Arien touches my arm, drawing my attention back to him. “Leta? I—I’ve been thinking.” He leans in and softens his voice. “What if, after the tithe, we didn’t go home? What if we didn’t go back, ever? You know Mother wouldn’t stop us.”
He rubs at his blistered fingers, then his gaze drops to my covered knees. I force a smile. “Should we build a house in the tallest tree of the forest? I’ll make us a quilt from dandelions and cook toadstool stew for our dinner. The birds can comb our hair.”
Arien scrunches his nose, the way he always does when I tease him. “I’m serious.”
“Where would we go, if we did leave?” The word feels strange in my mouth. It’s the first time either of us has spoken it aloud.
“We could stay here. We could stay in the village.”
The thought is vivid, threaded with gold. I look at the buildings surrounding the square. The healer’s thatch-roofed cottage with flower beds beneath the front windows. The store with barrels of flour and bolts of cloth. We could work in the store. I’d weigh sugar while Arien measured lengths of cloth. Or help in the healer’s garden. Tend her flowers, gather the petals and leaves she turns to medicine.
When I think of how I felt last night as I watched Arien’s hands in the flames, I want to stay in the village. I do. But everyone here already treats us suspiciously. They know how Mother took us in, how our lives have been brushed by death. Once marked, the Lord Under knows your name. That’s what people believe. And if they found out about Arien, about the shadows …
Arien’s dreams aren’t like the magic worked by alchemists, who draw on the golden power the Lady has threaded through the world. Their magic is light. His nightmares, full of shadows that come alive, are more like the power that comes from the Lord Under. Arien is not like that, not dark and wrong and terrible … But as soon as someone heard his cries, or saw his eyes turn black, they’d think he was. They’d call him corrupted. They’d fear him.
“I promised to keep you safe.” I stare down at my boots, scuffed by dust. I can’t look at Arien, at the tentative hope in his eyes. “I don’t know if you’d be safe in the village.”
“Then we’ll go somewhere else, somewhere far away.”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
Arien sighs, frustrated. The line starts to move, and I bend down to pick up the basket as we shift forward.
Across the square, a woman steps out of her cottage. Her eyes flicker over the crowd—and us—before narrowing at the ground. She takes something from a jar. A handful of salt. She throws it heavily into the street, then draws her salt-crumbed fingers across her chest. Two fingers, left to right, a line across her heart. The symbol of the Lady: a protection against darkness.
“Why did she do that?” Arien asks warily.
I look more closely at the crowd. But they aren’t focused on us, or anything that I can see. There’s just a vague, nervous crackle of restlessness, like the air before a storm.
Everyone is dressed in their nicest clothes. Polished boots, crisp linen shirts, pinned-up braids, delicately embroidered dresses. We’ve gathered like this is a celebration. And it is. At least, it should be. But in the line where we wait with our tithes, people murmur to one another anxiously. Around the square, more doors open. More villagers scatter salt over their thresholds. The healer has strung garlands of rosemary and sage across her windows.
“Have you heard?” A girl comes along the line, a pen and square of parchment in her hands. She has oak-brown skin and a cloud of beautiful curled hair, which she pushes out of her face before she scans the nearby people, unsettled. Her voice dampens to a whisper. “Lord Sylvanan is here. He’s come to claim the tithe.”
“Lord Sylvanan?” A nervous shudder runs through me. “Here? He never comes to tithe days.”
It was six years ago that we last gathered in Greymere, when it was our turn to pay the tithe to the Sylvanans, who own all the land in the valley. Then, there was nothing to fear.
The lord who came to the tithe day was older than Mother. He was tall and handsome, and wore his dark hair tied neatly back. He helped the villagers pack the wagon he’d brought to take everything back to his estate. Afterward he walked slowly through the square and looked appreciatively at the village. His eyes crinkled up when he smiled at Arien and me, running past amid a tangle of children.
But there’s a new lord now. His son. Because just after our last tithe day, the whole Sylvanan family died. All except for him, the new lord.