Page 43 of Adam, Mine

Bread

The family was very kind to him. The old man had a son, Felix, and the child was his sister, Agatha. The young dark woman was Safia, Felix’s betrothed.

Elias didn’t see Felix often, but he heard his warm, booming laugh all the way down the hall. He was told, by Agatha, that Felix had a job as a clinic doctor in town. Safia was left to do most housework, cleaning, mending, and cooking.

Her pretty voice rang out as she worked in the mornings and chased Agatha around the house.

They left Elias’s care to De Lacey, who rubbed his cuts with ointment and cleaned them. Elias could not yet put on his shirt without worrying his healing chest so he had to go shirtless. This also meant he could not walk around the space as he would like. He had to keep his back covered.

So he lay there as though he could not move, citing the injuries on the bottom of his feet and the slow-healing burns between his legs.

Elias looked out the window and wished to feel the wind on his face and smell the earth. He stretched in place after everyone had gone to bed, fearing that the creak of the wood floors would alert someone to his fitness.

Besides that, Elias felt very good. He felt better than he had in years. His injuries were healing faster than everyone expected. Burns fading to pink and white irritated patches, the stitches and cuts angry and red but no longer weeping fluid or bleeding.

Best of all was Safia’s cooking. Safia liked to cook with cinnamon, and though it was costly, Felix indulged her. Elias had never had so much of it in his life and keenly felt its luxury.

He could hear the family eating dinner in the front room. Hear their laughter and the rhythm of their conversation. It made him miss his own kin with a bitterness too sharp to discuss.

When Safia asked after him in that way, he turned his face to hide his tears and she didn’t ask again.

She rubbed a hand over his head every so often and it made his heart make birdsong.

What he would do for Magda’s roughness, the sweetness of her pinches, and the flutter of her eyelashes. What he would give to smell the scent on the top of Gida’s head, to braid her hair and tuck flowers into the pocket of her apron. What would it cost to dance with Alina, hear her heels pound the floor and the twinkle of her laugh? What horrors would he endure to push his face into his mother’s neck and have her hold him?

To taste the first bloody cut of his father’s hunting, fresh and salty on the tongue.

If he thought of them for too long, the image of their faces warped in terror and disgust surfaced. Victor’s crimes had poisoned even memories of them.

With the strange strength of his limbs, Elias wanted to mourn properly. To shout and cry and kick and break things, to bury his face in skirts that smelled of love like he was a babe, not full grown.

But instead, he lay there on his back and wished that he were dead.

Plush

Agatha was learning to read. From his bed he could hear her struggling.

Elias had not felt shame at his lack until now. Reading was not necessary for him and never had been.

He knew what different money looked like. He knew his numbers, could read those. He wasn’t fit for marriage due to his illness and was the only son among three girls. None of his siblings could read. Only his mother had been educated, and his father, with some difficulty.

She had made sure to read to them all. Whatever new book would show up in the apothecary would find its way to their home eventually, and she would trade it for another when shipments came in.

Elias was probably more well “read” than most of the people in the village and more diversely educated, too. Also, plenty of people in his village did not know how. It never came up day to day.

But since he’d met Victor, no less than three people had looked at him like he was ridiculous for it.

He heard Safia correcting Agatha and wished that he could go to sit beside them. Perhaps this time it would be different and the letters would stop flipping around.

De Lacey opened the door to his room.

“How do you fare? It should be time for you to rise soon,” he said.

Elias let him run his fingers over the closed wounds of his cuts and feel the fading heat of his burns.

“You should feel blessed at this healing. I have never before seen its like.”

Elias let out a shivery breath. He did not like the implications of that. “Perhaps God has seen my innocence and saw fit to grant me this kindness,” he said. “I shall leave tomorrow. What way will lead me to the closest city with travel from this country?”