The men came at us quickly. Jude set Constance on the ground and put his hands in the air. This means surrender, in the real world, but we weren’t in the real world. We were in some nightmare world where there’s no such thing as justice.
The deacons dragged Jude to the center of the courtyard, his boots scraping against the frozen ground. I ran for him, but someone ripped me away and held my stumps with iron grips. I lost all my breath, saw the scene through a gauze of white pain.
My eyes scanned the courtyard, taking in their ruddy scowling faces, and I realized I never could have rescued them. I thought all I’d have to do was tell Constance she could be free, that soon the rest of them would follow us off the mountain. But the offer of freedom doesn’t mean anything to people who already think they’re free.
The Prophet marched out of the crowd with a kerosene lantern held high. He brought the lantern near Jude’s face where he struggled on the ground, then glanced at me, and it was clear in his steel-tipped smirk that he understood.
He walked over to Constance. “What has occurred, wife-to-be?”
“Minnow came back with that boy to steal me away. They live in sin together in the woods.”
A great gasp went up. The Prophet straightened, holding his arms out to the sides. Even though he wasn’t standing in the Prophet Hall, I recognized these motions. He was preparing a sermon. He was thinking through a punishment.
He raged on about fornication and sin and damnation and fraternizing with Rymanites, but his face was calm. He looked happy. Overjoyed. This was his moment to smite someone, really and truly. On the ground, Jude jerked beneath the grips of the deacons.
Finally, the Prophet ended his diatribe, and it became so quiet in the courtyard, I could hear the trees creaking. The Prophet savored it. He stretched out the silence, looked at me, then at his deacons.
“Kill the Rymanite.”
I watched the words fall from the Prophet’s grizzled lips. I hear those words in my mind still. They are a chant. A hymn. I thumb the words in my mind like prayer beads. That was the moment I realized there would be a cost for all of this. A cost for believing. A cost for thinking there was a way to escape.
The deacons stood and there was a silent moment when Jude might’ve tried to make a break for it. He levered himself up on an elbow but, in the next moment, Deacon Jeremiah swung back and landed a fist into Jude’s face and he flattened back to the ground, a curved crimson wound cupping his eye bone. I traced the trajectory of each pair of heavy boots and tightened fists, the rush of blood that flew from Jude’s mouth with the first few kicks to the face, the molar that sailed gracelessly through the air and became lost in the mud, planted like a sunflower seed. His cheek puffed up and bruised with blood, and broke apart like an abscess after a cruelly aimed kick from Deacon Timothy. The deacons each took a turn, their fists and boots and knees and elbows hammering Jude down long past the time he’d stopped moving. I screamed, just to avoid hearing the sound of their fists sinking into Jude’s body.
I didn’t pray when my hands were cut off—it was much too fast and my mind could only process the basic information of the moment. Now, though, I screamed at God—at Charlie—at anyone—to make it stop.
“Samuel!” the Prophet shouted. My father had been standing to the side with his wives. “Are you a deacon or not?”
My father’s mouth was clenched. He swallowed with difficulty, then marched toward where Jude lay. He swung his leg back for a kick and I shut my eyes, screaming still, because Jude had stopped screaming. He’d stopped making any noise at all.
The women started to look uncomfortable and covered their children’s eyes with large hands. The rabid energy in the crowd gradually bled away as Jude began to look less like a boy and more like something butchered. The deacons panted, their kicks growing feebler and feebler. In the clearing, it became so quiet practically the only thing you could hear was my sobs.
And then my father, of all people, uttered, “That’s enough,” barely loud enough to hear. The deacons looked from him to the Prophet, their faces shiny with sweat and flecked with blood. The Prophet nodded and the men stepped away. It felt awkward then, those men covered in gore standing in a loose circle, shifting their weight from foot to foot. The outsider’s body on the ground was like a spotlight on every ludicrous aspect of the entire place. The men who’d been holding me let their grip go slack, and I ran to Jude. I knelt beside him.
His eyes roved around, unfocused. It was hard for him to wipe the fear off of his face. He tried to smile but the teeth were broken in his mouth, protruding in different directions. He tried to talk but it came out like a gargle. He swallowed some of the blood and said—and said—
“Every morning, every evening, ain’t we got fun?”