“I don’t believe you,” Jean said, turning her face away.
“Would I know how to get here by myself?” Liyla asked her. “A week’s walk from home, in the mountains? Why would I know?”
Jean looked at her. She had to be telling a lie.
Fear:
The great bird of prey
Come to rip our throats.
Madness:
Our house
A heap of bricks.
Salt and ashes,
Salt and ashes.
We choke on the food of despair.
— Poem of the Wanderings in Elsare, Author Unknown, Ganbihar
Frantic, the children called and searched. The broken one screamed in her wall of stones. The smallest of them was gone. Kate had bolted from sleep near midday, shouting of wrong on the mountain, and Jean, the playful child, was nowhere in the house or garden.
Salt and ashes.
Salt and ashes.
The house would topple to a heap of bricks, and birds of prey circling.
The mist was rising.
Laysia ran breathless through the garden. She could feel the mist climbing the mountain, a smothering cloud rolling up to take the wood. No single broken soul stumbling, this, but the smoke rushing before a devouring fire. The air shuddered, and the children cringed and bent at the sound of it, a shout where a whisper had been.
“It’s taken her!” Susan cried. “Not Jean, too!”
She ran toward the coming wave.
“No!” Kate shouted. “This way!”
Behind the wall, the lost one’s wail choked and fell silent, and Laysia scattered the stones and released her. The maddened child fled before the onrush as the others turned to meet the tidal force, calling for their sister.
The smell of dirt and sawdust and baking leather clogged the tent as the hours wore away. Heat wrapped around Jean’s body, muffled her breath, slipped into her head to dull the edge of her thoughts. At last even the fear grew distant, an ache that throbbed behind a red curtain.
She hung listless against the ropes as the sun seeped orange across the canvas. Then a flash of white made her jerk upright.
A soldier had lifted the tent flap. From the corner of her eye, Jean saw the little mound curled beside her come to life. It was Liyla, wet with perspiration. The black dog bounded in, followed by the Genius and two soldiers. Looming figures in the reddened light, they were too big for the tent, pungent with animal musk and wool gone sour with damp.
“Ready the banner,” the Genius said. A soldier lifted Jean’s Barbie from the table and lashed it to a pole. The Genius took the red-handled knife and slipped it into his embroidered belt.
“Good. Bring them.”
Before Jean could protest, they jerked the chair from the ground and hoisted her between them. The ropes tore at her skin.
“Wait!” Where are you taking me? Stop! It hurts!”
No one answered. Over her shoulder, she could see a soldier yank Liyla, startled and blinking, to her feet.
Tears blurred Jean’s eyes in the sudden glare, but when they cleared, there stood Ker with a company of soldiers, the strange bald angle of her face twisting as she smiled.
“At last we begin. Hurry now. They’ve been sighted. A force of some size.”
The Genius’s voice came from behind Jean. “How many?”
Ker seemed uncertain. “The scout said he couldn’t tell. Something obscures his vision.”
The Genius only laughed. “Excellent. I would have expected nothing less.” Satisfaction curled from him like smoke.
From her place on the raised chair, Jean looked out at the hollow with its stumps and tents and red cloaks. Fewer than a hundred soldiers remained in the bowl of land. She turned her head, trying to see the others, and couldn’t.
“Come now,” the Genius said.
“Hiyup!” one of the soldiers called, and the men carrying Jean took off at a trot, heading west.
The soldiers climbed toward a half dozen tall trees that clung to the land overlooking the camp. The dog galloped ahead, turning when it reached the ridge. Another tent sat there, blocking Jean’s view of the forest, but she could see the trees sloping down to the west, dark lines in the breathless wood.
They set the chair down and released the ropes.
“Get up,” the Genius said. “Walk with me.” He spoke as if Jean really were his guest; he was as gleeful as he’d been when she’d entered the tent.
A soldier jerked Jean to her feet, and she stumbled on rubbery legs.
“Spark enjoys the woods,” the Genius went on, nodding in the dog’s direction. “So much less crowded than the city.”
He’d begun to stroll past the tent, and the soldier dragged her along. When they’d passed it, Jean turned to see the wood, rolling out from the camp, and nearly fell down again. In the near distance, waiting among the trees, were thousands of red cloaks, so thick on the mountain that she could no longer spy any of the bushes or vines and knots she’d waded through with the others. Silent, the mass seethed, waiting beneath the leaves, and though she craned her neck to find it, Jean couldn’t make out its end.
“Of course,” the Genius went on blithely, “too many people discover a pleasant spot like this, and it quickly becomes crowded.”
From the corner of her eye, Jean saw Liyla, shoved forward by another soldier to keep pace with them. They came to a second structure, a low barn with two wide doors and no windows, a flat roof, and walls of mud-plastered slats. To its left, a corral of sawed-off branches sat on a raised bit of land with a good view of the hollow. Inside it, four men and one woman sat hunched on the grass, their wrists manacled, attached by long chains to cuffs at their ankles. They sat strangely still, and with a start, Jean saw that the woman with her head resting against the splintery fence was Liyla’s mother. The girl’s father sat with his eyes half closed beside her.
The Genius saw
