All the spirits had stopped.
Cringing, they clustered just inside the shop. Holding her shoulder, Naelin pushed herself up against the wall. She glanced at Corinda. There was blood on her friend’s arm, and she was moaning.
The champion and the guard strolled through the smashed doorway. Smiling, they walked past the cowed spirits. “You did it,” the guardswoman said. “Congratulations!” Her voice was loud enough to echo across the platform, and Naelin saw people outside, crowded together by the door and window, listening to every word.
“The two things that a true queen needs are the instinct to survive and the instinct to protect,” the champion said. “You have both. Your queen and country need you.” He held out his hand and commanded, “You will come with us.”
Naelin looked at his hand, at her wounded friend, and then at the spirits who were watching her with wide, hollow eyes. This champion and guard had let the spirits come here, where they’d hurt an innocent person and terrified others. The spirits could have killed Corinda. Or Naelin. Or everyone in the market. And the champion and guard would have let them, all in the belief that what the country needed was more important than ordinary people’s pain, more important than their lives. Stupidly dangerous, she thought.
Clearly and loudly, Naelin said, “No.”
The champion shook his head. “You don’t understand.”
She understood enough. Fixing her eyes on the spirits, she formed a deliberate thought and threw it at them, Help me escape. Keep them here.
Snarling, the spirits leaped toward the champion and guard. The guard drew her knives, and the champion—Naelin didn’t stay to see what he did. Clutching her bleeding shoulder, Naelin bolted past them, out the door, and across the platform.
Outside, the crowd shrank away from her, and she saw people she’d known for years—friends of her late parents, shopkeepers she’d visited weekly, woodsmen and woodswomen who had bought her charms from Corinda’s shop, neighbors she’d seen daily on the forest paths and in town—staring at her as if she were as dangerous as a spirit. No one called out to her, and no one tried to stop her.
Naelin ran onto the rope bridges, toward home.
Chapter 8
Home.
Gray roof, bark-brown walls, blue shutters, with pots of pepper and tomato plants on the windowsills and a basket of herbs hung by the door, to soak in patches of sunlight—her home, that she’d bought with Renet, fixed with a hammer and nails bartered in exchange for her charms, shaped with their love and laughter and pain—Naelin had sunk her heart into this place. It had kept her and her family safe from wind, rain, wolves, bears, spirits, shielded them from both winter cold and summer heat. It had cradled them through all the important moments, the momentous moments like Erian’s and Llor’s births and the quieter moments like when she tucked them in at night or when they shared breakfast on a lazy morning. The kitchen floor boasted scuff marks from all the times they’d scooted their chairs closer to the table, and the bathroom still had water stains from the time Renet had tried to rig a shower. Llor had lost his first tooth in between the floorboards, and Erian had once scrawled doodles on the wall before Naelin had taken away her pencil. She hadn’t planned to ever leave.
Now she had no choice.
Naelin sped toward it, up the ladder, and inside. She threw herself into the kitchen and her arms around Erian and Llor. “Pack quickly,” she told them. She kissed both their foreheads. “Only what you need.”
“Mommy, I don’t wanna—” Llor’s voice pitched into a whine.
His sister shushed him. “Don’t you know her serious face?”
Llor screwed his face up like a shriveled apple. His lower lip quivered, and Naelin realized she’d scared him when she burst inside. “Everything’s all right, sweetie, but we have to take a trip. Just for a little while. You can bring Boo-Boo.”
He brightened and scampered to fetch his stuffed squirrel, the one Erian had sewed for him out of old bedsheets and extra buttons. Its tail was an old scrub brush that she’d cleaned and dyed. With the boy on a mission, Naelin retrieved three sacks from the rafters and began to stuff them with clothes, charms, bedding, and medicines. To hers, she added a few kitchen supplies: a paring knife, a tea strainer, forks and spoons, a ladle that had been her mother’s. As she packed, she tried hard not to think about anything but practicalities: there wasn’t time to sift through the layered memories, to linger over the lopsided owl carving that Erian had made or the shredded baby blanket that had been Llor’s or the pastel sketch of her wedding day. She still had the dried circle of roses that she’d worn in her hair, and up in the rafters, neatly packed away, was her wedding dress with the beaded embroidery on the bodice that had taken her grandmother six months of sewing every night . . . I’ll go to my home village, she decided. Ever since the day her parents died, she hadn’t gone back. She rarely even mentioned the place. No one would ever guess she’d gone there. With luck, her old house would be uninhabited, though the roof had probably caved in by now—
She heard her husband stomp his feet at the door, knocking off the debris, and she felt a lump in her throat. There was no point in keeping the dirt out, not anymore. Stop, she told herself firmly. She didn’t know she wouldn’t come back. All she had to do was find a place to lie low until this blew over, until the spirits forgot, until the neighbors moved on to other scandals, and then she could return. A month, maybe more, and then it would all return to normal.
Or mostly normal.
“You won’t be coming with us, Renet.” She didn’t turn around.
“You’re leaving?” She heard the shock in his voice, as if she’d hit him with a frying pan, and all she felt was tired. He couldn’t be surprised. He’d set this in motion. How did he expect it to end? Naelin blinked hard and told herself firmly that she would not cry. Over her home, yes. Over her life here, the cozy comfortable life she’d carved out for herself and her family, yes. But later, not now.
“You went too far this time, Renet. I can’t forgive this.” She bustled over to Llor and added a blanket to his pack, as well as warm socks. She checked Erian’s pack and added her brush. Erian’s eyes were overbright, trying hard to be brave. Naelin squeezed her hand and tried a smile, failing dismally. She then loaded the pack onto Erian’s back. “Did everyone make a pee? Llor, do you have to pee?”