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I jabbed my hand in the direction of the graveyard. “Tomorrow, my little brother, Belin, will be taken there to join his twin,” I yelled. “He was weak from months of cold and hunger, and he couldn’t fight the fever when it came for him. Our mother knew this, and so she lied to him: she told him that he should sleep, and that he would be better in the morning. But in the morning, he wasdead.” Tears had begun to stream down my cheeks, and I angrily wiped them away. “But maybe my mother was right. Maybe Belinisbetter, because he’s not suffering anymore. And maybe death is the only way to escape our torment. Who among us has not buried someone this winter?” I heard low murmurs: they all had lost fathers, children, sisters. Fever, hunger, the bloody flux—they were killing us, one by miserable one. “How much longer until there are more of usunderthe ground than above it?”
“Winter is always a hard season,” said Morris, the wheelwright, stupidly.
“This one’s the worst I’ve ever known,” said ancient Zenna, who’d managed to stagger her way toward us. “Death himself has settled in our village, hasn’t he?” She let out a strangled-sounding cackle. “He tells me he finds it very much to his liking.”
“Hush, you old witch,” said Maraulf roughly, and she jabbed him in the foot with her walking stick.
“Drunken softsword,” she replied with a sly smile.
“Be quiet and listen to me!” I said. “I know what we need to do.”
“We must pray harder,” said the wheelwright.
“Yes, we could ask God for help,” I said viciously. “But my mother and I tried that for the twins, and all it got us was sore throats and dead boys.” I lifted my skirt and climbed to the top of the churchyard’s stone fence. “I propose that we take matters into our own hands.”
From that height, when I shielded my eyes and squinted, I could see the thing that had haunted my dreams ever since Borin first took sick.
The baron’s castle. It loomed on the horizon like a squat, black mountain, and it was full of everything we lacked.
“I know how to get food. Maybe medicine, too,” I said.
“Oh, get down from there before you fall,” Serell, the cooper, said. “You’re mad.”
Of course they doubted me: I was the girl who always had a fanciful story to tell or a rosy song to sing, my voice as sweet as a lark’s.
But that was the old Hannah. The new one was as sharp and cold as a knife.
“Baron Jorian died in battle last summer,” I said. “And his son, Joachim, is young and untested. Now is our time to act.”
“And what would you have us do?” scoffed Maraulf. “Knock on the castle doors, ask for scraps, and hope he’s kind enough to give us some?”
“We shouldn’t ask for anything,” I said. “We shouldtakeit!”
Zenna began her crazed cackle again. Her eye, cloudy with mucus, rolled around in delight. “Death finds this notion very interesting indeed.”
Suddenly I felt like telling her to shut up. “Maybe I’m asking you to risk your lives,” I said, gazing down at the hungry, desperate villagers. “But what are lives like ours worth, anyway?”
No one spoke. No one wanted to be the first one to sayNothing. Our lives are worth nothing at all.
CHAPTER 4
In the end, four men agreed to my outrageous plan. “We’ll either be fed, Blackbird,” Maraulf had said, clapping me on the shoulder like a brother, “or else we’ll be dead.”
I’d smiled grimly at him, knowing that he was right. “And in one way or another, our troubles will be over,” I’d agreed.
It was late afternoon by the time I started back home. My steps were lighter than they’d been in months. I actually felt hopeful. Or was I—as Serell said—simplymad?
I’d just passed the bakehouse when arms grabbed me from behind, grasping tight around my waist. I reacted, letting out a cry as I crashed my elbow into a rib and stepped down hard on a leather boot.
“Ooff,” said a laughing voice. “That hurt!”
My heart leapt with relief—I knew that voice. Big hands spun me around, and I found myself looking up into the leaf-green eyes of Otto Rast, eldest son of the town doctor.
“You—youbeast,” I said in mock anger, striking him on the chest. “You scared me.”
“I did, did I?” Otto smiled and backed me up against the wall of what had once been the carter’s cottage. He kept his hands on my hips as he pressed himself against me and one of his thighspushed itself right between mine. “But I thought you were so fearless,” he said, his voice a low growl.
His touch sent a shiver through my whole body, and my breath quickened. “Where did you get that idea?” I looked away from him—his face was almost too handsome for me to bear.
