by Chuck Wendig
“I want to know what’s going on,” he says.
Esther nods. “You’ve been . . . away from us for some time.”
“Away. What? For—what do you mean? Time? How much time?”
But they don’t answer. Esther and Wanda just share a look—a conspiratorial connection that, for now, fails to include him. Shit. Instead, Esther says, “We’ll get there, Cael.” Green tendrils curl and uncurl from the tips of her fingers splayed out on the table. Fiddleheads opening, closing.
“I want to know.”
“You should rest.”
“I don’t want to rest.”
“What do you want to do?” It’s like she can sense it.
He says it without thinking: “I want to run.”
“So,” she says, “go. Run.”
The dead corn is thick out here. Thick as the bristles on a boot brush. Cael growls and pushes through, stalks thwacking him across the head and neck and arms, leaves—still sharp, even dead—cutting into him. His feet pound on hard black earth, and somewhere he realizes—
The corn isn’t dead. Not really. He can feel something still there. Some mote of life swirling around. Hundreds of motes, thousands, each a fading firefly, each bound to a single stalk of corn—the light dying but not extinguished. He runs through it, feeling these tiny life sources as he passes them, aware of them in a way that goes beyond sight and sound. And still the corn continues to batter him. It pisses him off. A hot fire churns in his gut. A new thread of hunger unspools through him, and he roars and keeps on running—
He makes an ax-blade shape out of his hand, swipes across the corn—
And a wave of corn ahead of him flattens to the ground. Ten feet in a wide arc, crackling and hissing as it mashes to the dirt.
Corn he never touched.
He skids to a halt. It was like a sonic blast, invisible but real.
His own Blight-vine tightens around his arm. As if in anticipation.
As if it’s excited.
Is the Blight a life all its own?
Or is it just me?
Is the excitement mine and not the corn’s?
He growls, then sweeps his arm out again—and more corn splinter-snaps. Pushed down, matted together like a corn-leaf doormat. Cael does it again and again, roaring and screaming until he’s the center of a circular clearing, the corn pushed away from him in every direction.
And then he grits his teeth.
He can still feel it out there. The corn. Living, not dead.
He closes his eyes.
He concentrates, thinking so hard he’s afraid he’ll piss himself.
The sound greets him—the rustle-hiss of the corn. All around him. That sound rises in volume until it’s a deafening roar. . . .
Then it stops. All at once.
When he opens his eyes—
All the corn has stood back up. Battered. Crooked. Shuddering like a shorn sheep in a cold wind. But standing tall once more.
What in King Hell have I become?
The morning sun is up now. And Cael can see how things have changed at Esther’s. The Maize Witch has been busy. Her little commune has grown. When Cael left for his run, he didn’t stop to look around—he just blasted into the bleak field, feet carrying him into the stalks with no intention but to run, maybe somewhere, maybe nowhere, definitely away.
And yet now he returns, and he sees how busy she’s been.
Other smaller houses are going up at the edges. Little huts and lean-tos. The garden has grown, too, upward and outward. Other Blighted mill about. A woman with hair like long, knotty tangles of moss. A man with tree-root feet. A pair of young children, not yet teenagers, running around, their fingers intertwined, handfasted with coils of vine and leaf.
As Cael passes, they all, without exception, stop to stare. Not as if he’s a freak, but as if he’s something special. The look on those faces: What is that?
They’re not scared of him.
They love him.
He shudders.
On the way back inside the house, he sees a familiar face—
Mole, from Boyland’s crew. He chews on a stick. The boy’s other arm hangs at his side, limp and crooked. “Hey, McAvoy.”
“Mole. I didn’t know you were here.”
“Well, I am.” The boy’s lip curls up in a sneer.
Cael struggles to find something to say.
Mole speaks instead. “They all think you’re real neat. But I remember you from Boxelder. You were a punk.” It’s now Cael hears the faint cracking in the boy’s voice—his time is almost on him, the time when he’ll move from being just a boy to being something close to a man. “And I’d bet all the ace notes that you’re still a punk. Wanda thinks you’re the rat’s right foot, but I know you ain’t. You mess with her, I’ll getcha.”
“All right.” Cael almost laughs. “Nice talkin’ to you, Mole.”
Mole nods and heads past, staring daggers as he does.
What in all the Heartland is going on?
Dinner.
Long table heaped with mounds of food.
And this time, not all fruits and vegetables, either.
Cael smells meat.
Edvard—one of Esther’s attendants, now out of his ratty patchwork coat and wearing instead a plain, rumpled white shirt with ivory buttons—pushes a ceramic crock toward him. “Rabbit,” he says. “Braised in its own juices. Broth a mirepoix—onion, carrot, celery. And that”—he points to an oval plate with a few chips in the glaze—“is a plate of crispy sweetbreads.”
The bald woman with the half-scale face must have seen the confused look that crossed Cael’s own, and she adds: “Not actual bread, Cael. Offal. Thymus gland of a fatted calf.”
It occurs to him that his lips are slick—Jeezum Crow, he’s about to start drooling like a mutt. He quick wipes at his mouth with the back of his hand, but everyone must know what’s happening because they all laugh. Politely enough, but he still feels shame rising pink in his cheeks.
Wanda, sitting to his left, reaches out to him, her hand on his. He can feel her—not just the skin on skin, but something deeper. That same kind of firefly mote he felt inside the corn, except with her it’s not just a firefly, but a bonfire roaring. Not just a lightning bug, but a sky filled with lightning. A million points of light inside her. The Blight. And again he wonders: Is the Blight separate from her, or a part of her? Cael doesn’t know.
“It’s okay,” she whispers to him. “I can feel you, too.”
He pulls his hand back but tries to smile to cover it up. It feels fake. He knows that. Everything feels off-kilter. Like maybe he’s still in a dream. Except he’s sure—well, pretty sure—that’s not true.
He turns toward Esther, sitting at the far end of the long table. He can feel her, too, and if Wanda contains a bonfire, Esther contains ten times the heat and the light. She’s a house on fire, a whole cornfield—hell, she’s all the world, burning so bright that the dark never settles, that the night becomes a memory, a myth.
And then Esther speaks. When she does, his sense of her closes down, shuts off. The light doesn’t go out, but he stops seeing it.
“We should eat,” she says.
And so they eat.
Cael goes for the meat.
The rabbit is so tender it falls apart in his mouth. Almost like it becomes one with the broth in which it sits. And the sweetbreads are, as the name advertises, genuinely sweet. An outer crunch gives way to a soft but firm interior, and it’s salty, too, and just off-tasting enough that it’s appealing in some way he can’t quite understand. The wildness of it calls to something deep within him.
This is the kind of food he figures sits on the table at the Lord and Lady’s manse, ever-replenishing itself.
He has to steady himself. He’s almost drunk on the food.
And just as he hits that point, the bald woman—Siobhan—goes to a small wooden sidebar and pulls out a bottle of red wine. She uncorks it with her teeth, follows this with a wink, a
nd begins to pour glasses for everyone. And soon everyone is drinking and eating, and mostly it’s Esther, Edvard, and Siobhan talking about simple things: how the new “settlers” are acclimating to life here at the farm, how they’ve cleared a few more plots and are going to build something called a “longhouse,” how they have a lead on a few more calves . . .
“You have cows?” Cael asks suddenly.
Esther nods. “And a goat.”
“And a dozen chickens,” Siobhan adds.
“Amazing what good food does for the animals,” Esther says.
Edvard jumps in: “The rabbit was one I found in our garden. I let him eat for a time. Saw that he had a little . . . wife and a nest of baby rabbits, too.”
“Kits,” Siobhan interrupts. “A litter of rabbit kits.”
Edvard shrugs it off. “I care not what they’re called, I only care that this little Ryukyu left behind a rabbit legacy. Then I felt comfortable putting an arrow through his eye.” He mimes pulling back a bowstring.
“Minimal technology,” Esther says. “A life predicated on the natural rhythms of living with and for the Heartland. For the whole world.”
Cael barely knows what she’s saying. The red wine is doing its part, pulling apart his mind like hot, warm monkey-bread. “You said you had a goat. I had a goat. We. My family.” His words feel like they’re melting in his mouth. Then he says, without thinking: “I want to go home.”
He feels dumb for uttering it. It’s a childish thing to say. And the way he said it, too: a plea from a mopey little boy. Shit.
But no one laughs this time.
Everyone gets quiet.
“You don’t have a home anymore,” Esther says.
“Boxelder is gone,” Wanda adds. Again, a Wanda different from the one he knows manifests: In an earlier life, Wanda wouldn’t even be able to say those three words without her voice cracking and tears spilling. But she says them now, chin up, out. Grief is in there, but it’s contained. Kept in its cup instead of poured over everything and everyone.
“I don’t understand,” Cael says.
“The Empyrean took it over,” Esther explains. “After the Saranyu fell, the clampdown started with Boxelder. They had advanced notice, so some of the townsfolk escaped. Others stayed and . . .”
“They’re not human anymore,” Wanda says. There, that time, a hitch in her voice, a grief-struck hiccup. Cael’s glad to hear it. Not because he likes her sorrow, but because in it, he still recognizes Wanda. “They’ve been changed.”
“Changed? I don’t understand.”
“They’re mechanicals now,” Esther says. “Encased in machine. Humanoid motorvators driven by their former minds but controlled by the Empyrean. A more effective worker. They tend the corn without any of that . . .”
“Disagreeable humanity?” Siobhan says.
“Mm.” Esther nods. “Metal men do not rebel.”
“Godsdamn,” Cael says. The wine and the news form a one-two punch. “You’re joking, right? Playing a prank on me, the drunk fool?” But the stares around the table tell him differently. He looks to Wanda. “Your family?”
She only says, “I don’t know.”
“When did this happen? How . . . long ago? How long was I—”
“Just over a year,” Esther says.
“A year.” His stomach does an internal belly flop. Everything tingles. Sweat beads on his brow like condensation on a glass. He tries to say something else, but his mouth is all cotton, and next thing he knows, he’s falling off his chair, hands catching him, knees cracking against the floor. The vine around his arm uncoils, lies slack—
He pukes.
BLOOD MAKES THE GRASS GROW
HIS MOUTH TASTES of dead rabbit. And stomach acid. His cheeks puff out as he exhales a regretful, embarrassed breath.
The room Esther gave to Cael is upstairs, in the back corner. A small room with wallpaper that once held bold stripes but whose dark lines are now faded and washed out—and peeling anyway. Great strips of it, like sunburned skin curling away from the flesh underneath.
It’s Wanda who stops by first. Asks him how he’s doing. Sits next to him and pulls his hand to her lap and strokes it. Then dances her fingers on the back of his neck, sending chills in both directions—down to his tailbone and up to the back of his head. His body tingles, skin gone to plucked chicken skin.
Cael sits on the bed.
“You okay?” she asks.
“I seem okay?”
“Point taken.”
“You seem awful okay with everything.”
“I’m a long ways from okay¸” she says. “A whole Heartland away from it. Everything’s different now. Everything’s gone all strange and slippery.” She shrugs. “But I’m getting there. This is my place now. And I think it’s yours, too.”
“I dunno, Wanda. I think . . . I think I need to go. Find my friends. Find Pop. I mean, dang, don’t you wanna find your family? Maybe they’re okay. Hell, maybe that dog of yours is still out there, nosing crotches like a champ.”
She laughs, and he does, too—the pressure, vented, if only a little. But then she says: “To what end? What happens if I find them? We run away together. Probably die together—and a whole lot sooner than any of us would’ve hoped for. Not much use in that. We can be useful here. We can change things with the gifts we’ve been given.” She places his hand on her knee. “Besides, Cael, we’re family now.”
“We’re Obligated, but not yet married.”
She leans her head on his shoulder. “No, but we will be soon.”
Before he can say anything, she’s standing back up. “Mother Esther wants to say some things to you. Talk about . . . what comes next and all.”
Mother Esther?
“Oh. Uh. All right.”
Wanda stoops and kisses his cheek. Her lips are warm. Her breath smells of grated apples. Then the girl, his Obligated, retreats from the room, and he wonders what happened to her in the time he was asleep. The Blight, obviously, but it’s more than that. She’s different. Still Wanda, at the heart of it all, but she’s tougher, too. More self-assured.
He doesn’t know what to make of that. He likes it, though.
Not much time to consider it further, because Esther must’ve been waiting right outside the door. The woman does not walk in so much as she seems to drift into the room, the way pollen drifts across plasto-sheen after a piss-blizzard—it’s effortless and ethereal. Divine, almost, as if she’s not even human.
And maybe she’s not. He picked up a young man purporting to be her son from the Saranyu, a man who—while only a few years older than Cael—still looks too old to be this woman’s child. The Blight isn’t just in her or a part of her. She is the Blight. Hell, for all Cael knows, it started with her. Maybe she was the first.
The witch sits and reaches back and grabs some of her hair—platinum with streaks of gold and filaments of true green—and begins to idly braid it.
“Time is not kind,” she finally says after a long silence.
“I don’t follow.”
“Everything keeps moving forward, with or without our permission. We can’t stop it. Can’t slow it down or turn it around. Life continues. Time progresses. Everything alive moves steadily toward death, and everything dead plays host to new life. Time continues, and it’s up to us to choose what we do with it. I wish that we had more time together. All of us, here. But that is no longer possible.”
“You’re still speaking like a . . . like the damn Maize Witch and not like a person who wants to be understood. You wanna say it, get to it.”
A perfume rises off her. It’s her breath. Before this moment he’s never seen or smelled the blooms of a Sweet Alice flower, but he pictures a cluster of little white petals and somehow he knows that this is the scent that’s crawling up his nose and winding tight around all the switches and levers inside his brain—he can feel it tugging, pulling. But he’s aware of it, too, in a way that he wasn’t before, and he steadies himself against i
t, pushing Esther’s control away.
His lips curl in a snarl: “Don’t. I’m not a poppet doll, so don’t try to make me dance. You want something, say what it is or get out.”
She recoils. The whites of her eyes shoot through with little tendrils—same size and shape as bloodshot veins, but these are like runner-vines searching dirt for sustenance. Then she blinks and they’re gone. She smiles.
“You’ve changed,” she says.
“I’m the same.”
She offers no rebuttal, but her smirk tells the story: Oh no, you’re not. Instead, she says: “You don’t want to stay here, do you?”
“No. I sure don’t.”
“You could do a lot of good here. This could be your home.”
“This won’t ever be my home, lady. And you won’t ever be my mother, no matter what Wanda thinks to call you. I got family and friends. They’re my home.”
She smiles stiffly. “Then I want your help.”
“Can’t imagine why.”
“You’re special. Different.”
“C’mon. You’re surrounded by . . . special people.” Blightborn. “You alone have more power in your pinkie finger than I will ever have.”
She smiles. “You ever play Checks?”
Checks. Simple enough game board: red and black squares, alternating. Red pieces on the black squares, black pieces on the red. Each a round piece with a different sigil carved into the top of it: crowns, pistols, horses, butterflies. That makes each piece different, each capable of its own move and only that. Goal is to move your pieces, jump them over the enemy’s to knock them off the board.
“Pop was a . . . a godsdamn mastermind at that game. He taught me early, and I always thought I had him, you know? But somehow by the end he always managed to jump my damn Queen and knock my ass outta the game.”
Pop used to say: In this game, the Queen is everything.
A deep ache lances through him. He misses Pop and Mom. Misses them so bad it’s like a living absence, a hungry wound.
He wonders if they’re even still alive.
“The Queen,” she says. “I bet you were aggressive with her.”
“Hell yeah I was. Most powerful piece on the board. Can go any direction, jump any poor dummy she comes across. She’s a big gun, that one.”
