Page 13 of A Land So Wide

“T he stones.” Greer sank to her knees. Her voice could hardly be heard above the confused crowd. “The Stones have moved.”

Her eyes darted to each of the monoliths.

The Warding Stones were Mistaken’s most absolute certainty.

They’d been there before the first settlers had arrived. They’d watched the outpost grow from a floundering band of survivors to a community and town. They affected everyone who came near them.

Occasionally, outsiders would wander across their borders—fur trappers, shipping merchants, people like Martha, fleeing their own villages after an attack from the Bright-Eyeds.

Should they stay in Mistaken past sunset, the Warding Stones’ hold would fall upon them, too, and they could never leave again.

Their grasp was impossible to break.

People tried, of course. Attempting to defy the Stones was a rite of childhood. Nervous, giggling youths would venture past the border just before sunset, only to be swept back by an unseen force, like dust bunnies rooted out from under a bed.

It was harmless fun, for the most part.

But every so often, someone would roam too far.

The Stones would always bring the person back, heedless of what lay between the wanderer and the town line.

There were the occasional bruises or split lips as people struck trees or stumbled over dips in the ground.

Clintock Finley once broke his ankle when his foot snagged on a tree root.

But never had Mistaken seen anything like the Calloways.

In the early days of the town, intrepid farmers, wanting to buy themselves a bit more land, had attempted to pull the Stones down. They’d tried dragging them away. They’d used ropes and chains and teams of cattle. They’d wielded levers and pulleys. They’d even used black-powder explosives.

The Stones would not budge.

Except—now they had.

They’d somehow shifted, cutting the size and sprawl of the land.

Greer could imagine how the terrible scene must have played out.

The Calloways would have been gathering the flock before sunset. They wouldn’t have had any worries at all. That part of the forest was well within the borders of town.

Until tonight.

The Stones had moved, herding every living thing along with them. Lambs. Ewes. The entire Calloway family. They must have been carried for hundreds of yards, thrown against trees and brambles, tossed over rocky outcroppings, smashing through streams and into one another.

Greer wondered how it had felt, to lose control of your body, of yourself. She hoped, for their sake, that the first strikes had done them in. She hoped they had not suffered.

Hearing Greer, the townspeople turned from the massacre toward the towering Stones.

Gasps of surprise filled the air.

“Were those always…?”

“Haven’t those…?”

“How did they…?”

“Who could have…?”

Ellis knelt beside Tàmhas, trying to loosen the young man’s hold on Fiona Calloway. His movements were slow and gentle. With utmost care, he extricated the girl’s severed hand from Tàmhas’s and laid it out upon the sodden grass.

It didn’t look real. It was like a broken curve of pottery, a discarded oyster shell left after a day of shucking.

Not a hand. Not a piece of a human who had been breathing and flushed with life only hours before.

Fiona was just a few years younger than Greer, with sun-freckled skin and long twists of scarlet hair.

Hanks of that hair now lay strewn around the field like coils of rope.

Bile rushed up into Greer’s throat with ferocity, burning everything in its path. She turned her head, coughing and sputtering, as another roil of disgust heaved at her middle.

Around her, the questions began to change.

“How”s shifted to “why”s.

The “why”s grew bolder, increasing from whispers of disbelief to noises of strangled horror.

As the panic swelled, Hessel Mackenzie stepped forward, ready to take charge. He held out his hands, attempting to quiet the clamor, to corral it into submission.

“My friends, a tragedy has occurred here tonight. The Calloways have been a vital part of our community. They were our neighbors, our friends, our family. The loss of…”

Here he paused, glancing about the carnage, ill at ease with his calculations.

“…so many…cannot be understated. Cannot be understood. We don’t know what caused this, but—”

“It’s obvious what caused it,” a voice shouted from the back of the group. “The Stones did this. The Stones have moved!”

Hessel’s eyes darted to the nearest rock. Its red luminescence danced like a trapped creature testing the limits of its cage, searching for a way out.

When Hessel spoke again, his voice was noticeably cowed, quavering with strain. “It does appear that is the case,” he admitted. “But we don’t know why. Or how. At daybreak, we should—”

“I’ll go.”

Greer heard the words ring out before realizing she’d spoken. She sensed those around her turn her way. She could feel the weight of their stares at her back, heavy and uncomfortable.

“I could go.” She straightened her spine, trying to bolster her resolve. “I have my maps. I can check the positions of the other Stones against them. If they’ve shifted, I’ll know.”

Her father began to shake his head, but Ayaan stepped forward, stopping him.

“What happened here tonight may not be an isolated incident. If other Stones have moved, we need to know where. There could have been others caught like…” His gaze fell on Fiona’s hand. “We need to understand the new perimeters. We’ll need maps. Who else but Greer could do all of this?”

Hessel’s gaze drifted over the gathered townspeople as he considered this. Finally, he nodded. “Go at first light. Take others with you. No one… no one, ” he repeated, raising his voice as an order to the entire group, “is to go anywhere alone until we understand what happened.”

Two young women beside Greer took small steps back, as if she might reach out and wrangle them into helping her.

Others shifted, their gazes studiously looking anywhere but in her direction.

Greer glanced to Ellis, and he nodded, a silent promise passing between them.

They would stick together, no matter what.

“How?” someone deep in the crowd called out. “How could they have moved?”

Hessel’s weary eyes roamed over those gathered, searching for who’d spoken. “I don’t know.”

“It was the Benevolence, wasn’t it?” The crowd parted now, revealing Meribeck Matthews, an older, widowed woman, wrapped in several shawls and a mulberry scarf. “The Benevolence have moved the Stones. They’re the only ones with the power to—”

“We don’t know that,” Hessel said, swiftly cutting off the woman’s troubling accusation.

The group swayed, shifting on their feet as the idea settled heavily over them.

Faces clouded with doubt. Worry marred the smoothness of brows.

Greer didn’t want to believe it possible, didn’t want to know what it meant that the Benevolence had moved the Stones.

Was the truce broken? Was the Benevolence’s protection over?

She thought of the map Ellis had bought for her, abandoned in their headlong sprint from the barn’s roof and undoubtedly lost. She remembered the river that she would never see, and an echo of her earlier wanderlust rang inside her.

If the truce was over and the border had fallen…

Curiosity burning bright, Greer made her way to the closest Stone and raised her head, preparing to test the border. Her heart hammered with an irregular pulse, hope and horror fighting to claim dominance.

Disappointment crushed through her as her hand met with the invisible resistance; it made her fingers ache, break out in a rash of pins and needles, like a limb long fallen asleep and beginning to wake.

She leaned against the Stone with her full weight, but it was like fighting against a swell of waves too powerful to swim through. She could go no farther.

“Something angered them,” Meribeck shouted, drawing Greer’s attention. “Some one caused this.”

Greer frowned. Only that afternoon, Louise had stalked off, blasphemous notions spilling from her lips, loud enough for anyone to hear. Any thing .

This couldn’t be Louise’s fault.

The events were unrelated. They had to be.

“Please, God, let them be,” Greer murmured, her heart aching.

Her words formed into little puffs of breath in the dark, frigid air. They rose up and were carried away.

Away from the gathering.

Away from the field and all its bloody stains.

Away from even the hold of the flickering Stones, traveling out into the great night sky, where they were swallowed up, unheard and unheeded.