ACT I — THE MENTOR
Chapter One
The wool blanket smelled like sun and dry grass. His mother had washed it that morning, hung it on the line, brought it in at dusk. Folded it twice. Laid it on the cot. Put her hand on his head and said nothing, and went back to the hearth.
He lay with his cheek against the wool and watched the firelight move on the rafters.
His father came in from the yard, cold on his coat, and set the axe by the door. Pulled off his boots one at a time. Stood them by the fire. Didn't say anything. His hands were dark with the day's work, the knuckles split where they'd split before, and he held them to the heat and turned them like he was reading something in them.
"Roof held through the wind," his father said, not looking at anyone in particular.
"It's held ten years," his mother said. "No reason for it to quit tonight."
Something in his father's face eased, just short of a smile. He didn't do it often. It cost him something to do it, the boy thought, though he couldn't have said what.
The boy had been half-asleep already, the way a child is half-asleep before true sleep takes him, aware of the room without being fully in it. He heard his father cross to the water barrel, heard the dipper go in and come out, heard him drink. Ordinary sounds. He would spend years afterward trying to remember one more of them and failing.
His mother set a bowl on the table.
"Eat," she said.
His father ate without talking, but the not-talking wasn't cold — it was just how the two of them sat together at the end of a day, worn down to the parts that didn't need words. The boy watched the shadow of his father's shoulders on the wall and listened to the spoon against the bowl, the wind against the shutters. His mother hummed something low while she worked at the washing, three notes over and over, a tune with no name he'd ever asked for. He closed his eyes.
The last good hour of his life. He didn't know it yet.
He didn't know how long he slept.
What woke him wasn't a sound. It came in under the door before the screaming did — a change in the air, something that had never been in this village in his life.
His father was already on his feet.
"Stay there."
The boy didn't move. His father crossed to the door, hand against it, listening. Firelight on his jaw. Gray in his beard. Then he took up the axe and looked at the woman.
"Get him under the cot."
She had her hands on him before he saw her face. Pulled him off the cot, pressed him into the dark space between the frame and the wall. Her hands were shaking. Her hair had come loose. She smelled like woodsmoke and the soap she made on Sundays.
"Don't move," she said. "Whatever you hear. Don't."
He opened his mouth. Nothing came out. She pressed her hand over it — warm, salt on his lips — held it, took it away, pressed her forehead to his.
Gone.
The door broke inward. Wood splitting where the latch had been. A boot through the gap. His father stepped into the doorway and brought the axe down and the first man fell back and didn't get up. His father followed him into the yard.
The boy couldn't see the rest. Only hear it.
A grunt. A weight hitting the ground. His father's breath, ragged, close to the door and then further from it. The axe landed twice more. A voice cried out in a language that wasn't the country's, high and short, cut off before it finished. The second man died in the yard.
For a moment nothing. Just his father's breathing, somewhere out in the dark, and the wind.
Then more came. More than his father had counted on — the sound of them told him that much. Boots on the frozen ground, more than two pairs, more than four. The voices didn't stop where the first two had. The boy lay with his hands over his ears and couldn't stop hearing what was happening on the other side of the wall — a third voice, then a fourth, his father's name shouted once by his mother from somewhere near the door, cut off.
His mother took the iron from the hearth.
He saw her cross the room. She didn't look at him. She stood at the door with the iron in both hands, back straight, firelight behind her, taller than he'd ever seen her.
A man came through the door.
She swung. The iron caught his skull and he turned and the dark sprayed the wall. He went down without a sound. A second man came in behind him and the iron wasn't enough this time and she went down under him.
The boy bit his own hand and didn't scream.
What happened after that he only ever saw in pieces, for years — the man on his mother, the lift of her hand against the floor, a sound from her throat no throat should make. It didn't last long. It lasted a long time. A mind fighting to survive a thing stops measuring it the way a clock does, and both lengths were true at once. He never worked out which one was truer. Fire caught the wool blanket on the cot above him. Smoke ran low along the floor. Heat filled his eyes, his nose, the back of his throat.
He stayed under the cot. She'd told him not to move.
The man left without looking back. Stepped over her on his way out. The boy saw the boot pass close to his face — mud dried on the leather, a strap wrapped around the calf — and then the man was gone and the room was burning.
He pulled himself out. Crawled where the smoke was thinner. Past his mother. Didn't look at her face.
The door was open. Heat pouring down off the burning roof. He pulled himself into the dirt of the yard and lay there with his cheek against the ground.
The yard was full of the dead.
His father where he'd fallen, one hand still close to the axe he'd dropped. Two men of the village near him — men the boy had known his whole life, men who'd sat at this table, whose names he could have said an hour ago and couldn't make himself say now. The boy who'd shown him how to set a snare last winter, face down, one hand stretched toward the well like he'd been trying to drink from it. A dog he didn't know lay near the fence, and he didn't understand why a stranger's dog was dead in his own yard, and then he stopped trying to understand anything.
Every house was burning. Smoke went up and bent east on the wind. No sound left in the village but the fire. Whoever had done this was already gone.
He counted without meaning to. Two houses, three, four — he lost the count at the fifth because the smoke made it hard to tell where one collapsed wall ended and the next began. Somewhere under one of those roofs was the loom his mother's mother had brought from wherever she'd come from before this village. He didn't think of it as a loss yet. He only noted, distantly, that it was gone, the way he noted the position of the sun.
He didn't know how long he lay there.
His legs wouldn't hold him at first. Hands and knees, then one foot, then the other, until he was standing with his hand on the rail of the well. His feet were bare — he'd come out without shoes. Black with dirt and soot. A thin line of blood from a cut on one ankle.
He looked at the cut. Felt nothing yet.
He didn't cry. Some part of him already understood that crying was for a child who still had something to cry for, and whatever he'd been an hour ago didn't exist anymore. The thing standing in the smoke was something else. It didn't know yet what.
He stood there a long time. Long enough that the sky at the eastern edge of the trees went from black to the gray that comes before color. Long enough that his legs stopped shaking on their own and he had to remember, on purpose, how to hold himself up. He looked at his own hands. They looked like someone else's hands, doing an ordinary thing — hanging at his sides — in a place where nothing ordinary was left.
A timber gave way behind him. The roof came down soft and heavy and the heat washed forward in a wave. He stepped away from it without thinking.
That was when he saw the man.
Standing at the gate. A moment before, he hadn't been there.