Chapter Three:
A Very Little Noose
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Helin ducked behind the barrel in the barn, lightly slipping off the arm of the boy balanced unsteadily upon her spindly shoulders. Raghnall dropped to the straw bed with a groan and a whimper, legs out, head lolling against the wall his back was pressed against.
Helin peeked around herself in the dark of the cover the ramshackle structure offered, a few steps away from the cart the children had crept from when the sound of men faded behind a slammed door. Barrels were stacked haphazardly around the place, another three wagons, sans their horses, dotted in the hay beds. It smelled musky in there, dry out from under the heavy rain and sleet, warm too.
Maybe it wasn't a barn at all but a temporary loading port.
"Do you think you can walk?"
Raghnall grimaced at even the suggestion of weight on his clumsily bent leg.
"No chance. Don't think I can even move it."
Not the best news then. Wherever the five men had gone they wouldn't be gone long. If this really was some sort of storage unit for the Second Army encampment outside of their village, someone, eventually, would come in to get some rations, to crack open a barrel, and then it was over. Done.
Helin didn't know if the Second Army hung children for stealing, but there was a tree back in Ozryn, old and gnarled and grey, thick with its warped branches that never grew any leaves no matter the time of year. Raghnall had told her that his brothers had told him that their parents remembered from their parents, as all good ghost stories begin with a passed down fashion, that the tree used to be littered with the strung-up bodies of Ozryn rebels, men, women and children, when the Fjerdan army had taken hold of the village long before their time.
According to Fedek, you can still hear their death rattles on windy nights.
Would the Ravkan Second Army do the same? They would need a very little noose for Helin, she thought. Barely a yard of rope would do. Maybe a bit more for Raghnall, who was shooting up like a weed in the last season.
"Your brothers, Uil'yam and Karl, they joined the army, didn't they?"
Raghnall blinked at her through the dark, scowling.
"'Course they did. All good Grisha join the Second Army when they advance from the Little Palace, and my brothers are the best."
He tuts at her, glowers some more, as if she's gone and insulted him, insulted his family, winces again, and once more Helin's face flames pink.
Her world had always been small, pocket-sized, restrained to Petunja's hut and garden, the patch by the river, the pond by the woods, and the whispering rumours around the village that she picked up when no one thought she was there. There had never been mention of Grisha before in her liminal-limited world, of Little or Large Palaces, of Second or First Armies outside the context of ghost stories, and suddenly Helin was struck terribly by how big and confusing the world outside her village truly was.
Similarly, awfully, with a kind of naïve revelation only youth could offer, Helin had the strange notion that her preconceived tiny world had been exactly what Petunja and her husband had spent her entire life carefully crafting around her, caging her in with. Decorating with shooing, scowling, and smacking when conversations close by began to drift into territories they didn't want her to see or hear.
A beating was always a good distraction from discussions.
Why?
"Do you think your brothers might be here?"
Raghnall shrugged, his shoulders quaking. Not a good sign either.
"Maybe? I don't know. Ma or Pa haven't heard from them in a while. Got her spitting feathers, right? Nothing can be done Pa said. If they're on the move, they're on the move and have little time for writing. Doesn't stop her moaning, though."
Helin squatted down in the hay, shuffling close to her friend, her toes wiggling in the warmth it offered her bare, soaked feet.
"Well… If they're here maybe I can find them. Maybe they can sneak us out without getting noticed. I don't fancy being hung from the rafters of this barn."
Raghnall's face waxed white, the freckles across his nose starkly dark in the loss of colour.
"You think they might hang us?"
Now it was Helin's time to tut.
"We stole from the Second Army, Rag… Or at least tried to. I'd rather not take the chance of my life on the mercy of a band of men trained to fight and kill. Best case scenario, if we get caught here and they don't think we're scouts for some Fjerdan unit hiding up ahead, what with your hair and eyes, we get dragged back home and they tell your parents and Petunja what we tried to do."
And Petunja would do a lot worse to her for bringing attention, bad attention, upon her than a short, sharp drop and a snap could. Raghnall, impossibly, paled even further, likely thinking of his mother's temper if she found out he had snuck out to go raid a Second Army cart.
"I think I might prefer the hanging."
Helin too. Which meant they needed to get out of here, and fast.
Helin doesn't want to leave Raghnall, she really, really doesn't, but they were swiftly and resolutely out of options.
She was fast.
She could do this.
"Look, you can't walk so you stay here. Keep still, keep low and keep quiet. I'll try and spy outside, see if I can spot Uil'yam or Karl. I'll be gone fifteen minutes max. If I can't find them, we'll have to try and get you walking on that leg, and we'll have to make a break for it ourselves. The sooner we get out of here, the better."
Warily, Raghnall agreed with a soft nod of his head.
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A sea of hastily assembled pavilions and tents dotted the countryside outside the barn, rusted silver underneath the moonlight. They came in all silhouettes and proportions, some so squat and fat they looked ready to burst, others tall with flags upon their heads, crowning glories flashing icons Helin couldn't hope to decipher.
Not like she could read at all, actually.
The tents pressed in from all sides, huddled together tightly as if they favoured safety by proximity, the paths, if they could be called such, snaking through almost madly, trodden in tunnelled groves with rain and slush they squelched with each step. The smell-
The smell was something else. Thick nearly, rancid with sweat, soiled cotton, and something that tickled her nose. Copper, maybe?
Metallic.
Helin darted out from behind a green tent, just as a woman and a man in blue Keftas strolled on by, and dipped behind the red one across the way, keeping to the edges, the fringes, the shadows.
Blonde and brunette. Decidedly not a Laska.
Neither were the seven men sitting around a fire near the next marquee, stained pots in hand and wooden spoons scooping up soup, laughter bright in the night.
Helin's stomach roiled. Four bites of bread were hardly enough to stave off three days' worth of hunger. She hesitated, watching forlornly as one Soldier scraped the bottom of his bowl, but inevitably pushed on.
Another tent, another five minutes. Another quashing path, another three. Another red tent, another two.
No amber-spiced hair.
No Laska's.
She was turning back, disappointment and worry nipping jagged frustration in her chest, thinking about, perhaps, stealing one of the little carts in the barn, the pull-along ones with the iron grip used to dray Horse feed to the stables, loading Raghnall up inside like a prized, tossed Ketterdam turkey, and hauling him home herself when she saw it.
A tent. Just like the others-
Not like the others.
This one was black, as dark as the sky above, and its flap was tied open, the owner clearly unperturbed by the chance someone would dare go inside.
She smelled the mutton stew before she saw it on the table in the middle of the tent, sitting on a silver tray, she had never seen real silver before, steam rising in tendrils from the bowl. Helin waited, she listened, she watched.
No one was in the tent.
She glanced down the path, right and left and right again just to make sure, and bit down hard her lip.
Hauling Raghnall home would be a lot easier if she had something to stop the cramping in her belly, a bit of wood for the fire that would see her dragging a boy thrice her weight home for three or more hours, and she was very fast-
She did have three minutes left-
Just a mouthful-
Helin shook her head and took five steps towards where Raghnall laid in hiding-
And swiftly swivelled on her heel when her stomach churned, darting for the open flap.
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Helin didn't bother with the spoon. Her feet on tiptoes at the rim of the table, her greedy fingers stretching out, splayed, snatching the bowl right up from its carry tray, fingertips sizzling with the warmth, the glorious warmth, and she tipped her head back and supped straight from the bowl.
She chewed on the carrots, real carrots and not slightly gone-off turnip, and chunks of mutton, fatty and slightly spiced, and thick gravy, not bitty with corn-flour, and other pieces too, delightful chunks of things she had never tasted before, little pieces of surprise and awe for her senses.
When Helin lowered the bowl, the stew was gone.
Not a drop left.
She used the back of her hand to wipe her mouth off, gaze catching on the glint of a mug. She stole that too, expecting the same delight she had found in the bowl, took a gulp-
And her face crumpled up, tight, stiff, the bob of her throat reluctant. She placed the mug down and pushed it far, far away from herself.
Whoever's food Helin had robbed, they could keep their burning-sour drink.
Her heels had just struck rug, warm rug that swallowed up her toes and softly tickled her soles, readying to bolt when the voice came.
"What do we have here?"
The voice, low and warm, startled her. Helin span, heart hammering in her bony chest at the sight of the tent's entrance. For a marvellous moment, she thought it might have closed, because all she sees is black, dense thick black, but the flap had not closed in the wind at all.
A man stood in the entrance.
Helin's hands shake. Her knobbly knees shake. Her breath shakes. Everything shakes and then freezes.
Like this black tent, the man appears far too large to Helin, towering and imposing and garbed in black.
Everything about him was black.
Black Kefta, black boots, black hair, black eyes.
Everything inside her tells her to run, and she wonders idly, dazedly, if that was how people felt when they looked into her own black eyes.
The man falters, just a breath, a beat, the slightest hint of his eyes squinting as if he was confused, maybe shocked at finding her frozen there-
Of course he was, he'd come back to his tent to find some Ozryn orphan gobbling up his food in the dead of the night.
He took a long stride forward.
"It's alright, child."
He tells her smoothly. Child. The way he says it is gentle, tender nearly, placating, but Helin's heart beats like a rabbit in her chest. She had heard Petunja call her just the same, say it just the same, lulling her closer so the seamstress could hit without having to chase the child down.
Helin had learned long ago that adults couldn't be trusted. What they said and what they did were sometimes, mostly, two different things.
Kindness can and does mask anger.
He takes another step, and Helin thought of Raghnall in the barn, of being hung, of having another Ozryn grey tree with bodies swinging from the branches.
Would they tell ghost stories of them in fifty years' time?
He begins to reach out, surely to smack or wrangle in by the scruff of her neck, and it's then that it happens. The terrible, horrendous thing. The thing she must not, never, not once, not at all do. She felt it swell in her chest, in her fear where dark things grew. It frightens her, this power. It terrifies her more than simply the sin that it is. For all her trying, for all her worth, Petunja had never been able to beat it out of her, as much as she and her husband and the local priest had tried.
And they had tried.
They had tried so, so hard.
Helin wished they had succeeded with a bottomless want that ran as deep as her hunger.
The shadows of the tent pulse, thriving, breathing, alive, the feeling in her chest a twin-flame-
And the shadows burst.
A.N: Been working on my other fics, particularly Glitch if you read it, but this one just keeps pulling at me so here we are folks, another quick update.
As always, thank you for taking to time out to read this nonsense, hope you enjoyed it, and if you can, and want to see more, don't forget to drop a review! See you all soon.