her hands on her apron. “But I think I know where.”
chapter 24
She sat heavily on the bench. “Just before they came for him, he was in a bad mood, but that wasn’t unusual. He’d come across a stash of stuff, the week before. Bought it, found it, or nicked it—he didn’t say, and I didn’t ask. He’d thought at first he was on to a good thing—thought it might be worth something for a change. But then he said it turned out to be nothing—just papers. Hard to sell, at least to Omegas. He couldn’t read, himself—like most of us. I tried to teach him a bit, but he was never patient enough. Once, he might have tried to sell the papers to Alphas—they’re just as curious about the Before as we are. He used to have a few Alpha contacts who traded with him from time to time. But it’d been years since he’d dealt with any of them. Since the drought years, and all the new Council reforms, you couldn’t trust them not to turn you in for breaking the taboo. So he was having trouble shifting these papers. That’s all I knew.”
“You never saw them?”
“I told you. I’d never have let him bring something like that into this house. At first, I thought the papers must’ve been in the storehouse. Thought the Council must have got them, before they burned it. But then I learned that they’d tortured him. And I remembered how they turned this place inside out. So I thought of the Kissing Tree.”
I looked at her blankly.
“He found it when he was a teenager,” she went on. “We used to go there when we first met. I was living in a boardinghouse. Joe had the storehouse, but Greg was always hanging about there, under our feet. There wasn’t ever much privacy. So he used to take me to the Kissing Tree.
“It’s a huge tree, and hollow on the inside. Somewhere private, and out of the weather, at least.” She didn’t look embarrassed—instead, for the first time since I’d returned to New Hobart, she gave me her old grin. “Joe even put up a little shelf. We used to keep candles there, and matches, a blanket. Even after we were married and I’d taken over running this place, we went there sometimes. Used to take a bit of a picnic, grab a moment away from the kids.” She exhaled slowly, making her way back through the years that had passed since then. “We hadn’t been there for ages, when they took him. Years and years. But it was our secret, that place. Just the two of us knew about it. And I know he used to keep stuff there sometimes, if he had something that he didn’t want the Council patrols to get wind of. Or sometimes if he didn’t want to give Greg a cut of something.”
“Where is it?”
“In the forest, south of here.”
I sat down beside her on the bench, head down, picturing those blackened stumps.
“Don’t take it so hard,” Elsa said. “You didn’t burn the whole forest down. And even if the tree’s gone, I don’t even know for sure that there was anything hidden there.”
“You never checked?” I said.
“Haven’t you been listening to me?” Elsa said. “I saw them take him, and I found out what they did to him.” She shook her head slowly. “The only reason I’d ever have gone within a mile of that place would be to burn the tree down myself, and anything in it.”
Ω
Zoe was still waiting outside, and she came with us to the tithe collector’s office, to tell Piper and the others. They insisted that we take a small guard of resistance soldiers with us to the forest. There’d been no sign, yet, of Council troops massing close to the town, but we were taking no chances. At the southern gate, on the Ringmaster’s orders, the soldiers issued us with horses. Zoe had to help me mount, and I braced my broken arm against my ribs, but couldn’t stop my sharp intake of breath as she boosted me into the saddle. Elsa had never ridden before, so she sat behind me, clutching me tightly around the waist.
It had been three days since the battle, and our troops had gathered the bodies from where they’d fallen, but the earth was frozen solid and refused our dead, and there was no time for burials, anyway. When we rounded the hillock behind which we’d sheltered during