Chapter 6
I was five years old.
Gran was out training Jonas on a birth at the Crier cottage, Aunt Florence and Uncle Richard were dispensing inoculations, and Dad had gone out before dawn to deliver a body to the Elders for a funeral.
We’d unexpectedly lost the Guardian in our care in the middle of the night.
Only Mom and I were home, preparing a batch of painkilling tincture from white willow bark and wild lettuce, its pungent scent crimping the air.
Mom was in an odd mood that day, and I was somber, too, both of us affected by the loss of a patient. Her thick black hair was piled atop her head as she brewed up medicines and sang sad Valley songs. She barely startled when the door flew open.
“Hurry!” Eero of the Carpenter House screamed. He was a good friend to Jonas, but in that moment, he was nearly unrecognizable.
“What is it?” Mom asked, banking the fire and pulling on her cloak. I’d already strapped on my crossbody medical kit. By that time, I’d been assisting on field calls for months.
“It’s Kirby,” Eero choked out.
Dad?
The world turned inside out, sky becoming ground and air burning like water in my lungs.
My father was the center of everything good, the shoulder I rested on when I was sad and the smile I ran to when I was proud.
He couldn’t be hurt. I’d seen him only hours before.
He was bothered by the death of the Guardian, of course, but in peak physical health.
I glanced to Mom in a panic, but she was already following Eero out the door.
I tried not to think of the boy’s bluish lips and fingernails or the pronounced white around his pupils.
He was showing classic signs of shock. What did that mean for my dad?
Eero led us to a clearing at the edge of the woods. Bluebells, fresh and vivid—my mother’s favorite—lined the path. We were closer to the Wall than I had ever been. Disrespectfully close, even. But that worry vanished as my brain caught up with the carnage before me.
At first, I thought I was staring at a heap of bloody clothes, that’s how twisted Dad’s body was.
Mom gasped, then slapped her hands over her mouth.
It was the only time I’d ever seen her freeze in a crisis, before or since.
I dashed forward, my mind detaching from my soul so I could treat him.
I told myself I wasn’t looking at the man who taught me to dance standing on his feet and tied my hair into two low buns for school each morning.
Who told me that I was going to be the best Apothecary the village had ever seen because I noticed things that other people missed.
He was only a patient who needed my help.
Yet I started trembling when I reached him.
What was left of him.
His face was so ravaged that I wouldn’t have recognized him if not for the wooden turtle pendant he never removed, a gift from Jonas. His shirt front was sliced in several places, his intestines spilling onto the earth. The smell of human waste and congealed blood told me we were too late.
Still, I searched for a pulse before stumbling away.
“He’s gone,” I whispered.
“This is my fault,” my mother wailed, startling me. She fell to her knees in front of my father’s body, keening, burying her hands in the blood-soaked soil. She began sobbing, repeating a version of the same strange words.
I’m so sorry. It’s all my fault. I shouldn’t have stood out.
It made no sense. Whatever had happened to Dad was an accident, a freak animal attack.
There were hundreds of acres of wilderness surrounding the Valley, and even the youngest among us knows not to wander too far into it.
I studied the corpse, the pieces of my father lying in a bed of wildflowers at my feet, and I began floating away from myself as my mother continued to shriek her apologies to the sky.
Eventually, I heard leaves crunching. Footfalls sounded in the distance, but I paid them no mind.
I didn’t even care if whatever killed my father came back for me next.
Mom seemed to, though. She gasped and scrambled toward me, as if remembering for the first time that I was there.
I didn’t fault her. No one knew how they’d react in the face of tragedy.
I, myself, felt nothing at all.
“Rose, you must be careful,” she hissed, grabbing my face, saying those words to me for the first of what would be hundreds, thousands, of times.
“Promise me, baby,” she said fiercely, her hands slick with my father’s blood.
“Promise me you’ll be good. That you’ll follow every rule.
Learn from this, Rosie. Don’t draw attention to yourself.
You and your brother’s lives depend on it. ”
I’d meant to choke out a small assent between her sobs. To let her know I’d do whatever she asked. But the moment my mouth opened, so too did my heart, and I screamed instead.
That’s when the Guardians appeared.
.
I don’t remember who was in the party that searched the woods, or when we were told it was a wild mountain lion that’d mauled my father. I don’t think I ever fully forgave Mom for surely being the reason he diverted into the forest that day—picking flowers, as he was always wont to do for her.
It was only later that night, in the cottage, as Gran handed me a steaming mug of honeyed mint tea, that I began to feel the horror of it descend past my head and into my body. I dropped the mug and ran to the sink to throw up everything I’d eaten.
The teachings at home changed that day.
Mom, who’d always instilled in Jonas and me a healthy respect for the Valley’s systems and institutions, began to go at it with something like mania. Learn the rules like your own name. Never talk back. Draw no attention to yourself.
I came to believe that if I made one misstep, my family would suffer like my father had.
It was on my shoulders to keep them safe, and the only way to do it was to follow the rules absolutely.
That’s when I started twisting the skin between my pointer finger and thumb, a reminder not to let heretical words escape my lips.
From that day forward, I’d stayed completely in line—right up until I was told I couldn’t care for my elderly patients.
I shake my head, returning to the now, to Misia’s kitchen. I realize with a start that she’s staring at me, expecting a response. What had she said to me?
We’re being hunted, Rose. You of all people should respect that, given what happened to your father.
“I’m sorry, but I’ve never seen one of the predators.” I shudder, and it isn’t faked. “Though you’re right, I’ve witnessed their handiwork.”
The creature that got my father ate the body he’d been bringing to the Guardians, too.
Years went by without another attack, to the point that we’d hoped those two deaths had been an anomaly.
But eight months ago, two more Guardians were killed.
One I saw, her bones shattered, skin hanging off her in sheets.
The body of the second had been placed directly into the Harvest basket, covered, so I don’t know what shape he’d been found in.
That’s when the curfew was rolled out and the whipping posts built. I’m wondering why the restrictions weren’t put in place at the time of the first animal attack—probably no one would have accepted them back then—when Misia lashes out at me.
“It must be nice to be so sheltered.” Her words drip with sarcasm.
“Sorry,” I say again.
I don’t know why I keep apologizing, but it seems to calm her.
The deep line between her brows disappears.
She finishes cinching her belt and slides her sword into an attached sheath.
With her lean, muscled frame, short hair, and the triple line tattoo branding her upper cheek, she’s the picture of ferocity.
“No need to apologize. You haven’t seen the beasts because we’re doing our job,” she says. “Pray we keep it up.”
I think she’s turning to leave when she glances at me, her eyes glittering with the same malice I witnessed in Jarek yesterday.
“By the way,” she says, “I was mistaken last night when I told Gryphon that your dress was wet and that’s why you couldn’t wear it to bed.
Sorry,” she says, mocking my string of apologies.
She glides a wicked-looking blade into each of her wrist braces and steps outside into the overcast day.