“When the people came out of the cities, they had no wall like this. They had to find out all of this for themselves. They left it for us so that we would not have to do that,” Samuel said.
Illya remembered the first day he had been shown the wall as a little himself. From Samuel’s description, he had pictured the cities as being underground. He had laughed at the thought of the people coming up out of them, blinking in the bright sunshine like moles coming out of their holes.
“Who has seen this one?” Samuel asked, and several of the littles raised their hands.
“Lace top,” a little boy said, and Samuel gave him an approving nod then moved on to point out some less common plants. These littles would see them again and again until they could recite what was on the wall without looking.
Illya could close his eyes and think his way down it. The fern fiddlehead was at the top, then the red-stemmed creeper beside the spotted mushroom, then blue cones, hood-flower, the lace top, and many more.
Some plants held malice all the time, and some only when they looked a certain way. This might be when they had flowers, when their shoots grew bigger than your little finger, or when they grew thorns. The pictures on the wall showed all of these things too.
“How did the people find them?” a little girl asked. Her belly was swollen too, just like Molly’s. Her eyes looked too big for her face, ringed with dark hollows.
“They learned by eating the plants to see what would happen,” Samuel said.
“They ate all the malice plants?” the lace-top boy asked. Samuel nodded.
“Why didn’t they die?” he asked.
“A lot of them did. That is why the wall is such a gift,” Samuel said, and the littles stared at it open-mouthed. Illya’s thoughts drifted, as they often had in the past days, to the book. What was it hiding? Did it have secrets in its pages like this? Things that could make their lives so much better that someday people wouldn’t be able to imagine how they had lived without knowing?
“What are these?” Samuel asked, indicating the carvings. They were separated from the malice plants by a wide groove running down the center.
“Those are the ones we eat,” said the lace-top boy. Illya swallowed. Half of the littles gazed at the carvings with wide, longing eyes. Some looked away sullenly.
“Yes, you probably recognize many of them. There are a few that do not grow anymore, or if they do, we have not been able to find them.” Samuel pointed to the first ones in the list.
“This one was called corn, the next one is wheat. They grew in the dust plains to the east before the seeds died,” Samuel said.
“I never saw anything like that,” one of the older ones said, crossing his arms.
Illya thought of the letters. He had stared at the first row so many times that he could have written them out in snow.
C, a, n, y, o, u, i, m, a
Repetition again, he realized. The shape a after C was the same as the a after m.
He thought through them a little farther: there was g, then i. Another repetition. He began to wonder how many letters there were in all, once you accounted for the fact some of them were just the same ones over and over.
“I never did either,” Samuel answered the boy with a sad smile. “But maybe someday we will find them again.”
That evening, Illya joined the people beside the central fire, more to distract himself from hunger than anything else.
The villagers milled around like a hive of bees with no queen to follow: directionless and afraid. The fragile ties between neighbors were strung taut, like bowstrings, and there was the sense in the air that at any moment they could snap.
“Only thing for it is to leave.” Illya overheard a man nearby speaking in low tones to several of his friends.
“Things never used to be like this,” said Charlie Polestad. “I remember when Dane—”
“Will you shut it about Dane Marshall? It’s not going to bring those days back,” the first man, Eddie Matheson, said.
“Marshall was the best Leader we ever had. Nothing’s gone right since he was killed. Ever since Elias—“
“Keep your voice down, Mark,” Eddie whispered.
“She talks about curses, but nothing has been more cursed than this village under that man,” Mark spat, in lower tones, jerking his head toward the stone house.
“Can’t leave anyway. It’s no good out there either,” Eddie said after a brief silence. “And them Terrors are hungry too.”
“Not like you’ll pop over the hill and find spring in the next valley,” Charlie said. He shook his head. “My ma’s weaker than I’ve ever seen her. We haven’t had more than bark in a week or more. She can’t even get out of bed now.”
There was silence at this. No one seemed to know what to say. Illya snuck a look past his shoulder at the men. Charlie hung his head and scuffed his foot on the ground.
“It’s not right,” Mark said. “Old Marieke starving when there’s some that have plenty.” He looked again at the stone house. Illya had not seen any of its residents—Elias, Impiri, and Sabelle—for several days, not since before the riot at Samuel’s. If they were holed up inside with stores of food while the rest of the village faced the disappearance of the roots, things could go bad, and quickly.
“They don’t have any more than the rest of us,” Charlie said, his face sagging. He rubbed his hand across the back of his neck.
“What we should be doing is weeding out the weakest, the ones who won’t survive anyway, give the rest of us a chance.” Jimmer Duncan strode up and joined the men. Charlie turned on him.
“You take that back,” he said. He cracked his neck and rolled his shoulders back. His jaw was hard, and his eyes were fierce. Jimmer, taller than him by a head, lifted his chin and looked down at Charlie.
“Won’t help them if all of the rest of us starve too. S’not like we would be killing anyone, just sending them to find a new chance somewhere else,” Jimmer said.
A cry tore from Charlie’s throat. He flung himself at Jimmer, pounding the bigger man with white-knuckled fists. Illya’s stomach rolled over. All he had eaten that day was bark and not the friendliest variety either. His stomach had been cramping with the effort of holding it down even before he had heard the talk.
Jimmer hardly flinched at Charlie’s blows. Soon, the other men succeeded in separating them. Illya retreated, realizing with a chill that went right through his bones that Charlie had been the only one who tried to shut Jimmer up.
The weakest.
That meant the old, the very young, and anyone already close to starving. That meant Charlie’s ma, old Marieke.
It meant Molly.
CHAPTER FOUR
AT HOME, ILLYA watched his sister sleeping peacefully in his mother’s arms. After a long time, he buried himself in his furs and lost himself in the book, trying to tell himself that it had been nothing but idle talk. He stared at the pictures, dreaming of how the people in them had lived, how they had always had enough to eat. You could see it in the roundness of their cheeks, their height, and the strength of their bodies. They had never talked about tossing starving elders or littles outside the walls to be taken by Terrors; he was sure of it.
He chewed on his lip, gazing for perhaps the hundredth time at the basket of plants in the smiling man’s arms. He traced their shapes then the shapes of the letters below the picture. Illya counted the characters in the passage, accounting for when they repeated. He found there weren’t very many at all.