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I walked out to our frozen garden, where I expected to find my brother playing with his friend Vincy, who lived with his widowed father a little ways up the lane.
Vincy was there all right, dancing around in the dirt and stabbing invisible monsters with a pointed stick. But Conn was nowhere in sight.
“Where’s my brother?” I asked.
“He went down to the river,” Vincy said, viciously striking the air. “Takethat! And that, you slavering beast!”
The river? Alone? Panic rose in my throat. “When?” I demanded. The river took a life every season—in spring floods, a summer drowning, or a winter plunge through the ice.
Vincy shrugged and dropped the stick to his side. “Don’t know,” he said. “Haven’t seen him in forever. Is it suppertime? Do you have food?”
Ignoring him, I rushed back inside to get my cape, trying not to let my terror show.Dear God we can’t lose another boy. “He’s gone to the river,” I said. “I’ll fetch him.”
My mother gasped and her face went white. “Run,” she said.
But even as I was moving toward the door, it burst wide open, and in came Conn, soaked to the skin and blue with cold. My mother shrieked and ran to him, clutching at his sopping clothes and trying to pull them off before he froze.
But Conn wasn’t half drowned. He was grinning ear to ear. In his small hands he gripped a black, snakelike fish—a winter eel.
“I broke a hole in the ice,” he said. “I sat there for hours and hours, Mama. And then I caught him!”
My mother clasped him to her chest, her thin face radiant with relief. “Hannah, gut the eel.”
The moment I touched its cold, slimy flesh, I could tell that it had been dead for days. Poor little Conn, thinking himself a great fisherman, had plucked a decaying thing from the frigid river and brought it home for us to eat.
And I was nearly desperate enough to cook it.
But with Conn by the fire now, getting rubbed pink and dry by my mother, I went to the door and threw the eel into the street. The dogs would find it quickly enough, and they had stronger stomachs than we did.
Then I dished out our meager slurry of cabbage and a few grains of barley. It was pale and watery, seasoned with the last of our salt. I knew that we’d slurp up every drop, and that when we went to our beds, we’d still be hungry. We’d wake in the middle of the night with empty guts twisting.
As if she could hear my thoughts, my mother looked up at me. “The harvest will be better this year,” she said. Her lovely face was lined and her brow etched deep with worry. She was trying so hard to keep us alive, and it just wasn’t working.
“We can’t wait that long,” I said. I put down my spoon. “But I’m going to make sure we don’t have to.”
My mother frowned. “I don’t understand.”
I pushed my soup bowl over toward Conn; I was past feeling hunger. “I’m going to do something, Mother,” I said. “It’s dangerous, but it has to be done.”
CHAPTER 6
I woke, fell asleep, and then woke again. In the dim artificial light, a shadow tiptoed toward me. I tried to get away from it, but I couldn’t. The shadow stuck something small and sharp into the crook of my elbow. I screamed.
“Hush, Hannah, dear,” the shadow said. “It’s okay.”
I didn’t believe the shadow at all. How did it know my name? I tried to speak, but my tongue was too big for my mouth. In my head there was confusion and darkness and a roaring that sounded like a terrible wind.
The shadow touched my cheek. “You just need to get some rest. You’ll feel better in the morning.”
Lies!I wanted to say.Lies!
I was afraid to fall asleep again because I didn’t know what the shadow would do to me while I was unconscious. But sleep was coming. I could feel it rising like a huge black wave, getting closer and closer, no matter how I tried to run from it. When it crashed over me, it obliterated me. The shadow vanished.Ivanished.
I dreamed of sharp things. Needles. Knives.
Blood.
CHAPTER 7
