by Alyson Hagy
She peeled the ruined clothes from her body. Half-naked and stooped with wariness, she began a slow circling of the house from the inside. Her lower windows were shuttered as they had been for years, but she peered through the slats where she could, and she listened. She heard the inane territorial boast of a cardinal bird. And the crows—they were engaged in their usual confabulation in the high branches of the walnut trees. It was not enough. This late in the morning she ought to hear the ring of axes in the woods or laughter from the riverbank as the children of the Uninvited cast nets for fish. The camp’s silence made no sense. She needed to know what was happening. As she clawed through her cedar chest for clean clothing, she told herself it would not be wise to step outside. A reconnoiter would be dangerous. There was, however, the telescope.
There had once been several telescopes, back in a time she could barely remember. Her father had been a quiet man—even before war trimmed his vocabulary and his happiness. He was perceived by those who knew him to be a just soul, so his silence was taken as a sign of good character. Medical instruments were his first love. He filled a tall, glass-fronted cabinet with the forceps and augurs and bone saws he used in his work. He became a stargazer only after his exhausting service in one tragic army, then another; after the unfortunate loss of his wife left him with the care of two small daughters. He spent many widowed hours attempting to read the heavens that spiraled above him, a glass of homemade rye at his elbow. If he found anything other than companionable silence among the stars, he had not said so. Now only a single scope remained, a battered, brass-trimmed thing that featured four adjustable lenses. It was the sole household object her charity-minded sister had refused to trade or sell. Some human weaknesses, her sister said, are meant to be preserved.
The telescope didn’t work well in daylight, but she knew how to maneuver the lenses until she could gain the blurred perspective of an artillery officer perched on a sunlit ridge. She scanned the road first, then the open hillside to the south. The meadow there was close to the border she shared with the Altices. Nothing. She used her own eyes to survey her garden and Hendricks’s rudimentary camp. She could see a pair of crows pecking their way toward something that lay in the emaciated thicket of her corn patch. If Tul Boitnott was dead, she said to herself as she pulled all but one lens from the cylinder of the telescope and took aim at that spot of ground, then he was even smaller in death than she had imagined he would be.
As she brought the black bulb of a crow’s head into focus, a curve of unexpected color caught her eye. She could see what might be the tousle of human hair and the underwing pallor of a child’s wrist. But red? A curve of bright red? She wrenched the scope into yet another position as dread purled down her spine. This time, she was able see the boy, or at least the trumpet he carried with him wherever he went.
The sight of his empty, half-curled hand made her retch both bile and air.
Estefan. Her Estefan.
One … two … three … four. She forced herself to count and breathe before she looked through the telescope again—just to be sure. She cocked her good eye fearfully against the lens. It was him. Her Estefan. Indeed.
There was no decision. Untethered by caution or good judgment, she began to run—across her scratched, untended floors and down her wheezing stairs. She was aware of only one fact: it couldn’t be true, it wasn’t possible. Estefan had no reason to be on this side of the creek, near her garden. He could not be dead.
Yet even as she raced toward him, hoping he was alive, hoping she could save him, her mind began to wrap itself in thorns. How had competent Hendricks come into conflict with Estefan instead of Tul? How could he have made such a mistake? The boys were nothing alike. Tul was larger and moved with feral ease. Estefan was a sprite. Also, Estefan and the camp children would never attack Hendricks or anyone connected to her. Would they? As she threw open the door of the house, other cruel and tremulous notions began to occur to her. What if the council’s warnings were coming true in the worst of all ways? What if the Uninvited, somehow stirred up by the Altices or others, had suddenly lost complete faith in her? Desperate, she looked toward the road bridge, right at her sister’s cairn. What she saw there drew an icy thread of fear through her veins. The cairn, its pallid stones still gleaming from the night’s rain, had been smashed to half its height. Atop the profane wreckage, impaled upon a sharpened stake, was the head of the bowlegged dog.
Later, she told it to him slowly, understanding he wouldn’t consider Estefan’s death a crime, not at first. He hadn’t known the boy. He wasn’t familiar with the Uninvited or their ways. She began with the strategic. There was a heaped bonfire at the edge of the tree line to the southeast, and it was burning right now, in the light of day. Altices—men and women, boys and girls—were tending the fire and sharing in its significance. In her western fields, the ones occupied by the Uninvited, several smaller fires were also burning—one near the damaged cairn. Those fires were being fed by restless, shifting knots of men, the most able bodies in the camp, all of whom were armed. She didn’t tell him about the dog’s severed head.
She had done two things before she awoke Hendricks. Brazen things. She had gone to Estefan, and when she understood he was irretrievably dead, she returned to the house and unpacked a length of green silk from the very bottom of her cedar chest. It was the final remnant of her sister’s flimsy gowns. Because the boy looked utterly discarded in death and because she couldn’t bear to contemplate the meaty gap of his throat, she brushed her numbed lips across his brow as she placed the red trumpet within the crook of his arm before she covered him.
Then, for just a little while, it was more than she could bear. Her knees weakened. Her heart careened against her lungs, choking off her air. And she found herself kneeling next to the boy, rocking to and fro, to and fro, while her mouth filled with the fragments of a song she tried to sing to him, music composed from her own terrible confusion.
O, I wish there was a sail to see …
She sang to navigate a path toward pain. To find the agony she knew she deserved. The piteous costs of love had to be somewhere ahead, not far away. They had to be.
A boat made just to carry me …
She was all too familiar with the unsympathetic void that filled her skin nearly every hour of every day. It was her echo chamber, the grotto of her doom. The boy with the red trumpet had offered her a few tuneless notes of hope, but he was gone. She had lost the capacity to feel grief, or much of anything, when she was young. It had been taken from her, removed as the yolk is removed from an egg, during her calamitous days in prison. Her sister’s assassination had hollowed her even more. Yet she had always hoped it would return to her one day, the ability to suffer. She believed its absence, her lack of communion, made her more of a demon than any hex her ignorant neighbors believed she was capable of casting.
O, there ought to be a sail to see …
Even when she was able to stand again, she couldn’t summon the courage to carry Estefan’s body into the camp of the people who loved him most. She dared not face them. So she lifted him, the tumbled and flapping weight of him, and bore him across the narrow bridge to the ruined sprawl of the cairn. She left him there, at the foot of the doused white comet of stone, telling herself that the mothers and fathers who called themselves the Uninvited, those weary souls who were trying to knit themselves together into some kind of durable fabric, would not want her to take him any farther.
They will never forgive us for the death of the boy, she said to herself, rubbing her stinging eyes with her knuckles. They will never forgive me.
Then she stood on the porch in full view of all possible opponents and whistled for the dogs. She drew in only two—the scrap-eared rat catcher and the lumbering beagle. The rat catcher had been severely beaten. It would be blind in one eye if it managed to survive at all. The beagle appeared undisturbed, as always. There was no sign of the brindle sight hound.
“So we are hated in both directions,�
� she told Hendricks as she tried to persuade him to fuel himself with broth. “That’s how it reads to me. Whatever line of protection was drawn around this house is gone. I don’t know if the Altices and the others were both roaming last night, looking for one another or for you or for any kind of trouble they could find. I don’t know why he … why the boy was close to the house. The council said trouble was coming, but I didn’t … I don’t understand. Maybe Billy Kingery and his damn bargain men have riled people up for reasons they haven’t shared with me. Maybe fair truces aren’t meant to last anymore. It doesn’t matter. You struck the mortal blow. You killed the … that boy.” She paused to swallow past the dry noose that constricted her throat. “The Uninvited will see you as my man, which means we have offended our only ally.”
Hendricks, whose eyes now glittered with pain, made as if to get to his feet. He seemed to be signaling to her that he would accept his fate at the hands of the Uninvited—alone. He didn’t expect her to pay for his mistake. His staggerer’s face told her so. But she wasn’t interested in his sacrifice. “Stay put,” she said. “I’m not giving you up. That doesn’t accomplish anything. I know how to get you safely out of this house. We’ll do it tonight.”
“No,” he said. “I ain’t a sneak. And I can’t … I can’t walk yet besides.”
She recognized the truth in that. He wouldn’t get far on foot.
“You,” he said, pointing at her with a wavering hand. “You go. And take my letter.”
“Damn your letter,” she said. “That’s done with. It’s done.”
“It … ain’t,” he said, coughing once more. “Hear … hear me out.”
It took him a while to lay out his plan. His leg was very swollen. And he remained weak. Fleeing would kill him sooner than an Altice hatchet blade, he told her. But she—she could leave. Those who sought revenge weren’t seeking her.
“I asked you to notch off young Tul’s finger. His Altice kin will count that against me,” she said. “They’ll want us both.”
“You asked me to make the cut,” Hendricks replied, one half of his mouth slanting into a wan smile. “I didn’t comply. The boy’s got all his digits, though … though I meant to end his life last night. And I may do it yet.”
“I’ve got nowhere to go,” she said.
“The letter,” he repeated. “You’ll … you deliver it. I need you to keep that promise.”
She sensed it again, hanging in the smoke-spumed corners of her witch’s kitchen, deepening along the pine planks of her floor. Pure, pooling desolation. For years she had vowed to stay here, whether they came to burn her or bury her or lift her onto some kind of imposter’s bier. She had made the house, its crimes and mythologies, both her penance and her grave because that was the only atonement she could imagine. It wasn’t her fate to minister to the open world as her sister had done. She had inscribed another destiny—to be the unsouled one, the rememberer. She could not leave this place.
“No. I won’t go.” She wouldn’t look at him as she spoke.
“Then we die like … like rats in a den.” He coughed. “Or worse.”
“We’ll die like we’re meant to.”
He didn’t waste precious energy on dispute. He spat into one of his hands and wiped the excess on the ruin of his shirt. His eyes, she saw, were as frigid as winter stars. “Then you’ll do two things for me … if that’s how you’ll have it. You’ll lay out the loads for my pistol, so I can see … see what I got. And you’ll read. You’ll read me your coward’s letter.”
His damnable confidence—the way he continued to concoct his weaknesses into strengths—shifted her despair toward rage. She felt the flames of her frustrations and inadequacies begin to flicker across her cheeks. How dare he question the quality of her work? How dare he question her judgment, especially after all she’d done for him? “If that’s your wish, Mr. Hendricks, I’ll read you an entire history of cowardice, but it won’t be mine.” She strode into the white-walled parlor, wishing the whole swarm of Altices would fly at them right that minute, heckling, destroying. She didn’t want to suffer a useless chorus of human talking before she died, especially not with this man. “I’ll start it from here,” she shouted, not caring if Hendricks could hear her properly or not.
“At this time,” she recited from memory. “At this time in the valley of the river they call the Blackwater …” The words she had copied down hummed across her tongue. She didn’t even have to look at the first of the heavily inked pages. She spoke and she spoke, hoping Hendricks felt as miserable and trapped in his final cocoon as she did in hers. She stopped only when she realized there was a loud pounding noise coming from the kitchen.
“Come here,” Hendricks called. “You need to c-come where I can see your face.”
She went to him, seething.
“Say … again?” he asked, his own face now strangely open in its shape, lifted at the same angle she had seen only that morning, against the silvery trunk of the maple tree.
She began once more, the sentences buzzing past her teeth on their particular wings. She was beginning to regret the spat. What a pair of jesters they were to be quarreling at such a time, she thought. What mad japes.
He stopped her, brow furrowed. “I … I know I’m dizzied. But you ain’t speaking in a voice I recognize.”
She clenched her eyes shut so she couldn’t see him.
“I can’t … I know my head’s light,” he continued. “I can’t understand why you’re talking in a voice that ain’t yours.”
She turned from him, looking up into the kitchen rafters at the bundled barks and flowers she would never have a chance to use. There would be no more letters, no more paper monuments or pleas crafted at the whims of others. The life she’d scrawled out for herself was about to be erased. “Mr. Hendricks, I’ve had all I can stand of human miscommunication for this day, or any other. I’ve tried to be patient. My voice is my voice. I’m sorry you no longer like the sound of it. You’ve told me you know how to read. I’ll bring the pages to you. You can puzzle over them yourself.”
“You … you misunderstand me,” he said, trying once again to lever himself to his feet so he could face her. “I’m asking who’s talking out of your mouth. Don’t you hear it? Why is she asking me questions with your lips? What does she want me to say?”
She spun on her heel to reprimand him one last time. But a hot taste lashed across her tongue, a heedless flavoring of gunpowder and brine, and then it was as if all the bones had been yanked from her legs. She fell that quickly. There was no way to stop it, no way she could bargain or complain or control the collapse that overtook her. It felt as though something, or someone, had grabbed hold of her very soul and was kidnapping it, subduing it for aims of their own. How strange, she thought, as she plummeted down and down and down—feeling as though she was being pruned from her own agitated body. How strange it was to die without planning or worry. How swiftly the struggle turned to sleep.
He was there when she opened her eyes. But not with his hunter’s knife or the pistol she’d never seen him use. His body was naked and glazed by the yellow flickering of a woodsman’s rock-ringed fire. She, too, was naked. But she was painted more in shadow than in light. And he was loving her, more craftily than Joshua Gilpin ever had, more carefully than the besotted colonel from the Fishersville prison could ever have imagined. He hovered over her, his gray eyes closed tight with need. Dark hair had grown long on his skull, and his beard was untended. He didn’t seem wounded in any way, nor did she. But there was a new kind of cold in the air. She could feel it against her skin. Brittle cold. A cold devoid of the moisture that came from long, slow rivers and from rain. She couldn’t tell where they were, in what settlement or region. She couldn’t locate a horizon or a sky. But the cries she heard—the joyful beggings—those hailed straight from her own mouth as she clutched him into her again, again, again.
“What should we tell them?” her sister asked as they dug the last of the small graves. “A
re we stealing their unhappiness? Or just their children?”
“This is what I know,” he whispered, leaning close to her face with its dry lips and crusted eyelids. “I know you’re strong. I know you want to live. You can make it out of this house if you’ll trust me. I’ll be right behind you. We can see this through.”
She was lying in a nest of blankets on the flagstones of the hearth. The stones were warm, but there was no fire. There was only the remnant heat of the coals, deep and throbbing. The air smelled smoky in a trapped and mangered way. She tried to draw her arms up over her breasts, which, because of the dream, she was certain were bare. They weren’t. She was dressed. And Hendricks was tending to her, a clay bowl filled with water in his hands. How long had she been laid out, she wondered. Who was she?
“They shot fire arrows through the windows upstairs,” he said. “That’s the stink you smell. I doused the fires and closed your shutters, so the problem’s settled for now. But I’m afraid your springhouse has been raided. I seen Altices coming and going from that direction. I bet they’ve took that mountain cat skin you wanted. It seemed smart to leave them be.”
“How … how long?”
“You been out more than a day. Night’s coming on again. It’s some powerful prayers or spells you keep around this place, at least in the minds of the people who live close by. They are reluctant to take us on.”
She struggled to sit upright. “You … your leg?” she asked.
“Swelled up thick and not good in any way you’d recommend,” he said, showing again the rare crook of a smile. “But it’s my turn to nursemaid.”
“I don’t—” She tried to swallow the hot pool of spit that had gathered in her throat. “I can’t tell wha—”