Prized (18 page)

Read Prized Online

Authors: Caragh M. O'Brien

BOOK: Prized
12.15Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
“Of course, Mlass,” Peter said.
It was the perfectly polite thing to say, yet even that seemed completely mixed up and wrong to her.
 
The men always cut loose after the thirty-two games, but this night was by far wilder and louder than the other times
she'd seen. She was certain Leon's gesture of inviting the men to vote had something to do with it, as if he'd awoken a slumbering, destructive force, and the Matrarc's moment of the soundless matina didn't carry over to the urges of the night. From the clerestory, she could see a glow reflecting up into the trees from bonfires down by the marsh, and she saw torches heading toward the glade site in the woods where she'd once spoken to Peony, too.
For hours, it wasn't safe to go out, but as the night finally crept toward dawn and Sylum grew quiet, Gaia couldn't wait anymore to see Leon. Taking her blue cloak from its peg, she pulled on her old white boots. The early air was surprisingly cold as she let herself out the kitchen door and headed up the road.
The sound of breaking bottles had been replaced by crickets, and as the full moon set behind the bluff, a peculiar, ashy light hovered over the road. Gaia strode rapidly, feeling her breath condense in the air before her face. She turned a familiar corner, and the Chardo place spread before her on her right. The house was dark, but a lamp hanging high in the barn filled the open doorway and cast an inviting yellow parallelogram onto the driveway, almost as if one of the brothers was beckoning to her. Gaia didn't stop.
The road narrowed as it began to rise along the face of the bluff, and soon she hit several switchbacks. To the east, morning light was creeping over the black, sullen rim of the earth, and the surface of the marsh began to glow with ribbons of lit water.
At the top of the bluff, Gaia paused, uncertain of her way. She remembered overhearing once that the winner's cabin stood by a meadow. A stump stood beside the road with an
abandoned axe propped in its top, like a mute sentry marking the entrance to another world, and she headed to the right. A line of half a dozen cabins gradually emerged, lightless.
When a distant door slammed, a hollow, sharp bang in the stillness, she turned toward the noise and found a narrow track that wound even farther along the ridge. The pines were older here, with thick, massive trunks. Many of the lower branches had broken off over time, leaving sharp spikes pointing horizontally out of the trunks, like blind arms into the mist.
At last the trees parted, and Gaia stood at the edge of a small meadow where the fog hovered knee-high. Across the meadow, perched at the brink of the bluff, stood a sturdy, low-slung cabin with a deep wraparound porch and stone steps. Smoke rose straight and thin from a stovepipe on the left side of the roof. Weathered to the same color as the early morning grayness, the stone and log cabin seemed to grow naturally out of the rock. An enormous oak stood beside it, the tips of its upper branches stretching over the roof, each individual leaf silhouetted against the pink in the sky.
Bright geraniums were planted in two pots beside the cabin's steps, red velvet in the growing light, and a water urn hanging from the porch reminded her of home.
Home
. As she reached for the railing and set her feet upon the stone steps to the porch, an ache stirred in her. She stared through the screen door to the empty, dim entryway beyond, and her intuition told her she'd come to the right place.
She tapped softly on the wooden frame, and her eye caught on the iron scrollwork of the open interior door. A creak of movement came from farther inside, and a moment later, a dark, solid figure stepped into view. Leon Vlatir stood on the other side of the screen, his expression obscured by the mesh, and yet
she knew there was no welcome in him.
How can it be worse to see him than to not see him?
Gaia reached for the door that separated them. “Hey.”
“I'm not ready to see you,” he said.
She faltered and her hand stopped in mid-air. “Are you all right?” she asked.
He gave an infinitesimal shake of his head.
“I'm sorry,” she began.
“No,” he said. “I don't want your voice. I don't want anything about you here.”
Gaia was startled. Unbelieving. He couldn't be sending her away. Not after they'd both come so far. “I'm supposed to go with you to get Maya.”
“Come back later. Or better yet, meet me on the beach.”
“I just have to see you,” she said. “Just for a little. I want—” Her voice closed in on itself. “Let me talk to you. Please.”
The spring squeaked as she pulled open the screen door. Leon turned his back and walked farther into the cabin. She watched him descend a couple of steps, pass through the main room, and head out the opposite door to a back deck that overlooked the valley. She followed him as far as the door, but there was something so off-putting, so private in the way he stood and leaned his hands upon the top railing, that she couldn't go farther. Yet neither could she leave.
The back of his head was a mess of damp, nearly black hair, grown full and shaggy, entirely unlike the crisp military cut that she'd known before. His sleeves were carelessly rolled, and the tail end of his brown shirt hung loose over the seat of his homespun trousers. He'd grown slightly taller, and his shoulders were dense where they tested the seams of his shirt. Streamlined as ever, he was clearly stronger than he'd been in
the Enclave. Much. She'd never seen him without boots before, except once when he'd inspected the freckles on his ankle, and now his bare heels on the wood of the deck seemed to be the only vulnerable thing about him.
A stillness immobilized him, as if he had schooled his body to remain motionless despite a starved, inner disquiet.
She pushed through the door and stepped softly to the railing beside him, where she could finally see his profile. His beard was gone. Instead of surveying the valley below, he had his eyes closed, and his fingers were clasped tight around the wooden railing. A row of colorful little pebbles was lined up along the top of the rail, as if the last occupants had left them there for a greeting, and they were incongruously playful in the early light.
“Leon,” she began softly. “I can see you're angry with me. I hardly know where to begin, but I'm so sorry.”
“Don't,” he said. “I don't want your apologies.”
She gulped back the rest of her words.
But I am sorry
, she thought. “Did you really cross the wasteland to find me?” she asked.
Cleanly dressed and shaved, he should have looked more like the old Leon, but when he finally turned, dark bangs hung to half conceal his blue eyes, and his expression was openly hostile.
“Believe me,” he said. “I regret it.”
Her pulse jumped, and she swallowed thickly. “I never wanted you trapped here.”
“That isn't why.”
“Isn't there a chance you could be happy here, despite how you started?”
He let out a broken laugh and ran a hand back through his hair in an old gesture she recognized.
“This is what I don't need yet,” he said. “You, talking to me. Asking your questions. I don't want to say any of this.”
“But I don't want you to be so unhappy.”
He shook his head. “Just don't. You're not the same person you were,” he said. “It's not like I'm talking to the old Gaia. I can't forget that.”
What would you say to the old Gaia?
“How do you know I'm so different?”
His expression grew cooler still. “You burned my note, for one thing. That was hard to miss.”
“Peony burned it.”
“You let her. Same difference.”
She didn't know how to explain it, but her only pride, her last defiance had come from not breaking the rules of her confinement. “I couldn't accept it,” she said. “As long as I didn't step outside the lodge, I was still resisting the Matrarc. Your note was part of that.”
“That's ridiculous,” he said bluntly.
It must seem like that, especially since she'd capitulated shortly after that. How could she explain how lonely and awful it had become in the lodge, how her last strength had vanished as she watched that scrap of paper burn? “It was your note that made me finally realize I had to give in.”
“I don't get it.”
Gaia turned toward the marsh. “The Matrarc made me give up something. She wouldn't let you out until I did.” She didn't want to feel this hurt and confused again. She'd made her decision.
“I'm entitled to know what she asked you for,” he said.
She stared bleakly toward the horizon. “I helped someone miscarry her baby, and the Matrarc wanted to know who. She made me promise not to do it again.”
“It was Peony, wasn't it? That's why she helped with the paper.” His eyes narrowed in amazement. “Why didn't you just agree, Gaia? You could have agreed on day one, and then done whatever you wanted to secretly.”
“Lied, you mean?”
“Wasn't letting me out of prison worth one lie? Why does the Matrarc even deserve your honesty?”
He was confusing her more. Honesty came from within. It wasn't what someone deserved. “You know how bad I am at lying, even if I wanted to,” she said. “Which I don't. Even when I tried to be discreet about Peony's miscarriage, the Matrarc knew about it in less than a day. I could never lie to her over years. Besides, I wanted her to see I wouldn't give in. I wanted
her
to change her mind,” she said.
“But then
you
did.”
“I had to go on with living. I had to get you out.”
The stillness came over him again, alarming her. He wasn't satisfied with her answer. It wasn't good enough, what she'd done, and he certainly wasn't grateful. In the end, he hadn't even needed her to get him out of prison. He'd done that himself by winning the thirty-two games.
He peered over at her again. “Look at you. You used to be Gaia Stone from outside the wall. You had nothing to lose and nothing could stop you. Now you're one of them.”
“I've had to adjust, that's all. I'm not especially proud of it.”
“Why not be? You're a girl now,” he said.
“What are you implying?”
“Just what I said. You're a girl in a place where the girls rule.”
She frowned. “You think I just want to be part of the ruling class.”
“I'm sure you'll find it very convenient.”
She instinctively recoiled. Their positions were reversed, she realized, as neatly and completely as a flip of a card. In the Enclave, he'd been a person of privilege and power, while she'd been a poor midwife from outside the wall, entering it only to become a prisoner of Q cell, and finally a fugitive.
“Now you know what it was like for me back at home,” she said.
“I have just spent two months in prison, shackled to Malachai, for no reason at all,” he said. “I think I've got you beat.”
“Really?” she demanded. “You think two months of prison beats years, no, generations of neglect and abuse?”
“What do you think the men here have been putting up with?” Leon asked. “What do you think my future's going to be like? No man here is free. Even if they're not in jail, they're still slaves.”
“They are not,” she disagreed. “I've seen plenty of happy men here.”
“Those are just the ones who've succeeded in pleasing some girl. The rest of them are all warped and stunted from trying to.”
Now he was exaggerating. “That is totally untrue,” she said.
He laughed strangely. “You don't even see it anymore. That's how myopic you've become.”
“But you see everything clearly,” she said, getting her own edge of sarcasm. “At least there's food and shelter for everybody here, not like in Wharfton, where you Enclave people doled out your meager drips of water for the rest of us, and spied on us, and killed the people who resisted you.”
“Now we're getting to it,” he said.
“Just don't try to tell me it was better there.”
“I'll concede it's better here, for you,” he said.
“It's not just better for me! You're like any other man of
Sylum now. You can do anything you want: work, build a safe home, eat your fill. You can even marry and have children some day, if you can get someone to love you.”
His eyes flashed darkly. “Yes. The Matrarc's husband informed me I get to join the pool if my sperm are viable,” he said. “Naturally, I'll have to be tested. He wants it done soon.”
Embarrassed, she looked over the rail toward the distant marsh. “I'm sorry,” she muttered.
“He's sure it will just be a technicality,” he added. “And then, as you say, there's the problem of getting anyone to love me. Even if the male-female odds weren't ridiculously bad, there's the fact of how utterly unlovable I am. Thanks for reminding me.”

Other books

George, Anne by Murder Runs in the Family: A Southern Sisters Mystery
Ghost Roll by Julia Keller
A Lesson in Pride by Connors, Jennifer
Forever Fae by L.P. Dover
Go Not Gently by Cath Staincliffe
Backward Glass by Lomax, David
Down on Her Knees by Christine Bell