“You are wrong, I think,” Samuel said, smiling at her. “This is something special.”
Impiri snorted with laughter.
“Whatever you say, old man,” she said and stood up taller before turning and pushing her way past the crowd.
When she was beyond the ring of onlookers, Impiri looked back.
“It’s of the Olders. You know that no good can come of it,” she said and strode off toward the stone house. Sabelle followed her. She glanced back over her shoulder at Illya, catching his eye for a moment before climbing the stairs and going inside.
Illya looked at Samuel. The Healer’s eyes were shining. He brushed his fingertips across the book’s smooth cover.
“A book,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper. “How long has it been since I’ve seen one?”
“I found it,” Illya said, almost to himself.
Samuel looked up at him, frowning.
“If anyone would have, you would,” he said and tucked the book carefully inside his own jacket.
The people had lost interest and started to disperse. Grenya and Aunt Ada joined them, and they went together back toward home.
Samuel soon turned down the path to his hut. Illya stopped and watched him walk away until Samuel looked back over his shoulder.
“Tomorrow,” he mouthed and patted the outline of the book under his jacket.
Suddenly, Illya didn’t mind quite as much that he was going home to a tiny hut empty of food. His hollow stomach had been like a dark cloud over him, weighty with rain, but the prospect of exploring those pages broke through it like a ray of sunshine.
When they stopped in front of his Aunt Ada’s hut, she motioned for them to wait. A few minutes later, she came out and pressed a wrapped package into Grenya’s hands. Grenya unwrapped a corner and revealed a loaf of black lichen, already soaked, pounded and dried so that it wouldn’t cramp the belly when you ate it.
“Oh, Ada! You shouldn’t. What will you eat?” Grenya said, the creases on her forehead deepening as she looked up at her sister-in-law.
“Got a little more left yet.” Ada shrugged. Grenya raised her eyebrows.
“Besides,” Ada said, “families have to stick together in these times.” Grenya’s eyes shifted almost imperceptibly back toward the stone house. Ada shook her head.
“She may be my sister, but you are still more our family than she ever will be, even with Victor gone. Take it,” she said.
CHAPTER TWO
ILLYA’S STOMACH, NOT filled by the watery soup of lichen and boiled bark shavings, ached through the night. His mind spun, refusing to settle. Images of the book and the brief glimpse he’d had of its pages wove through a dream of digging through endless mud. Before the sun had begun its ascent over the mountain behind the village, he folded his legs and sat up on his furs. He watched the window, waiting for the light.
When dawn lightened the sky in blue streaks, Illya eased the door open, careful not to let it creak and wake his family. He crept outside into the sharp air, his breath clouding around him as he left the warmth of the hut. He hoped that the Healer was awake.
“I thought I might see you,” Samuel said. “Does this mean you have decided to take on that apprenticeship?”
“Uh…” Illya stalled, blushing. He tried to peek around Samuel into the recesses of the room behind him without being too obvious. The Healer had approached Illya’s mother some time ago about Illya becoming his apprentice. Illya hadn’t agreed because, though he was curious about everything that Samuel knew, settling into the path of Healer would forever keep him from becoming a Patroller. Patrollers hunted for big game and protected the village territory from Rover gangs. It had been a long time since a Rover attack, since Illya had been very small, but he could still remember their whooping screams as they had climbed the walls. His father had been a Patroller then and had shot a Rover man in the leg with a crossbow that Illya still had in the lean-to behind his mother’s hut.
It was a foolish hope anyway. Conna Duncan, the current lead Patroller, had hated Illya ever since they were boys, when he had seen Conna crying beside the river with a set of black eyes his father had given him. Illya’s hobby of tinkering with Olders’ things hadn’t done anything to endear him to Conna further, or to anyone else in the village.
Samuel chuckled.
“I will propose a trade,” he said. “You look at this book, and I will teach you about plants.”
Illya met his eye, wondering if he could be serious. Samuel grinned.
“I am not going to live forever. Someone needs to know what I know,” he said. Illya’s mouth dried, suddenly feeling like the cracked earth of the dust plains beyond the mountains. He swallowed and cast a quick glance back over his shoulder. The sky had grown pink, shot through with gold. The Patrollers would be at the gates now to leave for the hunt, desperate for the big kill that could make all the difference for the village’s survival. His cousin Benja would be there too; he had become a Patroller five years past. Benja was a good hunter and could climb trees almost as well as a squirrel, making him a perfect scout.
Illya looked back at Samuel, watching his expression. The Healer’s face was kind but far from pity; his eyes held a hint of a challenge.
“If you think you can do it, that is,” he said, shrugging.
Illya’s set his jaw against the sick feeling in his stomach.
“It’s a deal,” he said and followed the Healer into the dimly lit room, shutting the door on the rising sun outside.
Shelves crammed with cloth bags and clay jars covered the walls. Bunches of dried herbs hung from the rafters, filling the room with a dusty green fragrance: a memory of spring. There was a fire crackling in the pit, sending smoke up through a hole in the center of the roof and casting shifting light on the walls and ceiling. Illya scanned the rafters, wondering if there was anything good to eat up there.
Samuel withdrew the book from a shelf corner and set it on a wooden table in the back of the room, motioning for him to sit down.
Now that it was finally in front of him, Illya stared at the book for a long moment. The cover was the color of pale buckskin and was covered with swirling lines. He was surprised to find himself shaking as he reached to open it. He hesitated and drew his hand back.
Among his people, it was believed that there were things a person was not meant to know. It was a gift of the gods that there were secrets in the world. When a person lost that gift: when he asked too much, he lost his mind as well.
But the longing to see what was inside it was too powerful to ignore. Illya sucked in a breath of cold, smoky air and opened the cover.
Charcoal-colored lines marched across the page in uniform rows. He traced his finger across the first row, wondering if they would brush away, but the shapes did not smear. Somehow, they seemed to be part of the paper. Grasping the edge of the paper with care, he turned it over. The markings alone were a wonder, but the next thing he came to was even better. A smiling man stood in a field with a basket full of plants. He looked like he was just beyond a window, not a hundred years or more in the past.
Illya didn’t recognize most of the plants the man was holding, though a few appeared to be bigger versions of things that grew in the woods. There was an onion in the basket. It was half as big as the man’s head! Illya stared at the long, pointy green stalks and the white hair-roots below the round bulb and felt his mouth watering.
On the next page was an array of shining colors, the colors of ripe crabapples and new leaves. There was clean silver metal and glass as clear as water. At first, Illya didn’t know what he was looking at, but a few moments later, he recognized the shape of the objects. Cars.