Pretty sure it was because I was blind. Useless. I’d had that told to me on many occasions, the words screamed and sharpened so they’d drill farther into my skull.
“You don’t look like you believe me,” Archer said.
"You don't know my baba."
"So tell me about him."
I turned my head away from him, not a fan of going deeper into that conversational topic at all.
"Does he beat you." It wasn't a question, his voice growing too hard to make it one.
"Not once. All he does is work in the cellar beneath our house all day, every day." That was it. The end. Time to redirect. "Do you know what the package is?"
He went quiet for so long that I thought he hadn't heard me. Then, finally, the word twisting with pain: "Poison."
Poison. I’d always called it “the delivery” or “the package” to put distance between it and myself. Deep down, though, I knew from my own limited experience with it. It wasn’t just moonshine and wolfsbane and some of Ama’s herbs because the combination was powerful. I knew this, and I hated that I did.
But I didn’t know how he knew and why he seemed so affected by it.
I waited, feeling like I should reach out and touch him, gently coax more out of him. Maybe this was why he drifted away sometimes, lost in memories so vivid that they literally shook him. It had to be, and since I was already involved with the attempted delivery of it, I had a feeling this would be difficult for me to hear. But not as difficult for him to say.
We sat in silence for the longest time while he struggled—for words, for trust, for courage. I wished I could just hand those things over. I could feel his gaze roaming over my face, searching for any reason not to tell me.
"Archer, you don’t have to—"
"It killed almost my entire family."
I expected something devastating, but nothing like that. I assumed the package had something to do with livestock—which didn't really make any sense—but that was all I could come up with on my own. It had killed his entire family. My baba—with Ama’s help—had killed his family. The truth whipped across my face sharp enough to bring tears.
Would my delivery have done something similar? Killed another family, maybe?
"Indirectly," he continued. "It slowed us down, made us weak."
"Why?" I croaked through the guilt strangling my tongue.
"We used to live in the Crimson Forest."
I blinked. “Aren’t we in the Crimson Forest?”
“We’re right on the edge in the Slipjoint Forest.”
"But wilds live in the forest, not people."
"Well…we did. Another group came and decided they wanted us out. Of the Crimson Forest, anyway."
"They wanted you out when you had been there first? Why?"
He scraped his shoe across the wooden floorboards. "The ruby caves."
"Rubies… I didn't know there were ruby caves."
"Not many do. But somehow, they found out."
"Who is they?" But as soon as I asked it, I knew. "Gabriel.”
“And Faust,” he corrected.
“The ones we sold the moonshine to."
