If Corine died on the streets, surely her curse would die with her. Mary Louise wished the girl a quick and vulgar end, alone and friendless in a strange city.
Her fear was fading—and so were the scratch marks, according to Emma—when her faithful maid delivered a secret note from Alec Bradley. Mary Louise opened the envelope eagerly. He did not suggest the boathouse this time—not after what had happened there. Instead, he named a secluded corner of the garden. She found him there that evening, standing beside an ornamental pond and throwing berries in for the goldfish. Mary Louise seated herself on the bench beside the pond with her back to the water and smiled flirtatiously over her shoulder.
He tossed the remaining berries into the water, walked around the bench, and knelt on one knee. “My darling Sunshine, I’m so sorry for your loss. I’ve been worried for you. I heard—” He paused, his brow furrowed.
Mary Louise hung on to her smile, refusing to let it waver. He’d heard that she was hysterical, that she threw mirrors from the wall and tried to harm herself in front of the funeral guests. “I was distraught, Alec. But I’m better now.”
“Are you?” His eyes searched her face. “I can’t imagine what it was like to lose her that way.” He dropped his gaze. “I’ll say no more about it—except that Miss Worth was the kindest, most genuinely sweet soul I’ve ever known, present company excluded. I had occasion to speak to her several times while you were ill.”
“She told me so,” Mary Louise lied, her face stiffening with the strain of keeping her expression placid.
“I found her easy to talk to, perhaps because of our similar circumstances.”
“Similar circumstances?”
“Financial ruin,” he said, lifting his eyes to hers again. “Her father. My father. She understood what it meant to suddenly have no prospects. Dearest Mary Louise, didn’t you wonder why, after all these months, I’ve never declared my intentions to you? Why I ask you to meet me secretly—and improperly—rather than face your father and court you the way you deserve to be courted?”
Every single day. She touched his face. “Alec, I didn’t know.”
“I’m sure your father knew,” Alec said with a hint of bitterness in his voice. “He would never have permitted me … ” He shook his head and broke off, then smiled. “But the tide has turned. My family affairs are resolved, and I’m free to speak to your father—to ask to court you properly. Because I intend to marry you.”
“Alec,” she breathed.
“This is our last secret meeting,” he said with a grin, rising to his feet. “But I had to see you first. I wanted to explain. And I wanted to see with my own eyes that you were well, in spite of the grief you must feel.”
“With you,” she said, beaming back at him, “I shall always be well.”
He held up a finger, as if remembering something. “I brought you a gift. Not the sort of gift I’ll give you once I speak to your father, but something from the heart.” He reached inside his frock coat and removed a folded sheet of paper. Mary Louise smiled. He’d brought her a drawing. That was her Alec.
“I hope this will lighten your heart,” he said, handing it to her. His cheeks flushed with pride, and he stepped away from the bench to pluck more berries from the bushes. “It’s an image that keeps coming to my mind.”
Mary Louise unfolded the sketch. Two girls sat on a blanket by the shore of a lake. One had golden hair, brilliant eyes, and the smile of a carefree heart.
The other had black hair, dripping wet, and two bloody wounds where her eyes used to be.
One of them screamed.
“Mary Louise!” Alec shouted, whirling around. “What are you doing?”
Mary Louise lost sight of him. The world grew bright red—and then very dark.
Nick knelt down by the side of the Road and scooped up a handful of dirt. He rolled it around and let it pour through his fingers. As it fell, the warm wind caught it and scattered it through the air, forming a faint cloud of dust that undulated and blew away like his hopes. Only once before in his life had the soil been so dry, and he remembered the hardships that followed all too well. He had prayed in vain that the dryness of the earth, which was listed as one of the Signs, would not fall upon them. Yet his prayers went unheeded as the cloud of dust mocked him and his hopes of being spared the burden that would befall him and the rest of the Silverfoot tribe.
He stood up and wiped his hands off on his blue robes, for which he would probably catch holy hell from the caretakers. Monk’s robes were hard to come by nowadays, and every effort had to be made to make the ones they had last. The manufacture of new robes was usually saved for extreme necessity, such as when an unusually large number of boys were selected to become Monks, and the preparations for that undertaking often involved great effort by various members of the tribe. He could still vividly remember one time, back in his childhood at the old WaKeeney settlement, being tasked along with other children with searching out the increasingly rare pockets of cornflowers and hyacinth that had grown up along the Great Road to make dye. It seemed to him to be a bit of a waste, but the Monk-Kind only wore blue. It was ordained by the Book, and thus it would always be.
There were no hyacinths, or any other flowers for that matter, along the Great Road that summer. There hadn’t been enough rain that year to allow them to flourish. The food crops the year before had yielded much less than expected, the first of the many Signs that he and the rest of the Monk-Kind now had to look for, and it was generally accepted that this year’s entire harvest might be lost.
He gazed longingly at the tribe’s village, a half-hour’s walk to the north of the Great Road, on the outskirts of the ruins of the ancient city of Russell. As with the other ancient towns and cities along the Road, there was no clue as to exactly why it had been abandoned or what fate befell the people who had built it. When he was very tiny, the Crow used to tell campfire stories of a Great Storm, not unlike the one referred to in the Book, which picked up whole mountains and toppled them over like a child knocking over a tower of stones. Nick didn’t know if the Crow had been lying or exaggerating, but he knew for certain that there were no mountains in the land of Kansas any longer.
He turned his attention to the East. The Line-men had gone off that morning on a hunt. One group was sent to the South, where Nick knew they would find nothing. Another group was sent along the Road to the East, towards the nearby remains of another town, which the ancients had called Dorrance. From the village to Dorrance was a half-day’s journey, even for the Line-men, and it was unreasonable to expect them back any time before nightfall. Still, he prayed that they would return very soon with meat. The crop failure was the first of the three signs. The dry ground was the second. The empty-handed return of the Line-men would be the last sign and would mean the end of the village.
The rest of the tribe wasn’t overly worried; over the generations they had learned how to survive these ordeals. When the land had been used up to the point where it couldn’t sustain life any longer, all you had to do was pack up, load up, and head off back down the Road. Nick glanced at one of the posts that stood at regular intervals along the road, topped by a strange shape: two arcs that met at the bottom in a sharp point, topped with a scallop. Some of the signs still bore the faint outline of markings made generations before, resembling the numbers “7” and “0.” These markers had always let the people know they were travelling along the correct Road. After they had travelled for a long enough time, and the signs favoring their settling again were observed, the Crow would find a good place for them to stop and set up another village. Then the cycle of life would start over again for the Tribe.
The problem this time was that the Crow would not be able to lead them down the road. He was dying. And if he died, Nick would take his place.
Nick prayed harder than ever that the Line-men would not return empty handed.
***
“That’s all the lessons I’ve planned for today, boys.” Nick saw almost as mu
ch relief in his students’ faces as he felt himself at their early dismissal. He didn’t hate teaching—it was the part of a Monk’s job that he actually enjoyed the most—but like everyone else in the village he had bigger things on his mind that afternoon than lectures and interrogatories. “Before we go, are there any questions?”
“Yes, sir,” came a mousy voice from the back of the class. A series of groans forced their way to the surface among the other boys as they realized their freedom would have to wait for at least a few minutes. The questioner was a small boy whose name Nick had still not managed to remember even though he was quickly becoming one of the most active (and most questioning) students he’d had. “I was re-reading the part of the Book about the Deadly Poppy Field this morning, and I’m curious. What is ‘snow’ supposed to be?”
Nick grinned as the other boys’ grumbling grew louder. It was a common enough question among new students, common enough that the rest of the class had heard it so often that they had all grown sick of it. “I’ll save the details for another lesson in the interest of wrapping things up quickly here, but snow was a form of small ice crystals that used to fall out of the sky.”
“Like rain?”
“Just like rain, although it looked and behaved more like ash.”
“I see.” Something in the boy’s voice, however, tipped Nick off that he really hadn’t and that the subject was going to keep being brought up at sporadic intervals over the next few weeks.
“While we’re on the subject,” more groans came up, “can any of you tell me why the book says that it doesn’t snow any longer?”
One of the boys in the front row, an older student named Henry, stood up to answer the question. “Sir, according to the Book, the snow was destroyed long ago by an evil witch, who used an enchanted apple to concoct a spell. Dorothy managed to catch up with the witch and kill her as she did with all the other wicked witches, but not before the spell could take effect. The seven of the Monk-kind who were in charge of taking care of the snow tried very hard to break the spell but weren’t able to do anything. The Book says that one day a Monk will find a way to reverse the spell, and to this day seven Monks are tasked with trying to find a way to resurrect the snow.”
“Pretty much right, although I think you have a couple of the minor details a little confused.” Nick waved away the criticism as soon as he had finished saying it, “but like I said that’s a story for another day. Go on; get out of here before someone drops a house on you.” The boys laughed more at relief at their release than out of amusement at their teacher’s feeble joke and scattered quick as a wink.
As Nick left the school building, he was only mildly surprised to find Henry running along behind him. “Sir,” the younger boy squeaked, “can I talk with you?”
“Of course you can,” Nick chuckled in anticipation of his upcoming joke. “You already are.” He put his arm around the boy. He liked Henry. Not only was he a good student, but he had an old name: one of the names from the Book, like Nick’s. Nick didn’t really like the current trend of making up new, strange names for children. “Quick answer there on the snow question. You’ve been studying ahead lately, haven’t you?”
“I just read that section last night. To be honest, I’ve read it a number of times lately. I’m hoping one day to become one of the seven snow monks.”
“Well, I’ll give you that you’re a promising student, and you’re going to make a great member of the Monk-kind, but don’t set your hopes on something specific. Sometimes fate moves you in strange ways to put you where it needs you.”
“Is that what happened to you?” the younger boy asked. “You thought you were going to become a tinman, didn’t you?”
Nick stared down at Henry. “You know a lot about my past, don’t you?”
“It’s a good idea to get to know the new Crow, isn’t it?”
Nick winced. “That hasn’t happened yet.”
“But it’s going to, isn’t it?”
“To answer your question,” Nick tried to steer the conversation back away from the burden he knew was going to land squarely on his shoulders before too long, “yes. I come from a long family of tinmen. My father was one, as was his father. I was even named after the first tinman as described in the Book. My entire family has always been good with our hands—building things, fixing things—and I expected to carry on the tradition. But then the testing came, and my destiny shifted. You know the way of things. The smartest among the boys become Monks.”
“And the smartest among the Monks,” Henry pushed, “becomes the Crow.”
“And the most annoying of Monks,” Nick ruffled the boy’s hair, “becomes a teacher. So watch out before I make you deal with people like you every day.”
Both of the young Monks laughed, but when their merriment faded, Henry turned back to the uncertainty around them. “The signs are all there, aren’t they?”
“Boy,” Nick remonstrated, “you are too worried about the future and not enough about the present.” He sighed. “But, yes, it looks like the signs are all here, and within a day or two we’ll be moving on.”
“All of us?” Henry asked. “Haven’t there been times when some of the tribe has refused to move on?”
Nick stared at the boy. “I correct my previous statement. You’re not only too worried about the future, you’re also too worried about the past. You’re talking about the Redfoot tribe, aren’t you?”
“Yes. They broke off a few settlements back, before I was even born, didn’t they? Because they didn’t want to move on with the rest of us.”
“I was barely a baby myself,” Nick explained, “so I don’t know the whole story, only what has been taught. But the differences between the Redfoots and us went a lot deeper than just not wanting to move. Most of their religious leaders taught that the story of Dorothy and how she killed the Witches was just a dream, not an actual chronicle of real events, and that it should all be taken as a metaphor. They didn’t believe that we were actually commanded to follow the Road to the City where our problems would be solved, but that we should undertake a spiritual journey within ourselves. When the signs came and what would become our tribe prepared to move on, they insisted on staying behind. It was probably for the best, because such disputes can lead to wars if left to foment long enough.”
“And you?” Henry inquired, “What do you believe?”
“I believe,” Nick grinned again, “that you have too many chores to take care of to keep your side of the conversation going.” He playfully shoved the younger boy away and resumed his short walk to his quarters.
Henry’s questions gnawed at him. What did he believe? Most of his life he had believed in the Book and what it told him without question, but the more he learned, and the more he stared his destiny in its face, the more questions he, himself, had. That was one of the many reasons he was hoping that the burden of leadership wouldn’t fall upon him—at least not yet—because how could he lead others when he wasn’t sure he believed what he would end up telling them as their leader?
A few more months, he pleaded silently. Let the Crow live a few more months until the migration is underway. Let him be the one to give the order to once more follow the Road. Let him …
He stopped as he saw the face of the woman staring back at him as she ran down the lane towards him, because the look on that face let him know that all his pleas, silent and otherwise, had been in vain.
***
The Glinn was not an attractive woman—few women who lived as long as she had were—but she had a grace and a dignity that were a form of beauty in its own right. Looking at her through the glare from the candles in her hut, Nick thought for a moment that he could see the lovely young girl she once had been before her own responsibilities had taken their toll.
Much as the Crow was the leader of the Monk-kind, and by extension all the men of the tribe, the Glinn was the leader of the Jinjurs and thus the tribe’s top woman. As called for by the Book, the Jinjurs were sele
cted from among the girls of the tribe much the way the Monks were picked from the boys. The smartest, cleverest, and most caring girls became responsible for the care and healing of the tribe. They were the ones that became medicine women, judges and arbiters, and oversaw the day-to-day life of the village. Theirs was perhaps the most important job (except for times of conflict, when the Line-men were preeminent) and that fact alone would command a lot of respect for the Glinn. That she was also the wisest and most caring person Nick had ever known only added to the esteem lauded upon her.
Nick could feel his hands shaking as he reached out to accept the mug of tea she handed him. She hadn’t needed to tell him that the Crow—make that the former Crow—was dead, so she didn’t waste words. She just embraced him, brought him to her hut, and gave him enough time and silence to reconcile himself to the fate that had fallen upon him harder than the wall of one of the ancient ruins that surrounded them.
“I’m not ready,” he finally said to break the silence.
“No one ever is,” she said matter-of-factly. “No one is ever ready for anything. We just have to take things as they come.”
“What I’m saying is that I can’t lead. I can’t become the spiritual leader of the tribe. I can’t ask them to follow me down the Road.”
The Glinn stiffened. “Why do I feel that you’re not talking about something more than inexperience?”
Nick fumbled with the mug and took a sip of tea, then confessed his doubts. The Glinn listened to everything he had to say patiently and quietly, letting him unburden himself fully before speaking again herself.
“Nick, whether you want to lead or not, you are now the Crow of the Silverfoot Tribe. Like it or not, you are the leader of the Monk-kind, and the leader of all of our people.”
“Really? You say that like it’s a good thing. What kind of leader are they getting in me?”
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