Of Blood and Bone (Chronicles of The One #2)(103)

“Poisoned fruit, flowers that weren’t flowers but a serpent. I don’t know if it was for me or Duncan. It was Duncan I talked to, not Will.”

“I saw, when I could get a glimpse. I thought it must be Duncan. He has Katie’s eyes. He’s a very handsome boy.”

“He’s smart. A smart-ass, too.” She opened her eyes. “Sorry.”

“Close your eyes.”

“He’s smart,” she repeated. “We worked out a plan. He’ll take what I told him and what we worked out to Will in the morning. Will has a bad cold, and the healers said he had to sleep. Or Duncan said they did. I’ll watch in case, but feel like they won’t need me to help them this time. They’re prepared. I told him to tell Will and Katie you saw them.”

Her words began to slur as Lana glided her fingers over the cloth.

“Katie’s kitchen has daffodil walls. She has daffodils on the table. Pretty. Duncan burned his sandwich, but he ate it anyway.”

“That’s good, that’s fine. Sleep now, my baby. Sleep.”

Lana stayed to make sure the sleep held, then went out to put the vial and cloth away. And did the only thing left to do.

She started dinner for her family.





JOURNEYS


Hope is like the sun, which,

as we journey toward it,

casts the shadow of our burden behind us.

—Samuel Smiles





CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE


Fallon thought she knew her father, all the ins and outs, the ups and downs of him. But she learned over the next weeks there were parts and pieces of him she’d never seen.

She’d known, of course, the people in the village, the neighbors on other farms, those who ran the mill, wove cloth, made music, made weapons, liked and respected him.

The village had its structure and systems. Though its positioning in the mountains, a fair distance from what had been cities and what had once been urban sprawl, made it of little interest to Raiders, bounty hunters, the PWs, even the fractured and struggling government, there had been incidents over the years.

She knew, too, her father had helped fight off those who wanted to steal or overtake, those who simply wanted to destroy for the sake of burning and blood. But, by and large, outsiders left them alone.

Those she knew from trips to barter, for schooling, to help with injuries or illnesses spent their days going about their business. Food needed to be put on tables, clothes on backs, boots on feet. Babies needed to be born and the dead buried.

She knew that for most she was simply Simon and Lana’s daughter. A child. To begin to raise an army on her own doorstep, she needed her father to blaze the path.

He started with the farms, standing in fields or with his hands greasy helping repair equipment.

People listened to him. She saw that for herself when he held the first meeting, with about a dozen neighbors, at the farm.

“I grew up here,” he would say. “Now my kids are growing up here. But the world I grew up in’s gone. And the one, the only one my kids, your kids have ever known is nothing like before. Everyone here lost someone, to the Doom or the violence that came with it, and came after it. Some of you came here to escape that, to build a life in the world we’ve got left.

“We’ve been lucky,” he continued. “We don’t have a lot of trouble. That’s mostly geography. We know by what we hear on the radio, or from people who pass through, even settle here, there are other places where people are trying to build a life. Some of them are lucky, some aren’t.”

There were some murmurs of agreement, but for the most part people remained quiet to hear what Simon Swift had to say.

“We can go on like we are, hoping for the best, hoping that bad luck passes us by. But we know better. We’ve lost people when that bad luck’s come at us.”

“We’re better prepared now.” Darlie Wertz, a rawboned woman with two teenage boys, gripped her hands together until her knuckles went white. “We don’t want any trouble. Why go looking for it?”

Fallon knew Darlie had lost her whole family in the Doom, and she’d taken the boys in, made them her own. One, Charlie, bore the pentagram brand burned into his forehead.

“Darlie, not four months ago we had three people come through, one of them half-dead. They got caught in a raid not sixty miles from here.”

“Sixty miles is a long way. It’s not like it used to be.”

“No, it’s not like it used to be. I don’t see it ever being the way it used to be.”

You do. Fallon all but heard her father’s thoughts, and the sympathy in them.

“Some years back I stood on my porch and killed a man.” He kept talking in that steady way over the murmurs. “He didn’t give me much choice as he, and the one with him, planned to take what was mine, and likely kill me for sport. But they came here, Purity Warriors, hunting Lana. Hunting the baby in her.”

More rumblings, shifting, clearing of throats. “She’d had to run from a place where people, good people, were trying to build a life, a community.”

Simon looked at Lana, nodded.

“We thought we were prepared,” she said. “But we weren’t. Not enough to stop them before they killed so many of us. I came here, like a lot of us, from somewhere else, but this is home. It’s my home, and I want more than anything for my children to be safe and happy, to live my life with Simon right here. But they’re not going to let us.”