“It started. He rounded up the residents of Taitha and forced a pipe to their lips. Even the children, even the sick and the elderly. He owned them all. Total control.” Her face was downcast now. “His original goal was to sack Nesan, but he began to hear…voices, as they say.” My brows raised. “He claimed the Benevolent Saints came to him and told him of a prophecy, of a bastard born to Katia, Keeper of the Benevolent Saints. Personally, I think he was dealing in blood magic which is why he started to go mad,” she said quietly. “He claimed the Benevolent Saints told him that when the chosen one was found, he would feel the confirmation in his soul. He was to wed the chosen one, use their powers to destroy this world, start anew, and ascend.”
My stomach roiled. “Ascend?”
“Ascend to what, no one knows. My theory is that he thinks he’ll ascend to sainthood. Others say it will make him the rightful emperor of the realm.” She swallowed hard. “So he sent his guards and his growing army to conquer city after city, village after village, expanding his battalion of ravenous fiends, erasing their entire lives with leechthorn. Those who protest he kills on the spot, or hands them to his sadistic guards to do what they please. Says that his opposers were sent by the Blood Saints as obstacles to his mission. He denies his subjects until they’re at their strongest, on the brink of destroying themselves. They’ll do anything for that fix. Steal, maim, kill.”
“And they came to Maplenook?” I whispered. My fingernails were digging into my palms.
“They came to Maplenook. And they destroyed Maplenook.” Her eyes watered and I watched as she swallowed hard, the tears retreating.
“How did you–”
“Luck. Pure luck, Petra.” She looked me in the eyes, her normally soft gaze intense. “Maplenook was a lot closer to Taitha than Eserene is. The meager traders that came through the town brought some news of Kauvras, but not much. I really didn’t know much when...when it happened.
“My mother, my older brother Josef, and I had finished breakfast when we heard the screams. Blood curdling. When we got outside, we saw them. Every one of Kauvras’ men had masks over their faces to protect them from the smoke and bundles of leechthorn in their fists. My father had been collecting water from the well. He was caught in the mess of fleeing villagers. And I watched as a soldier the size of a mountain in a bear mask grabbed my father by the back of his head and held his lips to a burning pipe.” Wrena took a deep breath. “My mother dropped to her knees. I’m not sure if there would ever have been a chance she’d recover from that alone.
“Josef turned to me, simply sayingwoodpileand grabbed my mother, hauling her back inside, the best protection he could think of. The woodpile had been where we played as children, an alcove that could fit a small child situated between two stacks of wood. I was sixteen at that point, far too large to fit in the spot, but I shimmied my way in and waited, praying to the Saints that the masked men didn’t find me, find my mother and brother. From a small gap between logs, I could see into the street.” Wrena stopped, and I could tell by the look on her face that she was preparing herself to speak the words that would come next. “They dragged my mother out by her hair. She waswailing,screaming for the Benevolent Saints as two guards held her down and put the pipe to her lips. I swear I saw her skin go gray. And Josef…” she swallowed. “Josef screamed as he watched my mother all but die, flailing and punching and kicking at the guards around him. Until the man in the bear mask grabbed him from behind and put a blade to his throat, and that was it.” Her voice threatened to break. Her next words came quickly, as if she were afraid that they’d get stuck. “He fell to the ground and his body was twitching, and there was blood spilling from his mouth and he wasdying.” A tear slid down her cheek. I knew the feeling of seeing a sibling die, seeing a sibling spit blood and the deepknowingof what it meant.
“At the last second, he turned his head to face me, and we locked eyes through the gap in the logs. And I watched him take his last breath.” She straightened. “They lined up all the prisoners, their new soldiers, and counted off as they marched into the woods, away from the village, back to Taitha with almost a hundred new recruits, my mother included. And that was it. I buried Josef beside the house, in the vegetable garden.”
We were silent for a long while, the sound of an occasional sniff punctuating the quiet. We had both watched as the life was extinguished from our siblings, a pain that was hard to put into words, only understood by those who had experienced it. We had both watched everything be ripped away. She inhaled. “I made it through the forest somehow. I don’t remember much of the days I wandered, but I ended up in a small town called Julia on the Hudna River. My feet were bloodied and my clothes were torn. There was a convoy of refugees from other villages leaving for Eserene escorted by two men. I don’t remember asking, I just remember suddenly being a part of this group of bundled women with screaming children and bloody feet.
“One of the two men leading the convoy took a liking to me, and I to him.” She paused, her eyes softening at the memory. “He was a soldier in the Eserenian army, deployed on missions to retrieve refugees from any number of horrors across the continent, not just Kauvras. His brother had ascended to the Royal Guard and he was able to secure me this position. I would sneak down to the pubs on my nights off to see him, steal a few moments with him.” She looked off wistfully, a sad smile pulling at her lips. “He told me that as soon as the situation in Taitha calmed down, as soon as he didn’t need to lead convoys of refugees, he would leave the Eserenian army, find steady work and save up enough money so I wouldn’t need to hold this position. King Umfray was still alive, but the red delirium had been setting in. And Kauvras wasn’t fit to rule of course. He could never tell me, but I think that King Belin was already in the castle at that point, preparing to take the throne upon Umfray’s death. King Umfray declared that any refugees who were let in were forbidden to discuss what was going on outside of Eserene’s walls. I had to blindly trust that he would make good on his promise, that he could one day tell me what was happening and why it was so secretive. And I did trust him.”
I willed my mind to give her my full attention, to stop sorting through my own past and listen to her. “You think Belin was already here?”
She sighed. “I think so. I’ve drawn it out a million times, considered every possibility. Did King Umfray sound like the kind of man who would let refugees into Eserene?” No. He hadn’t been. He was a good king to his people but not to those outside the walls. “I didn’t know much about the King, only what I could get from the little that was revealed to me and what I heard in passing in the halls of the Low Royal Castle.”
“And your soldier continued to be sent out for refugees?”
“Yes. He was gone for weeks at a time and our time together was precious. No vow of celibacy or life of service was worth a single day without him. I loved him more than I could fathom and I would spend every waking moment of eternity with him if I could. I would have died for him.”
A familiar pain erupted in my chest, joining the other wounds that had opened tonight. “And then…?”
She went quiet again. “He was slaughtered by Kauvras’ men the next year on his way back to Julia to escort another convoy.” I knew it had been coming but I had held out hope. “The day his brother delivered the news was also the day I looked at the calendar and realized my cycle was late. I didn’t even have time to grieve until…” Her hand rested on her belly, a slow nod to her head. “Until I was grieving again. Came and went before I knew it. My last piece of him…” Silence. A blank stare. “Gone.”
My Saints. “Wrena, I—”
“No,” she cut me off, her face softening again. She looked at me. She really looked at me. I saw in her eyes something one could only see if they had shared the deepest parts of their soul, laid bare their darkest days. “Thank you,” she said.
“Thankyou,”I replied. We didn’t have to explain further.
“It is growing close to dawn, ” she remarked, looking out the crack in the curtains. I nodded, and she noted the apprehension on my face. “You’re going to do absolutely fine, Petra.” The words were almost convincing.
The interview swirled in my head with the information I just learned. Wrena’s pain had permeated my soul. My entire body ached with the weight of her heartbreak, crashing against my own with jagged edges. My brain burned, the thoughts overlapping at every corner. How the hell was I supposed to sort through this?
“Do you think he’ll come here?” I asked suddenly. “Kauvras, or his men?”
Wrena pursed her lips. “We’re so far removed from the rest of the continent,” she explained. “I’d be surprised if they made it here any time soon. I’m not sure any city has the resources to lay siege to a city with walls as fortified as Eserene’s.” I nodded, thinking of the wall that had been the backdrop of my entire life — a comforting, constant presence. The thought of anything beyond the wall made me uncomfortable. I didn’t like to consider the possibilities of life anywhere else, of the beasts that prowled between.
Wrena began to stir and I realized my eyes burned with exhaustion. “Goodnight, Wrena,” I said, smiling as she gathered the tray from the bed, rising to her feet.
She smiled. “Goodnight, Petra.”
I rolled over as dawn broke. I saw Larka’s face and a man with Wrena’s eyes and men in masks.