Give the Dark My Love(61)

I nodded again. Our accents gave us away.

“I can take you halfway there, if you want to save some coin.” When I hesitated, he added, “I mean, if you don’t mind . . .” He glanced over his shoulder, at the bodies on the cart.

I hefted myself up to sit beside him. I’d intended to stop by the quarantine hospital on the way, but if I could save some silver, I could bring the money home to my parents.

The driver clucked at his draft horses, leading them down to the docks. “So what’s your story?”

“A student at Yūgen, going home,” I said.

He looked impressed. “I wondered as much. Good to see a local girl not in a factory.”

That was the way of the north; everyone there was local.

“Scholarship,” I said, unable to hide the pride in my voice. I never spoke about the scholarship from the mysterious benefactor at school; it was too close to bragging, too likely to draw the kind of attention I didn’t want. But this man reminded me of Papa.

“Good on you!” he said. “You taking alchemical robes and all?”

“Maybe,” I said. Who knew if only one year at Yūgen would be deemed worthy enough.

“Always a string, nah?”

We hit a bump in the street, and the bodies behind us thumped heavily. “Always a string,” I said.

The cart clopped onto the dock, the horses’ hooves landing with a hollow thud. The driver had me get down while he unhitched the horses in front of a flat-bottomed boat, larger than any of the others out there. When we were ready to go, we pushed off from the dock.

We stopped at the quarantine hospital. I thought again of getting off there, but before I had the chance to volunteer, workers emerged with more bodies. The driver tied up the ferry, then jumped down to help put the dead into the boat. I climbed down after him and moved to help.

“Nah, you’re a lady; you wait up there,” the driver said, nodding to the boat.

“I am not a lady,” I replied, reaching to help bear the burden.

I am not one of them. My heart belonged to the north, my soul to the church, my hands to the hospital.

The driver nodded appreciatively, and together we loaded new bodies onto the cart on the boat. The workers thanked us—one of them calling me by name—and the driver pushed off away from the stone steps.

“So what’s your story?” I asked him as we crossed the open water, heading to the forest in the center of the island and the field Dilada had helped clear.

“Parents worked in the mills.”

“Which one?”

“Grindhouse. Dust killed ’em.”

“I’m sorry.”

The driver focused on the boat, but we were gliding smoothly through the water. “Didn’t want that life. Tried to cut it as a farmer. Couldn’t. So here I am.”

Bearing the dead to their graves.

I looked behind us, past the quarantine hospital on its little island and toward the rocky cliffs upon which Northface Harbor sat. The southerners saw features in the dark spots—a face looking out at the bay—but the northerners saw features in the light parts. My grandmother used to say the cliffs held an image of a rabbit. I liked that story much better.

As the sun rose higher into the sky, the bodies began to smell. I turned my face away, but there was no escaping the strange, sweetly rotting humid stench.

“Yeah, it’s bad,” the driver said when he noticed my expression. “You get used to it, though.”

I thought about the quarantine hospital.

“I guess you can get used to anything,” I said.



* * *



? ? ?

At the clearing, I could still see the small iron rings that Governor Adelaide had given us, spread intermittently along the rows of graves. More graves had been added since then, and more rings, too—it was good to know that someone was memorializing the dead. The smell of earth, fresh and damp, filled the air—a welcome relief from the stench that clung to the death cart.

“Avoid any villages with black marks,” the skipper warned me when I disembarked.

I knew this from Papa, but I nodded anyway and thanked him.

Cutting through the forest and approaching my home village from the south was a different route than I was used to, but it was easy enough to stick to the coast and then veer up at the first village. I got lucky; I walked only about five miles before I ran into another cart that carried me for the next ten. I walked another three or so when that cart stopped at a village with sassoon blooms carved into its gate, and then joined a caravan that dropped me less than a mile from my own village. The sun had set by the time I passed under the gates with carved carmellina flowers. I breathed a silent prayer to Oryous; there was no black bunting on the tall wooden planks.

In the spring, people from villages miles away would come here to celebrate the solstice, and carmellina flowers would pop up in the trees, huge and red and fragrant. In the winter, my sister and I would slide across the icy pond until fishermen cracked it open, dropping their lines below the surface. People knew our village because it was home to the flowers, and to the fish, and to my father, the only bookseller in the area.

The main road gave way to the heart of the village. Stone houses and stores with thatched roofs, shared walls, and a covered walkway lined each side of the street. I peered into the dark windows, my heart singing. I spotted the dry goods store where we bought feed for the mule, the bakery where Mama sent Nessie and me to fetch bread when she was too busy to bake it, the church hall creating a dark outline against the stars.