The Grace Year(64)

My stomach growls.

“I get what you’re trying to do, you know.” I glare up at him. “When I was five, I went to the orchards with my father. He could reach right up and pluck an apple from the limbs. I asked him to hold me up so I could get one, and he refused. He said, ‘You’re smart enough to get one on your own.’ It made me furious, but he was right. Eventually, I grabbed a long stick and beat it out of the tree.” I laugh at the memory. “I have to admit, it was the best apple I’ve ever had.”

He smiles, but I see something behind his eyes. A tinge of sadness … regret.

“Do you know who your father is?” I ask.

“I was born in June.” He looks at me like I should know what that means.

“April, for me.”

“Figures,” he says. “Stubborn. Obstinate. Try this one.” He rolls another walnut my way. “I was born nine months from when the poachers returned for a new hunting season.”

“Oh,” I say, feeling heat rise in my cheeks. “So he’s a poacher?”

“Was a poacher.”

“I’m sorry … did he pass?”

“If you mean pass right over the mountain, then yes.” He cracks another one. “He got a kill, but he didn’t take us with him. He offered to take my mom and me, but not the girls. He could never look at them as anything but the enemy.”

“Like Anders?” I ask, thinking about the way he talks about the grace year girls.

He lets out a deep sigh. “Anders is complicated. His mother was once a grace year girl. She got rid of her magic, nearly died from it, has a scar clear across her face, but her husband-to-be didn’t like the way she looked anymore, so they banished her.”

“I know this story from my mother,” I whisper. “She was a Wendell girl.”

He shrugs. “She hated the county. Everything it stood for. She raised her boys the same.”

“She had more than one boy?” I ask, sitting up a little taller.

“A rarity. I know.” He nestles the empty shells together. “She loved them. Doted on them. Especially William, Anders’s little brother. He was always so … happy. Anders wanted to get a kill so his little brother wouldn’t have to. And now they’re gone…” His voice trails off.

“The curse?” I ask.

Ryker nods. “My mother believes it happened for a reason, but she believes a lot of things. I guess if the curse never happened, if your father hadn’t saved him, we wouldn’t be here right now.” He looks up at me. His eyes are the color of burned sugar. I never noticed that before.

I swallow hard. “Your mother sounds lovely. What’s she like?”

“Kind, beautiful, full of life.” As he says this, I watch his entire body relax. Normally he holds his frame like a tight wire, ready for anything, but I see an ease come over him. “But there are spells. She works hard, provides as much as she can, but she’s getting older now. Before I came of age, it was my responsibility to take my sisters from the hut when she had a visitor … to help her when she needed to recover.”

“Recover?”

His shoulders collapse. “Sometimes it’s crying spells. A dark cloud hanging over her. Other times it’s more serious and I have to send for the healer.”

“Serious how?” I’m still trying to crack the shell, but I don’t have the muscle strength.

“The wives are spared this,” he says as he picks another walnut. “While you are vessels for sons, the women of the outskirts are vessels for their desire. Their rage.” His eyes narrow. “There are certain men that will only be accepted inside a hut when the food is running low.”

I think about the Tommy Pearsons and Geezer Fallows of the world, and a shiver runs through my blood.

“Or worse, the guards,” he adds.

“The guards? But they’ve gone under the knife. They don’t have any…” I finally manage to crack the walnut open.

He raises a brow; he almost seems amused by my sputtering. “It doesn’t castrate their minds. If anything, it makes them worse.”

“How?” I ask as I tip back the shell, finally getting something to eat.

“Because no matter what they do, they can never be truly … satisfied.”

I think about Hans, weeping in the healing house, ice nestled between his legs … the look of utter despair when he escorted the girls home from his first grace year, the girl he loved not being one of them. The tic he had of rubbing his heart, like he could somehow mend it. His trembling hand when he unsnagged my ribbon from the post. Maybe that’s true for some, but not Hans.

“That’s like saying all poachers are animals,” I say.

“Maybe we are.” He glances up at me, trying to gauge my reaction.

He wants to know what I think of him.

But I’m afraid of what will slip out if I open my mouth.

“Here,” he says as he reaches over, putting his hand over mine to help me crack the next one.

I could still be delirious from the fever breaking, or high on the fresh air, but when he pulls his hand away, my fingers seem to hang there in the ether, as if longing for his return.





SPRING