Chapter 12 #2
I blanch beneath the weight of Silas’s gaze. I can feel it burning a hole through the side of my head as I stare at the stupid little smirk pulling at the corner of Rylan’s mouth. How he knows about that I have no idea.
“Right, well, we actually have somewhere to be, if that was all?” Silas says from beside me. I’m glad for his interruption, not wanting to draw this interaction out any longer.
“Of course,” Rylan responds. “I didn’t mean to hold you up.”
“Sure.” Silas just walks down the steps past Rylan, avoiding his gaze as he begins to saddle his horse. I move to follow him, but as I go to pass Rylan, his fingers gently close around my wrist, stopping me.
“Are you okay?” he asks, his voice no more than a whisper in the small space between our bodies.
“I’m not sure anyone is,” is all I can say.
…
My arms hug Silas’s waist as his horse Chester trots down the uneven surface that leads to the back of the houses surrounding the town square.
We chose to ride this way, avoiding the square for as long as possible, hoping to see our friends first.
My bottom bounces in the saddle as the horse makes his way through the Pines’ orchard, Silas pulling on the reins so the horse doesn’t get distracted by the fruit lining the way to their back door.
I slide off the saddle before Silas can so much as pull the horse to a stop, and give Chester a small cuddle as Silas fastens his reins around a post. I don’t miss how Silas gives the horse enough lead room that he could lean over and steal an apple or two. What is it they say about old habits?
As soon as I take a step towards the door, Silas’s voice stops me. “How did the blacksmith end up at your cabin for a cup of tea?” His words are as sharp as a blade, slicing through the silence that has lingered between us all the way here.
I sift through my mind, searching for an excuse, but the lie doesn’t come as easily to me as it did for Rylan. “Does it matter?” I ask.
“Of course it matters, Evie.”
“Not compared to everything else that has occurred in the last mere twenty-four hours, no, it does not matter, Silas.” I shake my head as we approach the back door and knock, the stained glass rattling as I do.
I don’t have the energy to lie to him, nor do I have the energy to try to convey the truth, so I simply avoid it altogether. It seems so far from relevant at this moment.
Edward’s head appears as he looks through the glass, a sigh of relief when he sees us.
“Oh, Everleigh,” he says as he opens the door. “We were wondering if you might come by.”
“Is Hazel still here?” I ask as I walk through the doorway.
“I’m in here,” Hazel’s voice calls from within the house.
“Oh, thank the gods,” I mutter when I see her seated at the dining room table.
She stands up to pull me into a tight embrace. “Did you hear?”
“I saw. We saw.” I gesture to Silas. “We got there just in time.”
“I had to go, Everleigh,” she says, shaking her head. “I had to watch what they did to them.”
“I know.” I nod. “I know.”
“Come, sit,” Maeve says, beckoning us to the table. She is wearing a grey dress with simple white accents, something far plainer than anything I’ve ever seen her in.
Sylvan isn’t a place where we have so much coin to spend on finer fabrics with glittering accents. Our seamstresses work with simpler materials, but Mrs. Pines is always the one person you will see wearing colour and finding ways to dress herself up, but not today.
“What was it like out there?” she asks, looking at me and Silas. “I haven’t dared to open the curtains to see.”
“We took the back road,” Silas says. “We wanted to see you all first.”
Maeve reaches her hand across the table, grasping his. “Are you okay, my sweet boy?”
The Pines were always close to my parents, so we’ve known them since we were children. But when my parents died, Maeve was the person who showed up for us, taking on the role of making sure we were always looked after, always doing okay. She hasn’t stopped looking out for us in all these years.
“I cannot find myself in a position to complain, given everything,” Silas says. She just nods, her eyes softening in understanding. All that is written on her face is sorrow, mirroring everyone else in the room.
“Dunsmoor was a fine man,” Mr. Pines says from where he stands at the edge of the kitchen. “He did not deserve to be staked like an animal for roasting.” He drags a hand over his face. His words draw me back to the exact moment the poker slipped through Dunsmoor’s skin.
“Edward!” Maeve scolds. Edward just waves a dismissive hand and disappears down the hall.
“I’m sorry,” Maeve starts.
“No,” Hazel stops her. “He is right. He did not deserve that, none of them did.”
“In the eyes of King Wyndbrook, that is exactly what they deserved,” Maeve mutters.
“How can a king want his subjects to die?” Hazel shakes her head. “He is supposed to be our ruler, our protector. He is sentencing us to death for so much as disagreeing with him.”
I don’t know what Dahlia did to garner the mayor’s attention, to end up hanging at the end of a rope. I’m not sure I want to know. But it is clear that any kind of evidence means little to these men.
What could Dahlia have possibly done to be branded as a witch? I don’t believe we will ever know, and that somehow makes it worse.
“We must become our own protectors,” I say. “We must find a way.” It is the only way we can survive, we have only ourselves to rely on now.
“But who will protect everyone else?” Hazel says.
Maeve’s eyes flick between Hazel and I, her brows furrowed.
“You girls must be careful.” She leans across the table, holding each of our hands in hers, and I'm not sure that I've ever seen Maeve with the kind of look on her face that she is wearing now, her brows furrowed and her strong gaze unwavering.
“You must be quick, you must be smart, you must be wary. Dahlia was no more than a scared girl, and her mother nothing more than her fiercest protector.” Her eyes are laced with worry as she looks over us.
“You are the exact people that they are after.” Hearing her say it out loud makes my stomach sink.
“You cannot stop; people need help more than ever, but you must be smart. Swear it to me.”
“I swear it,” we echo. Maeve nods her head and leans back in her chair.
Silas’s gaze hardens as he watches the three of us, his jaw flexing as he clamps his teeth together. “Has there been any noise from the square this morning?”
Hazel shakes her head. “Not a thing.”
“People have gone quiet,” Edward’s voice cuts through the room once again.
I turn to see him leaning against the doorframe, his arms crossed.
“They have won this town's compliance in killing Dunsmoor. No one will dare to so much as look at Hawthorne wrong for fear that they will be killed.” I can’t help but think back to Mr. Bagley’s stories of Lenthara—this is how it starts.
Silas shakes his head, scrubbing a hand over the stubble that has shadowed his jaw in the last day.
“They wanted people to follow their rules. They’ve got it,” Edward mutters. I feel ill.
“People fought,” Hazel says. “People stood up. I stood up.”
“And it nearly got you killed,” he says, no mercy in his tone. I’ve never seen Edward so much as raise his voice, let alone speak with such venom, but I know that venom is directed outside of this house, out to the town square where his friend was murdered in cold blood.
“My point is,” Hazel says, standing up to pace the room. “Not everyone is going to sit around and take this. We do not hide,” she says, her gaze directed at me.
“Not everyone, but the silence out there,” Edward points in the direction of the square, “says it all. It says that people don’t want to die, so they will stay quiet, just as they did in those seats yesterday.”
When I thought about Lenthara I couldn’t understand how things could change so quickly, but I’m watching it happen right in front of my eyes.
“Then let us break the silence.” Hazel marches up to the front door and swings it open.
“Hazel!” Maeve stops her in her tracks. “You cannot afford to be loud. Neither of you can.” She looks to where I now stand, ready to follow Hazel into the square.
“This town cannot afford for the two of you to be loud; it needs you.” Her eyes are pleading, and she’s far from wrong.
I supply most of the healers in Sylvan, and Hazel is one of the best.
Without her, without me, this town would crumble under the weight of sickness before next winter.
I don’t want to think of a version of life without either of us.
“Well, I can be as loud as I want,” Silas says, walking past all of us and out into the square. Edward follows right after him, the both of them disappearing into the square.
“If we can’t be loud,” I say, “can we at least not be quiet either?”
Maeve nods, understanding my question, and the three of us follow out of the door, stepping into the town square.
I feel my lips begin to tremble as my eyes take in the scene left behind. All the chairs are gone, folded up and stored only the gods know where. Dunsmoor is gone, the bricks he laid painted with his blood from where he was dragged away from the scene.
But what is left is the Livingstons.
Dahlia and Pearl hang in the exact same spots where they were executed yesterday.
Maeve turns her head, looking away from the nightmarish scene, a hand over her mouth. But Hazel doesn’t flinch, a deadly fire in her eyes as she stares at the bodies of a mother and a daughter who found the same fate at the end of a rope tied by powerful men.
Silas’s head snaps to where the axe handed to Dunsmoor lies discarded on the ground, no one having dared to touch it. I don’t think a single living soul has walked into the square this morning. No one but us.
Silas walks over to it, picking it up without hesitation. “Edward,” he says, his voice firm.
“I’m with you,” is all Edward says before the both of them are walking up to where the women hang.
Silas uses the axe to cut the rope above Pearl’s head, letting her drop into Edward’s arms. They do the same with Dahlia, and then together they carry the women—beaten and bruised—out of the square, past the Pines’ house, through the rows of apple trees and into the forest behind them.
Maeve, Hazel, and I simply follow them. Maeve collects a spade stuck in the soil in the orchard as we pass, and we continue in silence, following the men deep into the forest, walking for what feels like hours until Edward stops.
“Here.”
They lay the women down, and I can’t help but drop to my knees beside Dahlia. Tears swell in my eyes as I gently brush her matted hair off of her face, only to reveal the purple and yellow bruising that litters her skin.
The sound of the spade cutting into the dirt can’t even drag my gaze away from the tortured woman in front of me. Her entire body is bruised, her collarbone so swollen the bone must be broken, and her hands…
I have to hold back the bile fighting to make its way up my throat at the sight of her empty nail beds filled with layers of dried blood. The wounds look so agonising, they must have poured for hours.
I tear my gaze away, not being able to stomach looking at her for another second, not without a moment's reprieve. I barely knew her, yet something tugs at me. This feels like more than just them. It feels bigger than the moment we are in.
I watch as Silas uses his entire body weight to dig out a grave in the forest floor. Edward stands in front of the weeping willow that leaves this part of the forest completely shaded, completely protected. I watch as he pulls a knife from his pocket and begins carving words into the tree’s trunk.
Devastation fills the air, and it’s suffocating. Every one of us choking on it as we lay the Livingston women to rest. The five of us being the only ones who know where they are, the only people who were willing to go out there and stand face to face with the tragedy of these women’s deaths.
“Do you think they will find peace?” Hazel whispers from where she sits straightening Pearl’s skirts, her tears leaving dark spots sprinkling the fabric. “After dying this way, after being killed…can they still find peace?”
Maeve drops to her knees between us, grasping our hands in hers. “We are giving them peace here now. We are giving them a beautiful place to rest. Somewhere far away from the horrors they endured.” She squeezes our hands hard. “If they might find peace anywhere, it is here.”
Hazel nods, and I just look back up to where Edward has taken the spade from Silas, pushing the metal into the ground and tossing the dirt behind him.
The three of us sit, hands entwined as the men dig, and dig, and dig. As Edward finishes carving their names into the wood.
Pearl and Dahlia Livingston, it reads. May they forever find peace in these woods.
I cry silently as Silas and Edward lift them from in front of us, laying them side by side in the grave. Tears blur my vision as Silas helps me to my feet.
I slowly walk over to the pile of dirt they dug up. Kneeling beside the grave, I fill my hand with the soil. I don’t know how to say goodbye. I don’t know what I could say. I didn’t know them at all.
So I just open my fist, letting the dirt fall through my fingers and onto the bodies of the first witches of Sylvan.