To Meet Surrender: Chapter 1

Again the wings came.

The wings were in her dreams again.

It wasn’t the sight of them, but the sound. A great, slow rush, like the mill sail catching wind. Like every sheet in the village snapping on the line. Warmth poured off him the way heat rolled off the bread oven in January, and Alba leaned in.

During the dream, she always leaned in.

His hand found the curve of her jaw. She knew the weight of that hand the way she knew the weight of a full pail, of a sleeping lamb. She turned her face into his palm and lifted her chin to look at him at last, but the shadows above his shoulders remained dark, and the place where his face should have been was still a blur. Somewhere behind her ribs, a thin cold thread pulled taut, far away, like a hook set in ice.

Look at me, she tried to say, but she could never speak in that place.

She woke with her hand reaching, her palms clammy. The loft was black. Cold. And smelled of straw and the sheep below. She curled her hands back under the blanket, pressing her knuckles against her breastbone until it ached.

Blessed Mother, full of grace. The prayer flooded her head, as easy as kneading bread, her hands moving before thought. Forgive me the dream. Again. Forgive me for not wanting to wake.

Again.

She never managed to confess the dreams to Père Colin, who read out the sins of the parish each Sunday with such relish that Alba had privately concluded he kept a list through the week like Maman kept accounts of laid eggs. “Lust,” he’d thundered last month, “was a wolf that came dressed in sheep’s wool.”

He looked very satisfied with the phrase. Alba had sat in the third pew with her hands folded, knowing for certain it wasn’t a wolf. It was wings. And then she spent the rest of the mass certain that everyone could see the shame written across her face.

She couldn’t pray this away. Creatures of shadow were monsters, and yet she dreamed of them. She should be married by now, or at least looking, and yet the only man that held any interest for her was of her own imagining. Père Colin talked of this from the pulpit. Sermons about the Devil’s servants who wore beautiful faces. Papa said it plainly at the table with the shutters barred. Maman said it with ash and rowan on the windowsills every night before bed.

Danger. Horror.

Despite her internal self-flagellation, three or four nights in every seven, Alba dreamed of wings. Of warmth. Of a hand she trusted. Craved . . .

She jolted under the blankets when the ladder creaked under Papa’s weight as he came in from the yard. The morning was starting whether she was fit for it or not.

“Alba, are you—”

“I’m up, Papa.” She made a show of rubbing her eyes and yawning.

Her father raised an eyebrow. “Dreaming again?”

She averted her eyes, hunting for her smock. “Only of adventure.” That was a lie, but only because those stories hadn’t popped into her head last night. When she wasn’t dreaming of hell, she dreamed of long journeys. Of weapons and battles. Of a bejeweled hilt and gleaming blade with her hand wrapped around it.

Her father didn’t need to know which dream appeared when.

“Always swords and armor. Why not a needle and thread?” He grunted and lowered himself to the floor, and Alba dressed quickly. Maman had the fire up and the first loaves shaped by the time she climbed down from her bed, and the kitchen smelled of smoke and yeast.

Wash day, baking day, spinning day. Every day had its name. This one had two. To everyone else in the village it was preparation day. In this house it was also the day of the ward.

Papa sat at the table with the wooden box in front of him, the one with the wool lining, and did not meet her eyes. It was his way of telling her to sit. The box had come from Maman’s mother, from hers before that, and from some longer line of grandmothers stretching back past anyone’s remembering. Inside, on the wool sat the silver thorn. Hollow, finger-long, bright as the day it was made no matter how many years it had been used.

She sat, then laid her arm on the table, wrist up, the skin there pale and dotted with the small fading marks of a hundred Fridays.

“It’s low,” Papa said to Maman, not to her. He tilted the clay vial against the firelight. The tincture inside, dark as walnut hulls, barely climbed its walls.

“There’ll be more,” Maman said in the voice she used for the hens will lay and the frost will hold off.

Papa grunted. “From where? The group from the north didn’t come at Michaelmas. Nor at Martinmas.”

Maman’s hands paused in the dough. Started again. “There will be more.”

Papa dipped the thorn. The silver point went dark, and Alba did what she always did. She studied the beam over the door and took inventory to distract herself. Adze marks: eleven. Nail: one, bent. Hook where the herbs hung: the bundle wanted changing, the rosemary had gone grey as a mouse.

The sting was small and familiar, like the bite of an asp. Then the cold came threading up the veins of her wrist toward her elbow, and behind it the taste arrived at the back of her throat though she’d swallowed nothing. Bitter and green.. Her body knew the ritual so well that the shiver arrived on schedule, halfway up her forearm.

“There.” Papa pressed his thumb over the bead of blood. He held it there, firm, while Maman brought the scrap of linen. He bound the wrist himself, tight and tucked. Not one drop free. Not one drop ever free. When Alba was small, she’d asked why the cut from the thorn never bled past his thumb, why her scrapes closed by supper when Hauviette wore her scabs for a fortnight at least. Papa said, “The ward keeps your blood strong,” and she had asked, being small, stupid, and not yet schooled in keeping her mouth shut, “What would I need strong blood for?”

Maman had crossed herself. Twice. That had been the end of asking.

But the rules had come after, taught like catechism. By repetition until they lived in her bones and not her head. Never bleed where the air can carry it. Burn what your blood touches. And the third rule, the one Papa always delivered with his eyes on the shutter latch: do not go out after dark.

“Done.” Papa patted her bound wrist once, awkward and gentle. He was not truly old, but the winters had got into his joints early, the way sickness had got into Maman’s lungs. Some mornings, Alba caught herself looking at the two of them with their swollen knuckles, their rattling breath. It wasn’t quite grief that she felt. It was more like standing in a doorway with no way in.

She was never ill. She’d never once, in eighteen years, been ill, and she had learned to lie about it. To invent headaches, to walk more slowly than her legs needed, because in a village this size, health like hers was its own kind of mark.

“The Cattenoz girl is at the well by now.” Maman slid the water yoke toward her. “If she tells the news to anyone before you, we’ll hear about it all week.”

Alba snorted and rushed out of the house.

Hauviette Cattenoz was indeed at the well, and had saved the news the way a cat saves a mouse. Presented with pride. Only a little mauled.

“Refugees,” she spat, before Alba’s bucket had touched water. “In the night. From up past the north woods. Gilles saw them on the road at first light. A whole family with their goods in a handcart and the grandmother riding the ox. They wouldn’t stop. Wouldn’t so much as take bread. The man just kept saying they’d started moving at night.”

Alba pretended to be shocked. “Who had?”

“The English.” Hauviette leaned in, thrilled and appalled. “The host that burned Availles. They say it doesn’t march under the sun. They say it comes on after dark, and it’s at your fields by matins, and—” She dropped her voice. “—they say the dogs won’t bark at the men. They whimper and hide.”

The rope ran cold and wet through Alba’s fists.