“Hang on,” a younger voice called.
One set of feet crunched over the frozen undergrowth. I closed my eyes, pressing my face against the cold bark. My arm muscles started to quaver but I didn’t dare readjust my hold on the branch.
The footsteps stopped abruptly.
Even then, I thought I was safe. I didn’t remember that I’d left my bonnet behind in the maidenhood room. I didn’t take into account my braid, hanging in a rope behind me.
I felt my scalp nearly ripped from my head. I crashed out of the tree onto my back on the needle-strewn ground. Abel, a deacon with a mean, pinched face and a patchy blond beard, crouched over me, my braid in his fist. He dropped my hair, picked up his boot slowly, and stepped on my cheek, holding me to the ground.
“You’ll get it now, bitch,” he spat. “I can’t wait to see what Prophet thinks up to punish you.”
He leaned over me, putting all his weight on my cheek, and I groaned in pain, fearing my jaw would pop like a chestnut from its socket.
“I hope he lets me choose,” he said, his voice sunk into a whisper. “I’ve got something in mind for you.”
I was breathing so hard that little orange orbs had sprung up over my vision, and cold tears fell from my eyes. I saw the boots of the older, slower men finally trundle into the clearing, watched them pause and take in the sight of me, and with them came the understanding that I’d be punished for this. Not only forced to marry the Prophet, but branded or cut or whipped or something else. Some wives who disobeyed their husbands had their heads shaved, only there weren’t any razors in the Community so it was done with a knife. A blunt knife, by the look of their scalps afterward.
My father stood on the fringes of the group, not speaking.
“Get her to her feet,” Deacon Larry said.
“Let’s just take care of her here,” Abel said. “The Prophet wouldn’t care.”
“This woman belongs to the Prophet,” Larry said. “We’ll leave it to him in his infinite wisdom to select a much more fitting punishment than we ever could.”
“Even so amen,” a couple of deacons replied.
They hauled me to my feet and frog-marched me through the dark wilderness. When we crashed through the trees, everyone was standing around the courtyard in their nightgowns, the wives holding lanterns, pushing back the night with little pools of light. In those moments, it felt as though this yellow-lit clearing was the only place on Earth, so walled-in were we by darkness.
It was clear from their faces that none of them expected I’d actually make it to freedom. The Prophet stood in the middle, just in front of the fire pit whose dying coals backlit him with a halo of orange light and smoke. He looked devilish, his eyes angrier than I’d ever seen. I could almost feel heat radiating off him.
“We found her about half a mile north, almost to the property of those filthy Rymanites,” Abel said. I looked at his face. They knew of Jude and his family. The idea started my muscles shaking.
“Did they spy you?” he asked.
“No, they must have known better than to show their faces to us.”
“Never count on the ability of a Rymanite to think logically. They are devious and unpredictable.”
“Don’t use that word,” I shouted.
The Prophet tilted his head toward me, a smile almost playing over his lips. “I would be worrying about yourself right now, Sister Minnow,” he said, deadly quiet. “For it’s you who is standing in the shower of God’s wrath. It’s you who will burn for this.”
My breath hitched in my throat and tears began surging from my eyes. I didn’t even try to hide them. It was too much, the Prophet standing before me, all gigantic and imposing and furious, and the crowd shifting and excited at the mention of a punishment. I let loose a torrent of slippery unstoppable tears, heavy tears, the kind that feel like they could accomplish something.
The Prophet’s smile disappeared. “What do you have to cry about?” he barked. “The blessing of the Prophet is nothing to cry about!”
“I’m crying because I’m sad!” I shouted. “That’s usually why people cry, isn’t it?”
The Prophet reeled back as though I’d struck him again. I’d never spoken to him—to anyone—that way before.
“God warned me of your wickedness, Minnow,” he said. “I was willing to accept you as a wife because you are so in need of a firm hand to guide you toward the path of righteousness. But God has informed me that a replacement may be acceptable. If you are in some way . . . incapacitated, Constance would serve as a worthy replacement.”
Behind me, I heard unconscious gasps leave mouths, enough to tell me I wasn’t the only one who knew this was wrong. It went against the whole purpose of marriage as God decreed in his prophecy all those years ago. We married to make children. Constance was twelve, a child herself.