E. L. Stricker

THE ALMANAC

CHAPTER ONE

ILLYA OSLOV FLICKED an ice-coated strand of dark hair out of his eyes and tried to swallow the lump of panic that was rising in his throat.

There was nothing here.

With his heart hammering a frantic drumbeat in his ears, he crouched back to the earth, ignoring the sinking sun and the lengthening shadows. This cattail stand was the last one they had left. The stalks had all been harvested earlier in the year, but there should still be roots left to eat. He refused to believe they could be gone. Illya scraped deeper into the mud. Frigid river water swirled in to fill the hole, soaking his shirt. His nose dripped, and his back ached, but still he dug. Weakness seemed to spread from his shrunken stomach through his whole body, making his vision blur and his muscles tremble. He couldn’t remember when he had last had a real meal.

Darkness began to filter through the sky above him. He felt the shift without looking up. He clenched his teeth together. Soon, the gates in the walls around his village would be closing. Night brought the Terrors. No one stayed out after dark and lived to tell about it. He knew this as well as anything; as well as he knew which plants to eat and which held the malice that could kill; as well as he knew his own ma’s face, but his ma and little sister back in the village were every bit as hungry as he was. He could not go back empty-handed again.

It was near the end of his seventeenth winter, and it was the worst he could remember. The game was gone, the foraging nearly so, and still the snow had not broken. He scraped through another layer of mud, and his nails caught on something. Quickly, he cleared away more, feeling an odd slippery texture through the grit.

Plastic.

His heart began to beat faster. Plastic was rare, left behind by the Olders from the time before the Calamity. It was something he had only seen a handful of times. He could feel regular, straight edges in the mud.

Night advanced, its claws reached over the mountaintop behind him. Not far away, in the darkness that had just covered the foothills, the first yipping of the Terrors began. Illya jerked his head up and stared into the dark with wide eyes. A jolt of fear shot through him and stole his breath. He was out of time.

Still, the box could have anything inside it. Ignoring the mud that caked his palm and stuck under his fingernails, he scraped and pulled with all of his strength until it came loose with a sucking pop. It was smaller than he had expected. The color was strange, and something he didn’t have a name for; between leaves and sky, blue and green at once.

He pushed himself up. He clutched the box to his chest and ran.

* * *

The light was gone, and an eerie yip yip yee rang out in the dark. His feet pounded on the frozen earth. His chest heaved like a set of bellows, and he pushed his legs faster and faster.

He could see the safety of the fires of his village ahead. They looked tiny in the distance, seeming to be too small to be the center of all his hopes.

Faster.

The yipping was getting louder, sounding closer. Illya thought he could hear the sound of the Terrors’ gravelly breaths in the air behind him. He strained his eyes forward, willing the ground ahead to be smooth with no tree branches or roots to trip him.

There was a rustling and cracking sound in the brush nearby. He faltered but didn’t turn to see what it was, pressing for new speed as horrible thoughts boiled up in his mind: images of snapping teeth, gleaming eyes, and furious claws.

His neck prickled. He clutched the box closer and tried to focus on counting his steps to drive away the surge of panic. One, two, three— he lost count after ten when he forgot some of the words.

Then he was there. The gates were shut. A palisade of sharply cut pine trunks loomed high above him, cutting him off from sanctuary. He dropped the box and pounded on the gates, yelling with the last of his breath.

There was no answer.

Illya threw himself against the wall, hammering until his fists throbbed. How could this be happening? When he hadn’t come home at evening time, his mother would have worried. She would be looking for him. Surely, she would have thought to check the gates.

But that was the problem. They wouldn’t think to look for him out here because no one but a madman would have imagined staying out this late themselves. His cousin’s hut, the Healer’s, the central fires; there would be many places inside the walls they would look before they checked here.

He wiped his face. His hand was coated in river grit, and it scraped across his cheeks as the mud mingled with a few tears that had escaped from the corners of his eyes.

A growl came from the darkness behind him.

Illya slipped in the snow as he turned to face the sound, barely staying on his feet. Light from the fires on the hill behind the wall glinted off dozens of eyes. The Terrors had surrounded him, and there was no direction left to run.

He glanced around for a branch or rock, anything to use to defend himself. There was nothing he could reach without getting far too close to the gleaming ring of eyes.

He worked his hand into a gap between the stakes behind him, where ropes woven from reed fiber lashed them to cross braces. His fingers, slippery with mud, fumbled on the knot. They were numb and felt disconnected from him, like lumps of clay.

Then, through the gap in the slats, he saw movement. Outlined by the glow of the fires beyond were two figures, walking away from him on the path inside the walls. A bubble of hope swelled in his chest and he yelled, but the sound came out broken and thin. His voice was hoarse from the cold, and he could not push it out more than a few feet.

The figures were getting farther away by the moment.

Illya snatched the plastic box up from the ground and heaved it as hard as he could, high over the fence. Desperation gave him strength, and it flew through the air a long way before falling directly between them. They stopped, looked down at it, and then turned back in the direction it had come from. Illya yelled again with every ounce of breath he had, finally getting more than a croak out of his lungs. The taller figure hesitated, but the other sprinted towards the gate.

More snarls came out of the darkness around him. He could hear the creaking of wood against wood and heavy breathing. Finally, the gates swung open.

As Illya fell through the opening, something brushed against his ankles, and a red line of pain seared across his calf. He scrambled inside and collapsed on the ground, gasping. The gates closed with a groan; the figure of his rescuer leaned against them, struggling with the latch as a chorus of angry howls rose into the night beyond the wall. Illya pulled himself up and stumbled over. Together, they jammed the crossbar into place.

“It’s full dark! Are you trying to get yourself killed?”

It was a girl, slight and red-haired. She turned and glared up at him, chest heaving, shaking with fury.

Sabelle Eder. Of all the people to find him. He gasped, still trying to catch his breath, and found himself staring at the firelight skipping through her tangled waves of hair. His head spun, and prickling heat spread up his neck to his ears.

“Uh…” he managed.

Sabelle was the prettiest girl in the village, and her father was the village Leader. Illya clenched his fists, trying to keep them from shaking. A shiver went through his entire body, reaching his bones. In his flight, he had forgotten the cold, but now he felt it. His damp clothes clung to him.

“What’s this?”

Sabelle’s mother, Impiri, had reached them and was gripping the plastic box with white-knuckled fingers. It was open, and the lid lay on the ground at her feet. Illya’s heart thudded harder. He strained his neck to peer inside.

“An Olders’ thing,” Impiri said, pursing her lips. She looked up from it and met his eyes. Standing, he was taller than her, but the force behind her gaze made her tower in his imagination. He looked at his feet.

“You know better than to bring something like this here,” she said.

“It could have been food,” he muttered then snuck another covetous glance at the box. His stomach was aching, but he ignored it. He caught a glimpse of more plastic inside. Impiri snorted, and his cheeks flared hot.

“Ma,” Sabelle murmured.

“It’s a wonder you haven’t brought the Calamity in before now. All that junk. That… bicycle. Devil’s work,” Impiri said. She scowled down at the box as if it held a particularly offensive insect.

“Illya!” His ma was sprinting toward them down the path. His aunt, Ada, followed close behind her.

“Your boy was outside the gates Grenya. Brought in another Olders’ thing,” Impiri said, her lips and nose wrinkling up as if she had smelled a skunk.

“In the dark?” His ma’s eyes were wide and bright with worry. She gripped him by the shoulders, looking him over.

“Illya, you’re bleeding!” There was a rip in his pants, and through it a deep scratch was visible, cutting across his calf. A line of blood was trickling down his ankle and soaking into his boot.

“It’s nothing, Ma, I caught it on a branch,” he said. She knelt and ripped a piece of cloth from her skirt to bind it. He winced. Their clothes were a patchwork of animal skins and salvaged remnants of the finer cloth of the Olders. There was less and less Olders’ cloth around these days, and he knew that skirt was one of his mother’s favorites.

Ada came up behind him and flung a fur over his shoulders, cutting off the sharp chill of the wind.

“He’s alright now,” Ada said. Grenya stood. Her eyebrows gathered together in a reproachful cluster. She licked her fingers and began to wipe some of the mud off his cheek.

“Ma!” Illya squirmed away, horrified that Sabelle had just seen his mother clean his face as if he was a kid. He shrugged her off and edged closer to the box. Impiri was picking at the plastic inside it.

“What is this?” she muttered, tearing through the top of the wrapping. Gingerly, as if she was holding something that could burn, she lifted a floppy object out and let the plastic drop to the ground.

It was not food.

“It’s paper!” Illya blurted, shaking again, this time not with cold but with excitement.

He had seen a few pieces of paper before but never so much at once. It was bound together along one side.

“A book,” Impiri said. She narrowed her eyes at it and ran her finger down its smooth edge.

Illya wanted to grab it right out of her hands to get a closer look but held himself back.

“I found paper one time. Turned to dust when I touched it,” Grenya said.

“When we were girls, our pa had some he used to start the fire,” Ada said to her. “Worked pretty good.”

Impiri looked up at her. “Pa had the right idea about this sort of thing,” she said.

“He just liked it for kindling,” Ada said and shrugged.

“You don’t know everything,” Impiri said, sniffing.

“What’s it for?” Sabelle asked.

There was silence for a moment, filled with nothing but the crackling of the distant fires and the wind howling through the slats of the palisade.

“It has stories marked down on it, and they say you can hear them in your mind when you look at it,” Ada said.

Impiri shuddered. “It’s the worst kind of Olders’ magic,” she said.

Sabelle frowned and glanced at Illya, meeting his eyes for a brief moment. He wasn’t sure in the dim firelight, but he thought that she blushed. His heart skipped, and she looked away.

“Oh, leave off that talk, Impiri,” Ada said, sighing.

“What good have Olders’ leavings ever done us? You know Pa always said—”

“He just liked to hear himself talk.” Ada cut her off.

“Did you find any roots, Illya?” Grenya asked.

Illya’s heart dropped. He tore his eyes from the book and shook his head. Grenya smiled, a little sadly.

“Tomorrow then,” she said.

Illya took a deep breath. “No,” he said. He swallowed then went on. “Won’t be anything tomorrow either. I went farther downstream than we have ever dug before, and there was nothing. The roots are gone.”

The women’s chattering dropped off abruptly. They stared at him.

Impiri broke the silence, “They can’t be.”

“It’s true. There’s nothing out there,” Illya said, looking up to meet the challenge in her eyes. His legs shook as the realization of it hit him in waves. There was no food tonight and none to come soon, likely nothing before spring. His head spun. How many of the villagers would starve before the snow melted?

Impiri’s eyes flared hot. She gripped the book as if she would rip it apart.

“You bring this thing into the village, and now you tell us the roots are gone,” she said. “I think it’s no coincidence.” Her grip tightened on the book as if she could strangle the life out of it.

“Impiri—” Ada started to speak, but Impiri turned and stormed down the path toward the fires, clutching the book to her chest.

In moments, she had reached the roaring fires beside the stone farmhouse in the center of the village. Illya ran to catch up, passing rows of mud and thatch huts that were ringed around the stone house like a legion of devoted worshipers around a god.

It was growing late, but there were still people at the fires. In better times, the villagers would gather here in the evenings to tell stories, dance, and even share in feasts when food was plentiful. Now, knots of waif-like people huddled together, trying to forget their hunger in the warmth of the fires. The air was thick with desperation. Lately, it had not been unusual for bitter fights to break out over the little food that they found.

Impiri headed directly for the largest fire. Illya caught up to her and grabbed her arm, pulling her back.

“You can’t burn it,” he said.

“Let go of me.” Impiri jerked out of his grasp. By now, they had attracted the attention of the other gathered villagers. People started drifting over to see what the commotion was.

“That boy of Grenya’s,” he heard someone whisper nearby. Illya’s face burned.

“Don’t interfere with things you don’t understand,” Impiri said, sniffing. She turned back to the fire but stopped when another hand descended onto her shoulder. Illya looked up and saw the wrinkled face of the village Healer, Samuel.

“What is this?” Samuel asked. Impiri tensed against his hand then relaxed, letting her breath out long and slow. Samuel was one of the oldest people in the village. He taught the smallest children about edible plants, and he was old enough that nearly everyone could remember learning from him as a little themselves. Because of this, the entire village carried an awe of him and a peculiar fear that he would catch them out in their mischief, even if childhood was long past. They may not even be engaged in wrongdoing at all, but it still seemed to be necessary to stop and check.

“It’s nothing.” Impiri tucked the book inside her patchwork jacket.

“Nothing?” Samuel raised his eyebrows. His stern face relaxed into a smile, and he lifted his hand from Impiri’s shoulder.

“You won’t mind if I have a look then,” he said, shrugging. “Humor an old man.”

Impiri pursed her lips then glanced around at the growing crowd of people. Finally, she pulled the book out from her jacket and held it out to him.

Samuel took the book from her gently. He cradled it in both of his hands, and Illya finally got a good look at it. The paper was brown, like dry leaves. It seemed fragile, as if it could crumble away in the Healer’s fingers.

“You are wrong, I think,” Samuel said, smiling at her. “This is something special.”

Impiri snorted with laughter.

“Whatever you say, old man,” she said and stood up taller before turning and pushing her way past the crowd.

When she was beyond the ring of onlookers, Impiri looked back.

“It’s of the Olders. You know that no good can come of it,” she said and strode off toward the stone house. Sabelle followed her. She glanced back over her shoulder at Illya, catching his eye for a moment before climbing the stairs and going inside.

Illya looked at Samuel. The Healer’s eyes were shining. He brushed his fingertips across the book’s smooth cover.

“A book,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper. “How long has it been since I’ve seen one?”

“I found it,” Illya said, almost to himself.

Samuel looked up at him, frowning.

“If anyone would have, you would,” he said and tucked the book carefully inside his own jacket.

The people had lost interest and started to disperse. Grenya and Aunt Ada joined them, and they went together back toward home.

Samuel soon turned down the path to his hut. Illya stopped and watched him walk away until Samuel looked back over his shoulder.

“Tomorrow,” he mouthed and patted the outline of the book under his jacket.

Suddenly, Illya didn’t mind quite as much that he was going home to a tiny hut empty of food. His hollow stomach had been like a dark cloud over him, weighty with rain, but the prospect of exploring those pages broke through it like a ray of sunshine.

When they stopped in front of his Aunt Ada’s hut, she motioned for them to wait. A few minutes later, she came out and pressed a wrapped package into Grenya’s hands. Grenya unwrapped a corner and revealed a loaf of black lichen, already soaked, pounded and dried so that it wouldn’t cramp the belly when you ate it.

“Oh, Ada! You shouldn’t. What will you eat?” Grenya said, the creases on her forehead deepening as she looked up at her sister-in-law.

“Got a little more left yet.” Ada shrugged. Grenya raised her eyebrows.

“Besides,” Ada said, “families have to stick together in these times.” Grenya’s eyes shifted almost imperceptibly back toward the stone house. Ada shook her head.

“She may be my sister, but you are still more our family than she ever will be, even with Victor gone. Take it,” she said.

CHAPTER TWO

ILLYA’S STOMACH, NOT filled by the watery soup of lichen and boiled bark shavings, ached through the night. His mind spun, refusing to settle. Images of the book and the brief glimpse he’d had of its pages wove through a dream of digging through endless mud. Before the sun had begun its ascent over the mountain behind the village, he folded his legs and sat up on his furs. He watched the window, waiting for the light.

When dawn lightened the sky in blue streaks, Illya eased the door open, careful not to let it creak and wake his family. He crept outside into the sharp air, his breath clouding around him as he left the warmth of the hut. He hoped that the Healer was awake.

* * *

“I thought I might see you,” Samuel said. “Does this mean you have decided to take on that apprenticeship?”

“Uh…” Illya stalled, blushing. He tried to peek around Samuel into the recesses of the room behind him without being too obvious. The Healer had approached Illya’s mother some time ago about Illya becoming his apprentice. Illya hadn’t agreed because, though he was curious about everything that Samuel knew, settling into the path of Healer would forever keep him from becoming a Patroller. Patrollers hunted for big game and protected the village territory from Rover gangs. It had been a long time since a Rover attack, since Illya had been very small, but he could still remember their whooping screams as they had climbed the walls. His father had been a Patroller then and had shot a Rover man in the leg with a crossbow that Illya still had in the lean-to behind his mother’s hut.

It was a foolish hope anyway. Conna Duncan, the current lead Patroller, had hated Illya ever since they were boys, when he had seen Conna crying beside the river with a set of black eyes his father had given him. Illya’s hobby of tinkering with Olders’ things hadn’t done anything to endear him to Conna further, or to anyone else in the village.

Samuel chuckled.

“I will propose a trade,” he said. “You look at this book, and I will teach you about plants.”

Illya met his eye, wondering if he could be serious. Samuel grinned.

“I am not going to live forever. Someone needs to know what I know,” he said. Illya’s mouth dried, suddenly feeling like the cracked earth of the dust plains beyond the mountains. He swallowed and cast a quick glance back over his shoulder. The sky had grown pink, shot through with gold. The Patrollers would be at the gates now to leave for the hunt, desperate for the big kill that could make all the difference for the village’s survival. His cousin Benja would be there too; he had become a Patroller five years past. Benja was a good hunter and could climb trees almost as well as a squirrel, making him a perfect scout.

Illya looked back at Samuel, watching his expression. The Healer’s face was kind but far from pity; his eyes held a hint of a challenge.

“If you think you can do it, that is,” he said, shrugging.

Illya’s set his jaw against the sick feeling in his stomach.

“It’s a deal,” he said and followed the Healer into the dimly lit room, shutting the door on the rising sun outside.

Shelves crammed with cloth bags and clay jars covered the walls. Bunches of dried herbs hung from the rafters, filling the room with a dusty green fragrance: a memory of spring. There was a fire crackling in the pit, sending smoke up through a hole in the center of the roof and casting shifting light on the walls and ceiling. Illya scanned the rafters, wondering if there was anything good to eat up there.

Samuel withdrew the book from a shelf corner and set it on a wooden table in the back of the room, motioning for him to sit down.

* * *

Now that it was finally in front of him, Illya stared at the book for a long moment. The cover was the color of pale buckskin and was covered with swirling lines. He was surprised to find himself shaking as he reached to open it. He hesitated and drew his hand back.

Among his people, it was believed that there were things a person was not meant to know. It was a gift of the gods that there were secrets in the world. When a person lost that gift: when he asked too much, he lost his mind as well.

But the longing to see what was inside it was too powerful to ignore. Illya sucked in a breath of cold, smoky air and opened the cover.

Charcoal-colored lines marched across the page in uniform rows. He traced his finger across the first row, wondering if they would brush away, but the shapes did not smear. Somehow, they seemed to be part of the paper. Grasping the edge of the paper with care, he turned it over. The markings alone were a wonder, but the next thing he came to was even better. A smiling man stood in a field with a basket full of plants. He looked like he was just beyond a window, not a hundred years or more in the past.

Illya didn’t recognize most of the plants the man was holding, though a few appeared to be bigger versions of things that grew in the woods. There was an onion in the basket. It was half as big as the man’s head! Illya stared at the long, pointy green stalks and the white hair-roots below the round bulb and felt his mouth watering.

On the next page was an array of shining colors, the colors of ripe crabapples and new leaves. There was clean silver metal and glass as clear as water. At first, Illya didn’t know what he was looking at, but a few moments later, he recognized the shape of the objects. Cars.

They barely resembled the rusted-out heaps that littered the broad path running past the village. Most of the cars he had seen had holes and missing parts; the victims of generations of salvage. Many had plants growing out of the windows. One even had a tree coming out of its front.

Inside the cars in the picture, there were people. They were fatter than anyone he had ever seen in his life. Some smiled, but others stared blankly into the distance.

Then there were more pages of the black shapes, some lined up in even grids.

“A marvel, isn’t it?” Samuel said.

“They look like ants. A hundred ants in a row,” Illya said. He wasn’t sure how many a hundred was, but he knew that it was a lot. He traced a line on the table with his fingertip, trying to make it as straight as the ones in the grid, and failed.

“Letters,” Samuel said.

“What?”

“They are letters. They make up words that will tell you the thoughts of the person who put them down,” Samuel said.

Illya shook his head. “Do you know what they say?” he asked.

Samuel pursed his lips, still gazing at the letters. “When I was a child, there was a man who could read words.” He paused and frowned. “I never learned,” he said, looking away.

Illya couldn’t imagine Samuel as a child.

“How long ago was that?” he blurted then cringed, his face growing hot. His mother was always telling him he had to learn when to hold his tongue. Samuel fixed him in place with a sharp look; then the corners of his mouth crept up. He chuckled.

“Almost fifty years ago,” he said. Illya’s mouth dropped open.

“How did you live through fifty winters?” he asked.

“There were fifty springs, summers, and autumns too,” Samuel said. “But not all of it has been as hard as now.”

Illya dropped his eyes back to the book and flipped through it to cover his embarrassment. There were many pages of the letters, but scattered among them were more pictures, each one more fantastic than the last.

He saw strange things mingled with others that he recognized. Fire shot out of the bottom of a cone-shaped thing that took up an entire page, standing stark and white against a blue sky. Tiny people watched the fire from the edge of the picture. On the next page, there was a fish. It was so ordinary compared to the rest of the wonders that Illya laughed out loud. It was a trout, something he saw every day in the river when the fishing was good. Below it was a salmon with a pointy face.

On the next page, a grinning man held up a catfish as long as his arm. Illya recognized its pouting lip and whiskers. His stomach growled. A fish for breakfast would have been a miracle right now.

He turned the page, and there was a picture of a pair of people kissing. Illya snapped the book shut. Heat blazed in his ears and prickled along his jaw. He looked up and was relieved to see that Samuel was sorting through the pots on the far wall with his back turned. Illya’s mind went to Sabelle and the way she had looked at him the night before, her eyes dark and blue, like deep water. He opened the book to the kissing page again and stared at it in fascination.

Kissing hadn’t changed at all since then, though he was hardly an expert. He had never kissed anyone.

“Kissing and trout!” he said out loud, forgetting for a moment about Samuel. He cringed, hunching his shoulders, and glanced back at Samuel. The Healer was watching him, and his eyebrows had climbed nearly to his hairline. Samuel opened his mouth, but anything he had intended to say was abruptly cut off by angry yelling outside and a pounding at the door.

“Open up, old man!”

“We know you have food in there!”

Samuel frowned, and his eyebrows drew together. With slow deliberation in each movement, he walked to the door and opened it. A crowd comprised of what seemed to be half of the men in the village had gathered outside. They pushed and shoved at each other, trying to get into the hut.

“Everyone is starving.” Jimmer Duncan shoved a smaller man out of the way to cross the threshold of the door.

“Are you so out of touch you can hoard all this stuff and not feel nothing about it?” he said, pointing at the herbs hanging from the rafters.

He lurched across the room, and Illya caught a whiff of the brew that some of the men drank on his breath. Illya stood, knocking his chair over in his haste. He grabbed the book from the table and stuffed it inside his jacket before flattening himself against the back wall.

“It ain’t right, really,” said Piers Malkin, almost apologetically. “The roots are all gone, we just been out to dig, and there’s nothing left out there.” Samuel met this comment with silence.

“You can’t keep all this stuff from the rest of us, even if it’s supposed to be medicine,” Piers continued.

Jimmer, meanwhile, started smashing the clay pots against the floor, evidently hoping to find them filled with food. Powdered herbs spilled out of the shards in heaps and wafted into the air to mix with the smoke from the fire. Illya’s nose tickled as he inhaled the dust. More men crowded into the hut, shoving each other. From outside came the sounds of a brawl and the crunch of a fist slamming into someone’s nose.

Samuel stood by, seeming unruffled. He stepped back as a pot smashed at his feet and pressed his lips together as he regarded the new pile of gray-green powder on the floor.

“By all means, help yourselves,” he said.

Jimmer growled, having emptied all the shelves and found nothing. He started stripping the herbs from their ties on the rafters.

Conna Duncan pushed past two men who were fighting over a jar, just inside the doorway, and grabbed Jimmer’s arm. Jimmer rounded on him, swinging his fists. Conna ducked and sidestepped the fist in a well-practiced move.

“You watch yourself, boy,” Jimmer said, snarling.

“You don’t even know what that is,” Conna yelled back.

Illya bit back a yelp and dodged as Piers shoved Conna into the wall beside him. Conna recovered his balance then glared at Illya.

“What are you looking at?” he asked, reddening. He turned and lunged at his father.

“Oh, he is welcome to eat those,” Samuel said. With a swiftness that belied his age, he reached out and snatched a dried plant from another man who was about to stuff it into his mouth.

“This one, though, would steal your breath and put you far beyond my help. I wouldn’t recommend it,” Samuel said. He turned back to Jimmer, who had just swallowed his own handful of herbs, and smiled.

“That one wasn’t nearly so deadly, but judging the amount you just ate, you’ll soon be running for the trenches with your pants around your ankles and your bowels in a cramp. Don’t come to me, for I fear I won’t have anything left to give you,” Samuel said, shrugging, with a gesture at the mayhem that had been made of his once tidy hut.

Jimmer’s face blanched. He clutched his belly and pushed his way past the people in the doorway. The mob fell still in the wake of Samuel’s comment. He looked around cheerily as several men dropped what they had been eating and spit mouthfuls out onto the floor.

“Oh, cheer up. You should all be fine,” he said. “Except for you perhaps, Martin. Do come right back if your face starts swelling.” Samuel squinted at Martin for a moment then nodded as if satisfied.

The men, almost as one, started to stumble backward out of the hut, muttering apologies. A few clutched their bellies the way Jimmer had done.

When all that remained of the raid was a floor covered in clay shards and herb dust, Samuel looked up from the mess.

“First lesson, Illya,” he said brightly. “The amount of a thing eaten is what makes the difference between a poison and a cure.”

They spent the remainder of the morning cleaning up and assessing what needed to be replaced. Samuel took the opportunity to cram Illya’s head with information about the best times to gather the herbs and the way to process them. He included a sizable dose of the many properties of the plants as they swept them up.

By the end of it, Illya felt like he couldn’t fit another fact into his mind.

It became evident to him that Samuel wouldn’t be able to repair the entirety of the damage for a long time. It would take a full year at least because many of the plants only grew during particular seasons. He wondered aloud how Samuel could be so relaxed about it all.

“There are few limits to what desperate men will do, and hungry men are desperate men,” Samuel said, meeting Illya’s eyes with all trace of joviality gone.

“We are fortunate that they left when they did, but I fear that the worst is still coming.”

Illya noticed a slight tremor in the Healer’s hands as he replaced a rare whole jar in its spot on the shelf.

“Maybe, because of today, they will remember to fear this place when that time comes,” Samuel said, gazing at the jar.

CHAPTER THREE

IT WAS NOT until he returned home that evening, after an unsuccessful afternoon of foraging and fishing with his cousin Benja, that Illya realized he still had the book tucked in the inner pocket of his coat. His fingers lingered on the unfamiliar outline, then he carefully drew it out. Had Samuel meant for him to take it? Why hadn’t the Healer, who noticed everything, noticed that it was gone?

His little sister Molly was sitting on the dirt floor of the hut with her skinny arms wrapped around her knees. She was as thin as he had ever seen her, but her belly was round. It was almost like the fat people in the pictures, though Illya knew that it was not the same thing. Most of the children in the village started to look that way at the end of a hard winter.

“I’m hungry,” she whined. Worry twisted his gut. The lichen from Aunt Ada was gone, and he had nothing to give her.

“I’m sorry Mol,” he said. She looked up at him and started whimpering as she rocked back and forth. Her cheeks were hollow; the shadows under her cheekbones were deepening by the day. He looked at her bony wrists and knobby knees and felt sick.

“Maybe I’ll catch a fish tomorrow,” he said, forcing brightness into his voice. “A big, fat one. Maybe I’ll even get two.”

Molly didn’t answer but tucked her head down into the circle of her arms, pressing her forehead to her knees. His mother met his eyes from across the room. The crease in her brow deepened, but she said nothing.

He got up and put some more sticks on the dying fire. Crouching onto his hands, he blew at the base of it until the coals were hot, and flames rose tall to catch the fresh kindling. The firelight brightened the room, lending a cheer despite the hollow worry. It softened the misery in Molly’s face and flowed over Grenya’s back. It glinted off the warps and ripples of the glass jars that were wedged into the mud of the wall to make their single window.

Illya was proud of those. He had been the man of the family since his father had died, and he had rebuilt the hut himself season after season, reinforcing it and improving it with salvaged things. He had found the jars, rare and whole, in a nearby ruin a year past. Because of his find, his mother was the only one in the village with a glass window. Not even the stone house had any left.

He watched her pull a clay pot down from the shelf below the window to look inside. She put it aside and reached for another then another. The knot in his stomach pulled tighter with each one she set away.

Illya swallowed. He wanted to scream, but he pressed his lips together to hold it in. He couldn’t remember ever feeling so helpless before. Molly was wasting away before his eyes, and there was nothing he could do to stop it. He dropped his eyes and stared at the floor.

Turning his back to them, he pulled his furs up around his shoulders and opened the book.

He stopped for a moment, his fingers hovering over the page. Those who lost the gift would hear the hidden voices of the world pouring into their thoughts, whispering secrets, driving the person to do mad and dangerous things. To lose the gift was a Calamity of its own. Anyone touched by madness would be cast out of the village for fear the contagion would spread.

He traced the shapes of the letters with his finger. Rachel, Benja’s older sister, had lost her mind years before. It had been so long ago that he barely remembered her. Illya listened for the voices to come pouring in on him. He knew he had seen enough in the pictures earlier that they could come at any moment. He held his breath.

None came.

He gazed at the letters, wondering what they meant. There was a round shape that could represent the sun. S could be a snake or maybe a rope.

Samuel had held no fear of the book, Illya remembered. The Healer knew more than anyone in the village. If anyone were to lose the gift, it would be him. Still, Illya felt more than a little uneasy as he looked at the letters. To try to learn what they meant was surely taking it too far. They said that Rachel had been thrown out of the village at night when the voices had come and was never seen again.

But knowledge was a gift too. How else could they know what to eat or how to make fires? He blinked.

There was nothing among the shapes that he could see that could represent food. Even his people had ways to mark down what was food and what was not. An entire wall of the stone house had the shapes of the plants that were edible and the plants that held malice carved onto it. If these letters were the shapes of important things, there seemed to be a lot missing.

Across the room his ma sighed, putting aside another jar. She reached for the last one on the shelf. Their stores were gone. He knew better than to hope that she would find anything inside it.

She pulled out several handfuls of shavings from the inner bark of a birch tree. He swallowed. More bark. It was not good for much besides making you feel full for a little while, and he wasn’t sure if that was better than nothing at all. She positioned a pot of water over the fire on a grate that had come from one of the rusted-out cars along the broad pathway.

He blinked, trying to clear his eyes as he looked back down at the page. The firelight had left spots in his vision, blurring the letters. When they came back into focus, he noticed something. There was a C at the beginning of a line, then another, smaller one, a few words later. He looked again to see if other shapes repeated. There were many repetitions. Sometimes there were even two of the same shape in a row. In one place there were two circles. Why would you say “sun” and then “sun” again?

He laid his head back and rubbed his hand across his eyes then looked back at the page. C could be a shield—that could mean battle. He tried to guess the meaning of each shape, looking for clues for what the words might say. Shield first, then an arm over a fat belly, a hill, raised arms, sun, cup, spear? It didn’t make sense.

He squinted at the page, trying to let the lines of each word blend into a recognizable shape, but it was useless.

He shook his head, shutting the book, and put it aside more roughly than he meant to before joining his family. They sat near the fire and chewed on the softened bark slowly, sipping the hot water to wash it down.

* * *

“The first plants you must learn are the malice plants,” Samuel said to the group of wriggling children in front of the wall. Illya chased one of the littles across the snow and picked him up by the waist, returning him to the others.

“The shoots will come soon, and do you know what will happen to you if you pick the wrong kind?” Samuel said. They sobered, with wide eyes and serious nodding heads despite the chaos of a few moments before. Every one of them had already begun to learn this. Its importance had been impressed on them since the first time they had been able to grab things and put them in their mouths.

“When the people came out of the cities, they had no wall like this. They had to find out all of this for themselves. They left it for us so that we would not have to do that,” Samuel said.

Illya remembered the first day he had been shown the wall as a little himself. From Samuel’s description, he had pictured the cities as being underground. He had laughed at the thought of the people coming up out of them, blinking in the bright sunshine like moles coming out of their holes.

“Who has seen this one?” Samuel asked, and several of the littles raised their hands.

“Lace top,” a little boy said, and Samuel gave him an approving nod then moved on to point out some less common plants. These littles would see them again and again until they could recite what was on the wall without looking.

Illya could close his eyes and think his way down it. The fern fiddlehead was at the top, then the red-stemmed creeper beside the spotted mushroom, then blue cones, hood-flower, the lace top, and many more.

Some plants held malice all the time, and some only when they looked a certain way. This might be when they had flowers, when their shoots grew bigger than your little finger, or when they grew thorns. The pictures on the wall showed all of these things too.

“How did the people find them?” a little girl asked. Her belly was swollen too, just like Molly’s. Her eyes looked too big for her face, ringed with dark hollows.

“They learned by eating the plants to see what would happen,” Samuel said.

“They ate all the malice plants?” the lace-top boy asked. Samuel nodded.

“Why didn’t they die?” he asked.

“A lot of them did. That is why the wall is such a gift,” Samuel said, and the littles stared at it open-mouthed. Illya’s thoughts drifted, as they often had in the past days, to the book. What was it hiding? Did it have secrets in its pages like this? Things that could make their lives so much better that someday people wouldn’t be able to imagine how they had lived without knowing?

“What are these?” Samuel asked, indicating the carvings. They were separated from the malice plants by a wide groove running down the center.

“Those are the ones we eat,” said the lace-top boy. Illya swallowed. Half of the littles gazed at the carvings with wide, longing eyes. Some looked away sullenly.

“Yes, you probably recognize many of them. There are a few that do not grow anymore, or if they do, we have not been able to find them.” Samuel pointed to the first ones in the list.

“This one was called corn, the next one is wheat. They grew in the dust plains to the east before the seeds died,” Samuel said.

“I never saw anything like that,” one of the older ones said, crossing his arms.

Illya thought of the letters. He had stared at the first row so many times that he could have written them out in snow.

C, a, n, y, o, u, i, m, a

Repetition again, he realized. The shape a after C was the same as the a after m.

He thought through them a little farther: there was g, then i. Another repetition. He began to wonder how many letters there were in all, once you accounted for the fact some of them were just the same ones over and over.

“I never did either,” Samuel answered the boy with a sad smile. “But maybe someday we will find them again.”

* * *

That evening, Illya joined the people beside the central fire, more to distract himself from hunger than anything else.

The villagers milled around like a hive of bees with no queen to follow: directionless and afraid. The fragile ties between neighbors were strung taut, like bowstrings, and there was the sense in the air that at any moment they could snap.

“Only thing for it is to leave.” Illya overheard a man nearby speaking in low tones to several of his friends.

“Things never used to be like this,” said Charlie Polestad. “I remember when Dane—”

“Will you shut it about Dane Marshall? It’s not going to bring those days back,” the first man, Eddie Matheson, said.

“Marshall was the best Leader we ever had. Nothing’s gone right since he was killed. Ever since Elias—“

“Keep your voice down, Mark,” Eddie whispered.

“She talks about curses, but nothing has been more cursed than this village under that man,” Mark spat, in lower tones, jerking his head toward the stone house.

“Can’t leave anyway. It’s no good out there either,” Eddie said after a brief silence. “And them Terrors are hungry too.”

“Not like you’ll pop over the hill and find spring in the next valley,” Charlie said. He shook his head. “My ma’s weaker than I’ve ever seen her. We haven’t had more than bark in a week or more. She can’t even get out of bed now.”

There was silence at this. No one seemed to know what to say. Illya snuck a look past his shoulder at the men. Charlie hung his head and scuffed his foot on the ground.

“It’s not right,” Mark said. “Old Marieke starving when there’s some that have plenty.” He looked again at the stone house. Illya had not seen any of its residents—Elias, Impiri, and Sabelle—for several days, not since before the riot at Samuel’s. If they were holed up inside with stores of food while the rest of the village faced the disappearance of the roots, things could go bad, and quickly.

“They don’t have any more than the rest of us,” Charlie said, his face sagging. He rubbed his hand across the back of his neck.

“What we should be doing is weeding out the weakest, the ones who won’t survive anyway, give the rest of us a chance.” Jimmer Duncan strode up and joined the men. Charlie turned on him.

“You take that back,” he said. He cracked his neck and rolled his shoulders back. His jaw was hard, and his eyes were fierce. Jimmer, taller than him by a head, lifted his chin and looked down at Charlie.

“Won’t help them if all of the rest of us starve too. S’not like we would be killing anyone, just sending them to find a new chance somewhere else,” Jimmer said.

A cry tore from Charlie’s throat. He flung himself at Jimmer, pounding the bigger man with white-knuckled fists. Illya’s stomach rolled over. All he had eaten that day was bark and not the friendliest variety either. His stomach had been cramping with the effort of holding it down even before he had heard the talk.

Jimmer hardly flinched at Charlie’s blows. Soon, the other men succeeded in separating them. Illya retreated, realizing with a chill that went right through his bones that Charlie had been the only one who tried to shut Jimmer up.

The weakest.

That meant the old, the very young, and anyone already close to starving. That meant Charlie’s ma, old Marieke.

It meant Molly.

CHAPTER FOUR

AT HOME, ILLYA watched his sister sleeping peacefully in his mother’s arms. After a long time, he buried himself in his furs and lost himself in the book, trying to tell himself that it had been nothing but idle talk. He stared at the pictures, dreaming of how the people in them had lived, how they had always had enough to eat. You could see it in the roundness of their cheeks, their height, and the strength of their bodies. They had never talked about tossing starving elders or littles outside the walls to be taken by Terrors; he was sure of it.

He chewed on his lip, gazing for perhaps the hundredth time at the basket of plants in the smiling man’s arms. He traced their shapes then the shapes of the letters below the picture. Illya counted the characters in the passage, accounting for when they repeated. He found there weren’t very many at all.

Painstakingly, Illya scratched each shape into the mud that covered the wall beside his bed with a sharp twig.

His letters came out wobbly and large, very different than the neat little shapes on the page. Some of them seemed to just be bigger versions of the same thing. He put the big C under the smaller one, and the same with M, U, and O. Then he decided to take the big ones away from his list altogether, guessing that all of them were bigger versions of the others, even though they weren’t all obvious. He counted the letters, stumbling a few times when he got past ten but eventually getting what he felt was a good estimate. There were about 30 of them. That wasn’t so many.

c a n y o u i m g e r l h t w r s ? p d k f b j q x ! z

The list was actually simple, condensed out of something impossibly huge.

When he realized the audacity of what he had done, cold sweat broke out across his forehead. Holding himself perfectly quiet, he listened to the wind whistling through the cracks in the walls and waited for a sign that he had lost the gift, and his mind with it: the first whispers coming from the things around him. Slowly, he shifted his eyes from the ceiling to the center of the room, and the blackened clay pot over the fire pit, wondering if it would start speaking and what it would have to say.

No voices came.

He let his breath out. From outside came the patter of rain. He squinted up at the window, trying to see the drops through it. Firelight glinted off the jars and bounced into his eye, making him blink.

Mason jars.

That was a word: their name. It was something everyone knew, although no one could have said why or where the name had come from. And he remembered an oddity that had always puzzled him. He got up and crossed the room to run his fingers across the familiar bumps on the side of a jar.

He had always wondered why they were there. Until now, he had thought that the bumps were a decoration. But now he saw that they looked just like the letters in the book. He whispered the word.

“Mason.”

It had been right in front of him all along!

M A S O N

The bumps had warped with age, but they were the same on all five jars. Five letters and five sounds. Illya wiped at his forehead with his hand, trembling. The letters were sounds. That was the answer.

Not only that, he knew what five of them were.

CHAPTER FIVE

ILLYA WORKED IN the dim light of Samuel’s hut, retrieving bunches of herbs from the rafters and grinding them into powders.

“What is this?” Samuel held up a dry sprig with oval leaves, gray with age but still giving off a pungent scent.

“Bayberry,” Illya said.

“Uses?”

“To fight the small calamities, to bring sweat, and to start the upchuck.”

“Yes, that’s right. Now, when you have its bark, it works well as a poultice for sores, and when you have the fruits, you can boil them to get wax for candles or to seal cloth against water.”

Illya nodded. He focused on his work, relaxing in the rhythm of the grinding and the cadences of the Healer’s words. He wondered if he would ever know enough to trace the shapes for all of them.

He had squinted at the book by the light of his family’s fire late into the night, until his mother had woken up and scolded him for piling logs on. The light had died away gradually after that, but by then it didn’t matter. The letters he knew were all through the book, and by the time he had to put it away, he had read “man,” “son,” “on,” “an,” and “am”. It was like a doorway had broken open and light from beyond was shining through the crack.

Illya had done something that no one else had in living memory, but the scope of what remained to the mystery was still daunting. Samuel’s words hummed and drifted in and out of his ears; each one made up of different sounds, each sound with a letter that he could find, if only he could push the door open a little wider.

“Stoneroot will have to be replaced next, though you won’t like grinding it,” Samuel said. “Still, it’s worth the effort. There are many uses for the stoneroot. Most important, it is good to calm the cough that comes with the small Calamities,” Samuel continued, and Illya put the information into his mind, next to the qualities for bayberry.

“They’ll come soon now. Cold time is shifting into the damp time. Best thing we can do to keep them from spreading is to stop the cough,” Samuel said.

Germes, tiny spirits that flew on the wind, went into wet places and brought Calamities and the ’fection. Everyone knew that. They would get into a nose with a drip or uncovered eyes. The cough made stronger winds for them to sail on.

Calamities. Stoneroot. Grind. Written words had different lengths. He had seen that quickly enough. Hearing them, it made sense. Spoken words were made of different numbers of sounds too. Now he had a new idea.

There weren’t very many words with only one sound or even two.

There was “I,” and “a.” Illya tried and couldn’t think of any others that only had one sound. He halted in his work when he realized that he already knew a. It was part of mason. That meant he would be able to find I, another letter.

Six.

The two-sound words would help too. Many of them could be the key to new letters, and, if he could work out enough of them, he might be able to fill in the gaps in the longer words.

Samuel took in a sharp breath. Illya heard a jabbering, like a flock of crows, distant but growing louder.

There was a shriek and what sounded like someone crying.

The sounds grew closer and closer. Illya and Samuel held perfectly still, as if moving could attract the attention of the crowd outside, despite the walls that surrounded them. Samuel snapped the bayberry twig in half in his fingers but seemed not to notice. His face was white.

Then there was a whoop, and the voices began to recede.

“Something’s happened,” Illya said, rising to his feet to look outside. Samuel held up his hand.

“I have to see,” Illya said. He turned back to the door and eased it open.

There was a crowd, but it had moved past them, towards the central fire. Where the day before the men had been a mob, full of rage and desperation, this was a very different scene. They were laughing. It was the first laughter Illya had seen on their faces in months. Happiness shone in their eyes like rising sunlight and spread across the hills of their cheeks.

Laughter. That was why they had sounded like cackling birds. It had been so long since Illya had heard it that he hadn’t recognized the sound.

Two of the same men who had smashed up the Healer’s hut just the day before had linked arms and were dancing in a frenzied circle in the middle of it all. Julian Reyes, one of the Patrollers, was kneeling on the ground in the midst of the crowd with both hands over his face. Illya couldn’t be sure from the distance, but he thought he saw tears running down the boy’s cheeks.

“I think it’s okay,” he said to Samuel. Together they left the hut.

Charlie was standing a little way out of the crowd with his arms folded across his chest.

“What’s happened?” Illya asked.

“Shoots,” Charlie said. “The melt’s started and the shoots have come back.”

On the ground in front of Julian was a pile of wet earth. From it, a tiny green spike with a curled end was pushing its way towards the sky. Illya couldn’t hold back a grin at the sight. The shoot was a small thing, but its promise meant everything. Charlie smiled in return, but there was still a tinge of worry in his eyes.

“It won’t be enough for my ma. Hasn’t come soon enough,” he said. Illya’s insides twisted, his thoughts skipping to the hollow-eyed littles and to Molly with her strange, swollen belly. Charlie was right. It would still be weeks before the shoots spread across the ground in a carpet of plenty and their worries would be truly behind them.

Still, the sight of the little shoot went a long way towards filling his spirit even though it would do nothing to fill his stomach.

A boy took up a reed flute and began to play a tune to accompany the dancing. Soon, an old man joined him with a string instrument, and then Illya’s cousin Benja came with an old buckskin drum. It had been made by their grandfather from a hollowed-out log with a tanned deer hide stretched over it. It was a solid drum and still made a deep, resonant sound although it was old. Benja loved it. He oiled the wood each year with animal fat to keep it from cracking.

Benja adjusted the strap—a length of leather, patterned with turquoise stones and silver that Illya had found for him in the same ruin the mason jars had come from—across his shoulder. He pounded a rhythm in time with their tune, and a woman joined in, shaking seashell bracelets over her head.

Illya found a dry bit of ground and sat down, leaning against a rock to watch. He never danced. He couldn’t get over the idea that everyone would watch him and think he looked foolish.

There was a mosaic set into the ground, left over from the first settlers. It showed a cornucopia full of plants. Its stones pressed the rough approximation of a vine into his calf in a much different way than the real plant would have imprinted. Illya rubbed it and watched Benja toss his head as he hit the drum, smiling to himself as if he had a secret.

The music crept into Illya’s soul, catching at a nameless longing, plucking with fingers made from a strain of flute, a beat of the drum, a clattering seashell-fall. The thrumming of the strings weaved below the higher energy of the reed flute and percussion with a sound that surrounded them, forgettable as a heartbeat.

The dancing people were infected too. More and more villagers joined. Julian picked up the little shoot, and cradled it in his hands, still kneeling on the ground in the midst of it all. Illya watched as the villagers pranced around the fire, embarrassed to see their bony frames, the way the sagging skin on the backs of their arms flapped, their angular movements in ill-fitting clothes. They moved with abandon, seemingly unaware of the foolishness of their spectacle.

They were free, and he found himself in a state of acute discomfort that he did not share in the feeling. He scowled, attempting to balance on his superiority and the thought that he would never let himself look so ridiculous.

A chill sharpened the air and the roughness of the rock pressed into his back. A large, worn-out woman pranced past. She streamed a tattered shawl behind her head like it was a pair of giant wings.

His thoughts drifted over the day: Molly and her skinny knees, the laughing people, the book and its beautiful pictures. He thought of the two-sound words and how close he was to unlocking it all. He thought of the people in the pictures and how they had lived. Beyond his spinning thoughts, an awareness of someone’s attention grew.

Sabelle.

He looked up and met her eyes across the circle. He blushed. Heat rose up his neck and reached past his ears. She glanced away quickly but soon looked back at him. His heart sped up. He kept staring at her when she looked away again, stupidly mesmerized by the shape of her ear, like a little seashell.

He ducked his head, looking down, and pretended to be deeply interested in a tear in the knee of his pants. He wondered if he had been talking to himself earlier and that was why she had been watching him. He knew that his face was red. When he looked up, she was watching him again, with a little smile at the corners of her mouth. Illya smiled back at her.

He wasn’t sure what they were smiling about, maybe it was the shoots, maybe nothing at all. He grinned like an idiot. It was as if they had a secret together, although he had no idea of what it was. Eventually, Martha Sayen, who was sitting beside Sabelle, elbowed her in the ribs, and she broke the gaze.

He rubbed his sweaty hand through his hair. On the other side of the fires, Impiri was talking to a few people, flinging her hands around to punctuate whatever she was saying. What was it he had been thinking? He couldn’t remember now. Julian got up from the ground, still clutching the clump of earth, and joined the people who were listening to Impiri.

“…have to share it all around,” Illya caught one of the women saying.

He glanced at Sabelle again, but she was looking away now, watching the crowd around her mother. Martha whispered something to her, and they both glanced at him and started giggling. His stomach tumbled around like a river rapid, and he looked down.

A shadow came between him and the fire. He gulped and looked up, both hoping and fearing that it was her. Instead, Benja stood over him, grinning.

“Not going to ask her to dance?” Benja said. Illya glared at him. Benja knew perfectly well how he felt about dancing. Illya glanced down at his arm and shook his head. He wondered how he would look out there, galloping around, hanging on to her hand.

“We all know… got to be stores in the cellar there.” Jimmer’s voice drifted across the square. He was talking to Impiri, pointing to the stone house. Elias, the village Leader, came and stood between them with his hands up. Illya strained to hear what they were saying.

Benja plunked himself down beside Illya, sagging back against the rock, chuckling.

“She would dance with you, you know,” Benja said. Illya felt himself redden again and locked his eyes on the ground. He must have been obvious when he had been watching her if Benja had seen it from where he had been playing.

“You saw,” Illya said, scowling. Benja snorted.

“Anyone who was looking saw all that,” he said. Illya cringed.

“I guess you don’t remember that she was doing the same thing you were,” Benja said and punched Illya in the shoulder. Illya braced himself to keep from being knocked over. It wasn’t fair that Benja weighed so much more than him.

Across the circle, the group around Impiri and Elias was growing. Aunt Ada had joined them, and suddenly Illya did not have to strain to hear at all.

“A sign? Have we come to that? Looking for signs in the woods and the clouds?” Ada said, her fists shoved into her hips as she glared at her sister.

Illya and Benja looked at each other then got up and moved closer.

“Soon there will be plenty for everyone again,” Elias said, holding up his hands. “The shoots have come. We’re safe.”

Some of the people nodded, but many stood back with their arms folded across their chests.

“If you look at your neighbors and think that your problems come from them, you’re right,” Impiri said, snapping.

Jimmer took a half step backward. “But it’s not because anyone is hoarding food.”

Her eyes flashed. “Our ancestors set out the rules for survival. As long as we follow in their way, we will have enough. But if we don’t remember them, and what they taught, we will go the way of the Olders!” Her voice reached a high pitch.

“I thought that we were people who used our minds and survived by our wits,” Ada said, but Impiri paid no attention to her.

“The Olders angered the gods, yet we bring their things, their corruption here. We bring the gods’ anger down on our village.”

She looked around, breathless, her eyes hovering on one person, then another, and finally settling on Illya.

“He has been bringing in more and more,” she said, pointing at him. The people nearby muttered to each other, a rising buzz around him. Illya wished that he could sink into the earth. Beside him, Benja shifted closer.

Impiri was a person of standing in the village and people still listened to her. Her grandfather had led all of their ancestors through the Calamity. Her father, and Ada’s, Dane Marshall, had been the best Leader they had ever had. Even if her husband struggled to fill his shoes, he was still the head of the village. Many would blame Illya if that was what she told them to do. It would be less frightening than facing the real problem. He tried to glance back at Sabelle without being obvious, wishing he could see her face, but she was too far behind him.

Elias was nodding. “We’ve gotten careless. We have to remember that the founders survived when so many others didn’t. We can’t forget their ways.” Illya looked around the circle. Ada was red-faced with clenched fists. A few people looked uncertain, but too many nodded in ready agreement.

Elias looked at Impiri and put his hand on her shoulder.

“He’s just a boy. And there are things of the Olders all around us,” he said. Impiri narrowed her eyes at Elias.

“There is a disease here and it has to be cleaned out before it is too late,” she said then turned back to the crowd.

“We must find each thing of the Olders that has wormed its way in and burn it.”

“Time someone did something about the way things are going. People forgetting what the Founders taught. I don’t hold with it,” Jimmer Duncan said, nodding. Elias frowned, his eyes darting from Impiri to the other people. He sighed.

“If there is corruption, we can clean it out. The shoots have returned. We have time,” he said, holding up his hand. He raised his voice so that it reached over the hum of the crowd. “We have been given a second chance.”

“Don’t need to be feeding people that bring curses down on us either,” Jimmer continued, muttering under Elias’s words.

“Yes,” Impiri said. “It is a new chance.” She looked from face to face in the circle, squinting in the dimming light as though she could see the corruption hiding inside each of them.

She moved from Ada to Uncle Leo, to Benja, then to Illya. Before she could say anything, a wail sounded through the crowd, anguished and terrible, driving a chill to his core.

Jannica Myr staggered into the firelight.

“It’s too late,” she said.

She was clutching a small bundle to her chest, sobbing.

“He’s gone. My boy is gone.” Her voice cracked. Her eyes squeezed closed; then her lips parted in a silent sob.

Another one lost.

Illya’s heart dropped into his stomach. He looked around for his family, suddenly frantic to find them. The sight of the lifeless boy was burned into his mind, remaining even after he had turned away.

Molly.

Stumbling, Illya broke into a run, gripped with fear that he would find her in the same state. Behind him, the people murmured like a swishing sea, and breaking through the sound came Jannica’s sobs.

“A shame, but one less mouth to feed,” a man muttered as he passed. Illya stumbled. The little boy was the fifth person they had lost to starvation that winter. A person could last through much, but when they were weak, or very young, the fear of finding them still in their beds never to wake again was real.

Illya burst through the door and found a scene untouched by the tragedy outside. His mother sat with Molly on her bed. Together, they were drawing pictures on the dirt floor. He looked down, and his heart clenched. His sister’s hand was tracing a lumpy circle.

“We are having a feast,” she said and smiled up at him. Her eyes were happy despite the sunken cheeks and dark hollows below them.

“I’m eating a potato.”

“I have ramps, greens, fish, and a whole rabbit,” his ma said, pointing at the other pictures on the floor. Illya swallowed, for a moment finding himself unable to speak. He sat down beside them.

“First shoots,” he said. “They’ve found the first shoots.” Both of them looked up at him, wide-eyed. Grenya smiled, the crease between her brows softening. Illya put his arm around his little sister’s shoulders and hugged her close until she squirmed away.

Later, after Molly was asleep, Illya told his mother about Jannica and her little boy. She gripped the table edge, going pale.

“Another one.” She shook her head, gazing down at Molly’s small face.

“It won’t happen to her. We won’t let it happen to her,” she said. Illya nodded, though he knew that they would be just as helpless as Jannica had been if it did.

“We can get by a little longer.” He paused. “We have to.”

Then, because he couldn’t stand taking the thought any further, he turned away and pulled the book out from between his furs.

He scanned the text for two-letter words, letting the rows of letters, orderly and clean, fill his mind. He traced them in the dirt with shaking fingers, making shapes that, while not as perfect as the ones in the book, were at least recognizable. There were a lot of them, but as he drew, he found that many had the letters he already knew.

His mind skipped feverishly from clue to clue. He read “am,” and “as,” and “is.” Then he found “if,” “go,” and “my.” Now he knew m,a,s,o,n,i,f,g,y. He glanced at Molly, sleeping peacefully in her furs, and held his breath as he watched her chest rise and fall. He rubbed the back of his neck, remembering what Impiri had said and what Jimmer had said before Jannica had come. He thought of the people standing by, too many agreeing with them.

If Impiri had known that he was reading, she would have him thrown out of the village without a thought.

He turned the page to the picture of the fat man. The Olders had never sat by helplessly watching their children starving; he was sure of it. He set his jaw and focused on the letters again. If he could learn their secrets, maybe he wouldn’t have to watch her starve.

“Is” was a funny one. The sound of “s” in mason was not quite the same as the sound it made in is. It was like it was dragged out, and he couldn’t figure out why. Illya went through the text, saying the letters he knew out loud as he came to them, trying to match them to words he knew. There were many that he couldn’t guess at, but sometimes, when he sounded the letters out in longer words, he could tell which sounds filled in the gaps.

He read “can,” “day,” and “hands.” Each new sound unlocked more and more. Soon he had so many sounds that he had to stop and draw them all out in the dirt, with a picture of a word that started with the sound beside each letter he knew, just to keep track.

He read “fast,” and, a short while later, “past.” He grinned as he added p to his list, beside Molly’s potato.

CHAPTER SIX

“YOU’RE NOT SERIOUS. You can read this?” Benja demanded. They sat together on the riverbank, watching a fish trap they had just set. Benja was looking at a page with a picture of a shining red car. There was a square of short green grass with fat people standing on it beside the car, and a large house in the background.

“Well, kind of. I haven’t read very much yet,” he said. Benja looked up from the page, staring at Illya with his mouth still open. Illya reddened. He tried to skip a stone across the water and failed. The rains had come and the river was muddy and raging. Most of the snow had washed away, and the paths through the village had all become running streams.

“You found something big here, Coz,” Benja whispered.

“I guess so,” Illya said, grinning.

“We can see how they did things,” Benja said.

“Maybe even do some of it too,” Illya said but hesitated. “I want to know how they lived. They had so much.” He glanced past the trees towards the broad path with some longing.

“I wonder when it will be dry enough to take the bicycle out again,” he said. Benja said nothing, watching him. Illya looked back at the book and scowled.

“You think Impiri’s right. They…” Benja said.

“They all died. They must have done something wrong,” Illya said.

Benja chewed on his lip for a minute then glanced up from the book at Illya.

“After you left, Impiri told everyone that we lost Jannica’s boy because of the corruption in the village. The gods punished us, and that’s why the roots ran out too soon,” he said.

“But… that’s—“

“Stupid.” Benja nodded. “But not everyone thinks so.” Illya opened his mouth but could find no words to say.

“Jannica went sort of… crazy,” Benja said. He stopped and swallowed. Illya held his breath, his shoulders tensing slightly. They had not spoken of madness or of Rachel in many years. Benja looked up, met his eyes briefly, then looked out across the river and deftly skipped a stone, succeeding despite the speed of the current. He cleared his throat.

“She took her boy and left, opened the gates and ran off into the woods,” Benja said. “It was long past dark by then.”

Illya stared down at the picture. The bright colors had taken on a slightly sinister cast. Benja shivered as if shaking off a chill.

“The worst thing is people were saying it was good riddance,” he muttered. He breathed in, then out, sharply, looking up to meet Illya’s eyes with sudden intensity. He held Illya’s gaze for a long moment.

“You haven’t lost it,” he said finally. “The gift.”

Illya shook his head. Benja seemed to relax slightly. He grabbed the book and pulled it closer.

“What’s it say then?” he said.

“This word,” Illya said, pointing, “is ‘chicken.’” Benja burst into laughter, all remaining tension dissolving from his posture. Illya grinned and let go of his breath.

“That’s what they’re afraid of? Chicken?”

“Well, there is a lot more, but I have a key to almost all these symbols. Each one stands for a sound. They repeat over and over, you see? There are only about thirty of them.”

“But have you read anything else?” Benja asked.

“A few. I started with the short ones. Chicken was hard to get actually. The sounds run together,” Illya said.

Benja shook his head and stared at him in wonder.

“How do you keep it all straight in your head? I never could,” he said. Illya shifted uncomfortably.

“You know that song the littles sing at each other? When they jump rope or play patty cake.”

Benja shook his head. “Sure, but there’s lots of those,” he said.

“It’s the one that goes A, B, C, D, E, F, G.”

Everyone knew that song. It was just a string of nonsense sounds. Littles liked to compete to sing it as fast as they could so that parts of it made silly words. When Molly had been a little younger, she had loved to yell, “ELEMENOPEE!” at the top of her voice, which would always send her into a fit of giggles.

“Sure,” Benja said and shrugged.

“I actually didn’t figure this out until after I had most of the sounds, but that song is letters,” Illya said. “There’s this place at the end of the book where there are long lists of words that all start with the same letter.” Benja stared at him.

“I thought it was weird, so I’d been looking at it a lot, and then I realized it was the same as that song, all those letters in the same order, one after another,” Illya said.

“A, b, c…” Benja said, and ran his fingers through his short, sandy hair, scratching his head.

“They are a little bit different. It’s like the song takes a sound and makes a whole word out of it to make it easier to say. Instead of just ‘buh’, it’s ‘bee’.”

“Do you think that song was made to help people read then?” Benja asked. “Way back in the Olders’ days?”

Illya nodded.

“That’s what I thought, but there are places where the sounds don’t fit when you read them. I could just have it all wrong.”

“I don’t think you have it wrong.” Benja was looking at him, wide-eyed. Illya studied his feet, more embarrassed than ever. Benja had grown up beside him and had been Illya’s closest friend for as long as he could remember, but Illya couldn’t remember a time when Benja had been impressed by anything he had done.

“These pictures are something too,” Benja said. “There aren’t huts in any of them, just big houses, like the stone house.” Illya shook his head, thinking of what it could mean. What if all of the Olders had lived in houses? There were ruins nearby, all of them houses, but they had always assumed that the huts that ordinary people had lived in had been swept away by time. Their own huts were flimsy things. Every few years they were damaged by storms and floods and had to be rebuilt.

“What’d that be like? You would always be safe.”

“Don’t know,” Benja said.

They sat together for some time, working out the first line of the passage.

“Can you imagine a regular, egg-laying hen turning into a crowing rooster?” Illya sounded out.

“That’s it? That’s what it’s about?” Benja snickered. Illya went on.

“It happened to a chicken belonging to Jeannie and John Howard, whose prize hen, Gertie, started crowing instead of clucking, and grew a wattle,” he read. He pressed his lips together. After all his work, it was nothing but a bunch of nonsense.

“That can’t be right, maybe I did it wrong,” he mumbled. Painstakingly, he checked over each letter. There were a few places where he wasn’t sure. Still, even the difficult words were close enough to recognize what they were.

“No, that’s right,” he said finally. Benja laughed.

“What?”

“Well, you have to admit it’s kind of funny,” he said. “They knew so many things, and they had so much, but this is what they wrote about. Chickens.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

WHEN THEY PULLED in the trap, there were two wriggling fish inside.

“Whoo!” Benja yelled and punched the air. Illya held them up, their silver scales flashing in the sunlight. The river was a tricky spirit, sometimes giving nothing, sometimes giving plenty. At times, it took from them to pay for what it had given. It could take a boat, a hut, or even a person. Not five years before, Illya’s father had been lost that way.

He struck each one with a rock until it stopped flopping. They were a decent size for this early in the spring, one of them two hands long, and the other just a little shorter. They gutted the fish and ran twine through their gills, Illya tying one to his belt, and Benja taking the other.

“Back in a minute,” Benja said, nodding toward a stand of trees. Illya folded the book into a soft buckskin and slid it into his pack.

A yell followed by the sound of a struggle came from the direction that Benja had gone. Illya dropped his bag and ran towards the sound, but before he reached the trees, there was a splash. He whipped around just in time to see Benja swept down the current, struggling to keep his head above water. Illya froze, visions of his father disappearing under muddy rapids flashed through his mind, paralyzing him.

Benja fought the waves, splashing to keep his head above water. Illya shook himself out of his stunned state. He ran along the bank and picked up the fish trap as he ran. He would not lose Benja too.

He flung the fish trap across the water to Benja. The trap fell a few stride lengths short. Benja fought to reach it. His strokes were not enough against the current. Illya pulled with all his might, dragging the rope back in as fast as he could. Benja was swept downstream; he gulped then went under the water.

The seconds stretched into eternity; then Benja’s head resurfaced. He gasped in the air, kicking and flailing his arms. Illya took a running start and flung the fish trap toward his cousin with every ounce of strength he could find.

This time, it landed a few feet away from Benja. He kicked, reached out, and caught the slats in his fingers. Illya dug his heels into the muddy ground, leaning back as the added weight of Benja in the current pulled on the rope. Unable to pull the rope hand over hand, he staggered backward with it a step at a time, digging his feet into the mud with each step as he went.

Benja kicked against the water, lending what strength he could to Illya’s efforts. Finally, he crawled onto the bank, his chest heaving. He coughed and spewed a mess of debris and river water onto the ground. Illya loosened his fingers from the rope and flexed the stiffness out of them. Benja rolled over and looked up at the sky, still catching his breath. A bruise was beginning to form along his jaw, and a trickle of blood dripped from a split lower lip and blended with the beads of river water on his chin.

“Someone came up behind me, I was taking a pee,” he said and sat up, pausing to spit a glob of bloody mucous on the ground. “Had my pants down ’round my ankles. Barely got them up and they hit me.” He rubbed his jaw.

“Shoved me in the river.” He scowled and looked at his feet. “Took the fish too. I didn’t even see who it was.”

Illya sucked in a sharp breath. He let it out slowly, shaking his head.

“I didn’t think even the worst of them would drown a man for a fish,” he said.

“I think there are some of them that would do anything,” Benja said, shivering. He nodded toward the other fish that was still strung to Illya’s belt. “Better hide that.”

It was one fish, but it meant everything for their families. Meat. With it, Molly would be safe for a few days more, maybe long enough for the new shoots to spread.

CHAPTER EIGHT

ILLYA LEFT THE village early the next morning and stowed the book under his jacket. He needed light to read by but didn’t dare sit beside his hut to do it. He was so early that he was the first person to reach the gates to unbar and open them. Outside the walls, he sat at the base of a big maple tree with bare branches and flipped through the book. The sun was coming up over the flats to the east, blazing fire across the sky.

“Shows what sort of weather will follow the moon’s entrance into any of its quarters,” he read. He frowned. How could they have known something like that?

The moon was still visible above the horizon: a circle cut perfectly in half. He wasn’t sure if it was the same thing the table meant by a quarter, but it could be. He traced his finger down the column and slowly studied each word.

The time of day was another thing he didn’t know. He decided to look at all of the entries for the morning. The first prediction was “Rain,” and the next one down said, “Stormy,” the one after that said, “Cold rain if the wind is west, snow if the wind is east.”

He held up his hand. West.

There would be rain then, no matter what time of the morning it was.

For a few heady seconds, he imagined going back to the village and telling the people at the central fire it would rain today.

He laughed at himself. Impiri and those who thought like her would have him thrown out of the village if they knew he was actually reading an Olders’ book. He could hear her now. Corruption! Curses! Banish him!

There were more words below the table.

Old wives’ tales to predict the weather: Those Old Wives knew a thing or two! The common adage “Red skies at night, sailor’s delight, red skies at morning, sailors take warning,” holds truth and can be used to forecast the weather with reasonable accuracy. The effect of red skies is caused by an accumulation of dust and humidity in the air, which refracts the light of the rising sun.

He caught his breath. Though the blaze of sunrise was fading as the sky lightened to a pale yellow, there had been a red sky. That was two signs.

He read on a little, then he heard a shout coming from beyond the walls. It was followed by more shouting. Quickly, he stowed the book under his jacket and hurried back to the gates.

They were raiding again. They were on the far side of the square, away from his mother’s hut he was relieved to see. They were heading in the direction of Samuel’s.

He kept out of sight from the growing crowd, and made his way around them by ducking behind huts, hoping to warn Samuel before they reached him.

* * *

Illya hesitated at the Healer’s door. A low murmur of voices came from beyond it. He paused then leaned closer, pressing his ear to the rough gray wood.

“…not with the talk that’s been going around.” A boy was mumbling.

“Two scoops in hot water,” Samuel’s voice came through the door, louder.

“But if there’s any more blood, you have to bring him to see me himself.” There was silence then a rustle.

“Do you have…” Illya only caught some of the words. “…comes with the drink, the wildness.”

“Nothing can be done for that if a man hasn’t got the sense to stay away from it,” said Samuel. There was a grunt followed by a scuffle. Suddenly, the door opened, and Conna came out. Illya leaped backward to avoid being hit. Conna stopped short and glared at him, stuffing something into his pocket. Illya took a few heavy breaths, hoping that he looked as if he had just run up to the hut.

He kept his face as blank as possible. Conna regarded him with narrowed eyes then slid his gaze away before taking off down the path at a walk so quick it was nearly a run.

Illya shrugged away his discomfort. He had more important things to worry about.

“Samuel,” he said, pushing his way inside, “they’re raiding the huts, dragging out any food stores that are left.” He glanced over his shoulder, through the open door, towards where Conna had disappeared, wondering for a moment why he wasn’t with the rest of them. His father was leading the group.

“After what they did before, I thought…” He gestured around the hut.

The Healer’s eyes flickered towards the door.

“I hope they learned before, but still…” He sighed and trailed off. The wrinkles in his forehead deepened. “May be better if we don’t stay here to see.”

He went to the corner and took two skin bags off hooks then turned around, holding one out to Illya.

“Willow bark,” he said.

“That will take most of the day,” Illya said.

“Exactly.”

Willows did not grow nearby. They were nearly in the lowlands, about ten bends downriver. If they went now, they wouldn’t be back until mid-afternoon.

The raids had moved to the far side of the village. They made their way out of the hut, staying out of sight and off the main paths as much as possible. There was yelling in the distance, crashing, and the sound of splintering wood from beyond the stone house. The raiders had gone through his family’s hut a few days before and found nothing. Still, Illya stopped there before they left to tell his ma to bar the door and keep Molly inside.

Ten bends downriver was not a bad distance to go in the summer. You could take a day and lie back in the shade of the tree, fishing the little swirling pool under the willows’ overhanging branches. At this time of year, the drifts were still waist-deep in the places where they had not washed away. Rain and runoff had created a grid of shifting bogs and streams across the hillside, alternating with the snow. Samuel was surprisingly nimble for his age, keeping up without trouble as they descended.

Illya’s foot punched through a snowdrift to find a running stream of frigid water underneath. He shook it off and stepped over a mound of deep snow. Soon, he found a well of dry ground where the snow had melted from around the base of a tree, and they stopped to catch their breath. Idly, he kicked at the damp earth, uncovering a net of withered leaves and stems. Recognizing the shape of the leaves, he crouched to examine them closer.

“A sunchoke,” he said.

“Humph,” Samuel grunted, breathing heavily now that they had stopped.

“Too bad it isn’t grown back yet. Think of that. Roasted sunchoke roots,” Illya said.

“Might be better not to think of that kind of thing.”

Samuel rubbed his elbow with a grimace and closed his eyes. Illya leaned back against the tree and considered the merits of scraping some of the tree bark off with his knife to chew on. It had been many hours since the fish the night before. A lump of bark dug into his back, and he shifted his weight off it, pushing back against the tree. Instead of rough bark, his elbow found a space. It wasn’t a lump at all but a hole.

“Hey, a squirrel nest!” Illya said.

Samuel brightened up, opening his eyes.

“Anything left in it?”

Illya shrugged. He hadn’t seen a squirrel in these woods in months. If he had, he probably would have eaten it. He reached inside then grinned, pulling out a handful of pine nuts and small striped seeds that had probably come from the sunchoke at their feet. The squirrel that had made this stash had not returned to eat its store.

There were enough that they could eat some and still stuff his pockets with handfuls to take back to his mother and Molly.

He divided them with Samuel, but after a few bites, he stopped chewing. His eyes widened, and he clutched the seeds tighter in his hand.

For a moment he barely breathed, remembering something he had read. It was the page after the one about the chicken. Gold light lanced through the trees and shone on his face as the midmorning sun parted the clouds.

“Seed saving,” he whispered.

“What’s that?” Samuel asked.

“Oh, nothing. Just thinking,” he said.

He had taken to carrying the book with him everywhere, not trusting to leave it in his hut. It was in the pack on his back, but he didn’t need to look at it to remember the words.

No matter how your food reaches your table, it all begins the same way… With a seed! Nothing is more rewarding than being able to walk out your back door and pick your dinner right out of a backyard garden full of vegetables. Follow these tips to collect and save your own seeds for a bountiful, home-grown harvest.

Seeds.

They had died out many years ago. The seeds for the plants the Olders had grown didn’t even exist anymore. The way the story went the first settlers had come out of the cities and become Planters to survive. They had seeds in packages, and for a year, there was plenty. The second year, they planted seeds that had come from the first years’ plants, and not a single plant had grown. A man in the group called Bernard Jones, Ph.D., saved them. Before the Calamity had come, he had studied famine foods of the Pacific Northwest.

He had taught the villagers about edible plants that they could find in the woods near the Planter’s house. Jones Ph.D. was the reason they had all survived. Illya was descended from him; it was one of the few things he felt proud of.

When Illya had read the passage about seeds, he had dismissed it as a lovely but impossible dream. The very thought of a garden was blasphemy. His people had survived because they did not plant. Garden plants died; wild plants thrived. Everyone knew that.

But a garden out the back door. The thought of it took his breath away. They could grow hundreds of plants; as many as the seeds they could find. They could grow so many that they wouldn’t even need to look in the forest anymore. More than enough for a whole winter.

He said nothing to Samuel but stowed his half of the seeds in his pocket. They set off again, making good time despite the difficult terrain. Illya kept going over it in his mind. Was it possible that he could put these very seeds in the ground and a sunchoke would come up?

The more he thought about it, he didn’t see why not. Sunchokes grew everywhere, even right outside the walls. Why wouldn’t they grow? Ground was ground, wherever it was.

They made good time, despite the difficult going, and got almost enough willow bark to replace what they had lost. The way back was uphill and slower. When they could see the walls in the distance, the sun was half down from its height. Neither of them spoke as they neared the gates. There was no shouting anymore. In fact, there was no sound of any kind.

A jolt of fear shot through his stomach. What if something terrible had happened? There should have been some activity: children laughing, distant arguments, and people coming and going at the gate.

The day was warmer than it had been in a long time, and with the exertion of the hike, he was sweating and stopped to catch his breath. He watched a line of ants crossing the ground, filing into a mounded hole in the earth. The wind picked up, just a bit, cutting through the stillness of the air and chilling his sweat-soaked skin. He shivered.

“I don’t see anyone.” Samuel was standing at the gates. They went to the central fires but found them entirely deserted.

There was a dull banging sound coming from a little way away. They followed it and found Ban Johnstead working behind his hut on the homemade forge he had inherited from his father.

“Ban.”

“Healer,” he said and nodded to Samuel and Illya.

“Where is everyone?”

Ban leaned his hammer against the forge.

“River. They went through everyone’s places this morning and didn’t find anything. Someone thought that if everyone went and dug, they were bound to find some cattails. Something that had been missed,” he said.

“Everyone? You didn’t go?” Illya asked.

Ban shrugged. “No point in it,” he said. “I already been, I know there’s nothing out there.” He was taller and broader than anyone else. If anyone could have ignored Jimmer and the rest of them, it was him.

“But the river…” Illya trailed off. A jumble of thoughts and images suddenly came together in his mind: the shifting bogs of snow and meltwater, the warmest day yet, the red sky, the moon, and something else that had triggered his memory but he hadn’t stopped to think about it.

Ants. Ants in a row. After the part about red skies, there had been a few more “Old Wives’ Tales.”

Insects can predict the weather too! Spiders will leave their webs, and ants will head to ground, often in a straight line, just before it rains.

Every sign was there. Rain was coming and a lot of it. In the spring, storms blew up unexpectedly and could be massive. His heart sped up. The images of ants in a row were swiftly replaced by the memory of Benja going underwater after they had been fishing yesterday and an older memory of his father, yelling as he grabbed Illya by the waist and threw him to higher ground before he was swept away.

The river was already swollen and would have risen even more, fed by the streams of runoff through the day. Rain would mean flooding, maybe coming swifter than anyone could predict.

Except him.

Illya dropped his pack and ran without a word of explanation to Ban and Samuel. Everyone had gone, pushed by the fear of the crowd and not wanting to speak against it. That meant his mother, and Molly and Benja were out there too.

* * *

“Everyone has to get out of here!” Illya shouted between gasps as he reached the mouth of the river gorge, waving his arms in the air. The people were spread out all along the river, bent to their digging. A few close by looked up and stared at him.

His belly clenched as belatedly he realized just what he was doing.

There was nothing else to do though, he had already hollered it at the top of his lungs, and the threat had not changed just because he was beginning to realize that he hadn’t thought this all the way through.

“Listen! Everyone listen!” he yelled.

More people looked up, and then, like a wave, more and more. They nudged their neighbors and pointed until, as one, everyone was staring at him.

His throat had gone dry, but he saw his mother and Molly a little distance away. His mother had stood up and was coming towards him. He swallowed.

“A storm is coming, going to be a bad one. We can’t be caught out here without warning. You… you know what can happen,” he said.

“A storm? But there are hardly any clouds,” a woman said.

“I know, I just… I just know that there is one coming,” he said.

How was he going to explain how he knew, and who would even believe him if he told them? No one had read in a hundred years or more. Even if they did believe him, to actually admit that he had read a book would be asking for disaster.

“You have to believe me. If it rains, with the melt already coming in… if the river floods it could fill up the gorge faster than you can run,” he said.

There was silence at this. He saw a few looks of pity on the faces of those nearest him. His mother had caught her breath and looked down. Her face was screwed up as if to hold back tears.

“Oh son…” Marieke Polestad was standing nearby. She came over and put a hand on his shoulder. “It was right around this time, wasn’t it, that we lost your da?”

He looked at his feet and nodded the affirmative.

“Well, come on,” she said, loud enough to reach those farthest away. “Maybe there is a storm coming, and maybe there is not, but it’s not like we are finding anything out here anyhow.”

His ma came up and reached out tentatively. He turned to her and let her enfold him in her arms. Sabelle was halfway down the gorge. For all appearances, she had just seen him have a complete breakdown in front of the entire village. His stomach felt like lead, but at least they were all leaving. Everyone would be safe. He should have been relieved that they had assumed such a good explanation for his outburst and he wouldn’t have to come up with anything more awkward or dangerous.

He should have been, but he wasn’t, not really. Not as she walked past between her parents and looked back over her shoulder at him in pity.

The sun moved past quarter-down and no rain came. The wind had picked up slightly, but it was a far cry from the storm he had promised. People sat around the central fires talking, shooting looks at him. He saw Jimmer and his friends muttering in a group beside Jimmer’s hut. Impiri was sitting with Elias beside the fire. They were all looking at him too.

He could imagine what they were saying. “That one’s always been funny. Lost the gift, hasn’t he? All those Olders’ things he brings in. He should be the first we throw out.”

Then it happened.

With almost no warning, the wind picked up. The clouds that had been scattered around the edge of the sky drew together, thick and low, and then boiled up into thunderheads. Then the rain came. It poured out of the sky, drenching the earth in moments. The wind howled, driving the raindrops sideways in massive gusts and tearing off tree branches. The people ran for shelter.

One of the derelict huts on the north side of the village was torn right off the ground and went tumbling away. At the sight of it, some turned away from their huts, heading instead for the stone house to take refuge.

Illya stood in the rain, staring up at it, his heart going so fast that it felt like it would fly out of his chest. The drops streamed down his face like tears. He was getting soaked, but he didn’t care. It had been right. The book had been right!

If he had not warned them, everyone would still have been down there. Already, the paths in the village had turned into muddy streams. There was no doubt that the gorge was flooded.

He shook. All of them could have drowned; his mother, his sister, Sabelle, Benja. The noise of water pounding on the earth was thunderous. The rain hammered his head and shoulders until his shirt was saturated, clinging to his body. The water ran down the backs of his legs, filling his shoes.

He stood in the rain and laughed.

CHAPTER NINE

OVER THE FOLLOWING days, Illya tried to keep out of sight as much as he could. Everywhere he went, he was followed by whispers and stares.

“How could he have known?”

“There’s something not right about it.”

“It’s not natural.”

“But he saved everyone.”

He stayed in Samuel’s hut as much as he could, helping the Healer lay out the willow bark to dry, boiling, steeping and grinding to replace the missing stores. They combed apart cattail heads for bandaging. Samuel continued a steady stream of information, stopping every once in a while to quiz Illya on what he had learned.

“Tell me the uses of stoneroot,” he said.

“Soothes cough,” Illya said, distractedly.

“And what else?”

Illya looked up, staring blankly.

There was a soft knock at the door. Samuel opened it to reveal Conna Duncan.

“The same thing?” Samuel asked him.

Conna started to speak but then looked into the hut and saw Illya. He shut his mouth and gave Samuel a terse nod.

Samuel took a jar off the shelf at the back of the room. It was one of the few that had remained intact during the raid. Illya tried to look busy, rearranging the same willow shavings he had just laid out on the table. He felt Conna’s stare as if it was a physical thing. He looked up and the look on Conna’s face took him off guard. There was a new quality, along with the usual disdain. It wasn’t the awe or fear he had seen lately on the faces of the more superstitious. It was calculating, as if Conna was trying to decide what he thought of him or maybe what to do about it. Illya looked back down, his neck pricking.

“If this doesn’t do it, I will have to see him myself,” Samuel said. Conna nodded wordlessly and left with a slam of the door.

“Your mind might as well be as far away as the sea,” Samuel said after they had worked for a while in silence.

“I’m sorry, really I am—”

“Would I be wrong if I were to guess that this all had something to do with that storm and how you knew it was coming?” Samuel asked.

Illya’s mouth gaped stupidly. The Healer had not mentioned it until now, and Illya had assumed that he had just taken the convenient explanation that mostly everyone had. It had been ravings brought on by grief, followed by coincidence. A strange coincidence to be sure but still coincidence.

“I just had a feeling,” Illya said.

If there was anyone in the village who he could have talked to about the book, it was Samuel, but still, something stopped him.

“A feeling, is that what it was?”

Illya nodded and fixed his eyes on the dirt floor of the hut.

“Well, the sun’s nearly half up. I am due at the wall to teach the littles. I’m guessing that you wouldn’t want to come along?”

Illya blanched. Sitting in full sight of the rest of the villagers, helping Samuel wrangle the littles sounded like the very last thing he wanted to do.

“Go on then, I think you won’t learn any more today anyhow.”

* * *

The next morning, before dawn, Illya tapped a quiet rhythm on the door to Benja’s hut. His cousin emerged a few minutes later, rubbing sleep from his eyes.

“Fishing?” Benja asked and yawned. He looked at Illya with an odd expression, a mix of wariness and curiosity. It was, in fact, a lot like the way everyone else had been looking at him since the storm. Illya frowned, shaken. He had not expected it from his cousin too. He beckoned for Benja to follow him and led him around the side of the hut.

“Something better than fishing,” he said and rolled the bicycle out from a cluster of bushes. A broad smile broke through the uncertainty on Benja’s face.

“Is it dry enough then?” he asked.

“I think so. Not everywhere but enough that we can get through,” Illya said.

With the distance they could get on the bicycle, there was a good chance of finding food in new territory. They decided to go as far as the broad path would take them, even past the furthest ruin they had explored, if the path was clear. As long as they turned back before the sun was at half up, they would be back before dark, and it seemed like the best chance of fresh hunting would be as far from the village as possible.

On an open, flat surface, riding the bicycle was as close to flying as a man could ever get. It was pure joy to feel the wind rushing through your hair. Their speed was nearly unhindered as they went down the broad path, and they hardly felt the vibration on the metal wheel rims rolling along the hard earth.

It was a little bit eerie how flat and straight the path was, with only gradual curves. If there was a hill, the way cut straight through it more often than not. At one place, there was a rounded tunnel lined with perfect square-edged stones that went all the way through a mountain.

Taking turns riding on the handlebars and pushing the pedals, they zipped along, dodging occasional roots and broken ground with ease.

“It’s that curve,” Benja said. He pointed to the bend in the road just ahead. “We passed this place just before we got to that ruin with the jars. It’s the farthest we have been.” They stopped to drink from a little stream and switch places on the bike. Benja looked at the curve with barely suppressed glee. He glanced at Illya, who returned his grin.

Illya hopped on the bike to pedal, and Benja got up on the handlebars. They bumped and jostled back onto the path. When they rounded the curve, the last ruin, or what they had always called that, came into view, and they flew right past it.

After a short while, they came to another ruin. It had been subjected to a far greater degree of destruction than the ruins closer to the village. There was hardly anything left. Illya slowed his pedaling.

The exertion of pedaling wore on him and he felt his muscles shaking, but he pressed on, driven past his hunger and fatigue by curiosity.

Then there was another ruin then another. The ruins started to appear closer and closer together. After a long while, they came around a bend and then to the top of a hill. The forest opened up before them, and they looked out over something astounding.

The word for what it was came to him unbidden. It was a city.

For as far as they could see, buildings sprawled, both flattening out the land and pushing it up into tall, jagged mesas. It was a far cry from the underground cave dwellings with blinking, stupid inhabitants that he had imagined as a little. It was like an enormous village, but he thought a hundred of his villages could fit into this place, or even more.

The city looked big enough that to cross it could have taken an entire day. They would barely be able to start exploring. But the possibilities of what they could find, given enough time, seemed truly limitless. A jolt shot through his chest. There could be food, tools, anything at all, maybe even another bicycle.

They switched places on the bike and rolled down the hill. They did not stop at the first house. By silent agreement they went on, wanting to see as much of the city as possible. They passed many houses then strange buildings that grew taller and taller as they went further in. It was like a maze of metal, with path after path leading away from the one they had ridden in on.

“Weird, isn’t it?” Benja asked from the handlebars.

“What?”

“This whole place. I bet you could find anything you wanted in this, and I think we are the only people here,” he said.

Illya considered it. “It’s been abandoned for a hundred years, maybe more.”

“Yeah, that’s just it. Why? It would be a great place for people live. As long as you weren’t so far in that you couldn’t get out to forage. Everything you could ever want would be right here. You could probably have a bunch of bikes and who knows what else.”

“I guess,” Illya said.

“So why aren’t there any people here?”

Illya shivered, looking around. The buildings flying past them had suddenly taken on a sinister, looming presence, despite the sunshine on their walls.

“Maybe there are,” he said after a minute, panting a little from the exertion of pedaling up a hill. “We haven’t looked through it all to make sure, right?”

Benja shook his head. “If there were people here, they would have lookouts, like our Patrollers. There isn’t much that goes on near our village that we don’t know about right away.”

“They could know we are here, but they just haven’t come out yet,” Illya said, starting to feel more nervous by the minute.

“Or there could be something that keeps people from living here,” Benja said seriously.

Illya swallowed. “Like what?”

Benja did not answer immediately. He shifted his weight on the handlebars and glanced back over his shoulder at Illya.

“Something like the Calamity,” he said.

Illya stared at him and for a moment forgot to look where he was pedaling. The front wheel hit a raised edge on the side of the road. Benja flew off his seat, and Illya followed, tumbling over the handlebars and crashing into Benja where he had come to rest on the ground.

“Ouch,” Benja groaned. “Your elbow’s in my eye.” Illya disentangled himself from his cousin and stood up gingerly, brushing himself off.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

Benja shook himself and cracked his neck to the right then the left. “Yeah.” He stood. “You didn’t have to overreact like that, you know. It’s just weird is all.” Illya took stock of himself. Besides scrapes on his elbows, he seemed to be okay. He shrugged experimentally and thought he would probably feel the effects of the fall tomorrow.

“You’re right. There’s something not right about it,” Illya said and hesitated, not wanting to sound cowardly. The buildings looked taller than ever, looming, seeming to draw closer together at their tops, as if they could close over them.

“The Calamity couldn’t still be around, though, right? No one has had it in forever,” he said, sounding much surer about it than he felt.

“It’s probably nothing. Maybe anyone who has come through here already had a place to live,” Benja said. Illya squinted against the afternoon sun, looking down the long row. It was truly massive. Even with lookouts to challenge their presence, there could be people here who they simply hadn’t reached yet. The idea of running into people made him just as nervous as wondering why there were none.

“Maybe we should go back,” he said.

Benja grunted and chewed on the corner of his lip. “Would have been good to find some parts for this heap,” he said and kicked affectionately at the bike, which still lay on the ground.

They got back on the bike and turned around. As they left the tall buildings behind and reached the outskirts, the uneasy feelings began to fade.

By the time the houses had started to spread out again, their worries seemed much more like the product of overactive imagination than reality. Not wanting to leave without looking a little bit, they stopped at a house at the bottom of the hill.

The house was at least the size of the stone house in their village but was made from wood. It had no roof, and the door hung lopsided. The entrance had a drift of dirt across it.

They walked through a small hallway into a larger room. Illya thought he could feel the echoes of the lives that once happened there. There were some pictures on the bowed walls and more that had fallen to the floor, leaving squares of darker color where they must have once hung. The floor was thick with old leaves. It almost looked like part of the forest, except for the broken glass and picture frames underneath the foliage.

Benja bent down and picked up a photograph. Illya looked over his shoulder at it. Faded people sat beside a rectangle of blue water. Behind them was a house that looked like the one they were standing in and completely unlike it at the same time. The gray, collapsed walls bore hardly any resemblance to the walls in the picture—blue, edged with smart, white trim—but the overall shape of it was the same.

Just like the pictures in Illya’s book, the scene was strangely perfect. The water was enclosed by straight white edges. Around it, unnaturally even, short grass grew. The people looked happy, holding up glass cups with bright decorations coming out of the tops. It was as if the Calamity had never happened and they were all still here, living their lives in this house.

It made him sad for them, although they were people he had never met.

“Let’s keep looking,” he said. Benja nodded and wordlessly, gently laid the picture back in its spot in the leaves.

Feeling somber, Illya walked down the hallway and went into another room.

He was startled to see a face looking back at him beyond the door. It was in a frame, like the little picture, and fractured by spider-web lines of cracked glass.

A boy was looking at him out of the glass, someone he didn’t recognize with thick brown hair and very dark eyes. Around him was the same room that Illya was standing in. Confused, he looked around and the boy in the picture did too.

The boy was him.

A mirror. He had never seen one before, only heard of them in stories; like looking into a pond but so clear it was as if you faced yourself. It was incredible, hard to imagine that something like it could exist, yet here it was, right in front of him.

Illya stared at his face. It looked younger than he thought it should.

Benja appeared behind him in the mirror. As he had always suspected, the comparison between Benja and himself was not very flattering. Beside his cousin, he thought that he looked like a stick.

“Whoa.” Benja stared at the mirror openmouthed. He stuck out his lower lip experimentally then, chuckling, began to contort his face into a series of poses, each one more hilarious than the last. Illya tried out a few himself. Looking at his own face was like seeing a stranger, and he felt disconnected from it.

There were more rooms in the house with rusted metal bed frames and broken furniture. It looked like there had been scavengers here, because most of the rooms were empty. Nothing was as fascinating as the mirror. Illya almost wanted to strap it to the bicycle and take it back but knew that even if they could have, it would have caused a riot back in the village.

Benja pedaled. To pass the time as they rode, Illya told one of the stories his family often told when they lay down before sleeping.

“There was once a man as tall as the hills who had for his only friend a big blue ox that he called Babe,” he said.

“How ’bout this one,” Benja interrupted him, breathing heavy as he pedaled up a short hill. “There was once a man who read a book and knew when it was going to rain before it did.”

Illya froze, his voice caught in his throat. All day, he had been expecting Benja to say something, but it still caught him off guard.

“It’s not the same thing, it’s nothing like a story, it’s just…” he stammered finally.

“It’s just like magic,” Benja said.

“Benj, there’s nothing magic about it. I’m the least magical person you’ll ever meet.”

“I don’t know. I couldn’t read that book,” Benja said.

“Anyone could, anyone could have learned the rain signs too,” Illya said.

“I don’t know.”

“The Olders just knew a lot about things. Things that could help us,” he said.

Benja laughed. “Maybe.”

Illya grunted.

“Go on with your story then,” Benja said after a few minutes of silence.

“His name was Paul. He had a seven-foot stride and could cut down a tree with a single swing of his ax,” Illya said, picturing it in his mind. After seeing the mirror, everything, even legends, seemed possible.

* * *

As they reached the gates, they heard a strange buzzing sound, like a swarm of bees. As they got closer, it got louder. The sound of hornets was more like it, Illya thought, recognizing angry voices and shouting.

A thudding sound started, repeating itself over and over. Illya went through the gate, Benja close behind, pushing the bicycle.

The air was thick with smoke, but it was not coming from the central fires, as he had imagined. Five huts were ablaze, their bones visible, black shells haloed in red. A crowd had gathered around the stone house. They held torches high into the air, and in the center, four men had a fallen tree trunk and were using it to batter against the door.

“I’m going to hide the bike,” Benja said in a low voice.

Illya nodded. “I have to find my ma and Molly.”

The crowd yelled and shoved each other. Someone threw a stone and broke through the rotten boards covering one of the upstairs windows. The front door started to splinter under the relentless pounding of the battering ram.

“We’re coming out. Back away, I warn you,” Elias yelled from behind the door.

The men with the ram retreated down the steps, and the battered door inched open. A moment later, Elias came out, holding his hands up above his head. Impiri followed behind him with Sabelle.

“There’s no food in there, you can look for yourselves,” Elias said. The people did not answer immediately, and Impiri took advantage of their brief hush to yell.

“I warned you all. The curses have fallen on us, and now madness has infected all of you.” She took a deep breath then pressed on. “The rotten must be pared away, or we will all be destroyed.” Her eyes settled on Illya as he passed, trying to skirt around the crowd. He could feel her hate driving into him like a spike and was suddenly very aware of the book in his pack and the seeds in his pocket, where he had kept them since the day he had found them.

Jimmer, leading a small knot of men, pushed past the crowd to stand beside Impiri.

“Maybe there’s food, and maybe there’s not. But she has the right of it,” he said. “You all know what we have to do.”

Marieke was standing nearby. Jimmer hesitated for the briefest moment before grabbing her by the arm, pushing her to walk in front of him.

“Pare away the rotten,” he said, relishing the words then hurrying on. “It’s harsh, but it’s reality, and we have to face it. Any that won’t survive have to be sent off, find their own way. Any who’s cursed can go too. We can’t afford the food they take out of all our mouths.”

A strangled cry tore out of Charlie Polestad’s mouth. He leaped on Jimmer and started punching him in the face. The men who had been with Jimmer spread out and started to grab littles and old folks, dragging them toward the gates with expressions of grim determination. Illya looked around desperately for Molly but didn’t see her.

“Wait!” he yelled, his voice drowning in the noise of the crowd.

His heart would not stop hammering. He pushed his way past people, heading for the stairs of the stone house.

This was insane. They were going to chuck him out for madness, for curses, right now. He blinked. The picture from the house, of the people beside the blue water, came into his mind. Olders: with their magic, with their mirror and their sprawling city. Olders who had always had enough to eat.

He couldn’t stand back and do nothing, he couldn’t wait for them to find Molly and throw her out, not when he knew something that could save everyone. He pressed his lips together.

He needed to stop making such a habit of this.

He climbed the stairs and faced the crowd.

“I have an idea.”

CHAPTER TEN

SILENCE DESCENDED ON the crowd, rippling out from his words like the rings set off by a rock dropping into a pond. A sea of faces turned towards him one by one. He knew that the shock couldn’t last long. He scrambled in his pack for the book.

“I found something. It’s a book, a real book of the Olders. Says how they used to live.” Illya rushed through the words then paused for a second, chewing on his lip before going on.

“I can read it,” he said, looking out at the stunned faces.

“This is how I knew that there was going to be a storm,” he said. “This is what saved all of us, and it’s going to save us again.”

Impiri’s mouth dropped open. Rage flared behind her eyes. The sound of the crowd started to build into a roar.

“Wait, listen! I know that the Olders made some mistakes, but they never starved. Look,” he said. He flipped open the book to the picture of the fat man and held it up high.

People jostled closer to see, for the moment their curiosity overcoming everything else. No one would be able to deny that the picture was spectacular. He saw their eyes widen as the people nearby got a good look.

“This part says”—he sounded out each word, remembering them as he came across them—“‘The best time for planting is in the spring, a few weeks after the last frost. The soil should be workable. Pick an area that gets southern exposure and has access to plenty of water. Consider sprouting seeds in a warm, damp place before transferring them to the tilled soil.’”

The people showed no comprehension of what Illya had said. He may as well have been speaking another language.

“Look at this man. He’s no different than any of us, except that he’s fat.” A few people laughed. Encouraged, Illya went on.

Impiri stood back with her arms crossed, and her lips pressed into a thin line.

“I’ve never seen a man as fat as he is. The Olders did some things wrong, but they always had enough food. Look at this.” Illya held up the page to show them the garden. “They ate plants from a garden, kept animals too. They didn’t have to spend their days looking for food; it was right outside their back doors. That’s why they always had enough.”

“The seeds of the Olders’ plants all died, but these are the seeds of our plants.” He reached into his pocket and held up a handful of the gray, wedge-shaped seeds.

“They will still be the same plants, just the same as the ones on the wall. The same plants that my great, great grandfather, Jones Ph.D. told us to eat, but they would be here in the village. Do you see?”

The people stared at him. His idea was so far from what anyone had ever considered that no one reacted to his words right away. Jimmer stood up, and Charlie let him, their fight forgotten. Jimmer wiped a smear of blood from his lip and advanced on Illya.

“You want us to be Planters?” he said. “You got some idea from a bunch of dead people, and you think that we should just do it.”

“We are going to starve,” someone said. Angry muttering surged up from the crowd.

“Wait! What if there’s something to this idea?” Charlie yelled above the din.

“What does he know? He is just a kid.”

“Garden plants die; wild plants thrive. Everyone knows that.”

“That thing is cursed. That book”—Impiri nearly spat the words—“is the reason for—”

“But these… These would be the same wild plants,” Illya said, stuttering. His stomach clenched into a knot, and his head started swimming as he looked out over the unfriendly crowd.

“He’s the first to go, I say,” Jimmer yelled.

“It’s the way of the devil!” Impiri shrieked.

“How do we know he can even read that thing? No one has been able to read since my grandad’s time,” a man called out.

The villagers shifted, and scowled, their eyes clouded over with uncertainty. They didn’t see a stroke of inspiration, a life-changing idea that could save them. They saw blasphemy and a crazy kid.

Illya’s knees started shaking uncontrollably in the force of the hatred he saw.

“He saved us! He saved everyone from the flood with that book.” It was Benja.

“We’re not falling into an Olders’ trap. Best we keep to our ways, always worked before,” Jimmer yelled.

“Wait, I—”

He swallowed his terror and tried to say something, but Conna Duncan spoke first, cutting him off. Illya’s resolve crumbled.

“What do you know about it? You’re so drunk you can barely see past your face,” Conna said. “If you’re going to throw out the weak ones, you’re going to have to start with your own boy.” Conna mounted the steps and faced Jimmer down. He turned around and nodded at something over his shoulder. A smaller boy came out of the crowd and shuffled up the steps. It was Arro Duncan. He looked very pale, more so than hunger could account for. He crouched behind Conna, as if unwilling to come out of the relative safety of his older brother’s shadow.

“You would know if you paid attention to anything. Boy’s been coughing up blood for two weeks,” Conna said; he looked down and met Illya’s gaze with narrowed eyes. Jimmer pulled his youngest son out from behind Conna, and held him by the shoulders, studying his face with a frown.

Illya broke Conna’s stare after a few seconds. He tried to gather his thoughts. There had to be something he could say.

“I think he’s right,” Conna said.

Illya’s head felt like an empty cavern. The last words he had ever expected to hear echoed around it, bouncing off the walls. Conna gave him a strange half smile.

“Look around you. We’ve been starving for years. We scrape by and get a little here, a little there, but it’s never enough. We lose people every year.

“The Patrollers go out and hunt every day. It’s getting harder and harder to find game.” He nodded to the other Patrollers who stood in a little group nearby.

“We can’t move somewhere else, most don’t have the strength, and there’s nowhere to go if they did,” Conna said. The people were quiet again. They appeared to be listening.

Even for the most irrational, it was hard to ignore Conna. He was one of the most successful hunters they had. With that and the pack of Patrollers behind him, he was growing into a voice to be reckoned with in the village.

“We can’t throw out half of our people. We’ve only survived this long because we’ve stayed together, and I haven’t heard a good plan from anyone until now,” Conna continued. “What he says is true, the Olders may have had their problems, but they always had enough to eat.”

Impiri started to speak, but Conna cut her off.

“We can worry about corruption and repeating the mistakes of the Olders later, if we make it through the winter. Burning things is not going to bring us food.”

Impiri narrowed her eyes.

“Let everyone remember that I said that book was cursed, remember that when the next plague hits us,” she said, folding her arms across her chest.

“It could be a gift from the gods that it was found, it already saved us from the flood, who knows what else it can do?” Charlie Polestad said.

“And it’s another gift that we have someone who can read it!” Conna said. He clapped Illya on the back so hard that he had to stagger and catch himself to keep from falling off the steps. Conna smiled, a tight expression that seemed to hide more zeal than it showed.

“Hear, hear!” yelled Julian Reyes. His words were echoed by several more of the young Patrollers, who had now positioned themselves as a barrier between the stairs and the restless crowd. With an almost maniacal gleam in his eyes, Conna raised his voice.

“We need a new Leader, someone who has the vision to lead us through these times.” He turned his head and looked at Illya

Illya felt his stomach turning over as Conna gave him a vaguely predatory smile. His thoughts felt slow, as if lodged in the riverbank mud. He could hardly comprehend what Conna was saying.

“I nominate Illya! The man with the book!” Conna yelled.

Cheering exploded from a surprisingly large portion of the crowd. Those who weren’t cheering looked around, stunned. Elias himself was pale, staring at the ground as if he wanted it to swallow him up.

Illya’s ears burned. He felt the pressure of their gazes shifting slowly from Conna to him as if the actuality of him was an afterthought to Conna.

For a moment, he thought he was going to be sick and lose whatever was left in his stomach right there in front of all of them. Then he saw Benja standing with his aunt and uncle at the back of the crowd.

They were all cheering. Benja was beaming and clapping his hands above his head. Samuel, who had come forward at some point in the commotion, and was looking Aaro over, looked up and gave him a small smile.

More people joined in the cheering as it went on, swept along with the crowd and the feelings that Conna had stirred. In their faces, he saw the hope that he had been unable to spark in them when he stood alone. He cleared his throat.

“I know we’re afraid of repeating their mistakes,” Illya said, finally finding his voice. “But I think that if we’re careful, we can learn from what they did. We don’t have a lot of choices. Either we can starve, or we can try something new. We risk making a mistake, but maybe we’ll survive.”

“If you ask me, a choice between definitely starving and probably surviving is no choice at all,” Charlie called out.

Impiri stood beside Elias, looking as pale as the snow that still lingered on the ground. Her eyes were bright and wild.

“Remember that I warned you,” she said and pulled open the door to the house. She disappeared, dragging Sabelle inside after her before she slammed the door.

“Alright then, let’s see if he can do it,” said a man.

“I told you. He saved us one time already, I knew there was something about him,” said another.

“Illya the Leader!” Conna said and the Patrollers took up the chant, and it spread through the crowd.

“Illya the Leader! Illya the Leader! Illya the Leader!”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

HE SWALLOWED. HE wasn’t sure what was worse: the people who appeared downright surly or the ones that gazed up at him with wide eyes full of expectation. A sleepless night of thinking had not given him any kind of plan.

His mother’s raised eyebrows when she learned what had happened had not helped his confidence either. She had promised to support him, no matter what she thought of it all. Now, faced with the reality of what he was supposed to be doing, he was sure she had only said that because the alternative at this point was for them all to be thrown out. He didn’t want to be Leader at all, but everything had run away from him. All he had wanted was to make them listen and try planting. To be the head of this village would be like leading around a wild beast at the end of a leash, with nothing but a shield of bluffed confidence to keep it from devouring him.

What had Conna been thinking? Illya was seventeen, technically an adult but only barely, and Conna himself wasn’t much older. Elias had led the village for as long as Illya could remember. How could Conna think Illya could replace him?

They were all watching him, and the moment grew long. He needed to say something. He tried to remember why he was doing this, thinking about the seeds that he still carried and what they meant for everyone.

Deciding that it couldn’t hurt, he reached into his pocket and drew out a handful, holding it up for the crowd to see. He cleared his throat.

“Today we are going to start something new,” he said. Consciously he stilled his shaking hand and calmed his breaths, pulling them in even and slow.

He had dreams. There was no lack of those in his mind, but it was one thing to sit alone and let his imagination run wild. It was another to stand in front of a crowd and make those ideas come out coherently.

“We are going to plant. It’s a big change, but it’s the best chance we have,” he said.

“If we are going to make this work we can’t do it halfway. It’s going to be hard work, but we all have to help if we are going to make it.” He sucked in a deep breath.

His mind churned feverishly, thinking of how to proceed. There wouldn’t be any bicycle trips until the seeds got in the ground. He would assign the minimum number of people possible to gathering the new shoots to feed everyone. The rest would have to dig the soil and break it up to make it soft, the way it was in the picture.

“If we spend the summer growing these plants”—he held up his seeds again—“we will have a harvest in the fall, more than you would dream possible, right outside our doors.” He gestured toward the empty field between the village and the edge of the forest.

Charlie started clapping, alone in the crowd. The sound dropped into the silence like pebbles into water for a few moments before Conna joined him and then a few others. Illya’s mouth felt wooly. He stopped himself from chewing on the edge of his lip. It was split and had started to bleed.

“The first thing we have to do is make a field. We have to break up the soil, like this.” He flipped open the book to the picture of the garden and held it out over the crowd for them to see.

There were many blank stares, punctuated by occasional nodding. He looked out over the crowd, wondering how long it would be before they were rioting against him too. His throat was tight, and he forced himself to take a slow breath. He glanced towards the woods, where the snow had mostly receded and the shoots were coming in with agonizing slowness.

“So,” he continued after a moment, “we just have to decide who will dig and who will get food for everyone.” He had no idea of how to start. How could he tell people who were old enough to be his parents what to do?

Conna jumped up on the stairs beside him.

“The book is full of mysteries, full of things that can lead us to a better life,” he yelled. “We are blessed to have a Leader who can read it.” This was met by scattered cheering.

“Those who dig the field will be the first to see the mysteries working. They will be the ones who build our future. Those who gather food will be making it possible to do this. All jobs are honorable. Each one of you is essential to our success.”

Illya raised his eyebrows, then blinked and schooled his expression. He still didn’t know what to think of Conna’s support, and he hadn’t been sure it would continue.

Just as they had yesterday, Conna’s words sparked something in the crowd that Illya had been unable to reach. Murmurs of speculation rippled through the people, swelling louder until Charlie yelled out over the din.

“I will dig the field!”

Those around them, not wanting to be shamed, began to volunteer as well. Soon, the crowd was a cacophony of yells.

“I will dig!”

“And I!”

In the end, Conna led everyone who had volunteered to the field to get started. Illya watched them go, rallying after Conna as if he was the Leader they had chosen after all. The sight of them, so thin, so painfully underfed, made Illya think of a pack of ghosts. He wondered if they had the strength for the digging or if they would fade away before the shoots had grown.

Maybe it was already too late.

No one was left standing in front of the stairs except for a surly-looking Jimmer with a small knot of friends around him. Impiri and Elias had not come to the gathering at all, and neither had Sabelle.

Jimmer crossed his arms. Illya opened his mouth, but no sound came out. Closing his mouth, he swallowed then tried again. He tasted blood and had a giddy feeling that it would somehow give strength to his words.

“So you have decided to be food gatherers, an important job,” he said, trying to parrot Conna. Somehow, it didn’t seem to come out the same way.

“We’ll be watching you, boy. You’re going to mess up eventually, and we’ll be here to take you down,” Jimmer said. Piers Malkin, who was standing beside Jimmer, spat in Illya’s direction. It didn’t reach him but arced through the air to splat on the stair below him. They turned away, leaving Illya standing over an empty square.

He could see the field from where he stood. Benja had not come this morning, nor had Samuel. His Aunt Ada and Uncle Leo were there, though, along with his mother and sister, digging with everyone else.

He kicked his toe into the edge of the stairs, and a piece of rotten wood came away. They didn’t have any food gatherers at all now, and no one to cook either.

Conna was pointing people toward different areas of the field. He had always been good at telling people what to do. Pushy was one word for it, bully was another; one that Illya and Benja had used to describe him more than once. The people started to hack away at the thawing mud with a variety of implements. Some had real tools from the shed behind the stone house, others had sticks.

Illya made his way toward the field. Conna looked up when he neared and walked out to meet him, pulling him aside.

“You gotta do less talking, more telling,” Conna said. “They have to think you know what you’re doing.” Illya frowned.

“Did fine, though, you’ll get it,” Conna said and gave him a grin.

“Um… Thanks,” he said, shoving his hand into his pocket and running his fingers through the seeds. He wondered where Benja was.

“We still need food gatherers,” he said. “Your pa and some people were there but they…”

Conna’s expression darkened, and Illya stopped.

“Patrollers can do it,” Conna said. “They should keep going out.” Then he smiled, the anger receding from his face. “We’ll make it work. It has to work.”

Illya looked out over the field at all the people working. His mother was bending over, hacking at the soil. He still didn’t know quite how all of this had happened. He thought of the venom on Impiri’s face when she had stalked away and suppressed a shudder. Conna was right. It had to work. There was no going back now.

His mother looked up and met his eye. Her face was streaked with dirt, and she did not look happy. Illya started to walk toward her. Conna caught him by the arm before he got two paces.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m going to dig. I’m not just going stand here and watch,” Illya said. Conna shook his head.

“You can’t. They have to see you as a Leader, someone who is above them, someone worth following. Go over there and start digging and they will never respect you.”

“I don’t know about that—”

Conna tightened his grip on Illya’s arm.

“I’m going to help you. This idea is one of the best chances we have. But you have to be willing to do whatever it takes,” he said.

Illya stared at him, wanting to say something, to find some way to tell him he was wrong, but his words caught in his throat. He looked at his feet. Conna relaxed his grip.

“Water,” Conna said. He called out to the people. “Digging is hard work, we will stop for water.”

He directed some of the Patrollers to fetch skins of water from the river and distribute them among the people and to go find whatever shoots they could. Illya felt foolish for not thinking of water first but tried not to show it. He shuffled over to talk to his ma while Conna directed the Patrollers.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

She wiped her hand across her mouth. Finally, she sighed and looked away.

“A little hard work never hurt anyone,” she said.

“No.”

“And this is what we have to do to make it work,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“Then what are you sorry for?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

She glanced over to where Conna was directing people back out to the field.

“I just hope you know what you are doing,” she said as she went back to her work.

“Me too,” he whispered, too low for her to hear. He wanted more than anything to pick up a shovel and dig alongside her, but Conna was striding towards him.

Illya turned away and closed his eyes. He wasn’t cut out to be a Leader; he didn’t know the first thing about it and he had never been one to sit by while other people worked. He was just going to have to tell Conna where things stood, that was all.

He had barely opened his mouth when he heard a commotion at the edge of the field.

Jimmer had returned, this time with Impiri and Elias beside him. He had taken a hoe from Charlie and was brandishing it in the air, yelling. It seemed he had gotten into his brew over the course of the morning. With the rest of the food gone, Jimmer appeared to be living on it.

“Waste of time and—”

Conna pushed him in the chest, cutting him off. Jimmer staggered backward, and Conna muttered to him, low-voiced. Illya caught a little of what he was saying as he neared them.

“—not going to let you ruin this like you ruin everything else,” Conna said.

“We should burn this too, along with all the rest of it.” Impiri snatched the hoe from Jimmer, who appeared ready to use it to hit Conna.

The people had left their digging to watch. Most kept their distance, but Charlie pushed his way back up to the front.

“We’re not burning anything,” he said. “And I’ll take that back.” He grabbed the hoe, trying to take it from her. They struggled over it. Impiri ripped the hoe free of Charlie’s grip and swung it. She hit Charlie, opening a gash across his forehead. He dropped to the ground. Blood poured from his head and soaked into the freshly-dug earth.

Impiri dropped the hoe with a clatter and covered her mouth with her hands. Illya fell to his knees beside Charlie, trying to remember what Samuel had taught him about bleeding. His mind had turned to mush, and the voices around him sounded like they were coming from far away.

The red slick of blood blurred in his vision.

Somewhere above him, Impiri started to babble.

“I never—“

“Shut up.” Conna snapped. “Haven’t you done enough already?”

“Pressure, direct pressure,” Illya said to himself. He pressed the heel of his hand against the gash. Charlie’s blood was hot and sticky.

“I’m going to be sick,” someone said behind him.

“Charlie, can you hear me?” he asked. The man was alive; he could tell that by the way his chest still rose and fell with breaths. Near Charlie’s temple, a pulse beat against Illya’s wrist.

Charlie groaned but did not wake up.

Impiri spoke up again.

“I didn’t mean to—“

“What if he never wakes up?” Piers said.

The bleeding had mostly stopped under the pressure, though Illya still had not moved his hand. It was slippery, and if he didn’t hold it just right, more of it welled and escaped from around his fingers. Charlie’s eyes fluttered then closed again.

Illya pressed harder against the gash. The cut would probably need to be stitched shut with the sharpened bone needles and strings of gut that Samuel kept on hand.

He swallowed. For a thing like this to happen on the first day was surely a terrible omen. Besides that, Charlie was his friend and had been one of the staunchest supporters of his idea so far. He thought of all the misgivings he’d had over reading the book in the first place and the fears he had brushed aside because he had been too curious to stop. Watching Charlie’s closed eyes, he wondered if Impiri had been right after all.

Maybe they were cursed.

“A stretcher,” Conna was saying. Illya looked up, still not daring to move his hand from Charlie’s sticky forehead. Conna was directing the Patrollers to tie together some branches from the woodpile into a travois. The rest of the people stood in a mute circle, watching.

Illya remembered then that he was supposed to be the Leader. He straightened up as much as he could while leaving his hand fixed to Charlie’s forehead.

“Yes. He needs Samuel,” he said with as much authority as he could muster.

Once they had built the travois, they carefully lifted Charlie onto it. It was an awkward procession that made its way down from the field and through the village to Samuel’s hut. Conna, thankfully, thought to direct everyone back to the digging before they set out. At least there was no gawking as they shuffled along.

Illya was bent over, walking sideways to keep his hand on Charlie’s forehead, as two Patrollers dragged the travois. Conna walked alongside. Belatedly, it occurred to Illya that holding pressure like this was a job a real Leader would have delegated to someone else.

He pushed the thought out of his mind. Right now, it didn’t matter. All that mattered was keeping the blood from spilling out. He would just have to worry about figuring out how to be a real Leader later.

Samuel answered the door at the first knock and surveyed them with mild surprise.

“So, the new Leader has come back to be my apprentice after all,” he said. Illya blushed and explained what had happened.

Samuel pried Charlie’s eyes open with his fingers and felt the shape of his skull and the pulse at his neck, lifting Illya’s hand to look at the gash beneath.

“No danger there, as long as it’s kept clean,” he said, indicating the cut. He regarded Illya appraisingly for a moment before shoving a cloth into his hand and indicating for him to continue holding pressure.

“Bind that on; then start cleaning around it,” he said. Illya followed his instructions while Samuel continued his examination.

“What if he doesn’t wake?” Illya asked.

“He’s just knocked out,” Samuel said. He reached up onto a shelf and began fumbling among the pots.

“Heartbeat is strong, no break in his skull,” he continued, opening one of them carefully and giving it a tentative sniff. He drew his face back abruptly, looking like he was going to sneeze. He rubbed his nose.

“Not quite what it’s for, but this will do,” he said. He came closer and opened the pot under Charlie’s nose.

Charlie snorted and thrashed, nearly knocking the pot out of Samuel’s hand. The movement reopened the cut on his forehead, and blood seeped through the bandage.

“What…” he mumbled, his eyes fluttering open. Samuel stood back, closing the pot with a smile and stashing it back on the shelf. Illya dove forward to stop the bleeding again.

Conna stood in the doorway and studied Illya with his lips pressed together before turning to leave, taking the Patrollers with him.

“Lie still,” Samuel said to Charlie. “You’re going to need rest before you are right again.” They finished cleaning and bandaging the cut. Samuel explained to him that he could not fall asleep for a few hours. “But you can have willow bark tea for the pain.”

Illya stayed in the hut with Samuel while the Healer finished cleaning and re-bandaging Charlie’s head. After Samuel was satisfied, and he had sent Charlie home to rest, Illya lingered, not wanting to face everything outside yet. It felt strange not to be quizzed about the plants Samuel was crushing.

“Are you intending to remain the Leader of the village after you have succeeded in this plan?” Samuel asked him after a while.

“I don’t know,” Illya said, hesitating. “I didn’t mean for any of this to happen at all.”

“It is a rare thing to have the power to change things,” Samuel said.

They were quiet for a while as Samuel continued to work on grinding and mixing.

“I suppose there would be no purpose in asking you about the properties of willow bark,” he said. Illya looked down at the floor.

“Dried and brewed into tea, use it for pain or to bring down fever,” he mumbled.

Samuel looked up at him with something of a challenge in his eyes.

“You would have made a good Healer,” he said. “You have a quick mind, and you can still ask the kinds of questions that need to be asked.” Illya was not sure what to think of this. He didn’t answer.

“Try to be as good a Leader as you would have been a Healer,” Samuel said. He frowned. “It’s a noble cause. Many a young man has lost himself when he was swept away by a noble cause.”

“I know what I’m doing,” Illya said and hoped with all his might that it was true.

CHAPTER TWELVE

“A DEER, CONNA got a deer!” Molly ran through the open door, panting and out of breath, covered in mud.

“Really?” Illya asked, looking up from the book.

“Yes, yes, yes!” she squealed.

Conna had gone out with the Patrollers to hunt that morning, after setting everyone else to digging the field.

Illya closed the book and wondered if there had been flooding in the plains with all the rain. If there had, animals living there would have been pushed to the higher ground near the village. His people couldn’t hunt in the lowlands because the area was too far out of their territory. There would be no way to return to the village before nightfall, and legends held that violent gangs of Rovers ranged out there, killing whoever they found.

A deer. A truly lucky turn. With the timing of it, Illya couldn’t help but feel it had something to do with the book. He ran his fingers across the cover. It had letters on it too, big letters that had taken a long time to read because they had extra curls and lines. Almanac.

The book that would save them all. If Charlie’s injury had been a bad omen, then this was the very best.

“Come on. They’re already tying it up for roasting.” Molly grabbed his hand, pulling him up from his furs.

The central fire was roaring. People streamed in from the field, caked in mud. The sight gave Illya a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. He had spent a day or so hovering at the edge of the field trying to look Leader-like but only succeeding in scowling with his discomfort. When Conna had suggested that he go work on reading the book and look at it for guidance, he had readily agreed.

He was still sure that it was only a matter of time before they all turned on him.

Molly scampered away to sit with her friends as soon as they entered the circle. The girls hovered in a little flock, watching as the women prepared the deer and set it on a spit to turn over the fire.

Since he was the hunter who had made the kill, Conna was responsible for carving it. He stood near the fire, sharpening a metal knife on a stone. It was one of the new ones that Ban Johnsted had figured out how to make the year before. The other Patrollers clustered around, slapping him on the back, making observations about the deer’s size and the spread of its antlers.

“We should make a headdress out of these,” said Nico Myr, holding the rack up on Conna’s head.

Julian Reyes whispered something into Conna’s ear and was rewarded with a roar of laughter. Illya, who was just far enough away that he hadn’t joined them yet, halted, fighting the urge to flee. He may be the Leader now, but it didn’t change the feeling that they must be laughing at him somehow. None of them had ever had anything to do with him before all of this had happened.

The deer was a scrawny one, affected by the hard winter as harshly as the village had been. As juices dropped into the flames below the spit, delicious smells wafted through the air and reached his nose.

Conna would cut off chunks and pass them out as they cooked. Usually, he would have started with himself and the other Patrollers before moving on to the rest of the villagers. Illya would have stood back with the rest of them. He thought of going to find Benja, but Conna saw him first.

“Leader!” Conna said and motioned him over.

“Almost done here,” Conna said. He poked the knife into one of the parts closest to the fire—a leg—then carved off a slice. With a smile that did not quite reach his eyes, he held it out to Illya on the end of the knife. Illya took it.

“Look at the good luck the book has brought us,” Conna said in a louder voice so that everyone could hear. He slapped Illya on the back, and the villagers broke into a spontaneous cheer.

Illya grinned despite his discomfort. With meat in his hands ready to eat, it was hard not to feel like everything was going to be all right. Conna carved a piece for himself next then for each of the boys around him, ending with his little brother Aaro.

Illya looked around for Benja and found him on the edge of the circle, standing with his parents. Mud was smeared across his face and covered his clothes. He met Illya’s eyes for a moment then looked away. He was not smiling.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

“WHAT IS IT?” Illya asked.

People came to him nearly every day now with petty disputes and questions. It was as if they had decided he was truly their Leader and that meant that he should solve all of their problems.

The man in front of him was mumbling something about a new fence his neighbor had put up between their huts. Apparently, they had very different ideas about where it should go. Illya wondered why on earth people couldn’t solve problems like this on their own, not to mention why they thought he had any idea of what to do.

The one thing that was saving him in this mess, though he had never thought he would say it, was Conna. Again and again, when Illya found himself floundering in front of the crowd, Conna managed to pipe up with a comment to save him. Just like on the first day, somehow, he always knew what to say.

The plan was working. The digging was going well. It was hard not to feel hopeful when progress could be seen in the field every day. He had inspected it that morning with Conna, and they thought it might be ready by that afternoon.

The man in front of him was droning out a list of grievances that his neighbor had committed in the past. The seeds sat in Illya’s pocket, their fate fast approaching. In a few hours, they would be put in the ground. With his idea so close to becoming real, it was hard to focus on anything else.

“Do you suppose?” the man was saying. “Would you have a look at the… Almanac?” He whispered the name of the book as if he was afraid to say it out loud then continued, “You know, see if it has anything to say about it?”

Illya realized that he had no idea what the man had been saying for the past few minutes.

“I don’t really think…“

Then he stopped himself. As tenuous as his position as Leader was, the last thing he needed to do was to deny the main thing that gave him credibility.

“Well… alright then,” Illya said.

He picked up the book and sat up straighter. Hoping that what he found would somehow apply to the man’s situation, he opened it to a random page.

“Hmm,” he said. The man’s eyes widened.

“What’s it say?” the man asked.

Illya held up a finger. Deciphering the letters was still a slow process. The man stared at him intently, his eyes trying to penetrate Illya’s skull as if he could see the reading happening. A bead of sweat rolled down the back of Illya’s neck. The words didn’t make very much sense.

Finally, he looked up and cleared his throat, hoping that the man would be so impressed that he wouldn’t notice.

“How is it that one careless match can start a forest fire but it takes a whole box to start a campfire?” he read aloud. The man was silent.

“Ah,” he said after a bit, looking at Illya with a somewhat frantic expression. “It has a… deeper meaning?”

“Yes.” Illya coughed. “The words they used back then were different than we use now. We must look for meaning that applies to our lives today.”

The man nodded. “Maybe it means that a good neighbor is as precious as a campfire,” he said, his eyes darting and nervous.

Illya nodded. “Yes, I think you have it,” he said. A smile spread across the man’s face.

“The book has something to teach everyone. You are wise to see its message so quickly,” Illya said. Privately, he thought that he may have to ask this man again if he ever needed to find meaning in the book where there seemed to be none. Beaming, the man rose. He thanked Illya and shuffled backward out of the hut, ducking his head repeatedly in thanks as he went, so that he resembled a bobbing pigeon.

With some reluctance, Illya forced his attention back to the passage he had been translating when the man had come in.

“Finally, another unanswerable question,” he sounded out loud, haltingly. “Why is it that our feet smell and our nose runs?”

Illya groaned and held his face in his hands. Except for the sections on weather and planting, a lot of what he had read had turned out to be very confusing. He flipped to the next page, just as there was a quiet knock on the door. Undoubtedly another villager with a stupid problem.

“What now?” he snapped.

“Oh… sorry. Never mind.” Benja had poked his head through the door and was now backing out hastily.

“No, wait!” Illya got to his feet quickly. “I didn’t mean that. I thought you were someone else.” Benja stopped and rested his hand on the doorframe, frowning.

“Okay then,” Benja said. He stared down at the open book, and his eyes widened. It seemed to be forever since they had looked at it together and laughed over the fact that it was about chickens. Illya blinked, realizing that it had barely been two weeks.

They stood in awkward silence, Benja looking at the book and Illya looking at him. Finally, Illya cleared his throat.

“How’ve you—“

“I just wanted to say it’s good. What you’re doing,” Benja blurted out, interrupting him.

“Oh,” Illya said. “Thanks.”

He felt like squirming at the tone of admiration in Benja’s voice. He needed someone to talk to, someone who wasn’t Conna. He needed someone to tell him if he was going crazy or doing the stupidest thing in his life. He didn’t need another villager to come stare at him. He needed Benja.

His heart sunk into his stomach.

“I wondered how you’d been,” Illya said. He looked down at the ground and dug his toe into the earth.

Benja shrugged.

“This has been really weird,” Illya said.

Benja breathed in deep and let his breath out in a slow sigh.

“Do you want to go fishing?” he mumbled.

For a second, Illya started to say yes. He would have loved nothing more than to leave it all behind and sit by the river with his cousin, but then he remembered the seeds in his pocket.

“The field is supposed to be ready soon,” Illya said.

Benja nodded and turned away. “I know. I’ve been out there,” he said.

“Will you watch the planting?” Illya asked.

“Yeah,” Benja said. “Wouldn’t miss it.” He gave Illya an awkward smile and left the hut, his shoulders slumped and his hands shoved into his pockets.

Illya clenched his fist to stop himself from hitting the wall.

* * *

It was eerie to walk through the village and find it deserted. It reminded him of the day of the flood, and he couldn’t shake the feeling that, like that day, something must be wrong. Everyone was finishing the digging in the field; a simple enough explanation, but in his dark mood, he imagined the spirits of everyone who had starved haunting the empty huts. In the distance, the Terrors had started to howl. The shadows of the evening took on a sinister cast. He walked faster, as if they could reach out and grab him.

A clanging sound started nearby.

With the setting sun behind him like a halo, Ban stood at his forge, beating a piece of glowing metal into shape. Slowly, a blade began to take shape under the pounding.

Metal things were difficult to make, but Ban knew how to do it. It was another lost thing that they had found again, just like reading.

For Ban, the knowledge had been in his family for years; he simply had to figure out how to use it. He had been taught by his grandfather, Martin, who had learned about blacksmithing from his own father. It went back in their family to the time of the Olders.

Ban looked up from his work; the clanging stopped.

“Leader,” he said.

Illya felt his cheeks redden.

“I’m sorry; I was going to the field,” Illya stammered.

Ban turned back to his work with a grunt. He pumped the bellows so that the embers under the forge glowed hot then returned to shaping the bright metal.

The raw material was scarce. There was not a lot of metal around that hadn’t been claimed by rust, but it didn’t take very much to make a knife. Ban would put a piece of scrap right on the fire and work the bellows until the metal was red as a coal.

It had taken Ban’s family a hundred years to find a way to make one thing that could replace something the Olders had left behind. The knives were a single tool, yet the Olders had used countless things like them. It made Illya’s head swim to think of the extent of all that his people had lost.

The planting was about more than their survival, Illya thought, feeling the seeds in his pocket.

They had to make a new world where it was possible to do new things, where they didn’t simply scrape by in the same miserable cycle day after day, season after season.

“Have you been out there then?” Illya asked.

Ban stopped and glanced at him, a slight frown on his face.

“I was,” he said. “Your Conna wanted more of these.” Ban held up the glowing blade with his tongs.

For some reason, the sight of the blade made Illya uneasy. He turned away and looked towards the field.

The diggers were making their way off the field to rest at the edge. They leaned on their digging tools and shovels, some no more than chips of wood wedged into crude tree-branch handles. The people laughed and talked, looking happy.

The Patrollers who had been out gathering started coming in from the forest with armloads of shoots and stalks. Nico, grinning, carried a basket brimming with new mushrooms. Everyone was working hard so that the dream of planting could have a chance.

His people deserved more than just survival. They deserved to thrive. It didn’t matter how he felt, how awkward being the Leader was for him, Illya realized. He could lose a hundred friends and it would still all be worth it.

He wasn’t doing this for himself. It was for the people who had put their faith in him. It was for his mother and sister, who could not make it through another hungry winter. It was for Charlie, who had come back to dig the day after being hit, even though there was still a lump on his head the size of an egg.

Conna was right. He had to do whatever it took.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

IMPIRI, ELIAS, AND Jimmer came out of the stone house and walked to the edge of the field. Impiri crossed her arms across her chest; she shook her head as she talked to Elias. After a few minutes, Sabelle came out and joined them. She stood back from her parents. Like them, she was conspicuously clean of mud. She examined the field with a slight frown then crouched down and ran her fingers through the soil, her lips parting slightly.

It was time. Illya approached, feeling the eyes of all the assembled people shift to him one by one. The field looked just like the pictures in the book, soft and level with no weeds or rocks.

Next year, if this worked, they could extend it to the edge of the forest then maybe even start another on the other side of the village.

Next year.

He couldn’t help smiling at the thought. Until now, no one had been sure there would even be a “next year”. He felt their eyes on him, especially Sabelle’s. His belly clenched with nerves in a way that was becoming all too familiar. He repeated the thought to himself with each step.

Next year, next year, next year.

Then he was there, in the center of a ring of people. They stared at him expectantly, waiting for him to speak. He cleared his throat and opened the book. Conna had suggested that he read to them. It had taken hours of practice to make sure it would come out smoothly.

“Prepare the soil to the depth of two to three feet by tilling; break up large clumps until you can run your fingers through it.”

Reaching down, he picked up a handful of wet dirt. He smiled and let it trickle through his fingers to fall to the ground. The people cheered. A lot of work had gone into making this field, and they were proud of it.

“Remove all the rocks.” He nodded toward the stones they had piled into a large cairn at the edge of the field.

“Maybe someday we will be able to build more stone houses with those,” he said. He glanced up and saw Impiri’s scowl. She did not appear impressed with the idea at all.

“What’s it say next?” asked a young boy standing beside his father in the crowd. His little face was streaked with dirt, and he leaned on a makeshift shovel, looking much like a miniature adult. Illya smiled at him.

“Plant seeds along furrows. Depth and spacing vary according to species,” he read.

“What’s a species?” the little boy asked. Illya opened his mouth then stopped. He was about to admit that he didn’t know, but Conna spoke first.

“We have seeds to plant. Let’s go make furrows.” The people cheered again, and the little boy sulked. His father placed a hand on his shoulder, and he didn’t say anything else.

“The furrows are troughs in the soil, like long valleys. Make them as long as the length of the field,” Illya said, closing the book and using it to point. “They should be as deep as one of your fingers and as far apart as the length of a man’s arm.”

The book gave a general range for depth and spacing but recommended that they follow the “package instructions.” Illya didn’t know what those were, but he was fairly sure he didn’t have them.

Planting at the depth of a finger was a pure guess. He hoped that it wouldn’t prove to be a terrible mistake, but there was nothing left to do but try and see what happened.

The people spread out across the field with their tools. Sabelle picked up a stick and moved to join them. Impiri caught her by the elbow. Sabelle jerked away from her mother’s grasp and went to dig beside Benja.

Illya buried his fingers in the seeds in his pocket and watched them.

After so much labor, the people made short work of the furrows. Illya took the seeds out of his pocket, cradling them in his hand. Solemnly, he walked down the length of the field and placed them a foot apart along the bottoms of the furrows. The gray wedges looked tiny and insignificant, almost disappearing in the soil where they fell. He swallowed.

Now that he saw them lying in the ground, it seemed impossible that one little seed was all it took.

Then he was done. The seeds were all out there, safely in the ground. The people spread out and carefully covered the furrows with soil.

Illya smiled, feeling better than he had all week. Conna had approved of him planting the seeds himself because it was appropriately symbolic. It felt wonderful to do something practical after all of the tension of preparation.

They were all looking at him. He caught a glare from Conna, and scrambled to say something.

“The book says that they will sprout soon, and in a few weeks, we will see shoots.”

Even those who were still unsure brightened at the thought of shoots. For the first time, he saw smiles all around.

“By fall, we will have mature plants. A hundred sunchokes, each with a whole network of roots and with great big seed heads,” he said, his shoulders relaxing.

“Your plants will shrivel up and die and all of us with them,” Impiri shouted from the edge of the field.

Conna started to answer, but, for once, Illya was faster. The moment of planting was too sweet to let her ruin it.

“We don’t need you sending curses at us,” he said.

“It’s no curse, boy. It’s the truth,” Impiri said, striding up to him. Her face wrinkled up like an old crabapple. “You forget that my great grandfather was the Planter. I know more about the dangers of planting than you do.”

Illya sighed; he started to roll his eyes at her but remembered that everyone was watching him as stopped.

“The old Planters ended because their seeds never grew. But we have new seeds now.” He pointed at the forest, which was just beginning to burst into life. The shoots of a few weeks past were growing tall, starting to become plants, and the trees grew tender leaf buds.

“A real Planter would know that, even if they sprout, they will die without water,” Impiri said. The condescension in her voice was like a spear jab. He felt his face grow hot with fury.

“What do you know about it?” he sputtered; then he recovered. “How long has it been since the time of the last Planter? There’s plenty of water here, when has the forest ever died from lack of it?”

Impiri smirked and crossed her arms.

“In the forest there is water but not here. The sun will get hot soon. You will see,” she said.

Illya blinked. Her words sank into his mind slowly, like a rock dropping into a swamp. He had never paid particular attention to this field before the digging, but he had walked through it every summer of his life.

“That’s true, that is,” someone said in the crowd.

“We’ve been carrying water in for people to drink. It’s a long way from the river.” He heard Julian whispering to Conna nearby.

Frantically, Illya shifted through his memories, thinking of what the field was like at different times of the year. Around him, the crowd’s muttering rose like a windstorm. A horrible sick feeling filled his stomach.

She was right.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

THE BUZZING OF the crowd pressed in on his eardrums.

“Stop it! Stop it!” Illya yelled.

The people gaped up at him. He winced at the note of panic he heard coming through in his voice.

“We will figure it out. It’s only a minor setback.”

“Then you admit that it’s a setback,” Impiri said. “You admit that your precious book was wrong.”

“No! I just didn’t know—”

“I’m sure there are many little things we will be adjusting to make sure this works,” Conna said smoothly, cutting him off. He came up behind Illya and put a hand on his shoulder. “We will find a way to bring water. It isn’t a problem. You’ll all see when we have a field of beautiful plants.”

They were not so easily satisfied. Illya glanced around and saw many dark expressions.

Illya edged away from Conna, unsure of what to do. The emotions of the crowd surged against him like breakers in a storm. Their belief in him would not hold up for long.

“I’ve heard enough of your talk,” Jimmer growled and started at Conna. Conna backed away.

“You stupid boys are going to ruin us because you can’t be bothered to think,” Elias gasped, his face red with fury. He turned to the people, spreading his hands palms up, pleading. “I’ve never led you wrong before. Why wouldn’t you trust me?”

“Because you had no plan at all!” Illya snapped, surprised by the strength of his reaction. It wasn’t Elias’s fault that they had all nearly starved, but he hadn’t been willing to do anything to stop it either. Illya was taking a risk, but at least he was willing to do what it took. Arguments that had halted when Jimmer ran at Conna resumed throughout the cluster of people.

“You would lead this village to rot,” Elias said.

“We have already looked too far into things that should be mysteries,” Impiri said. “What will you do when—”

She was interrupted when two men who had been arguing started shoving each other and stumbled into her, pushing her to the ground.

Nearby, Conna was struggling with his father. He seemed well practiced in dodging Jimmer’s strikes, but one of them connected with his nose, and blood poured down his face.

Impiri was sitting on the ground, shrieking at the men who collided with her. Sabelle pulled her to her feet. Somewhere behind him, Illya heard Benja hollering at Elias in his defense.

“You would have left us all starving or thrown us all out!” Benja yelled.

Then a group of people near Impiri picked up the abandoned shovels on the edge of the field and started hacking at the newly planted furrows. Illya saw it in a blur, his vision tunneling in on the sight of the sharp blades tearing at the earth.

He raced toward them, imagining the seeds themselves being hacked to pieces. The only thing he felt was panic. He reached the people and started to pull the tools away, but there were too many of them, and he was only one person.

“Father, no!” Sabelle’s cry cut through the air. He turned and saw her sprinting towards something beyond the crowd, her hair streaming out behind her, her eyes frantic.

Then the struggling crowd parted for a moment, and Illya saw what she had seen.

Elias had Benja. He held a crude metal knife to Benja’s throat. Sabelle reached them. Elias stared at her with a crazed look as if he didn’t recognize her.

The man that he was had departed and left another in his place. Illya lurched forward with his heart in his throat as Sabelle seized her father’s hand. She wrenched the knife away from Benja’s throat. He struggled against the arm Elias had barred across his chest, trying to get free.

Elias held on to Benja tightly, but he did not fight his daughter. Something flickered behind the desperation. His eyes went dull and he and let her pull the knife from his fingers.

“Don’t hurt him,” Sabelle whispered. They stared at each other. Illya pushed past people, trying to reach them. He was not the only one who had heard Sabelle’s scream; many were now crowding in to get a view.

Conna, with Julian and Aaro behind him, arrived first and freed Benja from Elias’ grasp. The Patrollers seized Elias, holding his arms behind his back. Conna produced a length of rope from somewhere and bound his hands together.

No one in the crowd was fighting anymore. All stared in shock at the old Leader.

Elias stopped fighting. He hung his head, and tears ran unchecked down his cheeks. Sabelle was crying too.

“I…” Elias said and gulped in shuddering sob.

“Benja didn’t do anything to you,” Conna said, snarling.

Elias didn’t answer. He looked down. Frozen, Illya stared at him, blinking again and again as if he could reset the scene. Things were happening so fast, whirling past in a blur, out of his control. Everything seemed to be unraveling around him.

Conna was whispering something in his ear.

“We have to lock him up, there’s no other way,” he said. Illya looked up. He could find no words to respond. His eyes drifted over to where Sabelle stood. She was crying. Nearby, Benja was stroking his uninjured throat.

“He’s lost the gift. Can’t you see? He could turn on us at any time,” Conna murmured.

“Lock him up?” Illya asked.

“Unless you think banishment is better,” Conna said. Illya sucked in a breath and shook his head. No one would ever be banished again in this village, not if he could help it.

Conna clapped him on the shoulder and began to speak to everyone in a raised voice.

“Elias is a danger to the village. First, he failed to do anything for us when the roots went. Now he spreads unrest. This is a time for celebrating what we have accomplished, but instead a man has had his life threatened.

“By order of the Leader, Elias will be locked in the cellar of the stone house, where he won’t be a danger to us anymore!” Conna seized Elias by his tied wrists and held them up in the air. The Patrollers clustered in tighter around him, flanking Elias with an obvious show of strength.

“We won’t tolerate sabotage, not when our survival is at stake,” Conna said. He gave a nod and the Patrollers pulled Elias away.

No one spoke as the figures retreated. Illya saw the stunned expressions on the faces around him, and his stomach cramped in worry. He glanced at Sabelle.

Her eyes were red from crying, and she bit her lip, watching silently. Illya swallowed, wanting to do something to make everything better, but he had no idea where to start. His heart sank; he was sure that any chance he had ever had with her was ruined.

Suddenly, she looked up at him, meeting his eyes over the sea of shaking heads. He couldn’t read her expression. He frowned, wishing he could tell her how sorry he was, how he had never meant for any of this to happen.

But it had happened.

He was in up to his neck now, and he had no choice but to move forward. The crowd was beginning to mill about with an air of uncertainty, coming out of their paralysis as the moment passed. He had to say something to salvage something of the day.

“Everyone listen,” he yelled, and his voice croaked. He ignored the jumping of his stomach.

“We will find a way to bring water. Until we do, some people will be assigned to carry it,” he said, and this time his voice came out clear and loud. Conna returned from the stone house and stood beside him.

“The digging was a giant task, and we did it. You all made it possible.” He paused for emphasis, hoping desperately that they weren’t regretting what they had done now. “This is a great accomplishment, but it’s only the start. We can do anything if we all work together. Everyone will support each other. Everyone will have a job,” Illya said. He took a breath and scanned their faces. So far, no one seemed to have anything to say.

Conna began to speak. “I think that after what just happened, we can all agree that it’s time we had a way to protect ourselves. I propose a team of Enforcers to do inside the village what the Patrollers do outside,” Conna said.

Illya pressed his lips together. He didn’t like the sound of that, but Conna had a point he had to admit. He glanced down at the gashes in the newly planted furrows.

“We’ve never needed anything like that before,” Charlie Polestad said.

“That’s because we have never been in the kind of danger we are now,” Conna shot back. “If this plan fails, it will be the end of us.”

“So, you’re going to lock all of us up in the cellar now, just because we don’t agree with you?” Impiri said, nearly spitting the words.

“I hope that won’t be necessary,” Conna said. Impiri looked back and forth between Conna and Illya. She nodded slowly, once.

“I see,” she said.

Illya clenched his teeth.

He opened his mouth to protest then shut it again. He could not afford to push Conna away, especially not now. The stakes were higher than ever.

He looked at the field, and the lump in his stomach hardened.

“Conna’s right. We have to be willing to do what it takes, and that means protecting ourselves,” Illya said.

He picked up the book again, opening it to the right section. He licked his lips, which had gone dry with nerves, and read:

“In a garden, weeds, insects, animals, and harsh weather can all kill seedlings and rob you of your harvest.” He looked around significantly and shut the book.

“So, there will be people to pull out weeds,” he said. He had practiced this speech many times when he was alone in his hut, thinking over what he was going to say.

“We also need water-carriers, child-watchers, cooks, and, of course, hunters and gatherers.” The people said nothing. He took a deep breath. He was just getting to the best part.

“When we have worked out how make it through this year, we can start planning for next year,” he said.

He paused then, letting the words sink in for a moment. There was murmuring now, and though he couldn’t be sure, he thought it was excitement. He glanced at Sabelle. She was still frowning, but he thought it was a little less than before. Impiri put her hand on Sabelle’s shoulder and she shrugged it off. His mother and Benja were standing nearby, beaming outright at him. Heartened, he pushed on.

“I want us to expand this field to the edge of the forest. After that, we can tear down the ruined huts on the north side of the village and plant there too. Next year, we will have three times the harvest.” He smiled wide, lightness at the thought of it rising through him.

“There are a few other jobs. Samuel will continue as our Healer. Instead of the old way, where you paid him in game or foods, we must recognize that most people will be in the position of depending on others for food, and we will share all we have equally every day. We will gather at the central fire for meals and eat together.”

He knew that families looked forward to going home to share the evening meal, but this would not be so different. The whole village would become a family. In his inflated dreams, he could see visions of countless nights of happy feasting.

Maybe someday they could even assign people to be artisans and inventors. Then Ban would be able to work on inventing new and better things all the time. Someday, maybe they could have the kind of world the Olders had lived in, the kind in the beautiful pictures.

“Once the cold comes, we will have a bountiful harvest that will see us through the winter easily.” He had read about “bountiful harvests” and thought that the words were perfect for this occasion.

“Now you will come forward, one at a time, and I will give you the position that I have chosen for you. I have consulted the Almanac, and I have given each of you the job that you are best suited to do.” He sent a quick glance at Conna, who nodded in approval. Despite his earlier misgivings, Illya felt a swell of pride. He knew his words had come out smoothly with no telltale stutter.

Charlie stepped up first, his eagerness plain on his face, despite a red lump and a gash on his forehead, which still hadn’t fully healed. Illya smiled, feeling a surge of warmth for him. He had decided to give Charlie one of the most labor-intensive jobs, knowing that he would do it with enthusiasm.

“Charlie Polestadt, you will be a water-carrier until we have a watering system. After that, the water-carriers will be soil-diggers for the new fields,” he said. Charlie beamed at him, and Illya returned it. His wife Leya stepped up next.

Illya had decided to assign entire families to the same job. That way, children who were old enough to work with some supervision could be taught by their parents. This way, they would need fewer child-watchers.

He hesitated for a moment before continuing. He knew that some of them were bound not to like it.

Leya was pregnant, due in two months. Still, she had worked alongside her husband digging the new field.

“Leya Polestadt, you will be a water-carrier, then a soil-digger with Charlie,” he said. “Of course, you must take care of yourself, and when the time for your baby comes near, you will rest.” He smiled at her tentatively, and Leya returned it.

He went on, assigning each person as he or she stepped up. He had spent many hours speculating who would be best for each job.

“You probably have noticed that I have kept families together,” he said. He paused and studied the crowd. As he had expected, there were mixed reactions. Charlie and Leya still had smiles on their faces. He wondered if it was his imagination, but their smiles now appeared a little strained. Others were making no attempt to hide their displeasure.

He had assigned Impiri to food preparation and Sabelle along with her. He had not wanted it to be Sabelle’s task, but Impiri was undisputedly one of the best cooks in the village. Predictably, Impiri looked furious, though he had tried to pick something she would be good at and enjoy. Sabelle was not meeting his gaze at all.

“The wisdom of the Almanac has guided me in the best way. I know that we are just starting out, and some things may need to change as we go. Everyone will need to be patient until we get it right,” he said. Impiri glared even more sharply but miraculously held her tongue.

Those who were already Patrollers had kept their jobs and would hunt, and now some of them would become Conna’s Enforcers. Their families would be gatherers. Besides himself and Conna, who were Leader and Second, there were few exceptions to the family units. Samuel was one of them, as he did not have a family. Conna had pointed out that if everyone survived each year, and more people were born, the village could double in size. There would be plenty of people to take over for Samuel eventually. Maybe they would even need a whole family of Healers to take care of everyone by then.

This was a compelling thought. When Illya had heard it, his mind had spun into wild calculations, and the real magnitude of what they were doing hit him. The small problems they dealt with now were nothing compared to the scope of it.

“I think that families are… one of the best things we have,” he said, trying to find a way to explain.

It wasn’t enough. The villagers needed to understand why it had to be this way, to feel the excitement he felt. He looked at Sabelle, who was still staring at the ground, and his voice froze in his throat.

Conna jumped up beside him.

“We have to do what is necessary. Everyone has to make sacrifices. Report to your new jobs after the morning meal tomorrow. Hunters, gatherers, you know what to do. Food preparation to the central fires, child-watchers and children under five winters to the stone house, other groups to this field. The Leader will be here to tell each of the new groups how to proceed,” Conna said, raising his eyebrows at Illya, apparently waiting for confirmation.

Illya swallowed. “There is deer left, and the Patrollers have been out today to gather. We will feast to celebrate!” he said.

The people began to trickle towards the central fire, looking diminished. It should have been a time full of joy. Elias’ imprisonment had set a sober cast on the day, but Illya knew some of it was because of his changes.

Impiri walked ahead of him.

It appeared that she was going to cooperate to avoid being locked up. He frowned. No matter what kind of face she put on, he couldn’t trust her. But she had pointed out the water problem early on. He really should thank her no matter what her intentions had been. If no one had thought of it, it could have turned into a disaster.

“Impiri,” he called and increased his pace to catch up with her.

“What?” she snapped, turning around. “I assume I have to cook this feast we are all going to eat now?”

“No… it’s not that,” Illya said, holding up his hands. “It’s late, we’ll all work together to cook tonight.” He glanced at Sabelle, who had stopped and was watching them.

“How did you know about the water?”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

IMPIRI STARED AT him for a long time. Illya held her gaze. His face felt hot and prickly. A drop of sweat ran down the center of his back. Finally, she spoke.

“And if I don’t tell you what I know, are you going to have me locked up like you locked up my husband?”

It was more than a little galling to ask Impiri for help after all she had done to stop him. But he knew that he wasn’t going to get anywhere by making her angrier than she already was.

“I could use your help,” Illya said.

“Why should I help you?”

Sabelle came closer and put her hand on Impiri’s arm.

“He is trying to help all of us, Mother,” she said, and she gave him the smallest smile. Suddenly, he felt warm all the way to his toes. He smiled back.

“That’s enough of that.” Impiri grabbed Sabelle by the wrist. She stormed away from him down the path, pulling her daughter with her. Illya caught snatches of the words she said as they went.

“Foolish girl… locked up your father… bring us all to ruin, mark me… just because you like a boy…“

He stood still in the path, grinning idiotically. Ahead of him, there was nothing but problems. He had no idea what to do about the water. The last thing Impiri wanted to do was tell him what she knew.

Tomorrow, the villagers would go to work in their new jobs, and he was sure that most of them would hate him by the end of the day, and Conna’s new Enforcers were another thing altogether.

His whole life seemed fraught with troubles, but Illya thought that he felt better just then than he ever had. He whispered the words back to himself, to hear them again.

“Just because you like a boy.”

* * *

The watering problem was made immeasurably worse when Illya discovered a passage in the book that instructed the ground be kept damp until the seeds had sprouted and the plants were “well established.” This turned out to be a massive amount of work, relieved only after the sun went down at night. To make matters worse, spring shifted to summer that year earlier than anyone could remember it. The rains stopped as if someone had put a cork in the sky. The sun began to beat down with real heat only a few days after the seeds had been placed in the ground. He was forced to pull people off all non-essential tasks just to carry enough water.

Because that included everything that wasn’t food-gathering, this turned out to be most of the villagers. Unfortunately, it included Impiri and Sabelle.

Impiri lugged skins of water along with the rest of them. While she said nothing, she made no secret of her feelings, scowling at him at every chance. Perhaps, Illya thought, she was just waiting for a disaster, a sign that the curses she had predicted had come to pass.

In spite of the hardship, the field stayed watered. He hoped that the plants would sprout any day. It was hard to measure work when it evaporated, but Illya took each day without a catastrophe as a victory and a good omen. He told the people so, keeping them going with praise and desperation, holding out for something to happen, a sign to show them all they were doing the right thing. Then, as if in defiance of Impiri’s predictions, there was a real stroke of luck.

Benja had spent a few days setting up a new network of traps along the river. It had been natural to Illya to make him a hunter. It was Benja, though, who had the foresight to spend his time hunting fish.

The immediate worry of starvation had receded with Conna’s deer, but even that would only last so long. Now, because of Benja’s traps, they caught the steelhead salmon run as it swept up the river past the village. There would be enough for everyone to eat and plenty left over to smoke over the fires to preserve for the winter. It was just what they needed; a reason for celebration and a good omen all at once.

* * *

The air was thick with smells and sounds as Illya made his way to the central fires that night. Precious fat was rendered from the salmon skins and bubbled and popped as it ran into clay pots. The women who had been given the afternoon off from watering to prepare the feast filleted the fish efficiently and dropped the pieces into the fat to sizzle and spit.

Delicious odors wafted through the air. The villagers laughed with each other. They hummed as they worked. Men were drinking in a group near the fire, hooting with laughter as they played a game of chance. For a moment, it was as if all the tumult and worry of the past months had never happened.

No, it was better than that, Illya thought. Before the roots had gone, the villagers had existed in a state of willful ignorance and preoccupation with their day-to-day worries. If you could just gossip about your neighbors enough, or find the latest omen in the clouds, it could cover up the real problem: the one that was too terrifying to face.

Tonight, the ease was real. The people laughed with new freedom. No matter how much anyone disagreed with him, no one could deny that they had begun to feel hope.

“Hi.”

Illya turned around. Benja stood behind him, wearing an uncertain smile.

“Hey Benj,” Illya said, lighting up at the sight of his friend.

“Thanks for finding the fish,” Illya said.

“Just doing my job,” Benja replied, his voice resting ironically on the last word. His face darkened. Illya flinched. Of all people, he had thought that Benja would support him

now.

Benja must have seen his discomfort because he tried to smile. Illya had watched him smile all his life, but now his expression looked like it belonged to a stranger.

“I like to fish, so it’s alright for me,” Benja said; then he turned and walked away. Charlie walked past him with a hugely pregnant Leya and nodded to him.

Unsure how to feel, Illya got his fish then went to find a place to sit at the edge of the circle. Benja had gone to talk to the musicians, who were setting up in the center. Illya looked for his ma, wondering what it would look like to everyone if he sat with her. It had been a while since they had shared a meal.

Grenya was sitting with Aunt Ada and a group of women. They laughed and teased each other, making jokes.

“Be careful when you become a child-watcher, Deede, they say that children are contagious!” Aunt Ada said to a young girl who had just been hand-fasted. Deede blushed and said she wouldn’t mind that at all, and all the women laughed.

“When it came out of you, you would,” Grenya said.

Illya turned away. His sister Molly had joined the other young girls where they sat giggling and shooting glances across the circle at the boys. Illya looked back at her, surprised. When had she started looking at boys? Hadn’t it only been a few weeks ago that she had sat on the floor of their hut, wailing for dinner like a little?

True, he had not been paying attention lately, but had he really missed so much?

She was small for her age, he knew that. It was because she had never been well fed, but when he stopped to think about it, he realized she wasn’t a little anymore, not at all. He was seventeen now. That meant she had gone from twelve to thirteen.

There was an unexpected thickness in his throat, and he turned away to hide his face.

He went to sit by Conna and Aaro, thinking that he probably couldn’t keep living in his mother’s hut for much longer either, not if he was the Leader. As if he wasn’t already lonely enough.

“You alright?”

Illya looked up, startled out of his reverie. Conna was eating his fish and wasn’t paying attention. Aaro was watching him.

Illya shrugged.

“Of course,” he said. “This is all, great.”

Aaro didn’t say anything but watched him for a moment.

“Okay,” he said.

The music started, and Illya closed his eyes and tried to let himself be carried away. The bright fire shone through his closed eyelids. The music sang through the night air. A loud pop sounded from the fire as a rock exploded in the heat. A child squealed and ran to his mother, frightened by the noise. Illya opened his eyes and saw a shower of sparks shooting up from the fire to mingle with the stars twinkling across the dark sky.

The women who had prepared the fish were eating now, having served everyone else. They left the clay cooking pots to the side of the fires to stay warm. The fat in them would be used again and again to cook and preserve food. The musicians started to play.

Uncle Leo grabbed his wife and whirled her around. The light reflected off her graying red hair. She laughed out loud in his arms.

“That’s my girl!” He chuckled and spun her out, twirling her around and around until she spun back in and collapsed into his embrace, laughing. Many people were dancing now, spinning each other around. Illya thought he could take at least a little of the credit for their full bellies and a lot more of the credit for the new hope in the air.

Automatically, he looked for Sabelle. He hadn’t spoken to her since Impiri had hustled her away the other day. Impiri had said that she liked him, but that hadn’t made it any easier to go talk to her; somehow, it made it harder than ever. He searched through the gathered people but did not see her.

He saw Impiri though. She was sitting alone eating, not aware of him watching. For once, she was not scowling.

On an impulse, he got up.

“Good fish?” he asked as he approached her.

She didn’t answer but looked up at him, the familiar frown returning to her face. He sat down.

“There have been no curses,” he said.

“And you had to come over and say you told me so,” she said.

“It’s not that,” he said. “I was hoping… if you can see now how things could be you would change your mind. Tell me what you know about the old Planter.”

“Or what?” she asked.

“Or I guess you are going to spend a lot of time carrying water,” he said.

“Is that a threat?” she asked.

“It’s just the truth,” he said then paused.

“You have been treated the same as everybody else, you know. You didn’t have to be,” he said.

She looked at him for a while, her eyes flat.

Illya studied her, narrowing his eyes. Then she smiled, smug and self-satisfied.

“I can tell you what I know, and your plan will still fail. The truth is I don’t know much at all,” Impiri said, shrugging.

“You have to know something,” Illya said, raising his voice. “Why else would you let me think that you did?” People had noticed their conversation. They were starting to watch. Impiri took a bite of fish.

“I’ll show you, and you’ll be just as lost as ever.” She laughed: an unpleasant sound.

She finished her fish and got up, beckoning for him to follow.

They went to the stone house. Impiri opened the door to let him inside, spreading her hands in an ironic gesture of welcome.

“Are you going to take our house next?” she asked. “You already have the cellar and my husband. What about a nice big house to go along with it?”

“Of course not,” he said. Impiri raised her eyebrows, studying him.

“No, I don’t suppose you would. Sabelle wouldn’t like you for it, would she?” she said, laughing mirthlessly and stopping in the kitchen to light a candle from the banked coals in a wood cook stove.

“That’s not why—” he said and stopped. He could feel the heat of anger building in him, but he knew it could do no good to rise to Impiri’s baiting.

Illya had never been past the main rooms of the house. There was an entryway, a room with chairs, and then the kitchen. Beyond that were stairs, probably leading to the family’s sleeping places above. It was a fitting place for a Leader. He suspected that the house itself had done a lot to lend Elias’ Leadership legitimacy over the years. It was hard to look at it when you lived in a one-room hut and not believe that the people who lived there were somehow above you.

She was right that some people in his position would have taken the house; Conna certainly would.

There was a second set of stairs leading down from the kitchen into the cellar. That was where Impiri led him now. He hesitated, wondering what she was up to.

He needn’t have worried. When they had reached the bottom of the stairs, there was candlelight to the left beside an Enforcer who guarded the room that held Elias. She ignored it and turned to the right, taking him down a hall and then into a room full of dusty shelves ghosted with cobwebs before stopping at a small door. Illya shivered. The cellar was an eerie place in the flickering candlelight.

“This has always been called the pump room,” she said. “A long time ago, I asked my pa why.” She opened the door, shedding a beam of light from her candle onto an incomprehensible mess of parts, rusted and halfway sunk in mud.

“It’s because this is a water pump. This is what it took to water that same field, what the Planter used.” She pressed her lips together and gave him a thin smile. Her eyes brightened momentarily.

“Hasn’t worked for the whole life of this village, and it’s not about to start now,” she said.

Illya crouched down. Avoiding her stare, he examined the heap.

It was true. There was nothing here but a pile of broken parts, like so many of the left-over “machines” of the Olders. He lowered his head. Even with Impiri’s pessimism, he had still hoped to find something.

“How did it work?” he asked, his voice breaking past the tightness in his throat. He had been stupid to think that she would tell him anything that could help.

“Oh, it ran on their ‘licktricity.’ It’s useless without it,” she said, shrugging. Then, almost gleefully, she continued.

“Those things are pipes,” she said, pointing to a pyramid of long metal tubes stacked against the wall.

“It forced water up from below the ground and then through those, out to the plants.” Her lip curled as she looked at the pump, as if it should be ashamed for treating the water with such little consideration.

“It has pieces that should move to do that,” Illya mumbled to himself. “I wonder if we could just move them with our hands.” Experimentally, he pulled and pushed on various parts of the pump.

It was no use. Even if he’d had the first idea of how to make it work, it was so rusted that bits of it crumbled off at his touch. The parts all seemed frozen in place.

“Like I said, it’s broken,” Impiri said.

Illya stood up and wiped his hands off on his pants.

“I guess there will just be more water carrying for all of us then,” he said.

Impiri shrugged, her mouth pinching. She turned and went back up the stairs, taking the candle with her and not bothering to wait for him.

When Illya returned to the fire, the people were still dancing. They carried on as if nothing had happened, as if they were not all doomed to carry water for eternity. Nearly aching with disappointment, he looked around for Conna.

His second in command was not where Illya had left him. Aaro now sat with Julian and Nico. They had started a game of Targets, tossing stones into circles on the ground. A moment later, he saw Conna.

In Illya’s absence, he had found Sabelle.

They were dancing to the music, whirling around and laughing as if they had no cares in the world. Her hair was unbound. She was beautiful with the firelight on her face. He looked at the way her eyelashes lay on her cheeks; he saw the way Conna held her hands and felt sick.

Illya looked away. He folded his arms across his chest and stared at the dirt, trying very hard not to let it overwhelm him.

A shadow fell over him, obscuring the firelight.

“You’ll excuse me, Leader,” said a man’s voice above his head.

“What?” Illya said, raising his gaze slowly. His eyes were blurred and he could feel the tears he held back burning behind them.

It was Ban. Illya blinked, his vision clearing slightly.

“I been thinking about this watering,” Ban said. “And I might have an idea.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

“YOU AREN’T THE only one who has paper,” Ban said with a small smile.

“What do you mean?” Illya asked, reluctant to come out of his gloom. He couldn’t help being curious though. If anyone in the village might be able to figure out a solution that would work, it was Ban.

“Got a few things, drawings all folded up. My granddad gave ’em to me,” Ban said. “There’s one that might help.”

Illya sat up straighter. The song had finished, and nearby Sabelle had dropped Conna’s hands. She was retreating to the edge of the circle, where Martha and Josie were sitting. Illya felt a little bit better.

“Show me,” he said.

* * *

Ban’s hut was full of broken parts and pieces. There was scrap metal for his blacksmithing and many other salvaged tools and Olders’ things. Illya whistled; there was even more here than he had collected in the lean-to behind his mother’s hut. She had always affectionately called it his magpie nest because he had hardly ever gone out to explore the nearby ruins without coming back with something for it.

Firelight glinted off the piles of metal stashed in every corner and on the shelves, turning the hut into a jungle of twisted shadows. If Impiri had ever been in this place, Illya would have gotten knocked down to a much lower spot on her priority list.

“Wife thinks I’m crazy hanging on to all this stuff,” Ban said in response to Illya’s raised eyebrows. “She says she still likes me fine though.”

Ban grinned and led him to the table, where there were several pieces of paper spread out. Illya picked up the one on top, fingering the now-familiar smoothness with his fingertips. It was browned and creased through the middle.

“Your granddad saved these all this time?” he asked.

“Yep, been stowed away in there,” Ban said, pointing to a case leaning against the table made of what looked like leather. The clasp was broken, and Illya could see divided fabric slots inside. It had letters stitched into the top. REB

The paper was a drawing. The markings on it were faint, and some of them had worn away completely, but Illya could still see the essence of what it was.

A wheel. It was tall with cups around its edge. A crude sketch of a man stood beside it, showing that it was twice his height. It sat partially submerged in a pond, with arrows indicating that it would rotate. The cups on the ascending half were full of water. They would hit a bar and overturn into a trough at the top. Faint letters across the bottom of the drawing said, “Old-Fashioned Noria Wheel.”

“A water wheel,” Illya whispered to himself, amazed at the simplicity of it.

“Yeah,” Ban said. “We would still have to figure a way to get the water from the river to the field, but at least this gets it up out of the river,” he said.

Illya looked at Ban, his eyes wide.

“I know how to do that,” he said.

“You do? How?” Ban asked

“Impiri!” Illya exclaimed, getting excited. Ban stared at him, appearing thoroughly perplexed. Illya laughed out loud.

“Something she showed me. She wanted me to see how it wouldn’t work, how we are going to fail… but we don’t need a pump after all! We just need pipes!” he said. Ban was still staring at him with no comprehension. Illya knew he was babbling, but he couldn’t help it.

“This wheel is tall,” he said. “Water will run down from it, like down a hill, if it has a path.” Ban nodded, he raised his eyebrows.

“There is a stack of pipes in the cellar. All we have to do is run them from this trough down to the field, and as long as it gets lower as it goes, the water will carry itself.”

Ban’s eyes widened with comprehension. “We have it then,” he said. “The water will carry itself!” He slapped his hand down on the table.

* * *

“We just have to carve wooden pegs to join these pieces,” Ban said. They had assembled the most likely people they could find to help build. Ban drew a schematic of the water wheel with a set of downward-flowing pipes into the mud of the riverbank.

He stood back and looked at his drawing with satisfaction and a fascination that Illya recognized. He had it too: it was the same thing he felt whenever he read his book.

“We can make these cup pieces by soaking wood and bending them into the shape we need around stones,” Ban said, glancing at Illya as if for confirmation.

“That’s good, excellent really,” Illya said. He took a breath, making a decision.

“From now on, you will be called Ban Builder. Everyone should do what he says; this water wheel is going to make all the difference,” he said. Ban nodded, his face flushed.

He stood up and wiped his hands on his pants.

“Right then, so what’s left is to get the materials,” Ban said.

They dispersed. Though it would have made more sense to leave him to fishing, Illya had asked for Benja to be among Ban’s helpers. He wanted to talk to his cousin more than ever.

“Hey, there’s some stuff in the cellar we need,” he said, drawing Benja aside. “Help me?” Benja raised both eyebrows.

“Course,” he said and hesitated. “I’ll get someone else to help? Not like a Leader to carry things around, from what I hear.”

“I haven’t forgotten how to work,” Illya said.

Conna wouldn’t have liked it if he was there, but he was not. He was way across the village, busy drilling the Enforcers, who had started having daily practice sessions in the open space beside the field.

Once in the cellar, Illya hoisted one end of a pipe onto his shoulder. Benja took the other end. It was heavy, and he was sweating by the time they got it up the stairs and out into the light. The pipe was rusted, but the spot they had been stacked in was one of the driest in the cellar room. The rust was not as bad as Illya had expected it to be. They went back again and again, taking many trips before they had all the pipes stacked alongside the river.

“Some of these are going to leak pretty bad,” Benja said, brushing at a spot rust, which revealed a hole all the way through the thickness of the metal.

“Maybe Ban can patch them,” Illya said doubtfully. He wiped the sweat from his forehead with the edge of his shirt. “There should be enough, even if there are some we can’t use.”

“Anything that shortens that distance will help,” Benja said. A line of people still tromped past them with skins of water, keeping the field damp as the heat of the day intensified.

Illya felt better than he had in a long time. Action was going a long way toward easing his guilt. If all went well, there would be a few days of wood soaking, then the building, which couldn’t take more than a day or two. In all, it should be less than a week and the people would be relieved of the carrying.

As they lugged the pipes one by one through the heat, Benja and Illya fell back into their old habits of laughing and joking, pushing each other to work faster. Out from under Conna’s scrutiny for once, he had felt like just another villager. It was a glimpse of another life; one he hadn’t realized how much he missed.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

“THE SEEDS HAVE sprouted!” Conna grasped Illya’s shoulder and shook it for emphasis. He rubbed the sleep from his eyes and blinked at Conna, not sure if he had heard right.

“They have come, just like you said they would. Illya, we have plants!”

He heard laughter drifting through the air.

“Really? Sprouts?” he said.

“Come and see,” Conna said.

It was like spring had come new. The people laughed and celebrated. Some nodded to Illya as they passed. He saw new respect in their eyes, and his heart swelled.

Charlie Polestadt was crouching down at the edge of the field. He stood up and stuck his fists to his hips.

“Look!” he called, as they neared. “You can see them, you can see them all!” He pointed down at the earth. At first, Illya didn’t see anything. He reached the edge of the field and dropped to his knees, putting his face close to the ground.

They were there. Overnight, tiny green sprouts, some with opened leaf buds, had emerged from the furrows.

Illya was overwhelmed with the urge to laugh and cry at once.

“It’s working.”

“I know it’s working!” Charlie slapped him on the back. “Always knew it would.”

“We all did,” Conna said.

Charlie’s broad face was sunburned and lined with fatigue from hard work but was full of such undisguised joy that Illya couldn’t help feeling it himself. Even Conna seemed proud. Tears prickled at the corners of his eyes. He blinked furiously. It would not do to cry, not at all.

Until this moment, there had been no way to know if the seeds would sprout at all. Now there was a carpet of green at his feet.

* * *

In the days that followed, the village was a changed place. People who had regarded him with suspicion before were open and relaxed. Impiri, slaving over the cooking fires, seemed afraid to say anything at all. More and more people came to his hut to get a closer look at the book and hear words from it.

A week after the sprouting, the plants had doubled in size. The people worked harder than ever to keep them watered. But, finally, the Noria wheel was nearing completion. Illya had continued to help with the building. He woke with the sun each day to make time for reading before the day’s work started. He was determined to be the best Leader possible, and he was sure that in the book’s pages he could find the answer to any problem if he just looked hard enough. The book had proved its wisdom. The days of hesitation and worry that he would lose his mind were over.

When he had read as much as he could without his eyes blurring, he joined Ban and the other builders at the river. They spent a sweltering morning pounding pieces of carved wood into tight-fitting notches. Assembling the wheel went quickly once all of the pieces had been constructed, and by afternoon it was complete. All that remained was to put it into position.

Two towers had been built on the riverbank: stacked stones inside a wooden frame. They were nearly the height of a man. Five men lifted the giant wheel and positioned it between them, placing the center shaft on grooves across the tops.

As soon as they lowered it into the river, the wheel started spinning, pushed by the current. It picked up cups of water, and, just as in the drawing, overturned them into a trough at the top. Ban had salvaged a few things from the nearby ruins to aid in the construction, but, in the end, most of the wheel had been built out of wood from the forest.

This was a fact of which Illya was extremely proud. He loved the idea that his people had found a way to do something like this without help from Olders’ things. The world of the Olders had been full of marvels, but you never knew if anything they had made would ever be found again.

The Noria wheel stood at the height of two men. It had to be tall to deliver the water to the top of the long network of pipes, which sloped downward from the river to the edge of the field. Eight spokes joined together at the hub, the other ends linked by smoothed pieces of wood joined into a circle. The notched joints, which had been tight when the wood was dry, had swelled and become unbreakable when the wood absorbed the river water.

Illya stared as the river pushed it around and around. Water rushed from the trough down the pipes, some dripping out of small leaks where they had rusted through but most of it flowing past. When it reached the end and spilled out onto the field, everyone broke out into cheers.

Illya’s heart felt light as a feather rising on a draft as he jogged to the field to watch the water flooding out.

It poured and poured. For a while, it soaked into the thirsty ground, but after some time it began to pool.

The wheel was too efficient. They would have to leave it out of the river much of the time or the field would become a swamp.

It was a slight setback, but Illya could not help feeling delighted. He hadn’t needed to worry if it would work or not: it was working too well. He wiped the sweat from his forehead and watched as Ban bustled around excitedly, pointing at parts of his construction and making a new drawing in the dirt.

“I think we could build those parts higher,” Ban said, indicating the tops of the stone columns.

“We need platforms that a few men can stand on. Then they can raise it out of the water when it needs to stop.”

Illya and the workmen looked over the drawing then spread out to collect more stones.

* * *

Any remaining vestiges of doubt left among the villagers were gone with the sprouts and the success of the wheel. Illya no longer hesitated before giving a new edict, and he started feeling like he had been meant to be the Leader all along.

“That book is something, isn’t it?” Samuel’s voice interrupted his thoughts one morning as he sat outside his hut reading. Illya looked up, squinting to make out the Healer’s face from the bright sunlight that surrounded his head. He grunted in response.

“People have been talking. They’re calling you a prophet,” he said.

“So?”

“Are you?” Samuel asked.

“Maybe I am,” Illya said. He believed it at that moment. Everything was changing. Everything was getting better, and it was all because of him and because of the book. Samuel laughed.

“Maybe you are, but perhaps you are not.”

“I’m the only one who can read,” Illya said.

“And what do you read?” Samuel asked. “It’s just a book. We might not have anything else like it, but, still, it’s just a book.”

“It has the wisdom of the Olders.”

“And they were just people.”

“At least they knew how to live,” Illya snapped.

“Fine. You are a prophet,” Samuel said. “Just make sure that when you save us all, you don’t destroy what we have in the process.” He frowned, his eyebrows drawn together. Illya met his gaze without flinching, his eyes hard like stones and his insides boiling.

“I know what I’m doing,” he said.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

A THUMPING SOUND interrupted a particularly good dream involving a sun-lit raspberry patch. Illya blinked himself awake. The sun was not even up yet, was Ban working in the dark? He shook his head. That couldn’t be right; they had finished the wheel and hadn’t started any new projects. Ban had been working to refine the operation of the wheel. Maybe he was devising a lifting system. Still, even if there had been work to be done, he couldn’t think of any reason why Ban would do it alone, in the dark.

Illya lay quiet, wondering if he was imagining the sound. The gates were still closed.

No one could be out there.

Nearby, his mother and Molly continued to sleep undisturbed. He shook his head, but the sound did not disappear. It was real, and it was coming from the direction of the river. Illya crawled out of bed and pulled himself to his feet.

Easing the door open so as not to disturb his family, he tiptoed outside. The village slept. Dawn was not far away, but no promise of light was visible yet on the horizon. The clanging continued, regular and unrelenting. It sounded like a rock slamming against something.

He ran towards the sound, his heart lurching, not bothering to stay quiet now that he was outside. The gates were open.

He hesitated. Making a split-second decision, he turned, not back but along the north path. Most of the huts on this side of the village were abandoned. Conna and Aaro had moved away from their father, into one of the most intact ones, the night after Illya had become the Leader. A few of his Enforcers had since settled in the huts nearby. A little distance away from the rest of the village, the Enforcers’ camp had taken on a kind of glamor.

Illya had not yet decided whether he should join them out there. So many things had changed in his life that he was reluctant to give up that last vestige of normalcy: home with his family.

He rapped on Conna’s door. After a few moments, it was opened by a bleary-eyed Aaro.

“Whaz goin’ on?” Aaro mumbled, blinking. Then he frowned, his eyes sharpening.

“Hear that?” Illya asked. “It’s coming from the wheel. I need backup.” Conna pushed past Aaro, his hair rumpled and eyes bloodshot.

“Get some of the others,” he said over his shoulder to his brother.

“Let’s go,” he said to Illya and took off up the path towards the gate.

Illya sprinted after Conna through the open gates. If any Terrors were out in the dark, they could be prowling through the entire village by now. He shuddered.

The wheel was still safely up on the riverbank. Two figures stood over it, working on something. Neither of them was Ban.

Conna broke into a new burst of speed. One of the figures dropped something on the ground and ran. The other either had not noticed them coming or didn’t care. When they got close enough, Illya saw that he was wielding a large rock, repeatedly smashing it into the wooden joints of the wheel.

Conna reached the man first and tackled him. They fought, a blur of hair and limbs, until Conna had him pinned. He grasped him by the shoulder and flipped him over so that Illya could see his face.

It was Piers Malkin, Jimmer Duncan’s friend. His face contorted with hate.

“Sabotage,” Illya said, almost disbelieving the word as he said it. If he hadn’t seen it himself, he wouldn’t have thought it possible. Everyone had seemed so content lately and so impressed by the book. Besides that, weeks of work had gone into this wheel. Who in his right mind would try to undo it?

“What of it?” Piers spat at him.

“You won’t get away with this,” Conna said, breathing heavily. There were shouts behind them. Aaro had rounded up the rest of the Enforcers, and they were streaming out of the gates towards the river. Dawn was coming now. The sky had begun to lighten over the flats to the east.

“We will lock you up until we figure out what to do,” Conna was saying. Already he had bound Piers’ hands and feet.

“What happened?” Julian gasped, slowing to a jog as he reached them.

“He was trying to break the wheel,” Illya said, still stunned. He crouched down and examined the wood. For all the banging, they had only managed to separate two joints. Some of them had been dented but held. Ban had done well when he had designed the fittings.

“There were two,” Conna said, finishing off his knots at Piers’ wrists. He pointed towards the forest. “The other one went that way.”

“Right,” Julian said and took off. Aaro and the other Enforcers followed him.

By the time the sun was fully over the horizon, they had given up the search for the second man. He’d had a solid head start, and there was no sign of him. With Conna pushing a bound Piers before him, they returned to the village.

“He was short, maybe thin,” Illya said. There were one or two men who could have matched that description. He did not think it had been a woman. Something about the way the figure had lumbered made him sure.

“There are only a few people it could be,” he said. Conna grunted in response.

“We’ll find him. Ask around, see who looks suspicious,” Aaro said. Conna said nothing but held Piers’ wrist with a white-knuckled grip.

There was no way to avoid parading past the cooking fires and the villagers who would undoubtedly be there at this time of the morning. Illya would rather have avoided the stares and gossip that would follow. But even if they had been able to keep the arrest quiet, with the damage to the wheel and investigation into the second perpetrator, there was no way the incident would go unnoticed.

There was a shocked silence, followed by a wave of muttering and whispers as they passed the fire. Elias’ arrest had followed an incident that everyone had witnessed. No one could have denied that there had been no better choice. Elias had been unbalanced, dangerous. This time, all they saw was the aftermath: a man they all knew, hands tied and ankles hobbled, accompanied by the entire pack of Enforcers.

Illya shot a glance ahead at Impiri, where she was ladling out hazelnut mush. There was soot smeared across her face. She looked up, appearing as startled as the rest of the people when the procession passed; not the expression of someone who was involved.

As Illya passed her, he nodded, thinking that courtesy couldn’t hurt.

She tilted her head then smiled in return, not genuinely. It was an odd smile but with at least the semblance of respect. She turned back to her cooking pot. Illya went on to catch up with the rest of the procession, which was now a little distance ahead.

He was a few steps away when he thought he heard her say something.

“What was that?” he said, turning around again. Impiri was looking away muttering under her breath, apparently to herself; no one else was nearby.

“He sends rain, right out of the sky. Part of the curse. Thinks I don’t know, but I do, oh yes I do,” she said to the pot. Illya’s mouth gaped. She glanced back over her shoulder and gave him another smile.

She resumed her stirring. Illya looked closer: the level of mush in the pot was so low that her spoon did not reach it. She didn’t seem to have noticed.

Illya shivered and backed away from her. She was distracted; that must be it. The sight of a man arrested was a shock. She was afraid, not thinking about what she was doing or saying. He shook his head, unwilling to acknowledge the other possibility. He had been small when Benja’s sister Rachel had lost the gift. Much too small to remember what it looked like when it happened.

Jannica had lost the gift, if the stories could be believed, just a few weeks ago. Was it like a Calamity, drifting through the air waiting to infect them all? He had worried about that when Elias had threatened Benja, but that had seemed to be different, a moment of desperation. Elias still had all of his senses afterward. Illya covered his mouth and nose with his hand, as if she carried the ’fection, and stumbled away. Conna and the Enforcers were returning from the stone house.

“We will have to round everyone up now, ask if they know anything,” Julian was saying.

“No need,” Conna said, holding up his hand. “We already know who was behind it,” he said.

“Did Piers say something?” Illya asked.

Conna shook his head. “Didn’t have to, obvious isn’t it?” he said.

Illya hesitated. It was true that there were people who had been against him from the start, but that wasn’t enough evidence to know.

“It was my pa. Piers and him are best mates… If that’s what you call getting drunk together every day,” Conna said. Aaro was standing beside him, staring at the ground.

“We both saw the other guy; he was smaller than Piers. That’s not like your pa at all,” Illya said.

“You can bet it was another of his friends then,” Conan said with a grimace. “If one of them was involved, all of them were. We have to make an example. You know there will just be more trouble until we do.”

“Pa’s all talk. Usually,” Aaro muttered, kicking the dirt.

Conna glared at him sharply. Aaro looked at the ground and scowled.

“I don’t know,” Illya said, feeling slightly sick. There had been no other choice than to lock up Piers and Elias, but how could they lock anyone else up unless they were sure they had been part of it?

“Impiri is the first we should question,” Julian said. “Always been against us, hasn’t she?”

“Sure, but that was no lady out there this morning,” Aaro said.

Illya’s stomach flipped over. If he had eaten any breakfast, he would have spewed it across the mosaic stones. If Impiri was losing her mind, he didn’t want anyone seeing. An epidemic of madness in the village would turn everyone against him and fast. It would look like everything she had predicted had come true.

He glanced around casually to cover his reaction. Maybe Conna was right. His father was trouble; there was no doubt about that.

Conna was eying him. Illya swallowed. Despite the logic of it, acid was rising in his throat.

When he hesitated, Conna’s eyes hardened, as if daring him to disagree. Illya met his stare and realized that he had another, far bigger problem. If Conna decided that he didn’t want to support the plan anymore, what would he have left? Nothing, that was what. A book and pile of opinions as fickle as the weather. Everyone would desert him at the first prediction he got wrong, the first disaster that struck.

The Enforcers would go with Conna. Illya would have no power against those who wanted him to fail. The whole plan would fall apart.

That couldn’t happen. Whether or not Jimmer had been part of this particular incident was a small detail. He had already caused plenty of trouble. What Conna wanted was nothing compared to the plants and how important they were.

He swallowed back the acrid taste. Conna’s stare bored into him.

“Right then,” he said. “Jimmer and his friends, round them all up.”

Conna smiled with a momentary gleam flashing in his eyes. Illya turned away. The plan was everything. None of those men would thank him come winter if they were free but starved to death.

The Enforcers had them all arrested in less than an hour, everyone who drank with Jimmer. Most of them had reacted with genuine surprise. They had not expected to be singled out. With Piers, there were five of them—Jimmer, Tom Garland, Lionel Sutter, and Donnie Johnsted, Ban’s older brother. Lionel had been the only one to try to run when the Enforcers had come knocking on his door. The silhouette that they had seen fit him, which was reassuring. It had taken a few extra arrests, but both of the saboteurs seemed to be safely out of the way.

Repairing the wheel took most of the day. Ban spent the morning carving new pieces and directing the other builders in the delicate task of removing the broken parts without destroying the rest of the wheel. He said nothing about his brother’s imprisonment. After that, it had been simple to put it all back together. Even so, Illya held his breath as he watched the men raising the wheel back onto the towers as evening approached. It spun just as well as ever, and the sound of the water rushing down the pipes to the field was particularly sweet. The water soaked readily into the soil. None of the little plants, now ankle-high, had wilted. It seemed that they would be no worse off for their day without water.

As the light fell, Illya made his way home more exhausted than he had been in a long time. There was yelling coming from his family’s hut, and he paused to listen. It was his mother and Benja.

“It’s not like him.” Benja was not yelling anymore. Illya had to strain to hear.

“He needs us more than ever now,” his mother answered, her voice shaking.

“Doesn’t mean we have to like what he is doing,” Benja said, his voice rising again.

His mother mumbled something.

Benja answered, too quietly to hear, and the door to the hut burst open. Illya ducked off the path and hid behind a tree. He had never tried to avoid Benja before in his life, but he had reacted before he could think about it. Benja stormed past him, not looking around.

Illya watched him go. His stomach felt hollow. When Benja was out of sight, Illya edged out from behind the tree. He hesitated, not sure that he wanted to go inside at all. Still, he could hardly sleep out on the ground.

Taking a breath, he pushed open the door.

Molly was not there. His mother was squinting over some mending at the table. She looked up when he entered, with a strained smile, but said nothing. Illya licked his lips, which suddenly felt parched. He tried to return the smile, pretending that he had not heard anything. He stood over his pile of furs, contemplating them intently, trying to think of something to say to break the strangled silence, perhaps to head off what he knew was coming. His mother sighed.

“Are you sure you know what you are doing?” she said. He turned and saw that she had shoved aside her mending. She did not look angry after all. She looked worried. He didn’t know which was worse.

“Yes,” he said, mustering as much confidence as he could to put into his words.

She turned away and picked up the mending again. She looked down at it but didn’t resume her work. He watched her, and the moments stretched out in silence.

“Just say what you think,” he said, the words bursting out when he could no longer contain them.

“These Enforcers… Elias was one thing, but arresting people just because they don’t agree with you?” Her eyes looked watery. “And people… people are saying that some of those men had nothing to do with it.”

“If they destroyed the wheel, it would kill the plants. How could I let them do that?”

“You didn’t even give them a chance to give their side of the story.”

“What could they possibly have to say? Those men have been trouble since the first day,” he said.

Sometimes the wind blew, whistling through the cracks for hours without stopping. It pushed you until you felt like screaming. The concern on her face had been grating on him for days, and it made him feel the same. She didn’t think he knew how to do anything.

But he wasn’t a weak little boy anymore. He was the Leader. They chose him. Why couldn’t she trust him to know what he was doing?

“I don’t think that you believe that,” she said.

“Of course I do.”

“If you let them talk, then maybe people would agree with them. You are afraid. That’s why you are letting Conna push you into this,” she said.

“That’s ridiculous,” he said. Boiling against her pity, her worry, he spat the words at her. “I thought you were behind me, I thought you of all people would understand how important this is.”

“This isn’t you. My kind, thoughtful boy would never do something like this,” she said. Illya hardened his jaw. She continued.

“I don’t know what’s happening to you, Illya. Telling everyone what to do, arresting people who haven’t done anything, it doesn’t have to be this way.”

“It does. You just can’t see.”

“I’m worried about you.”

Illya turned away. His insides had turned to stone.

“You shouldn’t be. I know what I’m doing,” he said.

“You can’t control everything.”

“I’m doing what needs to be done! You don’t know anything about it,” he said, his face flaring hot. Grenya pressed her lips together.

“I don’t need this, and I don’t need you.” Illya turned his back to her, shaking as he scraped together his belongings.

He shoved the book into the middle of the haphazard pile of bedding and clothes and hoisted it all up under his arm. Without looking at his mother again, he kicked the door open and left the hut. Molly was running along the path toward home.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“Away,” he said and walked into the night without looking back.

CHAPTER TWENTY

ILLYA SET HIMSELF up alone in one of the north-side huts, beside the Enforcers and Conna. This was accomplished by bursting through the door and tossing the pile in the corner before flopping down on it and falling into an exhausted sleep. It was not a peaceful rest. He was wrung out, drained by too much worry and too many feelings.

His anger seeped into his dreams as a strange montage, involving the image of a rock smashing against the wheel over and over then the realization that he was the one wielding it, trying to destroy the wheel. The vision of the wheel was replaced by Benja, then Impiri, then Jimmer, but he felt like he was hitting them with a cloud, so soft that it made no difference. All of his efforts were pointless.

He woke grumpy, with only a vague memory of why. Squinting at the unfamiliar walls, he was confused. He blinked a few times; then it all come flooding back and, with it, the nauseated, hollow feeling. He had never woken without his family around him. For a moment he felt like he would crumble under the weight of what he had done. But he couldn’t take it back now.

He scowled at the cracked mud on his new wall. Benja and his ma could think whatever they wanted. He didn’t need them anymore. He was the Leader; he had the whole village now.

The new hut was in a bad repair. Light shone through the roof where the thatch had fallen in, illuminating the fact that the floor was littered in a thick layer of leaves and dirt. Illya didn’t care. It had a door. That was all that mattered.

It was a long time before Illya ventured out past the safety of that door. He spent a little time arranging his things and a lot of time staring at the places where the mud had flaked off the walls, thinking.

The Enforcers, who were sitting around outside in the sun, looked at him with mild surprise when he did emerge. He wished that he had thought of bringing water for washing in with him the night before. He was sure that his eyes were red from crying, but if they noticed, none said anything about it.

He spent a good part of the remaining day fixing the roof of his new hut. He re-mudded the walls and swept out the collected debris, grateful for the excuse to stay away from everyone. He saw his mother and Molly from a distance when they went out with the other gatherers. They didn’t see him.

He wondered if they had thought it as strange to wake to a hut without him in it as he had felt to wake in a room without them. He decided that he didn’t care about that either and returned to weaving fresh grass through the lattice of branches on the roof. He didn’t see Benja at all that day and thought that he was glad about that too.

Illya sat alone at dinner but was joined by Conna before long. Illya felt an unexpected surge of fondness for his Second as he walked up with an easy grin on his face. They sat in companionable silence, eating fish, greens, and the first of the summer berries. It was not quite the same as friendship, but it was the closest thing he had. Of everyone in the village, Conna knew how hard it was to be a Leader. No one else understood.

Illya got swept away by these thoughts and, without meaning to, sighed out loud.

“What?” Conna said. Illya shook his head and shrugged.

“Everything is so different now, you know,” he said.

Conna laughed out loud.

“You’re telling me. One day we are just nobodies. Me and Aaro living under that…” His jaw tightened. “You hanging around with that old coot and his plants. The next day, here we are, running the whole village.”

“Samuel isn’t an old coot,” Illya said.

Conna grinned at him and shrugged, softening the words. “He’s kind of an old coot.” Illya eyed him then smiled back.

“Alright, I guess you could say that. He is kind of a coot. He’s definitely old.”

“You got to give a guy respect for being old,” Conna said. “Doesn’t happen much.” He frowned and was silent for a while.

“We’re going to fix that though,” he said with a quick grin. He handed Illya a skin of liquid.

“Here,” he said. Illya took it and sniffed curiously. It was pungent and burned the back of his nose. He coughed, his eyes watering. Jimmer’s brew.

He had never tried it before. His mother always got a look of disdain on her face whenever it was mentioned. A lot of people disapproved, not just because of the wildness it brought but because to make it they used fruit in the fall that they could have stored for food.

When he thought of what his mother would say, Illya scowled and took a swig. It seared his throat, and he choked. Coughing, he gasped and shook his head. Conna chuckled.

“Never tried it before?” he asked. Illya hesitated, embarrassed to admit it, but nodded. The brew burned in his chest; soon it dulled to warmth and spread out through him.

Conna regarded the skin.

“Probably a good thing,” he said then took a swig himself. They sat in silence, watching the fire for a long time. A good deal of the awkwardness Illya had been feeling had burned away with the brew; it was a loosening sort of sensation. He found that he wasn’t worried about anything. It was as if the brew had untied a knot that had been tethering him to all of his responsibilities and cares.

“Should have locked the old man up a long time ago, for all he used to do to us when he got into this stuff,” Conna said. His tone was casual; he could have been talking about the weather or how well the fish were biting. Illya stared at him, caught off guard.

“Now he’s got no one around to beat on,” Conna said and laughed, a flat sound with no joy.

“That’s something else that’s different,” Conna said, glancing to meet Illya’s stare briefly before looking away. “The old man hasn’t been able to hit on me in a while, not since I got big enough to fight back. Aaro, though, he’s still kind of a little guy. Once he started being one of your Enforcers, Pa didn’t touch him anymore either.” Conna smiled.

“He hit Aaro?” Illya asked, more to have something to say than from a need to know the answer.

“I hit Aaro too.” Conna jerked his head up and glared at him, sharp, defiant. “Had to. When he was little.” Illya kept his mouth shut, having no idea what to say to this.

“Someone had to teach him to take it and not cry. With him”—Conna nodded toward the stone house, where Jimmer was locked up—“it’s worse for a little guy if he cries. First, he is just swinging, mad at the world. Doesn’t have anything to do with you. Then you cry and he focuses in on you.” Conna took another drink. “Gets a lot worse. Better to just take it and keep your mouth shut.”

Illya was quiet. He watched Conna’s face crumple in anger.

Conna tipped the skin up again but stopped mid-drink to look at something. Illya followed his gaze and saw Sabelle coming across the circle towards them. His breath caught.

“Hi,” she said, stopping in front of them. Illya wasn’t sure who she was talking to but guessed that it wasn’t him. She hadn’t spoken a word to him since the night when her mother had dragged her away. Conna smiled at her; somehow he didn’t seem awkward in her presence at all. Illya wondered if drinking the brew every day would cure him of awkwardness forever. His head was full of a fuzzy feeling as if he was looking out from behind a blanket.

“Hey,” Conna said. He moved over for her to sit down. “You remember Illya, right?”

Sabelle looked up and smiled at Illya with adorable hesitation. Her eyes darted away and came to rest on the ground between them. Illya stared. Somehow, the brew tingling inside his head was making his eyes get caught on the shape of her chin.

“Hi,” he said, after far too long. He glanced over Conna, who was watching the interaction. Conna rolled his eyes and got up.

“I’ll see you guys later. I’m tired,” he said and walked away, still swigging the brew. Illya froze. He told his breath to come out evenly. What had just happened? Conna had left him sitting alone with Sabelle and he couldn’t begin to think of why.

The blanket that the brew had wrapped around his brain had softened all of his thoughts, making them form slowly, but he had the sense that it would protect him from making any mistakes too.

He had been thinking about something but couldn’t remember what. The only thing in his mind was the picture of Sabelle’s face. He had thought she was angry with him for locking up her father. He had also thought she liked Conna.

“It’s pretty out,” he said eventually.

“It is.” She looked up at him again from under long eyelashes. “The stars are bright.”

“They aren’t as pretty as you,” he said. Immediately, his ears started burning. He ducked his head away, feeling incredibly stupid. The brew had not protected him after all. He had made a complete fool of himself. He wondered if she was going to get up and leave. She didn’t.

He risked a glance at her and saw that, for some reason, she was smiling. They sat together, watching the fire crackling.

His tongue had become lodged in a block of stone. Even if he had been able to think of anything else to say, he couldn’t have gotten it out.

Still, she was smiling, and it felt like a bubble was inflating in his chest. He realized that he must have a giant, stupid grin on his face because he could feel his cheeks stretching.

He became vaguely aware of the growing attention of the rest of the villagers, still sitting in groups around the circle. Though there were no obvious stares, he knew they were watching.

“Um.” He cleared his throat. “Do you want to go for a walk?”

Sabelle’s eyes widened then darted back to the ground. She opened her mouth to speak and closed it again. He held his breath. His head was clearing, and the old awkwardness was coming back too.

She sent a fleeting look in the direction of the cooking fires, where her mother was hovering. Illya hoped it was his imagination, but he thought that Impiri might be muttering to the pot again.

“I don’t think I can,” she said. With an apologetic smile, she got up then walked to the fires. Illya watched her go and scrubbed his hand through his hair. With nothing else to do, he got up too and headed back to his hut although it was still early.

Walking made him feel the brew much stronger. His steps wove. He was confused, unsure why she had left when it had seemed to be going well. Then he realized that she had probably come over to see Conna and had only stayed to be polite.

Illya’s heart broke a little. His ribs felt like they were squeezing in to crush it, and his head spun. He growled and slammed his fist into a tree, furious with himself for being so stupid.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

WHEN HE GOT back to the Enforcers’ camp, he saw that they had made a fire of their own. Conna was there, and when he saw Illya approaching, he raised his eyebrows.

Illya turned towards his hut.

“Hey Illya, come over. We’ve got a game going,” someone said. Illya looked back at them, wrinkling his forehead, wondering if they had planned a joke on him.

“I don’t know,” he mumbled, kicking the doorway of his new hut and squinting through the darkness to see what they were doing.

“Come on,” Conna said. “It’s fun.”

He wanted nothing more than to hide away from the world, but he didn’t want them thinking he was a loser either. Illya went over to sit by Aaro, who scooted over to make room.

Once he had joined them in the glow of the fire, Illya started to feel a little bit better. Strangely, they seemed genuinely happy to see him. They laughed readily and joked with each other, making wild claims about their hunting prowess as they played a game of slingshot, flinging pebbles to bounce off the trees, trying to hit randomly spaced circles drawn in the dirt. Everywhere else in the village there was tension, the weight of everyone’s constant scrutiny and expectations. Here, they were just having fun.

Illya could not help grinning when Julian handed him the slingshot. It was by far his best weapon. He still had an old crossbow that his father had rigged for him, but he had never gotten over the feeling that hit him when he braced it against his shoulder. The first day he had used it was the day his father had been lost. It stirred up far too many memories and too many regrets for him to develop any talent with it. A slingshot, though, was a different story.

He placed the pebble then held on to the handle and drew back the sling. Squinting one eye to aim, he let go and ricocheted the pebble off a nearby tree to land squarely in the center of the smallest circle.

The boys around him erupted into cheers and whoops, the ones nearby pounding him on the back. He smiled unchecked then, reveling in the praise, and passed the slingshot on to Aaro.

* * *

Illya didn’t talk to Benja or anyone in his family at all over the following days. Samuel, too, was conspicuously absent, almost seeming to avoid him. Each time Illya began to feel a twinge of guilt over it, he reminded himself that none of them were seeking him out either. If they didn’t want anything to do with him, then that was just fine, that was the way it was going to be.

The plants were growing well, and there had been no further sabotage of the wheel. Illya spent more and more time with Conna and the Enforcers. After being gawked at by the rest of the villagers all day, it was a relief to sit among them and laugh, playing games and passing the skin of brew around.

Ban, who Illya knew was responsible for one of his greatest successes, had taken the name “Builder” to heart. With the water wheel complete, he was working on plans for reservoir troughs near the field and had already forged several new digging tools of metal, similar to the ones that had been left behind in the shed beside the stone house.

These accomplishments reminded Illya, even at his lowest moments, that it was all worth it. Still, he could not completely suppress the nagging worry that he had made a mistake. Everyone was doing their job, but he wished that they were following him out of something other than fear.

Alone one evening, Illya sat back against the wall of his hut, thinking. If only everyone had taken to their work with the same pride that Ban had. Ban Builder. It was as if, by naming him, he had given the blacksmith an identity. Something he could be proud to be.

He wondered what it would be like if all the gatherers, cooks, and soil-diggers could do their jobs with the same love. They would get a lot more done and probably be happier doing it.

As he thought, a new idea began to form in his mind.

Control. His mother had said he couldn’t control everything.

Anger flared through him at the memory.

She didn’t think he could do anything right, but hadn’t he succeeded in protecting the plants? Since the arrests, two weeks had passed without an incident. He thought again of Ban and his new building projects. It was because of Illya that Ban had the chance to build new things at all. Any other year, he would have joined the rest of them gathering, desperate to get enough before winter. Because of what Illya had done, there was the sea of waving leaves in the field. It was because of him that they were all going to have enough to eat.

The things that he was controlling were the things that were going right.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

AARO SHOOK HIM awake before dawn.

“It’s time,” he said.

The air was sharp and bit at Illya’s face: a chilly morning, the first in months. It felt like it had come far too soon. He shivered, more from the trepidation that was building inside him than the cold. Every time he thought about what he was about to do, he became more nervous. Resolutely, he stopped himself from thinking about it at all.

He had agonized over what to do to make everyone happy. After days of worry, he had approached Conna. When Illya had mentioned how Ban had seemed to take to the title of “Builder”, Conna came up with an idea. It was radical, but Conna had said that it would be the first step towards making sure the new way of life continued for future generations. If they didn’t think about the future, if everything that they had learned would be forgotten and they might as well not try at all.

He had a good point.

Illya allowed himself a moment of wild fancy, dreaming of future generations. He wondered if they would remember him and what he had done, the way they remembered Jones, Ph.D. and the first settlers. People in the future would learn about him as littles. “This is the gift that Illya left us,” they would say when they planted and harvested the fields.

Despite his nerves, he couldn’t suppress a grin at the thought of that. He couldn’t chicken out now.

A cry of agony ripped from the hut at the end of the lane. Illya halted his steps involuntarily, shuddering, then went on, glad that Conna and Aaro were with him. Usually, he would have been left far outside the circle of mystery that surrounded birth. When Molly had been born, he had spent the night at Benja’s. What he remembered about that night was the novelty of sleeping away from home and that he and Benja had gotten into a sword fight with Aunt Ada’s carved wooden spoons and broken one of them.

There were births in the village every year, and the intensity of the cries always terrified him. But it could be so sweet when it was all done, with another little in the village.

When a mother finally emerged from her hut, clutching a wrinkly new person, all wrapped up in furs, everyone would feel the joy of it. She would be exhausted but carry a new grace, as if she had taken a glimpse at infinity and lived to tell about it. Birth was a mystery, dark and beautiful and terrible. Just now, Illya felt like he had little right to be a part of it.

They didn’t all turn out like that; sometimes they didn’t come back at all. It seemed like women had one foot on the other side during this time. It didn’t take very much to take another step that way instead of returning to the world with a new life.

There was another howl. He wondered what was happening inside the hut and if the baby would be born soon. They called him a prophet, but he could predict nothing of this.

Leya howled and howled. Charlie paced up and down outside the hut. Illya stood beside him, putting his hand on Charlie’s shoulder awkwardly from time to time, knowing that he could do nothing to help.

There was a new scream, if possible worse than the ones that had come before. Charlie started towards the door of the hut. Conna stopped him.

“Keep it together,” he said.

Charlie paced, starting his way into the hut again and again, and stopping himself again and again. Illya, Conna, and Aaro leaned against the wall of the hut in silence.

“Oh, Leya!” Charlie sobbed.

After some time, she fell quiet. They stood up, holding their breath, while the silence seemed to last an eternity. Illya caught Conna’s eye. Conna shook his head and looked at the ground.

Then the night was pierced by a cry, with Leya’s laugh closely following. Charlie pushed his way into the hut, sobbing freely. Marieke poked her head out of the door and smiled at the three of them.

“It’s a boy!” she said.

The sun had just risen in the sky: a bright yellow disk.

To Illya, it seemed like a sign—a new birth and, with it, a new dawn. Conna gave him an encouraging nod and he pushed his way inside.

Leya, wrapped in blankets, was holding a tiny, red-faced bundle. Charlie stood over her, stroking her hair, kissing her forehead. He didn’t appear to be capable of words and kept looking back and forth between his wife and the new baby as if he couldn’t decide who he wanted to look at more. Illya’s hands sweated, for a moment he felt wrong for intruding on the scene. Then Leya looked up and beamed at him.

“Congratulations,” he said, returning her smile. He slowed his breaths, trying to still his nerves. “Come with me and bring your son,” he said to Charlie.

Charlie followed him without a question, cradling the baby with extra care as if he didn’t quite know what to do with it. Leya lay back against her pillow, looking radiant.

They walked the short distance to the central fire, where the villagers were already starting to eat. Illya pulled Charlie with him up onto the stairs. When they saw Charlie and the baby, everyone broke into spontaneous cheers. They would have been awake for hours too, waiting and hoping as they listened to Leya’s screams. Illya took the baby from Charlie. Holding him in the crook of his arm, he turned to face the crowd. He took a deep breath, rehearsing what Conna had suggested in his mind for a moment, to make sure he said it right.

“I would like to announce the birth of our newest villager. He is the first since we planted our seeds and the first of many more to come! Charlie, what will your son be called?” he asked.

“Ezekiel!” Charlie said, beaming. “Ezekiel Polestadt.”

“I give you Ezekiel!” Illya cried. “But not Ezekiel Polestadt, as we would have called him in the old days. He is a son of the new dawn! I give you Ezekiel Soil-Digger!”

Charlie stared at him. His mouth fell open. There was a stunned silence from the gathered people. Then rage flooded their faces.

Everything started moving in slow motion. The faces, which had been full of excitement, preparing to celebrate, contorted into anger. Charlie stared at him dumbfounded, and his face reddened then turned purple. They were all shouting. Illya thought that Charlie might have attacked him if he hadn’t been holding the man’s newborn son.

“Wait!” he yelled, frantic to head them off. He held on to baby Ezekiel like a shield.

“If you don’t want—” He started to speak, ready to take it all back, to do whatever they wanted, but Conna cut him off.

“Look at those plants!” He flung his arm out toward the field. “Look at them! You know there wouldn’t be anything there if it wasn’t for Illya. Think about where you would be right now if it weren’t for his ideas.”

The people halted, still furious, but at least they were listening.

“You know what we would be doing now. Fall is getting near; you can feel it in the air. Have you forgotten that fear so quickly? Are you so quick to lose gratitude for what he has given you that you don’t remember?” Conna was breathing heavily, his chest heaving as he yelled over the crowd at the top of his voice. “Right now, we would be scrambling, spending every hour of daylight to find enough just to get through winter. But look at what we have, more than we have ever had before, and it’s right there. It’s all right outside your doors.” Conna let his arm fall.

“I didn’t do anything,” Illya said. The people, who had been focusing on Conna, shifted to him.

“You did it yourselves. None of this would be here if it wasn’t for all the work you did, the soil-diggers especially.” He glanced up at Charlie pleadingly. The man still frowned, but his expression softened.

“I just wanted you to be proud of it,” he said.

“This baby is inheriting a noble purpose,” Conna said. “Think how future generations will remember you, the first Soil-Diggers, the first Builders. How we think of the first settlers and know that we are here and alive because of them. If we hadn’t planted this summer, we would have no future generations.”

There was a long stretch of silence. Illya had to remind himself to breathe. He could tell that Conna’s words had reached them, struck a chord in a few. But for as many as there were looking thoughtful an equal number continued to glare. Impiri and Sabelle were standing together a little distance away, still beside the cooking fires. Sabelle looked disturbed, her arms crossed across her chest.

Illya supposed that she must be considering the idea of being called Sabelle Cook and thinking that she didn’t like it. Near them, Benja was leaning against a tree, scowling. He would be Benja Fisher. It was a name to be proud of, Illya thought with a surge of anger. His cousin should be grateful to have it.

Impiri, alone of everyone, did not appear disturbed in the slightest. She smiled at Illya as if it had been her lifelong ambition to be called Impiri Cook. He wrinkled his forehead and blinked. On second glance, her expression looked more like a smirk, as if she knew something that he didn’t. At that moment, Illya was sure that it was not the smile of a madwoman.

The baby was still nestled in the crook of his arm. Ezekiel was awake and looking around. Illya swayed with him unconsciously, soothing him. It was something he had done with Molly when she was small.

“Maybe it’s the right thing,” Charlie said. Illya’s eyes widened, he studied Charlie’s face. The man did seem proud, if a little unsure. He reached out for his son. Carefully, Illya placed the infant in Charlie’s arms.

“Ezekiel Soil-Digger,” he murmured. “Wonder what Leya will think of that.”

“It has a nice ring to it,” Conna said.

Charlie glanced up at Illya.

“We’ve thought you were right from the start, you know,” he said, and Illya nodded. He hesitated before continuing. “It does have a nice ring, come to think of it,” he said and gave Illya a somewhat forced smile.

Charlie went back to his hut to give Leya a chance to feed Ezekiel, who had begun to try to eat his fingers. The villagers dispersed, seeming to be mollified by Charlie’s acceptance.

They were subdued. Though a few laughed and joked with each other again, it was a far different scene than it had been before he made the announcement.

Conna slapped Illya on the back.

“Nice,” he said.

Illya nodded, distracted. They didn’t look happy and proud, not really at all.

* * *

He didn’t have time to worry about it for long. Before the sun had reached its height, the entire village was rejoicing with the announcement that raspberries had been found ripened on the mountain slopes. He, along with most of the rest of the people, joined the gatherers when they went out after the midday meal. He still was not talking to his mother and avoided the side of the patch where she was picking.

Surrounded by the smell of sweet berries, they filled baskets with the tiny, soft fruit, eating nearly as many as they saved. Raspberries were a rare treat and didn’t stay fresh for long. There was no doubt that there would be feasting that night.

Once again, he had made a change for the better and been rewarded by a good sign. The people hadn’t liked it. He had almost lost control of the beast, he knew. But berries coming was one of the best omens they could have had. Reassured, he told himself that no matter what they all thought he had been right after all.

They took all of the ripe berries, leaving a good amount that would be ready in a few more days. Illya ate and picked, becoming steadily giddier with the sweetness of them and the beauty of the day as the afternoon went on. Soon, he forgot that he had even been afraid that morning.

Above the slopes, granite crags shot straight upward to the sky. Far below them, the river roared into a white cyclone as it raced down the gorge. It crashed from rock to rock, some of the water dissipating into mist in the heat of the air while the rest continued down in a torrent.

The rocky slopes were perfect for berries. From his vantage, Illya could see three more types besides the raspberries that were good to eat, also near to ripening. They spread across the hillside as far as he could see, in every direction he looked. Bright and dark little jewels hung below broad green leaves or clustered up in the sun. If there was a heaven, he thought, this must be it.

The bounty of deep summer would soon be replaced by the fading time. Always, the little death that was winter marched forward, faster than they could prepare for it. Even with enough food for the body to survive, they still faced the strain of the fear that wore away at the mind year after year.

After the first hard freeze, when the plants had been well and truly laid low and would not return, there was a moment when one felt relief. After the frenzy of the gathering season, there were no more preparations to make. All there was left to do was sit in your hut and know you had done all you could.

This relief would last only for a little while. As you stayed inside day after day, the snow piling up outside, inevitably it gave way to uncertainty then fear. With nothing to do but obsess, or make nervous calculations in your mind about your food stores and how long they would last, worry became your constant companion. Hunger would come more and more frequently and last longer. People thinned, and you began to hope with desperation that none would thin past the point of survival.

You hunted then, trudging through the deep snow, burning valuable energy and usually coming back with nothing. There was no other choice after all. “Try or die,” Benja liked to say.

The thought of his cousin made Illya frown. He remembered the scowl on Benja’s face that morning, when he had made his announcement, and pushed the thought aside.

This year would not be like that. When the fading time started, they would harvest. That was a new word.

Harvest. When you had so much food that you had to devote an entire season to picking it all. This year, when the snows swirled deep, there would still be food. He tried to think about what that would be like, a winter with no thinning time.

He wondered what they would do with all of their time. They would make songs, or poetry, or tell stories. Maybe Ban would invent new things.

The gatherers descended from the slopes, hauling baskets heavily laden with berries. Illya followed with his basket, keeping a little distance from the rest of the people, still lost in thought. When they re-entered the village, he took the path leading back to the Enforcers’ camp and his new hut.

It would be good to read them something from the book after they had feasted. It would remind them of how happy they were and why. Inside, the light was dim compared with the brightness of the afternoon sun. Illya fumbled under his pile of furs, where he had hidden the book, feeling rather than looking for it as his eyes adjusted.

He felt only the softness of the furs and reached farther, irritated. His fingers brushed against the rough dirt of the floor.

He kicked over the whole pile of furs and started picking them up, one by one, his heart racing.

He knew he had left it here, carefully stowed in its plastic box, safe from any danger.

He rubbed his fingers across his face and through his hair and growled. He sat on the floor of the hut with his heart thumping and tried to think if he could have left it anywhere else. But there was no way; he had always kept the book nearby.

Without the book, he was nothing. He knew that the people’s fragile trust would crumble if it were shaken at all, especially after this morning.

He heard a soft sound on the other side of the room and jerked his head up.

Someone was in the hut with him.

In the shadowy corner behind the door, two figures crouched. The light was dim, but Illya’s eyes had adjusted, and he saw one of them clutching the straight lines of the box. He lurched forward and pulled the figure into the light.

“What’s going on here? You…” His mouth fell open, and he felt as if the air had been sucked out of the room.

“Benja?”

He gaped at the sight of his cousin’s miserable face and the book that he was holding. His chest felt tight, and he swayed on his feet as he stared, disbelieving. Benja had taken his book. He had been about to leave with it when Illya had come in. A second figure crouched in the shadows behind Benja. Illya blinked at it, slow to register what he was seeing. It was Impiri.

He staggered backward, looking wildly from Benja to Impiri, Impiri to Benja, and to the book, undeniably clasped in Benja’s hands.

Benja straightened his back and stared Illya down. A beast inside Illya’s chest had woken and was roaring, setting his head on fire and his entire body to shaking with the sound of it.

The roar built up in his chest and tore out of him. He ran at Benja, hot tears streaming down his face, and tackled him to the ground, throwing all of his pain at his oldest friend.

The tears dripped off his nose and ran into the corners of his mouth. Illya tasted salt. He sucked in air, gasping because his throat was tight. He couldn’t get any more sound to come out, but he pulled back his fist and hit his cousin in the face over and over again. Benja didn’t fight back; he tucked his head into his chest and brought up an arm to protect his nose and eyes, one arm still around the book.

The door swung open, and light rushed into the dim room, blocked quickly by Conna’s entry. He pulled Illya off his cousin. Benja was lying on the floor, curled around the book. His nose was bleeding, and bruises were already forming on his face.

“What happened?” Conna demanded. Illya couldn’t speak. He wiped his face with his shirt and spat a glob of bile-tasting spit on the ground. Benja groaned.

“You have to stop this,” Benja said, gasping. He sat up and staggered to his feet, glaring at Illya, and said, “This book is turning you into someone you aren’t. Locking people up, naming people’s kids for them. Look at yourself! What are you doing?

“I said before that we should look at it, but not that we should do everything it says. You aren’t this guy. Maybe this jerk is, but not you.” He lurched toward Conna with a wild swing of his fist. Conna stepped out of range coolly.

Impiri chuckled in the corner. “I told you this would happen,” she said.

“Shut up,” Conna snapped at her.

“You were going to steal the book?” Conna said and picked up Benja by the fabric at the front of his shirt. “Betray your own cousin?”

Illya still said nothing. He gasped, unable to find his breath. He watched a stream of blood running from Benja’s nose down his chin and did not feel sorry.

Benja had been his best friend for as long as he could remember. He had been there through everything, when Illya had lost his father, when he had learned to read, through every dream and sorrow and joy of his life.

The idea that Benja could align himself with some scheme of Impiri’s was incomprehensible. It felt like Benja had stabbed him with a knife. He wrenched the book from his cousin’s hands.

“You don’t know me at all,” he sputtered.

“Treason,” Conna said. “That’s what it is to steal from the Leader. No matter who you are, family or not, it’s treason. You should be thrown out of the village for this.”

Illya stared down at the cover of the book, shaking with relief that it was in his hands again. He ran his fingertips across the smooth paper, barely listening to Conna.

“But prison instead, I think,” Conna said. He tied Benja’s wrists together. Benja glared but didn’t struggle.

“Not banishment. We haven’t banished anyone, and we won’t start now. We will show everyone that their Leader is merciful, even for the greatest crime,” Conna said and turned to Impiri. “You too. You’ve been nothing but trouble since the beginning. We should have known you were planning something like this.” He pulled her to her feet and tied her wrists similarly.

She grinned at him, showing all her teeth. There were black gaps where some of them had fallen out, reminding Illya of the jagged boulders that stuck up into the sky at the top of the mountain above the berry slope.

Conna looked at Illya as if for confirmation. Illya opened his mouth soundlessly and closed it again. He was feeling so many things at once that he couldn’t form a thought.

He nodded, vaguely registering the sight of Benja’s face. Bruises were forming under his eyes. The blood flowing from his nose had dripped onto his shirt. Illya looked down at the book and nodded again. Almanac, it said, in scrolling letters, embellished with vines and flowers.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

IT WAS NOT yet sunset. Illya watched from his doorway as Conna pushed Benja and Impiri towards the central fire. Everyone was already there, feasting on the raspberries. Beyond the fire, towering over the huts, was the roof of the stone house, where they would join the rest of the prisoners.

He would leave it to Conna; he couldn’t face it. Illya wondered for an awful moment if the prison was getting so full that they would expand into the second half of the cellar. Maybe Benja would be locked in the muddy little pump room that they had carried the pipes from together, not so long ago.

He turned to a bush outside his door and lost all of the berries he had eaten. Shaking, he wiped his mouth and leaned back against the wall, hugging the book. A tear dripped off the tip of his nose and splashed on its cover. Hastily, he brushed it off. It left a smear of moisture across the second half of the word “Almanac.”

He glanced at the fires and saw that Conna had already disappeared into the crowd with Benja and Impiri. Someone was coming up the path toward him. He wondered for a moment if Conna had sent an Enforcer back for him. But as the figure got closer, he recognized his mother.

His stomach twisted. The tears, which had been hot running down his face, flared cold in the evening breeze, suddenly feeling like ice on his cheeks.

Illya started to duck into his hut but, seeing the sun was not quite at the lower edge of the sky, changed his mind. Nothing would stop her from coming in after him, but he still had a good hour of light. At the fires, everyone was absorbed in what Conna was saying. Illya turned towards the gates and ran.

By the time he reached the river and the place where the water wheel was set up on the bank, he was sobbing. He looked back over his shoulder, but no one was following. Illya ran on, stumbling over roots and uneven ground, barely looking where he was going.

Benja.

The realization of his cousin’s betrayal hit him in waves, fading as he focused on keeping his footing, only to crash over him with new intensity moments later. His heart had become a hollow cavern, empty of all but the thought of what had happened; it pulsed through him again and again, unchecked by substance. Benja had been his best friend for his entire life. How could he have done it? He remembered making faces in the mirror together in the old city and stopped, sagging against a tree, gasping.

Illya punched the tree as if he could punish it for what he had lost. His lungs burned; his entire body ached. The sun had sunk low enough to touch the horizon. His tears were spent, leaving behind a deep weariness and a pounding head. His escape had been too brief, but he knew that he should turn back, no matter what was waiting for him in the village.

He sagged against the tree, not caring for once. The Terrors, or his mother; it was hard to know which would be worse.

In his aimless run, he had come a long way. Looking around, he realized that he was in a familiar pine grove far downriver, very close to the place where he had found the seeds.

He wanted nothing more now than to crawl into the furs in his hut and let the oblivion of sleep take him. He turned back, wanting to run, but found that he had no more energy. He turned off his route, taking the short detour that would lead him to the place where he had found the seeds. If he ever needed something to cheer him up, it was now.

At the clearing, he thought that he had come to the wrong place.

Where there should have been a tall stand of nearly grown sunchokes coming into flower, there was nothing but a mat of shriveled leaves. He picked through the dead foliage on the ground and found a desiccated, heart-shaped leaf attached to a withered stem. Covering it was a thin layer of white fuzz.

His heart started racing before his mind fully comprehended it. He looked around, his eyes focusing on the knobbed-edged squirrel hole in the tree on the edge of the clearing where he had found the seeds. There was no mistake; it was the same place.

He thought of the waist-high plants back at home. His palms went clammy. Heat and cold flashed through him, and he had to sit down to keep from falling over. If these plants had a disease, wouldn’t his plants, which had come from them, have it too?

Forcing his breaths to slow, Illya told himself that there was no need to panic yet. After all, it could be just this plant. Besides that, it was the roots that mattered. That was the part they would eat.

He looked around more, pushing aside a layer of pine needles and dirt. There had to be other plants here. In fact, there had to have been a plant healthy enough to produce seeds at some point. If it had been able to make seeds, perhaps it had not been affected like the others. When he pushed aside a layer of deadfall, he found more stems, just as withered as the first, spreading out all across the clearing.

Each one had the same heart-shaped leaves clinging to it, coated in white. Mostly they were immature, but after a bit, Illya found a plant that had matured enough to produce a flower before the disease had overtaken it. Slowly, and feeling as if time was somehow moving at a different rate, he ran his thumb across the rough center. The dusty white covering flaked off and fell to the ground.

Underneath, barely matured, were seeds. Illya pinched one between his thumb and forefinger and carefully plucked it out of the flower-head, already knowing what he would find. It was a whole seed. Wedge-shaped and gray, just like the ones he had found months before.

His heart dropped into his stomach. This plant had made seeds, but it was months away from having roots that were mature enough to eat.

Illya staggered to his feet, backed out of the clearing, and then took off at a run toward the village. There had been nothing wrong with the plants that morning, but his mind swam with images of dried leaves and flaking white frost.

* * *

His heart was still racing when he reached the edge of the forest. At the gates he made himself stop and breathe. There was no reason to give up yet, he told himself. Maybe there would be no white spots now or ever. Their plants could be perfectly fine.

It was sunset, and he met no one as he approached the field. He wondered if his mother had seen him running away. He felt a fresh pang of regret, but it was pushed aside by fear when he saw his plants in the distance.

They looked every bit as healthy as they had been that morning when he had passed by them carrying Charlie’s baby. Waist high and swaying gently in the wind, a few of them had the beginnings of flower-heads. They were probably the same size that the parent plants had been when the disease had taken them down.

He walked into the field and bent down among them. Carefully, he picked up one of the leaves and turned it over in his hand.

There were no white patches; not on the stem, the leaf, or the unopened flower. He sank to his knees, trembling. The plants were healthy. He had worried for nothing.

He closed his eyes but couldn’t shake the vision of the white-frosted leaves below the squirrel nest.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

ILLYA COULDN’T AVOID his mother forever. In the morning, he went to breakfast with his head down, hoping to attract as little attention as possible before returning to his hut with his food. He had just turned to leave when she caught him by the arm. She jerked her head in the direction of her hut, eyes flaming.

“Who do you think you are?” she burst out, yelling at him as loud as she could once they were behind the closed door. The door would, of course, do nothing to keep the entire village from hearing.

“As if Benja’s some kind of criminal! How could you?”

“You weren’t there, you didn’t see,” Illya said, scrambling for justification. “He was trying to steal the book.”

“And it never occurred to you that he could have a good reason?” It was as if he was a little again and he had just come inside after getting his clean clothes filthy. The knot in his stomach twisted tighter. He could handle her anger, but he was utterly defenseless against disappointment.

“He was with Impiri,” he said then straightened up, grasping for one last strain of righteous anger. “She wants me to fail. She has wanted me to fail since the beginning.”

His mother raised her eyebrows and folded her arms across her chest.

“I caught him with it in his hands!” Illya said, bristling, his voice rising to a frantic note.

“You have to let him go,” she said, now with infuriating calm.

“I don’t have to do anything,” Illya yelled. How could she question him like this? Didn’t she realize he wasn’t a child anymore?

“How can you throw away your family like this?” she asked.

“You think Impiri’s right too, don’t you? All of you. You all want me to fail!” he yelled. He could feel the beast in his chest stirring, starting to roar. Illya whirled around and stormed out, slamming the door behind him. Not bothering to look where he was going, he nearly ran into Samuel on the path.

He backed up a step.

“What? You agree with Impiri too? Seeds are the work of the devil?” He glared at Samuel’s raised eyebrows. A small yellow butterfly flitted through the air between them as if it didn’t have a care in the world. Illya scowled at it.

“No,” Samuel said, frowning. “The thing that has driven you from your family; that is the work of the devil.” Illya narrowed his eyes. Samuel was against him too, just like everyone else.

“You are a fool to give in, to let it push you away from your friends and the people who care about you,” Samuel said.

“I have friends,” Illya snapped.

He left Samuel without another word and went back to the Enforcers’ camp and retreated into his hut.

His solitude did not last. After a few minutes, there was a knock on the door. Illya had opened the book and was staring at the page but was unable to comprehend a single word. He glared at the door, sure that it would be Samuel or his mother. He wished that he could stay mute and pretend the hut was empty until they went away. But he was supposed to be the Leader. He couldn’t hide like a frightened little.

It was Dianthe Morris, a friend of Impiri’s. He wondered if she had come to beg for Impiri’s release. Was he going to hear about it from every single person in the village? He stood up tall and tried to appear unruffled and wise.

She didn’t mention Impiri. Instead, she asked him to read to her from the book. He blinked at her stupidly for a moment. It was hard to believe, after everything that had happened the previous day, that people still thought he was a prophet. Of course, no one but him knew about the real disaster yet.

He invited her in, feeling a moment of dull gratitude that he had taken the time to make the hut presentable when he had moved into it.

He squinted down at the letters on the page, trying to regain his composure, deciphering them one at a time. Dianthe gaped at him.

“What was your question?” he asked.

“Will my son Brant find a strong wife and have sons?” she asked. Illya sighed inwardly and studied the passage he had translated.

Pertinent Possum Points: Its intelligence is on a par with that of a pig. It is similar to many cats in size, weighing 12 to 15 pounds at maturity. It is as fastidious as most cats. It has black eyes that may appear “beady” because they do not have an iris.

“Um.” He cleared his throat.

“Yes?”

“The Almanac is mysterious with this prediction,” he said.

“What does it say?” she asked, her eyes gleaming. Illya pursed his lips and stared at the black letters, stalling for time.

“It mentions good size, intelligence, black eyes,” he said. Dianthe breathed out.

“The book is so wise!” she said. “Does it say anything else?”

Illya frowned with what he hoped was an air of sober wisdom. “She will be clean, I think,” he said finally. Her eyes widened even more.

After she had left, Illya stared down at the book. The letters blurred together. A possum. He had just told Dianthe that her son was going to marry a possum. He supposed that they would have a litter of little black-eyed possum babies. Sons, naturally.

How could he ever have believed it when they had called him a prophet? The book was useless. It lay innocuous before him on the table, the smug rows of letters seeming to mock him with their perfect uniformity, their promise of untold wisdom. This book was the reason he had arrested his best friend.

With a surge of fury, he seized the book and flung it across the room. It hit the opposite wall and fell to the floor in a heap, open to the page that he had read more often than any other. Seed Saving: A Time-Honored Practice for a Bountiful Harvest.

There was another knock at the door. Illya closed his eyes. Why couldn’t people just leave him alone?

“Come in,” he said.

This time, it was Conna. His eyes skittered over to the book on the floor before sliding back to Illya. He smiled as if he hadn’t seen anything.

“Hey,” he said. Illya returned his smile weakly.

“You should come see some of those guys fight, getting pretty good with drilling every day,” he said. Illya nodded noncommittally. Privately, he thought that if he never saw fighting again for the rest of his life, it would be just fine with him.

“Things are going so well with the plants and everything, I was thinking maybe we should start clearing more land for next year’s planting,” Conna said.

“Next year,” Illya murmured. The idea that had once gleamed before him like a beacon now dropped into his stomach like a rock. If his plants got the disease, the villagers wouldn’t just be back to where they had started in spring; they would be worse off than ever. A whole summer wasted on a pointless endeavor, and winter was looming closer every day. Next year seemed hopelessly far away. He shook off the feeling, telling himself that there was no disease yet. It was possible that there never would be.

He took a breath.

“I don’t know if we are doing all of this right,” he said.

“It’s going great,” Conna said, looking closer at Illya.

“A lot of people are mad,” Illya said after a minute, swallowing then meeting Conna’s eyes. “They don’t like their jobs. They don’t like the arrests.”

Conna shook his head.

“They don’t have a choice. We don’t have a choice. You said it yourself: we have to do whatever it takes to make this work.” His scrutiny sharpened. “They won’t be around to complain at all if they’ve all starved to death.” Illya frowned, trying not to think of the dead plants downriver.

There was no going back now. They had gone so far that the plan had to work. There was no time left to gather enough food in the usual way. If it didn’t work, the people would tear them apart, and then they would all starve.

Illya looked at Conna and nodded. “You’re right. Of course, you’re right,” he said.

* * *

In the days that followed, Illya returned to the book with renewed vigor. It was very different than the excitement that had fueled his longing to read. Instead, he was driven by a frantic, almost obsessive desperation, looking for a cure. He couldn’t help but think that the book had betrayed him somehow. Logically, though, he knew that it had no mind of its own. It was and always had been only what it had been made to be. It was just a book.

Always in the back of his mind was the dread that he was running out of options and time. He went back over all of the words about planting, looking for anything he might have missed. He started checking on the plants several times a day, as often as he thought he could without anyone noticing.

Throughout the day his fears would mount as the white spots took a deeper and deeper hold on his imagination. When he couldn’t stand it anymore, he would check on the plants again, sometimes returning to the field ten times in a day. The fear could only be held back by the sight of them, whole, healthy and untarnished.

One afternoon, in air thick with baked-in heat, he brushed sweat off his forehead and knelt down among the leaves. He turned over a leaf, examining its top and underside then all down its stem to the ground. There was no white. He sighed, but it was a small relief. The book had not yielded any clues. Either the Olders had never encountered this problem or the book had significant gaps in its overview of their knowledge.

A shadow cut across his palm, and the leaf cradled in it. He looked up.

“Charlie.”

“I was going to ask…” Charlie said, appearing uncomfortable. “’Course you’re busy.” He looked curiously down at Illya.

“Oh!” Illya said. “I was just checking the progress of the plants.” He stood and brushed his hand off on his trousers. Charlie smiled. His face seemed strained with worry. Sweat was running off his forehead and past his ears. It had soaked his shirt in the shape of a dagger down the center of his chest.

“How are Ezekiel and Leya?” Illya asked, trying to ignore a surge of guilt that went through him at this sight. He turned away, trying to swallow nausea.

Deep summer should have been the best time of the year, but now he saw how hard it was for the people to be out in the fields in the heat day after day. A short way away, Marieke stood up from where she had been crouching in the dirt, pulling up weeds. She stretched, rubbing her lower back.

“Oh, great,” Charlie said. “Little guy eats a lot. He’s already bigger.”

Illya looked down at the plant at his feet.

“The plants look good too,” he said, which was true, at least for the moment. They did look good, for the moment.

“Yea,” Charlie said. He hesitated as if he wanted to add something. Illya kept his eyes fixed on the plant and waited.

“I heard about Molly and Brant. Maybe their baby will be the next.”

Illya blinked at him stupidly, feeling like an owl. “Molly… My sister Molly?” he asked. There was no one else called Molly in the village, but he had to have misheard.

“And Brant. They’re courting now, right?” Charlie said.

“They’re courting,” Illya repeated. His brain felt as if it had been flung into a solid wall and come to an abrupt splat. He seemed to be surrounded by blank space, the air filled with vague buzzing. Somewhere beyond the blankness, Charlie was still talking.

Molly had black eyes.

Molly was only thirteen.

“I just have been wondering… I used to love to hunt in the shade at this time of year or wait until the fish are biting in the evening. With the sun going down and the gnats buzzing over the water,” Charlie said. “I know we have to do it this way, to get everything going, but… once it’s all set up, couldn’t I hunt too? Not just dig?”

Illya closed his eyes then opened them again. He tried to listen to what Charlie was saying but couldn’t make his head clear.

“I don’t mind hard work,” Charlie said, rushing his words out now. “It makes me happy to come and dig all day, to think that my family will have enough.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” Illya managed.

“I just hoped that, someday, I could do something else too. It does wear a man down to do the same thing every day.” Charlie dropped his eyes to the ground.

Illya’s heart pounded in his ears. Everything seemed muffled and far away as he looked across the expanse of waving leaves. He remembered that Charlie was still waiting for an answer, somewhere outside of the hazy periphery of his vision.

“It is honorable to dig the soil, Charlie,” he said. “You are making all of this possible.”

He knew that it wasn’t the answer that Charlie wanted. It wasn’t answer at all, really. But there was nothing else he could say. His heart hammered, and his breaths came fast and short, making his vision glaze with bright points of light.

He remembered Molly as a tiny girl, playing by the river. He saw Molly and Brant handfasting then holding a newborn baby, thin and howling with hunger. Then came the white patches on the plants and Charlie with a face like a man who had taken a knife to the gut, realizing that Illya had betrayed them all.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

THE MORNING FOG was thick. It swirled around Illya’s legs and coated his feet and ankles with tiny beads of water.

It was nearly opaque. You could almost look at the white patches on the underside of the leaves and tell yourself they were just a bit more fog. Almost.

Despite the fog, the early morning, his tired eyes, the dim light; despite a hundred factors, Illya knew the truth.

The white spots were there. They were small, too small for casual notice, but it would not be long before they spread and coated the surface of every leaf.

He had expected his spirits to crash when this happened, and he braced himself for the impending feeling of despair, but it did not come.

Spots, that’s all they were, Illya thought. Tiny spots, no bigger than a freckle.

They didn’t seem like they could be real.

He dropped the leaf and pulled in a breath, squaring his shoulders. It didn’t matter how small the spots were. He had to tell everyone.

Illya walked back toward his hut, his legs growing heavier with each step.

They would be furious. He wondered what they would do to him. He swallowed.

It wasn’t long before he stopped walking altogether.

He was going to die.

Once the thought came to him, he could think of no other way it could end.

His knees turned to liquid. He started breathing so fast that darkness closed in on the sides of his vision. He closed his eyes, trying to force himself to calm down, but he might as well have ordered the river to flow uphill.

He had to tell them, but if he did, they wouldn’t bother with throwing him out to the Terrors. They would kill him themselves.

Maybe there was another way. There had to be a better option than just telling everyone and taking what came.

The longer he entertained this thought, the more attractive it grew. The darkness around his vision started to recede, and his breaths slowed. There would be another way. He would think of something.

After all, there was still time. It would take a little while before the white patches spread enough to be noticed. At the very least, there was some time to think about how to say it.

* * *

Illya studied the book all day until the letters on the page seemed to quiver. His eyes blurred and his head pounded. He looked at every page, and not one of them had a solution.

He thought of burning the fields to the ground and starting again. Of course, it would only work if they could find new seeds and if there was enough time to grow new plants before the first frost.

All too clearly, he remembered the chill that had started to come in the mornings. The days were still hot, but it wouldn’t be long before the nights froze.

And there was still the problem of having to face everyone and tell them about it. All day, he had stubbornly cherished a hope that he would find a solution that could be done at night when everyone was asleep. But there was nothing. The book was useless.

Try as he might, Illya could not think through the possible unfolding of events without coming to an abrupt and violent halt right at the point where he stood up on the steps and admitted to them that his plan was a failure.

He paced, embroiled in frustration and regrets.

As night fell, he did not go to the central fires. He hadn’t eaten anything all day, and he knew that people would notice he was missing, but there was no way he could sit calmly in the circle and pretend that nothing was wrong.

He needed advice and from someone wiser than him. Talking to his mother was out of the question, Samuel too. He thought briefly of going to his Aunt Ada then shuddered to think what she must think of him at the moment, with her son locked in jail.

He decided to walk, hoping that the air would clear his mind, which was threatening to spiral out of control with fear. He was grateful that it was late; he would be less likely to run into anyone. He walked along the perimeter of the village, following the wall, thinking back to the day he had found the book. He had risked so much to bring it home. He should have seen even then that it was dangerous, bad luck; the Terrors had nearly caught him because of it.

Maybe it would have been better for everyone if they had eaten him that night after all.

After a short while, he reached the fields. The white patches would have spread today. He hesitated, watching the plants from a distance for a while. He didn’t want to look, but he had to see how much they had grown to guess how much time he had left.

He had crouched among the leaves to examine them in the moonlight when he heard voices coming from the other end of the field. He caught his breath and his body froze.

Were they looking at the plants? Had they found the mold before he had even had the chance to come forward?

Moving as quietly as he could, Illya advanced, staying crouched low among the leaves.

“But what we do agree on is that we have to do something,” said a woman’s voice that he didn’t recognize immediately.

“I don’t know about all those curses and stuff. I just know when I asked if it was always going to be this way, or if I could hunt again sometimes, I didn’t get an answer.” Illya’s heart sank when he recognized the voice as Charlie’s. He knew that Charlie had been unhappy, but he hadn’t thought the man would actually turn against him.

“Maybe it brings curses and maybe it doesn’t,” said a man’s voice. “What matters is what are we going to do about it?”

“I don’t know about this,” another woman said.

“What do mean? You agreed this afternoon when I asked you to come,” the first voice pleaded. Illya listened again. His heart plummeted as he recognized what he should have known instantly. It was his Aunt Ada.

He had locked up her son; betrayed her in the worst possible way. He deserved her anger, expected it. But still, her defection hit him deeply, worse than even Charlie’s had done.

“That book has power. You have to agree. He knew about that flood. Saved everyone that day,” the second woman said, her tone lowering in awe towards the end.

“That doesn’t change that I want to be a hunter again someday,” Charlie said. “And my son, my boy should learn to hunt too. The way things are, he never will. He won’t ever do anything but dig the fields. Doesn’t feel right.”

“If the book is from the gods, we shouldn’t go against what it says,” the woman answered.

“It’s not from the gods. It’s from the Olders. And what did they know?” Ada said.

“Well, you can’t read it, can you?” the woman said. Illya should have felt happy to hear someone defending him, but, instead, the woman’s stubborn belief in him made him feel worse than ever. No one would be defending him for long.

At any moment, one of them could look at the plants too closely. Bits of white dust could have even flaked off and landed on their shoes.

“Of course not.” Ada sighed. “It doesn’t matter. What does is what he is doing, not why. I’ve known that boy since he was no more than a twinkle, and he isn’t himself, none of this is like him.”

“We don’t need to argue. What we need are more people. We can’t do anything violent, not with those Enforcers. I don’t want anyone to get hurt. We should keep this quiet, just talk to as many as we can, see who might join us. If we can get enough, we can confront the Leader with that. He won’t be able to ignore us then,” Charlie said. Illya had heard enough; he crept away.

* * *

He got up before dawn, although his vision was blurred and his head was groggy from the late night. He dreamed of the disease taking over, spreading so rapidly he could see it advancing across the leaves. But when he got to the field, the white growth was minimal; there was still time. Relief hit him with unexpected intensity, and he sank to his knees among the plants, forgetting to care if anyone could see him.

After a while, he pulled himself together and dunked his head in the water of the irrigation trough. With new resolve, he made his way to the breakfast fires, determined to take control of the situation. On his way, he passed the stone house.

He stopped in the path. Benja was in there. Illya stared at the light of the sunrise glinting off the bits of broken glass still stuck in the edges of its boarded windows. He wondered if he should go inside and see him.

People walking by looked at him curiously.

Illya tapped his foot on the ground. Water ran off his hair and dripped into the dust at his feet.

It would do no good to go in, he decided. Nothing could come of it besides more yelling. He would deserve it, but it couldn’t do anything to help now. He ducked his head and turned away.

Footsteps approached, and he turned to see Sabelle. Dawn had barely reached the top of the full-leafed maple. Morning sun, lancing through the mist, danced on the grass she was crossing as if its purpose was to light up the places where her feet stepped.

She looked up as she came near. Her face was streaked with soot. For the first time, he noticed that her clothes were heavily stained from the work of cooking. From her fingers to her sleeves, rolled up at the elbow, her skin was red from scrubbing pots and working in the heat.

He swallowed. She was still beautiful underneath the soot. She smiled at him. It hit him in the belly with the force of a punch. Despite it all, she still had a smile for him. She still thought that he was trying to do something good. His stomach clenched in shame.

“Hi,” she said.

The small smile was devastating. Soon, Illya would have no choice but to tell everyone about the disease, whether he had a plan to fix it or not. When that happened, the smile would be gone. He was sure of it.

Suddenly, he realized he would never have a better chance than this moment to tell her how he felt.

In a few days, he was going to die. He could see no way around it.

She might like Conna better; she might even laugh at him. But going to his death and never letting her know would be much worse.

Illya reached out and took her hand. The skin of her palm was rough from work. The morning air was cool and smelled like damp grass. He held her hand in his carefully.

“I’m sorry,” he said, wanting to tell her everything, to apologize before it was too late.

Her eyes were wide and very blue. They held his gaze; though the little smile faded. She did not drop his hand.

“Why?” she asked.

His voice caught, and he found that he couldn’t answer. He shook his head.

“You’ve always done what you had to do,” she said, gazing up at him. Without stopping to think, he leaned in closer to her. Her cheeks were red, and her eyes burned with intensity.

Suddenly, she met him. Her lips were soft on his. She smelled like dew and campfire smoke. Wisps of her hair tickled the sides of his face.

He never wanted it to end. Energy pulsed through him. It was like riding the bicycle down the mountainside without wrecking once.

When she drew away, he let her, not wanting to push his luck. She giggled.

Her eyes darted around, afraid to meet his. He was smiling so wide that his lips had stuck to his teeth. He ducked his head away awkwardly. She gently pulled her hand away from his.

“Well, um, I have to go,” she said and gave him a look over her shoulder as she walked away that made it seem like there was a joke that only they knew. His head whirled. His spirits soared, far removed from the crushing guilt that had laid over him for days.

He had kissed Sabelle! The realization of it struck him a bit belatedly. His stomach fluttered, and his smile stretched from ear to ear. For a few moments, he was someone else. Someone who had not led his village to starvation with a stupid scheme.

But to go from despair to soaring so high only made the fall back down to Earth worse than ever when it came.

Soon, she would find out about the mold, and she would hate him. After that, he would die, and she would starve along with everyone else.

* * *

Illya found Conna sitting beside the Enforcers’ fire with Aaro that evening. He had spent the entire day searching through the book one more time for a cure for the mold, but there still was nothing to be found. His adviser had always been able to come up with ideas before now. As much as Illya didn’t want to involve anyone else, he was quickly running out of options.

Shockingly, Conna smirked when Illya asked to speak to him alone.

“Sabelle?” he asked with a knowing voice once Illya had shut his door.

“What?” It was the last thing Illya had expected to hear.

“Everyone is talking about it. Word gets around.”

“But no one else was there,” Illya protested. It bothered him to think of everyone talking about him and Sabelle. It had felt like their secret. A sweet thing he could keep to redeem a little of the devastation of the past few days.

“She probably told her friends. She’s a girl. That’s what they do,” Conna said.

Illya scowled. “Humph.” He hesitated before saying more, wondering again if it was right to say anything to Conna. He sighed, and his shoulders fell. There was no other way.

“We have a problem,” he said, keeping his voice low. “The plants are diseased.”

Conna wrinkled his forehead as if he didn’t understand.

“I went to look at the original ones. They’re grown over with mold. They are all dead,” he said. Conna’s eyebrows pulled together so tight that a chasm of skin appeared between them.

“It showed up on our plants yesterday.” Illya paused, chewing on the inside of his lip. “They are going to die.”

Conna’s eyebrows flew up. “You have got to be kidding!” he whispered.

Illya shook his head, wishing with a profound desperation that he was.

“No,” Conna said, shaking his head and backing up several steps. The color drained from his face.

“Unless we can think of another plan, there’s going to be nothing at harvest time,” Illya said.

“This is bad,” Conna said. He ran his hands through his hair. “Really bad.”

“We have to tell them about it,” Illya said.

Conna’s eyes widened. He shook his head with vehemence. “We can’t say anything!” he whispered.

“They are going to find out soon. It’s small, but it’s going to spread,” Illya said.

Conna glared at him and shook his head again as if he refused to believe it. “You know what they’ll do to us.”

“I know.” Illya sighed. “I heard some of them talking last night. They are trying to get support to take the leadership from us. But if we can think of a way to fix things, they might be willing to listen… I thought about planting again.”

Conna frowned and crossed his arms. “There isn’t time. At the rate that those plants have grown so far, new ones wouldn’t be big enough before the frost,” he said.

“So, we think of something else,” Illya answered.

Conna let out his breath and looked up at the ceiling. “Alright,” he said, “I’ll think of something, but you have to give me some time.”

“We don’t have much time. Soon the white will spread enough that someone will notice it,” Illya said.

Conna looked at his feet and paused before continuing.

“I’m just… fuzzy headed tonight,” he said, sounding ashamed. “A little too much of that brew, my head isn’t working right.”

“Fine,” Illya said. “Tomorrow, when it wears off, we’ll talk again. We have to think of something.” Conna was staring the ground in anger, or perhaps it was shame.

Illya put his hand on Conna’s shoulder. “It’s okay,” he said. “No matter what happens, it’s me they’re going to be mad at anyway.” He tried to laugh and failed. Things could be worse, he thought. At least there was one friend left who still considered himself that.

“Go get some sleep,” Illya said.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

ILLYA HAD NEVER really been asleep, but at a certain point his eyes opened, and he knew. There could be no more waiting.

He had already waited for three days, doing nothing while the disease had advanced. Three fruitless days where he had done nothing but ignore the catastrophe that could kill them all. He sat up, wide awake in the dim light, with a conviction that he could not go a step further if the steps were leading his people in this way.

His people. He had never thought of them quite in that way. In his mind, they had been something like adversaries all along; people to influence, to bring along, to push and pull and change. The thought filled him with shame. His people! They were the people he led, who he was responsible for, and who he was letting down.

Sabelle’s soot-streaked face swam in his thoughts; then the thought of Benja sitting in his cell; Charlie’s humble pride over the plants that were doomed; the people meeting in the dark, plotting against him, but only wanting him to see, to listen to them. Samuel was right, and his mother too, and Benja.

All of them were right. He had made a terrible mistake. It didn’t matter what the villagers did to him when they found out. He couldn’t leave it for another moment.

He tried to get up and found his muscles would not obey him. They could do anything at all: death, dismemberment, little things like that. The fear of it was real enough to evoke a physical response in a direct argument with his convictions.

But there was no other choice. Illya did not have a magical plan to save them all, and he knew now that they would not find one. He was not a prophet, and the book was just a book, the random thoughts of a people long gone. All he could do was tell the truth and hope that they had enough time left to figure something out. With everyone working together, they could still have a chance; maybe Conna would find a way for them after all, but they couldn’t afford to lose another day.

Sweating and shaking, Illya swung his feet over the edge of his furs and wiped his hands off on his thigh, adding minuscule wear to the hand-shaped tracks already on his pants. As if getting all the sweat off could solve the problem.

After that, all that remained were the small, practical actions that would bring him to the end. They were ordinary things that he didn’t usually think about, but he now found himself focusing on each moment with peculiar intensity.

Out of bed.

One foot in front of the other. Ignore the dread. Wipe your hands. Force yourself forward, keep walking, splash water on your face. Swallow the lump in your throat, keep walking, smooth your hair. Wipe your hands again. Sweat is your only enemy now. Keep going.

He considered it could be the last time he walked through his door or any door at all. He shook the thought away.

Don’t think about that. Place your right foot in front of your left. Reach the path outside the hut. Let your feet take over. Pick up one and then the other.

The dread was growing; it couldn’t be swallowed back. He thought it might paralyze him, stop him in his tracks. He wiped away the sweat again.

Face the dread.

What is the worst thing that could happen? he asked himself.

They could riot.

Will you survive?

Maybe. Probably not.

But they all might survive, in the end.

Face it down. Keep going.

He hesitated again at the edge of the mosaic by the fires, cold in the early pre-dawn light. The irony of the cornucopia, spilling over with food, struck him as particularly cruel in the middle of this starving village. He thought of the maker of the mosaic and the people who had first settled here. What would they think of it now?

The square was still empty, and he breathed for a moment, feeling the stillness of what was undoubtedly nothing but the pause before the storm. In a way, he was just like that mosaic maker; a man who dreamed too large. It was not such an awful crime, to dream.

He came to the rusted metal can beside the fires. It was there in case the villagers ever needed to be called together urgently. Illya could only remember it beaten a handful of times in his lifetime. Once for a fire that had consumed half the huts in the time before they had begun building them farther apart.

To beat it now would be to admit that it was an emergency; that his directions had steered them all down a path so dangerous they may not reach safety. But the only choice left was honesty. He would tell them everything, present himself for their justice and hope that it counted for something.

He picked up the thick branch that lay on the can.

It was like jumping off a cliff. You couldn’t think about it, especially not about the splat at the end. Jerking and spastic, he beat the branch against the round of metal with cacophonous urgency.

Minutes later, they were all there. Conna was the first; he stood beside Illya with a supportive smile that Illya barely registered. Sleepily, they trickled in straight from their beds, and Illya faked it a little more. He smiled, unwilling to betray anything as they gathered.

Then they were all there, watching him.

He stepped up onto the stairs. Conna watched him sideways. Illya wondered if he saw the shake behind his smile, how he was swallowing too many times, the way he wiped his hand too casually down his thigh. Like jumping off a cliff.

Suddenly, Conna pushed past him and jumped onto the stairs.

Conna would introduce him then, Illya thought, a little relieved. Someone would stand beside him.

“I have called you here this morning to tell you of a traitor in our midst and to give you the chance to judge him!” Conna’s voice rose. Illya was stunned; grumbling rose in the crowd. Before he could react, Conna pushed on.

“I have heard a confession from this man,” he yelled, pointing at Illya, “who you have called your Leader, who you have trusted with the village, your lives, your future!

“Who you allowed to change your whole world, to dictate the future of your children!” Conna’s voice rose to a frantic pitch and cracked.

“This man has lied to you! His crops will never be harvested. They’re infected with a disease and soon they will all die. He told me that he found the father plants dead. He has known about this and said nothing.

“He is leading you into starvation. He did all of this to keep his power over you, knowing full well that in a short time it will be winter and we will have nothing to eat!”

The crowd stared.

“Traitor!” someone yelled.

It was like a spark to a field of dry grass. Suddenly, all of them were calling, “Traitor, traitor, traitor!” The cries blended into a roar. They pushed at each other to grab at him.

Illya stumbled backward and jumped off the side of the stairs, putting them between him and most of the mob. He was too stunned to pull his thoughts together. All around was a blur of angry faces, advancing. Then Conna struck him across the jaw with his fist and he reeled, nearly falling.

“You!” Conna bellowed. “What do you have to say for yourself?”

“It’s true,” Illya stuttered. “But I didn’t…” He froze, unable to find the right words.

“I mean I came this morning to tell you, it wasn’t him that called you at all!” He was shaking, his jaw throbbed, and he tasted blood. He couldn’t remember what he had been planning to say.

“I hoped we could find a way to save the plants, but it’s no use, it’s true, they will die.”

“We are going to starve!” Dianthe howled. Then Conna spoke, calm over the angry crowd, his voice full of conviction.

“We have to push this traitor out of the village. We have been taken in by his poisonous ideas, his book, and his lies!” The crowd whooped and screamed in support.

“The only way we can survive the winter will be by working together to gather as much as we can, we need a strong Leader!” Conna continued.

“I nominate Conna!” Dianthe yelled, somehow abruptly in control of her hysterics. The crowd was a chorus of “Yea!” and “Conna for Leader!” then “Down with the traitor!” “Throw him out!” and then, “Kill him! Kill him! Kill him!”

Illya jumped onto the stairs and ran, leaping off the far side. He pushed past the people there before they could make up their minds to organize. He broke free from the crowd in seconds and ran.

The village went past him in a blur. All the spots he had lingered over that morning were far behind him before he registered their passing. He flew past the huts, the field with its doomed plants, and the gates. He leaped over the bank outside the walls at the same spot he had fled from the Terrors with the book just a few months ago; before any of this mess: before the seeds, before Ezekiel Soil-Digger, before he had doomed the village, before the Almanac. It seemed like a lifetime had passed since then.

He thought that he had never run so fast, not even when the Terrors had been at his heels. Terrors had teeth and claws and hunger, but people had bows and arrows and rage.

Randomly, he weaved from tree to tree, trying to make himself a difficult target. He had a small head start. It took a few moments for the mob to realize that he had run and that they wanted to follow him.

He glanced back over his shoulders, remembered the Enforcers with their weeks of training, and decided it would be better to go for as much distance as possible. He cut through the brush, heading for the broad path, crashing through bushes, his arms pumping. His heartbeat pounded through his whole body, and he burst out onto the path in an all-out sprint.

His bicycle tracks from the day with Benja had long since washed away, but he could not help remembering that day, flying over the smooth surface, so carefree.

The bicycle was back in the village, still behind his mother’s hut in the magpie nest. He could have escaped the villagers easily on it, but there was no way he could turn back for it. No doubt it would be destroyed now, along with everything else.

He ran forever.

There was nothing left for him in the world but running. No feelings existed but fear and exhaustion. He breathed in and out: his lungs were bellows that drove him on as they pumped. His legs grew heavier and heavier, and he ignored it. On and on he went until he drifted into thought and realized that he hadn’t heard anyone behind him for a very long time.

After a long while, he risked ducking behind a tree to look back. Once his inertia stopped, his lack of breath caught up to him. He gasped painfully and sagged against the tree trunk.

He had come a long way, driven by terror to unusual speed. He was just past the place where you would leave the path to find the second ruin. In about another mile was the third ruin: as far as you could walk in a day and still make it back before dark.

Beyond that were the places you could only reach with the bicycle; the spring he had stopped at with Benja, the ruins beyond it, and then the expanse of the old city itself.

Illya crumpled, if they were not behind him now, they would not catch up before he was farther away than they would ever go. The fear of pursuit had drained away, and he found that it had been the only thing keeping him upright.

After a while, he walked again. His legs shook and his vision blurred, but he still wanted to get past the third ruin.

As he went, he continued looking back over his shoulder compulsively, but a new fear started to grow. No one was following him anymore. Why would they? The sun would be at height soon. Even with the speed of his flight, he was not far ahead of the marching day. Soon, he would reach the point where a person would have to turn back to the village or be caught out at night with the Terrors.

He would not be able to turn back. He may have escaped, but he could never return. If he did, he would find himself full of arrows before he had even reached the walls.

Banishment.

The mob had called for his death, but the sentence he had given himself would be far worse. He had no people now. He was alone with no walls and no home to keep him safe. In a few hours, it would be night, and the Terrors would find him.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

ILLYA GAVE UP. He knew that there was no hope of surviving the night. After sitting back against a tree for a while, flooded with gruesome thoughts for the better part of an hour, he let go of all of it. There was nothing more he could do. The feeling, though horrible, was oddly freeing.

He couldn’t change any of it, not what was going on in the village and not what was going to happen to him. He had been living under the weight of guilt for so long that to be free of all responsibility made him giddy. All summer, he had held the survival of the village and the weight of being Leader on his shoulders.

The truth was out now, and there were no secrets left for anyone to find. No one expected him to save the village anymore or to bring it through the winter. No one expected anything at all of him anymore.

After a while, Illya got up. He walked through the heat, feeling it penetrate. It relaxed his muscles deep to the bone. He walked and walked, and the heat beat down. It moved past pleasant and soon he was stifled, closed in by his clothes. They were a barrier between him and the free air. He tore at them, leaving holes that did not quite accommodate the need to escape.

The leafy canopy of trees ended, and the bare spots on his arms began to scorch in the unrelenting glare. He was in a place he had never been before, having always stayed on the broad path whenever he had been this far out of the village. In a daze he wandered, eventually aware that the need to find water was becoming desperate. He walked and walked, it was mid-afternoon, and the sun beat relentlessly on his shoulders.

He heard the water before he saw it. A roar and a cool breeze directed him to turn through a gap in the boulders and trees.

The air was sweet and sharp, smelling of sage and sticky geranium. A giant waterfall crashed down a rocky cliff into a deep blue pool. It emptied into a stream, which he supposed would eventually feed the main river far below. He stripped off the remainder of his clothes and dove straight into the deep blue pool.

The cold of it was sharp and unexpected. It stole his breath and made his body ache, but he relished it. Tiny bubbles, disrupted by his plunge, rose all around him, tingling his skin. He lapped great gulps of water and felt his mind clear. When he began to shiver, he swam to the shore and pulled himself out. The ache slowly receded from his hands and feet as he sat in the friendly sun.

It was not until dusk began to settle that fear crept back in on him. The shock of the cold water had brought him back to life. Now he realized that he wanted very much to keep that life after all. If he was going to have any chance of doing that, he had to find a place where he could defend himself.

After some debate, he scaled the cliff beside the falls, hoping that the Terrors would not come to higher ground. Fog drifted over the pooling water above the falls, deceptively still before the plunge, glowing pink in the setting sun. The temperature dropped as the sunlight fled with a visible speed from the far hillsides. He heard it then. The first yip yip yee sounded, way off in the hills.

A few moments later, an answering yip yip yip rang out. Fear poured over him as if it was a bucket of icy water. He gasped, breathing too fast, and tried to recover himself before he let his mind spin out of control.

The Terrors were out there and they were coming.

Illya had never actually seen them before. He had heard them every night of his life. A few months ago, he had nearly met them, but he had no idea of what they looked like. He realized he didn’t have a first clue of what he was about to face.

Were there many kinds of beasts or just one? How big would they be? Could they climb trees? As the shadows lengthened, the woods, lovely in the afternoon, appeared sinister. He felt like the Terrors could be hiding anywhere, ready to jump out from behind a rock or tree at any moment. He had spent his life in the woods and seen them through all conditions. He knew all their seasons; snow and rain and the heat of summer. He had simply never been out in them at night.

Everyone knew that the rules changed in the dark.

In the early days of the village, people had been attacked in the night. Many had been killed before they had come together to build great fires and walls to keep out the night.

Fires.

He fixated on that. Maybe he couldn’t build walls or a giant fire, but he could build a small one. He didn’t know if it would be enough. Either way, there was no other choice. He had to try something.

Try or die, right? He thought of Benja and felt a pang through his chest.

Would the villagers release Benja now that he was gone? Or would Conna make his family pay for Illya’s crimes?

He closed his eyes. He didn’t think Conna would do that; he was almost sure.

He shivered, shaking himself out of his paralysis. There was nothing he could do about it, and if he didn’t find a way to make it through the night, there never would be.

The yipping was growing louder. He searched for a defensible place for his fire, moving quickly, gathering the driest kindling he could find as he went.

He piled his kindling in an open area beside a tall rock outcropping. The light was nearly gone, and he shook off his habitual fear, forcing himself to keep working despite the urge to run for the safety of the gates. Samuel had said once that he could be the master of many things if he had the will to do it. He wasn’t the master of anything really, but he was the only one out here who could be the master of himself. That was all there was left.

He took his knife out of his belt, thankful that he was in the habit of always wearing it. Carefully, he shaved kindling from a dry branch and made a little pile of it under a pyramid of small sticks. He struck the blade on a piece of flint stone.

His hands were shaking, and it took several attempts to make a big enough spark. Finally, his strikes sparked and caught the kindling. Illya dropped quickly onto the ground and pursed his lips to blow gently on the little coal. It flared hot, and the tiny flame shortened, gathering itself around its source. Then, in the absence at the end of his breath, it leaped up to catch the bigger sticks of the pyramid.

Illya built the fire up as big as he could make it, going as far as he dared into the darkness nearby to find bigger and bigger pieces of wood as it grew. He dug a trench in a half-circle around himself and built up fuel in it, spreading the fire into a ring on each side that was not guarded by the rocks.

The yips were still down in the hills, but in the dark, it seemed like the space between them and him had shrunk. He shivered, fumbling in his pile of wood, rejecting a stick with live moss on it. Too often he had crushed an infant fire with a green stick. He would use it later, when the fire was hot enough to ignite any fuel.

The fire grew, burning down into coals and flaring up again into a blaze to devour fresh wood. Finally, he settled back against the rock and relaxed a little bit. It was nothing like the walls of the village, but he had done all he could.

He realized that he hadn’t eaten all day. It certainly wasn’t a first, but it had been a few months since he had felt real hunger. He crept over and drank from the river but didn’t dare to go farther than that. Deciding that it would be too risky to do anything more about his empty stomach, he built up the fire higher to take his mind off it.

The warmth bathed him. He stared out into the darkness, at first jumping at every little sound then fighting the urge to drowse off in the heat. After a long while, he came to the conclusion that it didn’t seem the Terrors were determined to swoop down on him after all. His unease lingered, but he was profoundly exhausted, and eventually he couldn’t fight it any longer.

* * *

Morning came.

The early sun shone through the trees onto his face, easing him out of his dreams. Illya blinked and came awake to find that the Terrors had not eaten him after all. The fire had gone out sometime in the night, and he had not woken to build it up again.

He looked around at the sun on the trees, appearing so cheerful, so normal, that it seemed as though nothing had happened at all. He laughed out loud then pinched himself experimentally to check if he still existed. It was real, all of it: the forest, the sun of a new day, and him, alive in it.

A few coals of his fire still glowed under a layer of ash, and it sprang to life easily when he built up a section of the ring to warm his hands. He had camped at the junction of a small stream and the main watercourse. The water swirled as the energetic little stream met the ponderous flow of the larger channel.

It turned out to be a perfect place for fish. Before the sun was high in the sky, Illya had fashioned a fishing line from a carved wooden hook and a piece of string that he unraveled from his shirt. He found fat grubs and a few earthworms under a large rock on the bank, and it was not long before there were two beautiful trout roasting on a bed of coals at the edge of his fire.

Fortified with food, he took off in search of a cave.

It had not been difficult to survive outside. It was no different really than what everyone did in the village every day: making fire, finding food and water. He didn’t know when he would meet the Terrors, but if he had made it through with nothing but a fire, his chances with a cave should be decent.

At midmorning, he sighted a cave in the cliffs far up the side of the mountain. He debated for a bit. It would probably be hard for a Terror to reach him there, but in the end, he decided it was too far away from the stream. It had been invaluable the previous night to get water easily. Besides, the morning fish for breakfast was something he would dearly like to repeat.

The second cave he came to was lower on the hillside but occupied, and he backed away ever so slowly from a sleeping badger. The next he found had recently been inhabited, perhaps by the very Terrors he had heard in the night. He shuddered when he saw the piles of bones in it, some of them with scraps of meat still on them that looked suspiciously fresh. With this image in his mind, he hurried, knowing it was more important than ever to find a secure place to settle.

The Terrors may not have bothered him behind his fire, but they had been close by after all. He would be foolish to relax now, just because he had gotten lucky once.

Then he found a perfect cave; it was near the water but just high enough to be dry. There were no signs of occupants, and it ended before it went too deep; big enough for him, but not big enough for anything else to hide somewhere inside.

He established a good stock of firewood then foraged for roots, greens, and berries. When he had enough food for a day laid by, he set to digging a fire pit at the entrance. With a roaring fire lit at the mouth of his cave, Illya finally relaxed.

As the days went on his food stores grew, and he became more accustomed to his new home. He started giving himself until he had heard the first yips before he piled on fresh kindling, blew on the banked coals, and stayed near the circle of firelight. With the stream nearby, he could fish just outside of the entrance to his cave and still stay near the fire. As the light faded across the water, gnats and flies could be seen flitting across its rippled surface. Fish would jump and bite at the flies then more than they ever did in the afternoon.

He was coming to realize that the villagers had let many things slip their notice for their fear of the dark. Fish bit the best at twilight, right as everyone would be leaving to go behind the walls, and also in the morning before they would think it was safe enough to go out.

One day, he saw a deer come to the river to drink as the light fell. It had been so long since he had seen any big game that he froze when he saw it. He watched it; with nothing but a knife and a new slingshot half made, there was no way he could hunt it. He was well hidden behind a screen of trees and had not built up his fire yet. The deer didn’t seem to know he was there.

It drank from the river, looking up sometimes to stand perfectly still while its ears twitched. Illya barely breathed, enthralled. He had wanted to get a deer for as long as he had been old enough to hunt.

They were extremely rare near the village, and every time he had caught a glimpse of one, it had been running away. He could see it breathing. Then the deer started up suddenly and bounded away through the trees.

He built up the fire and sat at the entrance to his cave, looking out at the reflection of the light on the water. The black field across the river had stars above it, and the water mirrored the moon in a silver ribbon before him. In the field, tiny lights winked in and out of sight in the brush, as if they were mimicking the stars above. He smiled. He had seen fireflies plenty of times before but never quite like this.

There was a rustling noise outside of the sphere of firelight. He squinted past it and saw the back of a small creature as it ran past. Relieved that it was nothing large or menacing, he stepped outside of the firelight to get a closer look.

It was a coyote. Illya had often seen them when he was out hunting. They were not usually dangerous, and the people usually left them alone because they were hard to catch and not good for eating.

An entire pack of them was beside his cave, sniffing and circling. He lunged quickly to chase one away from the pile of fish bones beside the fire. It scampered away, and he threw a rock at it.

By some quirk, his aim found a mark he had not intended, and the rock hit the beast squarely across the nose. It took off with a yelp, and the rest of the pack ran with it. Illya heard the familiar yipping of the Terrors sounding in the night as the coyotes retreated. Quickly, he dashed back into his cave, his heart pounding. He wondered if the little dogs would be attacked. For a long while, he squinted into the night, trying to catch a glimpse of what was going on.

Once his eyes had adjusted, he could see the coyotes were clearly under the moonlight: light shapes retreating across dark fields. But no Terrors appeared to close in on them. He could hear the yipping getting fainter as the dogs drew farther away. For a wild moment, he wondered if the Terrors were invisible.

Then the answer came to him. No Terrors had descended on them out of the darkness because they were the ones making the sounds. They were the Terrors, and he had driven them away by throwing a single rock. All this time, his people had lived in fear of nothing but a pack of coyotes.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

WITH ONLY HIMSELF to feed, there was little to occupy his time. Illya knew that he should be preparing for winter; gathering food and finding ways to store it, maybe even finding a better place to stay. But the idea of surviving an entire winter on his own, outside the village, seemed so impossible that he could barely comprehend trying it. He avoided thinking about the future as much as possible and instead found his thoughts drifting to the past.

He was free, but he had not escaped what he had done. More and more, as he sat alone in his camp with nothing but the fire for company, Illya sank into guilt. He missed his family. He wondered what they were all doing now and worried about how the villagers were treating them. He worried that he was wrong in assuming Conna would not make an example of them, though they’d had nothing to do with his crimes.

He wondered if the plants had died from the disease yet or if any had lived. Most of all, he wondered if the villagers had found a way to survive the winter.

He tried not to think of Sabelle, but inevitably there were moments when his thoughts went back to that morning: the last time he had seen her. A whiff of campfire smoke and dew, or the flash of the color of her eyes in a bluebird’s wing, and he would be back with her under the maple. The way she smelled and the smile on her face as she had looked up at him would flood in on him. She had liked him, despite everything.

She probably hated him now. He wondered if she was with Conna, now that he had taken over.

Whenever he could pull himself out of his gloom, Illya did his best to turn his camp into a home. He discovered another ruin nearby. This one was so far off the broad path that none of the villagers could have ever been to it.

The building was in shambles, so much that his cave was a better shelter, but he scavenged a good bit of cloth and even found some empty metal cans that had not completely rusted through. With these additions, his little cave was outfitted nicely.

He set traps and had more success than he had ever had closer to the village. Soon he had some furs tanning. For the moment, survival was not the hardest thing about being away from home.

He sat by the stream one morning and thought of Molly drawing the lumpy potato on the floor. He was suddenly so lonely he had to close his eyes against tears. She was being courted by that boy, Dianthe’s son. He had never gotten the chance to ask her if she even liked him.

His belly twisted with an absurd surge of new guilt. Compared to everything else that had happened, telling Dianthe to look for a girl with black eyes for her son to marry had to be the least of it. There weren’t many girls with black eyes in the village. If he had thought it through at all, he could have predicted that it would happen.

He hoped that Molly liked the boy or that she knew how to tell him no if she didn’t. They could even be married by now, he realized. Sometimes marriages came fast once young people started courting, especially in uncertain times like these.

He swallowed.

He didn’t know anything. He didn’t even know if they were alright.

Of course, to find any answers, he would have to go back, and he had no doubt that the lynching he had fled would resume right where it had left off.

He tried to put it all out of his mind and went out to check his traps. But things that Conna had said, which had once seemed innocent and well-meaning, kept popping into his head.

We have to do whatever it takes.

With each memory, it got harder and harder to keep from worrying. Conna had always been ruthless. At the time, it had seemed excusable. Illya had overlooked it because he thought that it served the plan. But if the pattern held, Conna was probably capable of anything.

He shook the thought away.

He tried to remember another side of Conna, the one that had reached out and supported him in the first place, the one that had been his friend when everyone else had deserted him. Conna had always been there, no matter what.

Until he had betrayed the knowledge of the plant disease to all the villagers and nearly gotten Illya killed.

Illya drove his fist into a nearby tree.

Pain shot through him, and he doubled over around his hand. He curled around his arm, smelling tree sap as hot lances throbbed from his knuckles.

* * *

Two of the traps were empty, although one had paw prints on the ground nearby. He adjusted it and went on. His third trap had been sprung but was empty too. The fourth had a rabbit.

Alone by his fire, he sat back and worked on scraping the new hide. He tried to concentrate on the work, but his hand throbbed, and the memories were pounding against his mind like river water against a runoff dam. He couldn’t help but think of how he would have been with them all now, eating beside the central fire. Carefully, he dragged a sharp stone back and forth across the underside of the skin, ignoring the pain in his hand. It made him feel better to hurt, almost as if it was a piece of justice for what he had done. He worked until the hide was perfectly clean.

Holding it under the running water of the stream, he rubbed it with sand, cleaning it as well as he could. The pebbles on the riverbank dug into his knees as he worked, and he shifted his weight before rinsing the sand free of the fur.

He went back to his fire, shivering. It was not very cold, but there was the hint of a chill in the air.

He spread the hide out on the ground in front of him and crouched beside it to bore holes along the edge with his knife. His knee itched, and he rubbed it absently, feeling the indentations the river pebbles had left where he had kneeled in them.

Another memory flooded into his mind. On the night the first shoots had come months before, another set of pebbles had pressed a pattern into his calf as he had watched the dancing. He remembered Sabelle’s timid smile at him across the circle. It was a point of such sweetness that it hurt to think of it.

The people who had made that mosaic would have no idea of the hardship that would follow for their people.

He made holes around the edge of the skin and cut strips of the leather to tie it across a frame to dry. This part of the process would take a week, and it would take another few days to treat the hide with brains, soften it, and set it all in with smoke from the fire. He wondered which one of their ancestors had known how to tan a hide. Perhaps the same one who could heat and pound metal into a shape, who had saved a picture of a Noria wheel. Someone in Ban’s family, no doubt. Maybe that ancestor had been the only one who had brought anything useful out of the world of the Olders.

There were some things, though, that the settlers had known well. How was it that there were such massive gaps when all of it mattered to survive? Someone had known enough about medicines to give Samuel’s forerunners the knowledge that had been passed to him.

Edible foods, though, which should have been the most basic information, had to be discovered almost entirely by trial and error. Jones Ph.D., legend told, had only known about a handful of plants, barely enough to get them through the first season.

The mosaic would have been made long after that. It was of all the plants they had gathered. A celebration of all they had learned.

Illya stopped, remembering that night at the fire again—and something that didn’t quite fit. The pattern of pebble leaves had still been outlined on his calf after he had gotten home that night. He had barely moved the whole evening because he had been so distracted by Sabelle. There had been something strange about those leaves. He touched his calf with his fingertips, imagining that the ghost of their imprint remained, though it was long gone.

He frowned then shook his head. The memory was wrong; that must be it.

He turned back to the rabbit skin, tying it tightly to its frame. He would never be back in the village to look at the stupid mosaic again anyway.

* * *

The morning dawned with frost on the ground. When Illya came out of his cave, he stared around in disbelief. Every blade of grass and rock was silver. The river steamed slightly. The air was sharp. The wind had shifted direction, now coming out of the north.

First frost.

It was too soon. There should be more time left. But Illya had lost track of the days out here. Going listlessly from day to day, seeing no one but himself; he couldn’t be sure if it had been two weeks, or less, or even more.

The big stream slowed and turned beside his cave, gathering into a pool before flowing on. In the cold air, the water seemed still, almost as smooth as glass as it reflected the dawn sky. It reminded him of the mirror they had found on the day he had gone into the old city with Benja.

His hair was longer than it had been then. It was wild around his head. The water blurred his features in a way that the mirror hadn’t. It was appropriate, he thought, as if the blurring had not come from the motion of the water, or the occasional wisps of steam drifting across it, but from himself. He was distorted: a guilty man weighed down with mistakes. None of the clear innocence remained of the day he had laughed with his cousin.

Now it was the face of a coward.

Illya stared himself down in the water.

This was the face of a guy who would leave his best friend in prison and run away to save his skin. A lot of things could hide behind a face.

The old, sick feeling rose in his throat. Samuel had said he could be the master of himself, but he hadn’t done anything like that. He had run away.

The air bit his nose; he breathed it in deeply, feeling the cold of the morning penetrate into his lungs. It woke him, jolting him out of his gloom, clearing his mind.

He remembered Conna drinking the brew, telling Illya that he had hit his brother when he was small because it was good for him.

He had gone in front of the village to own up to what he had done, but he hadn’t owned up at all. He had run away like the worst kind of coward. But not before he had let Conna manipulate him then handed the village to him on a platter.

Conna who would hit Aaro, who would arrest his own father; Conna who was capable of anything.

Illya’s breath came out in pants, hot against the frosty air.

Maybe there was still something he could do. He couldn’t fix everything, but maybe he could make accounting for a little of what he had done. He took a step, then another. He would find them. This place had been kind to him, although he didn’t deserve it. There was still game here and plants too. It wasn’t enough for everyone, but his ma, Molly, Benja and his parents… they could have a chance.

He was going back for his family.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

IF HE TOOK the safer route through the forest, it would be a journey of several days to the village. If he went north and met the path, he might make it all the way in a day or two if he moved quickly.

But it was much more likely that he would meet Patrollers on the path. Approaching the village unseen would be nearly impossible.

He thought about Conna and how the skin of brew had seemed stuck to his hand every evening. If he could hit his brother, what would stop him from hitting someone else? Illya’s mother, his little sister; all of them were defenseless. Conna was the Leader, with all the Enforcers behind him and much less of a conscience to stop him than Illya had ever had. Anything could be happening in the village now.

He knew how the brew made you feel; how easy it was to make bad choices seem justified. Conna would be desperate to solidify his position. He would want to make examples, to distance himself from Illya and the plan that had failed.

That would be more than enough of a reason to imprison Illya’s entire family, or worse. The more he thought about it, the more convinced he was that they were in real danger. It had been weeks. Conna could have locked them up without food. They could have been starving all this time.

Illya made straight for the waterfall and the more dangerous path. He had not retraced his steps since he had made his cave camp, preferring to range farther out in his explorations. The way back was unfamiliar, but he knew that he could not go wrong if he followed the watercourse.

It was still early when he reached the falls. They were taller than he remembered, at least thirty feet high, and surrounded by wet rocks and sheer cliffs. He had climbed right up them to reach the safer refuge above. It had not seemed like a difficult feat then. That day, he had faced death many times over and accepted it.

The mob of villagers, the Terrors; all of it had made the climb seem like nothing in comparison. Perhaps it had been nothing. The way up from the bottom had seemed simple, with obvious handgrips and footrests.

Now, looking over the edge, he could see none of the friendly grips. The rocks were steep, slippery, impossible. Flanking the falls on either side, an accompaniment of cliffs dropped as abruptly as if the earth had been sliced off with a knife. It was as if the gods had decided that this was where the world would end, and the water and anything else that didn’t realize it in time to stop its forward momentum could just go ahead and drop right off.

Low clouds had settled down over the mountains over the course of the morning and now obscured the earth below the falls almost entirely. Illya stood on the edge of the world and looked out over a sea of boiling gray vapor. The water that roared past him fell to unimaginable depths. Tiny flecks of spray hit his face in a desperate attempt to throw themselves back up to the land of the living.

Illya sat down on the edge of the cliff, thinking back to the route he had taken up it, trying not to think of his family back in the village at Conna’s mercy.

After some time, with no success, he walked to the right then to the left in hopes of finding an easier way down.

The cliff was impassible.

To the right, the cliffs ended where the mountain went up. If he were to find a passage in that direction, he would have to climb it. It would take a day and take him far out of his way. Even then, there was a chance he wouldn’t find a way around.

The left ended in yet another cliff, which dropped down abruptly, leaving no possibility of going forward.

Discouraged, he returned to the falls. The sun was already at height, and the low clouds had cleared away. Now he could see that it wasn’t as far down as it had seemed, perhaps the height of five men.

He stared over the edge into the pool. He had already lost a full morning. As the sun moved across the sky, his mind ran away from him. While he was stuck here, anything could be happening to his family. There could be riots. His family would be a target. They could even get killed.

He remembered the plunge into that pool on the hot day of his flight, how the water had folded around him, embracing him, and he knew the answer.

He felt like his blood had turned to fire. It was one thing to remember the smooth dive into the pool. It was quite another to stand at the edge, hearing the roar of the water as it crashed on the rocks below.

The wind pushed him forward, and, by reflex, he pushed back against it, resisting what he knew he had to do. He looked over the edge and watched the spray disappearing into the air. His head spun.

This was crazy.

But he couldn’t just sit there.

Try or die.

You had to try because trying meant you still had hope.

He had to do it because without hope there was nothing. With no hope, he would live out the rest of his short days alone in the little cave, ignoring the world, fading away in shame.

The fire flared high in his blood. He had not gone to the full depths of that pool. There was no guarantee that there would only be smooth blue water to meet him at the bottom.

It was best not to think about it too much. He could spend hours gazing into the pool, and it would make no difference in the end. All there was left was to jump, or not.

He ran, heart pounding, thinking of a million things at once: the angle of his jump, the speed of his legs, the launch needed to clear the protruding rocks, the force of his feet against the edge as they pushed off. Then he was flying into the air with the wind rushing past his sun-heated cheeks. He gasped. Blue rushed up to meet him.

He hit the water, and it knocked out all of the breath he had taken in. His legs slammed into the pebbled bottom of the pool, but the blue darkness surrounded him just as it had before. It cradled his body, slowing his descent just enough that the clash did not break him after all.

Illya pushed his way up toward the wavering blue light above his head. Then his face broke the surface, and fresh air flooded into his lungs.

He had done it. He felt as if he had crossed over a portal into another world as he pulled himself up onto the bank and breathed in deep, full breaths.

There was no time to lose now. Even if he moved as fast as he could, it would still take at least whole day to get back to the village. He wouldn’t make it by nightfall, not with the day half-gone.

He had barely allowed himself to catch his breath when he kept going. Looking up at the sun often to keep his bearings, he scrambled down hillsides and through brush. He was slowed down by his soaked clothes, and whenever he stopped for more than a moment, he began to shiver. The day went on, and he could only hope that he was going in the right direction. When he had first come off the path, he had been too distracted to look for landmarks.

After a while, he remembered the spring that met the path before the third ruin and followed the stream, hoping that it was the same one.

It was dusk when the stream finally crossed the path. The journey to the path had taken an entire day when it should have only taken half. He stopped to drink and splash water on his face. He dried his face off on his shirt, then saw something on the ground.

There were footprints. Not animal tracks, human footprints, but nothing like the prints his feet made in the mud. Everyone in the village had boots made from stitched animal hides. In the summer, they went barefoot as often as not. All of their footprints were smooth, sometimes large, sometimes small, but all with soft edges.

These tracks were covered in ridges, strange, regular shapes with sharp corners.

He squatted down again and examined them. There were straight lines and chunky shapes almost like the letters in the book. He held his breath as if the unknown person could be hiding in the bushes, but after a few seconds, nothing had happened, and he breathed again.

Rover gangs, like the one that had attacked so long ago, just like the Patrollers guarded against.

But the Patrollers were Enforcers now. They couldn’t be guarding all the territory around the village, not if they had to guard a jail full of thier own people.

The footprints was fresh. Whoever they were, they had stopped at this spring recently. If they kept going down the path, it would only be a matter of time before they found the village.

Illya glanced around, shaking off a crawling sensation that was rising up his spine. He set off at a run, hoping to make up a little time and distance between himself and this place before the light was gone.

He had not eaten all day and soon felt the all too familiar weakness that came from too much walking and not enough food. Nevertheless, he did not slow.

A branch cracked up ahead, and he heard an odd shuffling sound. Without thinking, he dove into a stand of bushes to hide, snagging his pants on a thorn. The sound of more breaking twigs approached. He wasn’t close enough to run into a patrol yet, or was he? Not at this time of the evening, it was impossible.

Illya froze, his breath halting in his throat at the sight of a man coming around the bend in the road, a stone’s throw away from him. He peered through the night, his eyes wide and round as the full moon.

Something about the slope of the man’s shoulders was familiar and tickled his memory.

Benja.

It was Benja! He looked again, not believing what he saw. His cousin was thinner than he had been. He was holding his bow in one hand and had a bundle of something wrapped in cloth slung over his shoulder. He had not seen Illya yet. Illya hesitated. The last time he had seen Benja was the day he’d had him arrested. He didn’t know how his cousin would react to seeing him.

Benja was walking with a shuffle as if he was exhausted. Illya looked closer and saw something that made his breath freeze in his throat. Benja was dragging his leg, which had been tied up in red-stained cloth. Behind him was a trail of blood.

Illya stumbled out of the bushes, tearing his pants further. He didn’t care. He pushed his way onto the path just in time to catch Benja as he staggered and sagged to the ground. He was sweating and pale, gray around the eyes. His gaze seemed unfocused as if he was looking across a long distance.

“Ouch,” he said, and his eyes rolled back in his head.

“Benja!”

Illya lowered him to the ground. He shook his cousin’s shoulders, his heart pounding.

“Wake up! What happened? Benja!”

Benja groaned. His eyes opened for a moment then fluttered closed.

“We can’t stay here in the open,” Illya said, his voice wavering. He pulled Benja up to his feet. With his arm around Benja’s waist to hold him up and some coaxing, he got them both through the screen of bushes beside the road to the base of a big tree.

Gingerly, he sat Benja down beside it and scraped together some wood and tinder. He struck his piece of flint over and over into it, his hand shaking as shuddering waves of panic crashed over him. Even if the Terrors were nothing but coyotes, a pack of them could have killed Benja in his weakened state. He thought of the bones in the cave he had found. They would certainly come for the blood that was trailed down the road.

What if the fire didn’t light? What if there were too many of them to fight off?

Finally, a spark caught, and Illya nursed it to life. He moved Benja closer to the heat, swallowing worry when the movement did not wake his cousin.

Carefully, he unwrapped the saturated cloth from Benja’s leg. His ankle had been torn open. Punctures that looked to have come from a powerful set of teeth made a semicircle on it. A ragged chunk of muscle had been torn out of Benja’s lower calf.

The wound was deep. Under continuously welling blood, Illya saw a gleam of white. It had to be a ligament or bone. He didn’t hesitate for another moment. His apprenticeship with Samuel had not been useless, after all. He knew how to stop bleeding.

He tore a strip from the bottom of his shirt and wrapped up the wound again. Firmly, he pushed down on it. His head spun as the blood welled up under the fabric and soaked through with awful warmth. The wound was much worse than the cut he had held on Charlie’s forehead.

He pushed harder, trying not to panic but failing as he felt the faint pulse of Benja’s life seeping out from under his fingers.

His muscles shook with fatigue. The world narrowed in around him until there was nothing in it but him and his cousin and his hands, white-knuckled against the wound. Finally, the blood stopped soaking through the bandage.

He knew that it would start again the moment he let up. Benja could not afford to lose any more blood. He had to find a way to keep pressure on the wound without holding it. After some thought, he packed the fabric into the wound and tied another strip of his shirt cloth around it. He twisted a stick in the knot to tighten it, securing it by doubling the ends back and knotting them behind the ankle bone. It held. He collapsed back against the tree then, shaking, his heart pounding so that he felt it through his whole body.

He sent a thought of gratitude to Samuel for his patient training but wished more than anything that Samuel were there. Illya had only the most basic idea of what to do for Benja. It might not be enough. The thought was terrifying, and he shook it away.

What Benja needed was action, not wishes. Illya pulled himself up, bracing against the tree. He got water from the stream and built the fire higher. Benja was shivering violently, still horribly pale, with beads of sweat running down the sides of his face.

Shock, Illya thought. Remembering something else Samuel had taught him, he elevated his cousin’s legs on a rock. Gently, he slapped Benja’s face until he groaned then coaxed some water into his mouth. Benja swallowed and did not pass out again. Illya let himself feel a tiny bit encouraged.

He checked the bandage again and loosened it a little, until he could feel the feeble thrumming of Benja’s heart at the spot on top of his foot where it should always be. He took a deep breath, collecting his thoughts. What could have made a wound like this? How had Benja come to be so far out on the path at nightfall? What would have happened to him if he had fallen there, alone, his blood welling up and spilling into the earth unchecked?

Illya shuddered and closed his eyes.

What would Samuel do? Clean the wound as a start. Even if Benja survived so much blood loss, the ’fection was a more dangerous enemy than the injury itself. The Healer would use yarrow leaf in boiled water, some of the brew, or garlic broth. If he could clean it out well enough, he would sew the edges of the wound together. Samuel had tiny bone needles and thin strips of suet. He had rows and rows of jars with herbs and salves, almost entirely replaced in the months since the raid. Illya had none of those things.

This wound, shaped like a scoop, couldn’t be sewn together at all. It would have to heal by what Samuel had called “the second way,” filling in slowly from the edges, rather than by knitting together in an even seam. To heal the second way took a very long time, and Benja did not have time.

Benja groaned and opened his eyes. There was a little more color in his cheeks.

“Hey,” he said. He grimaced: an awful expression that appeared to take more energy than he had. His head slumped to the side.

“Okay Benj?” Illya asked, his voice catching. His eyes were burning, and his face felt hot. He rubbed his eyes and tears came away on his hand. Benja squinted up at him then closed his eyes.

“Knock it off,” he said. “I’m the one who’s hurt.”

“I’m sorry,” Illya whispered.

“You don’t get to feel sorry for yourself.” Benja opened his eyes again, glaring with unexpected ferocity, though his gaze seemed unfocused. “You were a stupid jerk, but you’re still my cousin and my friend, and that is all there is.” He closed his eyes as if it had taken an enormous effort to talk.

Illya stared at the bandages. The blood had not soaked through yet. Benja opened his eyes again.

“Ran into a badger,” he said. “Got ahold of me a couple of miles ago and wouldn’t let go. Took some of me with him. I’d stopped for a drink, picked the wrong spot. Stupid not to know a badger den.” He laughed a little, without mirth.

“I wrapped it up. Tried to get as far away as I could. Kept getting harder to stay up. I couldn’t even see where I was going,” he said.

“You probably left a trail of blood the whole way,” Illya said.

“Naw,” Benja said. “Only halfway, once it soaked through.” Illya glared at him, and Benja answered with a weak chuckle.

“What are you doing out here at all?” Illya asked. Benja tried to sit up, grunting with the effort.

“I came to find you,” he said. Illya dropped his eyes to the ground, studying a footprint he had left in the dust, his throat thick and tight.

“Knew you couldn’t be dead, like everyone said,” Benja said.

“They… must have let you out of prison,” Illya said, his voice breaking.

Benja squinted up at him and stared for a few uncomfortable moments, frowning. Illya wished the earth would swallow him up. He couldn’t meet Benja’s eyes.

“I got out,” Benja said finally. Illya managed a nod.

“That’s not all,” Benja said. “Conna locked up your ma and sister too. They are still in there. I…” He hesitated. “I was the only one with a window. I had help from the outside, but the Enforcers heard me climbing out.” Illya groaned and, without thinking, struck the tree with his injured hand. He pulled it into his chest and sucked in air through gritted teeth, welcoming the pain, though it made stars dance across his vision. For a moment, the throbbing in his hand chased away the horrible images of his mother and sister in jail.

Benja looked from Illya’s hand to his face, frowning.

“I don’t even know who broke me out. There was a scratching; then the window opened. I was halfway through climbing out and the guards came. I had to run for it. I hoped I could find you.” Benja’s face was white. It stretched as he grimaced so that he looked like one of the skeletons that lived under the skin of men.

Benja had been his friend all along. He had tried to stop it all; every mistake that Illya had made. Even stealing the book had only been to save Illya from himself. Illya looked away, not knowing what to say. He felt tears welling up in his eyes again.

“There’s… something else,” Benja said, wincing as he shifted his leg. “After you left, Impiri asked the guard to bring Conna. They talked for a while. I couldn’t hear what they said, but he let her out. After that, rumors were that they were leading the village together and that… Sabelle was promised to him.”

Illya saw spots dancing in front of his eyes. There was a roaring in his ears that overtook all other sounds. Hot rage coiled up inside him.

“She wanted that?” he managed to say.

Benja frowned. “I don’t think anyone could force that girl to do something she didn’t want to,” he said.

“Great,” Illya muttered. He stared at the ground, wishing suddenly that he had stayed in his cave after all. He had thought that things couldn’t possibly get worse, but he had been wrong. Finally, he rubbed his hand across his eyes and sighed.

“I still have to go back,” he said.

Benja shook his head. “You can’t. They only stopped looking for you because they think you’re dead. They’d shoot an arrow right through you as soon as they saw you,” he said.

“I’m not afraid.”

“You should be. Conna can get them all stirred up about anything with the way he talks, and he isn’t messing around. Those Enforcers of his would kill you.” Illya stared into the fire. A branch exploded and sent sparks up into the night air.

“He won’t keep them locked up forever,” Benja said.

“He could do anything he wants to them,” Illya said. Benja frowned but did not disagree. New beads of sweat had broken out on his forehead from the effort of talking. Illya covered him up with the remainder of his shirt.

“Just rest. You’re safe now, at least,” he said.

In truth, Benja was a long way from being out of danger. Illya built up the fire then coated a branch in sap to burn for light before setting off in search of medicinal plants. Benja was asleep before Illya finished making the torch.

Illya crashed through the underbrush in the darkness, disregarding how thorns and branches caught at him, tearing his skin. He held the flaming branch high above his head, casting a circle of shifting light ahead. He knew he couldn’t go far from Benja. Bleeding, and weak, he would be easy prey for the Terrors and anything else that was out there.

Trying to focus on the immediate need, instead of the overwhelming flood of worries, he scanned the ground for the fuzzy little fronds of yarrow.

There were none anywhere. Why was it that you saw hundreds of them when you were foraging for something tastier? He thought wistfully of the rows of dried plants hanging from Samuel’s walls and ceiling.

CHAPTER THIRTY

ILLYA BUILT A little shelter around his cousin. Benja laid in it, too weak to move, for four days. Illya did everything that he could think of to treat the wound. Not having any clay pots, or even a piece of rawhide to hang over the fire and boil water in, he layered the broadest leaves he could find, crossing them back and forth into a bowl to hold water. He placed it over the fire on a stack of rocks. After a little while, the outer leaves burned away, but the inner ones stayed intact long enough for bubbles to rise to the surface of the water.

He tore fresh bandages from his shirt and cleaned them with part of the water. With the rest of it, he brewed an infusion of yarrow and a little wild garlic and used it to wash the wound.

It had taken a long time to find yarrow, but once he had, it was plentiful, and there were enough of the fuzzy leaves to pack into the wound in the place of the filthy fabric of his shirt. He feared the ’fection, but, having done everything about it that was in his power, he tried to put it out of his mind.

Now the immediate concern was all the blood that Benja had lost. He could not sit up without lying back again, dizzy and wan. Knowing that Benja needed meat to recover, Illya ranged away from him as far as he dared in the search for it. Game was sparse now that he was closer to the village, and though he had set traps, he had not caught anything.

On the fifth morning, after boiling water and cleaning Benja’s wound, he went out along the trap line again.

His fears weighed down, pressing on his mind. Time was dwindling by while his family was stuck in prison at Conna’s mercy and the village faced the approach of winter unprepared. Meanwhile, the Rovers who had left the footprints by the spring could be anywhere. They could have attacked the village already. Most of the people there didn’t even believe that the Rovers existed anymore. Already divided by their internal problems, they would be an easy target.

Through it all, Benja was growing weaker and weaker as the days passed. Illya was desperate to find meat. Still, trap after trap came up empty. When he reached the end of the line, there was a sprung trap, with paw prints nearby.

Usually, he would have reset the trap, encouraged that there had been something in the area, even if it had escaped. But as he looked down at the little line of prints, he sunk to his knees in despair. The enormity of what he was facing threatened to crush him.

He couldn’t stay out there, waiting to catch food where there was none. He was doing his best to battle the forces arrayed against Benja alone, but it wasn’t enough. Benja needed Samuel. He knew in his deepest heart that, despite all of his best efforts, he was losing the battle. Benja was going to fade until he slipped away.

Illya knelt beside the sprung trap and the little prints in the dust for a long time and cried.

Eventually, it eased, as if he had indeed washed the despair from his heart with the tears. He blinked them away and found himself on the other side of the flood.

The trap and its one missed opportunity didn’t matter, not really. He knew what he had to do. There would be no way to sneak into the village unseen, not with a gravely wounded man. To get to Samuel, he would have to pass right through the center square. There was no way to go through at night, not with the gates shut. He would have to carry Benja through the village in broad daylight, in full sight of anyone who happened to be there, and hope that they would let him get to Samuel before shooting him down.

They would kill him eventually, and it didn’t matter. At least he wouldn’t be around to see Sabelle marry Conna. All that mattered was getting Benja to safety and getting his family out of prison. After that, maybe he would be able to warn them about the Rovers. They would all have a better chance then.

He went back to the little lean-to, gauging the position of the sun in the sky.

“Benj, we are going to Samuel,” he said. Benja did not respond.

He was pale to grayness. A sheen of sweat coated his skin, and his eyes were glassy and unfocused. He moaned when Illya tried to move him. Though he was shivering, his face was hot with fever. Illya swore. He pulled the bandaging off the wound and found that it was far too hot. It was red and smelled sickening.

No red streaks were running towards Benja’s heart, though; that, at least, was good.

There was a little of the yarrow infusion left from that morning, and Illya used all of it to clean the wound as well as he could. All the while, he talked.

“It’s going to be okay, Benj. You are going to be fine. Everything will be alright,” he said. Benja groaned intermittently, muttering incoherent words, as if he was already on the other side, talking to someone there. Maybe his sister, Rachel, or Illya’s father.

Illya clenched his jaw as he worked. Benja couldn’t die; he wouldn’t let it happen. There were no red streaks now, and there would be no red streaks. He would get to Samuel, and the Healer would know what to do.

There was an area where a flap of skin had stayed attached at the edge of the wound. Illya had cut away the grossly mangled part on the first night but left that bit, unsure if it would be better or worse to keep it. He dabbed gently at it with the leaves.

The spot sunk under the pressure of his fingers and yellow pus oozed out from under the flap. Frantically, Illya pressed on the skin all around the area. He found more. He cleaned and rinsed, cleaned and rinsed, then collapsed, sagging against the wall of the cave. Benja had caught the ’fection.

Squinting through the glaze of moisture across his vision, he took a handful of clean, soaked yarrow and packed the wound. When the ’fection came, first there would be heat and redness then the puss and fever. After that came red streaks. Death always followed once they came.

He couldn’t carry Benja himself and make good time. Instead, he built a travois much like the one Conna had made for Charlie on the day of the planting.

He had used most of his shirt for bandages and he didn’t have enough cloth to tie the travois together, so he joined the branches with strips of bark soaked in the stream until they were flexible. The idea came when he had remembered Ban, soaking wood to shape it into cups for the water wheel.

It was late afternoon by the time he got Benja on the travois, but Illya didn’t care. He would walk all night and all day after that if he had to. He hoisted up the poles and dragged it onto the path.

* * *

At sunset, Illya didn’t stop. Doggedly, he went on, putting one foot in front of the other, pushing himself forward in a daze, though his head spun with thirst and hunger.

The going was unbearably slow. A journey that would have taken a few hours if he could have run stretched out as he dragged the weight of his unconscious cousin over roots, and uneven ground. After the night chill had burned away, the sun rose hot. Sweat rolled down his forehead into his eyes. His fingers were slippery and numb with the continuous effort of gripping the travois poles, but he pressed on.

It was nearing sunset on the second day when he reached the spot on the riverbank where once he had stayed outside the walls to dig a box from the mud. Illya paused then gently laid Benja down. He scooped up some river water and trickled it onto Benja’s forehead to cool him before taking a drink himself.

The wound did not seem to be worse but was no better either. Illya stood. They would be in sight of the gates soon, and he was glad. Benja would be safe, and he would finally face them all.

* * *

They passed through the gates without meeting anyone. The air felt unnaturally still and thick, pulling into his heaving lungs like molasses. Nothing but the weary creaking of the travois broke the silence.

After a bit, he smelled the fires, heard them crackling, then heard the laughter of the villagers. Benja moaned, stirring for the first time in many miles. Illya tightened his grip.

This was it. Samuel’s hut was close, almost in sight now. Please let it not be too late, he prayed silently. Even if there had been a way to avoid the circle, he wouldn’t have taken it.

He wanted to face them. It was terrifying, but he wanted it more than anything he had wanted in his life. The weeks of crushing guilt were over.

Illya strode into their midst as if it was just another evening. Everyone stopped talking.

A ripple of whispers followed behind him; the response delayed as the people shook themselves out of their shock and turned to their neighbors to ask if they had indeed seen what they thought they had.

“That’s Illya. That’s him.”

“But he is dead.”

“Where did he come from?”

“He’s crazy. Why would he come back here?”

Illya lifted his chin, meeting the incredulous stares, and pushed on, dragging the travois step by step. Samuel’s hut was visible beyond the circle of firelight. The second hemisphere of the murmuring crowd stood ahead of him, threatening to block his way. He hoped Samuel himself would be somewhere among them and would step out of the crowd, but it was not to be.

“Stop.”

Illya glanced in the direction of the voice. Conna, apparently not affected by the paralysis that had stopped everyone else, was standing up on the steps, his bow fully drawn. He had an arrow aimed directly at the center of Illya’s chest.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

ILLYA STOPPED.

Conna’s bow creaked. The door behind him opened, and Impiri emerged, holding an ancient gun. She came to stand beside him.

“I knew it was too good to be true that we had seen the last of him,” she muttered to Conna.

“Let me by,” Illya said, his voice steady. “Let me take Benja to Samuel. Then I’ll come back, and you can do whatever you want with me.” He raised his voice as he spoke, pushing past the nerves, hearing it ring out with confidence that it had never had when he had been their Leader.

Conna contemplated this with narrowed eyes, his bow unmoved from its mark. Illya swallowed. Conna only had to let go of the string and the arrow would be buried in his heart.

“Let him. Where is he going to go?” Aaro said. Conna frowned, looking from Illya to Benja and back again. Illya stared him down. There was no fear, just the inevitability of what had to happen.

“Fine,” Conna said finally and lowered his bow. Behind him, Impiri frowned.

“Don’t forget that he is not to be trusted,” she said.

Illya didn’t bother to answer. He turned back to his path, put his head down, and pulled, watching the stones of the mosaic passing by under his feet. Only twenty more steps remained, but they seemed to stretch out longer than any part of the journey before. The crowd parted in front of him. No one apparently wanted to take issue, now that Conna had backed down. Instead they stared, their eyes boring into him as he passed.

He passed the oak tree, and there, standing under the canopy of its branches, was Sabelle. She stared at him with wide eyes, her face pale, looking thinner than he remembered. He met her gaze and she dropped her eyes to the ground. On her left hand was a promise ring carved from wood.

Illya gritted his teeth together and went on, telling himself that it didn’t matter, not anymore. He had not slept or eaten in two days. The remainder of his shirt hung in tatters. He was bone tired, filthy, and covered with Benja’s blood. He reached the Healer’s hut and kicked the door open. His entire body shook.

Samuel lifted one eyebrow, betraying only mild surprise at the sight of Illya bursting through his door.

“Knew you would come back,” he said.

Together, they moved Benja off his travois onto the pile of skins beside Samuel’s fire. Absently, Samuel directed Illya to boil water and to tear fresh bandages. Every so often, he muttered the names of herbs as he unwrapped the old bandages and examined the wound. Illya stared at the Healer’s face, his stomach clenching with every crease of his forehead, every frown. He retrieved herbs for Samuel from the shelves on the walls and from the dried bunches hanging from the ceiling.

“You did well,” Samuel said. “It’s clean and still no red streaks.” He looked up at Illya with a small smile. The door opened again, pouring light into the dim room and revealing Conna, backed by four Enforcers.

“That’s enough. You’ve got him here,” he said. Illya took a slow breath and shifted his eyes from Samuel to Benja’s pale face. He had barely opened his eyes or spoken since they had first left the camp. Illya knew that as difficult as the journey had been for him, for Benja it had been a hundred times worse. He only hoped that the strain of it hadn’t been too much.

“He’s going to be alright,” Samuel murmured.

Illya met his gaze. The Healer’s eyes were sincere but betrayed concern despite the reassuring words.

“Wonderful,” Conna said. “When he’s awake, he can answer for breaking out of prison.” He motioned, and the Enforcers surged forward, seizing Illya by the shoulders. They pinned his arm behind his back and propelled him away from Benja and Samuel, out of the hut, back to the crowd at the center fire.

Illya did not struggle. He had promised that he would come. It was only fair that he be judged for his actions.

He stood below the stairs, the sea of angry faces only a few feet away. Behind him, on the stairs, Conna was speaking.

“You all know what he deserves,” he yelled. It could have been his imagination, but Illya thought that he heard an edge of panic behind Conna’s words.

“This summer was all we had. He lied to you. It is his fault that all we have to show for it is that field out there,” Conna said. To the west of the circle, beyond a few rows of huts, was the field. Illya’s mouth went dry. The rays of the setting sun illuminated it, making it glow with a sick beauty. Where there had been row after row of waist-high plants, full of promise, now there was a mat of withered leaves and white-coated stems.

“Banishment wasn’t enough for him,” Conna said. From behind him, Illya heard the creak of a bow being drawn. “This time, we have to make sure he isn’t coming back.” Illya knew that there was no point in defending himself. Denial would be hollow in the face of their anger and despair.

“You want justice?” he asked. “You should have justice. It’s only right.” Behind him, the bow creaked, but no twang and piercing ending followed the sound. Conna must have been waiting for the crowd’s approval before he released the arrow.

Illya took that moment while they hesitated, confusion at his easy capitulation warring with their anger, to pull up a vine from the ground. It was a plant that grew everywhere, even pushing up between the stones of the mosaic.

He raised his fist high for all of them to see it: the red-stemmed creeper, first of the malice plants.

Illya stuffed the creeper into his mouth, chewed it up and swallowed it down.

The villagers jostled each other, fighting for a clear view of what would happen next. Their murmurs swelled louder. No one knew how the creeper killed. No one had eaten one of the malice plants within any of their lifetimes.

Would it drop him quickly? Would he stagger about, frothing at the mouth, his face purple as he choked to death? Or would he double over as his stomach cramped up in agony?

Illya glanced back over his shoulder at Conna, who had lowered his bow and was gaping at Illya with his mouth hanging open.

Nothing happened.

The moments stretched out as the people goggled at him, wild-eyed, whispering to their friends. Illya felt nothing, no sign that he was about to drop dead in the middle of the square.

He smiled. An absurd urge bubbled up inside him, filling him with wild, giddy feelings and the overwhelming need to laugh. He chuckled then laughed out loud. The people stared, no doubt wondering if this was the way the plant killed: an excess of joy.

But Illya was not dying. He felt wonderful. It was the first time he had eaten in days, since the night before the missed trap when he had eaten a tiny bit of a fish he had caught for Benja.

He pushed people aside and ran to the place in the mosaic. He knew what he would find, though he had not looked at it since the night of the first shoots, since the night it had been impressed on his calf when he watched Sabelle. There, beside the cattail root and the spring ramp, only a short distance from the sunchoke itself: the red-stemmed creeper was laid out in tiny stones.

“This plant!” he yelled, pulling more of it up from the ground. The creeper was everywhere. There was even a little vine of it coming up to overlap its stone counterpart.

“This is a plant for eating,” he said, holding it up in the air. “I haven’t died yet, and I’m not going to die. Look, all of you! It is right here in the mosaic. This picture is a cornucopia. It was made to celebrate a fat time when our ancestors had enough to eat.” He looked around. Their faces were shocked, disbelieving.

“That can’t be right,” Charlie muttered.

“You think I’m crazy,” Illya said. “I know what you are all thinking. It’s on the wall.” The villagers gawked at him, some nodding, others simply staring in confusion.

Clearly, most of them still thought that he was bound to drop dead at any moment. But more and more time was passing since he had eaten the plant. Without evidence to the contrary appearing, soon they would have to start considering that he could be right.

Illya walked to the fire. The crowd parted for him with fear, as if he was a ghost. It was true in a way, he thought. He had gone out and survived the night and now was back among them. He had eaten the creeper and should be dying now, but that wasn’t happening either. He grabbed the end of a half-burned stick from the edge of the fire pit and pulled it out.

Using the charred end of his stick, he drew a shaky symbol on the stones of the square.

?

“This,” he said, “we have always thought it was a fern fiddlehead, but no one could ever say what that little dot was. A slip of the chisel we always said, right?” He looked around. They were listening.

“It’s not a plant. It is a symbol. I saw it all through the book.” At the mention of the book, a few people grumbled. Illya held up his hands.

“I know you don’t trust me. The book has brought nothing but trouble. But listen. The people who made that wall still knew how to read. They would have known this symbol.” Illya took a breath.

“Wherever I saw it in the book, it came after a question, something they didn’t know. It’s a mark, an unsure mark,” he said and paused, letting the meaning of his words sink in.

“There are two plants beside it on the wall. The creeper and the mushroom. One of those plants is in the cornucopia and the other isn’t. Someone must have eaten them both on the same day. Maybe they died, and the people didn’t know which one had the malice. No one would have wanted to risk trying it again. But there was a time when someone put the creeper here, to celebrate that it was food.”

By now, more than enough time had passed that something should have happened to him if the creeper had malice. Below it on the wall was lace top; a plant that would freeze the body and steal the breath in minutes according to legend.

Illya pulled up another handful of the creeper, stuffed it into his mouth, and swallowed.

“You can wait as long as you need to see that I come to no harm from it. Once you believe me, you will also see that this is what is going to get us through the winter.”

All around eyes widened, followed by a hum of voices. The creeper was everywhere, it grew in the smallest cracks and spread across the ground. If everyone gathered it, with the meat smoking beside the fire, there would be enough food to see them through.

“That doesn’t change what he did,” Conna yelled, his face red and furious. He must have sensed the shift in the crowd, how they now clustered around Illya with curiosity, their urge to punish him fading. He seemed afraid to raise his bow again. Instead, he whirled around and pointed at the field of dead plants.

“He lied to us. Remember what happened the last time we trusted something from that book of his.”

“I did,” Illya said. “I found the parent plants with disease and said nothing. It was only because I hoped that it would not happen here. If it hadn’t, we would be digging sunchokes now.” He dropped his eyes. The full magnitude of what they had lost, the security, the hope, hit him with a wave of piercing sorrow.

“What Conna didn’t tell you is that I had come to tell everyone about it that morning and he spoke first.” Illya turned on Conna and fixed him with a stare. He narrowed his eyes, daring Conna to do what needed to be done, to come out with everything, to face it all. Conna broke the stare and shifted his gaze around, catching the eyes of the handful of Enforcers who were standing nearby.

“You won’t admit it to them?” Illya asked, his words gaining strength. He took a breath. Around him the people looked from him to Conna and back again. Conna pressed his lips together.

“If they are stupid enough to forget what you have done, it won’t be on me,” Conna said.

Beyond the barren field, the golden grass swayed in the wind. There was silence, filled, as silence often is, with small sounds. Crickets in the grasses, the rustling leaves of the oak tree above them, the small shuffling and continual arranging of the people shifting their weight and looking to see what their neighbors would do.

No one wanted to be the first to act.

He looked from face to face. There were some there who were intelligent enough to know he was right, who wouldn’t be swept away by hysteria, he was sure of it.

Charlie, he thought, surely would be on his side, but the man didn’t meet his eye.

He had not forgiven Illya for the Soil-Digger fiasco. It hadn’t been Illya’s idea either, but he couldn’t know that.

Ban was in the crowd, and Illya looked to him hopefully, but he was deep in conversation in low tones with another man.

The silence stretched on.

“What about the people in the cellar, people who haven’t done anything wrong?” Illya asked.

“What will happen in midwinter? Will the food still be shared with them when people begin starving? Or will they be left to starve?”

The silence thickened.

Aaro stepped out from behind Conna. Slowly, he walked across the square, darting a swift glance over his shoulder at his brother as he passed. Illya tensed as he neared, but something about the boy’s face made him pause. His eyes were hard and his jaw was clenched, working visibly. He met Illya’s eyes, pressed his lips together, and nodded. He stood beside Illya and turned to face his brother.

Sometimes, love counted for more than fear.

Conna’s face went pale. His mouth opened, and closed, and opened again.

“How can you…” he said.

“You can’t keep Pa in there,” Aaro said.

“After everything, you stand for him?” Conna spat back.

Aaro shrugged, “Maybe I just don’t want to be like him. No one else is going to get hurt,” Aaro said.

Conna turned to the left then to the right, looking at the other Enforcers.

“Well, he might have gone crazy, but the rest of you haven’t,” he said. None of them answered. Instead, they looked away or at Illya speculatively.

“He could be right,” Julian said.

“There never was a plan for the people in there come winter, not that I heard of,” Nico said.

“Julian? Nico? No, come on. Martin?” Conna said, his voice reaching greater levels of desperation as each name was met with silence.

“We have been divided long enough. It’s time to get those people out of the cellar,” Illya said, raising his voice. “It’s time to reconcile, to work together. It’s our last chance.”

He beckoned to Aaro and the other Enforcers to follow him, hoping that they would. He ascended the stairs, pushing past Conna. Conna’s face was flaming red. His mouth gaped open, but a look at the Enforcers behind Illya stopped him from doing anything. Illya went down the stairs to the cellar. Mark, the Enforcer guard, stopped him but soon let them past when faced with Aaro and all the rest of them.

Illya emerged from the front door of the house surrounded by his family, blinking in the sunshine; his heart swelled until it felt like it could burst. Elias came out next, and Sabelle sprinted up the stairs to take her father’s arm. He was pale and shaking. Impiri hung back, looking awkward. Elias had been in the cellar for three months.

Next came Jimmer with Aaro, they stopped briefly at the top of the stairs, and Jimmer turned to face Conna.

Before he could say anything, there was a wild yelling from the direction of the gates.

“What? Terrors? It’s still early for…” Julian said. Illya’s heart froze, and a chill shot up his spine.

“No,” Illya said. “Rovers. It’s a Rover attack!” he yelled at the top of his lungs. The people shuffled around, obviously confused. He had been hoping he could warn them, that they would have time to fortify the walls, maybe even to train a bit, but it was not to be.

Men with wild hair and markings painted all over their bodies streamed through the gates, whooping and yelling. They raised their bows and started firing. A rain of arrows fell on the crowd. Some of them had guns strapped across their backs.

“Take cover!” Illya yelled.

The stunned people surged into action. A few had been hit and were clutching legs and arms. One man lay on the ground, unmoving, an arrow sticking though his chest.

Charlie.

A wave of dizziness washed over Illya.

“Charlie,” he whispered, his voice catching in his throat. But there was no time for sorrow. He pushed his mother and Molly back through the doors of the house then turned back to the fight. The Enforcers had been taken off guard without their bows to hand. While they scrambled for their weapons, dodging arrows, Conna stood on the porch staring at the chaos, not reacting. His bow lay at his feet, unused.

“Conna.” Illya shook his shoulders. Conna blinked and looked at him mutely.

“Shoot, Piri, shoot!” Ada screamed at her sister who was still clutching the ancient gun. Her knuckles were white, and her eyes were wide.

“There’s… there’s only one bullet,” she whispered. “It’s the last one left.”

Ada’s shoulder’s fell slightly. She nodded. “The one Pa saved,” she said.

Impiri nodded. “For just in case,” she said.

“Make it count,” Ada said. The Enforcers had gathered into a little cluster and were returning fire, but many of them were wounded, and they struggled to hold back against the onslaught.

“We should surrender,” Conna muttered. Illya remembered his own pa then and the crossbow that was still in the magpie nest. He bolted for his mother’s hut. Would he even be able to hold it steady without the memories swooping in to steal his mind? Would he be able to face them?

There was no choice. He had to do something. Try or die. He retrieved the bow and a handful of bolts and sprinted back to the fighting. Near the fires, racks of meat were drying, and piles of foraged plants lay, waiting to be stored for winter: everything the villagers had been able to gather since he had left. The food was the thinnest of hope, but it was all they had. Even with the red-stemmed creeper, they would not survive if all they had managed to save was stolen.

Illya nocked a bolt into the center of the crossbow and sighted down his arm, his belly clenching and arms shaking. He breathed, trying to still them. It had been ten years since he had even picked up this weapon, but he knew that his slingshot would not be enough. His target shook in front of him as he took too long to aim. Try as he might, he could not keep the end of the bolt still.

Suddenly, from behind him came a loud bang, followed by another to his right, just after it. Something whistled past his ear, and there was a crack and splintering sound from the oak tree. He turned and saw a Rover drop his gun and clutch his shoulder. There was a trickle of red, and behind him a branch fell from the oak tree to the ground. Illya turned around to see where the other sound had come from and saw Impiri lowering the muzzle of her father’s gun, her face white. She met Illya’s eyes and pressed her lips together.

Her aim had not been perfect, but she had used the last bullet to save Illya’s life. He bit his lip, turned around again. He sighted and pulled the trigger, adding the power of his crossbow to the rain of arrows the Enforcers were sending at the Rovers at the gate. His bolt drove into the leg of their leader—a man with a strip of hair down the center of his shaved head.

The man bellowed, stumbling as he tried to run forward. The Enforcers loaded more arrows in their bows and let them loose. Illya shot as fast as he could. His years of practice aiming the slingshot seemed to cross over to the less-familiar weapon so that he hit a mark with almost every shot. Soon the Rovers were retreating, most nursing wounds to their shooting arms or legs.

They retreated to the gates, and the Enforcers ran forward, chasing them with arrows nocked. Illya slid a fresh bolt into the crossbow and joined them. Just before the Rovers went through the gates, their leader turned and sent an arrow flying back in a high arc over their heads.

“Impiri, look out!” came a yell. Ada raced towards her sister. She shoved Impiri to the ground, and the arrow found its mark in her chest.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

AUNT ADA LAY on the ground, a red stain spreading out under her. There was a clatter as the gun fell from Impiri’s fingers. Her hands flew to her face; she dropped to her knees and began to keen, rocking back and forth.

Aunt Ada was lying on her side. The arrow had hit her in the right side of her chest. Not the side with the heart, Illya thought frantically, thankful for it, though it was a small thing. She was still breathing but shallowly. Gently, he removed the arrow, hoping it hadn’t pierced anything vital. He held pressure on the wound.

The injured side was not rising and falling with her breaths in the same way as the undamaged side. It felt sunken, as if it had deflated and could not hold the air. Then it started growing bigger, seeming to suck in air between his fingers and through the hole as she took breaths. Illya took his hand from the hole, watching the trickle of blood. If the air getting sucked in was coming out, the blood in the wound would be bubbling, and it was not. He listened, pressing his ear to her ribcage. He wasn’t sure what he was listening for, but it sounded different than any lung he had ever listened to before. She struggled to breathe more with each breath.

“Samuel,” he screamed, “get Samuel!” Her chest sounded like Benja’s old drum, he realized. Hollow. Fingers shaking, he felt between her ribs. He was terrified of making her worse, but he knew that something had to be done quickly to let the air out.

Illya took a deep breath and carefully pushed a knife between her ribs. A hissing stream of air came bubbling from the hole he had made. She took a breath, a little easier. He slid his knife back a little bit, now thinking about the lung re-inflating inside. He didn’t want to pierce it again, but he knew that he had to keep the hole open somehow.

At that moment, Samuel came up behind him. He took one look at the scene and slapped a hand tightly over the arrow hole. He took the knife handle from Illya then called for a hollow cattail reed from his bag. The Healer slid the reed into the opening before withdrawing the knife.

Samuel sighed. His shoulders relaxed visibly.

Illya sank to the ground. Soon, his mother and Molly were beside him, embracing him. Uncle Leo knelt beside Ada and stroked her hair off her face.

Guilt clenched his stomach. If he had been faster, if he had warned them sooner, they could have been ready. If he hadn’t tried to lead them, how different could it all be? The Patrollers would have still been out where they needed to be, not guarding a jail of thier own people. Maybe none of this would have happened at all.

But it had taken all of them to reach this point. No one person had made it happen. He wasn’t the devil. Impiri, who was now huddled over her sister, sobbing, and being comforted by Sabelle and Elias, was not the devil either. Not even Conna or the Rovers were the devil. The devil was a thing that hid amongst them, preying on differences and anger, wedging itself into those cracks to drive them all apart.

Samuel was right. They were fools to let it do its work.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

IT WAS SPRING. Benja and Illya stood together, looking out over a field of tiny shoots. They made a soft green blanket over the earth, and Illya was reminded of the photograph they had seen once. A square of short, funny grass had sat behind smiling people in the house of the old city.

“You know, it’s probably a good thing all those sunchokes kicked it,” Benja said thoughtfully, stroking a scraggly beard that had sprouted on his face over the winter, resembling the sparse little shoots in a certain way. “They make me fart awful. Would have been a bad winter.”

Illya burst out in laughter, unable to hold back a flood of chuckles and hiccups. Finally, he caught his breath enough to gasp.

“Me too, Benj, me too.”

“At least Ma can walk and breathe at the same time now,” Benja said with a new note of seriousness. “There would be no air left in our hut if we had been eating those sunchokes all this time. She wouldn’t have been able to escape.”

It had not been an easy winter. The snows had come far too early and lasted too long. Even with the mass of red-stemmed creeper they had been able to gather, their stores had been too small.

After Illya had told them the truth about the legendary Terrors, the villagers had made hunting excursions beyond their old boundaries. The people had been hesitant to stay out after dark at first. A generations-old habit was not easily broken. But, with enough time and necessity, even the most nervous had ventured out to the area above the waterfall and beyond.

It had not been easy to go so far to get food, but no one had died from starvation. It was an incredible feat to make it through a winter without losing a single person, considering that once it had seemed that the entire village would go that way.

Perhaps the best thing that had come out of it all was the seeds. The field with its moldy plants had been burned. In the frenzy before winter, as the villagers gathered plants, they also collected and saved all of the healthiest seeds they could find. Now there were many kinds of plants sprouting in the freshly-tilled field. There were some new sunchokes, but they were only one of the numerous types of plants that made up the lovely green carpet.

“You are right, this is better,” Illya said.

After the terrible day of the battle, everyone had agreed that they needed big changes. Even with a new plant to eat and the promise of game outside their boundaries, it would not be long before the new resources, too, were depleted. They needed a new system, and, despite the pain of the previous failure, most had agreed to give planting another try. There were no more Enforcers. The Patrollers re-formed under Aaro, but every villager who could lift a bow now trained daily. Everyone needed to be able to defend themselves, and they would not be taken by surprise again.

The village was now led by a council of ten villagers with Elias as chairman. Ban was on it and Illya’s mother. Leya, somber and grief-stricken after the loss of Charlie, but possessed of wisdom and a level head, was too. Aaro was the youngest member. Conna had taken off. Everyone thought he had followed the Rovers after the battle, probably to join them; there was nothing left for him in the village after things hadn’t gone his way. Illya hadn’t noticed; he had been focused on Aunt Ada at the time. Conna hadn’t been seen since then.

Illya had also been offered a place on the council.

“You are the one who reads. We need to hear what you have to say,” Elias had said. Illya had turned him down. He was not a prophet. The Almanac was just a book and nothing more. Instead, he resumed his old place as Samuel’s apprentice. The village was going to need a Healer when the old man couldn’t work anymore, and Illya knew that he could learn to do it well.

He still read, but now Illya prowled the pages of the book for medicines, remedies, and ways of treating ailments. He devoured this knowledge, along with all that Samuel had to teach him, with the same excitement he had felt when he had first discovered how to read. They had found a few more books in the farther ruins, and Illya was teaching Molly, Benja, and Ban Jonstead how to read from a wonderful book called Robinson Crusoe.

Benja was still chuckling and wiped a tear from his eye. He hitched the thick leather strap of his drum higher on his shoulder.

Illya looked past him to see Sabelle walking by with Martha, looking beautiful, wearing a new blue dress that had been scavenged from one of the farther ruins. They hadn’t ventured to the city yet, but their world was much bigger now that they didn’t fear the night. She looked back over her shoulder and gave him a smile full of shared secrets. His heart thudded, and he returned it. Many things had changed, but some things were the same as they had always been.

He turned back to the plants. Later, he would dance with her beside the central fires. He would twirl her around and make her dress spin and watch her eyes sparkle.

There were new herbs to collect for Samuel now that the shoots were up in the forest.

For now, though, Illya was content just to be, to stand beside his best friend and see the miracle of shoots that had pushed up through the earth to find the sun once again.

Author’s Note

Author’s Note. For inquiring minds, please know that The Old Farmer’s Almanac ® has been quoted in this book: Stillman, Janice. Ed. The Old Farmer’s Almanac 2013, no 221 (Dublin, NH: Yankee Publishing Inc. 2012) Kindle edition. Quotation on Pg 50: Location 3201. Pg 54: Location 3384. Pg 102: Location 3239. Pg 186: Location 1486.

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Copyright

Copyright © 2019

E. L. Stricker

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-7343654-0-5

ISBN-13: 978-1-7343654-0-5

Content

E. L. Stricker
THE ALMANAC

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Author’s Note

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