Winterkill (4 page)

A wolf. I stare at him, my heart slowing bit by bit, and then a curse bursts out: “Almighty! You scared the life out of me!”

He fiddles with the catch on his rifle.
“Je suis désolé.”

I wish he'd find another way to look sorry. I breathe again, the tight feeling in my chest easing up. Both my foot and shoulder are singing pain something awful, but I'm so relieved there's no attack, my anger melts away. “All right.” I rub my rope-burned hands and take a step toward the door, expecting to follow him back to our post.

Andre doesn't move. “Emmeline,” he says, “can you . . . not speak? Of this. To people. To Council.”

I frown. He doesn't want me to tell anyone. Why? Sure, false alarms are Wayward acts. But we didn't raise the alarm.

“Mes yeux,”
he says. “They are not good now.”

I study him. If his eyes aren't reliable, why hasn't he told Council as much? They'd release him from Watch, send him to a job where he wouldn't have to stand on this bleeding wall each night.

“Je ne comprends pas,”
I say.

He looks uncomfortable. “My family. They were healthy this year. The food.”

And then I see. He doesn't want to give his position up because he'd be losing the extra rations.

My mind whirls. That's a Wayward act in itself: it's putting the settlement at risk. But there are other Watchers on the wall every night. And if he's doing it for his family . . .

I squish my eyes tight, trying to think.

A first offense gets a warning; a second means punishment.
True Waywards end up hanging at the Crossroads, swaying in gibbets in a forbidden ravine due west of the fortification.

The last Waywards were sent years ago, when I was small. A south-quarter couple—the Thibaults—stole stores and hoarded them over the winter. To be sent to the Crossroads you have to fail your virtues pretty bad, like them. Or you have to do something truly awful, like my grandma'am.

Andre's watery eyes are worried. If Council knew he was unfit for Watch and hiding it . . . I wonder what family he's speaking on. A life mate, children . . . grandchildren?

The sole reason the settlement isn't in a ruckus right now is because my arms are the size of sparrows' kneecaps. And a little voice in my head wonders if Frère Andre is testing my virtues, wonders if he's trying to catch me promising something Wayward. He looks so worried, though.

I ignore the voice and shake my head no.

His shoulders relax.
“Merci.”
He straightens.
“Viens.”

I follow, making my way through the tower and shutting the door. I wince as my shoulder hollers in protest. My foot answers with a dull throb.

Ahead of me, Andre's shoulders are back to a brave, straight line. I stomp on my foot, my insides all upside down. Did I just do something foolish? Suppose Brother Stockham finds out? This would be a third offense; would that warrant the Crossroads? I want to ask Tom about it, but I know he'd just worry himself sick. Tom is never Wayward. Not by choice, anyhow.

Back on the wall, the stars are dull through the clouds and the Watch flats are empty; there's no sign of the wolf.
It's as though the dark mist drifting toward the fortification swallowed the animal whole.

Oftentimes I wonder how it'd be if that darkness swallowed
me
whole.

Andre beckons to me to take my place beside him on the wall. He's looking on me real friendly, and I want to feel glad I reassured him.

But all I can do is pray to the Almighty word doesn't get back to Council about my good deed.

IN THE MORNING, I'M GATHERING OUT IN THE
first line of trees to the north, trying hard not to think on my Watch shift last night. Paying no mind to my digging stick, I bark my knuckles on an unearthed stone. Bright red blood springs to the surface of my shredded skin. I suck at my dirtcaked hand, swallowing soil and iron.

Other gatherers sift around the Watch flats, picking the last of the berries on the edge of the woods. Some are just inside the trees to the west, gathering fodder for the penned sheep. I can see still others on the east side of the fort, in the willows near the banks, checking the rabbit snares. Most gatherers are inside the walls, harvesting the meager gardens.

I'm the only one who gathers for Soeur Manon, the only one who has to do this cursed root digging. I guess I should be grateful she took me on. Some people wouldn't want me working for them at all. Gathering gets me out of the fortification too, and today, the woods are heaps more inviting than the wary stares and the sad curve of my pa's spine.

Last night, Andre spent the rest of our shift schooling me in a number of things I've never wondered about: types of buckshot, knife whetting, nighttime birdcalls. I watched him careful-like, trying to figure if he was just playing at being kind because I did him that good turn. I wanted to warm to him. Just the idea of feeling a kinship with someone—I mean, besides Tom—felt real good.

That feeling lasted till I got home. Then Pa and me broke our fast in silence and Pa's defeated shoulders spoke plain. I fixed my eyes on the table while we ate, sure the disappointment on his face would set me to banging my foot against the table leg more times than it could bear. Helping Frère Andre didn't feel so good anymore, neither. My stomach was clenched real tight—near too tight for food—so I just filled my head with the song my ma used to sing to me at night.

Sleep, little one, with your secret heart,

Take to the night like the swallow.

When morning time brings what your secret heart sings,

Set your feet to the same path and follow.

I was real young when she died. Troubles after giving birth to a boy who didn't live. I didn't think on my ma much for a long while. Then this summer, when I was out at the river watching the swallows in the bank, one of the birds swung so close, it near brushed my eyelashes with its wings. And I remembered that song, remembered her singing it to me.

I like that “secret heart” bit. With all the eyeballing round here, I like the notion there's a part of me no one gets to
know about if I don't want them to. But I don't speak on that kind of thing to anyone, not even Tom.

There was a time I might speak on it with my pa—back just after Ma died, when he'd try to cook stew the way she cooked it, or sing her songs though he can't sing a note. Back then, Pa would blink away the sadness of losing Ma and find a way to make me smile—carve me out a little birch dolly, or pick me some of the clover that grows near the rabbit snares. Back then, I might've told him some things.

But these days Pa's got a worry to him and we don't speak on much. He looks at me nervous-like and real sad, like the older I get, the more Stained I am. This morning it was plain as the scrubby brown beard on his face. I told him nothing about Watch, just ate and made myself scarce. I thought the fresh air would ease my thoughts, but Pa's worried eyes keep surfacing in my mind. Need to find a way to make that worry disappear . . .

A soft wind stirs the leaves above me. The Lost People drift through the branches, whispering to me, calling to me. My neck prickles, but I know that what I truly need to worry about is doing something unmindful—spilling my gatherings or such. The Watcher in the tower can see me if I need him to, and the larger beasts—wolves and bears—are far too skittish to venture close. And Takings in the daytime are rare.

But.

Mayhap my pa would be relieved if I didn't come back.

A stubborn piece of root bursts free in a shower of soil. I dust it off and drop it in my satchel, then sit back on my heels, wrapping my knuckles in the tail of my
ceinture
. I need
three or four chunks of root to warrant my return; we need all the stores we can manage before
La Prise de Glaces
—the big Ice Up—arrives next month.

Each year, I feel it coming on the air like a poison breath. The birds escape in jagged lines across the sky and the woods get brittle and stark, waiting. When it strikes,
La Prise
sweeps down in ice-cold winds that burn and blistering snow that swirls so thick and fast, you need a rope to guide you from the kitchen to the woodshed. The sun wanes, the dark grows, and—the worst of it—we are all shut inside the fortification until the Thaw. Months of howling winter winds, months of nothing to do but attend pitiful bindings. When we finally stagger out into the springtime air, thinner still and half mad, we thank Almighty we've lived to see the trees bud out and the river swell.

Next Thaw, someone will come
. No one says that out loud, and I suspect it's because no one believes it anymore. After eight decades of barely scratching out an existence here, the unsaid is louder, truer, than any declaration of hope: either everyone else is cut off, like us, or they're already dead.

I lift the cloth from my knuckles to make sure the bleeding has stopped, then scan the dirt for a new spot to dig. I'm not strong enough to get the rest of the root I unearthed. It's too far down, and besides, there are bound to be others nearer the surface. I rub at my brow absent-like and feel dirt smear across my forehead.

Oftentimes I wonder what they left behind for
this
. Pa says back years before we came, the
coureurs de bois
were the only ones traveling out this way, chasing after animal pelts. Then the animals those men were hunting got scarcer the
further west they traveled, so they returned east to work the land.

But over decades, too many people arrived from the Old World; the colonies got crowded, relations with the First Peoples got tense. A few families—our ancestors—decided to press west. Pa says it was an odd assortment: English speakers looking for a better life, French speakers trying to escape being deported to the Old World, the offspring of French speakers and First Peoples who were tired of persecution for being of mixed blood. No way they all got along; I suspect the idea was to come in the safety of numbers, and spread out once they found suitable land.

But the emptiness should have warned them. Where were the First Peoples that were said to roam these lands? In the east, the First Peoples shared with the settlers from the Old World, taught them to survive on the new land; they mingled, had families together—became the mélange, whose blood remains in the people of the south quarter.

Here, just their ghosts remained, traces of people who had up and vanished. But where did they go? And why?

When the settlers halted in the woods just shy of the foothills, before the wall of Great Rock, they got an answer.

The
malmaci
had Taken those First Peoples. And then it came for them too.

It wiped out more than half those forest-dwelling settlers in a few short months, killed all the beasts of burden too. People would wake to find their loved ones' bloodied, blistered corpses, and their livestock ravaged the same. Terrified, twenty or so families shored up together in a settlement on
the banks of the river. People who chanced the woods to the west or the plains to the east either never returned or were found torn apart, their eyes and ears bleeding rivers, their spilled-out insides swollen and black.

A Council of men, led by Brother Stockham's greatgrandpa, formed to bring order and safety. They built the Crossroads for anyone who defied their rule. Anyone who breached the borders, anyone unwilling to comply with settlement rules was deemed Wayward because they put everyone at risk from what lurked in the woods beyond.

We survive together, or we perish.

Those who spoke French called it
le Mal
—the bad thing. Those with First Peoples in their blood called it the
maci-manitow
—the evil spirit.

Honesty, Bravery, Discovery: these virtues create a strength that keeps the evil—the
malmaci
—at bay.

I guess my grandma'am didn't have that strength.

Every day I ask my secret heart if everyone is right to look at me the way they do—like I don't have it, neither. Today, sitting across from my pa's sad eyes, it was trilling
Wayward girl, Wayward girl.

I can see the Watchtower from where I'm sitting in the trees. It's supposed to make me feel safe, but suddenly my skin is crawling at the thought of someone up there, watching me with scornful eyes.

A flash of black at the gates catches my eye. A Councilman is coming out across the flats. Can't see who it is from the distance, but he won't be coming to help gather berries or roots; he'd never have to do something so menial.

My chest gets tight. I don't want to have to talk to whoever it is, not after being punished with Watch, not after last night.

I push back into the bramble, away from the flats. I'm still visible, but when the Councilman stops halfway to the woods to talk to a woman headed toward the fort, I dart behind a tree.

I look around the forest. Leaves shimmer all shades of gold and red. Branches catch the soft breeze and sigh, like the woods are thinking on some fond memory.