Chapter Four:
The Rabbit and the Priest
*•̩̩͙✩•̩̩͙*
Helin doesn't know when she ducked down exactly, knees drawn up to her chin. Nor yet does she know when her hands came clamping down over her own ears, a poor, wretched attempt at drowning out the wail and rumble of the bursting shadows. She doesn't know when her eyes screwed so tightly shut, when her teeth fixed together behind her lips so cruelly she thought they might break, or when precisely the blunt nails of her fingers dug crescent shaped indents into her temple.
It is a strange thing, but when you are dreading something, in the flight of fear and shock and snatched-wide by the wind of an unexpected, horrible scare, and you would give anything to slow down time just so you could think, could breathe-
Time has a rude habit of speeding up.
Helin only knows in that moment that she had gone from before, from standing frozen with a belly full of stew, to this wrecked ruin hunkered on the floor as shadows erupted around her.
It couldn't have been very long at all by what came next.
The wailing ended abruptly, perhaps immediately, perhaps before it could even begin in earnest. Helin still does not stand, does not open her eyes, does not breathe. Only no screams come, no shrieks or shouts of polarized terror, just silence and-
Peace.
She cracks open an eye cautiously, expecting to see the ravages of the dark, the costs of what the shade can do, but she does not find corpses or torn down tents or an overturned valley. Instead she saw something… Impossible.
The man stood much as he had before, halfway between the table and the entrance, between the world and herself, but her shadows, the ones she had made come bursting out of their dwellings of corners and nooks and hidden places to choke the world, were-
Well, they were trapped.
Arms scattered wide, fingers splayed, the man seemed to have somehow, in some way, incredibly, boxed them in before they could sweep too far in their fury and rage. There they hung, in the middle of the room, in the space between them, floating and rolling, nearly languidly as if they were but soft waves on some far off shore. Bringing his hands closer and closer together, slowly, gently, they shrank and condensed until only a little ball of black remained, tiny, so small it could fit into his open hand.
Her Palm-sized panic cradled between long fingers.
The man gazed strongly at the ball of shadow hanging before him, and then his gaze met hers through it, black in the black in the black.
There was no fear, no hatred, no disgust.
He smiled at her, teeth flashing white in his pale face, voice lofty and light and a little bit awed.
"Remarkable."
*•̩̩͙✩•̩̩͙*
Helin sat on the chair in the heart of the black tent the man had steered her into with a gentle but unshakable hand on her shoulder. There was no where to run now, no place to hide, no happenstance to distract. Helin was pinned to the chair under a watchful eye, and she sat there with her back straight, her hands hidden underneath her legs so he could not see them fisted, and her mouth resolutely, determinedly, shut.
He sat across the table from her, idly rolling the ring around his thumb over the joint, staring in that strange, curious way of his.
He was also asking her questions.
Many questions.
"Where did you come from? Not far from here, I assume?"
"Are you alone?"
"Why don't you tell me where you live so I can get you home, yes?"
"I'm sure your friends are worried about you. If you let me know where they are I can bring you to them?"
Helin doesn't answer a single one. She made no move, no flinch, not so much as a huff. She sits straight back in her chair and stays stonily silent, and she dreads.
They knew what she was now. They knew what she could do. Were the people outside building a pyre? What wood were they using? Helin hopes it's not oak.
Oak burns slow.
"Do I at least get a name?"
It had been much longer than fifteen minutes now, and surely Raghnall had assumed she wasn't coming back. Hopefully he had found his own way out from the camp, might have had to crawl or limp, but perhaps he had gotten out and free all the same. Maybe he was already halfway back to Ozryn by now if he caught a farmer on the road back to the village.
Helin just needed to figure out a way to do the same before the fires were lit.
"Olga."
Her voice was dry and brittle, and bouncing in its lie. The ring stopped spinning around the mans' finger.
"Olga, is it? And does Olga have parents out looking for her right now?"
Lie.
Lie and get out.
"Yes."
Helin nodded frantically. Maybe if the man thought she had people who cared for her, out there waiting for her, he might think about them and not her, might have empathy or sympathy, or whatever it was that made adult's stall execution.
"They would be very worried. I must get back to them right now-"
"And where do these parents of yours live?"
Somewhere in the tent, something ticks and tocks. Helin counts three turns before she answers.
"Arkesk."
The man behind the table hums long and low, and his head tilted just a little.
"That's a long, long way to come without any shoes."
Pointedly, he glanced down to her bare, mud-caked feet poking out the hem of her tatty dress. Her toes curl under the cocked brow, her throat bobbing with a deep swallow.
"They're… Merchants. We travel with the trade. We're currently staying camped out in the weeping woods."
Again, the ring began to spin, and Helin watched the black-fat faced jewel sparkle in the low-light of the tent.
"What kind of merchants?"
A beat.
"Spice."
"Spice merchants? From Arkesk?"
Helin blinked, refusing to look at the man in the eye. Instead her gaze falls to the table, and even the grains in the wood seem to scream her mistake back at her.
Arkesk was known for tailoring and textiles.
Think!
"My mother is originally from Shu Han. She has family who come over and bring the spices we sell on their visits."
Another tick.
Another tock.
The man-
The man laughs, a noise that seems to unwittingly break free of his throat, deep and raspy like his well-trimmed beard. It reminded Helin a little of pine needles, shiny and thin, and easy to get pricked by.
"You're quick on your feet, aren't you? Very clever for one so young."
Helin doesn't know what he means by that, she was sitting still and not running at all, nor why it would be funny. She finds nothing about this, sitting in a black tent being questioned after stealing from the Second Army, having done what she never should have done, amusing at all.
She must have been scowling, frown pulled deep over her hooded eyes, because when she meets the mans gaze for the first time since being shepherded into this seat, he chuckles at it like one would chuckle at a hissing kitten, lounges back in his chair, and waves over to one of two guards now standing vigil at the tents entrance, voice rising with the flick of his fingers.
"Bring him in."
Helin's stomach dropped.
"You know, before I found you in this tent I was called away from the supper you ate by my men who found the most peculiar thing stashed away in our storage."
Raghnall, half carried by his bum leg, came around the corner of the tent, in through the flaps, held up by a stern looking woman in a red Kefta.
He was staring at his boots.
He also had a bloody honey-cake clasped in his hand.
Helin's stomach doesn't just drop, it shatters.
"Raghnall here tells me your name is Helin and that you're both from Ozryn. Raghnall here has two brothers in the Second Army, and two more at the Little palace and you…"
The man leaned over the table, peerlessly, head cocked.
"You're an orphan."
The muscle in Helin's jaw contracts until she's pushing words through her teeth and not her tongue.
"I'm not an orphan!"
"Oh?"
The man inquired rather politely, softly, given Helin's rather poor outburst. She shrivelled and shrunk under the gentleness of it.
She always thought Petunja husbands fists could hit hard, but there was something about the gentleness to this man that struck harsher somehow. Differently, but hard all the same.
"I'm not an orphan… I just don't know where my mother or father are."
Someone was giving Petunja the gold for her care each month. Someone had placed her on their doorstep in a wicker basket. Someone must have given her this Saint-awful gift.
"But they send gold each month, so they must care."
Helin doesn't know if she was trying to convince the man or herself of this. Perhaps both.
He seemed to understand this too, seemed to somehow see right through her, and Helin dropped her gaze down to the table, staring hard at a knot in the polished grain of the wood.
It looked as tangled as her belly felt.
"And how do they send this gold?"
A tick, a tock, a tick-
"Helin."
Helin broke. What good was keeping silent now? Raghnall had his honey-cake, and now Helin would have her pyre.
"They leave it in an envelope on our doorstep on the last day of each month. It has my name on it. I've seen the cover."
One of the man's hands fell to the table, fingers drumming. Helin counted them go. One, two, three, four. Again. One, two, three, four.
It was the only thing keeping her calm. Like two sets of heartbeats.
"Does the envelope contain any letters?"
Helin helplessly shrugged.
"Don't know. Petunja always snatches it up before I can get to it-"
And she realized her mistake immediately, shoulders stiffening under her shawl.
"Petunja, is it?"
The man asked with his too-toothy smile. Helin blinked, and blinked, ran a small tongue over her chapped lips, shaking her head, and panicked.
"I meant Taisiya. Taisiya Petrov. She's a farmer's wife on the edges of Ozryn-"
But the man was no longer listening, no longer looking, no longer watching with those dark eyes that saw everything, every jump of her cheek and every wince of her eye and every lie from her lip, turning to the woman with the stern face and the red Kefta, nodding.
"Take some men over to Ozryn and drop the boy off at his home on your way. Bring me this Petunja, will you? We need to have a little… Talk. And make sure she brings those letters if she still has them. She shouldn't be too hard to track down, what with her Fjerdan name living this side of the border."
"I meant Taisiya, really-"
The woman gave a jarring nod, a hard down and upward tilt, and Raghnall floundered as he was swiftly dragged towards the entrance of the tent.
"Helin! Wait! He said we could go home and have cakes if I told him-"
Raghnall's voice cut off as he disappeared around the bend, and Helin's hands braced on the table she was sitting at, readying to heave herself off the chair and bolt after her friend-
"I really wouldn't advice it, Helin."
Helin froze at the man's soft voice, gazing at him, and then the guards-
All looking at her.
All readying to chase.
Helin sagged back into her seat.
Her chin trembled.
"Hung."
The man frowned confusedly over at her.
"Excuse me?"
Helin squared her shoulders.
"I want to be hung. Not drowned or burned or skinned. It's faster… Or so I've heard."
Hiding her shaking, shivering hands underneath her legs, Helin tried to be brave. She didn't think she managed it, not with how shaky her voice was, the shiver down her spine that prickled like the mans' pine-needle laughter, or the wobble to her bottom lip, but she tried and maybe that was the important thing.
It was always going to come to this, wasn't it? Petunja had warned her, the Priest had warned her.
There's only one way to get rid of the dark.
The man's frown deepened, creases of confusion and concern etching furrows deep across his brow.
"Why would I hang you?"
Did he want her to say it? Was a confession a must before-
"You saw what I did. It's wrong. It's evil. Petunja said-"
Helin's mouth clamped shut, the words lodging somewhere deep in her throat. The man waited, and waited, and then clearly got tired of waiting.
"Petunja said?"
He sounded angry. Bruised almost. Like someone had come along and pulled his voice tight in a rope, and nearly ripped. Anew, Helin shivered and shrunk, tried to bury herself in her own dress and chair, tried to be small and invisible and-
And she broke on the memory of that terrible, terribly cry drifting along with the rancid smell of singed fur.
"She said if I gave into temptation again that the Saints would turn on the village, and I would put everyone at risk. She said the only way to purify sin is-... That light is the only way to get rid of the dark. Please, I don't want to be burned. She made me watch the Priest throw a live rabbit into a pit-fire, said that would be me if I did it again, and it-... It kept squealing-"
Helin's voice refused to continue, her words failing, falling. She hears that poor rabbit though, that terrible, lingering high-pitched squall of death, feels Petunja's hand on the back of her head, fingers digging into curls, pinning her in place, not letting her look away from the fire and the fur and the-
Helin doesn't want to die, not at all and not like that, and she'll beg if she has to, beg on her hands and knees and-
"Please, anything but the fire-pit. Please-"
The man stood from his seat, and Helin stiffened, bile in her throat and a rapid beat in her heart. She's sweating she knows, trembling so hard her teeth are knocking, and she's somehow both hot and cold and-
The shadows pulse and thrum-
The man made short strides to get around the table, and Helin thinks he was going to grab her, drag her to the closest fire like the Priest had grabbed the rabbit from the trap-
He doesn't. He bends down on his haunches close by the side of her chair, eye to eye with the small girl with her dangling muddy feet. He places a hand on her trembling leg, right over the crossed scar on her knee. She felt the hand through the cloth of her skirts. A heavy weight that was as warm as it was soft.
"No one's going to burn you, Helin."
Helin was confused. Petunja had told her if anyone ever found out, if she did it again-
Isn't he afraid of the Saints?
"Then what's going to happen to me?"
The hand on her knee flexed.
"You're coming home."
A.N: As always, thank you all so very, very much for the kind reviews, the favourites, and the follows. If you have a spare moment or two, please drop a review! And I will hopefully see you all soon. Stay safe!