Chapter 59
Fifty-Nine
Callah
" V inegar," I said, moving closer to the pair. "And my name is Callah Atwood."
"Felicity Baldwin," the brazen woman said, proving Tobias had been right about her name. "This is my friend, Abi - er, Abihail. Abi, she's the woman who helped Helah. The one who warned us this was coming."
"You..." Abi breathed, looking up at me. "How did you know?"
"She seems to be the one person with all the right connections," Felicity said. "Her intended is an imbecile who tells her anything that crosses his mind. She works in the infirmary, so she hears firsthand what happened with the hunters. She's protected in the girls' wing, and now we wives are relying on her."
"Widows," Abi corrected. "We're not married anymore, Felicity. That's the whole problem. They're going to make us marry some fungus farmers if we aren't bred, and I'm not ready to be thrown around by a husband again!"
"I know," Felicity grumbled. "I just wish I knew how they were going to do it."
"The same way they do when we turn," I said, moving to claim an open section of the bench. "It sounds like we'll get a set date, and we'll have to choose by the end or our decision will be made for us. Tobias said they'll use our lists - updated, of course."
"They'd have to, since most of those men are now dead," Felicity grumbled. "The widow's table is nearly full! I can't remember that ever happening before."
"Don't complain," Abi scolded.
Felicity huffed. "They blame us women for there not being enough Righteous in the compound, but they're throwing away our men as if they're never-ending."
"As if they're in the way," I corrected.
Which made both women look over at me. "What?" Felicity asked .
"Who makes the decisions?" I asked. "The elders, then the leaders of each task. Men, all of them."
"Except Ms. Lawton and Mrs. Worthington," Abi countered, looking at me with big, beautiful blue eyes. I could see why she'd be worried about her prospects. Men would clamor to get her as a wife.
"Yes," I said gently, "but Ms. Lawton and Mrs. Worthington don't get much say. When it comes to the decisions in the compound, the men and the leaders of each task decide what they need. The elders are the ultimate authority, right? The same elders who always marry girls who have just turned, not widows. The same elders who are rumored to have beaten their wives to death. Punishment, they say. To keep the Devil from them."
"Okay?" Felicity asked.
"And while young men are encouraged to marry, they aren't required to," I explained. "Women are. We are bred over and over until our bodies give out or the latest baby kills us."
"It is the Lord's way," Abi mumbled, sounding like she didn't believe that any more than I did.
"But what twenty-year-old - or, well, I guess younger now - girl is going to long for a man in his eighties? Even his fifties! No, we want men our age, who we can relate to. Maybe someone we have a history with in sermon, or a man we've grown closer to while performing our tasks."
"Makes sense," Felicity agreed, "but I don't see where you're going with this."
"The elders want to have the best wives," I explained. "The youngest, most beautiful, and least experienced. The ones they can terrorize the best. Those young men are in their way. There just aren't enough of us girls to go around, so they lowered the marriage age! Tobias told me that when he asked for permission to court me, Mr. Morgan had put his claim on a girl. Claim! A way to chase off the men who might be interested in her!"
"And they don't say a thing about it to us," Felicity breathed. "Damn them!"
I sucked in a breath, shocked at such violent language. And yet, I agreed with it. Slowly, I found myself nodding.
"Yes. Damn them."
"Damn all of them," Abi grumbled. "But how are we supposed to protect ourselves? My options are atrocious, and from the looks of it, I'll be married again in less than two months! I was supposed to have a year of mourning!"
"They kill our men," Felicity said, sounding like she was thinking to herself, "then send off more to fight the same way, and expect us to simply breed more? Why?"
"They like the act of breeding," Abi reminded her.
"And the servitude," I added. "Someone to cook, clean, mend, and care for everything. Someone to do all the chores."
"Someone to make their lives pleasant," Felicity realized. "The more rank a man has in the compound, the easier his life is. My husband told me that before he went out. "
"Who was your husband?" I asked.
"Phineas Baldwin," she said. "He hauled Miss Ross out when she was banished. I'm sorry."
"That has nothing to do with you," I assured her. "None of us should carry our husbands' guilt."
"If only it were so easy," Abi said. "Callah, when you marry, you become your husband's property. A reflection of him, and no one will ever let you forget it. When you're told he's been killed?"
"Try not to smile?" Felicity teased, looking at her friend.
Abi nodded in agreement. "There's so much relief that it's easy to cry. Allow yourself to wail. They want us to mourn, but the truth is most of us are rejoicing. God says we are to love our husbands, but our husbands are supposed to revere us and hold us as holy. They don't. They see us as a place they can vent their anger. A thing to hit when they make a mistake we had no part in."
"And the babies you will lose because of it?" Felicity said, shaking her head. "That will be your failing as well."
"So protect your stomach," Abi warned. "Mr. Warren is a large man. If he punishes you..."
"I know," I breathed. "That's why I'm here, actually. I..."
"It's okay," Abi assured me. "This is a safe place for the wives."
"But I'm not a wife! Not yet!"
"But you will be, much too soon," Felicity pointed out. "You will also need to be prepared. Your marriage night will be horrific, and you'll need somewhere to hide afterwards. Here, someone will help you."
I pressed both hands over my mouth, realizing what she meant. "Is it truly that bad?"
"Usually," Abi said. "Not always. My husband was gentle the first time. I could bear it. The second time it was even pleasurable, but when I told him I had something else to do, it all changed."
"When they want to breed," Felicity warned me, "they do not want to wait. It does not matter if you're already with child either. That's a lie the matrons told us as girls, but your man will remind you that you are his, and that you swore to obey him in all things."
"I don't want to get married," I breathed.
"But there's no stopping it," Abi said. "I wish there was, but none of us have found it yet."
"Except her friends," Felicity pointed out. "Maybe that's what we need to do. If we all attack our husbands..."
"They would simply send us to quarantine," I countered. "The women there have plenty of children." I pointed at myself as proof.
"Good point," Felicity said.
But I'd just realized that was a lie too. Those women weren't from here. I was so used to thinking they were, but Ayla had said Tobias's mother had been a Dragon. Her mother had been one as well. Mine probably was too .
"Wait," I breathed. "Do either of you remember a woman ever being sent to quarantine?"
"Would we know?" Abi asked.
"Everyone knows what happened to Ayla and Meri," I pointed out.
"Yes, but would they make a production out of sending a wife to quarantine?" Felicity asked. "Wouldn't a man be too ashamed to let that be known? I mean, we know there are women in there." She gestured at me with both hands, mimicking what I'd done only moments before.
"I think someone's lying," I said softly.
"How?" Felicity pressed.
But I wasn't ready to tell these women everything I knew. I didn't trust them that much. I wanted to feel them out, to see if they were willing to share anything, but to do that, they needed to start sharing with me.
"That old woman," I tried. "You know the one. She sits by the locked door that leads to quarantine?"
"Beulah Grant," Felicity said. "She watches the door and is allowed to escort visitors during the day. Usually, that's husbands attending their wives. Why?"
"Wouldn't she know something about how the women get in there?" I asked. "Because if none of us can remember anyone being taken there, then who's in there?"
"Your mother?" Abi said, sounding like she wasn't keeping up.
"Not anymore, but my mother also had no brothers," I told them. "No sisters, parents, or anything. I don't have any relations from her side to keep track of."
"We don't talk about those in quarantine," Felicity said, glancing over at me. "But wouldn't Ms. Lawton know too? She raises their children. She's raised many generations of children now. She'd have to know the mothers!"
"How old is she?" I asked, wondering how many classes of girls she had mentored.
"Forty-five," Abi breathed. "Ms. Grant is sixty-four."
"How?" I breathed, awed to hear such an advanced age.
"Barren," Felicity explained. "Ms. Grant was married for four years and was never able to produce a child. Ms. Lawton had two, but there were complications with the second. Her courses stopped and she never conceived again."
"It's the only way a woman is excused from marriage," Abi told me. "She must try for at least three years with no success at conceiving. Not birthing, mind. Just conceiving. If her husband dies before then, she will be remarried. If not, he can put her aside, like with Ms. Grant. She was shamed for many years and refused to even take meals with the society."
"And I don't know a way to prevent conception or fake being barren," I said, mostly to myself. "I just don't want to get married, but I don't want to be isolated in quarantine either. If I try what Ayla did and they won't kick me out?"
"Yeah," Felicity mumbled. "And you have a point about too many of us doing it. But what other choice do we have? "
"I don't know," I said. "Tonight, the girls' wing is filled with so much crying. I'm considered lucky because Tobias proposed, but I'm just scared."
"And you have every right to be," Felicity told me.
"Don't tell her that!" Abi snapped.
"She's not a fool!" Felicity shot back. "Callah has seen what husbands do. She works in the infirmary! She put Helah's face back together. I'm sure she understands breeding much better than you think."
"Meri told me her husband held her down to finish," I said. "She told me it hurt so much she couldn't stop crying, but he didn't care. He was just frustrated because she was making him feel bad."
"And so she had relations with her brother?" Abi huffed, sounding like she didn't believe me.
But I leaned forward to look across Felicity so I could see her. "Meri lied."
That made Felicity sit up straight. "What?!"
"Meri wanted to hurt her husband the way he hurt her. She knew her brother had been to visit her the week she'd conceived - or close enough. She told Gideon that so he would react. She hoped she'd be thrown out, because she was afraid she'd die otherwise."
"And what did she think would happen to her on the surface?" Abi asked, but her tone sounded sympathetic, not like she was judging Meri at all.
"She thought she might have a chance," I said. "Tobias told me she's not on the tree."
"What tree?" Felicity asked.
"The one they chain banished women to." I shrugged. "He says a lot when he's trying to impress me. I smile and nod, trying not to react, and he keeps saying more, but that's all I have."
"Because something ate her?" Abi offered.
"Her chains weren't there either," I told them. "He said men who are banished are eaten, and they go collect the chains, but Meri was gone. Her, the chains, and everything." Then I looked between the pair of them. "But you're missing the important part of that story."
"Which is?" Felicity asked.
"Up above, there is a tree," I said. "God and the Devil are fighting. The world is supposed to be burning, but outside of this compound, there's a tree where the banished are chained. A real, living tree. There is food to be harvested. There are people around to become wild, but there's also a tree, which means the world can't be burning."
The air rushed from both women's lungs as my words hit them, but it was Felicity who responded. "And I'm pretty sure we're not supposed to know that either."
"Exactly," I agreed.
But I did. I also knew Ayla was alive. I knew these women weren't as righteous behind closed doors as they pretended in public. Over the last week, I'd come to realize everything I'd believed growing up was a lie.
And I was the only one who realized just how big that lie was.