Page 74 of What Blooms in Barren Lands

But before I could catch up to him, he walked up the moss-covered stairs and inside, out of sight. I went after him slowly,my limbs aching from fatigue, my mind vacant, all thought released from it like steam from a pressure cooker.

Then I heard a blood-curdling scream. And growls.

I took off running, tripping over my own feet in panic. I bounded up the grand staircase and through the main doorway. It was dark inside, the uneven cement floors covered with dust, strewn with debris. It took my eyes a while to adjust to the dimness. Bow at the ready, I followed the screams into the next bare room.

What I found there nearly made me faint on the spot.

Lucas lay on the ground in a pool of dark blood, his long, elegant limbs quaking by his sides as if he were trying to take flight. His gentle, boyish face was contorted with agony. A fury was feasting on something in his abdomen. She was a female. A plaid of copper hair streaked with grey ran down her back. Her shirt hung on her in rags, revealing knots of her spine and a brassiere black with dirt.

“Oi, look here!” I picked up a stone and threw it at the fury; no point wasting an arrow just to get her attention.

She whipped around, her face strangely resembling an eagle due to her beak-like nose and dark, wide-set eyes. Her mouth was stained with blood. She was readying herself to lunge at me but never got the chance to do so. I shot her neatly through her right eye socket.

“No,” I muttered. “No, no, no, no, no ...”

My heart, which had until then been hammering in my chest, turned to ice at the sight, the cold spreading quickly to my limbs. I stood paralysed, momentarily unable to process the sight before me. Lucas lay sprawled behind the terminated fury, dark blood pooling around him. But that was not the terrible part, not the blood, not even that it was pooling. No, the real horror lay in where it was poolingfrom. A jagged hole in his lower belly—so soft and hairless, innocent, blameless. The skin and muscletissue ripped to shreds around the wound. I realised I could see his internal organs, his intestines, and something else, but I could not focus on that, no, not with Lucas screaming those terrible screams.

Some of my archers were starting to gather around, exclaiming and covering their faces with their hands, aghast. Sofia lost consciousness and collapsed to the ground. Half-heartedly, Anna tried to revive her, but her own eyes kept darting from the limp figure on the ground to the one that was anything but silent and motionless.

I had no attention to spare for them.

I nocked an arrow, hesitating. Lucas kept turning his head from side to side rapidly, his eyes no more than slits, his movements jerky. My hands shook badly. I fired the arrow, and it hit the wall, causing some of the plaster to crumble, before it fell to the ground with a metallic clatter. I nocked another arrow and missed again, only grazing the poor boy’s cheek, which he didn’t seem to notice.

“No, please no, no ...”

Forced to admit that I couldn’t manage a headshot under the circumstances, I grimly perused other options. The heart, then. Would that be instant? Whereexactlywas the heart anyway? I moved a few steps closer and nearly gagged on the smell ... of blood and something else.

I nocked, fired, and the arrow pierced Lucas’ chest. I had aimed between the ribcage, but leaning more towards his left, and by some miracle did not miss my mark.

The thrashing continued for a terrible few seconds, and then, mercifully, Lucas lay still and peaceful.

I heard awful, desolate cries. It took me an eternity to realise that they were my own and that my legs must have given up because I was on the ground, cold underneath my scraped knees,and all around me was a cloud of dust that had risen with my impact.

“Russ, Finlay, make sure there are no more surprises, will you?” I heard Einar as if from a distance.

“Renny, come, get up.” Someone else spoke much closer to me in an accent of hard, rounded consonants.

Hands closed around my shoulders, pulling me up. They were small hands, but firm, and though their owner staggered a little as I leaned on him, he held me fast, one arm wrapped around my back, fingers inadvertently reaching too close to my breast. The smell of stale cigarette smoke engulfed me, and bile rose up my throat.

“You did well,” Albert told me. “You did the best you could for him. Come away now ... Hey, Einar, Einar, a little help here with your girl?”

For the rest of the day, I felt like a marionette, controlled from above my shoulder by strings of responsibility and resilience that didn’t feel like my own. My core was empty and hollow, sensationless, apart from the tight ball at the pit of my stomach. I didn’t seem alone in my daze, though, since all the faces I saw around seemed just as expressionless, just as detached from what had happened by the necessity to establish a safe residence in Vizzavona.

We piled the corpses on the crossroads. Then we siphoned some petrol out of the few cars left in the village, and Einar proceeded to pour it over the pile while standing on a ladder. It ignited with a violent whoosh, and soon, the lifeless bodies were nothing but dark outlines in the flame.

Meanwhile, Lucas lay inside the derelict mansion where he fell, covered by a sheet salvaged from one of the houses. For a split second, I had the absurd, horrible thought that we couldmerely add his body to the pile. It simply flashed through my mind before I could stop it, and I chased it out immediately. Yet it left me physically aching with guilt and unsure how I could ever carry on without seeing his pale, soft, lifeless features. No more than eighteen years old.

Most of the men took apart existing fences in the village and, using the collected material, started building the barricade. I spent most of the day with Anna and Sofia, all three wordlessly cleaning the kitchen and the dining hall in the red-shuttered hotel, which was to serve as our new main hall.

I insisted on patrolling the whole night, even though I swayed with fatigue and my legs felt heavy and yet unsolid like sacks of liquid. Einar and Russell joined me, but I didn’t see them at all as we each watched over different parts of the perimeter. I was by the train station where I judged an attack was most likely. I walked and walked, stepping over the rails, my head spinning. Some of the ashes on the crossroads still glowed red in the dark.

25

MARKS OF MERCY

As the leader, Einar had the first pick when it came to lodgings, which meant that I did, really. Most people would stay in erstwhile hotel rooms, but he and I chose a little stone cottage just beyond our new main hall.

It had wonderful, worn wooden floors and only four rooms: an adorable little kitchen with pale green cupboards and wooden countertops right by the entrance, a living room with a fireplace and a flower-patterned sofa, a bedroom with curtains of the same pattern, and finally an ensuite bathroom. There were no corridors, and the doors from one room led to the next one. I had always wanted to live in one like it, yet I could find no joy in it as I spent most of the next day attempting to make it habitable.