Chapter 5

I returned home flushed and breathless. My lips felt bruised, and I could still feel the warmth of Otto’s skin on mine. As I took off my linen headwrap, bits of straw shook loose and fell to the floor. Thankfully, no one noticed.

But whatever happiness I’d stolen in Otto’s arms quickly vanished. Mary sat huddled in a corner, miserably twisting yarn on a wooden spindle, and the air was heavy with Belin’s absence.

“Where did you go?” my mother asked, stirring a pot of gruel over the hearth’s feeble fire. “There’s the darning to do, and the thatch in the south corner is rotten.…” Her weak voice trailed off.

I made a show of hanging up my cape and brushing dust from my skirt. I kept my eyes away from the corner where Belin had breathed his last. Where did I go? I couldn’t tell her.

My name is Hannah Dory, and I am a traitor and a tramp.

“She just went for a walk, didn’t you, Hannah?” Mary said quickly. “I told her to, Mother. I thought it would make her feel better.”

I gave her a grateful look. Though I always thought of myself as Mary’s protector, she looked after me, too.

My mother sighed wearily. “I hope it did, since supper will be small comfort.” She reached out and took my hand in her rough fingers, to show that she forgave me for running off. “Call Conn in to eat, please.”

I walked out to our frozen garden, where I expected to find my brother playing with his friend Vincy, who lived with his widowed father a little ways up the lane.

Vincy was there all right, dancing around in the dirt and stabbing invisible monsters with a pointed stick. But Conn was nowhere in sight.

“Where’s my brother?” I asked.

“He went down to the river,” Vincy said, viciously striking the air. “Take that! And that, you slavering beast!”

The river? Alone? Panic rose in my throat. “When?” I demanded. The river took a life every season—in spring floods, a summer drowning, or a winter plunge through the ice.

Vincy shrugged and dropped the stick to his side. “Don’t know,” he said. “Haven’t seen him in forever. Is it suppertime? Do you have food?”

Ignoring him, I rushed back inside to get my cape, trying not to let my terror show. Dear God we can’t lose another boy. “He’s gone to the river,” I said. “I’ll fetch him.”

My mother gasped and her face went white. “Run,” she said.

But even as I was moving toward the door, it burst wide open, and in came Conn, soaked to the skin and blue with cold. My mother shrieked and ran to him, clutching at his sopping clothes and trying to pull them off before he froze.

But Conn wasn’t half drowned. He was grinning ear to ear. In his small hands he gripped a black, snakelike fish—a winter eel.

“I broke a hole in the ice,” he said. “I sat there for hours and hours, Mama. And then I caught him!”

My mother clasped him to her chest, her thin face radiant with relief. “Hannah, gut the eel.”

The moment I touched its cold, slimy flesh, I could tell that it had been dead for days. Poor little Conn, thinking himself a great fisherman, had plucked a decaying thing from the frigid river and brought it home for us to eat.

And I was nearly desperate enough to cook it.

But with Conn by the fire now, getting rubbed pink and dry by my mother, I went to the door and threw the eel into the street. The dogs would find it quickly enough, and they had stronger stomachs than we did.

Then I dished out our meager slurry of cabbage and a few grains of barley. It was pale and watery, seasoned with the last of our salt. I knew that we’d slurp up every drop, and that when we went to our beds, we’d still be hungry. We’d wake in the middle of the night with empty guts twisting.

As if she could hear my thoughts, my mother looked up at me. “The harvest will be better this year,” she said. Her lovely face was lined and her brow etched deep with worry. She was trying so hard to keep us alive, and it just wasn’t working.

“We can’t wait that long,” I said. I put down my spoon. “But I’m going to make sure we don’t have to.”

My mother frowned. “I don’t understand.”

I pushed my soup bowl over toward Conn; I was past feeling hunger. “I’m going to do something, Mother,” I said. “It’s dangerous, but it has to be done.”