Once his eyes had adjusted, he could see the coyotes were clearly under the moonlight: light shapes retreating across dark fields. But no Terrors appeared to close in on them. He could hear the yipping getting fainter as the dogs drew farther away. For a wild moment, he wondered if the Terrors were invisible.
Then the answer came to him. No Terrors had descended on them out of the darkness because they were the ones making the sounds. They were the Terrors, and he had driven them away by throwing a single rock. All this time, his people had lived in fear of nothing but a pack of coyotes.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
WITH ONLY HIMSELF to feed, there was little to occupy his time. Illya knew that he should be preparing for winter; gathering food and finding ways to store it, maybe even finding a better place to stay. But the idea of surviving an entire winter on his own, outside the village, seemed so impossible that he could barely comprehend trying it. He avoided thinking about the future as much as possible and instead found his thoughts drifting to the past.
He was free, but he had not escaped what he had done. More and more, as he sat alone in his camp with nothing but the fire for company, Illya sank into guilt. He missed his family. He wondered what they were all doing now and worried about how the villagers were treating them. He worried that he was wrong in assuming Conna would not make an example of them, though they’d had nothing to do with his crimes.
He wondered if the plants had died from the disease yet or if any had lived. Most of all, he wondered if the villagers had found a way to survive the winter.
He tried not to think of Sabelle, but inevitably there were moments when his thoughts went back to that morning: the last time he had seen her. A whiff of campfire smoke and dew, or the flash of the color of her eyes in a bluebird’s wing, and he would be back with her under the maple. The way she smelled and the smile on her face as she had looked up at him would flood in on him. She had liked him, despite everything.
She probably hated him now. He wondered if she was with Conna, now that he had taken over.
Whenever he could pull himself out of his gloom, Illya did his best to turn his camp into a home. He discovered another ruin nearby. This one was so far off the broad path that none of the villagers could have ever been to it.
The building was in shambles, so much that his cave was a better shelter, but he scavenged a good bit of cloth and even found some empty metal cans that had not completely rusted through. With these additions, his little cave was outfitted nicely.
He set traps and had more success than he had ever had closer to the village. Soon he had some furs tanning. For the moment, survival was not the hardest thing about being away from home.
He sat by the stream one morning and thought of Molly drawing the lumpy potato on the floor. He was suddenly so lonely he had to close his eyes against tears. She was being courted by that boy, Dianthe’s son. He had never gotten the chance to ask her if she even liked him.
His belly twisted with an absurd surge of new guilt. Compared to everything else that had happened, telling Dianthe to look for a girl with black eyes for her son to marry had to be the least of it. There weren’t many girls with black eyes in the village. If he had thought it through at all, he could have predicted that it would happen.
He hoped that Molly liked the boy or that she knew how to tell him no if she didn’t. They could even be married by now, he realized. Sometimes marriages came fast once young people started courting, especially in uncertain times like these.
He swallowed.
He didn’t know anything. He didn’t even know if they were alright.
Of course, to find any answers, he would have to go back, and he had no doubt that the lynching he had fled would resume right where it had left off.
He tried to put it all out of his mind and went out to check his traps. But things that Conna had said, which had once seemed innocent and well-meaning, kept popping into his head.
We have to do whatever it takes.
With each memory, it got harder and harder to keep from worrying. Conna had always been ruthless. At the time, it had seemed excusable. Illya had overlooked it because he thought that it served the plan. But if the pattern held, Conna was probably capable of anything.
He shook the thought away.
He tried to remember another side of Conna, the one that had reached out and supported him in the first place, the one that had been his friend when everyone else had deserted him. Conna had always been there, no matter what.
Until he had betrayed the knowledge of the plant disease to all the villagers and nearly gotten Illya killed.
Illya drove his fist into a nearby tree.
Pain shot through him, and he doubled over around his hand. He curled around his arm, smelling tree sap as hot lances throbbed from his knuckles.
Two of the traps were empty, although one had paw prints on the ground nearby. He adjusted it and went on. His third trap had been sprung but was empty too. The fourth had a rabbit.
Alone by his fire, he sat back and worked on scraping the new hide. He tried to concentrate on the work, but his hand throbbed, and the memories were pounding against his mind like river water against a runoff dam. He couldn’t help but think of how he would have been with them all now, eating beside the central fire. Carefully, he dragged a sharp stone back and forth across the underside of the skin, ignoring the pain in his hand. It made him feel better to hurt, almost as if it was a piece of justice for what he had done. He worked until the hide was perfectly clean.
Holding it under the running water of the stream, he rubbed it with sand, cleaning it as well as he could. The pebbles on the riverbank dug into his knees as he worked, and he shifted his weight before rinsing the sand free of the fur.
He went back to his fire, shivering. It was not very cold, but there was the hint of a chill in the air.
He spread the hide out on the ground in front of him and crouched beside it to bore holes along the edge with his knife. His knee itched, and he rubbed it absently, feeling the indentations the river pebbles had left where he had kneeled in them.
Another memory flooded into his mind. On the night the first shoots had come months before, another set of pebbles had pressed a pattern into his calf as he had watched the dancing. He remembered Sabelle’s timid smile at him across the circle. It was a point of such sweetness that it hurt to think of it.
The people who had made that mosaic would have no idea of the hardship that would follow for their people.
He made holes around the edge of the skin and cut strips of the leather to tie it across a frame to dry. This part of the process would take a week, and it would take another few days to treat the hide with brains, soften it, and set it all in with smoke from the fire. He wondered which one of their ancestors had known how to tan a hide. Perhaps the same one who could heat and pound metal into a shape, who had saved a picture of a Noria wheel. Someone in Ban’s family, no doubt. Maybe that ancestor had been the only one who had brought anything useful out of the world of the Olders.
There were some things, though, that the settlers had known well. How was it that there were such massive gaps when all of it mattered to survive? Someone had known enough about medicines to give Samuel’s forerunners the knowledge that had been passed to him.
Edible foods, though, which should have been the most basic information, had to be discovered almost entirely by trial and error. Jones Ph.D., legend told, had only known about a handful of plants, barely enough to get them through the first season.