21 #4
“I don’t want to.”
“What you want or don’t want doesn’t matter. You’re old enough now to be a servant, and that’s what your sort do. Get your things.”
“My sort?” Willem looked to his mother. “What does he mean, my sort?”
Ainslie clasped her hands together before her mouth, but though her throat worked, she couldn’t speak. She began to sob, soft, helpless sounds that tore at Willem’s young heart.
He sensed this was no light quarrel. This was a life-changing confrontation. Fear shot through him at the understanding.
He was often afraid, afraid of going hungry, afraid of being caught stealing, afraid the roof of their hut would fail.
This was different. This was existential, the fear that he could not protect his mother, nor protect himself.
He said to her, in his high-pitched boy’s voice, “Don’t cry, Mam.
I’m not leaving you,” and raised the axe in his shaking hands.
He had never in his short life committed an act of violence, and he wasn’t completely sure he could do it, but his mother’s misery was too much to bear.
“Not your choice, lad.” Skye spoke in an offhand manner, as if none of this were serious. He stepped around Ainslie as if she were a piece of furniture and started toward Willem. “Hurry now. I have a boat waiting.”
Ainslie moaned, “Don’t take him. Skye, please, please don’t take him.”
He didn’t even turn to her. “Now, Willem. We’ll be in fae country by nightfall.”
It was then the fatal mistake was made. Skye reached to wrest Idhri’s chopping axe away from him. Idhri was too slight to resist Skye’s greater height and weight, but he pulled back, gripping the axe with both hands as if he were holding on to his very life.
Skye’s temper broke. It showed in the color spots flaring in his cheeks, the narrowing of his cat’s eyes, the snarl that revealed his teeth. He lunged for the axe.
Ainslie, with a cry like that of a hurt kitten, threw herself at Skye’s back, her bony fingers curling into claws as she clutched at his neck.
In a move so swift Idhri couldn’t follow it, Skye drew a knife from his belt.
He stabbed at Ainslie’s arms, slicing the skin.
Blood sprayed across Skye’s tunic and spattered his chin.
Ainslie squealed and fell to the ground, huddling there with her knees drawn up, whimpering.
Skye stood over her, the knife poised to strike. “How dare you!” he growled.
Willem, desperate, leaped forward, lifting the axe over his head.
Skye spun toward him, the knife in his outstretched hand, the blade glinting in the light.
Willem struck at Skye’s hand with the axe, but it was a feeble, unpracticed gesture.
His blow missed Skye’s hand, but the axe handle caught the blade of the knife, and it spun in a circle, falling to the ground blade first. Skye swore and reached for it, but Ainslie, bleeding and weeping, scrambled to her knees.
She reached the knife before he could get to it.
Still on her knees, Ainslie held the blade straight out before her. Her arms wavered and shook, and the blade quivered in her hand. “You can’t have him! He’s mine, you can’t have him!”
Skye’s arms were much longer than Ainslee’s. It was easy for him to strike her with his fist. He caught her jawbone, and Willem heard it break with a sickening crack. He began to shake. His mother fell on her back, moaning in pain. The knife tumbled from her hands, and Skye snatched it up.
He spun toward Idhri. “We’re going, boy! No more arguments!”
Willem was trembling so badly he could barely hold the axe handle. “No,” he squeaked. “You’ll just have to kill me.”
Skye’s lip curled. “That’s one way to solve the problem,” he sneered. He stepped toward Willem, the knife in his hand, his lips pulled tight, his eyes glinting with temper.
Idhri remembered how that blade looked, narrow and sharp and glinting in the light.
He recalled that he, as Willem, thought he could feel it in his flesh even before it happened.
When it did, slicing into his side, the feeling was not the searing pain he had expected but an icy ache.
In time, he expected, it would hurt fiercely.
Skye pulled the knife back out of Willem’s body, and the boy felt hot blood follow the coldness of the steel.
He lost his hold on the axe. He gripped his wound with one hand and wondered if he was about to die.
He heard the despair of his mother’s thin keening, but he couldn’t move.
Slowly, as if the earth had reached up to pull him down, he fell, his legs splayed, his torso striking a chunk of uncut wood.
Skye spat at him, “I gave you your chance,” and turned away. In horror, frozen and helpless, Willem watched him turn and bend over Ainslie. Skye muttered, “Enough of you, too, woman,” as he plunged the knife into her belly.
Willem fell to one side, bleeding into the dirt.
He was half-conscious, struck nearly senseless with shock and grief.
Through trembling eyelids, with pain swirling up from his wound and into his chest, he watched Skye clean his knife on the grass, slide it back into its scabbard, and walk away from the hut without a backward glance.
The curtain fell in Willem’s mind in that moment, an impenetrable divider between then and now, separating the Willem that was and the Idhri of the present.
Until that moment beside Arthur’s tomb, touched on his forehead by the Keeper’s cold fingers, Idhri had remembered nothing of Willem, nothing of poor tragic Ainslie, nothing at all before the day he awoke, bandaged and washed and covered by a clean quilt, in Hugh and Emma’s tidy cottage.
One of the dogs had been curled on the floor at the foot of the bed and jumped up to lick his hand when he stirred.
But now he was engulfed by the onslaught of pain and grief and horror. It suffocated him, drowned him, blotted out the light and choked off his breath until he surrendered to the relief of oblivion.