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It was deepest winter, and there was misery everywhere I looked. A boy with hollow cheeks sat crying in a doorway of a thatch-roofed hovel, while a thin, mangy dog nosed in a nearby refuse heap for scraps. Another child—a filthy little girl—watched the dog with desperate eyes, waiting to steal whatever it scavenged.
I had nothing to give them. Our own food was all but gone. We’d killed and cooked our last hen weeks ago, eating every bit of her but the feathers.
My hands clutched over my stomach. There was nothing in it now—nothing, that is, but grief and rage. Just last night, I’d watched my little brother Belin die.
Mother hadn’t known I was awake, but I was. I saw him take his last awful, gasping breath in her arms. He’d been only seven, and now his tiny, emaciated body lay under a moth-eaten blanket in the back of a gravedigger’s cart. Soon he’d be put in the ground next to his twin, Borin, the first of them to come into the world and the first one to leave it.
My name is Hannah Dory. I have lost two brothers to hunger, and I will not lose anyone else. I am going to fight.
Have you ever felt a beloved hand grow cold in yours? If not, then I don’t expect you to understand.
“Blackbird, Blackbird,” crazy old Zenna said as she saw me hurrying by. She winked her one remaining eye at me. “Stop and give us a song.”
She called me Blackbird for my midnight hair and my habit of singing through a day’s work. She didn’t know that my brothers had died—that I’d rather scream than sing. I bowed to her quickly, then hastened on.
“Another day, then,” she called after me.
If we live another one, I thought bitterly.
Mary caught up with me a moment later, breathless and flushed. “Mother wants you at the spindle—I keep over-twisting the yarn.”
“What use is spinning when we’re starving?” I practically hissed. “We’d do better toeatthe bloody wool.”
Mary’s face crumpled, and I instantly regretted my harsh tone. “I’m sorry, my sweet,” I said, pulling her against my chest in a quick embrace. “I know Mother wants us to keep our hands busy. But I have … an errand.”
“Can I come?” Her bright blue eyes were suddenly hopeful.
My Mary, my shadow: she was four years younger than me and four times as sweet, and I loved her more than anyone else in the world.
“Not today. Go back home,” I said gently. “And take care of Mother and little Conn.”The last brother we have.
I could tell she didn’t want to. But unlike me, Mary was a good girl, and she did what she was told.
Down the hill, past the cobbler’s and the bakehouse and the weaver’s hut I went. I didn’t stop until I came to the heavy wooden doors of the village church. They were shut tight, but I yanked them open and stumbled inside. It was no warmer in the nave, but at least there was no wind to run its cold fingers down my neck. A rat skittered into the corner of the bell tower as I grabbed the frayed rope and pulled.
The church bell rang out across our village, once, twice—ten times. I pulled until my arms screamed with effort, and then I turned and went back outside.
Summoned by the sound of the bell, the people of my village stood shivering in the churchyard.
“Only the priest rings the bell, Hannah,” scolded Maraulf, the weaver.
“Father Alderton’s been dead a week now,” I said. “So I don’t think he’ll be complaining.”
“God rest his soul,” said pretty Ryia, bowing her head and folding her hands over her large belly. She’d have a baby in her arms soon, God willing.
Father Alderton had been a good man, and at my father’srequest, he’d even given me a bit of schooling and taught me to read. He’d never beaten me or told me I was going to hell for my stubbornness, the way the priest before him had.
Now I just hoped God was taking better care of Father Alderton’s soul than He had the priest’s earthly remains. Wolves had dug up the old man’s body from the graveyard and dragged it into the woods. Thomas the swineherd, searching the forest floor for kindling, had found the old man’s bloody, severed foot.
Do you see what I mean? This winter, even the predators are starving.
“What’s the ringing for?” said Merrick, Maraulf’s red-cheeked, oafish grown son. “Why did you call us here?”
I brushed my tangled hair from my forehead and stood up as tall as I could.
My name is Hannah Dory, and I am about to save us—or get us all killed.
CHAPTER 3
