Chương 52: Chapter 45 — The Letter from Home

The accounts were open on the kitchen table, the lamp pulled close, the columns of figures neat and complete through the end of last month. Grace had been keeping them this way for thirty years — the farm's numbers, the region's numbers, the small, careful record of what came in and what went out and what the difference between them meant for the coming season. She had taught Fenwick to read in this kitchen, at this table, with the lamp in this position because it was the best light in the house.

She was not looking at the accounts. She had been making notes for two weeks. Small things, individually meaningless — a merchant who had not come through on his usual route, a report from the miller's wife about the road east being quiet when it should not be, the behavior of the animals on three separate mornings that she had documented without being able to explain. She knew what it usually meant when animals behaved wrongly. This was not what it usually meant. She dipped her pen. Fenny, she wrote.

I don't know if this is worth sending, but I have been keeping notes, and you should have them. The figures first. She wrote the figures in order, with dates, with the context that made them meaningful. The merchant route. The miller's report. The three mornings. The harvest numbers from the eastern settlements had come in lower than expected for the second month running, and the rumor from the market was that two farms in the next valley had stopped sending anyone to trade.

She was three pages in when Thomas put his head through the door.

"Mum. Fire." She smelled it before she reached the road. The town was not far — ten minutes at a walk, five at a run, close enough that she had always been able to see the top of the mill from the upper field. What she could see now was not the mill. The orange light of it climbed the sky above the rooflines, and the smoke came after, thick and black, the kind that meant buildings rather than brush. Thomas was already running.

He was twenty-three and had been first through every door since he could walk, and he had never in his life been able to watch something burn without going toward it — a quality she had loved in him and feared in equal measure since he was six years old.

"Will," she said.

"Stay with Edie." She ran. The goblins were gone by the time she reached the high street — hit fast, set the fires, and were gone back into the dark before anyone could mount a response. Half the town was burning. The cooperage, the two houses beside it, and the old meeting hall that had stood since before her mother's time. People in the street with buckets, with wet sacking, with the blank faces of those doing the only thing available to them while something much larger than bucket-chains happened around them.

She found a bucket and got to work. She saw Edie later — much later, when the cooperage was lost, and they had moved to holding the houses on either side — working beside a young guinea pig she didn't recognize, the two of them passing buckets in the focused wordless rhythm of people who had found each other's pace and stopped thinking about it. Edie slipped with one of the buckets, and a smile and a blush happened on her face as the young gentleman caught it and laughed. Thomas had gone into the meeting hall.

She did not see him go in. She was on the other side of the cooperage with her bucket and the line had been holding, and she had not been watching the hall because the hall was someone else's problem until it wasn't. Someone told her afterward — one of the miller's sons, ash-faced, who had seen Thomas push through the doors and had not thought to stop him because Thomas going through a door first was such a common sight that it had not registered as something to stop.

He had gone in because someone had said there were people inside. An older couple from the north end of the high street, someone thought. A child, someone else said. Nobody was certain. The people inside, if there had been people inside, did not come out. This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it. Thomas did not come out either. The roof came down twenty minutes after he went in.

She heard it — everyone heard it, the long structural groan of it and then the collapse, the shower of sparks that rose above the roofline and drifted down across the street like something that had no idea what it had just done. The bucket line stopped. Someone was shouting. Someone else was crying, though she could not see who. Will found her in the street. She did not know how long she had been standing there. He pressed against her side the way he had when he was small.

She put her arm around him and held him there and watched the hall burn down to its foundations, and she did not say anything because there was nothing to say that would be useful, and she had never been in the habit of saying things that weren't useful. She thought of him at six years old, running toward a bonfire that had gotten out of hand in the lower field, and herself running after him, and the feeling of catching him by the back of his jacket just before he reached it.

She had not been there to catch him this time. They walked home in the early hours of the morning, the three of them, through a town that was half ash and half shell-shocked silence. She sat down at the kitchen table. The lamp was still burning. The accounts were still open. The letter was where she had left it, three pages of figures, merchant routes, and the behavior of the animals on three separate mornings. She picked up the pen. Thomas died tonight, she wrote in the meeting hall fire.

He went in because someone said there were people inside. You know how he was. She set the pen down. She picked it up again. The goblins came from the east. They were organized. I have not seen organized goblins before, and I have lived here my whole life. They set the fires and left. They did not take anything. She wrote that down, looked at it, and underlined did not take anything. I don't know what that means, but I think you will. The second night was quieter.

The town had pulled itself into whatever buildings remained sound, families doubling up in the houses that still had roofs, the gaps between them wider now and harder to cross in the dark. Grace had offered her farm to three families from the high street, and all three had declined — not from pride, she thought, but from the animal instinct to stay close to what remained of their own walls. She understood it. She felt it herself. Will had not left her side since the hall.

Edie had come back from the town in the late afternoon with the young guinea pig and his mother, both of them ash-covered and quiet, and Grace had given them the two spare rooms and not asked questions that could wait. She sat at the kitchen table. The lamp was closed. The letter was in front of her. She read back through it — the figures, the merchant route, the miller's report, Thomas — and picked up the pen and kept going. The town is damaged. We are managing. But Fenny, the goblins did not come for the town.

I have been thinking about this since last night, and I am certain of it. They came for something else, and the fire was an incidental or deliberate distraction, I cannot tell which. The animals were wrong again this morning. Not the same wrong as before. She paused. She listened to the house — Will asleep upstairs, the young man and his mother in the spare rooms, Edie somewhere she could not hear. There is a cave on the eastern edge of the settlement. The old one, the one we were told as children to leave alone.

Something is coming from that direction. I can hear it in the animals. I could hear it last night under the fire, and I can hear it now. She stopped writing. The chickens had gone quiet. She knew their sleeping silence, had known it for thirty years. This was different. The held-breath quiet of animals that had decided that making no sound was the safest option. She listened. Weight against the eastern wall of the barn. Once, then again, then a third time with more intention behind it. Not wind. Not a branch.

The sound of something that had arrived and was now determining how to get in. She wrote faster. I am sending this now. I don't know if it will reach you, but I am sending it. Whatever is in the accounts is true, and the notes are accurate, and I think the shape of it is something you need to see. Come when you can. The boys are well. Edie is well. Thomas— She stopped. Thomas was so proud of you. He never said it, but he was. We all are. Your loving mother, Grace She folded it.

Three pages, tight, the way she folded things that needed to survive a journey. She sealed it with the stub of wax on the windowsill, pressed her thumb into it, and stood up. The sound at the barn wall had moved. Closer now. The eastern side of the house. She went to the foot of the stairs. She did not shout. She said the name at a volume that would carry upstairs and no further, and she said it once, and she heard the immediate response of someone who had not been deeply asleep.

She held the letter out when he reached the bottom of the stairs.

"Go to the road," she said.

"Get to Millford. Send this to Thornwall. Don't stop for anything. Don't come back until someone comes with you." He took it. He looked at her face.

"Mum—""Go," she said.

"Now. Out the back, through the Hadley field, stay off the road until you reach the crossing." He went. She listened to his footsteps cross the kitchen and the back door open and close, and she stood at the foot of the stairs in the lamplight from the kitchen and waited until she was certain he was clear. Then she turned around.