Freda: Volume III in the New Eden series (5 page)

“Now, go to sleep and don’t worry about tomorrow, all right, you three? Ginger, don’t keep the others awake with your fancy stories like you always do. And Rosemary, don’t you hog the blanket. It’s going to be a cold night.”

I have never tucked them in before. I have always been the one being tucked in, with the three of them snuggled at my side. I feel a hole opening up inside me, stretching my soul into a darkness deeper than any Subterra cave.

The three dolls stare up at me. Their wide, button eyes are filled with the expectation and trust that I saw in Susannah’s children’s eyes. I look away. I have failed them, and I can’t bear to admit it to them.

“Go to sleep now,” I whisper before spinning and gliding quietly across the room to untie the curtains. The summer drapes, put up at the end of last spring and inappropriately thin for this cold weather, billow slowly down to block out the fading world.

I don’t want my dolls to see the apocalypse that will wake them tomorrow.

I stand at the window, my fingers still gripping the dainty summer fabric, and try hard not to cry. I breathe slowly, trying to calm myself. I must be strong. I must persevere. Dane and I have been through so much, and God has led us out of each ending to a new beginning. I know Dane no longer believes that, but I do. I must. It’s the only thing that can keep me from having my mind sucked down into that hole inside me.

Dear Lord
, I pray silently,
please help me to carry on.

CHAPTER 5

“Freda,” my mother scolds from the hallway, “what are you doing, child?”

I startle and turn, clasping my empty hands behind my back. I did not hear her come up the stairs.

“The essentials. We must gather the essentials.”

Without waiting for an answer, she disappears through the door across the hall and starts clattering around among the things strewn across the floor of her bedroom.

The essentials
, I think as I glance around my green-tinged room. The wardrobe looks needlessly festive, painted with bright images of daisies and bougainvillea. My childish drawings and simple embroideries cling to the walls in patient naiveté. My dressing table beckons with a tireless, exhausting optimism.
If only you brush your hair
, it seems to say,
everything will be all right
.

A few trinkets rest atop the table, drawing me to it.

My hairbrush lies bristles-up, the goathair stiff in its worn, oaken handle. It rests atop my copper-rimmed hand mirror, crafted by Mr. Townsend, the glasswright who used to live out east near Gregory’s house, by the big ruins. Darius forced Townsend to accompany the army to Tawtrukk because of his unique skills; I remember seeing his name on the list of those killed in the battles.

I lift both the brush and the mirror, the oaken handle warm in my right hand with the mirror’s copper handle cold in my left. The copper gleams, untarnished, which means my mother has been polishing it since I left. And the image in the mirror is clear. She’s been dusting, too.

Are these essentials? No. I should cut off my long hair, not lug these tools of vanity into the wilderness.

Across the length of the table lies a soft lace runner made by my great-grandfather. It’s yellowed over the decades, but its quiet grace still inspires me.
One day
, I used to tell myself every morning,
something as beautiful and perfectly measured will come from my own fingers
.

Essential? No. I don’t need to carry about a reminder of my failure.

Farther back on the table sits my sewing basket, clasped shut with a twine hoop around a silver button. I don’t need to open it to know what’s inside: needles, thread, pins, colored ribbon on wooden spools. In some spots, the wicker frays sharply; in others, it’s worn to river-stone smoothness. If I’d come home from the Wifing unchosen, my father would have asked Mrs. Basker to craft me a new one, larger and more fitting for the seamstress I would have become.

This one will do. Essential? Yes. No doubt my father will get his tools as well. I, however, shall carry my own.

As I lift the basket, a small book that had been resting behind it tumbles off the table to the floor, landing at my feet with an uncertain thump. I stoop and retrieve it, my breath taken away by a flood of memories in its soft, tattered cloth cover.

I learned to read on my mother’s lap with this book. This book taught me my prayers, which I whispered beside my father in front of the crackling fire on cold winter nights. This book, like my dolls, has been all over Southshaw with me. I had it tucked into a hidden pocket in my blouse during my interview with Judith. Had she known, I think she would have approved.

Essential? Certainly.

“Freda, come on now.” My mother stands in the doorway behind me, her face stern. She holds a small bundle wrapped in a shawl I made when I was eleven. Tight-knit and overlarge, the shawl should have been given to a goatherd years ago to warm his goats in their pen. Of all the beautiful shawls and blankets in our house, why would she choose this clumsy rag to keep?

“Are you ready?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

I slip the book into my pocket and scoop up the sewing basket, then turn to face her.

Her stoic frown twists to surprise. “That’s all? Those are the only essentials you’ve considered?”

Replies flit through my mind like hummingbirds, difficult to catch. I’ve lived six months without these things, from Fobrasse’s Subterran apartments to Micktuk’s smelly shack to many blanketless nights under the stars. My definition of essential has changed. And so has hers, judging from the size of the bundle in her arms.

“Yes,” is all I can muster.

Her eyes flick to the wardrobe, to the dark corners of the room, to the crisply made bed. “Very well,” she snaps, and she turns and descends to the ground floor.

“No, wait” I chirp, and I grasp the mirror and the brush, then bustle to the bed.

I whisper to the dolls, “I’m sorry to wake you, but you can’t stay here.” I scoop them up, squeeze them tight, and hurry down the stairs, out the open door, and into the snow-shrouded yard.

As I leap down the steps to the slate path, my mother tsks and says, “You forgot to close the door again. Will you never learn?”

I pause and look back, remembering the hundreds, maybe thousands of times she’s said that to me.

I smile at her and say, “I guess not” before marching away from the house.

Dane is already waiting beside my father at the gate. Each wears a large knapsack. I wonder what they’ve salvaged from the workshop. Dane dangles a smaller pack before me as I approach.

“Perhaps,” he says with a curious look, “since you have so little of your own, you can carry your mother’s things also.”

“You said just the essentials.”

“I guess I did.”

“The absolute essentials.”

“You’re right.”

I can’t tell if he’s angry with me or not.
Oh Freda,
I think,
you were a fool to fall into nostalgia instead of focusing on survival.
How many candles did I leave behind? Blankets, clothing, tools, even the knobs from the wardrobe doors would be more useful than what I carry.

But there’s no time to go back, so I accept the empty sack from him. How many days of life have I just traded for my silly sentimentalism?

My mother places her bundle at my feet, and together we kneel to fill my sack with her essentials. Clothes—mostly socks—and candles. An extra flint, a whetstone, tweezers, several kitchen knives, two small cooking pots, two metal cups... I stop thinking and just shove everything inside the pack. When I’ve finished, my mother takes the three dolls and curls them into a cozy space inside one of the pots, fitting the sewing kit in last.

Before cinching it, she gestures at my bulging pockets.

“It’s nothing,” I begin, but she halts me with a raised finger.

Reluctantly I extract the embroidery and the little prayer book and hand them to her. She regards them with surprise, then hands them back to me.

“These,” she whispers, “will keep better in your pocket.”

“Ready?” my father demands from behind me.

“Just,” my mother replies, standing up with a small groan and putting her hands to her back. I wonder if she can make it over the mountain pass.

I stand and hide the twinges of exhaustion and pain in my own back, my hips, and my arms. Lifting the pack, I settle it on one shoulder, feeling its bite in my bones. As I swing it round to slip my other arm through, it wobbles and topples me off balance.

Dane leaps to my side, grabbing the sack with one hand and steadying me with the other. His strong arm on my waist feels good. I don’t remember the last time we held each other. This is by no means tender, but it’s as close as we’ve come for some time, and I like it. There has been far too much rushing about, yelling, and fighting these past days.

Although he wears his own heavy pack, he seems unburdened by holding mine as I slip my arm through the strap and heft it onto my back. It’s lumpy, and awkward. And heavy.

We all look back at the doomed house.

“You know,” Dane startles me with a sudden wistfulness, “I never once saw your bedroom.”

“Of course not,” my father says with startling authority, but his tone is fringed with amusement. Dane always reminded him of Linkan, when they were friends as young men. “That would have been inappropriate.”

“Yes,” agrees Dane. “At the time.” He grasps my hand in his, and his warmth flows up my arm and all through me.

My mother slips past us all and through the gate, saying, “At the time, you were no taller than this fence.” She lets her fingers brush the top of the post which comes up only to about my waist.

Dane laughs, and there’s mirth in it, even as dusk turns to dark and we hurry away from my home and abandon my past. As we walk through the deepening shadows of the road, the pack bites into my shoulders and the winter crawls into my bones. The walking keeps us thawed, but every wearying step reminds me that before noon tomorrow we must cover fifteen more miles, up and over the snow-thickened pass.

In fifteen minutes we’ve reached Semper’s house at the southern edge of the village. The familiar silhouettes of the chapel and the low house blacken a void in the dark woods. I’m grateful we can’t see the destruction Darius left behind. As we approach and then pass the ruined chapel, I direct my gaze to the feet of my mother before me, concentrating on the smooth rhythm of her footsteps.

“I don’t understand,” Dane says as we leave the desecrated temple behind us forever. “Where is everyone?”

The stables wait, closed up against the snow and cold. A dozen people huddle around a single lantern and a tiny fire which light up the wall in flickering orange and black. A gust knifes in from the west, billowing their jackets and stinging my face. Why must this night be so cruel?

Dane rushes forward. “They were told to hurry.” He halts and turns, confronting my father, “Didn’t they know to hurry?”

“They will come soon, Dane,” my father says, but the words are hollow.

“They should have come already,” Dane replies as he starts off toward the group again. Halfway there, he shouts to them. “The others! Where are the others!”

Three of the menacing, huddled shadows turn, revealing flickering faces in the lantern’s light. The young mother from the barn. My cousin Jeffrey. Mary, the grown daughter of the glasswright, only a few years older than I.

One of the others stomps toward us. Patrick’s voice carries across the meadow as we approach. “No idea, Semper. This is all that have come so far.”

Concern and frustration wrinkle Dane’s words. “I said one hour. Didn’t I say one hour? I’ve given them more than that.”

“Perhaps more will come as we ready the horses,” Patrick soothes.

Dane darts forward, slipping his pack off his back and dropping it in the snow near the lantern. The others stand and watch as I hurry to keep up, dropping my knapsack next to his. In an instant he’s at the door of the stables, his numb fingers bullying the latch open. He sweeps the door out in a wide arc, then rushes inside.

Patrick grabs the lantern and charges in behind him.

“Only two!” Dane’s exclamation hits me like a kick in my belly. “Where are the horses!”

I remember the small herd of horses down by the lake. We don’t have time to round them up now.

Dane comes back to the door and glances frantically around the darkness. But there is nothing to see. There are no hundreds of people to lead out of Southshaw. There are no legions of horses to carry our essentials, or to bear us into the mountains.

“I was going to tell you, Semper,” says Patrick.

“Stop calling me Semper,” Dane growls.

“But—”

“Get the horses ready to go. We leave in ten minutes whether anyone else shows up or not.”

The lantern dangles in Patrick’s loose grip before him, the orange light dancing devilishly on the two men’s faces. It reminds me of the terrifying nights in the caves while Lupay and Garrett dug out after the collapse. I see in Dane’s granite stare the same empty hopelessness that I saw in Lupay’s eyes when she first returned to the big cavern and told us of the cave-in. I see in Patrick’s confusion the same desperation that I heard in Susannah’s voice during those hot, suffocating hours.

Dane barks out, “Well?”

Patrick looks to me, but what can I say?

Dane hisses, “The horses aren’t going to ready themselves, are they?”

Patrick starts back like a dog kicked by its master. “No, Semper,” he mumbles.

As Patrick turns to head back to the stables, Dane grabs his thick coat and spins him around and holds him tight. Dane draws Patrick close, the lantern swinging wildly with metallic squeals, hurling violent firelight onto the stable walls. For an instant, I see the terrifying strength hidden in Dane’s lean muscles, the brutality of Baddock coming out in his glaring eyes.

“Don’t call me Semper,” he threatens.

Patrick has recovered from his surprise and shows strength of his own as he straightens and glares right back at Dane. Like Baddock was, Patrick is compact but powerful, quick and smart. As he stands face to face with Dane, I can see why Darius appointed him one of the leaders of his army.

“As you wish.”

Dane releases Patrick. Both men breathe hard, their steamy breath glowing orange between them.

After a moment, Dane says again, “Ready the horses.”

Patrick considers for a moment, then nods and turns toward the stables. After three quick steps, he stops and spins, pointing at Dane.