Page 1

Letters and Secrets

Sadie

“Hallo, Sadie Schaduw!” a lilting voice called out behind me in Wolfennite Dietsch.

“Is any of that mail for us?”

Amanda Smucker and her best friend, Priscilla Glickwulf, fell into step beside me on the dirt road before I could reach either of their houses with the last of the letters I’d promised to deliver for Reuben.

“Actually, yes,” I answered in English with a little squeak.

We were all around the same age—our early twenties—and we had attended school together.

But Amanda rarely spoke to me directly, much less asked me any questions.

The thing was, people called me Sadie Schaduw for a reason.

I’d spent most of my life trailing behind my best and only friend, Naomi, the quiet shadow to her fierce, confident flame.

Finding myself suddenly flanked by two girls who wouldn’t even bother to say hi to me if I wasn’t carrying this mailbag made the urge to shrink behind my best friend rise up like a biological reflex.

But Naomi wasn’t here.

It was just me and all the nerves I had to steady before reaching into the mailbag Reuben had handed me earlier when I offered to help with his route so he could finish the rest of his chores before all the parents returned from the community meeting about the upcoming Scottish-Canadian Bridal Exchange.

"Here you go." I passed Amanda a bundle of envelopes, neatly tied with twine.

All the letters she’d received from potential Scottish grooms in the international mail.

“Goodness, are all of these for me?” Amanda’s hair—tucked away under her black bonnet in a crown of golden braids—somehow managed to swish before she snatched the stack of letters from my hand.

“Most of them.” I reached back into the bag for the last two letters in Reuben’s mailbag.

“These are for you, Priscilla.”

“ Dank je wel ,” Priscilla murmured, her face flushing as she accepted the letters with far less pride than Amanda.

She slipped them into the deep pocket of her plain blue dress—an exact match to the ones Amanda and I wore, although mine was several sizes larger.

All three of us also sported white aprons over our dresses, marking us as unwed she-wolves of St. Ailbe.

But while Amanda and Priscilla were already expecting letters from potential suitors all the way in Scotland, I couldn’t even imagine receiving a piece of mail from anywhere beyond our little Ontario village.

What would that even feel like?

To have someone show interest in me—openly, and for all to see?

“Has Naomi received any letters from the Scottish grooms?” Amanda’s question snapped me out of my musing.

Her tone sounded casual, and coveting was strictly against the St. Ailbe Ordnung—the long, handwritten list of rules that governed our village.

Still, a trace of jealousy lingered in the background of the question.

Naomi didn’t care that she was the prettiest she-wolf in the village—maybe in all of Canada.

But I could tell Amanda did.

“Um…” I shifted the now-empty mail satchel on my shoulder, trying to come up with a truthful answer that didn’t accidentally reveal Naomi had only signed up for the Bridal Exchange to attend her older sister’s wedding in Faoltiarn.

She hadn’t even tried to correspond with any of the Scottish grooms, despite being in charge of all the logistics, like getting plane tickets and passports for a bunch of she-wolves who’d mostly never set foot outside St. Ailbe.

“Or you? Did you receive any letters?” Priscilla added.

Her careful tone let me know the question was one made more out of politeness than genuine curiosity.

“ Ja, sicher .” Amanda let out an incredulous snort along with her “yeah, sure” before I could answer.

But then she caught herself and reset her face into one of serene piety.

Mocking was strictly against the St. Ailbe Ordnung, even if you didn’t believe a she-wolf like me had any real shot in the Bridal Exchange.

And as Naomi once pointed out, “Amanda’s trying to out-pious us all.”

“I mean, I assumed you didn’t even sign up for the Bride Exchange trip to Faoltiarn,” she said, pressing a hand to the top of her apron.

“Doesn’t your mother need you? Who would help her with all her good work if you weren’t here to assist and translate?”

She wasn’t wrong.

I’d never fully understood how my Jamaican-born mother ended up in a Wolfennite settlement in Canada.

She had mostly withheld any details about her life before St. Ailbe, or how I came to be—aside from fussing at me to put away my whittling work because it reminded her too much of “that no-good male.” That no-good male being the father she compared me to but refused to actually talk to me about.

What I did know was that she’d never quite lost her island accent—or managed to pick up the particular dialect of bastardized German her chosen community spoke.

For as long as I could remember, the rest of St. Ailbe had complained about two things when it came to the couple of Jamaican wolves in their midst: our odd smell and my mother’s persistent refusal to speak or even attempt to learn Wolfennite.

But they tolerated us—barely—because my mother had made herself indispensable as the town’s healer.

Delivering babies, tending to the elderly, and treating anything that couldn’t be healed with the magic of shifting into animal form.

It was good work, but from where I stood, being groomed to fill her shoes one day, it often looked less like service and more like servitude.

But maybe that wouldn’t have to be my fate.

Thinking of Reuben, I offered Amanda a neutral smile and conceded, “No, my mother would never allow me to leave St. Ailbe for a Bridal Exchange in Scotland.”

“Maybe this is for the best,” Amanda answered in Wolfennite with a decisive nod.

“Since our Ordnung makes us not allowed to send pictures, it would be perhaps misleading for you to correspond with someone who was unaware you do not quite…”

She tapped her lips with four fingers, searching for the right word, until she finally came up with, “…match. You do not exactly match the rest of the St. Ailbe she-wolves—with your size and distinct smell—now do you?”

Again, not wrong.

Ninety-nine percent of the eligible she-wolves in our village were thin, White, and well under six feet, with long hair demurely tucked into braids beneath their prayer coverings.

I was none of those things.

My hair was basically a large bush of kinky curls that couldn’t be fully contained beneath a prayer covering, no matter how tightly I braided it down.

I didn’t know who my father was, but he must have been Black, too, because I was easily the darkest person in our entire community.

Darker even than Naomi’s Ghanaian father.

Also taller. Standing over six feet without shoes on, I towered over every other she-wolf and nearly every male in the village.

I wouldn’t call myself hulking—though some of my classmates did before I finished at the village school—but with a huge chest and wide hips, I certainly wasn’t dainty or slender.

My mother often complained about how much extra fabric she needed to barter for whenever it came time to sew me a new plain blue dress.

Thank goodness, I’d finally stopped growing.

But not soon enough.

If photos were allowed by the St. Ailbe Ordnung, I’d stick out like an overlarge Black thumb.

Amanda wasn’t saying anything I hadn’t heard before.

Still, her words sliced through me.

And that hurt made the fingers on my right hand tingle in that way they sometimes did—when angry, violent feelings rose up inside of me, despite my being raised a pacifist. Clenching my teeth, I rubbed my thumb against the piece of knotty wood I’d stuff into my apron pocket, grounding myself in the rough grain, pushing.

..the anger…down.

“Where is Reuben Yoderwulf, anyway?” Priscilla asked in English, crinkling her brows.

“Isn’t the postmaster’s son supposed to deliver the mail?”

Another question I didn’t know how to answer—this time without giving my secret away.

But then I spotted Reuben Yoderwulf in the distance over Priscilla’s head, stealthily approaching the tree where we’d agreed to meet after I finished my route.

My heart soared, the tingling in my fingers stopped, and suddenly, Amanda’s words about me not matching didn’t feel quite so hurtful.

There was one male in St. Ailbe who knew exactly how I looked and smelled, and he’d decided to court me anyway.

“Enjoy your letters!” I gave Amanda and Priscilla a little wave and all but skipped away from that awkward conversation.

Toward the man who would save me from my fate of living and dying alone in St. Ailbe.

It was only the second official day of spring, but I already had the feeling that my entire life was about to change along with the landscape.

By this time next spring, everything will be different , I promised myself.

Little did I know how right I was about that—just not remotely in the way I was thinking as I made my way toward Reuben.