Total pages in book: 204
Estimated words: 193124 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 966(@200wpm)___ 772(@250wpm)___ 644(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 193124 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 966(@200wpm)___ 772(@250wpm)___ 644(@300wpm)
I stop and look over my shoulder.
Then I glance to the sky. With the cloud cover, I can’t see that star that appeared months ago, so bright that it eclipses any others in its vicinity. I have to agree with the others. Its presence carries a portent of doom, somehow.
When I twist back around, Mr. Cavenish and his escorts turn a corner and disappear out of sight. For an instant, I feel like I’m the only one alive inside our wall, everybody else dead, the tedious, lonely life I trudge through gone and replaced by something so much worse. Anxiety seeds along my nerve endings, my hands and feet blooming with numbness, and I try to reach through the wave of panic and cold chills to connect to the world around me. I, too, have a turning, churning core, and I fall into its whirlpool of dread and terror at the slightest topple—
I shove my hand into my cloak’s pocket and feel the bundle of herbs.
I can’t afford to stop, and I certainly can’t turn back.
Scurrying forth, my eyes bounce around at all the doors that are closed to me, all the windows covered. With each house, I pierce the veil of the clapboard walls and see inside. Never have I gone through the front entries or been welcomed as a guest at the meal table—I’m always snuck in the back, brought inside in secret, used for their purposes.
After which, I am worse than a stranger. I’m someone they know to their soul and wish they didn’t—
My feet freeze once again. It’s hard to figure out what’s a genuine warning instinct and what’s fear. But when a shadow in my wake shifts away into the fog, I know my eyes do not deceive.
Something in the street is tracking behind me.
I tremble under the cold weight of my cloak, and feel cracked nails prickle the skin of my nape, a warning that I’ve never felt before—
Hide.
That word, spoken in that assertive voice, takes the place of any other thought in my brain and all of the rushing anxiety in my blood. Throughout my life, the command has haunted me, as if it’s the proper name given to me by whoever birthed and then abandoned me here.
Grabbing fistfuls of sodden wool, I set in to an escape, all kinds of horrendous creatures with fangs and claws populating my mind and leaping free of my imagination to pursue me. Except maybe the threat is more prosaic than a demon. I’ve overheard stories in the pub of traveling men who seek to inoculate themselves from the Pox by a rutting. Even though I wear the drape for a different reason, I can’t escape what it means to everybody else.
All the lanes in my village channel into the market square, and if I can make it that far, there are places to hide in the empty vendor stalls, and also a watchman who makes rounds. He might help me because he has a daughter, and if I scream, perhaps I sound like her?
And I am not unarmed, I guess. I have my little knife tucked into my waistband, and through the jostling of my sloppy strides, I find the hilt with my hand and don’t waste time looking behind me again.
As I sense the presence fall into the chase, I trust the instinct more than my eyes in the darkness. Closer to the square. Closer. Closer—
The figure that steps out in front of me is such a shock that as I wheel my arms and skid on the cobblestones, I do what must never be done.
I look directly into the eyes of the bulky, bearded man who blocks my way.
Following a split second of recognition, a blast of energy goes through me and I am blinded. Then I see the farrier not as he is this night, in the rain, in the lane, but at the moment of his death: His craggy, bearded face is burned on one side, the flesh blackened as meat cooked on a spit, the cheekbone a blaze of bright white in the midst of the wounding, the roots of his molars rivers of enamel that feather into his exposed jaws. Likewise, his eye is gone from its socket and his hair is melted onto his skull. He is gasping for air and then not—
The agony he’s in floods my senses, my own face in indescribable agony, my lungs burning as if I’m breathing fire, the smell of smoke and cooked muscle coring into my nose. My body goes limp, my heart flickering before stopping as well, his death something transmitted into me, through me.
As he catches me in the midst of my collapse, his rough hands bite into my upper arms, and he keeps me from spilling onto the wet lane like something out of an upended basket. I feel myself get yanked into the shadows, and when he pulls me up to his chest, the unwounded side of his face comes into unbearable focus: The features are as he appears currently, no wasting from age, not even a change in the length, color, or thickness of his bushy beard.