Once the dishes were done, we retired inside where we sat around the small hearth. Heod strummed an instrument I hadn’t seen before while Sela sang several slow, melancholy songs that did their job and made all of us very sleepy. Hatho went to bed first, giving hugs and kisses to everyone, including me. I’d never been hugged by a little boy before, and his kiss on my cheek couldn’t help but remind me of Aaron. Tomorrow, I would search this village for him. After all, the rocks were nearby, so perhaps he was as well. My heart beat faster at the thought.
Horva joined Hatho soon after. Finally, when I began to yawn from the warmth, music, and rough events of the day, Amelia led me to the children’s room, where the two younger kids were already asleep. She insisted I share her bed and put a sleeping Horva in bed with Hatho.
As we lay there, I realized I couldn’t possibly go to sleep here. I felt too exposed, too vulnerable, after years of sleeping in my secure tower. Why, Demons could come through the window, through the door, even through these fragile wooden walls. Someone had to stay awake and protect people.
“Aella?” Amelia whispered.
“I’m awake,” I assured her.
She rolled onto her side, propped her head on her hand, and said, “Do you have a boyfriend?”
“No,” I said at once. I didn’t know her nearly well enough to get into the whole Aaron situation although if I found him here, I suppose I’d have to. Or maybe she might know him? Of course she would; in villages like these, everyone knew everyone.
“I do,” she continued. “His name’s Connell. You notice anything unusual about him?”
Now that was a riddle if I ever heard one. “How could I when I haven’t met him?”
“That’s exactly what I mean. Why hasn’t he come to see me? Everyone and their chickens must know what’s happened by now.”
“Maybe his parents won’t let him.”
“I suppose. His father has never seemed to like me for some reason.” She lay back, her shoulder touching mine. I forced myself to stay very still. Physical contact was still very difficult for me. I preferred not to have any outside of training. Somehow, getting knocked around was far more comfortable than an accidental brush. “If this had happened to him, though, nothing could’ve kept me away.”
“Everyone’s different.” Why was I defending this boy I’d never met?
“He’s never actually said he loves me. He’s kissed me—he’s a great kisser—but he never told me he loved me.”
“Is that important?” I really wanted to know for when I finally found Aaron. Who declares their love first, the boy or the girl? What were the rules?
“Yes, to me. I love him. I want to marry him. He hasn’t… He doesn’t bring up the subject.”
“So why don’t you ask him?”
She rolled away. “Because I’m afraid the answer might be ‘no.’”
I knew that fear. It lurked under all the memories of Aaron: the worry that I’d read everything wrong, that he’d kissed me out of pity or contempt or some other human emotion I didn’t have the experience to identify. “Is it better to not know then?”
“Maybe.”
“Be quiet,” Hatho said sleepily from the other bed. Horva muttered something as well.
I thought about it. “Amelia…is getting married and having kids the most important thing for a girl?”
“I don’t know, Aella. I wonder about that too. It’s all my mom did. It’s all my friends want to do. But…I mean, there’s got to be more, right?”
“There is. Your village is only a tiny part of the world.”
“What will you be when you grow up?”
I thought about it. In human years, I was already “grown up,” but for a Reaper… “I’ll be a warrior.” I decided to leave out the part about being the next Teller Witch. Probably because it would never happen.
“Who will you fight?”
“Hopefully no one ever. The best warriors don’t have to fight. They stop fights by simply being the best warriors.” It was something Andraste had tried to drill into me, to explain why I had to train like the Demon wars were still happening. For the first time, I got a sense of what he meant.
“I don’t know what I’ll be if I’m not like Mom. That’s scary.”
The thought of being like her mom scared me too, especially after my last conversation with Eldrid. “What do you want to be?”
“I tell you what I’ll be,” Hatho said more loudly. “I’ll be tired, because you won’t let me sleep.”
“Children,” Sela warned from the other room. Amelia and I giggled.
The three siblings eventually fell asleep, but I of course did not. I wondered if Vikki was concerned that I hadn’t yet returned. She’d be the first to notice. Then Keefe. No, I knew both of them would assume I was off pouting somewhere. Keefe would return to our tree by the waterfall, and when he didn’t find me, he’d use his super tracking abilities to deduce I wasn’t dead then he’d go home. He might think I was still mad over the whole arrow in the back thing. That made me sad. I never wanted to hurt Keefe. Maybe he could tell by my salty chi that I wasn’t angry. Who knows how all that really works? What I did know is that I couldn’t go back that night. Not yet. Not until I’d looked around for Aaron.
I should’ve just asked Amelia about it. She might know. But I didn’t want to wake her.
I watched the moon slowly move across the window as the night progressed and indulged myself in my favorite memory.
#
The next morning, we all had breakfast together. Heod stomped off to work in his field behind the house along with Horva and Hatho. “You stay here,” he said to Amelia. “Entertain your friend. And stay out of trouble.”
I knew what he really meant: they wanted to keep Amelia and me out of sight until the storm passed. But that wasn’t going to happen. As soon as he was gone, I said to her, “Amelia, why don’t you show me around your village?”
“Oh, dearie, let’s not do that,” Sela said casually. “I need help with the baking.”
“But I’m supposed to inspect the place,” I said. “I really can’t just stay in the kitchen all day.” The thought of it actually made me cry a little inside. How do these women do it?
Amelia wiped her face with her napkin and said, “Okay, let’s go. I can’t wait to see their faces anyway.”
We emerged onto a hard-packed dirt street. Around us were other houses, but ahead rose larger buildings…well, by comparison at any rate. People were out doing domestic chores just like I’d seen the humans do at the castle. Gradually, they all turned to look at us.
“What’s this village’s name?” I asked.
“Cartwangle.”
I giggled then cut it off when I saw she was serious.
She sighed. “I know. Sounds like something a boy would call his manhood, doesn’t it?”
“You should be dead,” a woman muttered as she passed us on the street.
Without looking, Amelia said, “Yeah, well, you should be pretty.” We both giggled again.
People gave us a wide berth as we reached the center of the village. Women drew water from the large community well while a bunch of teenage boys hung out at the door of what I assumed was a tavern. I searched their faces for kind, brown eyes. I found none. We kept walking.
This was my first glimpse of the place. I’d been unconscious when Amelia brought me to her family’s home. It wasn’t that different from the little human settlements all around the castle, not even in the way they stared at us as we passed. I was used to that. Amelia, clearly, was not.
“You’d think these people had never seen girls before,” she muttered, echoing her father.
“Probably not too many that came back from the dead,” I said, inconspicuously searching the crowd for an elderly hunting dog or some other sign of him.
“Well, there’s that.”
I noticed a small altar beneath a little shelter across from the well. It was a public shrine to Lurida Lumo. The interesting thing
was, he wasn’t depicted as the spider we knew him to be. Instead, the image represented him as a glowing human form with his right hand raised in either salute, friendship, or on its way to a firm parental slap.
A crowd hovered near this shrine, mostly older people crying or muttering among themselves. It was the first time I really thought about what killing their god meant to these people. Reapers believed in a single, all-powerful god, but s/he was a pretty distant figure who started the universe and then essentially stepped back to see what would happen. It certainly wasn’t a deity we could implore on our behalf. Its wishes came to us from the Teller Witch, and since she was presumed dead, we’d had no updates from the celestial realm in quite a while. If the prophecies were true, that Teller Witches received their first prophecies at puberty. Then in my case, the Creator was late. Maybe s/he was on vacation.
The women at the shrine saw us, pointed, and whispered. Some made little hand gestures. One kissed her fingertips and touched the face of Lurida Lumo on the shrine.
“Don’t make eye contact,” Amelia seethed. “Just keep walking.”
They fell silent as we passed, and I expected them to throw rocks or vegetables at us. But they did nothing.
“Well,” Amelia said as we stopped, “this is Cartwangle. Every last bit of it.”
“It’s nice,” I said.
“No, it’s not. There’s not a person here who wouldn’t like to see me as spider food right now.” She looked down and scuffed her toe in the dirt. “Will you come with me to see Connell?”
What if Connell was actually Aaron? I could have misremembered his name. What if they were the same boy? I looked at Amelia, lovely, with her human-colored brunette tresses and blue eyes. Of course. A boy like Aaron would want a girl like Amelia, not me. “Wouldn’t you rather do it alone?”
“I’d rather not do it at all. But I’d like you there.”
I didn’t really want to be along for this particular scene, but I could think of no graceful way to bow out without hurting her feelings. Was this what guarding a human king would be like? Following them around while they did things I had no desire to witness? Or worse.
Before I could answer, Amelia grabbed my arm. “Uh-oh.”
A man strode toward us. And I mean strode, the same way Andre or Adonis did when they were in high dudgeon. He was tall, broad-shouldered, and had a narrow beard that outlined his chin. People naturally got out of his path. His long, black hair bounced importantly. And he was different from the other villagers in one very significant way: He was the only one I saw who wore a sword.
Amelia looked around as if for a way out, but we were trapped in the middle of the courtyard. With nowhere to run, I turned and faced him, my expression carefully neutral.
He stopped in front of us. He kept his gaze on me as he said, “Amelia, who’s your friend?” His eyes were so dark they were almost black. I was fascinated.
“Aella,” I said, keeping my gaze steady.
“I’m Damato.” He didn’t offer to shake hands.
“I’ve heard your name.”
“I understand you’re a Reaper.”
“That’s right.” This guy got right to the point. I liked that.
“Can you prove that?”
“Not without a Demon to slay.”
“You could show me your spines.”
“You could buy me dinner before you ask me to undress.” I could have shown him my Reaper clan tattoo, which would identify me as the daughter of the leader of the Reapers, but if he didn’t think to ask for that, he wouldn’t understand it anyway.
He smiled. He was younger than I first thought, handsome in a leathery sort of way, and had sense enough to leave room to draw his weapon between us. But this wasn’t a make-friends conversation. He was feeling me out as a threat. He said, “I don’t undress children, and you look like a child to me.”
“I can’t help that.”
“I don’t like children who misbehave. They grow into adults who cause real trouble.”
“The list of things I don’t like gets longer every day. You learn to live with it.” I stared right at him. I think he took my point.
I was entirely ready, hands loose and feet spread to stay on balance. If he went for his sword, I’d rip out his throat before he cleared his scabbard. If he went for me, he’d draw back bloody stumps. Or at least, that’s what I told myself. He was a human, so I easily outmatched him in brute strength. But he also had the unmistakable demeanor of someone who was handy in a fight, wouldn’t panic, and perhaps knew about Reapers and wasn’t afraid of them. He’d have to make the first move.
“I’ll be watching you, little girl. You won’t wipe your ass while you’re here without me knowing it. And if you cause any more trouble, you’ll find I’m a handful myself. In the meantime, I’ve sent my messenger to Raggenborg, and I’ll find out if you’re telling me the truth. And if they didn’t send a Reaper…”
With his unfinished threat hanging in the air, he turned and walked away. Well, he strode. I wondered if he ever sauntered. Or skipped. I decided I didn’t like him. Very crude.
“Holy shit,” Amelia said when he was out of sight. “My heart’s thundering.”
“Who was that?”
“Damato was a bandit that we hired to be…I guess our protector. From the other bandits. He takes his job very seriously.”
“That’s what we’re supposed to do. The Reapers, I mean. Protect you.”
“You’re the first Reaper we’ve seen since the war, Aella. Your people either forgot about us or never came looking to see who was out here. Well…until now.”
She had me there. I’d have to press Adonis on this when I got back. Why weren’t we out here looking for these isolated communities and offering them protection? If nothing else, it would give all those idle Reapers something to do. It would give me something to do. I looked after Damato. “Is he any good?”
“We’ve only been raided once since we hired him. He stuck them on wooden spikes outside of town as a warning.”
“He impaled them?” I said with a gasp. “Alive?”
“They say. I was a little girl at the time.”
Reapers hold human life in high regard. It has always baffled us that humans don’t share that value. There were fewer more painful, drawn-out ways to die than having your own weight drive a wooden shaft through your body. If Damato organized that, he wasn’t kidding. I still wasn’t worried about taking him in a fair fight, but as Andre pointed out over and over, real fights were seldom fair.
And if he sent word to Raggenborg, my little vacation would soon be over. Adonis would send Keefe if I was lucky—Andraste if I wasn’t—to fetch me back. I’d be in big trouble when I returned too. But I couldn’t abandon Amelia yet. I needed to make sure her people wouldn’t also impale her for having the nerve not to die.
But first, I had to meet her boyfriend.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
We reached a house on the other side of town a little bigger than Amelia’s but constructed along similar lines. All the houses were built from the same materials and had the same sort of look to them.
She knocked firmly on the door. A moment later, a woman opened it. She was about Sela’s age, blonde, with the same air of tired domesticity. She said flatly, “Hello, Amelia.”
“Malmo,” Amelia said. “This is my friend, Aella.”
“Ma’am,” I said with a slight curtsey. Twice in one day. And I thought I’d never use those etiquette lessons.
“Is Connell around? I’d like to speak to him.”
Malmo looked at us both. I was usually pretty good at reading human expressions, but this woman kept everything off her face. At last, she said, “I’m not sure that’s a good idea, Amelia.”
Amelia’s voice shook. “I really need to see him, Malmo.”
“I understand that, but I have to think about my family. What you and your friend did…”
“Is it better to feed people to a big spider than to kill it and let pe
ople live?” I said. This provincialism was starting to get on my nerves.
“I don’t think you understand,” the woman said, sad and patient. “What if you’re wrong? What if Lurida Lumo takes his vengeance on us for your actions?”
“Bugs don’t seek vengeance.”
She shook her head wearily. “I’m sorry, Amelia. I can’t let you see him. It was doomed from the start anyway, honey. He’s…well…he’s wrong for you.”
Amelia’s lip trembled and her eyes filled with tears. “Please, Malmo. I love him.”
I was embarrassed for her sake and turned away. I spotted Damato leaning casually against a post in apparent conversation with a blacksmith preparing to shoe a horse. He glanced up at me, nodded, then looked away. He knew I knew he was watching.
“Amelia, you’ve never understood Connell. He’s…well…he doesn’t like…” She gave up and shook her head. “He’s out back with his flowers, Amelia. I’m sure he’ll be happy to see you.”
We went around the side of the house. Two little kids, much like Horva and Hatho, hung out a window and stared at us. I guess there wasn’t much else to do here except breed. I smiled at them, which made them duck back inside.
The back of this house was an overgrown garden of flower beds and bushes, and digging in it was a very handsome teenage boy. My heart jumped when I thought for a moment this might be Aaron. By the spleen-venting gods of Dowdry, was I the third side of a triangle with him and my new friend? But no, he was too young. Aaron would be older, more mature, and I had a hard time picturing him working in a garden. He’d been a hunter after all.
And when this boy looked up, I immediately knew Amelia was overlooking the most obvious thing in the world.
“Amelia!” he cried as he jumped to his feet. He wiped dirt on his hands, came over to us, and kissed her on both cheeks. Not the way a boyfriend would. Connell was one of those boys whose affection for girls was entirely sisterly.
And Amelia didn’t know.
She tried to kiss him back on the lips, but he turned away at the last second, a move he’d clearly used many times before. He was certainly a good-looking boy with big eyes, high cheekbones, and an unruly mop of hair that just begged a girl’s fingers to attempt to straighten it. I wondered if even he understood why he didn’t like girls.
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