A Haven in Ash (A Sanctuary Series) (Ashes of Luukessia Book 1)

by Robert J. Crane

“Your boy over the rest of them?” Hanrey said.

  “Yes.”

  “Hypocrite,” the old man growled. “You’re a fool.”

  “I refuse to lose my son—”

  “You know loss already!” Hanrey cried. “What’s another when you’re versed in it?”

  Margaut and Eounice together shouted together: “HANREY!”

  “You wish for every family in this village to know pain like that?” Hanrey demanded. “You wish for them to hurt, all of them, because you refuse? You wish for them to watch their wives and children die?” He thrust a stubby finger at Jasen. “He is the price. Do the right thing and let him go, the way any other noble villager among us would—the way many have.”

  Alixa clawed his wrist tight. She was crying, Jasen realized; he felt her shoulder heaving against him. “No,” she whispered, although it came as more of a croak. “Please …”

  “Smithson is correct,” said Baraghosa. “Your people will starve. As a member of the assembly, surely you must see the necessity of—”

  “Shove your ‘necessity’ up your backside,” Adem said. “You’re not taking him.”

  “No?”

  One word, hard and menacing: “No.”

  “Hmm. Well then. And the rest of you back this decision?”

  Eounice and Margaut exchanged glances, the latter looking far more nervous than her elder.

  “We voted against agreeing to your deal,” said Margaut. A nervous quiver shook her voice.

  “I see.” No disdain there, no displeasure. “I trust I know where your vote lays, Mr. Smithson. And you, Assembly Matron?”

  Griega said nothing.

  Baraghosa inclined his head. “But of course. In favor—as you would be. It is for the good of the village, after all.” Glancing back to Eounice and Margaut, he said, “Would you consider changing your mind? It would be of great benefit to your people, after all.” When Eounice did not say anything, he pivoted to Margaut. “Mrs. Weltan? Might you say yes?”

  She shook her head, averting her gaze. Her lip trembled.

  “You’re sure? I understand you have four children, Mrs. Weltan. Why, one of them is here in this very crowd tonight, is she not? Your youngest?” He turned, and though his gaze raked past Jasen and Alixa, her nails dug into him again, and her breath caught haggardly in her throat. “It would be a shame for you to watch any of them wither,” Baraghosa told Margaut, abyssal eyes on her downturned face once more.

  “I grow my own food,” she said softly. “My children shan’t go hungry.”

  “Ah, but do you know what hungry people do? They grow desperate. The rules of civilized society soon cease to apply. And though your garden is plentiful now, you must see what will happen once Terreas’s fields are empty, and stomachs are still not full?”

  “Don’t you dare threaten my sister-in-law,” Adem started.

  “I’m not threatening anyone,” said Baraghosa, “simply telling the truth. Hungry people will take. They will take from you, Mrs. Weltan. They will take it all.”

  Aunt Margaut’s fingers tightened. Like Alixa’s in Shilara’s sitting room a half-hour ago, her knuckles had gone entirely white.

  Baraghosa waited … but she said nothing.

  “I see,” he finally ceded. To Adem: “You will not bend?”

  “Never.”

  “Hmm.”

  A backward look at Jasen, whose blood ran cold.

  Alixa gasped, nails pressing deeper—

  Baraghosa turned back to the assembly, and said four words and four words only:

  “You will regret this.”

  And with that, he departed, leaving a room full of silent, disbelieving villagers—and the knowledge that, this year, for the first time in a long, long time, Terreas would not have enough food to feed its people.

  10

  The moment the door closed, fury broke out.

  “An outrage!” one man cried.

  “Hypocrisy!” shouted another.

  “You’ve sent our boys and girls off all these years!” shrieked one woman, old and grey and clutching her shawl like it would dart from her shoulders and out the window, never to be seen again. “Yet you balk at your own! Shame on you!”

  A chorus went up at that, all just slightly out of sync: “For shame!”

  “Shame!”

  “SHAME!!”

  Hanrey was loudest of all. Without Baraghosa’s presence to soften him—as if it ever had—he threw himself to his feet, shoving the table clear in one great shunting movement.

  “Of all the despicable—” he started.

  “Don’t you start again,” Eounice shouted at him. She shoved her chair back, rising too—

  Someone grappled him by the shoulder, pivoted him round. He stared into the face of an angry man lined with wrinkles, and a scar across his lip that ran down like an orange stripe.

  “You’re a coward, boy,” he wheezed into his face.

  “Get off him!” Alixa cried, wrestling Jasen free.

  “Should’ve gone with him while you had the chance!”

  “Shameful child,” parroted another.

  Jasen turned on his heel. The voices came from every direction, all fighting to be heard. And so many were directed at him, or his father, calling them fools, simpering children, shirkers of responsibility, betrayers of the village—

  The woman who’d grabbed Jasen and Alixa by the necks and shoved them up to the front was standing at the back of the crowd. Jasen caught sight of her face in the corner, by the door—one of the last to enter, apparently, and the last Baraghosa would’ve passed on his exit. An expression of purest disgust darkened her face. At the sight of Jasen catching eyes, she opened her mouth and spat a string of curses at him, black enough that they probably reached the ears of his ancestors back to the beginning of his line.

  Hanrey was fighting to get at Adem, blocked by Eounice on one side and gripped by Margaut, who he shook off every time her hands found his shoulders. Adem, to his credit, was fighting just as hard to get at the old man. Held back by two strong farmers called forth from the crowd by Margaut, he made no headway.

  “You’re a traitor to our people!” Hanrey roared.

  “And you’re a callous, uncaring old man.”

  “I’ve shown more care for this village today than you have in your entire tenure as assemblyman!”

  “You’re spewing dung, you ornery old badger.”

  Griega said, “Enough of this.”

  Hanrey ignored her, just craned his squat neck around to look past Eounice and stare up into Adem’s face—probably willing him close enough to head butt. “You’re a hypocrite and a traitor. You’ve killed our people.”

  “You’re an old fool,” Adem spat.

  “And you should’ve died with your poxed wife!”

  That did it. Something in Adem snapped. His face changed, twisting with purest rage. He shoved at Eounice—

  “Don’t you push me, either of you!” she shouted.

  “You say that to my face, you old bastard,” Adem said.

  “You heard the first time.”

  “SAY IT TO MY FACE!”

  “That is enough!” Griega said.

  Her voice was no more raised than Jasen had ever heard it, yet still she cut through the bickering, although not as totally as before. Though the crowd fell into silence, and Hanrey and Adem both quieted, neither ceased their stare-down.

  “You’re a waste of skin,” Adem told him, “not even good as the leathery husk you’ve resembled these past twenty years.”

  “And you—”

  “Don’t, Hanrey,” Margaut warned—and so did Griega, standing and raising a hand to still him.

  “Cease,” she said.

  Hanrey bristled. Beneath his beard, his lips twitched, as if he was daring himself to say more. Yet he stayed silent, scowling furiously, letting his glare do all the talking for him.

  “There will be no more of this,” said Griega, addressing both the assembly and the gathered villa
gers. “The disregard for our fellow villagers this night is appalling, and I will not stand for it, not in this assembly hall, nor anywhere this side of the boundary. If you wish to squabble, take leave of us and cross it. Defile scourge land with your words, but not this place. Do you hear?”

  Hanrey opened his mouth—

  “Shut it,” Margaut warned, voice hard. “You’ve dispensed enough hateful words for one night.”

  “I did not mean that—”

  “Be quiet, you old goat,” Eounice told him. “And take your bloody seat again, instead of standing around like an idiot. That goes for you too.”

  Adem obliged, though he looked none too pleased to be doing so, and he only deigned to sit once Hanrey had parked his backside once more.

  Eounice lowered herself into her chair, and Margaut took up her seat too, though not before dragging it sideways, as far from Hanrey as it would go without sending her beyond the edge of the table’s side.

  “Now,” said Griega, taking her seat last, “we will resume discussing matters with civility, if you please.”

  “He’s ruined us,” Hanrey said, low grumble of worry leaking out.

  “Baraghosa is not taking my son,” Adem replied.

  “How many others have you sent away all these years?”

  From the crowd, a woman’s voice Jasen half-recognized called, “You let him make off with my Rufus four years ago.”

  “My neighbor lost her Polly,” said another, older, although Jasen did not know it or the name—someone before his time, perhaps, or at the very least when he was too early for these visits to scar his mind the way they’d come to. “You oversaw that, Assemblyman Rabinn.”

  “Hypocrite,” Hanrey grumbled.

  “Be civil,” Griega said. Hanrey just huffed, folded his arms and turned away.

  “I’m just worried about our children,” said a heavyset woman. She was young, Jasen knew as he recognized her as having been one of the older children at school when he started, although the fat cocooning her made her appear much older. A swaddled newborn lay in her arms, oblivious to the chaos around it. “I’m afraid for them.”

  The grumbling discontent resumed.

  “You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” Hanrey barked at Adem—

  “You ought to learn to shut your damned mouth.”

  Eounice cried, “Adem! Hanrey!”

  “Sold us out for a no good, disrespectful boy—”

  “Don’t you dare talk about my son like that—”

  “—whose lack of manners plainly comes from a man who hasn’t the first clue of how to be a good father.”

  Adem was on his feet again—

  “GIVE HIM TO BARAGHOSA!” yelled someone from the crowd—

  It was beginning again. Voices fought for volume, growing louder by the second. They came from every direction, disorientating, dizzying—

  He should be pleased he’d escaped Baraghosa’s wrath—but this? The alternative?

  The newborn in the fat woman’s arms shifted, began to cry.

  The child might, Jasen thought, be one of those to die.

  His stomach twisted.

  Eounice was shouting over the noise now. Jasen caught, “—was your child? Would any of you be stood here demanding that they be let go? No! You’d—” And then Hanrey was shoving the table, and Adem had grabbed the old woman’s stick, was raising it as he shoved past, and Griega stepped out, her eyes burning—

  Alixa was a terrified statue at Jasen’s elbow. “What’s happening?” she cried.

  All this damned noise, this chaos—those awful candles, scents so cloying, making it so hard to breathe in this room, over-full, the air hot, hot—and all those children, who’d evaded Baraghosa, but who now might not be fed, who might not see the next summer, the spring, perhaps even the winter, all because of him—

  “I’ll go with him!”

  The words had tumbled out before Jasen knew he would say them, before he could catch them.

  There was a pause. Like Griega and Baraghosa before him, Jasen had cast the room into sudden quiet.

  The blaze in Adem’s eyes turned to fear as he found his son’s gaze.

  “I’ll go with him,” Jasen repeated.

  Alixa stared.

  The room stared.

  “Son,” Adem began. The shock had stolen much of his voice, so what came out was a muted, strangled sort of noise.

  “I’ll do it,” Jasen said, quick, before his father could try to convince him otherwise—before he himself could try to do the same. His decision was made, had been made in a moment. And if he thought, for even a second, that it was not the right thing to do, he would never go—and these people, in this room, would die.

  “I’ll go with Baraghosa for the seed.”

  “Someone needs to get him,” said someone in the crowd.

  Another, more shrill: “Someone get Baraghosa back!”

  The door was thrust open, and someone leapt out, shouting. More than one person, by the sound of it. Jasen dared not look; he couldn’t bring himself to watch them, happy and hopeful, knowing that it meant he had chosen to go with Baraghosa, out beyond the boundary—to die so they would not have to.

  “Jasen—” Adem began again.

  “It’s decided,” said Hanrey sharply. “The boy has made his decision.”

  “You’re not serious,” Alixa whispered, tugging at his wrist. She’d clutched it all this time, as though it might keep him from going—and still she held firm, both of them knowing she couldn’t keep him here no matter how tightly she held, no matter how hard she dug her fingernails into his skin, the way she pressed them into her own palms.

  “You’re not doing this,” she whispered.

  He looked her in the eye—and she knew; he could see it there, plain as day. So he said nothing.

  Her lips trembled. “Jasen.”

  The assembly were discussing—what, Jasen wasn’t sure. Same as the crowd behind him. Their voices all blurred indistinctly. He could pick out no words, and nor did he want to. He could focus only on one thing: that this was the right thing to do. He had been chosen. It was his duty not to let the village down.

  Be like Pityr, he told himself as his gaze fell through the floor, burrowing a long way into the earth. Go willingly, as he did.

  Go and embrace it.

  A fragmentary voice piped: You always did want to see beyond the boundary.

  He had, true. Although not like this.

  Not like this.

  As the noise of the room droned around him, Jasen thought of his fate. He tried to summon anything more than numbness. An echo of the terror that had clutched his bones when coming face to face with the scourge today would be something. A twinge of sadness? Hope to see his mother again?

  None of these came. He was only numb to it all.

  When the door burst open again, he came back to his senses. Eounice was narrating again, by the sound of it, talking about choices, but she ceased as someone spilled in from the outside.

  Jasen looked over his shoulder, his expression flat.

  No Baraghosa.

  It was a villager—Daniel Carmichael, who’d probably escaped Baraghosa’s clutches no more than five or six years ago himself. He was a reedy man without much strength, who busied himself most days with penning poems he read once a month at the tavern, to a cursory applause.

  “He’s not out here!” he cried.

  “What do you mean, not out there?” Hanrey demanded.

  “His lights have gone!” Daniel gasped for breath, sucking lungfuls in two great gulps. Sweat clung to his brow as though he’d run the paths etched around the mountains’ sides and come back without pausing. “We can’t see him. He’s already gone.”

  Murmuring broke out.

  Alixa echoed it. “How?” She frowned at Jasen, shimmering eyes below knitted eyebrows. “It takes longer than this to leave the village. The walk to the boundary alone takes …”

  Jasen shrugged, a dull lift of the shoulders. “H
e possesses strange magic.” A few times, Adem had mused that perhaps Baraghosa came from the west, from a land across the sea, whose name they’d only heard whispered—Arkaria. Jasen had thought one day he might see it.

  Over the course of the last fourteen hours, though, his every aspiration had been taken from him, then stamped into the ground and turned to dust.

  “Then he shan’t go,” said Adem firmly.

  That started Hanrey off again. “You’ve no fiber, Rabinn! Your boy has more of it than you!”

  “We have settled this,” Adem snarled, thumping a fist on the table—and no doubt imagining what it might be like send it into Hanrey’s red face. “The council decision is three to two against Baraghosa’s deal. Jasen is not going. We’ve settled it in the way of our people.”

  “You blasted—”

  “The boy wants to go,” shouted the neck-grabber from before. “Maybe that should be our new way from now on!”

  There was a nervous, low tide of agreement through the crowd, and more than Jasen would’ve expected.

  But then, of course there would. These gathered families had been spared destruction for another year. Now an out had presented itself, they had no reason not to agree to Jasen’s departure.

  If he had wished to back out, he need only look to see dozens more in this room had made the same decision—the right decision. Go with Baraghosa in exchange for seed. Save Terreas.

  The tides of a brewing fight were rising again.

  Jasen decided to head them off. Stepping forward to gather the assembly’s attention, he said, “I’ll go look for him.”

  Hanrey: “Will you?”

  “Yes.” Jasen swallowed. There was a lump in his throat, one which refused to be dislodged, dry and papery, like Baraghosa’s palm. “I’ll find him, and I’ll tell him I’ll go.” Another painful swallow. “And he’ll bring the seed.”

  If there was any relief in the room—and surely there was—Jasen didn’t feel it. He only felt his father’s eyes burning a hole in his face. Yet he wouldn’t meet them, couldn’t, and looked only to the other assemblymen and women in turn.

  He had seen his father heartbroken once before. He did not wish to see him so again.

  “You have our blessing,” said Griega, inclining her head. “Go, child. See to it that you find Baraghosa before he has traveled far.”