Chapter Fifty-Three Donny
Donny heard The Trench Tribune scrunch up in the ball of Gunner’s hand.
“Fuck,” Gunner yelled over and over. For the first time, Donny wished they had bluff on hand to knock his brother off his arse.
The sound of a copper frying pan falling told Donny his brother had broken into a rampage, something he would never risk in the presence of Patrick. Patrick would have him out in the cold, freezing his bollocks off. Tell him to cool his blood or stay out with the chickens in the yard.
“Bloody hell, Gun! Sit down before I’m forced to trounce you.”
“By a blind man?” Otto asked. “Seems unlikely.”
“It’ll make it all the more embarrassin’,” Donny insisted.
“Gunner,” Tess warned. “You mess up my kitchen, I’ll knock you flat myself.”
“How old is the issue?” Donny asked Otto and Scottie. The two men had brought it down the tunnels just this afternoon, having dredged it out of some dust yard on the east coastline.
“Two days” came Scottie’s grave voice. They all sounded this way now.
Thick with increasing despondence. Their luck worsening by the day.
Just this morning, they’d received a telegram from Dunnitch threatening retribution on Kenton Hill.
The trades had choked altogether. Kenton Hill was marooned in the north on its own desolate island. Winter’s end was still so far away.
“It ain’t true,” Gunner was fuming. Donny could practically feel the heat he was emitting, hear the turn of his heel as he paced. “Patty would never surrender to the House.”
“Of course it ain’t true!” Tess snarled, but at the notion of surrender rather than at Gunner. “But it’ll be enough to disband the last of the members, and we ain’t done a single thing to ease their minds.”
No, Donny thought. We’ve only worsened the tension.
Tess was right. This would be the final straw that broke them. And it seemed horribly tragic, poetic even, that years of work, of fortification, could be dismantled with a few pieces of newsprint.
“What do we do?” Otto asked, throwing a rope out in hopes someone would snag it and reel it in, as the Colsons always did.
But the right Colsons weren’t anywhere close, and Donny sat heavily in a chair, head in his hands, feeling the first waves of defeat finally crash over him. A terrible blankness washed in. It reminded him of deep water.
“What do we do, Donny?” Otto repeated, his voice so thin it might snap.
Suddenly, the door to the kitchen burst open. Sam appeared in an oversize coat his father used to wear, snow sticking to the fibers of his cap. “Someone’s coming down the western line,” he said, winded, chest heaving. In his hands he held a rifle, knuckles already white around the barrel.
“Shit,” Gunner intoned. Another pot collided with the brick.
Donny heard the sound of feet shuffling in the snow before anyone spoke. Three sets.
By his estimate, they were outside the haberdashery in the old town, where the lane turned to dirt and led up to the very edge of the quarry.
Donny heard the click of Gunner’s pistol, felt the chill of early morning cut into him.
“Briggs,” Gunner called ahead, his voice swallowed some by the wind. “Who’ve we got?”
Dunnitch miners, Donny guessed. Lads who drank too hard in the night and got the notion they’d ease their boiling blood in Kenton, start their own uprising with naught but a couple of Union-issued guns.
These were fraught times indeed.
Soon, Kenton would wake. The early risers would pull back their curtains. Old Mrs. Earnest would open her haberdashery. Best they get this sorry business done before the whistle for first shift blew.
“You’ll never believe it,” Briggs replied, still a ways off. Donny thought the drag of their feet sounded labored. Surely the snow hadn’t piled so high in the night?
“Holy shit,” Scottie mumbled. Donny heard the clack of his rifle as it lifted to his shoulder. “You don’t fuckin’ say.”
Gunner had taken two paces in front. Hostility crackled through the air and raised gooseflesh. “Now just what business do you two have, walkin’ back in here, eh?” he growled, the words curled in fury.
Donny sighed. “If someone doesn’t tell me who the fuck it is, it’s a bullet apiece.”
A heavy body crumpled to the ground like it had been shot, crunching into the snow.
“Don’t shoot,” said a broken voice, as though the bearer hadn’t drawn a proper breath in days. “Please. Just listen to me.”
It was a voice that sent a shock through Donny, momentarily paralyzing him.
He lifted his own gun.
“You’d better speak quick, swank,” Gunner snarled. “I’ve been itchin’ to cut someone, and the Scribbler is first on my list.”
“Polly?” Otto said aloud, stumbling forward. “What happened to her?”
Theo. Polly. Here in Kenton Hill.
It couldn’t mean anything good that they were here.
“She’s been badly hurt—she needs bluff, please.”
“Then you’ve come all this way for nothin’,” Gunner said, no less menacing. “Don’t have a drop. Wouldn’t spare none on a traitor, either, now, would we?”
Beside Donny, Otto shuffled, as though battling the urge to go to Polly.
“She has a fever,” Theo continued in that breathless voice. “She’s been unconscious for hours now. Please. Help her.”
“You don’t look in no better shape,” Scottie said. “Looks like you’ve been through a war, lad.”
“Why should we help her?” Donny asked.
Gunner scoffed. “Over my dead body. Best we can do is put her down.”
“No,” said Otto. His breaths had shortened. “Please, Gun.”
“She’s the reason, Otto!” Gunner thundered, his mind already made. “She’s the reason we’re in this mess. They both are. These two and that fuckin’ earth Charmer.”
“I want to hear what she’s got to say,” Otto continued, his voice stronger now. “I don’t ask you for hardly anythin’, Gunner. Do I? But I’m askin’ for this. I want—I need to hear her explain how she could…” Here, emotion took hold. “How she could do it,” he finished.
Donny lifted his chin again. “Why should we help her?” he asked once more. He pictured the water Charmer reduced in the snow, the outline of him fading.
But Donny also remembered how he’d saved him and Patrick from the fire Charmers. How he’d washed out the entire square. They might all be dead if not for him.
“Because I know where your brother is headed,” Theo said now. “And he’s in danger.”
A second body crunched into the snow.
It took some time for either Theo or Polly to wake.
They took them to the hotel, to their old rooms, and lit fires.
Their clothes were damp and freezing, but when Donny suggested to Tess that they change their clothes, his mother spit on the hardwood and walked out of the room, slamming the door behind her.
They were lucky she’d let them over the threshold at all.
It was Otto who cleaned and bandaged Polly’s hands. “I can’t look at her face,” he said to Donny, as though he needed to justify his actions. “I just can’t stand to look.”
Donny doubted she’d have much use of those hands once the flesh healed. Some burns, some cuts—they went too deep, muddled all the feeling. Gunner said they were “hunks of meat,” and they smelled to Donny like something fouled.
In number 14, Theo dragged his body upright as Donny and Gunner entered, sounding like he housed a reluctant skeleton that he dragged from place to place, like he was caved in by sleeplessness.
“Right,” Gunner said with no preamble. “Tell us all of it.”
And he did. He started with their escape from the National Artisan House, he, Patty, Nina, and somehow, their living father. He told them about Idia’s Seam and Polly’s translation of The Stewards’ Testament.
“That’s what Patty meant?” Donny said aloud. “When he said there was a lead on terranium?”
Theo described how they’d fled to Lavnonshire, and how Polly had been captured in the library by his father, the new presiding Head of House. How Polly had scribbled the translations to Patrick before she’d been bled of her ink.
“He played us,” Theo said like he was spitting rocks. “And now Nina and Patrick are likely crossing the countryside toward the Seam, and the House will be right behind them, ready to take possession of it once she uncovers it. They can’t reach the Seam without Nina.” He looked to them pleadingly.
“And Patrick and Nina don’t know it. They think this is a race.
Them against the House to reach the Seam first, and there’s no way to warn them.
Nina can’t uncover it. If she does, she becomes dispensable.
You understand? She’ll be shot like any other rebel.
” He pressed the heels of his palms to his eyes.
“It might already be too late. I didn’t know where else to go, who else to call on. ”
Donny felt his urgency. “Easy, Teddy. Tell us what the translation said. Where are they headed?”
“I don’t know,” Theodore said, panicked. “I don’t know! I wasn’t able to read it, and Polly has been unconscious. Whenever she wakes, she mumbles something about… about widow’s lace?”
“Widow’s lace, you say?” said Scottie, his tone curious. “You sure, lad?”
Theo inhaled. “Yes.”
“Only one place it grows,” Scottie said assuredly. “East central, right in the bloody middle. Scurry.”
Something pulsed between them.
“You sure?” Gunner asked him.
“Been all over the place,” Scottie said, and Donny pictured his great shoulders shrugging. “Every parish, whether by tunnel or boat. ’Bout the only remarkable thing about Scurry. Bloody red flowers everywhere in the spring. Fuckin’ pollen makes my eyes water.”
No sooner had he said it than Theo had demanded, “You should leave for Scurry now. Take all the fighters you have. Does Scurry have its own Union presence?”
Together, both Donny and Gunner deflated. Donny could practically hear his brother ripping hair from his own head. “There’s hardly a Union presence there at all,” Donny said in a voice that already screamed of defeat.
“What?” Theo said. The bedsprings groaned. “What do you mean? Scurry is a mining town.”
“A mining town we never reached,” Gunner said. “Never traded with. When we dug the tunnels, we couldn’t chance the gas pockets in Scurry. The ground there is wrought with ’em. Ain’t no better place for a gas explosion than a Scurry mine.”
“Our only contacts there are now dead,” Donny added. He didn’t mention how their deaths came about, or how it would likely get Patrick killed if he announced himself on Scurry soil.
“Then call on the other parishes!” Theo said, frustration taking hold. “Whoever you can reach!”
The silence that followed this plea was so thick, it coated the walls of Donny’s throat, made it difficult to speak. “There ain’t no one to call on, lad,” Donny said. “No one but us.”
“And it’ll have to do,” Gunner said, turning on his heel so that it squeaked on the hardwood. “Get your rest, swank. We’re headed to Scurry before nightfall.”
“We’ll leave sooner,” said a voice by the door. Donny imagined Tess standing with her hip pressed against the frame. Her expression would be grim. Her voice was too weak to belong to his mother. “I’ll tell Otto that he and Briggs are to hold over until we return.”
“Ma, you can’t come with us,” Donny said, but it was more pleading than authoritative. “It’ll be a long journey, and you’re already unwell—”
“That’s my son, walkin’ into an ambush,” she growled. “And I’ve got quite a lot to say to your father, heaven forbid he’s breathin’ when we get there.”
Donny frowned. “Ma?”
But she was gone, her feet already pounding down the stairwell, fading into the floors below.