Grief
There weren’t many people from Elias’s town that traveled far from home.
The only reason Elias had was when he was taken to see physicians for sugar sickness as a child.
He’d been to Ingelstad several times with his father in search of aid, but it was a doctor from Gaimersheim that found the combination of foods Elias could eat that gave him strength.
So Elias understood tall buildings and crowds. He understood the smell of smoke and the salt of bodies, the reek of waste and unwashed desperation of the poor without family. People bumping into each other, yelling at each other, selling to each other, all in the road.
When he was last in Ingelstad, he’d roamed the streets like a ghost, an automaton propelled by pain and rage. The people he passed avoided looking at him, like they avoided looking at beggars, and he did not care about it.
Now that he was washed and healing, his patchwork face on display, people’s gazes followed him.
He was not allowed to enter the fine store to purchase good new clothes until he doled out payment for them on the doorstep.
The cobbler demanded a story for Elias’s condition, and it was clear he assumed Elias’s riches were stolen.
The barber who trimmed the whiskers growing on his face and sold him a shaving kit asked after Samoa, and it took uncomfortably long for Elias to realize the man thought that he was a soldier home from that ordeal. *
Elias moved the greater share of his fortune into the lining of his coat and put a more reasonable amount in a purse. He put his shoulders back and stood taller than he liked, held his hands behind his back at rest—the way the only soldiers he had ever known back home did.
And with each small change in his behavior, the eyes roved over him less.
His pine tea wasn’t common here so Elias was forced to go out to the woods and gather needles to dry them for grinding.
It wasn’t the best use of his time, but it was important.
He had tried eating only fresh meat before and shuddered to remember the ache of his teeth and the illness that swept over him after a few weeks of this.
Elias sold his horse in Munich, cut down his supplies from Franz to the essentials, powdered his dry needles and bottled them. Then he purchased a new set of knives and commissioned a holster for them. Something new that the tanner did not particularly look happy about making for him.
“You use knives a lot?” he’d asked, staring dubiously at Elias’s mangled face.
“I was a cook, in another life,” Elias said. “I learned . . . overseas . . . that I am better with knives when it comes to hunting.”
That a man like this could understand, and the lie of army service slotted in where it was supposed to. The tanner brightened and went into a story about hunting knives while Elias ignored him and thought about what he was doing.
Justice was a funny thing where he was from. They didn’t have police and courts in their town. They had what was right and what was wrong, forgiveness and penance, punishment and retribution.
When the baker’s son took liberties with Lyrica and her father cut his face, no one said anything. When Arnie the sneak thief turned up to church with broken fingers, everyone still spoke to him kindly. Justice had been served and you move on.
Elias’s father had spoken to him of a series of murders in the past, before Elias was born.
Where a married man who desired another man’s wife had assaulted her and in the struggle took her life unintentionally.
The woman’s husband had walked the streets in mourning for three days before going to her rapist’s house and strangling his own wife.
The town buried the women near to each other and the rapist left from shame.
The murderer was embraced by the community and had brought flowers to both women’s graves every day until he passed.
Retribution and penance. Elias’s father made sure to mention that, if the woman had living family, they could have taken this man’s life as well and the circuit would have been complete.
But, as she was old enough for both parents to have passed and had no children, the man sought penance with the labor of flowers.
Elias was his family’s only son. They intended with this tale to teach him that women were not a game and their lives should not be whims to his desires. It was . . . not exactly a relevant lesson in that regard. But Elias had learned two things.
1. That the punishment of stealing a life was a life in exchange.
2. That the act of taking life required penance even when justice had been served.
The tanner was hammering in rivets and holes to sew. He’d gone quiet. Elias shifted on the bench uncomfortably.
“Can you add another loop? Wide as two fingers to the left side.”
The tanner looked up. “It won’t be secure enough for a bowie knife, if that’s what you’re using it for.”
Elias shook his head. He pulled Agatha’s doll from his pocket and held it up. “It’s for her.”
The tanner beamed. “Oh, is that for your girl back home?”
Elias put the doll away. “I don’t know if I will see her again. If I can, the way things are now.”
Misunderstanding him completely, the tanner reached across his work desk and put a hand on Elias’s sleeve.
“It doesn’t matter what you’ve done. When she sees your face, she will look past it and know her papa,” he said, eyes dark with compassion.
The thought of Gida tore through Elias, sharp and terrible. The tears on her face and the terror in her eyes. Elias just smiled tightly and nodded.
He paid the tanner and slid his new holster over his shoulders. His knives tucked well in their slots: close to his heart, easy to grab, never in the position to fall. The doll fit, too.