the girl whispered. “Oon-tie.”
“Yes,” she said, nodding her head. “Oon-tie. I’ll help you. Oon-tie.”
She pulled the girl inside the cloak with her and tied the sash, sharing her body heat with the pale, cold girl. Tucking the girl’s legs around her hips, she rose and once again searched the column for anything she could use for a bandage. Finally realizing that a torn strip of sackcloth was the best she would find, she did her best to wrap it around the girl’s throat while keeping the girl inside her cloak. It wasn’t a proper field dressing—where had that phrase come from?—but it would have to do.
“Oon-tie,” she whispered in the girl’s ear as she bound the wound. “Oon-tie.”
It was then that she realized her fingers were still burning, even though she’d grown warmer. This wasn’t the burn of cold-numbed nerves. It was as if she had dipped her hands into a bag of ants, and the burning itch was spreading up to her palms.
“Oon-tie,” she whispered again, carrying the girl with her to the river, where she knelt and plunged her hands into the icy water, then scrubbed them against each other.
The water soothed the burning enough that she could focus on what to do next: move away from this place. She had no idea if the killers would return, but the bodies themselves would soon draw natural scavengers. She didn’t want to be there when the vultures arrived, didn’t want this girl to watch them peck at the flesh of people she had known and loved.
In the darkness, she picked out a hard, stony road that ran alongside the river. She went upstream, for the simple reason that at least this way they would have access to clean water. After a few minutes, the river widened again, and the sound of water over rocks faded into the darkness. The road bent closer to the river, and a neat stack of thick, smooth logs seemed to materialize out of the night.
A portage, she thought. Perfect place for an ambush. And why do I know this?Who am I?
She let her mind wander over that question for a few minutes but could find no answer. Her back ached with the weight of carrying the girl, and she needed to rest. In the distance, a tree line beckoned. At least she would have cover. She could make it that far. Then they could rest.
But the tree line hovered just out of reach. Her depth perception had been skewed by the flat light of the moon, the crystalline nighttime air and the fact that she was climbing a slow, steady slope. Her breathing grew labored, but she pressed on, the girl shivering in her arms.
The girl ought to be warming up, too, she thought. Yet the girl’s breaths came in ragged rasps. The girl’s legs slid off her waist again and again, as if they were increasingly weighted with stones. Each time, the girl seemed to struggle harder to pull her thin legs back up. She was losing the battle for life.
The woman didn’t let herself think about that. The tree line. The tree line. It became a mantra, the whispered words keeping a rhythm to her stride as she forced herself on into the night.
Finally she could make out distinct trees, some kind of pine, tall and straight, wreathed in bunches of needles that looked as fluffy as a squirrel’s tail.
Just a few more steps, she told herself. You can do this. You’ve done it before. She had no idea where, or when. But she had done it—and more.
The girl went into spasms just as they reached the trees. The woman lowered herself to the ground, pulling the heavy wool even tighter around them, but the warmth did nothing to stem the spasms.
“Ooh-ooh-oon-tie,” the girl gasped.
“I’m trying” the woman answered. “I’m trying to help you, honey. Oon-tie. Oon-tie.”
She felt for a pulse again. It was weaker than before, tiny flutters fighting a rising black wave. The girl’s skin was clammy, her breath shallow. She laid the girl on the ground, in a pile of needles, and turned the girl’s face to her.
“Keep fighting,” she said, hoping her tone of voice would convey what the words could not. “Don’t give up. Don’t you quit on me.”
But the girl’s eyes grew cloudy, her breath more ragged, until finally she let out a tiny gasp.
“Teh-sah.”
Then she was still.
The woman lifted the girl and clutched her inside her cloak, sobbing in the darkness, vainly crying out to any god who might listen in this strange place, “Noooooooooo.”
Sara Deepwell hefted a barrel of ale from the stack and lowered it into a V-shaped cart, then rolled it out of the alehouse and in through the back door of the Deepwell Inn. Despite the cold of the morning, with mist still drifting in off the Adasen River and across the Commons, she wiped a sheen of perspiration from her forehead with a sleeve.
“That’s four barrels,” she said.
Her father, Bandylegs, looked up at the icy-blue sky and nodded. “I’m sure that will be plenty. Let’s get the stew going.”
“Yes, sir,” Sara said, suppressing a small sigh.
She could remember when four barrels of ale wouldn’t have lasted through half an evening at harvest festival. This year, it would probably be more than enough.
She went into the kitchen, dipped her fingertips in a basin and flicked the water onto the skillet atop the stove. The water danced and popped. Satisfied, she speared a huge mutton roast on a metal fork and pressed it onto the skillet, taking in the scent of searing meat, turning it every few minutes until it was nicely browned. The roast went into the boiling water in a cast-iron cauldron, along with the onion, garlic and herbs she had minced before dawn. Later she would add the potatoes, carrots and other vegetables. For now, though, she had other chores.
Always other chores, she thought sadly. The inn was too much work for her father alone, and she had been helping him for what seemed like forever. In truth, it had been six years. Six years to the day since she’d heard her mother’s laugh, since she’d heard her mother’s songs in the public room, since she’d seen her mother’s smile, since she’d tasted her mother’s fish chowder, since she’d felt her mother’s hand pushing at her shoulder to wake her in the morning. Six years, and it could have been yesterday.
It had been a morning just like this one, clear and cold, misty, with a north wind. Sara had been fourteen then, more worried about meeting her friends at the market and giggling as they watched the young men work the dock, pushing carts laden with sacks of wheat off the river barges, or carts laden with wool and furs onto them to be taken downriver. They would watch the men’s muscles ripple as they labored and try to guess which of them would be best at quelling the urges that fluttered in fourteen-year-old girls’ bellies. Not that Sara or any of her friends would have considered actually doing anything about those urges. The watching and the whispering, the giggling and the dreaming, were enough.
Sara had been planning exactly such an adventure that morning as she’d spread feed in the trough for the goat, drawn water from the well that gave the family and the inn its name, and picked an apron full of fresh tomatoes from their small garden. She’d gone into the pantry to put up the tomatoes and come out just in time to see her mother at the door, waving.
“I’m off to the market for flour,” her mother had said, the distinctive musical lilt in her voice as clear to Sara today as it had been six years ago this morning.
And then she was gone.
By midmorning, her father had grown anxious, and together they’d walked across the commons to the waterfront, first to the miller, then to the fish market, then to every other shop along the row, from the wool and fur drying sheds to the ice house. No one had seen her.
Together with a growing band of friends, they’d searched the commons, shooing sheep from their paths as they walked, then fanned out into the town as word spread before them. Townsfolk had checked back gardens, sheds, the stables, the waterfront again, the commons again. They’d expanded the search outside the wall, as farmers