He shushed her. He had started to pull off his sheet, planning to tiptoe across the floor and listen through the crack in the door, but he got no farther than plucking the cloth between his fingertips.
A shout came from the main room, the sound of something-a chair, he thought-knocked over, the scrabble of feet on the packed-earth floor. He froze. Another shout and whispered curses and then sounds he couldn't place for a moment and then he could: the dull thuds of fists against flesh. He swung his legs free from the bed and set them on the floor. The light shining around the door frame shifted and danced and grew brighter. He watched it, hearing Mor's sharp inhalation of breath.
The door to their room flew open, kicked by a booted foot. Torches lit the room, cruel in their intensity. Through the torchlight the bodies of men emerged, burly, garbed in crimson. The first strode across the room and slammed a hand down on Ravi's neck. He leaned in close, studying the boy, the torch so close to his head that his features were a motley of distorted highlight and shadow. A second figure went to Mor. He was gentler. He placed a finger under Mor's chin and turned her so that the first man could see her face.
'Yes,' he said, glancing between them, 'you're two sides of the same coin. You two are one, together in the womb, together in your fate. Your councilmen told us true. Come on. On your feet, both of you. We'll not harm you if you come quiet.'
He was so matter-of-fact, so casually intimidating that before he knew what he was doing Ravi was standing. He and Mor were pushed through the doorway into the main room. What Ravi saw there stayed in his memory only in fragments, disjointed images captured between the jolting motion of being shoved, stumbling. He saw his mother's face, openmouthed, her teeth looking like the fangs of a wolf or bear. His eyes shot around to find his father. He couldn't find him. He saw a commotion of men near the cook-stove, their arms and legs moving like those of some monster. He never did see him or pick out his body from among the motion, but Ravi knew that his father was at the center of it.
Ravi was roughly conveyed through it toward the door. His foot caught the side of the doorjamb, and he sprawled out into the night. He hit the ground hard on his forearms and elbows, rolled, and had a clear moment of thought as he watched the figures striding out after him. Red cloaks. They wore red cloaks! And that meant he and Mor were to be taken by the eaters! Older boys had told stories about such things, saying that from time to time the king to the south sent hunters through Candovia in search of the children his god loved to devour. Ravi had never believed it. It had never happened in his lifetime, and he knew older boys were cruel and liars. But now a man was reaching down for him; his father was pinned beneath a seething mass of limbs; his mother wore a wolf's face; his sister was crying out at some roughness.
The anger was in him complete and instant, like oil on a fire. He kicked at the man reaching for him, a glancing blow off his shin. This made him angrier and he kicked again and again, his legs churning as he squirmed on the hard-packed ground. The man cursed and jumped back, then came in again, his entire bulk trailing behind the point of his boot toe. Ravi tried to wrap himself around it and pull the man off balance, but the boot tore free and came on again. In a moment others joined it.
That was the first time they beat him senseless. Because Ravi was unconscious he remembered nothing of how they were bundled into a wagon waiting by the road. He did not hear his mother's wail or see her appear in the doorway, held back by a soldier's arm. Nor did Mor ever tell him of it. Yet somehow he knew. He knew as certainly as if she had lent him her eyes and her ears.
T wo days after the soldier squashed his nose-two days of travel, of beatings, of sleepless nights and numbing days-the children were herded with other groups from other villages near the coast. Many of them had been gathered in the coastal towns to celebrate the return of spring. Perhaps that was why they could be harvested in such great numbers. How the red-cloaked soldiers dealt with the children's parents Ravi was not sure. They could not beat them all, could they? Perhaps this was why they marched the children so mercilessly. Perhaps, but Ravi also felt certain there was more to it. Sometimes he could smell the pungent scent of mist carried on the breeze coming from the towns they skirted. It struck him with the melancholy that smoke from burned ruins would have. But the towns were not in ruins; not, at least, in the physical sense that was easiest to envision.
None of the children understood what was happening. Yes, they all knew the stories of the red-cloaked men, of the vanishings, but the stories had never been like this. They had heard of a child or two going missing every few years. Nothing more. And the tales had always said it was young children who were taken, none as old as Ravi and Mor. Whatever was happening now was a thing beyond even the nightmares that the older boys tried to weave into younger minds.
They were marched through the morning and into the afternoon. Around dusk they came down through sea bluffs and got their first view of the great league vessels. Their size was hard to gauge. At first Ravi thought them no large craft, but then he realized they were quite far out. They were, possibly, massive. They lay on a shimmering expanse of azure. The twins walked hand in hand near the front of the column. Ravi felt the swish of the tall, damp grass against his legs and thought he was lucky to be up front instead of behind, where the grass would be trodden down and could not be felt. Then he thought himself unkind or a fool or both. This is not possible, he thought. Not possible. But they continued to move forward, the world denying his claim without the slightest hesitation.
Ravi squeezed his sister's hand tighter and watched the ships.
They slept on a narrow ribbon of sand that night, hemmed in by crumbly cliffs guarded by watchers. Some of the children feared the ocean and cried. Ravi wanted to shout at them to stop, but he knew that would be unkind. He did not wish to be unkind. That would be making a bad thing worse and doing it to others as innocent as he. He was angry, and he did not want to let that anger fade or be replaced by fear or docility. He wanted to do something with it.
'Swear to me that you'll never give in to them,' he said. These were the first words he had spoken in some time. He did not look at his sister but instead gazed unfocused. He raked his hands through the damp sand, feeling the texture in his fingers.
When Mor did not answer, Ravi faced her and studied her in the yellowish light of the fires that rimmed the encampment. He took her by both wrists and held tightly enough that he knew his grip pained her. 'Don't go quiet. Swear that you won't!'
Mor looked miserable. 'Ravi, how can I? You see them.'
He drew close to her face. 'Swear it! Don't give yourself to them. Don't.'
She began to protest again, arguing that she would have to obey, alluding to the things they would do to her if she did not. Ravi cut her off.
'You're not listening,' he said. 'What I mean is don't ever believe that you are a slave, no matter what they make you do. The red cloaks say that we belong to some others now. They say we're not our own masters and that we have no parents. But they're liars. That's what I'm telling you to remember. You believe that they're liars?'
He waited until Mor nodded, then he continued, 'Don't forget that. Don't let them make their lies into truths. Never forget that you are Mor, sister of Ravi, child of the parents we share. Promise me that.'
She promised, and he finally let go of her wrists. 'Why do you say these things?' Mor asked. 'You act as if we are separated, but we're not. Just be quiet and don't draw attention and they will leave us with each other.'
Ravi said nothing, and was glad when she did not ask him to swear, as he had done.
Sometime in the middle of the night he decided what he would do. And it was the opposite of not drawing attention. Mor would not understand it, but if he managed what he thought he could, she would come to understand later. He did not know exactly how he would do it, but he resolved to try. He felt he would know the moment when it showed itself.
S econd to the league vessels themselves, the barges that approached the shore the next morning to transport the children were the largest human-made structures Ravi had ever seen. Squat rectangular rafts, they stretched wide along the shore, flattening the waves beneath them. They were made of a slate-gray material, dull in a manner that seemed to capture the light of the risen sun. Ravi could not say what made them move, but something did, slowly, inexorably. And there were people aboard them. Not many, and not near enough to make them out clearly. But on one of the closer barges a cluster of five figures stood atop a raised platform. They did not move and were nothing more than outlines at first, but Ravi felt certain that each stared directly at him.
The children on the beach stared as if these silent things and those aboard them were more frightening than anything they had yet faced. They began to murmur and whisper. A boy near the twins said, 'This is sorcery.' Nobody denied it.
