Wolves Among Us(63)

In a blur, he lunged. Before he could catch her, she threw her money on the floor, grabbing the violet-colored bottle she had spied, running out the door. Her heart pounded as he chased her out into the street.

“Do not go home, Mia!” he screamed after her. “I am trying to help you!”

People everywhere stared, something new in their eyes. They looked at her with something awful, something like pity.

She ran without stopping, losing the man easily. He threw his hands in the air and shouted after her, but she kept running. She did not slow until she turned the corner on the dirt path that led past the ivy-covered walls to her father’s shop and saw horse droppings on the path.

No one Mia knew rode a horse. Not to see her father anyway. His business involved too many rebels and revolutionaries, men who did not sit proud and obvious on a horse’s perch, men who had to sneak and hide and look over their shoulder.

Her father screamed. She ducked behind the wall, watching as men dragged him out of the shop, beating him until he fell and did not move. Smoke billowed out from the door of the shop, black and greasy.

“Where’s Tyndale?”

“He’d not be fool enough to hang round the place.”

“Is it all burned?” a man called to someone, someone still inside her father’s shop. The man emerged, his face covered in soot, marred by hatred.

“Not all of it,” the man said, kicking her father. She screamed, making the men look in her direction. Mia dropped the bottle, the glass shattering around her feet, the dark fluid wasted on the cold stone. God in His great mercy made her legs fly into a run, even before she knew what to do. Mia tore down the street, threading her tiny body through narrow passages and jumping out to run down other lanes. She ran until she found another village, where she stayed for days, coming out only at night to look for garbage to eat, to listen at windows for bits of news about her father and Tyndale.

Those men had raided his print shop on orders from someone important back in England. They had burned the press and everything in the shop. They had hung Mia’s doll in effigy as a joke, a warning to anyone who tried to scavenge through the wreckage. A black greasy hole stared at her where his shop had been.

Tyndale himself was never heard from again. Mia walked miles some nights to return to the shop’s empty space, thinking he would return for her.

He didn’t.

Tyndale became the most hunted man in the empire, in all of Europe. If caught, his fate would be unspeakable. People speculated on what tortures would be applied, which limbs would be torn, how slowly he would die. Mia understood why Tyndale didn’t want her. He would never allow her to be in his company again, not in these burning days.

Mia determined she would keep her promise. She would wait, if not for him, then for the burning days to end. And when they ended, she would read the book that stole her father and her beloved friend away. She would enter the new world their lives had bought her passage into.

But today, sitting in this dark cell alone with Alma, Mia had found her way to freedom. The burning days would never end; she saw that now. As long as the book was read, people would die for it. She had been wrong to wait, wrong to think a safer time and place to stand for the truth would find her. Truth made the world unsafe. Truth spurred evil into action. There would be no end to evil, not in this world, not while the book was still open.

And yet Mia found this one thing more to be true: She had been wrong to be so afraid, afraid of the darkness in the world, and afraid of the truth as well. She had survived the darkness, and she had survived the truth. She had survived the worst moments when she wished to die and the worst moments when she feared Alma would die. She had survived because God was not just in the church; He was in the world and in His Word. She had lost sight of that, frightened by the way people had responded to His Word, unwilling to lose another family for its sake. But He had never punished her for her weakness. He had healed and saved at wild, unpredictable moments, but He was here, and He was at work. They were together with God, right there, Alma and Mia, and they were safe.

Mia sat upon the bench, shifting her weight to ease the pain in her bones. Alma curled up like a kitten in her lap, and Mia bent over to kiss her head. Whatever happened now, Mia knew that this unpredictable, patient God was at work. She would choose to focus on this one thought and trust Him once more.

Worn by the streets, she had met and married Bjorn not many years after that awful year her father died, grateful for a constant roof and bed. She had stumbled into this good fortune and taken up his offer of marriage without question. And when her stomach swelled and the timely pains came upon her, she knew she had done the right thing. Her father and Tyndale, they would want her life to go on. They would want her to be a good wife and have many children and someday to teach them from the Book. If Mia survived this cell, she would do that.

She remembered Alma’s birth. She remembered lying in her bed, too weak to help, too filled with joy to even speak, watching a midwife rub Alma with salt and wine. Bjorn had come home drunk, elated.

Mia reached for his hand. “You do not mind it is a girl, then?”

“What? A girl? Well, have another.” He slapped his leg. “I heard news today, Mia, great news. A man causing much trouble for sheriffs, stirring up people—he got burned in Brussels last week. That’s the end of his work.”

Prickly black stars appeared in the corners of her vision. She could not focus on his face. The room shrank. Bjorn celebrated, but not for her. Not for them.