I crouch to search one of the lower cabinets, hiding my face to brush the tears away while I look for the salt sack, which is near empty. We can’t afford more. If we run out, we’ll have to go through next winter without any dried meat; there will be no salt to preserve it.
Then—a familiar hand on my shoulder. A gentle squeeze. I love you.
I turn around and face Ma, who is cupping a pinch of salt in her palm, a tiny, familiar smile tugging the corner of her mouth.
I sometimes forget that Ma can understand me the same way I understand her. She hears what I don’t say. What I want to say.
She wraps me in her arms, and I let go of a sob—short and fierce—muffled against her chest. After a tight squeeze, she pulls away. Her free hand brushes a wisp of sandy brown hair from my forehead, her fingers lingering lovingly on my freckles. She thinks they’re beautiful, but we agree to disagree.
“I know, I know.” I can’t help smiling, repeating what she always told me as a little girl. “They’re kisses from the fairies.”
Ma gestures for me to follow her back to the wooden chairs by the fire. She sits, motioning for me to do the same.
When I was much younger, we used to sit like this after dinnertime. Pa smoked his pipe and Kieran played with the toy Bards he sculpted from clay. Ma would braid my hair. Like those old bedtime stories, it was a time of warmth and safety. The tradition tapered off after Pa and Kieran died, but every so often, Ma rekindles it with only the two of us—when she knows I need it most.
The agitation in her fingers is gone as they gently comb though my hair. It isn’t particularly pretty like Fiona’s thick waves, but it’s long enough to twist and shape, which I think Ma enjoys. When I was young, she’d weave wildflowers into my braid.
The fire warms us both, her hands gathering my hair, and the images come—not dreams, exactly, but more than memories. Hungrier, somehow, and scarier, bursting through me like a storm of darkness—the sound of hooves, a pack of horses on a dusty road. A little boy weeping. Blue veins.
I sit against Ma’s knees, eyes squeezed shut, until the fire burns down to embers, and the stew is no longer steaming. A soft snore behind me reports that she has fallen asleep. I sit up and pat the elaborate braid she left in my hair, careful not to wake her.
Reclining in her chair, she appears peaceful in a way she doesn’t during the day. The crow’s feet and fine lines by her brow are softened, making her look more like the woman from my childhood. I pull the blanket off the back of the chair and drape it over her, pressing a kiss to the silver streak of hair at her temple. She snores gently, but doesn’t stir.
Strange as it sounds, that snore is the closest thing I’ve heard to her voice in years, and I wait in case I hear it again. Instead, Ma turns her head and her breath quiets.
I feel a pang of sadness in my chest. She deserves better than this. She deserves to know what’s happening to me, but she can’t.
But I’m not the only one in the house keeping secrets.
One night, when I couldn’t sleep after Kieran’s death, I watched from under my blankets as Ma gingerly removed a small item concealed beneath her bed and cradled it, before hiding it once more. Her faint candlelit shadow spread over my bed as she looked me over, and gently kissed my hair before she lay back down and fell asleep.
Now, I quietly step over to her wooden bed frame and reach below, my fingers searching for the small hole in the mattress. I withdraw a cloth pouch the size of my palm. There are strange symbols skillfully stitched into the cloth, but it is otherwise plain. I tip out the contents, and a small but heavy stone talisman slides into my other hand.
My mother’s secret treasure: a small, golden ox, a central figure in the stories of Gondal. It was Kieran’s. I don’t remember the day, but one morning he came home with it, claiming that a trader passing through the town had gifted it to him. Ma wanted to throw it away—it was only a year later that the Bards started raiding towns, hunting for banned items like these to destroy them once and for all. When she told us she’d burned it, Kieran was inconsolable. But he snuck over to my bed one night, opening his palm to reveal the ox. The strange material wouldn’t catch flame, he said. Instead, the gold only shone brighter.
Now Ma hides the figure, keeping it despite the danger.
I gently turn the figure over in my hand, feeling its weight. Upon closer inspection, I can see tiny greenish-gold veins in the stone, shimmering without the need for light. Stone like this cannot be found in Montane. Kieran said it was made in Gondal. He may as well have said it fell from the sky. Gondal is a lie, nothing more than a pretty story.
I close my eyes and an image of Kieran lying in bed flashes before me. He’s in the early stages of the disease, his brown hair plastered to his forehead with sweat. The larger veins in his neck are only beginning to darken. He gasps for air after every coughing fit, each one more brutal than the last.
“Don’t worry about me, Shae. I’m strong as an ox,” he told me before I was whisked out of the room, never to see him again.
For a long time, I can only stand in one place, squeezing my eyes shut until the stinging pain in my chest subsides. No matter how much time passes, the loss of Kieran has remained a brutal squeeze to my heart.
Gingerly, I put the ox back in its hiding place, close the front door behind me, and step past the wooden porch onto the road. I make sure to dust the iron death mask that hangs over our door—just in case.
The air smells crisp after the brief rain. In the dark, it’s easier to imagine Aster as it once was—shadows obscure the dry cracks in the earth, the barren fields, and the dull-eyed animals whose bones jut out at sharp angles. The moon is bright overhead, illuminating a sky covered in twinkling stars. The sprawling blackness reminds me of the stories of Gondal, bordered on one side by a vast body of sparkling blue water, said to be endless, beautiful, and deadly. It sparks fear in me, but also another feeling I yearn to be able to understand.
The dry grass crunches under the thin soles of my shoes. The sound of sheep rustling in their sleep follows me as I pass the barn.
At the edge of a grove of pine trees, I climb the massive boulder where Mads and I used to come to count the stars. The trees in the area are long dead, leaving behind only the contorted skeletons of their former selves—and plenty of space to see the sky. Their skinny, blackened branches are just another reminder that the land in our village is dying, that we could be next if we aren’t careful. I draw my knees to my chin, gazing out over the valley.
It looks bigger in the moonlight, an orb of faintly shimmering lights above. Below, heading west, a wide field is hedged by patches of bluish grass. Everything is ringed by the snow-capped mountains, on the other side of which lies the village of Aster, out on the plains through the pass. The moonlight is bright enough for me to clearly see my house farther down the hill, and the road leading to Aster’s center. On the other side, the pasture stretches beyond the dried-up pond and the dwindling forest where Pa used to go hunting.
My fingers reach for the needles tucked into my pocket. I try not to think about the shabbiness of the cloth or thread as I pull out my latest work, and soon, my needle is racing through the fabric, matching the speed of my thoughts. Unbidden images keep slipping into my mind every time I think I’ve chased them away. My fingers move of their own accord, the tulips I was stitching turn into exploding suns, followed by jagged mountain peaks, then the golden shapes inscribed on the Bards’ horses’ bridles, and yet more forms, these resembling fangs. I shudder, remembering something at the edge of a dream I had, but can’t quite see.