Page 41 of The Wicked Lies of Habren Faire

As we approach the end, the remaining creatures press back against the wall, scrambling over themselves to get away from the rapier.

I refuse to stop walking, even as my arm shakes and my breath comes in rapid, heaving gasps.

The point of my blade pokes a chest and pins it between the rapier and the wall.

With a hiss of pain, the creature throws itself aside.

I stand face-to-face with the narrow tunnel, bathed in lamplight for just a moment, before I spin around, keeping my back to the rock and my sword pointed right at the mass of creatures as they re-form their cluster around us. Ceridwen sticks a hand into the crawl space.

“On you go.” I release her arm, now stiff with creeping, hardening coal.

Ceridwen blows a strand of red hair out of her face. She’s leaning heavily to one side, like her infected flesh is weighing her down. She meets my eyes, forces a smile. “You want me to go first just in case what’s on the other side is worse.”

I laugh reluctantly. “Yes, this is a long-winded scheme to finally kill you off.”

Ceridwen catches my shoulder, pulls me close and kisses my cheek. I lean in, though I don’t look away from the frontline I’m holding off. If I look at her, I’ll cry. And we’ll both be dead for it.

“You’re so brave,” she says. “You know that, right?”

I nod, though I’ve never felt less certain of anything in my whole life.

Ceridwen lets out a deep, racking cough. I push at her blindly, hoping she’ll take my meaning.

“I’ll be waiting on the other side,” she tells me, “with my hand out to catch you.”

The last thing I hear before I’m completely alone is my sister scrambling through the coal. The circuit is darker without her.

“I’m sorry,” I tell the creatures, as if that means anything. Then I sheathe my sword and scramble into the tunnel.

They surge forward. A cracked hand seizes my leg.

I kick it loose, but the moment I’m free, another one takes its place, fingers locking around my ankle.

The heart of Y Lle Tywyll lies ahead, and I drag myself toward it while its victims haul me back.

The tunnel is impossibly long, impossibly narrow, but I keep going, pulling the strongest one with me.

I can hear its teeth snapping, and then they pierce into my heel. I scream, I can’t keep it in.

“Sabrina!”

A pale hand emerges from the gloom.

I wrench my arm up from my side, fingers barely brushing Ceridwen’s.

But I can’t reach. I keep getting dragged back, the sharp walls of the tunnel ripping me apart, the creature behind me pulling harder than I can resist…

until my sister’s hand shoots out and seizes my own.

Ceridwen yanks me forward, both of us gasping and shouting from the effort, until I’m expelled from the tunnel, and I come crashing out, right on top of her.

Behind me, the small gap in the cave-in crumples, trapping the monster within.

We lie on the ground, heaving for breath. Ceridwen’s arms wrap around me, holding me tight. The coal is still on her wrist, and some itches my own leg. I try to shake it off, but it won’t budge. I don’t care. I bury my head into her neck and breathe.

The shaft we’ve fallen into is littered with rubble and fallen rocks.

The walls are covered in the remnants of mining equipment that dangle precariously from their metal bonds.

Sandwich bags rot on ceiling hooks. The coal seam running through the wall eats any light that touches it, the roiling stone so dark it almost looks liquid.

It has the same horrid, glistening sheen as the veins under the skin of the infected.

Black damp sticks to the base of the rock, thick as soup and choking the air.

This is the center of a collapse. This is where men were crushed between two worlds, and their death and the iron left behind created Y Lle Tywyll.

This is where Eu gwlad and Wales meet.

We drag ourselves up, hands still joined, limbs heavy. My eyes take a moment to adjust, but there’s just nothing here save for a pinprick of light at the end. It’s all I can do to not run toward it, arms held out as if I could embrace the glow.

Ceridwen’s voice shakes. “Wait.”

A lamp flickers on. Then a second, and another. Davy lamps. They turn on one by one, up and down the tunnel, like stars coming out in the evening, and they’re attached to hands.

Thirty faces stare up at me.

Men stand clustered in the tight mineshaft.

Some hold picks, ready to strike the walls.

Others have misshapen heads—caved in by the collapsed ceiling, perhaps, their helmets inadequate protection against ton upon ton of rock.

Mostly, though, they just look ordinary. Completely human. Dead, but unchanged.

Thirty spotlights are trained upon us as if we’re actresses on a stage, leaving no room to shy away. They stare, and I begin to recognize each dirty face.

There’s the butcher’s lad, and the three boys who always played their fiddles from a shared booth at the pub and smiled when the room began to dance.

There’s Ron, Paul, Gethin and Sam—they sat across the room from me in school.

Behind them stands our neighbor, who left behind four children and a wife.

On and on they go, staring back at me, until I come to the man at the very front, his face so battered by the coal that I can’t recognize him.

His lamp doesn’t work, but he clings to it still.

“You’re David Parry’s girls, aren’t you?” His words are garbled from his contorted mouth. “What are you doing here?”

“Is David coming?” Gethin adds.

Another calls out. “Has he got the rescue on their way?”

All these dead men, kept alive deep beneath a land frozen in time, held in a perpetual death rattle, trying to dig their way out.

Their own slowly rotting bodies and the iron in their tools pollute the land, and with every gash they make in the rock, they spread it to the surface.

The only way to heal it is for them to stop, but how can they?

They’re trying to get home.

Ceridwen opens her mouth, sweet untruths ready on her tongue, but I pull her closer.

“Don’t lie to them,” I whisper.

Her eyes widen in panic. “What do I say?”

Pretty words and promises are dust this far beneath the earth.

These men have heard it all before from Lord Branshaw, from the foreman.

The mine is safe, your equipment works. We have plans in place, and your families will be compensated.

We’ll pay enough for this to be worth it, for you to live well.

A job is worth your life. Lies upon lies that I can’t add to. I finally step forward alone.

“No.” I let my eyes rake over them. “No one’s coming. They’ll try for three days, but they won’t be able to shift the coal, and when they make a crack big enough to call into, no one will reply.”

“How do you know?” says the leader, his grip flexing on his pickaxe.

My bravery pools at my feet. “Because it’s already happened.”

“Then why are you here?” someone shouts from the back.

I point past them, to the light. They all stare, but they can’t see it, and they never will.

My body feels heavy as I answer. “To stop you from digging.”

“They p-put a memorial sign outside the mine,” Ceridwen blurts out.

Every head whips back to us. Emotions dance over their faces, exaggerated by the flickering lamps. Disgust, satisfaction, horror. I don’t know which is worse.

“What’s a sign to us?” snaps the leader.

“They’ve got to charge Lord Branshaw,” says someone else.

There are murmurs of agreement, and the leader nods. “He never maintained the tunnels or the tools, didn’t listen to the inspectors.”

My ears prick at that, but what can I tell him?

The mine wasn’t maintained, but there’s magic working against them too.

In trying to save themselves, they’ve dug too deep into another world and damned it.

Two things can be right. The land can be angry, and Lord Branshaw and his board can be lazy and cheap.

“The sign is for them, so they can play penitent.” I step closer. “The mines close. All of them, eventually. The world moves on and the things that happened down here become a ghost story.”

The leader’s body suddenly caves in, and I notice a deep, oozing gash in his head. “It was for nothing, then?”

I shake my head furiously, stretch out my hands as if I could hold them all, only for my arms to fall to my side when confronted by the enormity of thirty dead men and boys.

“You fed your families, kept your wives stocked with candles to sew by, sent your children to school for as long as you could.” I look between them all, trying to commit each face to memory.

“It doesn’t make this right, doesn’t undo what was done here, and it won’t bring you the peace you deserve, but you were here for them.

They won’t forget, even decades from now.

They’ll remember. You loved and were loved in return.

Isn’t that all we can do? None of this will last, but all of it matters. ”

I think of our town a century from now, drowned by water no one will ever touch, and the lives that continue to branch from it, and I stare back at their leader unflinchingly.

“It can’t last,” I say. “That’s why it matters.”

Evergreen things like crown and country mean little to us, deep beneath the ground.

The Branshaws will hold on, draining the world until there’s nothing left to take, and when they write the history books, we’ll slip between the lines, but that doesn’t mean we weren’t here.

Sometimes I cannot move in the morning for how pointless this all feels, until I hear my sister on the stairs, or the door close as my dad leaves for work.

Until I think of my mam and my nan, and the hundreds of people who got out of bed before me, and kept getting up, kept fighting through, kept coming home after the sun was long set—who did it all over and over again, despite knowing that it meant nothing, not to the world, not in the grand scheme of things, because it meant everything to them.

They did it, so I can do it, too. I must do it, too.

Our lives may be small, yours and mine, but we live them, impossible as that feels sometimes, and remarkably, miraculously, people love us for our efforts.

Our lives are small—we’re nothing more than a speck of dust on an old coat, or a mayfly at the start of its first and only day—but from them spring a thousand stories.

“We can try again,” I tell them. “I’ll get them to bring your bodies home. We can—”

“No.” The leader looks back at his men, and they all finally train their lights on him. “I’ll not have anyone else die for this mine.”

I look at the pickaxe in his hand. It’s coated in corrupted dust. My eyes flick up and hold his, imploring him to listen. “Then you need to put that down.”

His grip tightens on the handle. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

“I know,” I say quickly. “Surely you can feel it? That things are different in this part of the mine: they’re… wrong? When you’re hacking at the walls, you’re letting something out. Something bad, like black damp. But you can stop it. You can let go.”

It sounds ridiculous as it leaves my mouth, selfish, even.

I am asking them to accept their fate so that my sister and I can walk back into the light.

Just like my dad, their friend, did every day.

Just as they did for their own families.

They know as well as I do that they’ll never get out, and if they set aside the pickaxe, then all they can do is sit here and wait, in the dark, for death to take them at last.

And still, I ask.

“Please.” My voice shakes.

The leader’s eyes squeeze shut; I think he’d take a deep breath if he hadn’t already used his last. I can’t see the moment he decides, but the pickaxe is in his hands, and then it hits the floor with a clatter, the rotten residue dropping from the iron.

He steps aside, staring at the tool abandoned on the damp-ridden floor. The rest of the miners follow him. There’s an almighty crash as each drops his pickaxe, and they part like a biblical sea, their lamps lighting a path to the end of the cave.

“Go,” someone says. “You girls won’t die here, too.”

Murmurs of assent follow.

“Get out of the dark,” they tell us, “and don’t come back.”

The leader looks to me one last time, his face still lost beneath the wound. “Don’t let them forget, will you, Parry?”

I shake my head, but I don’t have to promise. I’m my father’s daughter, and that means I’ll try until the end.

I grasp Ceridwen’s hand and hold her tight as we hurry down the aisle. She averts her eyes, but I don’t. I take in each face, and when we reach the end, I turn back, but their lights are out, and the miners are gone.

Ceridwen gasps and squeezes my fingers.

The gap widens in front of us into a door, and daylight greets us with open arms.