few times I have managed to peer up into the ever-present hood I’ve seen the glint of an eye, before he’s pulled the hood lower, the rest of his face shadowed and hidden.
Despite that, I can tell when he’s worried, or anxious, or angry, or pleased. I’ve learned to read his lips and his shoulders and his hands, the way he holds himself. He leans forward when he’s relaxed, his head tilting to the left. He taps his fingers on whatever surface he can find when he’s agitated: tree stumps, his own legs, his arms if they’re crossed. When he’s amused, two dimples form on the left of his mouth, none on the right. He rubs his tongue along his front teeth when he’s thinking. I can see the things he doesn’t say, because they’re written all over him.
“Is there anything else I should know?” Silas crosses his arms, cutting across my thoughts and pulling me back into the here and now. “From the meeting?”
The panic returns like a wave washing over me, and my stomach lurches as I remember what Unwin said. “We’re to be evacuated. With immediate effect. We’re all to go.”
“Go where?” he says.
“The refugee camp at Tyrwhitt, if we’ve nowhere else,” I say, even though I know we can’t go there.
I can feel his eyes on me, the fingers on his left hand tapping his arm with haste, his bottom lip pulled between his teeth, in what I’ve come to look on as his “thinking face”.
“Do you have to?” he says finally.
“The village will be turned into a barracks.” I have to force the words out past my tightening throat. “There’ll be a proper regiment here. Generals, archers, pike men, cavalry; they’ll requisition everywhere. There won’t be anywhere for us to stay.” I look away from him, breathing deeply, trying to stay in control, to fight off the terror that’s rising again, choking me. I feel suddenly warm, feverish. Dizzy.
I imagine my mother tearing through a refugee camp, slashing at children, pulling old men and women to her and sinking her teeth into them. I imagine the blood. The screams and the horror. Axes and swords and hacking, trying to stop her. The inevitable spread of the curse, even if they killed her. Me, orphaned, or dead alongside her. Fire…
“Errin?” Silas says quietly, and I force myself to look at him, pushing my cloak open a little to allow cold air to seep beneath it. The chill calms me, leaching the heat from my skin, and I take a deep breath. Silas waits quietly, chewing his lip.
“Sorry,” I say after a moment, when the fear has faded again. “What will you do, about the evacuation?”
“Nothing,” he says.
“But you can’t stay, they’re requisitioning everywhere. All of the huts will be used.”
“I have to stay.”
I open my mouth to ask for the hundredth time why, but snap it shut again at the sound of boots marching towards us, the sucking sound of wet mud pulling at leather. Without stopping to think, I push my front door open, grabbing Silas by the cloak. He makes a garbled noise, his hands rising to keep the hood against his face as I swing him into the room and close the door after us as quietly as I can, keeping an eye pressed to the tiniest sliver of a gap.
I breathe a sigh of relief when the pair of soldiers I passed earlier stride by without even looking at the cottage, their faces grim and their voices too low to hear. “I said you shouldn’t be out there,” I say, turning back into the room and blushing when I see Silas looking around, taking it all in.
I’ve never let him inside before, because of Mama, because no one can know what she is. In the books they burn the Varulvs at the stake, and the houses their families live in. With the families locked inside, to kill the infection. Four moons ago, I’d have thought that archaic, and impossible. But now … now people wear amulets and nail good bread to their doors. And people like me steal it when we can. Bread is bread.
I follow his gaze, looking at the shelves with their meagre contents: my faded smocks with their mismatched buttons; the blankets dangling from the makeshift washing line in the vain hope they’ll dry before my mother’s next incident; my pallet and thin blankets on the dusty floor; the battered table that acts as its canopy. I see the