Survivors (Harmony Book 3)

by Margaret Ball

  Kaytlin offered more information on Afguernsey goats than Jillian really wanted while expertly stripping the goat’s teats. Phrases like “lab cross, breeds true,” “cashmere undercoat,” “milk production,” and “eats anything,” bounced off her tired head. Finally Kaytlin stopped talking and handed Jillian a pail full of milk. “That should make Tomi happier!”

  “But how am I to get it into him?” She supposed she could sacrifice the other end of the shawl, dip it into the milk and try to get him to suck on it.

  “No, no, you won’t need to do that,” Felisha said. “Every lambing season we have to feed a few lambs whose mothers walk off and abandon them. Sheep are much stupider than goats; some of ours have – had – all the maternal instincts of a large rock. Wait here, I’ll get one of the feeding bottles from the kitchen.” She dashed into the living quarters and came out with a glass bottle topped with a large rubber nipple. “We’re okay for dishes, anyway; looks like they didn’t bother to wreck the house.”

  Jillian felt a little bit uncertain about giving Tomi something to suck on that had last been in a lamb’s mouth, but both girls swore that the kitchen chief had been an absolute tyrant about sterilizing everything before it was put away. And Tomi himself seemed to have no doubts at all; as soon as the bottle was within reach he seized it and began sucking vigorously.

  “He’s got a good grip on it,” Felisha exulted. “Are you sure he’s only three months?” She gazed at the baby with a hungry look that reminded Jillian of the unhappy women in Lost Maple. “I could hold him for you…”

  “Hey, I milked the goat!” Kaytlin interrupted. “Me first!”

  “But I found the bottle!”

  Jillian grinned. It was good to hear them squabbling like the children they’d been before life forced them to grow up overnight. “Felisha, why don’t you hold Tomi while Kaytlin shows me around the house quickly. Then Kaytlin can give him the second half of his bottle.”

  The living quarters showed some signs of a quick search: slashed pillows, drawers yanked out of a desk. But the pillows had been replaced neatly on the beds, and the emptied drawers were stacked on the top of the desk.

  Kaytlin was puzzled. “Someone must have been here since the raid. Those slobs wouldn’t have picked up after themselves.” She felt a towel in the washroom: still damp. “And they definitely wouldn’t have washed. I’m pretty sure the reason they were such an ugly looking crew was that they never cleaned any wounds they got, just let them get infected and chopped the part off.”

  Jillian felt her cheek. It didn’t seem to have become infected, probably thanks to Kaytlin and her poultices. But the raised line would likely be there forever.

  “And another thing,” Kaytlin said.

  “What?”

  She scowled. “Somebody has to have been milking Afsana regularly. Unless you think the goat fairy just made her show up like that, perfectly healthy and with her udder full.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  The deserted wool cooperative was a treasure-house of useful supplies, though Jillian wasn’t sure how much they should take with them. If Kaytlin and Felisha meant to stay here, everything was theirs. But surely they wouldn’t stay in a place that held tragic memories for them – an indefensible farm within range of the bandits? Or would they think that after the poisoning, they were safe enough? The question still hadn’t been settled in late afternoon.

  They’d certainly found enough food to take that off Jillian’s list of worries – bins of grain, dried tomatoes, braids of onions and garlic and hot peppers, even jars of preserved fruit. She was surprised that the bandits hadn’t carried everything away.

  “I told you they were lazy slobs,” Kaytlin said. “And stupid. They came after our sheep, and took Felisha and me as an afterthought. They didn’t have to kill everybody… Did I mention they were cruel, as well as stupid and lazy? But you know that.”

  “So they didn’t think of raiding your food stores?” Jillian hastily went back to the part that mattered now. The other was… something she would think about later.

  Maybe.

  On one thing she was determined. The goat was coming with them. If Kaytlin wanted to stay here, Jillian would get her to demonstrate how to milk the animal in the morning. She needed that milk for Tomi. And the feeding bottles, too. Beyond that, they would take only as much food as they needed to make it to Ash Grove. And the weapon Ruven was improvising from a rake handle and a sharp blade taken from the shearing shed.

  For tonight, Felisha was cooking some of the oats from a kitchen storage bin over a smoky fire of twigs and scrap lumber, with dried tomatoes and salt to season them.

  “If you used all the oats that aren’t left, this porridge is going to be way thick,” Kaytlin complained.

  “Well, I didn’t, then. Anyway, there wasn’t all that much left.”

  Kaytlin muttered that she knew the bin had been full on the day before the raid, and clearly somebody had been dipping into it since then. Probably the same somebody who’d burned the bodies, picked up the living quarters, and milked the goat. Not exactly hostile actions – but it made all of them nervous that someone had been living here who had chosen not to show himself.

  He turned up when the porridge was done: a lanky young man with the beginnings of a beard, limping in nervously with his empty hands held high.

  “Alun! They didn’t kill you?” Kaytlin sounded less than entirely happy about it.

  Alun told them he’d been hit on the head during the raid and regained consciousness in a pile of bodies. He’d been afraid to move until full daylight, when he could be sure the bandits were gone. He ducked his head and avoided looking at Kaytlin and Felisha as he told this part of the story.

  “I didn’t know – I thought everybody was dead but me. Until I sorted out the bodies. Then I realized you two were missing. But it had been a day and a half. I didn’t know where they’d taken you. Didn’t actually think – ”

  “That we might still be alive?”

  “I wasn’t thinking too well,” Alun said. “Look, I’m sorry about burning all the bodies, but I had to do something. I couldn’t leave our folk laying on the ground for scavengers to chew on, could I? And my leg’s been bad, it hurt too much to dig. The best I could do was knock down that old shed, it was fixing to fall down anyway, and, and…” He broke off, his mouth working. It looked to Jillian like he was trying to suppress a sob.

  “When you folk came,” he switched topics, “I was sleeping in the shearing shed. Heard voices. Didn’t know who you were – heard a man talking – thought it might be them come back. Got out of there, been hiding in the ditch along High Meadow all day. Heard you and F’lisha. Smelled food. Thought I might be going crazy, but discord take it – just as soon be crazy, or dead, as spend any longer here by m’self. At night they cry out, y’know. Our people. I hear them dying again.”

  Jillian thought that Alun might not be too tightly wrapped right now, but he might do better away from this cooperative. Nights alone with the ghosts of his dead clearly hadn’t done a lot for his sanity.

  “Well, that settles it,” Kaytlin said after hearing Alun’s story.

  “You’re going to stay here and rebuild the cooperative,” Jillian said dully. It was what she’d feared. She started building her arguments for taking the goat with them when she and Ruven left.

  “Dissonance! No!” Kaytlin exclaimed. “Three of us to defend the place? And all of us seeing our dead in every shadow? No, what I think is – if you don’t mind – we’d like to come along with you, see if we can find a place at Ash Grove. Alun, you agree, don’t you?”

  Jillian’s lips twitched. It was pretty clear who’d be making the decisions among those three. Alun looked to be seven or eight years older than Kaytlin, but that wasn’t giving him any advantage here. Not that he seemed to want it; he looked very relieved to have somebody to give him orders.

  “Whatever you say, Kaytlin. I just – well, you know I’ll go wherever you do.” Alun
slipped one arm around her shoulders. Kaytlin tensed, then jumped up and started directing operations.

  “Ruven and Jillian, you can take the big sleeping room. And Felisha and I will take Tomi for the night, so you can have some privacy. We’ll use our old quarters. Alun, which room are you using?” Her brisk tone said, without the need for words, that Alun would not be sharing her room that night, if ever.

  Jillian thought she knew exactly why Kaytlin was being so briskly decisive – and why she was barricading herself behind a baby and her younger companion. But she could have killed Kaytlin for dictating her own sleeping arrangements. She was nowhere near ready to be alone with Ruven.

  She was even less ready when the time came. There’d been a mirror fixed on the wall of the big sleeping room; while Kaytlin and Felisha were playing with Tomi, Jillian had lighted a candle and taken a long look. She hardly recognized the woman in the mirror: the thin sunburnt face marred by a long red weal, the tousled hair, the shadow of a bruise below one eye. She felt as though everything that had happened since their parting was written on her face for Ruven to read.

  She blew the candle out and huddled under the blankets. In the dark he wouldn’t see her damaged face. In the dark she wouldn’t have to meet his eyes; maybe she wouldn’t feel so ashamed, and maybe he wouldn’t see that she was afraid.

  Despite her best intentions, she tensed when Ruven slid under the blankets. “I’ve missed you, dear girl.” He reached out and drew her close, wrapping an arm around her shoulders.

  This is Ruven, not – not anybody else. All that is over. Forget it. But the feel of a man’s body brought back a memory of Kallan’s weight on her – No. Don’t think, don’t remember, and for harmony’s sake don’t run, this is Ruven, Ruven – She needed all her will not to flinch when he leaned over her and kissed her. She wished he would stop.

  She did have one excuse to put him off; her implant was just slightly out of date, and they should wait until she was sure Kallan hadn’t made her pregnant.

  She couldn’t bring herself to say that. Anyway, in a moment he did stop kissing her, even drawing back a little. “Tired?”

  She could say yes, and put off the reckoning by one night. “No!” said Jillian. “I’m not the least bit tired, and I’ve missed you too, and – and everything is all right.” She could hear her own voice climbing higher and higher, towards hysteria. Breathe. Control. You know how, you did it professionally for seven years. Two deep breaths and then speaking from her chest, not her throat, she achieved a simulacrum of calm. “Please, Ruven, just – just go ahead. It will be all right.” I can act the part. The part of Jillian Lisadel, who is in love with this man, who refuses to accept defeat. Whom I am not. Not any more.

  But Ruven drew back even more. “Nay, something’s wrong. What is it, love? Cannot you forgive me?”

  “Forgive? You?” Her voice cracked on the second word.

  “I failed you,” said Ruven, low-voiced. “I wasn’t there to protect you and Tomi. It took me days to get away from those lunatics, and by then-”

  By then, she’d been taken deep into the woods and... I won’t think. I don’t remember. It’s past and gone.

  “Ruven.” There was one thing she could say with perfect truth. “I have never, not for one minute, blamed you for anything that happened. It was my pride and folly that got us mixed up with those crazy people. It was my poor choice of traveling companions that got me... taken into the... forest. Now – we’re all alive, and as safe as we’ve ever been, and all I want is to put it behind us and get on with our own lives.” She forced herself to put her arms around him.

  She heard Kallan’s voice. “Show me how much you’re lovin’ it, bitch!” If she’d been able to act for the man she loathed, couldn’t she do as much for the man she loved?

  She could feel Ruven’s desire, and that nearly froze her. But she had forgotten his self-control. Still gently, he set her aside, sat on the edge of the bed. “But you are afraid of me?”

  “No, never that!”

  “Then what is it, love?”

  She’d already been on the edge of tears. His tender concern pushed her over and all the darkness within her came spilling out in disjointed phrases punctuated by sobs: Kallan and how he’d used baby Tomi to force her compliance, how he’d joyed in humiliating her, how he’d ordered her to ask him for sex and to tell him how much she wanted it, how she’d submitted to his demands and hated herself for it. And finally, how she’d stabbed and stabbed at a red ragged thing that would not die; memories that burned as if he had literally branded her.

  “I wish I could kill him,” he said when she ran out of words.

  Jillian giggled shrilly, on the narrow edge of hysteria. “Sorry – I got in ahead of you!”

  “Aye, but that’s not erased the marks he left on your soul.” He kissed her sore cheek, very gently. “Would it ease your heart if we went back there, put his body on a pole by the river where all the world could see him rotting?” He asked it as though it would be the most reasonable thing in the world for her to make such a request, nothing more than asking for his arm over an obstacle in the road.

  Jillian shook her head, then realized he could not see her in the dark. “No, I don’t want that.” Apart from the fact that we don’t know how many bandits recovered from the poisoning. «I don’t ever want to see that place again. All I want...» Her voice trailed off as she realized how impossible her wish was. She wanted everything to be as it had been a week ago. But she was broken now.

  “What is it, my love?”

  “Don’t call me that, I can’t bear it. You – you can’t love me now, not when you know everything!” Suppressed tears made her voice shaky. “Don’t you see, I’m not Jillian Lisadel any longer? You can’t love this!” She put his hand up to the welt on her cheek, where Kallan’s belt had cut the skin open.

  “You are my dear love,” said Ruven. “Don’t talk about yourself like that. Do you think I could ever despise you for doing what you must to keep yourself and Tomi alive? When it was my fault you were without protection?”

  Jillian put her palm against his lips. “Don’t ever say that.”

  “Then you, woman, don’t try to tell me that I can’t love you! I can wait,” Ruven said, “as long as you need me to wait.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  In the end they stayed one more night in the wool cooperative. Kaytlin and Felisha went out into the fields, rounding up sheep and goats that the bandits hadn’t bothered to kill. Alun accompanied them, saying, “If there’s trouble, maybe I can do a better job of protecting you than I did last time.” Jillian admired the sentiment while not placing much reliance on the weedy, limping Alun as a defender. She was, though, beginning to hope that Kaytlin’s addition of White Deathcaps had made that particular meal the last for that group. Or that any survivors were too sick to be interested in returning to a place they’d already raided once. Either way would be fine with her.

  Ruven was fiercely busy all day with the self-imposed tasks of fixing up a way for them to carry more supplies and digging out a hollow under the shearing shed where they could bury what they didn’t take with them. Jillian observed the furious energy he was putting into his work and regretted the past night. Her problems were taking their toll on Ruven as well as on herself.

  But she didn’t think she’d be any better at pretending what she couldn’t feel on the coming night.

  At the moment she didn’t seem to feel much of anything. She drifted around the living quarters, picking out things they should bring with them and things that should be buried for later retrieval; fed Tomi from the pail Kaytlin had filled with Afsana’s morning milk; kept a small fire going in the kitchen and simmered dried beans for an evening meal.

  Alun and the girls returned in mid-afternoon with half a dozen sheep and two more Afguernsey goats.

  “Can I try milking one? Either one?” Jillian asked, slightly proud of herself for having remembered that the backwards-curving horns didn’
t signify sex.

  “Well, you won’t get much out of that one,” Felisha giggled, pointing at one of the two identical hairy blobs.

  “Why not?”

  “Um, because he’s a billy – a male goat?”

  “How can you possibly tell?” To her, all three goats looked exactly alike: long tangled hair full of burs, a silly face and those big spiraling horns.

  “His tackle is hard to see under all that hair,” Kaytlin agreed. “But you can still tell because he doesn’t behave like a nanny.”

  The difference between Babur and the two nannies, Afsana and Anusha, became clear when Jillian was seated, trying to milk Anusha while Felisha held her with the rope halter. Afsana wandered aimlessly about the yard, munching happily on wisps of straw. Babur tried to get between Jillian and Anusha, then backed up several paces. “Oh-oh,” Felisha said apprehensively.

  Jillian looked up and to her left just in time to see a lowered head topped with evil-looking horns charging into her.

  “Oof.” She picked herself up and righted the stool. Babur knocked the milking stool back over and began trying to eat her dress. “Get off, you evil thing! Discord rot all male animals anyway. What did you bring him back for?”

  “To make more goats,” Kaytlin said. “Did you think the girls could do it all by themselves?”

  “Um. OK. I wasn’t actually thinking about future generations. But I can tell you one thing.” Jillian rubbed the place where she’d hit the ground. “There won’t be any future generations if you don’t tie up Babur while I’m trying to milk. You can just rename him Bar-Burque. And tell him I’ve heard that grilled goat testicles are considered quite the delicacy in some circles.”

  “Trying to milk is about right,” Felisha said, taking over the milking stool and feeling Anusha’s udder with expert hands. “Look, you have to get all the milk, if you let her wander off with it still dribbling out of her teats she’ll get an infection.” With a few rapid movements of her fingers the slight little girl got as much milk into the pail as Jillian had managed in all her efforts.