Thought how fitting it would be to have you scrubbing my floors.”
“I’d die before I let that happen.”
“And so you shall,” he says. “As I said earlier, Errin, a dead body, a box of poisons. A nice, neat diary telling the world what you made, and who you made it for. I’ll see you swing, and your precious Silas too, once we catch up to him.”
I didn’t think it was possible, but my blood runs even colder.
“I just hope they let me kick the stool out from under you.”
I turn around and punch him, clean in the face, my thumb tucked over my fingers, like Papa taught me. I feel the crunch of his nose shattering under my fist and instantly pain radiates through my hand, along my lower arm, as the skin on my knuckles splits. Cradling the damaged hand in my other, I bite down on my tongue to stop myself from crying out. Unwin is trying to staunch the flow of blood from his nose, and I watch, waiting for him to look at me. When he does I step towards him and he flinches.
“What goes around comes around, Chanse Unwin. Remember that. I’d be careful what you eat and drink from now on. You’ve seen what I can make.” I hold his gaze until he looks down, like a dog submitting to its master. Only then do I turn and leave.
I manage to make it halfway across the village before my legs give out and I have to lean against one of the cottages. I take deep breaths, cradling my bruised hand. It hurts so much. Yet I’d do it all over again if I had to.
I lean back against the wall, feeling the wet wood against my tunic, and panic rises, the ever-present rock in my chest pressing me into the earth. I don’t have any money. I don’t have anywhere to go. I don’t even have my knife.
What the hell do I do now?
I leave the village using the same path my family and I arrived on four moons ago, making the journey in reverse, this time veering right along the dirt track, cantering through small copses and lowland until I reach the Long Road. The land on either side of the road is scrub, gorse and bracken and thistle, wild land, unclaimed and unused by man.
When we came here the land was green and rich at the height of summer, at odds with the emptiness inside us, the gaping hole where my father had been. Now it’s barren and wintry, and there’s another hole where my brother, and mother, should be.
Where Silas should be, I think, and immediately humiliation and anger curdle in my stomach.
I look over my shoulder but can see no sign that I’m being followed. Despite that, I urge my stolen horse into a gallop, eager to put a few more miles between me and Almwyk before sunset. When I turn back again, smoke is still rising in the distance on the left and I allow myself a grin.
After the encounter with Unwin I knew I had to get out of Almwyk as fast as possible, knew that the soldiers would come for me. Between the body, the poisons and assaulting Unwin, I’d be thrown in jail at the very least, and this time Kirin wouldn’t be able to step in and save me. I’d felt a small pang of guilt at the trouble he’d be in for letting me slip away, but shaken it off. He’d be fine. After all, I attacked him too; he’d have the bruises to prove it.
So I went to the last place anyone would have thought to find me: Unwin’s House of Justice. I broke in through a small window at the back of the building, wrapping my cloak around my undamaged hand and smashing the thin window, before clearing the glass and heaving myself inside. I found myself in the pantry; the house was silent, and still, and I moved quickly. I took a clean towel and bound my split knuckles; then I dragged a sack of flour from the pantry into the kitchen, emptying it over the floor, coughing when it billowed up and into my face, laughing as it settled on every surface. Not that it would matter.
I filled the sack with as much of Unwin’s food as I could easily lift: bread, cheese, apples, the remains of a ham, a litre of fresh milk, some potted shrimp wrapped in muslin,