7
It would have ended there—or begun, I guess—if Sir John had left town like he said he would.
But he didn’t.
He walked into the common house each morning as if nothing had changed. He went out with the iron crews and ate with the townsfolk in the evenings, turning his good ear to listen. If he spoke less and frowned more—if he stared a little longer at our tumors and lesions, as if he was looking for scales or horns—I was the only one to notice.
But I wasn’t the only one who wanted him gone, now. There were mutterings, slantwise looks, unsubtle questions. For over a week, the great Sir John of Cincinnati had done nothing but eat our corn cakes and drink our beer. He kept his hawk hooded and his bullets in their bandolier; some hero!
They might have driven him out on their own, eventually, if Trillium Butcher hadn’t come screaming into the common house that a monster had snatched her best sow from the pen. I asked her if it could have been a regular predator that got it, a mountain cat or a wolf, and she wiped the tears and sweat from her face and said, dryly, that she wasn’t sure. Do regular mountain cats have bat wings, Secretary?
In the uproar that followed—it was suppertime, and half the town was ready to hunt May down with nothing but table knives—Laurel Boss turned once more to Sir John and asked, bluntly, “Are you going after it, or not?” There were bruised bags beneath her eyes; she’d buried a pair of twins today. Heatstroke.
The knight looked at her as if he were surfacing from deep water. “Yes,” he said, eventually. His eyes flicked to mine, then away. “Yes. Anon.”
He stood from the long table then, supper untouched, and asked Trillium Butcher where her pigs were penned. His voice—peaceful and formal, gently commanding—soothed the crowd instantly. I wondered, meanly, if they would even fight, when the enclave armies marched into our holler, or if they would fall willingly to their knees.
Or—would they be something else, by then? Something not easily conquered?
Sir John swept from the common house. I followed, unhurried; I knew where Trillium kept her pigs, and the game trail that would get me there well ahead of Sir John. I had time to go home and pull the pack out from under my bed, time to swipe a bottle of pills from Finch’s dresser. I even had time to pause on the hillside and look down at Iron Hollow.
A grand and prosperous place, I’d once thought, where everyone had enough to eat even in winter. But now I saw it as Finch and Sir John did: a dying place. A scrounging, desperate town full of sickly, short-lived people, where burials were more common than births.
They might go on as they were for another generation or two, but they would need to change, and keep changing, if they were to survive. They would need a good Boss and a clever Secretary, too—but Laurel was getting old and Finch was already dead, and I—I who owed them everything, who had sworn to serve them—was leaving.
I turned my back on Iron Hollow, and didn’t shed a single tear.