“I’m sorry.”
“I’m not. I’m glad he’s angry. He’s angry because he’s worried.” Her hand rises from her knee to her thigh, where she keeps her dagger beneath her dress. She fingers it and her mouth twitches with a smile. She says she knows what they’re wondering. They’re wondering, if she hates her husband so much, why not poison him? That is the woman’s way, isn’t it? Poison. She has considered it. Of course she has considered it. These days, he has grown more and more paranoid, and before he would sip his wine, before he would knife into a steak, he made his chef or server—or sometimes even Danica—taste everything.
Every s she utters takes a little too long to get out of her mouth, so that her sentences sound like a spitting fuse. Ella can’t tell if it’s the swollen lip or some pain-relieving opiate that causes this.
Besides, Danica says, poisoning him, killing him, would accomplish little beyond her temporary satisfaction. She might get away with it or she might get caught. And then? Someone else would take his place of power and similarly abuse it.
Ella cannot help but wonder about her, cannot help but feel this woman is more than she appears. There is something far more substantial and dangerous about her. She is like the blade she carries. A blade is rigid and cold and sharp. A blade is a decoration. A blade is a tool. A blade is a threat.
In a cold voice, carefully enunciating each word, Danica tells them her reason for coming now: she has a plan—and the plan concerns them, and the plan could kill them, if they aren’t careful. But if it works, and it just might, then an uprising will come that the deputies will not be able to quell.
“Go ahead, then. What is it?”
“My dear husband,” she says, “has decided to throw a ball.”
“Who’s he going to throw it at?” Simon says.
Ella says, “She means a party, you idiot.”
“A party,” Danica says. “A costume party no less. With cheeses and meats and sweet liquors and desserts and everything else one might consider far too extravagant for these thin times. And he plans to invite everyone who matters, who has any influence. Just as he believes in terrorizing those who defy him, he believes in spoiling those who would support him.” She brings a hand to the corner of her swelled eye. “If there was a time for us to do something, it would be then, wouldn’t you agree?”
*
The first arrow misses, sailing to the left of Colter and embedding itself in the ice. The second arrow, too, skitters past him. The third arrow might have struck its mark if not for Clark.
The crowd of girls did not notice her when they charged out of the mall. Nor did they notice the gone guard, no longer at her post. They were too intent on the naked figure sliding jerkily across the ice-scalloped parking lot.
So when the woman named Sasa falls forward with an arrow nested in the back of her skull, when they spin around to see Clark standing there with another arrow notched, they can only stare dumbly. They are pale and thin and quivering and bent backed. No longer a mob, just a bunch of lost little girls. Then one of them asks, in the smallest of voices, “What have you done?”
Two of the girls hug each other. One of them—the only old woman among them—whispers into a dead phone. The others look around as if to wait for a command that never comes.
“Anyone else want any trouble?”
The girls shake their heads or study the ground, no threat to her. She lowers her bow and calls out for Colter, tells him to come back.
Then she settles her eyes on the girls and asks them where the rest of her friends are and they point to the mall and she says, “Show me.”
Chapter 40
FOR DECADES NOW, in the Sanctuary’s Fourth Ward, you didn’t want to walk around at night unless you were looking for trouble. Something to snort, someone to fuck or fight. Every morning, the first bell rang and the sun chased away the night and revealed the bodies. The bodies of those beaten and stabbed and the bodies of those who choked on their own puke and the bodies of those who decided enough was enough and dove out a window or fell on a knife. In the heat, they bloated and festered, attracted rats and vultures, spread disease. So the Sanctuary authorized a cleanup team. The gatherers, they were called, mostly teenagers without a trade looking for some coin. When she was thirteen years old, Clark joined them. Mornings, a donkey pulled a cart and she hauled the bodies into it, with an apron and elbow-length gloves and a bandana shielding her nose and mouth. She came to associate this color—the ashen color of early morning—with grief. Grief was a color.
And that is the color of this place, North Dakota, and that is the color of her current state of mind.
By the time Lewis finds her, she is already drunk. They have given her what she asked for—a drink, a real drink—a jar of moonshine derived from tree bark. She gulps from it, her thirst returned. This is on the roof of the mall, where her legs dangle over the edge, her body hunched over in the shape of a hook.
Lewis approaches and touches her gently on the back. “I was worried about you.”
“Was?”
“Am.”
“Yeah? You should worry about yourself.” She stiffens and his hand falls off her.
“York?” he says.
She shakes her head and drinks and roughs a sleeve across her mouth.
For a long minute they stare off at the ice-humped city and the furnace glow of the oil fires beyond it. She drinks again from the jar. Her eyes waver in and out of focus. “Hey, have you ever noticed something?” She licks her lips as if her mouth has gone too dry for words. “Have you ever noticed how my head is different shaped? How one side of my face looks different than the other?”
“No.”
“It’s true. Look.” She turns her head one way, then the other, arranging her face into a scowl. Her breath is sour. “See?”