She needed to get home quickly before the old woman could harm Henry.
Avery scooted through the crowd, the noise at a fever pitch as bodies pressed against hers to move closer to the inner entrance. She was the salmon swimming upstream.
When she tripped over a man’s gnarled cane, she looked up to find a guard staring at her.
Just keep walking, she told herself, determined not to look again so he could not see her fear or her age. But out of the corner of her eye she could tell he was walking in lockstep with her.
Be calm. Act normal.
Not easy when she was trembling beneath her cape, the pillowcase pressed to her side. She would use the pillowcase as a weapon if need be.
I am wearing the queen’s jewels, she thought. I cannot get caught.
By the time Avery reached the gate that led out of the castle and into the bright sunlight, she was gasping, her stomach knotted, eyes burning.
A hand clutched her shoulder, and her knees went weak.
She would not be stopped now, no matter if the guard was three times her size. Avery spun with a clenched fist, only to face an old woman, skinny and hunched.
“Do you have any food for the poor?” she asked, eyes glazed and wearing a peculiar, far-off expression.
Avery reached under the cloak into her pillowcase and pressed all of her food into the woman’s hands. She would be home in time for supper and wouldn’t need the castle’s scraps. As an afterthought, she pulled a strand of beads from her neck and placed it around the woman’s, which would provide her with a month of food and drink if she sold it for the right price.
The old woman grasped Avery’s wrist, and for a frightful moment Avery thought she had discovered the star that would give her away.
“Bless you,” the woman said, squeezing her wrist with crooked, swollen fingers. Avery hurried away, savoring her first taste of freedom without so much as a glance back at the castle.
All afternoon and into the frigid evening, Avery navigated steep declines and climbed hills that took her breath away. The air was bitter cold, and the stark sky was blanketed with winter-white stars. She wondered a hundred times how the old woman had managed to push the cart so far for so long when Avery could barely put one slippered foot in front of the other.
She would have quit but for the prospect of home and rescuing Henry.
“The road home is always longest,” her mother had said on countless journeys from the shop or market.
Hours of travel once again felt like days.
By the time she reached the Salt Sea, Avery’s breath came in white puffs, and she felt as if she could sleep for days. Her bones burned from the cold and her feet ached. She regretted not having taken the time to look for her boots back in the bunk room. The cloak weighed a thousand pounds on her shoulders.
She almost regretted leaving the bunk room at all.
She called out to a young man who was about to push off on a bamboo raft. He stopped with a wary scowl.
“May I ride with you to the other side?” she asked.
Skepticism filled his eyes, and Avery wondered if she were wearing her age like a badge. Orphans, according to Kate, were worth handsome bounties from the king. Avery instinctively tucked behind her the wrist marked with the star.
She flashed the thick gold ring on her left hand.
“I’ll give you my wedding band. It’s worth a fortune.”
His eyes widened, and he reached to help her aboard.
As she sat, tucking the cape closer around her, he thrust out his hand as if expecting the ring. But Avery was tired of being swindled, of not knowing whom to trust. She narrowed her eyes at him.
“When we reach shore,” she said. “You have my word.”
And as the raft glided into the sea, Avery finally looked back at the castle for the first time. It looked again to her like a pyramid of gold perched on a pile of puffy clouds. Had she seen the castle from her home in the village, she never would have known what it was.
Its beauty was haunting, but she was glad to leave it and all its painful secrets behind.
When the raft finally reached the other side of the Salt Sea, Avery slipped the ring off her finger, as promised, and handed it to the man, who watched indifferently as she gathered her sack and continued into the night.
“Be careful,” Avery thought she heard the young man whisper as she stepped ashore.
It was too late for that, and home was just a few more miles away.
She couldn’t decide what she would tell her father first, but it was time to choose.
Chapter 30
Attacked
As the hour grew late, Avery wished she had kept at least a morsel of her food—even an apple. She came to a small village where the heavenly fragrance of wood smoke and roasting meat made her stomach ache with emptiness.
Don’t stop.
She pushed through her weakness, forcing herself through deep woods until she slowed at the sight of a horse tied to a tree. Soon she found a man sitting on the back of his wagon eating a loaf of bread. The wagon was overloaded with every imaginable household good.
Maybe he knows Father.
“Hello, dear!” he called, his smile broadening in the lamplight that made his face ghostly white. “Come closer so I can get a better look at you!” He saluted her with a bottle, and Avery could only imagine what he was drinking, certain she could already smell his breath from where she stood.
Maybe her attempt to look older had been more successful than she knew. Still, she didn’t like the way he eyed her.
Keep walking.
“Wait,” the peddler said, his voice kinder. “What do you need? I can help.”
Avery hesitated. She couldn’t deny she was weak from hunger, and despite his slurring speech and the promise of his bitter breath, his smile showed he was perhaps friendly.
She turned slowly. “I could use a bite.”
The man laughed. “I ain’t no cook, little lady, but I can sell you a host o’ pots.” He gestured grandly toward his merchandise.
Avery shook her head. “No, thank you.”
“How about a new dress?”
Avery turned and began walking faster.
She heard him clamber off the wagon and she tried to run, but she was sore and weighed down by the cloak.
He grabbed her and spun her around, bottle still in hand.
“Don’t walk away when I’m talking to you!” he spat, his smile gone. “No woman is allowed to disrespect me, especially one so young.”
The words struck fear to Avery’s heart. If he caught sight of the star on her wrist, he would surely take advantage of the bounty.
“I don’t want any pots,” Avery said evenly, “and I have no money. What good is a penniless girl to a peddler?”
His laugh sent chills up her spine. “You’re wearin’ a dress like that and you have no money? You think I’m a fool?”
He threw back a ragged drink, tossed his bottle aside, and yanked her cape from her neck. The strings bit into her skin before ripping away, and she was sure she was bleeding, though she wouldn’t dare lift her wrist to check.
With his eyes trained on hers, he dug into the pockets and, finding nothing, circled Avery, still clinging to the cloak.
“Now you’ve made me angry,” he whispered.
“Sell the cloak. You’ll make good money on it.”
He grabbed her pillowcase and rummaged through it, making Avery glad for the first time that she did not have her mother’s necklace.
He shoved her toward his wagon and demanded she climb in. Her legs felt like jelly, but she obeyed. What choice did she have?
He followed, made her sit down, and sat across from her. “What’s your name?” he asked.
When she didn’t respond, he grabbed her loosened braid and jerked her head back. Bringing his face to within inches of hers and sending a spray of spittle across her face, he said, “Answer me when I ask you a question, understand?”
Avery
nodded her throbbing head, and he let go.
“I know how to make you talk,” he said. “Don’t move.”
He turned and began rummaging through a wooden box, and Avery could only imagine what he was after. A knife? A rope? Worse?
She wasn’t about to sit there and find out. It was now or never. She leapt over the side of the wagon, landing hard on her hands and knees.
As she scrambled to her feet, she saw the man’s discarded bottle gleaming in the moonlight and she grabbed it.
“You’re a dead girl!” he raged as he staggered to the side of the wagon, the shining blade of a jeweled dagger proof of his promise. He slung one leg over and then the other. Just as his boot reached the ground and he began to pivot, Avery leaned forward and smashed the bottle against the back of his head with all of her might, and he slumped against the wagon and onto the ground in a heap.
For a second Avery stood paralyzed.
She waited for him to stand and come after her, but the man didn’t make a sound.
She couldn’t risk his coming to, so she gathered up her cape and pillowcase and turned to leave. Then she had another idea. Quickly and carefully she moved to stand over the man’s body. His eyes were wide and staring.
Her breath came fast and shallow.
She reached down and slid the jeweled dagger out of his hand.
This might be useful.
Dropping the dagger in her pillowcase, she untied the man’s horse—now dancing on the spot—pulled herself onto its back, dug her heels into its flanks, and never looked back.
Cold, tired, hungry, none of that mattered anymore. Reuniting with her father—and hopefully Henry—and spending the night in her own bed drove her on.
No punishment would be worse than this night.
She stopped twice for directions—once in a tiny cluster of peasants’ huts and once at a camp of tents—before she recognized her surroundings and knew she was finally close to home.
Nothing had ever felt so good.
She slowed the horse to a trot as she emerged from the woods and reached the edge of the field that separated her from her house—small and plain and glowing against the dark sky.
Stopping, Avery threw her legs over the side and slid to the ground. She tied the horse to a tree and started across the field alone, eager to enjoy every step. She wanted to move faster than her aching body allowed her to go.
Wind whipped through the tall grass and blew her hair around her face. She glanced up at the smoke puffing from the chimney until she stood only a few feet from her front door.
A light drew her to her bedroom window, so she went and peered inside, having dreamed of this moment since she had been snatched from the woods.
Her room was nearly the same as she had left it. It was messier than she remembered, but her brown everyday dress still lay crumpled on the floor, her copy of Jane Eyre splayed on the tiny desk beside her bed.
But then she saw the most curious thing.
Someone lay sleeping in her bed. And it wasn’t her father or brother.
Chapter 31
Flight
All Avery wanted was to fall into her father’s arms and to know that Henry was safe, then sleep till noon in the warmth of her own bed.
And now this.
A dirty man is drooling on my pillow!
She tiptoed back to the front of the cottage, frantic to stay in the shadows, and peered in the window. Six strange men sat at the kitchen table in her family’s chairs and ate from her mother’s best dishes.
Her father would’ve called them “dodgy,” these men with dirty hands and faces, beards long and unkempt. They ate fast and chewed with their mouths open—food spilling onto their clothes—and one, as soon as he was finished, flung his bowl against the wall. It shattered, prompting the others to burst into raucous belly laughs.
Instinctively, she reached into her pillowcase and retrieved the dagger.
With her back against the house and the dagger at her side, she inched along the home’s exterior slowly. Step by nerve-racking step, she prayed that what she found behind the house would confirm her greatest hope and not verify her worst fear.
But when she reached the back of the house, her heart sank and her breath caught in her throat.
The garden was badly overgrown.
Where Avery expected to see her father’s straw-covered rows, instead, withered stalks stood bent against the winter weather. He never would have allowed his garden to fall to ruin if he had been home. His carrier pigeons were nowhere to be found.
The realization made her skin go cold and then hot and then cold again.
I risked my life and maybe Henry’s life, too, to come home to squatters!
My father is not here and has not been here for a long time!
With a sickening feeling, Avery realized she was no closer to finding her family and had nowhere to go. It wasn’t as if she could return to the castle. She had traded everything for this moment, and she had chosen the wrong hand.
And then a thought struck her that she could no longer ignore.
Maybe I am an orphan.
She thought again of the old woman’s words in the woods—
“Didn’t want to mess with digging another grave.”
Maybe the grave had been for her father or Henry. Or both.
Something compelled her to go inside. It made no sense, but she could not ignore the feeling.
She knew even before she lifted the handle on the back door that what she was doing was dangerous and stupid, but she had to do it. She needed to see her home one more time, to breathe its familiar scent and linger in its familiar places. She might never be back again.
Seeing her home might help her understand if her father had ever returned after she and Henry were snatched from the woods.
She could hear the men in the kitchen as she quietly closed the back door behind her.
Everything became dark, but she knew the way.
Carefully, she inched along the hall and up the steps. Avoiding her bedroom because of Drooling Man, she sneaked into her father’s room where he had built a beautiful bed as a wedding gift for her mother. This was the place where she had curled beside her mother while listening to the best stories about the castle.
The bed was too large and too fancy for their simple, tiny home, but it was stunning—the nicest thing they owned. The blankets were rumpled, and Avery suspected one of the dodgy men downstairs was helping himself to a place to sleep each night.
Nothing in the room gave Avery any reason to believe her father had come home after she and Henry had been taken from the woods.
She saw her father’s writing desk, and an idea came to her.
I’ll leave a message, and if he returns before I do, he’ll know where to go.
She took a step toward the desk as the sound of footsteps approached in the hall.
She squatted beside the bed.
Slow, deliberate steps sounded in the room, followed by a thud on the mattress.
Crouching, she waited for snoring to come, and then she inched around the mattress and out the bedroom door.
More voices from the kitchen. More laughter.
No time to leave a note.
Breathless and scared, she went back down the stairs and out the back door.
She wanted to cry, but she knew if she started she would never stop. And the star on her wrist left a bounty on her head. She needed shelter, food, and sleep. She would need strength to decide what to do next. And besides the men who had invaded her childhood home, what other evil might lurk in the woods?
Is the old woman looking for me now?
The last place she wanted to wind up was in the Forbidden City.
Avery tightened her grip on the dagger and studied the ground, trying to come up with any option other than heading back across the field. But without help, there was no way she could challenge the half-dozen men in the kitchen and the one in her bedroom.
Where will I go? she prayed. Pl
ease help me.
She made her way back to the front of the house to leave the way she had come when the front door swung open and she whirled in surprise. One of the men was coming out, and the others were rising from the kitchen table behind him.
“A spy!” the man shouted. “Grab her!”
With the pillowcase still tucked under her arm and the dagger in her hand, Avery hiked up the hem of her cape and lit out across the field.
“After her!”
“She’s fast! Get the rifle!”
Avery zigzagged in the darkness, trying to forget her pain and fatigue, hoping she could put enough distance between herself and the men to give her time to untie the horse and leap aboard before they overtook her.
Their voices seemed to fade as she ran, but she couldn’t resist peeking back to make sure. Big mistake. Avery didn’t know what tripped her, but suddenly she was flat on her face, and the sound of the men’s heavy boots grew louder.
She scrambled up and was off again, but her speed and terror spooked the horse, and he skittered and stutter-stepped, circling away from her as she untied him. She cooed, “Whoa, boy, easy, easy,” trying to leap astride him.
If only I knew his name!
The men were nearly upon her, but they were gasping and wheezing.
“Come ’ere, you little rapscallion! We’ll ’ave you for dessert!”
But now she was aboard the horse and snapped the reins, shouting, “Let’s go!” and she bolted away. At the explosive report of a rifle shot, the steed lurched and nearly threw her, but Avery held tightly as the stallion darted through the thick trees.
She didn’t slow him until she was certain the men had given up on the chase. Avery patted the horse and murmured in his ear, “I’m going to call you Refuge. You saved my life, old boy.”
She led Refuge through familiar territory until she came to the castle made of fruitwood. Avery tied him and was about to enter the elaborate tree house when she heard short, anxious breaths like her own while traveling over the hills.
Avery had no more energy to fight.
If someone discovered her now, she would accept her fate, even welcome it.
The Glass Castle Page 12