berry juice every solstice, but that’s not how most of us live. We’re not Lormerians, with their temples and their living goddesses, and their creepy royal family. We’re people of science, and reason. Or at least I thought we were. I suppose it’s hard to remain on the side of reason when a five-hundred-year-old fairy tale comes to life and lays waste to the castle and the people in the country next door.
Be a good girl, or the Bringer will come, and then the Sleeping Prince will eat your heart, that’s what girls in Tremayne were told. He was a fairy-tale monster, a story to make us obedient, a cautionary tale against greed and autocracy. We never dreamed that he’d wake up. We’d forgotten that he was real.
I turn away from the woman and begin my catalogue of who’s left in Almwyk, accidentally catching the eye of one of the soldiers, who nods at me, causing the ever-present tightness in my chest to squeeze a little more. I nod back curtly and break the eye contact, trying to stay calm, resisting the urge to pat my pocket and make sure the vial is still there.
I’m really not cut out for drug smuggling. I checked the vial at least six times on the way here, despite the fact I didn’t see a single other soul, let alone have someone come close enough to pick my pockets. Then again, you can’t be too careful in Almwyk.
Almwyk, by and large, isn’t the kind of village where you’re friendly with your neighbours. Here asking for help or showing weakness of any kind is likely, at best, to result in being laughed at. At worst, it could mean a knife in your kidney if you ask the wrong person at the wrong time. Before the soldiers came it wasn’t uncommon for a body to be hauled into, or out of, the woods, and we all turned a blind eye to it. You learn quickly to be blind here.
The derelict cottages that make up Almwyk are the home to the desperate and the damned: those who lost their real homes and lives in other parts of Tregellan for crimes they’ll never, ever confess to. People always say that in times of great need, like war and disease, communities come together, support one another. Not in Almwyk. As the war has crept closer the cottages have slowly evacuated, and those remaining have descended on them, ripping out whatever they can for their own needs. I bet it’s a matter of time before occupancy isn’t an obstacle to the scavengers, when the instinct to grasp at anything that might make surviving easier will be stronger than basic courtesy. Even now I glance around the room, noting who remains, who is the likeliest threat.
It’s a game I like to play sometimes, trying to guess the crimes of the people still here. The worst criminals – murderers and the like – evaporated the moment the soldiers arrived, which leaves the middling dregs: the debtors, drunks, addicts, gamblers and liars. The poor and the unlucky. The ones who can’t leave because there is nowhere else for them to go.
This isn’t a place people come to live; it’s a place people come to rot.
I bunch my fists under my ragged cloak and watch my frozen breath hover in the air as I exhale, before it scatters, mingling with everyone else’s, adding to the damp fug in the room. The thick glass windows are rimed with condensation, and I hate the feeling that I’m breathing in my neighbours’ breaths, hate knowing that even the air I breathe these days is second-hand, or stolen. I can hardly breathe as it is.
When it seems everyone who’s coming has arrived, sitting dotted around the room like the last of the raisins in a sad plum pudding, Chanse Unwin – surely the realm’s most ironic Justice – strides into the room, chest puffed out, scanning every face. When his eyes land on me he half smiles a greeting, and my skin crawls as his smile rearranges itself into a concerned frown, or a parody of one. He looks so sweaty that I’m surprised the frown doesn’t slide clean off his face.
He’s flanked by the two grim-faced, green-coated soldiers who were manning the door outside, and they’re joined, unusually, by their captain, a red sash across his barrel chest. When six more soldiers follow them and position themselves around the edges of the space, the atmosphere in the