There was a tug again. This time the little girl’s wrist actually jumped up from the blanket, as if an invisible someone was lifting it. ‘What is that? Who is doing that?’ Hannah whispered, waving the offending wrist in front of her face, trying to see in the darkness if someone had sneaked in and tied a string around her arm.
She heard the dog pad in from the kitchen, his paws tapping out his approach on the linoleum. He was a big dog, like a wolf, and he climbed on the couch to curl up across Hannah’s feet. As she felt the warmth of his fur, Hannah drifted back to sleep, wondering why she couldn’t remember when they got a dog.
In the background the television was on. The boisterously loud refrain of a commercial woke Hannah from where she had fallen asleep. Her eyes widened in an effort to stay awake.
This time, the tugging came more frequently.
Churn woke to the snow tickling his nose and cheeks. The world, muted and out of focus, gradually exposed itself. Although he could feel it snowing, he wasn’t cold; rather, it was uncomfortably warm. Churn couldn’t recall the last time he had seen snow south of the Great Pragan Range. He was dimly aware that his body had been broken – he had so many injuries, there was no better way to describe it. A tugging sensation came from his left, as if he had been gripped by an invisible spectre, and Churn struggled to turn his head.
The soldiers had been brutal. The Malakasians had kicked, beaten and clubbed every inch of him. Churn assumed he was in shock, because except for his shoulders, nothing hurt any longer: his mind had closed off the part of itself that remembered the agony he had experienced that morning…Or had it been the previous morning? When he came fully awake, he drew a massive breath and screamed. He screamed for a long time, nearly half an aven, before passing out again.
Later, he woke in a panic, unable to breathe. His feet had slipped off the thin branch and now dangled high above the yard. The weight of his body pulling so hard on his shoulders made it impossible to breathe. He had been lucky to find that branch, though it was so narrow he was certain it would snap at any moment, but he mustn’t slip again. He had to stay awake.
He had been terrified the whole time the soldiers spent getting him up here. He’d already been beaten near to death and he had no fight left in him. He hadn’t fought back when the Malakasians tied him to a plank they’d found in the barn, not even when it snapped, the first time they tried to lift him. They hadn’t been deterred, though; they’d just found a sturdier piece of wood.
While the soldiers lashed him to the new plank, one, a pretty woman, climbed the giant cottonwood next to the ditch. Once he was secure, the men tossed the other end of his rope to the girl in the tree.
In all his life, Churn had never seen anyone who could climb a tree like that girl – through the haze of his injuries he had wondered if she was some kind of magician, perhaps half-woman, half-cat, she climbed the old cottonwood with such graceful ease. She found a solid branch near the top and looped the rope over and back down to her companions, who were impatiently barking orders up at her. They were all obviously relishing stringing-up their trophy, the killer of three of their brethren, and looking forward to leaving him there to die, slowly and in great pain.
As soon as his feet left the ground, Churn had started gasping for breath; his head was bleeding and his body was in screaming agony, but he was more frightened of suffocation. His head and shoulders crashed through the lower branches, sometimes stopping with a jolt, but each time he thought they’d give up and tie him off there, the half-cat-girl with the grim, pretty face would swing over to dislodge him so he could continue his journey into the upper branches. When she finally secured him, fifty paces above his family farm, she hadn’t noticed the thin branch jutting out of the trunk, but Churn counted it among the greatest strokes of good luck in his lifetime.
Though he faded in and out of consciousness, he remained lucid enough to keep his toes pressed firmly against the twig, taking enough of his weight that he could breathe a little. While he waited for it to snap, he thanked the snow for waking him.
He looked around, but there was no trace of the Malakasians below. He could see his sister and parents lying motionless in the grass below, and tried hoarsely to shout down to them. Perhaps they didn’t know he was here…
There’s that tugging again, from my left. Someone’s pulling on my arm.
They were dead. There was no way they could have survived the beating they had taken. Churn didn’t bother wondering why the squad had chosen this farm on this day (was it yesterday? How long have I been up here?) – trying to understand why the Malakasian Army acted with such brutality was like trying to understand their enigmatic leader.
The Pragan farmer who had grown as strong as a bull heaving bales up into the loft of his father’s barn dangled like a macabre ornament from the snowy branches of the cottonwood tree. He could see his sister’s cloak was soaked through where her neck had bled so badly. There was so much blood – it had stained the ground around her dark brown. Blood is supposed to be red. This isn’t right.
His father’s arm had been severed at the elbow. His old sword, little more than a rusty dagger, was still gripped in the missing hand. Churn would remember his father’s wailing scream for the rest of his life: he screamed until one of the Malakasians had hit him hard across the temple with a cudgel. There had been a snapping sound, and his father’s voice had been cut off in mid-cry.
His mother was dead too. She’d huddled on the ground, trying to revive Churn’s father. She hadn’t posed a threat; she hadn’t fought back, and they might have overlooked her, if she hadn’t run for the house when she saw the flames. There had been so much other brutality to distract them; they hadn’t realised the soldiers’ fire had kindled into a raging blaze, engulfing their house. Doren had been in there, Churn’s younger brother, the baby of the family.
Churn’s mother had ignored the inferno and burst through the front door, screaming to the gods of the Northern Forest – and then she had fallen silent. She hadn’t come out, and Churn couldn’t bear to think what his mother had seen before she had been swallowed by the flames.
Now his abused voice was a rasp at the back of his throat, but still Churn screamed as the smell of burning ash assaulted his nostrils. Flailing about in mental and physical agony, he finally managed to break the rope, and started crashing back down through the branches until the plank crossbeam caught in the juncture of two thick branches. Churn felt both shoulders come free from their sockets, the cartilage torn through, and he struck the ground with a thud that knocked the wind from his lungs – an unwelcome irony after he had struggled so hard to get any air in there at all. And then he screamed again, a dry wheeze that eventually faded to silence.
Kantu chanted the spell. It wasn’t difficult to recalclass="underline" he had used it thousands of times in the past five hundred Twinmoons. Just a few words, and the far portal would close and follow him – them – across the Fold. But not all of us. He closed his eyes and called it again just to be sure, steeling himself against the shrieking behind him. He couldn’t stand to hear it for another moment. The Larion leader couldn’t remember when he had started to cry; he was there now, crying, in the middle of the room. They had played with the baby here, reading her stories and watching her every move, as if nothing she might do or say in the entire span of her life was too insignificant to be missed by people who loved her that much. It was the room with the fireplace, but nothing burned in there now; it was too warm for a fire. Kantu wondered why there were still ashes in the fire grate. Why had they not cleaned those out last spring? Why keep a fireplace full of ashes all summer?