basket, and she was determined that her family should get every ounce of credit for the haul.
She lugged the basket around the edge of the plot in which her brothers and sisters remained scattered, picking. The Martin family’s share of Lady Andrews’s acreage covered three enormous plots: one of strawberries, one of corn, and one of potatoes. As soon as strawberry season ended, they would turn their attention to the corn, though that looked none too healthy either, lopsided and ungainly. The husks themselves looked fine, but when you stripped the green away, the kernels were invariably sickly and shriveled, not yellow but a dyspeptic-looking ochre. Aislinn’s mother was deep in the cornfield, working on one of the stalks. Picking off locusts, most likely. Aislinn waved, but her mother did not wave back, too intent on her task.
They are so tired, Aislinn thought. She knew that Mum and Da had been skipping dinner lately, quietly portioning out their shares to each child. The sight of them, forking pieces over to the plate of whichever child was talking, made Aislinn burn inside. Lady Andrews, the noblewoman who owned their plots, lived on the eastern end of the acreage, in a castle so high that its shadow fell over the strawberries in the morning. Lady Andrews was never hungry, nor were any of her bailiffs. The lady wore velvet dresses sewn with jewels. Sometimes, when she came down to inspect the tenants, a servant came with her, a man whose sole job appeared to be holding a sun cover over Lady Andrews’s head. Aislinn might be only fifteen, but she knew right from wrong, and when she looked out over the vast Andrews acreage and saw all of them, hundreds of tenants, hunched over in the fields—sometimes by lamplight, long after dusk had fallen—she burned.
This cannot be all of our lives, she thought. This cannot be everything we have to aspire to. There must be something else. Something better. The Blue Horizon always said so, whenever they visited the acreage. They always came disguised, as performers or traveling merchants, in order to slip past the bailiffs, but Aislinn recognized their message in all of its guises. They were sincere, the Blue Horizon people, and even Aislinn had been charmed by the picture they painted: a world without the distinctions of wealth or class, a world where everyone was equal. Aislinn liked the idea well enough in theory, but she was not gullible enough to believe that the Blue Horizon knew how to get there. They brought food and clothing, sometimes even medicine, but a few brief questions easily elicited the fact that their better world was as distant as the moon.
Father Moran called the Blue Horizon heretics and terrorists; a good part of his Sunday sermon was always devoted to the topic, carefully sandwiched in between the constant lectures on industry and godliness and knowing one’s place. The sermons were dull as dirt, but Aislinn didn’t mind Sunday mornings; it was the only time she got to take a nap. Father Moran would have called her a sinner, but Father Moran was not above bedding the wives of the acreage in exchange for absolution. The Church was no better than any of them; in fact, it was worse, precisely because it claimed to be better. Aislinn didn’t know why the Church and the Blue Horizon fought so bitterly; both were selling dreams in bottles, after all. The last time the Blue Horizon came through, they had brought new stories as well as food, tales of a magical queen who would lift the drought and redistribute the land. The better world was at hand, the young man had claimed, and Queen Elyssa would be the gate. Aislinn’s younger siblings listened to these stories with open mouths, but Aislinn had outgrown fairy tales. There would be no better world, no magical ending. This was all life was: endless, backbreaking work, for which one collected a reward of slow starvation. Aislinn had no quarrel with the Blue Horizon, but as far as she was concerned, they could take their True Queen and stuff her out back.
She had reached the large, rickety wagon at the far end of the cornfield. This wagon was shared, placed every day in the rough center of four families’ acres: the Pearces, the Martins, the Vines, and the Grahams. As soon as it filled up, one of the fathers—they rotated the duty—would hitch up the horse and drive the wagon over