5
The news that Ellia was dead reached home before me. I came in silent through the back door to find a knot of our neighbors bent low over the table, speaking quietly, faces grim. My father, standing by the fire, saw me, and read my face, and pulled me close. My mother came up beside.
“I’m so sorry, love. I’m so sorry.” She stroked my hair. We all three held each other.
I didn’t say that I’d been there, that I’d seen them do it.
I didn’t know what to say.
From the table, voices rising. “. . . so they’ve got to go! They cannot stay here another day!”
Nods and low words of approval.
At a soft knock at the front door, everyone snapped silent. The wheelwright laid a hand on her knife. My mother went to squint through the side window, then let the smith in quickly, and, with a glance up and down the lane, shut and locked the door again.
People came bringing news, or left bearing plans. By evening, the word was that the soldiers had shut themselves in the town hall and barred the doors. And that most of the village was making ready to drive them out.
The air felt like a cord drawing tight, and still tighter.
Just after nightfall, the handful who had gathered in our kitchen, some with lamps or heavy tools in hand, stood ready by the door.
My grandmother had come to look after my sisters and me. My parents told the four of us goodbye.
“Don’t worry. We’ll be back soon—no more than a few hours. And they’ll be gone.” My father looked at each of us, and nodded. He held a torch, not yet lit. Over my mother’s shoulder, the blade of her mattock shone in the firelight.
And they left.
I watched from the window until their lights were out of sight around the bend.
I took a candle from the table. “I’m going to bed to read.”
“You don’t want any dinner?” My grandmother was stirring the soup pot, and Adler was getting the dishes down from the shelf.
“I—I ate already.” I climbed the steep stairs. I waited until I heard the three of them talking at the table, and the rattle of spoons in bowls.
I blew the candle out, and crept along the quietest path across the boards, to the window between my sisters’ beds, looking over the back garden. I climbed out, and slipped along the roof to the back edge of the workshop, where I could lower myself down onto the shed. From there I jumped to the ground.
Then I ran.
The south lane was small, and quiet, and empty. My feet on the earth, and the low calls of nightbirds, and the rushing in my ears were the only sounds. Great white flowers, blooming under the half moon, shone in the dark. Ahead, there was another group headed for the town hall, under the light of a lantern carried on a pole. I jumped a fence, and scrambled through a garden, and ran along the edge of the forest until I was well past them, then took to the lane again.
The square was crowded and bright with torchlight, and the air felt too hot despite the night. From my place in a shadowed alley, I could see knives and axes held loose in hands. Whether my parents were deeper in the crowd than I could see, or whether I’d beaten them there, I didn’t know.
Creeping as close as I dared to the light, I listened, gathering scraps that stood out from the taut noise of the crowd.
“. . . send them away bloody and bruised, if it comes to it . . .”
“. . . cowards, holed up in our hall . . .”
“. . . didn’t think it would really come to this . . .”
“. . . knock the doors in if they don’t come out soon . . .”
Across the square, the hall stood—tall, heavy, strangely dark. The lights of the inn on the lower floors were out. A few windows in the upper stories, and the mayor’s office at the top, were the only spots of light across the building’s broad face.
The crowd was growing. Even for fairs the square was hardly ever so full. I crept back into the shadows.
A moment of half-quiet, then a roar—the emissary stood in bright lantern-light on the mayor’s balcony, high above the square. He raised his arms for silence, but there was none. He waved a pair of soldiers forward from inside, and they blew a few harsh blasts on trumpets.
In the half-second of lull in the noise of the crowd, he shouted out, his voice like the sound of a club against a high bell. “People of Cold Falls. I have been told you want us to leave. But you seem to misunderstand your circumstances. Consider this an education.”
The crowd thundered back, furious.
His face was empty.
I looked to the crowd. Torches were lifted high, and sharp tools shaken in their light. Again and again, in different words, the same cry: Hand over the ones who did it—the rest of you must go. A small group carried a stout post forward, and began battering the town hall’s doors.
Across the square from where I hid, a few paces down the darkness of another alley and behind most of the crowd, the torches were reflected back in shining glints of light.
Nearer to the town hall, in the shadows at the corner of the guildhall of the weavers, the same sort of gleam. But I knew those places—there was nothing there.
One point of light moved.
No.
I cried out.
But over their own shouts, no one heard me.
The soldiers poured out of the darkness, armored, weapons sheathed but swinging. People yelled, and ran, or swung the tools they’d only ever used for working, and there were more of us, but from the moment the two sides met, it was clear: We don’t know how to fight.
Scabbards and spear-shafts fell like hail in the orchard. Hoes and hammers were turned aside like grass. The ones who fought were hit from the front; the ones who ran were hit from the back. For every blow one of my neighbors managed to land, the soldiers struck dozens. The sounds were screams, and the thin rattle of armor, and the pounding of wood on flesh, so quiet it made me sick. Here and there I heard bones snap, and every time my teeth clenched down harder.
Those fleeing were knocked down, and if they staggered up to keep running they were knocked down again, chased until they made it out of the square and into the lanes. In moments, almost no one was trying to fight back, but only to get away, and then the square was half empty, and then it was only soldiers, walking slowly through the choked light of torches scattered on the stones, and a few people lying still.
Once I was sure they weren’t my parents, I felt myself begin to breathe again, shallow, ragged.
One of the soldiers yelled something up toward the balcony.
The emissary answered. “Yes. Yes, I think that will do it. We’ll call them back in the morning, to write it out clear, but for the moment, I think we’re done. Everyone quarters in here for the night, and set a double guard. But going forward, I think things will run much smoother here. That will be all.”
He turned, and disappeared into the mayor’s office, pulling shut the curtain behind him and blotting out the light. An officer started giving orders.
One by one, the soldiers prodded the still figures on the cobblestones, and hauled them to their feet, and marched them away. But two could not be roused. The soldiers left them where they’d fallen.
A few soldiers came near the alley. I drew further into the shadows, and ran into the night.
The arc of the swords, and the thrust of the spears, repeated in my mind, again and again. The preparation. The charge. The certainty behind the blows.
I climbed quiet back through the window and sat in the dark, trying to keep myself still. I tried to listen to the bright murmur of my grandmother telling my sisters tales downstairs. But I kept hearing the sounds of the square.
Finally the latch scraped, and I sprang down the steps.
My grandmother gasped, and my sisters began to cry. My mother’s cheek was crossed with a bright red stripe, and she held a bloody kerchief to her mouth. She walked with a limp. Blood was drying on my father’s neck, seeping down from some wound on his head. His hand was roughly wrapped in cloth, with more blood soaking through. The mattock and torch they’d left with were gone, and their eyes flitted like scared birds.
They assured us, thin and shaky, that it would all be alright, that they were fine, that everything was going to be fine, and sent us to bed. We sat silent in the dark at the top of the stair and listened as they cleaned their wounds and told my grandmother what had happened. They said they didn’t know if it would be safe to be outside tonight, and made up a bed for her by the fire.
Once they had dragged the table against the front door, and the benches against the others, and were repeating the same bleak answerless questions they’d begun with, we drew away from the stairs.
Marden began to cry again, so Adler and I sat with her, and I sang her favorite songs in a hushed voice, until they both had fallen asleep.
I climbed quietly into bed, and lay staring into the dark, my parents’ voices whispers I could barely hear.
We were walking through a part of the forest I’d never seen before.
“Mm.” Ellia pointed. “Across the meadow, there—two deer.”
I looked. Among the grass and flowers lay the bodies from the square.
I turned back to her. But I was alone.
I woke, trembling, tears running away into darkness. Everything was silent now.
Before dawn, a handbell clanged in the road, throwing me from another dream. I squinted out the window into blankness. A week before, Ellia and Sarah had been there with their wagon. Now, through a heavy fog, a troop of soldiers came at a quick march, some with torches, their captain on horseback in the lead, crying out in a loud voice: “The emissary calls the village to the square after sunrise. All must come!” They rang the bell and shouted again, then carried on toward the last houses down the way.
We ate, hardly speaking. A deep bruise now spread across my mother’s cheek, and she took her bites carefully to avoid her split lip.
Walking slowly through the fog, we met the smith, who told us: One of the masons and the village’s only real scribe had been killed last night on the square, and a farmer had made it out only to die at home hours later.
Now, the soldiers were not hiding. They stood stern before the town hall in ordered rows, blades already drawn, watching us as the square filled.
Bandages, crutches, and vivid bruises marked the growing crowd. If any soldiers had been injured at all, it didn’t show.
The festival stage had been set up again, just before the town hall doors. After a few minutes, the emissary walked quickly out and onto it, moving like this was a distraction from more important things he needed to get back to. He glanced over us, and spoke.
“You are of no use to the baroness dead. You are of no use to me dead. You are certainly of no use to your families dead. But try last night’s ridiculous display again, and you will quickly join your friends, your friends who have now died because they wanted to shirk their duty. We do not wish to hurt you. By the measures that matter most, we are all compatriots here. But to defy the baroness is to defy the natural order of the world, and if you disturb that order, we will set it right again. Let this be a lesson to you, each and every one.”
The fire that had burned the night before was gone. Everyone was quiet, eyes empty, or sometimes teary, as his speech went on. We had best get used to the way of things, he said, and if we had complaints, we should ask our dead neighbors whether complaining had served them well.
No one spoke.
How fast our fight had been snuffed out felt like a weight, growing heavier. Maybe we couldn’t drive them out by force, but did we have to accept this? The silence around me felt like it would stop my breath. Like I was trapped beneath a stone, down under the cold current of the river. Like if someone didn’t do something, and break this thing that held me, I would choke.
Finally, it cracked.
I shouted—No! You murderers! Get out of our home!
Or I tried to. But before half the words were out, my father pressed his uninjured hand over my mouth.
“Hush child, hush!” His voice was a harsh whisper. “Not now! Not now.” It wasn’t his hand, or his words, but the terror in his eyes that stopped me. I had never seen him so afraid.
I felt cold water rising around me again.
The emissary’s gaze glowed as he pointed at us. “Yes! Yes, teach your daughter.” He waved a hand over the crowd. “And all of you teach your children! As we have had to teach you. If you want a bright future for them, do not forget again that the days of the throne’s softness with you are over. The baroness’s will is true and it is law, and as I told you all when we arrived, we are her hand. Until yesterday, that hand was open. Your disobedience forced us to make it into a fist. From today forward, live wisely—do not force us to strike you again.”
He looked out at us, absently twisting a ring on his finger. “If this makes it clearer, think of the baroness as a smith. You are her workpiece, and we are the hammer she wields. Through us, she will shape you into the people you ought to be. Hardworking. Respectful. There is nowhere to run: Down the valley there are only more of us. At your back is the anvil of the merciless wood. The fewer blows her hammer has to strike—” He drove one first into the other palm. “—the better for everyone.” He spread his hands wide. “Now go. Return to your work. At the harvest the tribute must go out, and Baroness Freja does not suffer sluggards.”
People drifted out of the square as if in a daze. Sapped, withered, eyes downcast. An apple thrown down to rot with its seeds cut out. A saw with a broken blade.
It had been not two weeks since the soldiers arrived.