The Grace Year(73)
Dropping the ribbon to the floor, the last confine the county holds over me, I lead him to the bed.
He’s a poacher. I’m prey. Nothing will ever change that. But in this small treetop cabin, away from our home, and the men who named us, we are still human beings, longing for connection, to feel something more than despair in this bleak year.
With nothing but the moon and the stars as our witness, he lies beside me. Pressing our palms together, entwining our fingers, we breathe in time. This is exactly where we need to be. There’s no second-guessing, no thinking. And when his lips meet mine, the world disappears.
Like magic.
Tonight, as I lie next to him, I memorize every inch of him with my fingertips. Every scar. Every chiseled ridge. I whisper secrets into his skin, everything I’ve longed to tell him, and when I run out of breath, I place the deep blue flower in the palm of his hand. He’ll know what it means. As bittersweet as it is, I can’t help thinking that maybe it survived for exactly this occasion. Because words would fail me, my lips would betray me. But this flower will tell him everything he wants to hear, everything he needs to tell himself. He can read into every petal, every fall, every rivet in the stem, but the meaning will remain the same. Good-bye.
He’ll probably be wondering if he did something, said something to make me leave, or maybe he’ll just think I was spooked by Anders. No matter the cause, no matter the pain, he’ll understand it was for the best—inevitable.
He saved my life. And now it’s time for me to save his.
Gathering my things, I descend the ladder. I see Anders was true to his word, placing the candle and the shroud beneath the blind, but the candle has burned down to the quick, leaving nothing but a pool of soft wax. As I look up at the sky, a feeling of dread presses down on me. I thought it was just before dawn, but the sun has been up for hours, hidden beneath thick dark clouds. I stayed too long.
Wrapping the shroud around my body, my face, I smell fetid meat and bitter herbs. It smells of Anders.
Bumping into something hanging from the ladder, I grab on to it to stop the noise. I know that sound. It’s the wind chime Anders made. I can’t help wondering if these are the discarded bones of grace year girls. If that’s what will happen to me.
Stepping away from the shore, back toward the barrier, feels wrong. Like something my body isn’t supposed to do. He said he’d mark the trail. I’m searching for a pattern, anything that stands out, when I spot the orange-yellow leaves of the butterfly weed marking the trail. The meaning couldn’t be more clear—leave and never return. Anders definitely knows his flowers.
As I follow the trail of petals, there’s a part of me that wonders if this is all an elaborate hoax, a path leading me straight into Anders’s blade, but when I clear the last of the trees and come face-to-face with the towering fence, I know he meant what he said—every word of it. But where’s the gap in the fence? I’m wondering if I’m too late, if Hans has already mended it, when I see a giant pile of leaves heaped against the side of the barrier. Getting down on my hands and knees, I start digging through it, relieved and heartbroken all at once to see that it’s still there. The gap is smaller than I remember.
But the world was smaller then.
I’m getting ready to crawl back through when I hear a strange brushing sound behind me. Like silk against rough fingers. I told myself I wouldn’t look back, but my head turns on pure instinct. There’s nothing there. Nothing I can see, but with spring in full bloom, everything feels hidden from me. Even the top of Ryker’s blind has been swallowed up by the foliage. Nothing but a memory. Another dream I once had.
Crawling through the gap, I rip off the shrouds, but I can’t get away from Anders’s scent, his blade against my throat.
I brace myself against a pine, trying to catch my breath, trying to pull myself together, but just being back inside the encampment brings that claustrophobic feeling back.
As I stare at the path ahead, I’m thinking I could hide in the woods, wait out the rest of the year. I picked up enough survival skills watching Ryker these past few months, but that would be the coward’s way out. I’d never be able to live with myself knowing that I could’ve helped them. That I could’ve stopped this.
Despite everything they’ve done to me, they deserve to know the truth.
The woods look different than the last time I was here, every shade of green imaginable tucked in all around me, but the rocks, the trees, the jagged paths seem to be burned into my memory. With each step forward, I’m trying not to remember the madness, the cruelty, the chaos, but as soon as I reach the perimeter, the edge of the clearing, my heart starts beating hard against my rib cage, my palms are sweaty, my limbs feel weak. I have no idea what they’ll do to me, but it’s too late to turn back now.
Tying the red silk ribbon around my wrist, I step into the camp.
I’m expecting a flurry of commotion, the excited panic that comes when the trappers return from the wild—return from the dead—but no one seems to give me a second glance. In fact, the first few girls that pass seem to look right through me. I wonder if they think I’m a ghost, an apparition come back to haunt them. And for a moment, I wonder if it’s true. Maybe I died that night, maybe Ryker skinned me alive, and all of this is an elaborate hallucination of my own making.
Because even without the influence of the well water, I feel dizzy in their presence. Transparent. Paper thin. Like one stiff breeze could turn me into stardust.