Face-Slapping18 min read
The Red Box and the Broken White Piece
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I woke with my ribs seized by a black, pressing weight and the taste of iron in my mouth.
"Hold my hand," a small voice said. "Don't fuss."
The voice belonged to a boy no older than a child, darting candlelight across lacquered wood. He looked at me like someone who had been rehearsing for the exact moment I'd wake.
"Who—" I tried. The chest around me was too tight. The cloth against my skin was smooth and soaked with sweat. When I forced my knees to straighten the lid above me opened like a trapdoor and the world spilled in—yellow light, the smell of tallow, and him.
"Elena," he said, and his name slid into me like a rope. "You're awake. We are past the low passes. You're safe—for now."
"Safe?" I pushed out and tumbled clear, landed on something that thudded. My breaths came hot and huge. The room smelled of straw and smoke and the copper iron of fresh blood.
He lifted me as if I were nothing. He was bony, a boy with a narrow face, and he held a candle in an unsteady hand. "You sick long time. Father says a chest is safer than a cart. We hid you in the red box so you could not be seen."
"A chest?" I sat up and saw the red lacquer box with thin gold tracery where I'd been cramped. "You put me in a coffin."
The boy squinted at me with a kind of anger and pride. "A box, not a coffin. Stubborn people call it a coffin. Call it what you like. Listen—if my father finds you they won't put you back in any box. We ride to the capital. We will find my aunt."
My throat went dry. The memory came in jagged shards: me, leaning over paper in the blue hour, head aching; the fear like a stone; the lock on the chest; waking in darkness. I had stowed myself inside to follow them—curiosity, and a desire to find the face I'd half-remembered from lullabies.
"We have no time," the boy whispered, then slid to the floor and shoved the lid shut quick as a trap. His candle trembled. "Someone—"
The noise downstairs answered him before he could speak. A blow. Dishes shattered. Men shouting. Hooves. A voice a whole room filled with, deep and full of command:
"Who dares take the tribute!"
Then more sounds: chains, a barking low voice—someone calling out orders; swords; a rush like a small beast.
The boy's grip on my wrist tightened until skin bit. "Elena, you must hide." He threw the lid back up and almost as if he'd practiced the motion before, he dragged me under the bed.
We fit, squeezed, breath hitching. A man slammed through the door with an armor-scented hush. He looked like a collapsed boulder—wide, heavy, breath like a bellows. His face, though, was finely cut and familiar in a way that made my heart fall.
He slumped across from the bed and hit the wall. Blood darkened his lips when he spat. He had been stabbed. He raised a spear and called, "Cowards—there's poison in the food? Who dares—"
"I saw them," the boy said under his breath, and I knew then whose blood painted the floor in a wide, slow bloom. He was the one they fought for. He threw himself forward, and the longer spear rose and broke the chaos for a moment.
A blade cut, loud and sure as thunder. The spear clattered from his hand. He did not scream. His breath locked in a hiccup and he fell. Blood ran like a dark river.
I wanted to cry. I wanted to run. My hand found a small brick at my feet and my fingers closed around it the way a drowning person clutches a plank.
"Don't," the boy said. He rolled out from under the bed like a shadow and came for the door with a short dagger, moving with a speed that did not belong to his thin frame.
A massive soldier burst in, eyes like hungry slits. He laughed. "Burn it. Leave no witnesses."
Before I could do anything the boy crossed the floor and tried to stumble to meet him. He rolled. He found the long spear. He drove it back into the man who had been struck down, then another man came—a tall one, laughing with a voice like split oak—and pried the spear free. My cousin's father, the general, cursed and shoved him into the wall, and his blood sprayed in odd dark stars.
I felt cold, and then hot. My whole world contracted to the thud and metallic smell. The boy's fingers squeezed mine so hard I thought he'd break them. "Help me," he whispered.
I crawled. I hitched out from under the bed. I saw Jasper then—my cousin, hair matted with sweat, eyes dark and unfocused, the spear in his chest. He looked at me and like someone who has been given a rope he clung with a child's faith.
"Elena," he said, and his voice was a child's again. "Tuck your head. Don't cry. We'll go home."
"They're burning the house," someone barked, a voice that belonged to the men in grief or greed. "No one leaves with the tribute."
"Then we'll leave with the dead," the leader said, and the sound of laughter was a rope around my throat.
The boy hauled me up under one arm, pulled Jasper's limp shape with the other, and we slipped out the back like thieves into the night.
By the time we were clear the inn was a sputtering, rearing beast. Flames licked the rafters. Men swore and stamped and then ran like animals—some after us, some away. We hit the lane and dove into black, jumped a low wall, hit a pit of mud.
"Hold on," the boy—Jasper's brother?—whispered, though his voice was near-break. He fought for breath. "Mount the mare—there's a herd near the road."
I found a spooked horse and pushed Jasper atop it, then crawled after. I cinched the strap with hands that wanted to shake and jerked us forward.
Arrows sprang around us like hissing things. One brushed my hair; another thunked into the dirt behind. My heart pounded so loud I thought the world would split.
We fled. I do not know how many miles. The horse ran on a will of its own. The boy—whose name I would learn in time to come—kept his candle low and his curse lower.
"We'll make the city by dusk," he panted once. "We go to the house of the war family. They will hide us."
"This is the house of whom?" I asked. My voice was woven from smothered terror and galloping resolve.
"My aunt—she is kin to them," he said. "They won't betray family. Not now."
We crept into a roadside tavern, a smoked place where the men looked like wolves. They wore mourning strips; they had the knives of travellers. They stared, and suddenly the tension lessened.
A boy sat at a table with a towel over his shoulder, eyes like cold glass. He had a mole by his left eye that made the corner of his face look like a painted stroke. He had been eating alone and wiped his hands as we tumbled in.
"Who is this?" the towel-boy asked, as if he could smell the story in us.
"She is my kin," the boy who had helped me began. He was thin enough that alarm might have found him in the middle of all the men. "My cousin. She was swallowed in a box. Helped by the gods we escaped."
The towel-boy's mouth turned wry. He gave a small laugh and flicked his fingers. "You call me a god, you should bring offerings," he said. He reached out with a pair of chopsticks as if to test a shore, and with those chopsticks he plucked an arrow from beside the hearth where it had landed only moments before. The feather still trembled. He held the shaft between his fingers as if it were a trivial ornament.
"That arrow came from the men that burned your inn," I said, and my voice sounded like someone else’s, rough and coarse with grief and fatigue.
He did not look surprised. "Sometimes fire smells like a blessing. Sometimes it smells like dinner." He set the arrow down and tapped his fingers as though thinking. "You will need a doctor if the wound is poisoned."
"Do you know a doctor?" I asked, though my own hands trembled. Jasper's eyes rolled in his head; he was burning. I realized then that the wound had not only been blade-deep. There was a dark, oily smell coming from it.
The towel-boy—the boy with the mole—stood. "There is an old healer who boils herbs near the south lane. He sees anyone for a price. He is more than he looks. Leave me the money," he said.
I had none. I had only a hairpin, a strip of cloth, and a small carved chess piece that had been my amusement at the hours under the moon when I used to practice drawing. I took the chess piece out and offered it.
"You give me that?" he said, sharp and surprised.
"It is all I have," I said. "It once belonged to my grandfather."
"Then we will do something else," the towel-boy said. He took a small pot from under the counter and pried out a vial of bitter liquid. "This will buy breathing for a while. Muddle it in warm water, force him to swallow. Then ride for the city hospital in the morning. Promise me you will not stop."
The man with the mole—Ramon Schulz, I would learn—sleek and small and calm—was not the only one who watched. A sour-faced scholar with a yellow beard, who introduced himself with a sour sniff as Ernest, came forward and touched Jasper's pulse once, muttered, and produced a red pill.
"Give him that," Ernest said to me with a voice like sandpaper. "It will not cure the poison, but it will hold it visible—not gone. It will buy time. Send for the real healer in the city."
"Who would pay the price?" I asked, holding the small pill like some sacrament.
"Then give me what you can," Ernest said. He had the look of men who knew when death was only sleeping and when it was keeping an appointment. "Your hairpin will do. And the carved piece if you love such things."
I thought of the piece in my palm—white lacquer, a mark of an old name—my fingers closed till it hurt. In the end I slipped the hairpin and the piece to the man who smelled of herbs and old books.
Ernest frowned, then gave a curt nod. "Good. The boy will live if you do not dawdle."
"We ride," Ramon said. He had watched the village edge for a long time, and once more his voice tightened. "We go to the city. I will not leave you."
We left at first light, the city a bright smudge like a promise on the horizon. The horse shuffled and stumbled along a road that would have been a highway in better times. We moved in silence and fear and exhaustion until the city gate rose like the maw of a whale.
At the gate, soldiers parted the crowd. A big soldier with a face nicked by sun and season turned and squinted. "What brings you here with a man bleeding like a spill?"
"His name is Jasper Solovyov," I said quickly. "He is wounded. He is kin to the household of—Kendrick Zimmerman."
The soldier blinked. "Kendrick Zimmerman? The old general? The one who unsettled the capital? Move aside. Bring him to the court surgeon."
We were seen. Men bowed and drew aside. The city opened like a second skin.
Kendrick Zimmerman—my grandfather's name in this life—met me with a gaze like steel warmed quick. He looked at Jasper and then at me. "Who taught you to ride a man that way? Who let you sleep in a box?"
"No one," I said. "It was my choice."
He laughed, the kind of laugh that could be cruel or kind depending on the weather. "You are incorrigible. Good."
Days later, in the lanterned house beneath Kendrick's watch, I gave up the carving I had offered. I swallowed the memory of that chest and tucked into my sleeve the only thing I had taken back—an embroidered slipper from the field where I'd fought the woman in blue and later found the murderer’s boot-mark. It was odd and small and it fit in my palm like a secret.
"How did you sleep in a coffin and not go mad?" Kendrick asked once, when Jasper was sleeping and the house smelled of herbs and vinegar.
"Everyone has strange ways of keeping company with fear," I said. "Mine was counting the stitches on the lining."
Kendrick peered at me. He had fought many summers. He had reasons to be angry with the world. "You will learn to fight for others other than screaming. And you will learn to weigh when to shout and when to whisper."
Over the next weeks I was a thousand people. I was a nurse and a sparring partner and a clerk and an errand-runner. I learned to bind blood with a hand that stopped shaking. Ernest grunted and tutted at me and then corrected a knot I had tied with one eye half-closed.
"You have a mind," Ernest said once. "You twist and turn like a dog around a bone. A pity it's aimed at the wrong things."
Ramon would come and go and sometimes watch without speaking. One night he said, "There are things people will kill for that are not silver."
"What like fame?" I snapped, and he smiled without humour.
"Like a map," he said. "Like a place someone hid and someone else wants from under their teeth."
"A map?" I almost laughed, but I had seen little pieces before. Once, from a dead man’s sleeve, I had pried out a scrap of oil-darkened skin that had the curve of a river and a row of trees. It had been in the dead charlatan's hair-piece at his chest.
Ramon's eyes were steady. "The dead man who came here before you had a piece of something. He was not just a liar who wore a robe. He carried a scrap of a map. Men died for such scraps."
"Who would care enough to cut down an inn, poison plates, and burn a chest? We are nobody."
"You are a piece," he said softly. "When the wrong people pick you up, you might be very useful."
I thought of the red box that had nearly been my tomb. I thought of Jasper's father, Isaiah Long, who had fallen like a proud bird. I felt something like a slow cold settle on my tongue.
"If men will kill for maps," I said, "then we must know what the map leads to."
Kendrick set me a task. "Learn what you can. If the map is treasure you might buy safety with it. If it is leverage, you will need to know who wields it."
"Who then is the snake?" I asked, half girl and half soldier when anger put a spine in my voice.
Kendrick's eyes hardened. "There is a man at the capital who smiles like heaven and plots like winter. Franco Wilson has teeth hidden under silk. He covets the seat above him. He rides the whispers of court to pull men down. Many think he is a friend of the city. I think he is a man who would burn a household to clothe his ambition."
Franco Wilson. The name snagged on my mind like a fishhook.
"How do you know?" I said.
"He is frank enough," Kendrick said. "And we are not so blind."
The months unrolled like a slow rope. I practiced the gun—no, not gun, the longstaff of the field—under Kendrick’s careful, blunt watch. I learned medicine and how to loosen tongues with the right question. I learned to read a map until the lines looked like lives.
One evening, in the market, Ernest grumbled. "You ride a tiger," he said. "You think you can play at the edges of power and not get torn."
"Then help me get a name," I said, and he looked at me as if at a puzzle that was both amusing and frightening.
"Names are for the living," he said. "Bring me a scrap—anything—and I will tell you whose hand touched it."
I had the scrap from the charlatan's small leather piece. I had the embroidered shoe I had placed into my bosom like a promise. I took them to Ernest and he turned them over like a jeweller holding a coin to the light.
He squinted. "This leather is from a housekeeper's apron, not a map. But the stitch—is this a standard pattern in the east?"
"It's the same as the boots that walked on my uncle's chest when he died," I said. "The pattern is like a moon and stars."
"Moon and stars," Ernest muttered. "Old soldiers like the same marks. You are chasing an old mark on a new face."
"Then help me find who stitched that mark," I said.
He tapped a finger to the scrap and then his thumb to his teeth. "There is a scribe who works for messengers. He keeps records. He drew lines for a man named Garrison Gonzales long ago."
"Garrison Gonzales?" I said. The name fell. It fit like a key into a lock.
"Yes," Ernest said. "And he is not the only one."
We went then to the guild of messengers, to the waterways, to the quiet inkstand where men wrote orders other men carried. There I picked up things: Franco's name on a folded letter; the symbol of a medallion gifted to certain officers by the man who called himself Franco's friend; a payment record with a coin stamped with a mark I had seen—on the leather found at Isaiah Long's death.
"This is how men feed knives to wolves," Ramon said one night when he found me bent over a pile of soot-blackened receipts. "You follow the money, you find the teeth."
We followed the thread until a knot offered itself. A man of soft clothes and silk words walked in on a festival, and I had him.
The day they were to celebrate the governor's charity the city square swelled with people: merchants, soldiers, street singers, a dozen boys with shaved heads and broomsticks. Franco Wilson rode in a sedan littered with lacquer and smiles as though he were a man who had never lifted a hand beyond brushing bread.
I took the scrap of leather and the bloody stitch and the ledger and the list of bribes to the square, to a place where we would have witnesses. I had no altar—only a half-known howl of courage and the bright, exposing sun.
"Who is this woman?" someone asked as I climbed the steps.
"Silence," Kendrick said, and he was a column of iron.
"You cannot stand here," the mayor's clerk said.
"Watch," I answered and then I showed the ledger, the stitch, the coin, the receipt. I let a crowd hold each thing like it could hold a feverish truth.
"Who paid mercenaries to ambush an envoy, who gave silver for poison, who burned an inn to hide signatures?" I asked. My voice was not small, not shrill. It carried like a bell.
Franco's smile weathered. He stepped forward, hands open and gracious. "What is this?" he said pleasantly. "A woman with a scrap of tatter. Do not disturb the feast for a child's tale."
A scribe from our group read then from the ledger. He read the coin stamps, the folded orders, the name that appeared like a stain. "This mark appears on flight orders, on payments to brigands, and on a receipt for the costs of burning an outpost. Franco Wilson's seal appears here."
"What trickery!" Franco said. He laughed in that soft silk voice, and the crowd's mood dropped like a rock into a pond. People leaned. They scented entertainment.
"You wish to charm them," I said. "Charm them while the proofs are carried. Have them if you can. Do you deny your seal?"
Franco's smile hardened like an edge. He did a clean thing that men do when they have been counted out: his face changed until it was a mask of denied weather.
"It is false," he cried. "This woman spins tales. My seal—my honor—"
"Call the men who signed," I said. "Have them stand and answer in the square."
He bristled. "The men who signed—most are dead. Some are gone. And some are to be trusted." He turned and his voice dropped. "Arrest this woman for slander if you must."
There was a rumble among the crowd. Some looked away. Some reached for their knives. A woman clapped a hand to her mouth. A boy began a sketch of Franco with charcoal. Two men pulled out ink and began to copy the ledger. The clerk's face paled; rumors move quicker than justice does.
Kendrick stood with his arms like a gate. "Bring forth a man named Eastping," he said, and my heart hit my ribs because that name belonged to Garrison Gonzales' captain. "Let us find their tongues warmed by coin."
They brought men who were thin and witless with fear. They knelt and looked at Franco as if he would lift their heads and place crowns of gold on them.
"Did you pay these men?" Kendrick asked.
The lieutenant who had been pressed into duty vomited his answer with his mouth full of cursing names. "He paid! He—he gave us orders that the tribute be halted. He sent men with marks. Please—"
In the square, the murmur broke into a swell. Some people began to shout for justice, others to shout for the governor. A street vendor stood up on his stall and berated Franco.
"It is a plot!" Franco moved like a fish on a line. "You lie!" He laughed, and in his laugh was a crack.
"What do you say?" I asked.
Franco faltered. The corners of his mouth twitched. Then he leaned forward and with a sudden show of composure he offered a hand. "If you will produce the men who did this, I will—" He stopped, mouth open. He had been stopped by the sound of someone whispering near his ear.
I had the rest of his ledger in my hands—the one where he'd paid for the first detachment. I read aloud the handwriting: places, sums, a silver measure. One by one our witnesses stood—men who had been paid in the ledger. They were not many, but they were enough.
Franco's face lost its silk. "You cannot," he said. "You can not—"
"You set flames under miles of road and called it mercy?" someone cried loudly. "You burned an inn and called it necessity? You sent men disguised as lords and poisoned a table and called it politics?"
"It is a lie!" he pleaded. He turned to the crowd with all the practiced softness of a man who thinks a smile can pluck a thorn out. "They trap me with shadows. I am chief of the council, a man of service. I would never—"
Around him pens scratched. A boy tore off a scrap and began to draw the scene. Others mimed his gestures and many mouths echoed the words like thunder. One old woman spat and said, "Then show your hands."
He went through the motions of denial, then of anger, then of implausible astonishment. "You lie," he said, "you invent tales to raise your station. I am as astonished as any man."
"Do you hear this?" I said to the crowd. "Hear him. Hear him move from anger to pity to denial to begging. Hear what men do when the heat is on them."
He bristled once more, cheeks flushing. "You will see," Franco said. "You will see what slanders do to an honest man." His voice failed then, and for the first time I saw him shrink. "Do not—don't tear me from my home."
A woman opened her fan and slashed the air. "Shame on you!" she cried. "You make the city bow and then you strike us in the dark."
There was a sudden, audible shift. The crowd closed like a hand. Men who had not yet decided leaned forward. The scribe who had copied the ledger stood up and shouted, "I will show his coin to any man who will stand and say his name!" He waved the ledgers like just salvation.
Franco saw the ground go from under him. He took one step, and his world pivoted. He tried to laugh. The laugh did not fit his body. "It is slander," he kept saying, but the swell of witnesses and the ledger and the charcoal-drawings and the way the men with the moon-and-star stitch looked at him like one looks at a snake with a swollen head all piled up and he changed.
He went from a man of silk to a man stripped to reaction. "You—you cannot—" He tried to place his hands on Kendrick as if to hold him, then withdrew. "I will not—this is monstrous! I will—"
He dropped to his knees like a spoiled thing. "Please—" his voice warped, smaller than paper. "I did not order—do not—" His denial fell into pleading. He made to reach for a pocket and pull out a note, a plea, a bribe to smooth the noisy crowd. A thousand small eyes watched him fail.
Someone nearby—a scribe with ink cracked on his fingers—began to hiss the names of those who had been paid. The crowd bent and listened. They began to hum, low at first, then like a tide growing. "Shame! Shame!" the vendors cried. "Shame on him!" and a single clerk took out a scrap and began to read aloud the ledger entries one more time.
Franco's red face crumpled. "You cannot—" he wailed. "You will ruin me. For the love of God, help me! Please, help me!"
The crowd's reaction was not polite. They whispered, shouted, some applauded, some drew out charcoal and made quick pictures to carry home. An old woman slapped her palm against her thigh and laughed with the exhilaration of a storm. A young man recorded the ledger into memory like a curious scribe. A soldier who had once been paid under Franco's hand spat and, with the grim music of guilt and joy, tore a ribbon from his coat and flung it into the dust.
Franco went through the exact change of a man: a flush of rage, a flare of denial, a pounding of his chest, then the rapid descent that turned his voice into the voice of someone begging for breath. He sobbed, then whimpered, then turned to Kendrick like a man to a judge.
"Kendrick, I—" He could not form the words. He bowed so low his forehead scraped the stones. "Please! I can repay. I will repay tenfold! Tenfold, I beg—"
"No," Kendrick said, in a voice that was an axe. "Stand up."
Franco clambered to his feet with hands like a child's that had been used to silk. "Do you not know I serve the people?" he cried. "I have given them bread!"
"You gave them fire to hide a crime," a woman shouted. "You cared for your comforts and not for our children's sleeps."
The crowd closed like a book on him. Men shouted for him to be taken before the magistrate. Women spat in his direction. Children shouted that the man was a thief. Some drew knives in the glare of a public conviction and were restrained only by the soldiers who did not wish a riot.
Franco's face crumpled. He dropped again to his knees. He sobbed, and people leaned in with the relish of long-denied justice.
They did not beat him. That would have been barbarous. They made him stand under the stone fountain in the center of the square and read aloud the names of those he had ordered wrong. He tried to twist the words. He tried to place the heavy blame on a clerk. He begged for mercy as a man begs for a salt hand on a wound.
His fall was delicious to watch and pitiful to behold. "Forgive me," he said, and for a moment he was a child. A woman lunged forward and slapped his face so hard his head snapped. The slap was a punctuation point.
Then he did what guilty men do when the world closes: he began to tell names he had known. He started by trying to name small hands—men at the edges. Then he named a man in the north. Then a man in silk. People listened. Some took out paper and glanced, scribbling.
He was loud then, loud and staggering. "It was them! It was them who—" But when you are confessing under a roof of witnesses there is a way to count the weight of what you have done. He named small men. He named a captain. He tried to name one man of rank—an old minister—and when he did, the square shifted again like sand.
Those with notebooks took a step forward. They counted coins. They held each new name like a bead to be pulled. People who had not thought to be part of it found themselves drawn in.
At the end, he collapsed onto the cold paving stones, his silk a crumpled heap. He cried as if he had been made of the same fragile stuff as the ledger pages. "Please," he said. "Do not kill me. Spare me the gallows. Keep me from the court."
They would not kill him that day. They took him, bound, to the magistrate. They took him away in a sedan chair, his head bowed, his silk flecked with dust. As he went, people spat and some applauded and the children sketched him for the book of scandals they would carry home.
When it was over, Ramon found me and offered me a warm melon from his basket. "You did well," he said.
"I showed paper and a stitch." My voice was tired. "People believed paper and stitches."
"They will believe more now," he said. "You have made a place for yourself in a public square. That is dangerous fruit."
He was right. But I had cut one vine and shown it rotten to the light.
After Franco's fall the world did not become beautiful. It simply became honest in a way that looks ugly for a day. Men who had smiled at his banquets grew pale. Rewards that had been spoken of in private had to be unspoken. We had set an animal loose in the market—an animal called truth—and the city watched him walk.
We did not know what all the ledger would open. We did not know how many names were strung like beads on a necklace. We only knew we had struck a chord.
The stitched boot pattern led us deeper into a net of contracts and debts, and it was not long before a scribe from the city came to my little room in Kendrick’s house and whispered that a caravan from the far south had been intercepted with a crate marked with the same moon-and-star emblem.
"We will must go," Kendrick said, his voice a sea in a storm. "The map piece that came from the dead man—someone thinks it matters. Someone with cold hands thinks it matters enough to burn a tavern and poison a table."
"I found the small white chess piece that was mine," I said then. It had a crack through it like a fault line. "And an embroidered slipper. I will not leave either of them alone."
Ramon smiled thinly. "Those things do not look like the instruments of power. They look like the marks of someone who thinks of legacies."
"And sometimes," I said, "a family's legacy will be its last defense. We stand on one of those legacies."
I folded the cracked chess piece into my palm and felt the weight of small things. The world might shift like a properness of merchants or a flutter of silk, but some things—an embroidered shoe, a red box, a single white chess piece cracked across with age—would mark us for a long time.
Tonight, I looked at the red lacquer chest I had escaped, then at the cracked white piece, and felt a quiet like a hand over my heart. I had been buried and dug up and set running. I had killed in a field with a short blade and saved a life with a bitter pill. I had stood in the square and named the man who would be found out.
"If they take the map," Ramon murmured, "then all that remains is what we can do ourselves."
"I will learn to make myself harder than a ledger," I said. "And softer than a coin."
He laughed softly. "Then we might both be dangerous in the right way."
I raised the cracked white chess piece and felt the seam like a tiny sword. The red box would not be my coffin again. The embroidered slipper would not be left in mud. And the ledger would be read for many days.
"Keep your hand ready," Kendrick said, when he passed the little folded map to my fingers. "There are those who will come to the square to buy their truth back."
"I will not sell it," I said. I tucked the cracked piece into my sleeve, and when the moon rose it found me awake and counting stitches again, only now the stitches held not a dress but a life.
The End
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