by Teresa Rook
I don’t have to be, because Ennis tugs on my arm. I follow him backward into whatever safety he’s found. I brandish my weapon and the people start to look at me with fear. Sweat rolls between my shoulder blades and from my underarms. Red clamors in my peripheral vision, and I yelp.
Ennis has led us into the house, into the fire.
He pulls me down to my knees, and I fight, having misjudged him this whole time. I claw at his hand on my arms, so instead he grabs my hair. I shriek in betrayal and am immediately given over to a fit of coughing. This is suicide and I do not want to go down with him.
The first timber to fall lands in front of me, blocking my access to the outside world. Ennis still drags me on, and the flames lick at my hands and feet. Then he’s dragging me up a flight of stairs, and at the top, he punches a hole through the thin shingling. He lets go of me and stands back, imploring with watery, squinty eyes for me to climb.
I get it. I hoist myself up through the hole and Ennis follows. We stand precariously on the roof, still coughing while the fire spreads below us. The gray shingles are hot on the soles of my feet. Ennis covers his coughs with one hand, and with the other, he points to our left. The roof slopes down and disappears into smoke. I signal my confusion by shaking my head, but the proximity of the fire has me so scared my entire body is shaking, and I don’t know if he gets the message.
He grabs at my hands and gently pulls me a step toward the sloping roof. He opens his mouth to speak, but the air isn’t clear enough and he can only cough.
He squares his shoulders and runs, disappearing into the smoke.
I can’t see or hear anything through the fire, but I know the Chirals will be on the ground, circling the house, searching for me. And if I stay here, the fire will catch me. So I decide to trust Ennis and run after him, my heels landing painfully on the sandpaper shingles, leaving a bloody trail that will be burned away in mere moments.
I run straight into the smoke. I want to close my eyes against it but there must be a plan, so I keep them wide open. There: Ennis is above me, holding a hand down over a ledge. I’m so startled to see him perched in the sky that I fail to watch where my feet are going. I pitch forward as I reach the edge of the roof. Ennis wanted me to jump.
He catches one of my flailing arms as I go over, and with a few heaves, he’s pulled me onto the neighbouring roof. I lie on my back, legs hanging off the edge, and try to catch my breath here where the smoke’s thinner. As soon as I return to myself, I pull my legs up to my chest.
The Chirals can’t see us from here. By the time they can pick through the remains of the house and realize it’s short two bodies, we’ll be long gone, hopscotched over the rooftops.
nine
“You’re late.” The words come as a reprimand, but I read concern in Riksher’s stoic face. He stands at the edge of the tracks, the fire from Salis illuminating him and the horses at his sides. I try not to look back.
“Here,” he says to Ennis, “take Amara.” Ennis reaches out a tentative hand that the appaloosa immediately nuzzles into. To me, Riksher holds out the reins to a pinto with a suspicious dip in its back. “And this is Meeree.”
I take the reins and hold them loosely in my hands. The horse is patched with white and tan, like the desert under a bright, colourless sky. I reach for her muzzle but withdraw my hand before I make contact, the memory of Tilly clear and potent. I look away, trying to focus on anything else. Tears threaten, and I curl my hands into fists, straighten my back, and set my face in stone.
It’s not her fault. But she’s just not my Tilly.
The night hangs low over us, red still visible from the town not far back. The fire spread quickly, practically chasing us out. Now in the desert, we’re hidden by the darkness, but if we’re within sight when the sun comes up, we’ll be sitting ducks in the flat, empty land.
So we ride and I don’t ask questions, because I need to get away from here somehow, and at least this way I have a horse to do it on.
A horrifying thought occurs to me. What if the fire reaches the silos? What if all that food burns? What plan could I possibly concoct after that?
The red glow of the city slowly fades, and Ennis keeps looking back. A dust storm picks up to our left, dangerously close, and we ride hard to get away from it. By the time we’re safely away, Salis has dropped from view beneath the horizon.
We don’t stop riding until well into the night. When we finally do, Ennis silently pitches a sad tent from Amara’s saddlebags and backs away, nodding me towards it. I swallow and force myself go be pragmatic.
“Not sleeping yet,” I say. “You, neither. Come.”
He obliges, and I finger the charred edges of his collar, blackened by the fire. His skin won’t have fared much better. Ennis goes very still. I take my hand away and step back, not wanting my proximity to give him any ideas.
I jerk my chin at Riksher. “Do you have any cumberwort?”
He answers without looking at me. “Get some rest. I’ll keep watch.”
“Only if you want these burns to grow infected,” I say hotly. I point to the bulging saddlebags he’s removed from his horse. “Cumberwort. Do you have any or not?”
Riksher and Ennis look at each other, clueless. I sigh. Now that we’re not actively fleeing, the adrenaline is beginning to drain from my body. I feel my pulse in my blistering soles. “I’ll be back.”
“I’ll go with you,” Ennis says immediately, scrambling to his feet.
“You will not,” Riksher says. “If she wants to get lost in the desert, that’s her call. But you’re staying here.”
I tap my big toe against the side of the silver train tracks that lead all over the continent in one endless web. The spaces they leave between are wild and unsafe. “Don’t worry. I’m not leaving the tracks.”
“Wait,” Riksher says, and I turn back with a raised eyebrow. He tosses something at me and I catch it reflexively. It’s my satchel.
The latch comes unclipped with a click and I open it wide, trying to see inside by the faint light of the fire Riksher is starting. I pull out first my canteen, and then my knife. I rub a callused fingertip over the blade and, satisfied in its sharpness, bend to shove it into my boot. I curse.
“I don’t suppose you got my clothes, too? My boots?”
Riksher shrugs as frown down at my sooty red tunic. “That’s all I found.”
I purse my lips and clip the satchel around my waist. “Thanks.”
I try to enjoy the breeze without worrying it will kick up into a full-blown storm. A welcome reprieve after the stale, busy city.
After a few minutes of walking, I have to break my promise to stay on the tracks. I’m sure I’d find some cumberwort growing alongside them eventually, but the pain in my feet is worsening. Every step comes with a separate cringe. Besides, I won’t be able to spot the herb if I go beyond the reach of the firelight.
The desert is eerie off the tracks, and I find myself anxious to return to our little camp. I can just see the dilapidated trunks of the trees that have been dead for decades, trees that once sheltered the ground and showered it with soft pine needles in the fall. Not that I’ve ever seen a pine tree. Things have gone downhill fast since we killed the witches.
Most of them.
My mind sends images of wolves—real ones—jumping at me from between the trunks, massive jowls trailing spit and blood. Another thing I’ve never seen and never will. I wrap my arms around myself and wish I had company out here. I hope Riksher’s coldness towards me doesn’t transfer to Ennis.
Some part of me recognizes how absurd my attachment to him is. That I’ve known him for only one day. But he brought me to see the Wolf, and if that went poorly, that was on me for not making my case strongly enough.
Although, had Iskielle agreed to help me, I would never have been able to prove it. Ennis would be the only surviving witness, and I’ve seen how credible Ennis is to the rest of the Chirals.
The soles of my unshod feet chafe a
gainst the coarseness of the dead and dying grass. I find the off-white flowers and gather enough of them to grind into a poultice.
“You're back,” Ennis says when I return, getting halfway to his feet. I shake my head and smile at his enthusiasm. It’s nice to be missed.
“Yeah,” I say. “No problem. I just retraced my bloody footprints.”
Ennis's eyes widen and then narrow as he peers at the dark ground behind me. Riksher grunts. He’s especially unhappy when I demand some water to make the medicine, my own canteen empty. “We can’t waste this,” he says as he lets a few precious drops fall into a bowl.
“Obviously,” I mutter.
He softens a few minutes later as I smooth the salve over Ennis’s burns. It takes a few passes to clear the desert dirt from the wounds. Once I allow the poultice to set, the younger man visibly relaxes, his shoulders slipping down again after having been held stiffly to his ears for hours. I smear the remaining solution over my own raw feet, cringing as it drags out the dirt. But then the cooling tingle sets in, and I sigh in relief.
“First time I used this stuff was on a cat. I didn’t know what I was doing, so I just dumped as many flowers as I could find into a tub with cold water. Cat did not appreciate the bath.”
Ennis chuckles. “I take it the cat survived?”
“Yeah.” I think back to the barn fire. It feels like a week ago, but it’s been, what, two days? Three? I smile, because cats are small and flexible and the barn was full of holes. The cats, I am almost completely certain, survived. “Stupid thing tried to grab some meat off the grill in one of the cabins.”
Though stupid isn’t quite fair. There are less and less rodents every year, something I took as a blessing. Less pests means less spoilage, which means it’s easier to ignore the shrinking harvests. Easier to bury your head in the sand.
“How old were you?” Ennis retrieves a cracker from his bag and snaps it in half. He offers them both for me to choose from.
“Thanks,” I say, then take a bite. I think while I chew. It tastes like dust. “Twelve? Thirteen?”
“You both need to sleep,” Riksher says. “I’ll take first watch.”
“I’m fine.”
Ennis frowns at me. “You’ll get plenty of chances to prove how tough you are,” he says. Then he yawns.
Plenty of chances? Have I accidentally joined a quest?
I thank him again for the food, and he smiles.
“Sorry about your home,” I whisper before crawling inside the tent he pitched for me. He smiles at me again, weaker this time, and then retreats to his own tent. The cackling of the fire lulls me easily to sleep.
#####
I sleep straight through the night and feel guilty for it. Riksher looks moderately rested, so he must have traded off with his brother at some point.
We immediately pack up the supplies and Ennis passes me some cornbread to eat on horseback. Riksher is pushing us hard, but he doesn't seem afraid, just like he knows what has to be done. Doesn’t need to be motivated by emotion. We stop again at midday, and I determine to get some answers.
I dismount and Meeree attempts to graze on the yellowed grasses growing in patches along the edge of the tracks. I approach Riksher, who is studiously examining his own horse’s hooves. They look fine to me. He just wants to seem busy.
“Why am I here?”
He takes his time in answering, and even then, it's a non-answer. “Why are any of us here?”
I roll my eyes. “You know what I'm asking. Why did you rescue me?”
“Ennis did that.”
“But you had three horses waiting.”
I wait, and this turns out to be the best strategy. Riksher lets go of the horse’s leg and leans his back against her, watching me with a frown. “Ennis tells me you come from Barnab.”
“Yes.”
“Then you know what's happening to the land.”
My face heats up, having only learned this from Iskielle. My recent ignorance is shaming. “Yes.”
It’s dying, all of it. Even Barnab withers away.
“And you can read witch runes.”
“Well,” I say. I crack my knuckles absently, one by one. “I can tell they're there.”
He waves a hand. “That's what I meant. That's fine. You can tell if something is witch tech or not.”
“Yes.”
“And is there much tech on the Farms?”
There are some mysterious shimmering machines, yes, around which nothing at all will grow. There are no levers or handles, but they must have been useful once because they're in noteworthy locations: the mouth of a ditch, the highest point on the livestock hills, inside the grain house.
But it's more than that. “I think you're mistaken about tech,” I say, miming quotation marks in the air. “It's not always complex machines. Sometimes it's just—” I think of the altercation in the storehouse. “Just ordinary boxes. Anything can be witch tech, I think. Runes are everywhere. Can be on all sorts of stuff.”
He nods and smiles very slightly, as though I've passed some test. I wonder if I've been mistaken about him. Wonder if we will come out of this—whatever it is—as friends.
“So…” I prompt.
“It's the runes. Wherever there’s a high concentration of them, the land suffers.”
I tilt my head. “But isn't there suffering everywhere? What about the Dead— Ohhh.”
“The Dead Cities, yes. Where the witches lived and thrived. That's the worst of it now.” He looks at his hands. “We drove them out, but they left us trapped. Our entire world is poisoned.”
“What, they knew they were on the way out, so they ruined it all for us out of spite? Wrote their deadly runes on everything so we’d starve slowly?”
He locks his fingers around the back of his neck and tilts his head down. “That's what it looks like.”
I frown, not ready to accept this hypothesis. One thief in a storehouse does not an entire race evil make. “And you want to…”
“Save it all.” He looks up at me, his surprisingly earnest eyes asking something I can't quite decipher. “Obviously. Will you help?”
“Help? How?”
“The runes. They’re everywhere, but we can’t see them. Short of destroying absolutely everything, there’s no way to be sure we’ve gotten them all. But if you can find them, Ennis and I can destroy them.”
I blink. “Destroy them?” In all the years I’ve spent around the runes at Barnab, I’ve never thought to try and destroy them. When I was very young, my mother would tell me stories of when the tech worked, when she was a child. How it helped with the farm work. Did Tilly’s job in the fields, harvested great swathes of wheat in a fraction of the time we can by hand. The tech is useless now, but it wasn’t always. It’s always been something to revere with a tinge of sadness. And a bit of fear, yes, but nobody has wanted to destroy it.
Though if we can take away the thing that's turning our land to dust, we won't need to point fingers or squabble over food. There can be enough for all of us.
If it’s really the runes to blame.
“How do you know it’s the runes?”
“I told you. It’s worst in the Dead Cities.”
“But who says those things are related? Maybe there’s another reason.”
“If there’s another reason, nobody’s found it in twenty years,” he says, his patience wearing thin. “Something has to change. This is it.”
I shake my head. “No. It doesn’t make sense. Barnab has tons of tech. So why has it survived this long?”
“Because it was built at the strongest parts of the river?” He turns his palms up. “We can’t wait until we have all the answers. We’re out of time. We act now or we die waiting for everything to make perfect sense. This is something we can do, now. And you need to help.”
Riksher is convinced, but he offers me no proof, and my fondness for the tech makes me hesitate. If I help them, if we destroy everything, this isn’t something we can go back o
n. What if there’s a better way?
What if…
What if I could bring back the tech?
Carnigai has hundreds of years of history when it was prosperous, back when the witch tech helped instead of hurt. What if it can be made to help again? How would life on Barnab change if the tech in the river started spraying again, if we could till the fields with the giant vehicles rusting away between the corn stalks? The solution might be right under our noses.
I glance at Ennis, then back to Riksher. Neither of them will help me with this. They’ve got to believe the genocide was the right thing—they have no choice. It’s done, and they can’t go back on it. As Chirals, they’d rather double down than consider that maybe, just maybe, there might have been a place for witches after all.
A plan begins to form. A caveat. I’ll help them, mostly. While Riksher and Ennis are busy destroying, I’ll be studying. Searching. Learning. I’ll figure out the tech, find a way to manipulate it without runes.
But that’s the long game, and my tribe needs help now. The solution comes to me suddenly, courtesy of Old Man Wells. I don’t have to figure out the tech on the farm. If I can just get the trains running, Niroek will be open to us again. We can convince them to share their plenty.
I don’t have to save it all. I just have to save the trains. And in the meantime…
“Alright,” I say. “On one condition.”
Riksher leans back, wary. “Which is?”
I take a deep breath. “We go back to Salis. You help me steal food from the silos, and we bring it to Barnab. Then,” I say, “I’ll help you track down the tech.”
The lesser tech, they can destroy. Who knows, maybe Riksher is on to something, and it really will help. But I’ll lie about the trains. Those we’ll leave intact.
And I’ll find a way to get them running again.
ten
Riksher is unhappy about it, but he keeps his mouth shut the whole way back to Salis. Ennis, riding close beside me, talks enough for both of them.
