“Except for when they aren’t.” Salka put her hand on her hip. “You know what they’ll do to us if they find us?”
Every young striga grew up with the knowledge that the banishment from Heyne Town was considered clemency. Before the Dolas struck the agreement with the Heyne council all those years ago, infant strigas ended up at the bottom of the cliff as often as in the forest. There would be no mercy for a grown striga found in the town.
A shiver went down Salka’s spine and she could feel the comforting warmth of her other heart’s shadow slither up her back. She tensed her jaw and swatted it away, hoping her friends didn’t notice.
“They won’t catch us! Dran knows the trick of it, you know,” Emila said, pointing to Dran. “He’s been many times! He stole a chicken the last time he was there! Count the chickens in Alma’s yard if you don’t believe me.”
Dran nodded.
Salka had to admit it was an impressive feat. She thought of how a laying hen could improve her mother’s life. An egg each morning for Miriat’s breakfast. Salka imagined her mother’s surprise and how pleased she would be.
“How did you do it? I’m not saying I’ll go with you, mind,” she asked, though in her head she was already cooking up a breakfast of onion and eggs for her mother. Her proud offering. She wondered if her mother used to breakfast on eggs every day before she was forced to leave what Salka imagined as a life of endless comfort.
“Nothing to it,” Dran said, shrugging his shoulders.
Salka put her hands on her hips. “Be specific,” she said.
“All right, look,” Dran sighed and rolled his eyes for Emila’s benefit. She obliged with a giggle. “All the men leave at first light to work in the mine. Those who don’t will be warming their bones by their fires this late in the year and all the women leave at midday to carry food to their men. The town is practically abandoned for near two hours every day. There’s a path I know we can take, hidden from view. It’s easy pickings from then on if you’re fast.”
Salka mulled it over. Miriat would be glad of a chicken, that was for sure and certain. But she would also be furious to know her daughter had gone where she had been explicitly forbidden to go.
“I’ll do it,” Salka said quickly and immediately felt guilty. She straightened her back. She wouldn’t let Miriat dictate where she could and couldn’t go.
They moved quietly, with Dran leading the way. He seemed to move more awkwardly than usual, but Salka supposed it was the storm of last night making his leg hurt.
“What were you two talking about before?” Salka asked in a whisper, giving Emila’s arm a quick squeeze. “He stood awfully close, I thought…” She smiled and cast a sideways glance at her friend.
“Don’t tease! I can’t tell you anyway. It’s a secret,” Emila said, though she blushed with pleasure. She kept an even pace, though Salka noticed with some amusement that Emila’s shadow rose up and fell with emotion. She nudged her friend, who immediately brought her heart under control and murmured a quick apology.
“A secret you can keep? Well, that’s a first,” Salka said.
Emila ignored the jibe. She was a little out of breath and called out to Dran to stop for a moment. She looked imploringly at Salka, who didn’t bother sitting down, not even for solidarity’s sake. Now that she’d agreed to the adventure, she was impatient to get there.
“How do you two manage to walk so fast! I can barely keep up!” Emila sat on a tree stump and stretched her legs in front of her. She glanced around “Where’s Munu? I haven’t seen him today.”
“Oh, he’s around,” Salka said. “Never more than a whistle away. Watch.” She put two fingers in her mouth and whistled loudly. An acorn fell down and bounced off Emila’s head. “He’s in a good mood.” Salka grinned as Emila shot her an annoyed look.
“Why you keep that fleabag around I will never understand. His hunting days are behind him. And he seems to be getting meaner every day,” Dran said, looking at the trees.
“Sort of like you, then,” Salka shot back, and then covered her mouth. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean…”
“I know what you meant,” Dran said. He looked away and shrugged his arms. “Are you both ready to go?”
Emila gave Salka a reproachful look and rushed forward to walk alongside Dran. She tried to take his arm, but he shook her off, so she just trotted beside him. Salka followed miserably after. She idly grabbed the fluffy tops of the tall yellowed grasses growing between the exposed slate they walked on. It was slippery and wet after the night’s rain, and soon Salka’s boots were sodden through. Still, she enjoyed the cold morning air, even if the walk suddenly held a lot less appeal. She whistled softly and Munu flew down and sat himself on her shoulder, as was his custom. Salka hoped that Emila would look back at her, but her friend was too engrossed in a conversation with Dran to pay her much attention.
Emila laughed at something he said and cast a furtive look backwards. Salka blushed and felt suddenly self-conscious in her ugly cloak and her short hair which the moisture of the mountain air had curled tighter, forming a halo around her head.
She woke up before the roosters for this? To be sneered at by her best friend? Her face darkened with anger and she jutted out her chin defiantly.
They walked for a few hours, till Dran stopped and turned to Emila and Salka with a grin stretching his handsome face. He made a wide sweeping motion. “We’re here!”
Salka looked around. Instead of the tall pines which surrounded the striga village, the forest here was lush with vegetation. The changing autumn leaves colored the canopy above their heads with fiery reds and yellows.
“I’ve never been so far this side of the mountains,” Salka said, gently touching the snow-white bark of the tree next to her.
“Well, it’s high time if you ask me!” Dran said. “You have to live a little!”
He smiled at Salka, and Emila followed his lead, taking Salka’s arm again. Salka felt her heart swell with the gratitude of the forgiven.
They came to the edge of the forest. A large, gnarled tree rose before them. It seemed out of place there, and yet strangely beautiful. Small wooden tags hung from its branches, each covered in carved writing. Most of them were old, with a deep cut across the markings. The breeze moved the branches, causing the tags to rattle against each other. It sent shivers down Salka’s back.
Her mouth hung open. “What is it?” she said finally.
“It’s the Hope Tree.” Dran put his hand against the tree’s mossy bark. “It tells us when to come and collect the striga babies born in the town.”
“Maladia’s mentioned it before… But nobody really wants to talk about it,” Salka said, gently touching one of the markers. “Why is it called the Hope Tree?” She’d often seen Maladia and some of the other young strigas make the journey here, but she’d never been asked to go with them. She more than suspected her mother had something to do with that.
“I suppose the humans hope the baby will not be a striga and if it turns out to be one… Well, they hope it survives anyway…” Emila said. Dran raised his eyebrows, surprised at the uncharacteristic insight.
“The markers tell us when the baby is due. We usually send someone to camp out here for a bit, just in case it’s one of ours.” Dran took one of the tags down. “See, the ones that have a cross carved through are the old ones. That’s how we keep track. It would be impossible to have someone stationed so far out of the village permanently.”
“What if the baby comes early?” Emila asked, her eyes wide.
“We wait for a time before and after. There are few we miss,” Dran said, and casually threw an old tag into the bushes. Salka wondered if the tag represented a baby saved or one that didn’t need saving. One who’d been welcomed with joy; wrapped in a warm soft blanket, placed lovingly in a freshly carved crib. With parents and grandparents leaning over with smiles on their faces.
There was none of that for Salka and Miriat. Salka clenched her jaw. The townsfol
k should count themselves lucky if all she did was steal a chicken.
They walked in silence again until they could see fields through the trees.
Salka had never wandered this close to the town. She felt a thrill as she exchanged a smile with Emila. But her smile fell when she thought of Maladia. “Do you think they’re safe? Markus and Maladia, I mean?”
Dran turned to her sharply, as if stricken. “Why would you ask that?” As soon as the words left his lips he turned away, a blush spreading across his face.
It was Salka’s turn to be surprised. “Maladia was a friend. Do you not wonder…”
“No, I don’t,” Dran said. He paused for a moment and then turned back to her with a nod. An apology of sorts, she thought. He added, “It’s just there’s no point in wondering and worrying and thinking about them. They’re gone. Markus did a terrible thing and we had to let them go. We’re all sad, Salka, but we have to go on. And I say the best way to do it is to forget them entirely.”
Salka was about to say that the forgetting would not come so easily to Trina, except Emila pulled on her sleeve and pointed ahead.
“Look!” Emila said. “You can see the tops of the houses from here. Look how even they are, like teeth. Just one next to the other!”
Salka nodded, and they moved in a single file towards the town.
There were some terraced fields between the town and the forest, filled with hardy crops that could survive the unpredictable weather. There were small twisted purple potatoes, barley and oats growing in patches among the stones. The slate mines southeast of the town were the real bread and butter of the Heyne Mountain folk.
It was coming up on lunchtime and soon the miners’ wives and children would be making the trek down with warm food in their baskets. It was a ritual which had started before, when the Heyne Town was a Heyne Village, and it had continued while the population grew as a way of remaining connected to the old ways. Dran knew this, of course, when he proposed the trip.
Salka looked at him as he was explaining all this, and then she glanced at Emila, who was near giddy with anticipation.
Dran knew so much about the town and their customs, he almost made it sound like home, though he was born in the striga village. He was the fourth generation of strigas in his line, and – his mother hoped – the second leader once she was gone. Alma announced she was pregnant one day during an assembly and then moved on to the matters of land allocation, herding duties, and shearing rotations. Nobody had ever dared ask about the father, and nobody even cared much who he was, from what Salka understood.
As if he could sense her thoughts, Dran looked at her, his even eyebrows furrowed quizzically. “We have to be quick, you understand? In and out. If you get caught, we leave you,” Dran said with a smile which didn’t quite reach his eyes.
“Dra-an!” Emila smacked him playfully on the shoulder. “She’ll think you’re serious!”
Salka turned red. Just as she opened her mouth, Dran said, “I hope she does, Emila. And you best believe it too. You mess up and get caught, you’re on your own. There’ll be nothing we can do. Now, we’ve got to make a move, we don’t have a whole day.” He pulled his hood low over his face and told them to follow. Salka, still smarting from Emila’s comment, pushed ahead, letting her shoulder knock against Emila’s side. She was rewarded with an annoyed look. Munu jumped up and flew over their heads, a black outline against the grey sky.
They walked fast, moving from boulder to boulder, trying to keep as low to the ground as possible. Salka thought Emila looked quite comical, her head bobbing forward and backwards like a chicken being chased around the coop. When they got behind an elevated bit of ground Salka poked Emila’s arm and imitated a chicken gait. Emila tried to keep a severe expression but finally burst into giggles.
“Shut up!” Dran said. “You want to get the whole town on our heads? Be quiet or go back!”
Stifling their giggles, Emila and Salka said, “Sorry, Dran.” They smiled at each other and followed him downhill.
It was easier to keep hidden once they reached the edge of town. There were small barns and outhouses to sneak behind. But it was also scarier, in a way Salka didn’t think it would be. She had heard what the townsfolk did to a captured striga, and though she suspected at least half of it was made up, the other half was decidedly more risk than she was prepared to take.
But it was too late to turn back, especially without something to show for it.
“Dran,” Salka said, “where are we going now? These people have chickens, I can hear them through the fence. Let’s just grab a couple and we can go back.”
“I want more than a chicken,” he said without looking at her.
They kept moving through the quiet. Emila scrunched up her nose, and her shadow seemed to crawl into her in disgust. “God, it reeks!” she said. And it did. In the village there was the comforting, ever-present smell of goats, but for all that, the air was still crisp and tasted fresh the way only mountain air can. Heyne Town was large enough that all the smells a large number of people can produce crowded and oppressed the nostrils of anyone who wandered in.
They were in the center of the town now, hunched together behind a shop with barrels of what smelled like salted fish on one side and an open space on the other. They made sure to stick to the west side of town, in case someone coming back from the mines should see them.
“Right, we meet here when the sun moves above that peak,” Dran pointed towards a distant mountain. “It will be easier for us to go separately, rather than try to sneak through together. Keep your hoods over your faces. If somebody sees you, keep your wits about you, and don’t run; they might take you for a local. Always keep to the dark side of the street and keep your shadows in the dark too. The townsfolk might not listen in to every stranger’s heartbeat, but they would certainly notice your shadows.”
Dran went first. After a moment, Emila gave Salka a hug and said quickly, “I’ll try and get you something pretty.” And then she was off.
Salka waited for a moment, trying to steady her breath. The wooden wall of the shop felt oddly soothing to her. She stretched out her arm and watched her hand until it stopped shaking. She looked around. She’d only have the one chance to pick a direction. Heyne Town might not be rich, but it looked the very picture of opulence to someone brought up in the striga village. The straight, two-story houses with their barns fascinated Salka. Keeping livestock in a separate building made very little sense to her: losing all that heat and the comfort of the warm bodies was unthinkable.
Pulling the hood of her worn-out cloak over her face, she looked at the street between the houses, the smoothed-out cobblestones and the painted front doors. They all seemed terribly beautiful. That someone would paint their doors pale blue was an act of unimaginable extravagance. To have a door was luxury enough; to have a blue door was as far away from her world as the moon itself. She envied the inhabitants with all the savage strength of her heart. Anger rose up to the surface again, warming her chest and tightening her hands into fists. How dare those cold, cruel people have such loveliness in their lives while her mother’s house had nothing but some old skins by the entrance to keep out the winter cold?
Looking west, she saw a house on top of a small hill, sixty or so yards away from the shop, surrounded by coniferous hedges. There was no smoke coming through the chimney.
She decided to slide down the side of the elevated path and walk in its shadow as Darn had suggested. She sniffed and wiped her nose absent mindedly with her sleeve. It was getting colder. She walked quickly and scaled the wooden steps wedged into the side of the hill. She crept up to the window of the house and looked inside.
The neatly swept floor and the rough wooden table looked promising. Anyone with a table like that would be sure to have things to put on it. Not just a chicken or two but likely a whole coop! Salka crept around the side of the wall and looked through the other window. She jumped as something wet touched her hand; a black and white
lamb looked up at her and pressed its nose to the pocket of her trousers. “I have nothing for you. Go! Shoo!” Salka pushed the greedy face away, but the lamb was undeterred. It was very young, and Salka wondered briefly why a farmer would let a lamb be born so far into the autumn.
Munu landed noisily on the roof on the house and turned his head to the side. He then swept down toward Salka, grabbing her cloak, and started to pull on it.
“Ouch! What’s gotten into you? Munu, let go!” She froze as she heard what Munu must have seen from the roof. The townsfolk were back. There was shouting and calling out, and a horrifying certitude crept up Salka’s back in a shiver.
“Oh no…” she said. They must have seen Emila and Dran. She had to run. But she wasn’t going to leave empty-handed. She looked around her and met eyes with the black-and-white lamb which was watching her with the uncommitted curiosity typical of its kind. Making a quick decision, Salka took off her cloak and, with one swift movement, she swept the lamb up into it, hoisting it onto her back. She broke into a run, sliding down the hill and scraping her knees on the sharp stones. The cries were getting closer.
“I saw one of them! It went into Rodik’s house! Quick, don’t let it escape!”
Salka wondered briefly who Rodik was and whether it was Emila or Dran they had seen. She climbed back up the path toward the shop where she started, and was relieved to see Emila and Dran there, the latter panting heavily, leaning against the barrels.
“Good, you’re back! We have to get out of here… What the hell is that?!” Dran said, bristling. “That fucking thing will give us away!”
The lamb on Salka’s back was indeed making rather pitiful noises as it squirmed to get out of the makeshift sling. “No, it’s all right, let’s go!” Salka shifted her position uncomfortably. “Emila, you go first!” Her friend, face drained of color, nodded curtly and moved fast along the side of the houses towards the field.
Dran was listening to the noises of the townsfolk approaching with his back glued to the wall. “All right, we’ve got to go. They’re going house by house searching for us,” he said. “Follow me.”
The Second Bell Page 5
