Mist-Torn Witches 02:Witches in Red (18 page)

But when they came back, they gathered us together and delivered unexpected news.

“We were just told of an encampment called Ryazan, to the north, up above Enêmûsk,” my father said. “A prince of the House of Pählen owns a collection of silver mines, and there is a shortage of workers. The soldiers overseeing the mines have a large a provisions tent, and they are willing to sell food to anyone who mines for them. We could offer to work and buy food and at least have a place to spend the remainder of the winter.”

A chance at work and food sat well with the rest of us, and so we headed farther north and then slightly west. The going was slow, as only one horse now pulled each wagon. We rolled into the Ryazan encampment on the last dregs of our strength and spirit.

From the top of our wagon, I took my first look at what struck me as a sea of tents and men in brown tabards.

The Camp

At the time of our arrival in Ryazan, Aunt Miriam no longer even pretended to be our leader. She was barely able to rise from her bunk.

So it was my father, Uncle Landrien, and Mikolai who first spoke with Captain Garrett of the House of Pählen. He came out to meet us, and I stood in the doorway of our wagon, peering out and listening.

Captain Garrett was a wide-shouldered man, with silver hair and a proud bearing. But he was in need of workers, and he spoke to our men with respect. Unfortunately, the bargain he offered was a disappointment.

“Our miners sign a one-year contract,” he said, “and they get paid at the end when the contract is fulfilled. We just had a new round of contracts signed in the autumn, but I can sign you on at a slightly reduced wage, and you can work out the rest of the year.” He went on to explain that through the year, while working out their contracts, the men could take out vouchers to be exchanged for food from the provisions tent. These vouchers would later be counted against their wages. I could see this for what it was—a way to reduce monetary wages by preying on the miners’ need to feed their families. But at the time, I didn’t care. It sounded as if our men would be able to get food for us right away.

“However,” Captain Garrett continued, “no one is allowed to trade vouchers for provisions until they’ve worked in the mines for at least a month. We’ve had a few workers load up on food, work one day, and then disappear.”

My father’s face fell. We needed food now. We could not last a month.

The captain seemed to understand this—although I’d been watching him count the number of men in our group, along with the boys old enough to work. I knew
he wanted us to stay. He looked at our horses, which were all thin and weakened like us, but these last four were otherwise sound.

“I’ll buy your horses from you, and you can use the money to purchase provisions to feed your people.” He pointed north. “The miners’ camp is through those trees. You can get your wagons settled and then bring the horses to me.”

For traveling Móndyalítko, the idea of selling our horses was almost unthinkable. They were our lifeblood, our method of moving from one place to the next in the rhythm of the year. But we had lost our yearly rhythm, and the desperate state of the men drove them to agree with the captain’s offer. Later, I learned that none of the other miners had ever been told they had to work a month before taking advantage of the vouchers. Although Captain Garrett was a fair man in most ways, I thought he might have put us in a position of having to sell our horses so that we could not leave.

At the time, however, I didn’t know this.

By that afternoon, we’d settled our wagons in the miners’ camp. Our horses had been sold, and we’d been given a good price. Our larders were filled with supplies from the soldiers’ provision tent, including oats, lentils, dried tomatoes, onions, tea, wheels of cheese, and a few pails of milk with cream floating on the surface. How cheaply we’d been bought.

Then all the men except Marcus signed contracts to work for Captain Garrett. Marcus didn’t wish to sign, and he was excused because we would still need our
hunter. I am ashamed at how relieved we all felt simply to have food and a place to camp and the promise of work, even if the men would not be paid in actual coin for nearly a year.

We lit a campfire, and Katlyn and I got to work making a large pot of lentil stew with onions and dried tomatoes. That night, Mariah sat by the fire with a blanket around her shoulders, and I brought her a warm bowl of lentils. She was too hungry to even wolf it down, so she took small bites.

“We can stay here?” she whispered. “We won’t have to leave tomorrow?”

I don’t think she understood that our horses were gone.

“No,” I whispered back, sitting beside her. “We don’t have to leave, and I’ll make you soft oats with cream for breakfast.”

She leaned into me and pressed her face in my shoulder. Maybe we were not bought so cheaply after all.

The next day, the men went to the mines to work, all except for Marcus and Great-Uncle Marten, who was too old. Only one of Shawn’s boys had not turned twelve yet, and apparently, any male over twelve was considered old enough to work in the silver mines. So in one fell swoop, Captain Garrett had gained my father, Uncle Landrien, Mikolai, Micah, Shawn, and four of Shawn’s sons.

I let Mariah rest that day, and I set about the task of getting a more permanent camp set up. Then I made supper. Katlyn helped me, and she also minded her two remaining children and Shawn’s youngest.

Aunt Miriam did not rise from her bunk, and I began to worry that she was more than simply weary. I brought her tea and food, but she couldn’t eat.

When the men came back that evening, I had my first inkling that we’d made a horrible mistake.

The Móndyalítko were not born to spend their days underground in the darkness. They need light and air. Though our men had been drawn to the promise of work, they’d not fully considered the type of work for which they were signing on—hard labor in the darkness underground.

I saw fear and desperation in the eyes of my father.

Mariah saw it, too, but her reaction offered no pity. Catching me alone, she asked, “We’re not leaving, are we? Father won’t give up and make us leave?”

“No,” I assured her. “We will not leave.”

I fed the men dinner and did what I could to make their evening pleasant with food and a warm campfire.

The following morning, they went back to the mines.

Two days later, Aunt Miriam died in her sleep. Uncle Landrien, Mikolai, and Marcus mourned her. So did Father and I. Poor Mariah was beyond mourning and barely seemed aware that her aunt was gone. The girl was too driven by fear of being back out on the road again.

As that first year passed, I made friends with the wives of the miners who lived in shacks and huts in our encampment, and a few of them taught me to use the food vouchers wisely. The soldiers placed a high price on luxuries like tea, so if I wished for our men to have more real money coming in at the end of their
contracts, I learned to purchase only what was absolutely necessary. Of course, the problem with this was that I often ended up making the same things for supper—such as lentil stew. Marcus supplemented our meals with game and venison when he could. But the men were denied even small pleasures like tea. This troubled me, and yet, when I expressed my worries to my father, he told me to continue with my thrifty methods.

Over that year, I watched the life drain from the eyes of our men, and I saw a determination growing in my father that I’d never seen before. I knew he hated it here. He hated those mines. But what was going to happen when the men earned out their contracts and received the wages owed them? We certainly wouldn’t have enough to buy horses.

At the end of summer, I asked him, “What are we going to do?”

He studied me for a long moment. “I have a plan, but no one knows except Marcus, and you cannot speak of it yet. Do you swear?”

“Of course.”

“I’ve noticed the soldiers don’t guard their horses well, with perhaps one man on the perimeter at night. Once we are paid, after dark, we’ll overcome that one guard. We’ll take six horses and slip away the same night. We’ll leave Uncle Marten’s wagon behind. He can ride in Landrien’s. Micah and Katlyn and their children can ride with us.”

“No.” I shook my head. “Captain Garrett will come after us. You’ll be hanged for stealing their horses.”

“He won’t find us.” His voice lowered further. “I’ve
let it be known that we all long to return to Belfleur Keep in the east. He will believe that we have run, and he’ll organize men to chase us east. But Marcus has found us a place to hide only three leagues away. There is freshwater, fish, and good hunting for him. We’ll hide out until the soldiers stop seeking us, and only then will we begin to move.”

This sounded risky, but if Marcus believed the hiding place to be sound, I trusted his judgment.

“Where will we go after that?” I asked.

“Back to Kéonsk. I’m going to speak to Master Deandre about finding us work in the city, even if we end up mucking out stalls for the Väränji soldiers.” His voice broke. “But we have to get away from here, my girl. This is no place for us. Those mines are no place for us.”

“I know, Father.”

I reached out and stroked his arm, truly proud of him for the first time since Mother died.

Autumn came, and I prepared for our dangerous departure. I said nothing to Mariah. I knew she would fight me. She was going on fourteen, and for her, this place meant food and stability.

Finally, the day arrived when our men were paid, and I knew Father and Marcus were going to unveil their plan to the other men. I wasn’t entirely certain why Father had waited so long, but I think he feared that the younger men—Mikolai, Payton, and Orlando—would feel the same as Mariah and would not want to go back on the road. Perhaps he felt that if he sprang it on them when they all had money, they would be more likely to take a chance.

After the hour when their work had ended that day, I waited for them all to come home . . . and I waited. No one came.

Katlyn, Mariah, Marcus, and I grew worried.

Then one of the miners’ wives came to tell us that on payday, once a year, the men were excused at noon, so they could make the walk—several hours—to a large village somewhere between Ryazan and Enêmûsk, where they would use their money to have a mug of ale and buy supplies they could not get here. They would stay the night and come back in the morning, and then they would see Captain Garrett and sign new contracts.

I didn’t believe my father would do this, and that if he had gone with our men, it was only to explain his plan.

But the next day, just past noon, he walked slowly up to our wagon, and I could see the defeat in his face. Marcus ran up to him, and I had never seen Marcus desperate before. He hated this place, and he’d believed we were leaving.

“What’s happened?” he asked.

“They wouldn’t agree,” my father answered hoarsely, “not even your father. They said stealing horses from the soldiers was madness, and we would be caught and hanged. They spent their money, and they all signed a new contract.”

Marcus stumbled backward. “And you?”

“I . . . signed as well. I cannot leave the family.”

Marcus’s features twisted in bitter disappointment. Turning, he ran into the forest. But by now, I knew he’d be back. He wouldn’t leave the family either.

And so we began our second year in Ryazan.

Somewhere along the way, I began to stop caring about many things. Like a number of the older miners, Uncle Landrien began having problems with his joints, until he could barely close his hands without pain. I knew I should have pitied him, but I was beginning to have trouble just making it through the days with my washing and mending and cooking, each day blending into the next.

I never thought I would miss traveling, miss the road, but I did. In my entire life, I had never been in one place for so long. Our men stopped laughing. They stopped singing and playing their violins.

Captain Garrett was replaced by another man named Captain Asher, along with a new crop of soldiers who served under him. Asher didn’t have much to do with us so long as the silver in the mines kept flowing—and it did.

In that second year, a small part of me began to worry more about Mariah. She rarely spoke, and she seemed to spend much of her time off by herself. She resented helping me with the washing or the cooking, and it was easier for me to do it myself than to try to force her. She was growing up wild, but I couldn’t seem to bring myself to care.

I watched my father fading before my eyes.

The following autumn, most of our men signed their third contract, but Uncle Landrien could not. His joints had grown so painful from the cold and the damp and the relentless work in the mines that he could barely walk.

Orlando and Payton both married girls from the miners’ camp, thus grounding themselves forever.

Marcus continued to hunt for us, but he seemed to speak less and less.

The following winter, Mariah turned sixteen. She was hauntingly beautiful.

Not long after, my father caught a fever, and he died.

All of these things began to feel as if they were happening in someone else’s life, that I was just an observer. One day blended into the next.

Then, in the spring of our third year in Ryazan, Captain Asher died, and his replacement was not long in arriving. His name was Captain Keegan, and I felt a wave of fear the first time he visited the miners’ encampment. He looked at my family and me as if we were filth. I could see the disgust in his eyes, but his eyes stopped for much too long on Mariah, moving up and down her slight body and exquisite face.

He didn’t say a word. He just turned and walked away.

He had a handsome lieutenant named Sullian serving with him, along with a corporal named Quinn, who both struck me as fair men, and I hoped perhaps we would end up dealing with them more than with their captain.

But a week later, Keegan came back . . . to see me.

“I’ve done some checking,” he said, “and you and your sister have no man working in the mines. The rules are clear, and they were written for good reason. Women who have no men working in the mines need to clear out and make space.”