Sarah Avery - [BCS319 S01] Read online

  And The Ones Who Walk In

  By Sarah Avery

  The girl who had never known hunger turned her back on that house and walked, her hands empty, right out of the city. She did not say goodbye to her mother. That first day, as the road stretched through farm villages, she found public wells to stop at for water. No one troubled her when she lay down for the night under a roadside tree. Even this far beyond the gates, the city’s luck protected her. In the morning, a farmer pointed the way to an orchard where tradition permitted gleaner’s pickings to people like her. Tart cherries, and not many of them this far into summer, but they were better than nothing. She spent all the coins in her pocket, though she kept her sewing needles in their little brass case, on a pack already loaded with needful things from an old man at a lonely farmstand. Last Chance Gear and Provisions for All, his sign read, Please Pay If You’re Able. “You sure?” he asked. But the girl told him, and herself, that she’d never turn back. “Well,” he said, “here’s everything I wish I had when I tried. Good luck.” She pretended not to notice his missing foot, his crutch. He didn’t mention them, either.

  The second day, the road cut through timberland. It was more woodlot than forest, though, and she’d been taught to find creeks and berries. Her mother had expected her to leave when the time came and had made sure she was not entirely unprepared. This night, the girl who had never known hunger until yesterday made her bed well away from the road, hoping for softer ground. She woke damp and shivering, proud of all her little discomforts, swearing again that she’d never turn back. After seeing for herself what the blessed city did to win its people their blessings, she did not want to benefit from it a single day longer.

  At sunset on the third day, the girl reached the edge of the blessed city’s hinterlands. A wild forest should have grown at the edge of the tame one, but fire had burned it black. The luck boundary showed as clear and deliberate as a quilt seam, where a vast green curve met an expanse of ash. The girl had stepped out through the city’s ancient gates without hesitation, but here she paused. She had not expected to find wreckage so soon. Had it always been always like this? Her anger wanted to run across that line and revel in the ashes, but for one last night she slept on the green side of the boundary, hating herself for accepting the price someone else paid for the blessing of her safety. This time she made a small circle of stones and built a little fire of her own. No one would follow the smoke to rob her, not here. The Last Chance Man had put flint and steel in the pack, but in memory of her mother, the girl practiced what she’d been taught. Rubbing a stick against a strip of bark until she produced a coal took the better part of an hour. At least she woke dry.

  Now she did what she should have done first on her way out of the city. She dug up some tubers for her next meal, drank her fill at a creek, filled the waterskin the Last Chance Man had packed, and found a walking stick she could swing if she had to. She tried swinging it a couple of times and was ashamed at how it satisfied her to hear the thing cut the air. Like her countrymen, she regarded physical fighting with horror. But the other cities on this road were not like the one she had left behind.

  That was good, she reminded herself. She would carry her own risks now. She tapped the stick across the line to test how thick the ash was—easily ankle deep—took one last clear breath, and stepped into the luckless world.

  She’d never in her life coughed as much as she did in her first ten steps into the waste. Well before noon, she tore a wide strip off the bottom of her shirt to tie over her mouth and nose and keep the ash out. Uncovered, her midriff sunburned. Though the ground still stretched charcoal black to either side of the road, she saw fewer recognizable remains of trees now. The one stream she found was probably halfway to lye, running through all this wood ash. She knew that if she didn’t find the other side of the burnt land by midafternoon, she’d need to backtrack to the green side of the border to prepare for another try.

  But a childhood friend who’d walked out had soon walked right back in, after a mistake like that. He’d wanted one more night in the luck, which had made him want just one more night under a roof, then just one more delay to pick apples, and then he’d wanted a last night in his own bed and a last family dinner, and next thing he knew he was married with a baby and never going to risk leaving while that child was young.

  No, she would not fail as he had.

  She walked a little faster. Ash stuck to her sweat, trickled into her eyes, stung. She walked faster still. The ash could not go on forever.

  The road curved up a rise, and from the other side’s downslope she could see a river. On the far bank, grasslands stretched to the horizon. Before her, the ruins of a tall wooden bridge lay blackened and tumbled into rushing water.

  A steady wind blew toward her from the grasslands ahead. She was losing daylight. She’d get wet, inevitably. And she’d be a fool to try to light a fire in the dark in tall dry grass. The tubers she’d gathered weren’t safe to eat raw. She hesitated to break into the dried meat and fruits from the Last Chance Man, when she didn’t know where her food would come from after that. She hunkered down for the night in the lee of a stone pier of the fallen bridge and there knew hunger. It was much harder than the meal-skipping she’d been so proud of practicing back home. In all the world, only her exhaustion felt bigger.

  She dreamed of eggs fried with bread and the light of her mother’s kitchen.

  She woke hungry. Her anger at what her city was willing to do for its luck turned out to be bigger than her hunger after all. The one time she’d gone for her witnessing, in the dank cell where the luckbringer child was kept, she had tried to thank it—not to break the blessing but out of respect, as she would have thanked anyone for a kindness. But the city’s cruel blessing required the child’s misery to be absolute. It would not permit her even to open her mouth, as if a mighty hand covered it and gripped her jaw shut.

  She would walk on.

  Sooner or later she would need fire, so she dug through the wreckage of the bridge and found a big chunk of wood that hadn’t burned all the way through. No good to put it in her pack where it would dirty the little bit of dried food she was determined not to use, at least not as long as she had the fresh tubers. But she pulled out the coil of rope—bless that old man—and tied the wood to the outside of the pack. To pick her way across the river bottom’s rocks, she’d need one arm free for balancing.

  She ventured ankle-deep into the water just a step upstream of the fallen bridge beams, picking her way across what she thought would be a shallow path and congratulating herself on her fine walking stick, until she stepped into a sudden drop, and the river’s fastest current caught her. She had learned to swim in ocean waves but in a place where no child could ever drown. Her mind split, half laughing at her efforts to keep her head above water, the other half animal panic, until the river dropped her in an eddy on the grassy riverbank.

  How far downstream was she from the road? If she didn’t dry her wet clothes, the only ones she had, it wouldn’t matter where the road was. She’d learned as much from books. In books, people always cursed at times like this, but never having had occasion to before, she didn’t know how.

  Wringing out her wet things took more time than she’d imagined possible, and then she had to find a place where she could keep a fire going without setting all the grasslands alight. At last she found a spot where some creature had crushed the grass down to sleep on, breaking the tough stalks enough for her to clear them. It was a big circle. A family of deer might have made it. Or something that could eat her, she wasn’t sure. Too tired to care, she took the little spade the old man had loaded in the pack for her and dug a hole, and a bare ci
rcle of earth around it, for her fire. She dulled the edge of the knife he’d sold her, cutting low the dried grass around her for kindling, and piled it against the charred chunk of bridge she’d carried. It was wet. It would smoke conspicuously before it caught. Nothing to be done about that. She tucked the tubers underneath, to have a ready breakfast. Her wet clothes she laid in a ring around her fire to contain it, and she sat naked on the blanket her pack had kept to merely damp. How was it sunset already?

  The summer night buzzed with small biting insects that had no respect for her fire’s smoke. She knew these insects, had heard that they bit, but nothing could have prepared her for the itch. How dare they bite her, some voice in the depths of her asked. Did they not know where she was from? For the first time since she’d looked squarely at the price of her childhood’s luck, she laughed at herself. What a relief, to laugh.

  That was when something leapt out of the uncut grass beyond her ring and onto her. It pinned her shoulders to the stubbly ground and called out, “Got her!”

  Bandits—four of them that she could see. Maybe more out there. They’d followed her smoke. The one pinning her was so smudged with mud on the face that she couldn’t tell anything about them but their weight.

  This was not a thing her teachers had prepared her for.

  Another bandit picked through her pack. “Not much,” he said, “and all of it damp.” He was a young man, dressed in the familiar style of the blessed city. Was he still wearing the clothes he’d walked out in, or had he stolen them off some other walker? “All she’s got is the usual things from Old Man Last Chance.”

  The girl couldn’t reach her own walking stick, but he’d laid his down where she could maybe just stretch to it.

  “Better than nothing,” replied another young man’s voice.

  Somewhere in the tall grass, a baby cried and a woman’s voice started cursing. The curses turned into a howl, and the bandit who’d held her pinned rolled off and grabbed her walking stick.

  She had to tell herself to grab the other bandit’s stick three times before her hand woke up and did it. By the time she stood and looked up, her little circle was boiling over with mayhem. At its center, a barefoot woman with a wailing baby strapped to her chest swung a long stick with a sharp rock fastened to the point. There was a word for that kind of stick. The girl stood there trying to remember the word for it while the woman smacked the butt of the stick across the back of a bandit’s head to knock him sprawling, then flipped the tip downward and drove it toward his gut. He rolled almost far enough. Dodged a gut wound, but the little stone blade cut into his side, and blood spurted out. So much blood.

  The young man’s screams startled the baby into silence. His companions raised their hands in surrender and backed off a few steps.

  The girl dropped the walking stick, fell to her knees, and heaved up all the nothing in her stomach.

  “Just let us get him out of here,” said the muddy bandit, “and we’ll grant you safe passage.”

  The woman with the spear—the word was spear!—looked all four of the bandits over. “Children,” she said, shaking her head. “You’re barely more than children. Very well. There’s a plant with little silvery hairs on the leaves, grows on top of the river banks wherever they get steep to let some sun in. You know the kind?”

  “No,” said a young man who might have been the wounded one’s brother, never taking his eyes off the woman’s spearpoint.

  “Easy to recognize when you know to look. Next place downstream where the road and river meet. Silvery hairs, remember. Put the leaves on. Don’t rinse them first. They’ll stop his bleeding and keep the wound from turning, if anything can. Now get away, and leave this girl alone.”

  “Or what?” demanded the fourth bandit, who’d knelt to tend the fallen boy. Her voice choked back tears. “You’ll be hiding in the city’s luck, soon as you can reach it.”

  “Or I’ll see by his blood on my spear, and I’ll come out to track down every last one of you.”

  Without another word, they carried their companion out of the circle.

  Now the girl knew by their hasty tracks the most direct path to the river, where the road would be. It was the one direction she could not take, if she wanted to avoid those bandits in the morning.

  And they’d stolen her damp blanket.

  “Thank you,” she said to the wiry woman. “You saved my life.”

  The woman harrumphed as she pulled her whimpering baby out of its wrappings and put it to her breast. “I didn’t decide for sure to do it until my little one gave me away. Even odds you’d have joined them by morning. Around here, they all start out just like you. Good thing they’re not prepared for anybody who didn’t grow up soft like they did. Here.” She tried one-handed to untie the bulky knot that held the wrappings around her chest. Holding the wiggly baby took her other hand. “Cover up, child.”

  “Why?”

  “You’re naked.”

  “So?”

  “You like getting bitten by bugs?”

  “Definitely not. Thank you.” The girl stepped toward her to loosen the knot. The woman’s wrappings turned out to be a single length of strong hempen cloth that went on yard after yard.

  She’d made a ballgown once with less fabric than this.

  “You got a name?” The woman turned slowly to help her unwind the cloth.

  The girl had considered taking a new one, had refused to think of herself by the name her mother had given her. But just now she was thinking a little better of mothers, and her old name was a comfort. “Crocus.”

  “Crocus, you made a good fire, for what you had to work with. If you don’t mind, my daughter and I could do with a place to rest until morning.”

  “You’d be most welcome. To anything I have.”

  “Not much, and most of it damp, I’ve heard tell.” Smiling, the woman handed off the hempen cloth in a tangled mass.

  “So I guess we’d better eat whatever’s still good.” The girl, Crocus, shook the wrapping out straight and arranged it to keep the bugs off herself. “I was trying to make it last, but since it won’t now... I’m sorry there’s so little to share.” No point mentioning the tubers yet. Until they’d cooked for half the night, they would be poison.

  The woman leaned her weight on the butt of her spear and sat on the ground. “Where you’re going, Crocus, that’s a feast.”

  “A feast. Everywhere out there?”

  “It’s eight days’ walk to the next farm town, and unless you’ve got some specialized skill they lack there, you’ll soon run out of money to buy with.”

  But she had already spent the last of her coin. “I don’t suppose they’ve got much need for party clothes? I’m good at making them.”

  The woman laughed so hard she dislodged the baby from her breast and had to soothe it back on. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t laugh. You were brave to leave home. It was a noble thing to try.”

  The word try didn’t sit well with Crocus. “I’m never going back there.”

  “You might not. But if you ever have a child of your own, you’ll consider it. It’s a shocking, wretched thing to find out what you’re willing to do for your children.”

  Her mother had said much the same. She cut more of the grass from the circle’s edge and fed it slowly into the fire, piece by piece. She wouldn’t drag a stranger into a family argument that wasn’t her fault. The woman let her have her sullenness a while before she spoke again.

  “My name’s Paper, and this is Gentle.”

  “Paper?”

  Paper shrugged. “My parents named me for something rare and costly, or at least it was in our village. Like people in cities name their children after gems.”

  “They do that?”

  “Lots of places.”

  “Where are you headed, Paper?”

  “Same place you left, of course. May I?” She reached toward the little pile of river-dampened jerky.

  “I already offered. Why would you ever want to go t
here?”

  “So Gentle might live to see your age.”

  “She would, there. But it’s not a gentle place.”

  “Gentler than where I come from.”

  “Not really. Do you know what happens to the one child who buys us our luck?”

  “I know what happened to the four children I buried back in my village. And all the other children we buried with them. You got any clean water to drink?”

  “I’m sorry.” Crocus passed her the waterskin. “I went to see the child. If you ever go see... When you go see, because everyone does eventually, you’ll want to burn the whole place down. Except of course you can’t, it won’t burn, it can’t burn. Because of that one child. Nobody can ever come set the child free, because the luck it buys for the rest of us keeps us safe from anything good ever happening to it, I mean, to the child. The spell loops, see.” The words tumbled out faster and faster. “No army can come make us stop doing that, because our walls will never fall again. The founders thought of everything. The only way the child’s suffering could end is if everybody left at the same time. But even if all of us who grew up understanding walked out at once, there would still be people who don’t understand, walking in to take our places.” She decided to let herself cry this time, but nothing came. “Don’t go there, Paper. Please don’t go there.”

  Paper handed back the waterskin. “Only one thing I need to know for now.”

  “What’s that?”

  “How do they choose the child?”

  “You mean, could they choose Gentle?”

  Paper nodded.

  “No, it has to be one of us, born to the blessed city, or it wouldn’t be a proper sacrifice. But of course a child can’t be taken within the city or its hinterlands, because our luck would protect it. And its parents can’t still be alive and at home, or their luck would protect it. It’s tricky. But the spell loops, so there’s always someone traveling and orphaned to take when the last one’s dying.”

  “Clever. Ugly and cruel, but clever.”

  “And you can live with ugly and cruel?” Crocus considered telling every detail of the luckbringer child’s sores, to hurt Paper as the sight had hurt Crocus, even if no one could hurt as that child itself did.