“Shh,” murmured Travers. “It’s okay, it’s okay. Don’t be afraid. You can’t be afraid now, understand? Be a brave girl with me, Skye, a brave girl.”
I squeezed my eyes shut. Calmed myself. Let a breath go whistling out through my lips.
“Good girl,” he said. “Now lean to me.”
This was the tricky part.
The stool tilted and moved under my feet. It was an old thing, and I could tell the joints were loose just by the feel of it. That movement was sickening to me, but I did like Travers said, I leaned toward him, his fingers warm against palms going cold with fear. I leaned until the rope was tight against my throat, drawing a straight line, no slack, to where it hung around the tree branch, my body taut at an angle, my toes pointed to the ground. The edge of the stool pressed into the soft space on my foot between the ball and the heel.
“Good girl,” Travers told me. “Good.”
God, it hurt. The rope cut into my throat, and I knew there would be bruises there tomorrow I’d have to cover up. But this was how we played.
I knew the words that were coming next but even so, they sounded like someone else was saying them, not Travers. “Skye Thornton,” he said, “I give you to Hangjaw, the Spearman, the Gallows’ Burden. I give you to the Father of Bears.” And he touched my left side with the hazelwand he had brought for that purpose. “Now tell me what you see.”
And so I did.
I don’t remember what I told Travers.
None of us ever knew what it was we saw, and no one was ever allowed to talk about it after the fact. Those were the rules. I remember some of the stories though.
When Signy played the hanging game she told us about how her husband in ten years’ time would die highclimbing a tall spruce spar while he was throwing the rope and getting the steel spurs in. Ninety feet from the earth it’d get hit by lightning, crazy, just like that, and he’d be fried, still strapped to the top of the thing. But the problem was she never said who that husband was gonna be, and so no one would ever go with her, no one ever took her out to the Lawford Drive-In Theatre where the rest of us went when the time came, in case she wound up pregnant by accident and the poor boy sonuva had to hitch himself to that bit of unluckiness.
That first time I wasn’t afraid so much of playing the hanging game, I was afraid of what I was going to see in Travers’s eyes after. I was afraid of what he might know about me that I didn’t know about myself.
When he took the noose off after and he had massaged the skin on my neck, made sure I was breathing right, I remember opening my eyes, thinking I was going to see it then. But Travers looked the same as ever, same Travers, same smile, same brother of mine. And I thought, well, I guess it’s not so bad, then, whatever piece of luck it is that’s coming my way.
It was stupid, of course, but we were all taken by surprise that day things went wrong. There were four of us who had gone to play the hanging game, Travers and me, Ingrid Sullivan, the daughter of the skidder man who had killed two more bears than Dad that summer, and Barth Gibbons. Ingrid was there for Travers. She’d told me so before we set out, a secret whispered behind a cupped hand when Travers was getting the rope from the shed. But it was Barth I was there for. Barth was a year or two older, a pretty impossible age gap at that time to cross, but that didn’t matter much to me. All I knew was Barth had the nicest straight-as-straw black hair I’d ever seen and wouldn’t it be a fine thing if he slipped that coil around his neck and whispered something about his future wife, some red-haired, slim-hipped woman, when I was the only red-haired girl north of Lawford. That’s what I remember thinking, anyway.
It was Travers who played Priest. Ingrid and I were there, really, just as Witnesses, because sometimes it was better if you had one or two along, just in case you were too busy handling the rope and you missed something. Old Hangjaw didn’t like that.
But as it was when Barth went up and played the hanging game he didn’t say anything about a red-haired, slim-hipped woman after all. He said something about a she-bear he was going to cut into one day at the start of a late spring, holed up asleep in one of those hollowed-out, rotten redwood trunks. And when he tried to open the wood up with a chainsaw, how the woodchips and blood were just going to come spewing forth, take him by surprise. There was kind of a sick sense of disappointment in me at that, but we marked down the blood price of the she-bear anyway so that we’d be sure to let Barth know how much it was and how he could pay it when the time came.
Then up went Ingrid, and Travers, who was still Priest, which was what Ingrid wanted, held out his hand for her. She giggled and took it. She didn’t seem the least bit afraid, her corn-yellow hair tied behind her, smiling at my brother, leaning toward him when he told her to.
Like I said, I don’t know why we had never thought of it. I mean, of course, I’d thought of it that first time I was up there, that the
