But then while Ingrid was leaning in, we heard this noise, all of us, this low growling noise so deep you could feel it in the pit of your stomach. Then there was the rank smell of bear piss, which is a smell we all knew, living out in bear country.
Ingrid screamed, although that was the stupidest thing to do, and she twisted on the stool. Snap. Just as quick as that it had rolled beneath her and her feet were free, tap-dancing in the air.
It was quick as all get out.
Barth had turned and was staring into the woods, looking for that damned mother of a she-bear we had all heard, and so he hadn’t seen Ingrid fall.
But I had.
She was choking bad, and her tongue had snuck out of her mouth like a thick, purple worm. Her eyes were screwed up into white gibbous moons, that yellow hair of hers twisting in the wind.
Travers had long arms even then, the biggest arms you’d ever seen, like a bear himself, and he tried to grab her, but Ingrid was still choking anyhow. I was scared of the bear, but I was more scared for Ingrid so I took the Sharpfinger knife that Travers kept on his belt for skinning, and I made to right the stool and cut her down.
Travers, I think, was shaking his head, but I couldn’t see him from behind Ingrid, whose limbs were now flailing, not like she was hanging, but like she was being electrocuted. It was Barth who stopped me. He was thinking clearer than I was.
“The wand,” he said, “do it first, Skye. You have to.”
And so I took the hazelwand, which Travers had dropped when he grabbed hold of Ingrid, and I smacked her in the side so hard that she almost swung out of Travers’ arms. I tried to remember what Travers had said for me, but all I could come up with was Hangjaw’s name. Then Travers had her good, and I was able to get on the stool and saw the blade through the highrigging rope just above the knot. She tumbled like a scarecrow and hit the ground badly, her and Travers going down together in a heap.
I looked over at Barth, absurdly still wanting him to see how good I’d been, to get her with the wand and then cut her down, but Barth, because he was still thinking of the she-bear, wasn’t paying a whit’s worth of attention to me.
So I looked at Ingrid instead. Her face kind of bright red with the eyes still rolled back into her skull, body shaking and dancing even though she was on the ground. Travers had gotten out from under her, and now he was putting his ear next to her. At first I thought he was trying to tell if she was still breathing, but of course, he wasn’t, he was listening. He was listening to make sure he caught every word she said.
It could have only been a few seconds, that whispery grating voice I couldn’t quite catch. But still it scared me even worse than seeing that stool run out underneath her feet, the sound of Ingrid’s truth saying. I don’t know what she said, but Travers’s face went white, and when she was done her body stopped its shakes.
“Travers,” I said. Even though I was scared, I wanted to be Witness still, it was my job, and so I wanted him to tell me. “Just whisper it,” I told him then. “Go on.”
“No use,” Travers answered, and I couldn’t tell quite what he was talking about but then it became clear to me. Travers let go of her head. I realized how he’d been holding it steady so he could hear, but then the neck lolled at a strange, unnatural angle, and I knew it had snapped like a wet branch during the fall.
“Old Hangjaw wanted her to pay her daddy’s blood price,” he said.
That frightened me something fierce. Not just that Ingrid had died, well, I’d seen death before, but the way I had seen her mouth moving even though her neck had been snapped clean through. We never played the hanging game after that. Some of the men from the camp brought down that ash tree and burned all the wood away from town where no one would breathe the smoke of it.
And so we all grew up. Those of us that could, that is.
A couple of years down the line Travers won a scholarship and followed it south past Lawford and out of bear country. I was lonely, but I never could blame him. Dad did, though, and they never spoke much after that. And me, well, I married Barth Gibbons, even though he never whispered about a red-haired, slim-hipped woman. I guess we can all make our own luck. That’s what I did that day when I was seventeen, and I went with Barth out to the Lawford Drive-In Theatre. I didn’t know at the time how easy it was for something to take root in you, but several months later after I’d been retching for a week, convinced I had a helluva stomach flu, Momma told me she reckoned I must be pregnant.
She was right, of course. Dad was pissed for a while but after Barth proposed and we got properly married then he was okay. The baby, though, didn’t come the way we expected it to. She came two months too early, in a slick of blood that sure as hell smelled to me like bear piss though no one else will say so. I lost the next one that way too, and the next, just so many until I wouldn’t let Barth touch me because I didn’t want to see all those tiny, broken bodies laid out in the
