caring that he went upward, out of this lightless hell that lay beneath the earth of the quiet home he had always known.
An unknowable length of time later—minutes or lifetimes, they were all one in the dark—Carroll climbed a ladder and, as though for the first time in his life, saw stars.
Chapter 9
THE TABLEAU
All hurricanes begin in exactly the same way:
As a breath of calm air on a bright, pleasant day.
—Songs from the Almont Rebellion, as compiled by Merwinian
The cottage was dark as Aislinn came up out of the fields, keeping her head down, crawling through the grass. It was past two in the morning, an hour at which even the ultra-industrious Grahams would be home in bed, and Aislinn felt safe enough. She knew the topography of their acres well, and no matter which bailiff Lady Andrews had picked to replace Fallon, he could not be up to speed yet. Only the barest sliver of moon lit the path, but Aislinn had been living without torchlight for two weeks now, and she had grown used to finding her way.
But her family’s cottage was dark.
Aislinn crawled out of a tiny tussock, all that remained of the Vines’ winter wheat, and pushed herself up. After a quick glance around to see nothing stirring, she hurried down the lane, past the Vines’ cottage and her family’s cornfield. As she went, she said a silent apology to both the Vines and the Grahams. She had been living on their food for the past two weeks, and though she might comfort herself with the notion that the food really belonged to Lady Andrews, there was not enough to begin with. Soon there would be even less, for more than thirty feet of the Crithe had already dried up. Aislinn might call herself desperate, but the fact remained that she was a thief.
The door of the cottage stood ajar, a black rectangle against the deeper grey stone. Aislinn considered it for a long moment, then moved forward, slipping the knife from its sheath at her waist. She had stolen the knife from Fallon’s own equipment shed six days before, and it had allowed her to gut two rabbits and a fox . . . almost certainly the same fox that had been stealing chickens from the Wilings in the next acreage. All of the animals she caught had been tough and water-starved, but Aislinn was getting better and better at hunting, and that was the first thing she meant to tell her parents. No one on the acreage had had meat for months.
Look, she would tell them, we can stay here, living on the edge of starvation, or we can go elsewhere. Anywhere. All the way to New London, or even New Dover. I can get us meat. Not much, maybe, but more of a mouthful than we were getting here.
But when she stepped through the doorway, she knew immediately that they were gone. No snoring from her father or her brother Jensen, no embers glowing in the grate, and most of all, none of that particular sense of habitation that the cottage always gave off, an inevitable residue of the nine people living there.
After another quick look up and down the footpath, Aislinn pulled a candle from her pocket. This, too, she had liberated from Fallon’s shed, along with a flint and two empty canteens. Out in the open Almont, water was even harder to find than food, but Aislinn, while tracking the fox, had come upon a tiny pond hidden under thatches of blackberry brambles, their thorns so vicious that no one in his right mind would even touch the berries. After a day’s work and scratches innumerable, her dress torn to ribbons, Aislinn had cleared a path to the pond. It was nearly dry, but there had been enough to fill her two canteens, and now they were hidden back in her tiny camp, along with the rest of the cooked meat. She had not wanted to bring even a single canteen with her on this expedition, for the latches were shifty, not to be trusted. Losing the water would be bad; giving herself away would be worse.
When she struck the match, she saw them: all eight of them, lined up against the far wall. Their throats had been cut, but that was not even the worst of it; the worst had been visited upon Mum and Lita and Eve and Bailey. Bailey’s scrawny thighs were sticky with blood. Bailey, who was