. When she closed her eyes, tears leaked out. “I won’t run away,” she said. “Gir Doegre is our home. Mother and Father’s home.” She whirled on Pelufer, her eyes flying open. “We’ll ask the keepers for help.”
Help. It always came down to help. Pelufer would not ask for help! Then you got beholden. Get beholden to too many people and your life wasn’t your own anymore. “No.”
“Why not? Because of your stupid pride? Someone did this to us! That’s what keepers are for, to stop people doing things like this!”
“We can’t trust anyone. Not traders, not keepers. Only us.”
Elora gritted her teeth. “Then we’ll stack the wood up and hide it and sleep on the pitch till it gets cold and then we’ll trade it as firewood for lodgings and ...” Her own attempts to find trader solutions failed, as they had failed so many before her. They had bargained away everything of value but their bodies, and those were no use to anyone either.
“We’re waysiders,” Pelufer said. “Don’t you see? We’re waysiders in our own home now.”
“We’ve already been that, Pel. We’ve been that since Padda died.”
“Stop calling him that! You sound like a baby. He was a sodden old snock and a liar too, and ‘Father’ was too much respect for him!”
The flat sting of Elora’s slap opened into a throbbing oval ache. Pelufer stood firm. Elora’s body recoiled. Hitting Pelufer had made her instantly smaller, pulled into herself, but she would not let Pelufer see that on her face. Elora always thought that faces were the only thing about people that you could gauge.
Caille cried out, just after the crack of palm on cheek. It always took her the split of a breath to feel things. She drew breath to wail.
Elora pulled Caille’s face against her stomach to muffle the sound and said, “You get my workings. Obviously you know where I keep them. You get them, and then we’ll go and hide and figure out what’s next.”
Pelufer moved. This was something she could do. Mother would have told her to wear gloves, but she had no gloves. So she shifted the boards one by one, mindful of protruding nails, until she’d cleared [59] a space over the back right corner of the shed. She didn’t have to pull up the two loose floor planks; they’d bounced askew when the rest fell. Three small bundles wrapped in oiled cloth looked up at her from under wood dust. She replaced the oatbread in one of her pouches with them, drawing the string tight and double-knotting the end around her belt. The woven belt sagged.
Each of them had a blanket. She fished them out of the wreckage and tied them in a Bundle at the end of a fallen branch from the edge of the clearing. She picked the stoutest branch she could find. She’d coveted the keepers’ blades for as long as she could remember. But she’d settle, now, for a club. Her sisters needn’t know of its double purpose.
The brush lengthened into shadow and then contracted as the sun sank. They returned the way they had come. Dusk would help them. Anyone searching would have to bring a lamp that would betray them. They would probably not see three girls squeezed between thornbushes where no bodies could fit. If Caille could stay quiet ...
But it didn’t come to that. They crossed the point of Copper and Bronze Longs and went over the maurbridge into Lowhill. The longs were quiet, stalls empty and battened. Dim lights burned along the row of public houses by the river. Nothing seemed amiss.
Smelling an inn’s cookfire, Pelufer wondered how long it would be before whoever had knocked their shed down returned for the fuel. She knew it must have been Mireille, but she was too scared to summon more than cursory anger at her. She was always angry at Mireille. Mireille had tormented Elora as a child—some old feud between their mother and her mother that Pelufer never understood. That alone made Pelufer hate her. But then she had persuaded the alderfolk that Elora’s workings were sacrilege. It was a whole group of them, but she was the worst, the loudest, with the most convincing words. Elora didn’t think Pelufer knew about that. It had happened before Father died, when Elora was trying even harder to be Mother, when she tried to trade her workings to keep them going, when everything they had or earned went for Father’s drink. Elora said to be forgiving, she said to pity Mireille. Pelufer pitied no one. Pelufer trusted no one. Pelufer relied on no one.
“Only to hide,” Elora whispered to Caille. They stood in front of a locked byre. Animals rustled within. “Only to hide, not to frighten, not to steal their food.”
Caille squinted at Pelufer to be sure Elora wasn’t speaking only for herself. Then she accepted the rusty hairpin Elora held out. She slid it into the lock. She moved it up and down and sidewise, feeling [60] around. Then she pulled it out, rolled it in her fingers, reinserted it, and turned the lock.
They went in. A dog rose up snarling, then snuffled at Caille and flopped back down as if it were their own dog, only startled out of sleep. The stock shifted, nervous, but Caille touched each one in turn and they calmed. “Donkey, ox, ox, donkey, donkey, donkey,” she said to her sisters. Letting them know what they shared the space with.
They’d eaten most of Pelufer’s crushed takings on the trail. They finished the rest now in silence, and the water in the gourd Elora carried. Faint misty light fell in bars through ventilation slats high in the back wall of the byre when the moon rose.
“They’re beautiful eyes,” Elora said suddenly.
A peace offering.
Embarrassed, Pelufer shrugged and said, “It smells like Father after a bad night in here. But you picked a good one, Elora.”
“Donkey farts,” Caille said with relish. Pelufer heard her lips pull back from her baby teeth in a grin. She felt Caille drag the dog out of sleep into a hug, hear
d its halfhearted protesting whine become a contented whuffle, felt both little sister and big, warm dog settle in for sleep between her and Elora.
“You were his favorite, Pel, you know you were,” Elora said. “You know you’re only angry at him for leaving us. He loved you so much.”
Pelufer hated it when they talked about this. But Elora was trying. She would try, too. “No, it was you.” She had to make herself say it, but it wasn’t that hard, because it was true. “You were his girl.” She paused. “You looked like Mamma.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Do too.”
“Do not. You don’t remember her face.”
“Do too!” But not the way Elora meant. She remembered a shape, a softness. Defensive, hopeless, she said, “It was kind.”
“Ah,” Elora said, softly, if Pelufer had proved her wrong. But in the last sweep of cloud-free moonlight they both saw Caille, cuddled in between them, thumb on her cheek and chubby fingers curled against her mouth, the whole assemblage buried in the dog’s ruff. Caille had had only one glimpse of Mother, when all life and kindness had already gone from her, and had never felt the gentle touch of her living hand. If something happened to them, what would Caille remember?
“It won’t,” Elora said. “We won’t let it.”
“You don’t know what I was thinking.”
[61] “Do too.”
“All right you do.” Pelufer picked in vain at splinters she hadn’t felt enter palms and finger pads, slivers of what had been foursquare shelter, and thought, It already did, and we let it.
“You can’t go into the wood,” Elora said.
“I have to now,”
“You don’t.”
“I do. We’ll need things to barter in other towns. Awayfolk won’t recognize any of it. It’ll be safe to trade.”
“You can’t go into that place.”
“Yes I can. I went through Highhill today. It wasn’t so bad.”
“But that was just the ones who died in Highhill.”
The spirit wood was where they brought all the dead, from every part of Gir Doegre. A clearing, a gentle place that had been sacred once, a place where people of light had done their work. In other towns and other times, the tellers said, the dead were left where they’d died, for the bonefolk to collect. But here they delivered them, the last act the living could do in respect for the lost. In other times, passage would have been provided for the dying; there’d be nothing in the clearing for Pelufer to fear. But those times were gone. Pelufer could barely remember them. Elora could, but she rarely spoke of them; it was like talking about food you couldn’t have or things you missed about living with Mamma and Padda, it was a torment and it wasn’t fair to Caille.
That clearing in the woods was where all the dead went, and wherever the dead had been, Pelufer felt them, and named them.
“I came back from there before all right.”
“You weren’t all right.”
“I’m older now. I’m strong.”
“You’re not.”
“Am too.”
Sigh. “All right you are. But I’m coming with you.”
“You can’t, Elora. You know you can’t. You really know you can’t. And if you came, we’d have to bring Caille.”
“No,” said Caille, but there was no telling what she meant, and she might have spoken from dreams, the word was so slurred.
The woods had been dying for a long time. The edges of them were sere and brown and drooping. The drought had done it, mostly, but Gir Doegre’s river came from the Druilor Mountains, and Druilor runoff was poison to trees the same as it was to people. Dewmongers had worked for years to provide enough water to save them, and in the end had given up. Dowsers had searched in vain for underground springs. No one would use wood from the bonefolk’s forest—at least, [62] no one had yet, though next winter would tell—and so the dying trees stood uncut. None would harvest them, and none could save them.
Elora could not go into that place.
“I can barter my workings in other towns,” Elora said. “I’d rather that, than have you go there.”
“You have only three.” Pelufer untied the heavy pouch from her belt and passed it to Elora in the dark. “And I’ve seen them. You can’t trade these.”
“I will if I have to.”
“They might get just as angry in other towns as they did here. They might take these, too, and burn them.”
She could feel Elora flinch.
“It’s the only way. You know it and I know it.” She whispered, “Is she really asleep?”
“No,” Caille murmured from deep in dreams, and “No” again, but Pelufer slipped from her side without rousing her, and though the dog woke—she heard its breathing change—it took no interest in her movements. She started for the door. In her mind she was already in the woods, already approaching the place of her nightmares, already putting one foot in front of the other to force herself there, to root in humus and bracken and haunts. She jumped when a hand gripped hers hard in the dark. Elora, catching her as she passed.
“I’m glad you’ll get to leave here,” Elora said. “I know it’s what you wanted. I’m glad you’ll get what you wanted, Pel, really. Please come back so we can leave together.”
“I know it’s my fault,” Pelufer said. She made herself grip the hand in return. “I didn’t mean for this to come of it. I didn’t work it out this way.”
“I know you didn’t.”
“I only want to go home, Elora.”
“I know. I know.” A ragged breath. “But home’s gone.”
“I know. I’ll be back. At Nolfi’s barrow, if you have to leave here.” She tried to pull her hand free, but couldn’t.
“Please, Pel.” Elora’s grip became painful. Pelufer knew that she had her eyes squeezed shut just as tight, as she sent a prayer to whatever spirits still listened to frightened children. “Please, please come back.”
Dindry Leng
Every muscle in Louarn’s body clenched as a heart-piercing cry jerked the drowsing village awake. He snatched up stick and carrysack as he rose from his cross-legged vigil, and was halfway across the trampled brown triangle that had been the village green before its itinerant occupants had struggled from their bedding.
A lone peacekeeper trotted inside the moving sphere of a lantern’s glare, her path converging on Louarn’s. No candles flickered to life in the cottages around the green, though anxious eyes gleamed through cracked shutters as the keeper’s light moved past. Louarn fell in silently behind, where the keeper would not see him and order him back. Ahead of them, down the single road that led into and out of the loop-end village, another keeper would be coming toward them through the darkness, bearing no lantern to betray his presence and ruin his night-sight in the moonless gloom.
The cry of discovery had become a sustained keening. It was difficult to locate under the howling and barking of dogs in response, the wailing of wakened infants. Not the blacksmith’s, opposite the green’s point; not the first few crafteries along the road beyond it. Louarn heard geese, but couldn’t work out what that meant. The lantern turned down an alley between two dovecotes cooing and fluttering with the drowsy surprise of those within. Down the path was a cottage; the distressed honking came from beyond it. The downmongers’, then. Louarn followed.
[64] The sour dryness of bird droppings was cut by the unmistakable reek of blood. An eerie creaking was accompanied by a slow, erratic drip, both just audible as the keening died to whimpers. Louarn slipped through the open cottage door behind the silhouettes of three peacekeepers. The whimpers came from somewhere near the floor below the leftmost one. The middle one raised her lantern high.
“Sweet, merciful spirits,” she said.
Turning slowly in the gloom, suspended from a rafter by cords around their necks, were a man, a woman, and a younger woman. Wounds to their heads were evident only as deeper shadow, the stains that had run down their faces and into their nightclothes.
Louarn swallowed his gorge.
“Where are their hands?” breathed a peacekeeper.
They’d be in the closest midden heap. But Louarn could not tell them that without calling suspicion onto himself. Others were pushing in around him now, gasping at what they saw—enfolding him in anonymity. More gathered beyond the door.
“Cut them down cut them down,” sobbed the voice that had been keening, and two folk detached from the crowd to draw a young man up from his knees, restrain him when he lunged wildly for a peacekeeper’s blade.
“Fetch a ladder,” someone said, before they saw that there was one right there—the loft ladder that had been used to string the family up. Judging from the rafter’s groan, it wouldn’t support the dead weight of three bodies much longer as it was.
“We could only meet at night, her father didn’t approve of me, I never knew why but I’d come after midnight when they were sleeping and we’d sit together ... we’d ...” The explanation fractured into another keening wail. The young man’s friends tried to drag him from the cottage and the sight of his sweetheart’s body. “No,” he said, “no, for Eiden’s sake let me say goodbye to her before they come, cut her down and let me ...”
“We’ll bring her to them,” the tallest peacekeeper said as the others struggled to lower the bodies. “You can carry her to the boneyard, son, but only if you come away now and compose yourself.”
Louarn moved aside as the peacekeeper herded the friends bearing the youth’s sagging weight out of the cottage, clearing a way through the crowd beyond with low, firm words. He would interrogate that poor grieving boy. But there was nothing to be done for it.
The youth’s story would ring true. He had not done this thing.
The other peacekeepers had the bodies down now. Someone had taken a lantern up to the loft. “Blood in this bed too,” she said. “They were all three brained in their sleep.”
[65] It was better that way. Better quick, oblivious death under the end of a cudgel, than what Louarn had pictured.
The Binder's Road (The Sequel to 'Illumination') Page 7