I had long fantasized about joining them, seeing what lay beyond the evergreens. But they wouldn’t accept a woman. Not ever.
I set the bread down. “Mama…”
“You weren’t alive when the patrol brought one of those things back,” she said.
My eyebrow lifted. I’d never heard her speak of this. “One of those things?”
“They rode it on a wagon covered by a tarp,” she said, one finger tracing through the air. “Right down the main street here in the southern district.”
I sat forward. “I’ve never heard of this.”
“That’s because they rode it in at night, and I was a girl with a habit of sneaking through the streets past dusk.”
My eyebrows rose higher. “You?”
She waved a hand. “It doesn’t matter. Eury, whatever was under that tarp—it was evil. I could feel it.”
She had always been a little airy, driven by her impulses and feelings and whatever god or demon she thought might be hovering at a given moment.
“Did you see it?”
“I only saw one thing.” She clenched the edges of the stool, leaning in. “A hand.”
“A hand?”
“It didn’t move, just bobbed along with the wagon. But when it passed by, I caught a glimpse of two-inch nails and black-veined skin. I’m certain the wall was attacked.”
I shook my head. “The wall hasn’t been attacked in two generations, Mama.”
“So they say.” She pushed her chair out. “More bread?”
“No, Mama.” I turned in my seat as she crossed around to the counter. She began cutting from the loaf anyway. “Tell me about the creature you saw.”
Her knife slowed, and her shoulders seemed to fall in toward her chest as though to shrink herself. “Perhaps another time.”
My hand tightened on the chairback. No one had ever spoken of the creatures, nor the reason why we stood atop the wall at all, as though speaking of those times would bring them back. “The thing you saw on the wagon, do you think it walked on two legs?”
“I said another time, Eury.” She came back around with two slices, one for each of us, and sat.
In the Kingdom of Storms,the rains came fast. I was still sitting in my mother’s kitchen when the room darkened, the wind took ourhair, and she had only just gotten up to shut the window before the sky began to fall.
She stood at the glass. “Rain.”
Our people had a sixth sense for it. A smell in the air, distinct and astringent when it touched your nose. No matter the time of day, no matter where you were, you found cover.
At least the storms were brief.
I let out a sigh, gathering up our plates. “I left my jacket at the barracks.”
“So you’ll stay a while longer.”
“So I will.”
She brought me into the bedroom, the only other room in our home. We spent nearly all our time in the kitchen—preparing food and eating it, and when Aldric was around during my earliest years, talking.
She didn’t always welcome me into her bedroom. When Aldric came around, that was when I started going out into the night. That was when I first climbed the wall.
Today she sat me down on the bed and bent, began removing my boots.
