by Bobby Adair
Ella grabbed William’s shoulder, as if to reinforce the Warden’s words. “Stay here, William.”
William settled down.
“You must’ve had a hell of a time dragging me in here,” Bray said.
“We managed.”
“I owe you one.”
His eyes wandered to his bag, which was lying next to Ella. Ella recalled taking it from him the night before, and felt a surge of panic. Bray was staring at her intently. Before she could explain, he cut her off.
“It’s okay. You can keep what’s inside,” he said. “You saved my life. You deserve it.”
“Even the demon skins?” William asked.
“Even the demon skins.”
Ella unpacked Bray’s bag, taking the silver, skins and berries, and tossed the bag back to him. She started to collect her things. “Well, we’d better be on our way. I’m glad you survived.”
She slung her bag over her shoulder. With the knowledge that Bray had lived, some of the anger of the previous night returned, and she dismissed her guilt at accepting his things. She started making for the exit, retrieving her sword.
“Do you even know how to use that thing?” Bray asked, frowning.
“I’ll figure it out.”
“It’ll be heavy at first. You might want to take a few practice swings.”
Ella ignored him and kept crawling.
“I assume you know the way to Davenport?”
“We’ll follow the river.”
“That wouldn’t be wise, remember?” Bray called. “The river is the worst place to linger.”
“We’ll stick to the woods.”
“I know a safer way.”
Ella sighed. “Why don’t you just tell us where it is, then?”
Bray took a long sip from his flask. He smiled, relishing the knowledge he held over them. Ella’s anger mounted.
“Tell us which way to go, then,” she demanded.
“Why don’t I just take you there? I can get you there in half the time it’ll take you to find your way without me.”
“I’d rather go alone.”
“I have a few things to take care of in Davenport,” Bray said. “Besides, you won’t know any of the merchants, and they’ll cheat you on the scalps. Then they’ll turn a nice profit when they trade them in.”
Ella paused, torn between the man who’d helped them and the man who’d betrayed them. If they went with Bray, how could they trust him again? At the same time, heading off alone would be a huge gamble. Besides, they could use his connections with the merchants.
“You’ll take us to the fairest one?”
“The fairest, and the best looking.” Bray smirked.
Ella rolled her eyes. “Okay. Deal.”
Chapter 32: Ivory
At first light, Ivory came to a windswept lip of rock at the top edge of a near-vertical stone face. Somewhere in the past, half the mountain had splintered and fallen away, forming a thousand-foot cliff down to the ground that sloped gently for five or ten miles, to the edge of an endless blue ocean. Breathtakingly tall towers of the old city slowly rusted and rotted on that ground, on both sides of a river, on the small islands offshore, and stretching into the distant gray haze up and down the coast. Brighton was just a speck of a bumpkin village compared to that dead metropolis.
But just as the Ancients who used to live in the old city had disappeared, he knew eventually the remaining towers and smaller buildings would crumble into the forest until nothing remained. Whether it took months or years, decay was inevitable.
At one time, one of the towers had stood taller than the cliff on which Ivory now stood—a vertical living forest, home to a million birds and who could guess what else. Ivory had laid eyes on that building only once, on his first visit to the ancient city. His uncle had taken him there. Some time prior to their next visit, four months later, the tower had collapsed into a mound of debris, burying many of the nearby structures in the vague grid pattern around it.
From atop the cliff, the pile of that giant tower’s rubble seemed small, but in fact, it was enormous. Even after its inevitable destruction under the weight of its stones and steel, it stood taller than any building in any of the three towns, and its debris spread wide enough to cover a quarter of Brighton in broken stone. And that was just one of the ancient towers.
On Ivory’s previous trip, he’d asked his friend Jingo how many buildings the Ancients had abandoned when they left the old city. Jingo had laughed and asked Ivory to guess. And so Ivory had guessed. But Jingo never answered.
Ivory stood at the top of the cliff in the cold, clear air. It was always the cold days that gave the longest views. He sat on a big rock, close enough to the edge of the cliff that he was able to see most of the ancient city filling the land between the mountains and the shore, and started counting. He’d expected to find the task time-consuming and tedious. He’d also expected it to have an end.
As he counted his way across the grids and odd patterns, the task grew difficult. Some square patterns in the grid contained single structures, some contained multiples, and some seemed to have no pattern at all. There were whole swaths of the city he couldn’t see, blocked from view by the ancient towers. Peculiar mounds and hills dotted the old city’s patterns—whether crumbled buildings or overgrown forest hills, he couldn’t tell. The process of counting, it turned out, wasn’t a matter of ticking off units, but a matter of making judgments at each tick.
After several hours, he’d managed to count only a small portion of the buildings in the old city. It’d seemed like such a simple thing when he’d started. As he sat on his rock, staring into the distance, he felt defeated by the task and understood Jingo’s laughter. It was impossible to count all of the buildings and houses.
The city had to have been magnificent in those days before the fall, alive with more people than Ivory could imagine, full of inscrutable far-talking devices, flying machines, and terrible weapons of flame, like small bits of the sun brought down from heaven to incinerate the enemy.
Stories of Tech Magic, the secret of the Ancients. Could it have truly been that powerful? Every time Ivory looked at the old city and imagined what it had once been, he believed the old stories. But to believe those old stories was to accept despair. The Ancients had been eradicated by a brutish race of beasts and none of the Ancients’ wondrous devices and terrible weapons had saved them.
What did that say for Brighton, with its hovels of wood and stone, its bows and swords, its horses? When would the twisted men finally come to kill them all?
Chapter 33: Ella
Ella, William, and Bray spilled back onto the mountain.
“Don’t look, William,” Ella warned.
She did her best to shield the boy from the dead soldiers, but she could sense him peering through her fingers. Even in the daylight, the bodies on the mountainside were barely recognizable—carcasses of bone and gnawed skin. Half-eaten limbs were strewn across the landscape, heads separated from spines. Ella shuddered at the knowledge that it’d almost been they who were the dismembered corpses.
Before leaving the cave, Bray warned them to keep quiet. The demons often returned to places where they’d found humans. Not just for days, he’d said, but often for weeks. With that knowledge, they navigated the slope with knives drawn and an eye on their swords. Traveling in the daylight gave Ella some measure of comfort, but it wasn’t enough to quell her fear. The demons weren’t limited to any particular time of the sun, as she’d learned.
They’d attack anytime.
Soon they’d left the gruesome scene behind. The sun had crested the mountain, and its fervent rays spat upon the landscape, serving as both a guide and hindrance. Ella walked at a brisk pace, trying to keep the sound of her footsteps subdued. William scampered beside her. She noticed Bray was
leading them sideways, simultaneously descending the mountain and changing course.
William was scratching his neck. Ever since leaving the cave, he’d seemed distracted and withdrawn, and Ella had done her best to keep him on task. She could only imagine what he was thinking. They’d seen plenty of violence and bloodshed in town, but he’d never killed anyone himself. That must have had some effect on him.
In addition, he was probably afraid of what he was turning into.
The fact that the spores were taking hold of him must be terrifying. As a mother, it terrified her, and it shredded her heartstrings that she couldn’t help him. All Ella could do was to buy them some time. Sooner or later, William’s delusions would catch up to him, and from then on, his brain would deteriorate.
The knots on his skin would swell and spread.
To be fair, Ella didn’t know much about the infection. The stories the townspeople told were often vague and conflicting. Most of the infected people she’d encountered had been on their way to the pyre, ready to burn for sins they hadn’t yet committed. She knew what the beginning stages of the infection looked like, and she knew the result, but much of what happened in between was a mystery.
She remembered how Ethan had looked at her before he’d gone to the pyre. His eyes—normally deep and blue—had been shallow and unfocused. It wasn’t the look of a man infected, but the look of a man who knew what was coming.
Most days, she did her best to forget her husband’s final day, choosing to remember her husband as he’d lived, rather than as he’d died.
Ethan would’ve wanted it that way.
**
She’d met Ethan when she was fifteen. He’d come to Davenport on a farming mission, intent on trading tips with the locals. Or so she’d been told.
She’d been living with her aunt and uncle at the time. Several years earlier, Ella’s parents had died from Winter’s Death, a severe outbreak of the flu that had claimed fifty lives in Davenport. In addition to thinning the population, the illness had stripped the village of knowledge. Many of the deceased had been farmers or tradesman, and their absence left a gap in the economy, leading to a long season of famine.
And so Ella struggled. In addition to mourning her parents, she had to move out of her childhood home. Aunt Jean and Uncle Frederick were kind enough, but it was an adjustment, and one that didn’t come easy.
With the arrival of Ethan, everything changed once again.
On that particular day, her aunt and uncle called her in early from the field. Ethan was waiting in the house. Ella immediately scanned the table, certain she’d find a display of crops, but there was nothing but the boy, smiling nervously. Ella looked at him, confused. It wasn’t until she saw the expression on her uncle’s face that she understood.
“This is Ethan,” Uncle Frederick said.
His eyes watered, and he cleared his throat. Although Uncle Frederick was normally stoic, he was unable to contain his emotion. When she finally digested what was happening, Ella darted out of the house without a word, running into the field as fast as her legs would carry her.
Tears sprung to her eyes as she plowed through the grass. She kept her gaze on the harvest fields, intent on gaining as much distance from the scene as possible. Although she suspected this day would arrive, she hadn’t thought it would come so soon. There were things she had to take care of here—one obligation in particular that it broke her heart to leave with her aunt and uncle.
After several minutes of running, she collapsed into a ball in the field, crying quietly into her hands next to a row of leafy squash plants.
Several minutes later, she heard footsteps.
Ella hugged her knees, praying she could make herself disappear. With the exception of one happy miracle, the past few years had been some of the worst of her life, and she was still getting adjusted. When she looked up, she expected to find the stern face of her uncle, but was surprised to find Ethan. He knelt down on the dirt.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
The boy kept his distance, watching her from several feet away. She noticed his eyes darting around the landscape rather than looking at her, and after a while, she relaxed.
“I think so,” she answered.
As she looked over at him, she realized she’d barely taken him in. Ethan’s hair was brown and shaggy, his eyes a penetrating blue. He was handsome. Although he looked several years older than her, he had the appearance of someone who was just as confused as she was.
“My parents sent me here,” he confessed. “They’re waiting for me at the market.”
Ella nodded, drying her eyes. “I guess I won’t be picking the rest of my crops.”
Ethan went silent for a moment, the guilt apparent on his face.
“You can, if you want to.”
“But they’ll need me to—”
“Never mind. I’ll help you finish.”
With that, Ethan got to his feet and walked down the row, locating a half-filled basket of squash she’d left behind. He brought it back to her and helped her to her feet, then gave her a smile.
“You’ll have to show me which ones are ready,” he said.
“You don’t already know?” Ella wrinkled her brow in disbelief.
“Sure, but you might do things differently in Davenport. I’m from Brighton.”
With a coy smile, he bent over the nearest plant and made a show of tugging at the green leaves. Ella watched him for a minute, and then, unable to contain her amusement, walked over and showed him. Soon they were pulling squash together, filling the basket.
“The soil in Davenport is difficult for planting,” Ella said.
“How so?”
“My aunt and uncle had to work around the rocks. It’s hard to find dirt that is deep enough.”
“That makes sense. The villages built too close to the ruins are often that way,” Ethan said.
“What’s it like in Brighton?” she asked.
“Mostly the same. My parents have a farm, sort of like this one. The soil is rich for vegetables. I’m getting ready to purchase my own plot. I’ve been saving for it since I was a boy.”
“How old are you?”
“Almost sixteen. My birthday is just after the harvest.”
They chatted more, speaking of the yearly festival and the annual Riverwash, as well as the merchants they knew in town. Before long, they were laughing and getting along, and Ella forgot that her aunt and uncle were waiting for her. When they finished filling up the basket, Ella stopped in the field, glancing back at the house she’d called home for the past few years.
“I guess we’ll have to head back in.”
Ethan’s smile faded, and she saw that he was just as nervous. “Yeah. I told your aunt and uncle I’d bring you back inside.”
“How long will you be in town?” Ella swallowed.
“Just long enough to plan the ceremony.” Ethan paused, his eyes darting back to the field. “That is, if you agree.”
Ella’s heart swelled with emotion, and she nodded, forcing back the tears. Although she didn’t have a choice, she was grateful he’d asked. Unlike the older men in the village—the ones who whistled and catcalled while she delivered vegetables, she sensed that Ethan was different. And even though they’d just met, she was able to envision a life with him.
The illusion of choice was better than having no choice at all.
Chapter 34: Ella
As promised, Ethan secured his own plot in Brighton, and a year later, William was conceived.
Although she was homesick at first, Ella thrust herself into her new routine, tending to the newborn baby and assisting with the crops. Ethan’s parents helped in raising William, filling in the gaps left by Ella’s aunt and uncle. Soon the memories of her past life in Davenport faded—e
xcept for one that haunted her and another she treasured—and her life transitioned into something she could describe as happiness.
Ethan proved himself a hard worker, producing more food than was necessary to survive. Although a surplus of silver in Brighton was a rare thing, especially among The People, it was a goal Ella and Ethan both shared. As they tended the fields and delivered crops to the merchants, they dreamt of a day when they could lighten their workload.
Because travel was dangerous and expensive, Ella lost touch with her aunt and uncle, seeing them only a handful of times over the years. She did her best to fill William’s head with tales of her uncle’s firm but pleasant face, her aunt’s talent for cooking and sewing.
Despite the threat of demons and the periodic anxiety of The Cleansing, much of the last decade had been a pleasant one. Up until Ethan’s parents got sick.
The plague was vicious, and by the time it ended, it claimed the lives of her in-laws. Although Ella, Ethan, and William managed to escape the illness themselves, they spent the majority of their earnings on roots and medicines, hoping to assist Ethan’s parents.
And the worst was yet to come.
Right before the harvest, Ethan was called into battle. The soldiers had detected a horde of demons close to the border, and they enlisted the help of the townsfolk. Many of the farmers protested, citing concerns about lost crops and unprotected families, but General Blackthorn ignored them. The General had only one priority—eradicating the demons.
Ethan left for almost a week. During his absence, Ella and William did their best to tend to the crops, confident they could get through it.
Ella could still remember the joy she’d felt when her husband had returned from battle. But instead of returning her affection, Ethan kept them at a distance, sharing little about what he’d been through. It wasn’t until a day later that she found out the reason.
