Twenty minutes later Ever jumped out of the boat into the shallows and splashed up onto Golden Neck. The cold water soaked into her shoes and stockings, but it felt good: the sun was still hot. She put her satchel over her shoulder and watched as Jared stowed the oars and beached the boat. He checked his bowstring, frowning at one point as he ran his fingers down its length.
A trailhead opened onto the short beach, marked by a boulder rolled into place for that purpose. When Jared was finished obsessing over his bowstring, they made their way up the beach and into the woods.
The path was flat and smooth, and there was gravel spread in the low-lying areas. They crossed two small streams, both of which were bridged with sturdy bound pine logs sawn flat across the top. Elder Barrus took good care of his home on Golden Neck, and as he was the only one who lived there it was a good thing he did. The rest of the Blessed of Bountiful thought the place was bad luck.
Ever shook her head as they climbed a short set of stone steps that looked like they had been repaired recently.
"Elder Barrus pushes himself too hard," she said. "Living alone out here would be hard work for a young man, and he's not young. His heart isn't strong enough for this kind of labor. He's going to kill himself."
"It would kill him to stop working," Jared said from in front of her. He had insisted on going first. "He's an ornery old man, but his testimony is true. My father says he lives out here because he thinks living in the community makes you soft. 'The slothful man's desire kills him, for his hands refuse to labor.' " He turned his head slightly and Ever could see that he was smiling.
"He learned his scriptures from Elder Barrus," Jared explained. "My father, I mean. The Elders say his recollection of the Word is closest to the lost books of all the Blessed in Bountiful."
"I'm surprised to hear you speak so well of him," Ever said.
"Why?" asked Jared. They reached another set of drystone steps; the trail mounted a small hill in several well-planned stages, making an otherwise difficult hike into an easy walk. The trees of Golden Neck were mostly hardwoods, and the midday sun shining through their bright fall foliage turned the trail into a colorful tunnel through the forest. "Because people think he's strange?"
"It is a bit strange, wanting to live out here by yourself, isn't it?" Ever asked.
"Perhaps he feels that God is company enough." Ever took advantage of her place in the rear and made a frustrated gesture heavenward.
"He never took a wife, you know," Ever said. "And we know what the scriptures have to say about that."
"Who told you that?" Jared asked over his shoulder.
"Sister Higbee."
"Sister Higbee's your age—"
"Not that Sister Higbee, her mother."
"She's still half Elder Barrus's age," Jared said. "She doesn't know what she's talking about."
"And you do?" Ever asked sweetly.
"My father says he did have a wife, a long time ago. She died when they were both still young—just a little older than you, I think. He never remarried."
"I've never heard that before," Ever said, honestly surprised. "Why don't more people know that?"
"Probably because they listen to too much Women's Society gossip," Jared said, managing to sound both annoyed and like he'd won a point somehow.
"Well, I think it's romantic," Ever said. It was romantic. To think, irritable old Elder Barrus had spent his whole life alone, waiting to be reunited with his one true love.
Now it was Jared's turn to roll his eyes, which he did, coming to a full stop and looking at her incredulously before shaking his head and continuing on.
"Sometimes I think I'll never understand womenfolk," he muttered. Ever smiled. And that's exactly the way the "womenfolk" like it. She had a sudden image of Jared as a small bantam rooster, strutting around self-importantly, and stifled a laugh. He growled something she couldn't hear. Ever didn't ask for clarification.
They reached the top of the hill a few minutes later, coming out of the trees into a wide, grassy clearing. Elder Barrus's cabin was small but well-built, of seasoned logs and pitch; there was a vegetable garden on the kitchen side and a shed built up against the trees on the other. Beyond the cabin a corridor of trees had been topped or cut down, giving the little house a view of the ocean down the eastern slope of the hill.
Jared stopped as soon as he entered the clearing and held out a cautioning hand to Ever. At first she was confused, and was about to ask what the problem was, but then she looked at the cabin again and saw that the front door was ajar. She had overlooked it in admiring the tidiness of the clearing.
Jared held a finger to his lips and quietly slipped his bow off his shoulder, knocking a black-fletched arrow from the quiver strapped to his back. He put tension on the string without drawing it fully, and started forward, motioning Ever to follow him with a jerk of his head. She knew enough to keep her mouth shut. Jared was probably being paranoid and overcautious, but it wouldn't do to take unnecessary risks. For a man like Elder Barrus, leaving his front door open was like anyone else tracking mud into the Women's Society meetinghouse.
The packed earth of the path led right up to the door. They made very little noise approaching the house. The clearing seemed very quiet; the sound of a cicada starting to buzz off in the distance was almost startling.
Jared held out a hand again when they got to the door and tried to peer into the cabin. After a moment he backed up, drew his bowstring to his cheek, paused, then abruptly kicked the door in hard. It swung open almost all the way with barely a creak, stopping when it banged into some obstruction they couldn't see. A moment later Jared was through the door, sweeping the point of his arrow around the tiny house in all directions. He seemed to know what he was doing, but Ever couldn't help but be scared for both of them. He disappeared behind the door and Ever waited, holding her breath.
Jared looked pale when he reappeared, stumbling slightly as he crossed the wooden threshold.
"What?" asked Ever anxiously. Jared only shook his head.
"I don't think you should..." he began, swallowing, but Ever was already pushing her way past him into the cabin.
The cabin was a single large room, with a fireplace on the left side, a table in the middle, and a separate cooking hearth on the right, hung with iron pots and pans. A number of canisters had tumbled off of a shelf onto the floor, and a large sack of flour was torn open, coating the far wall and floor in a layer of off-white powder. Embers still smoldered in the fireplace. Elder Barrus's single small table was just behind the open door; one of the chairs had been overturned.
Elder Barrus, or what was left of him, was on the other side of the table, stretched out in front of the cold hearth. Ever clapped a hand to her mouth instinctively.
His face was a swollen red mess; one eye was completely shut. His simple buff shirt was stained in several places from what looked like stab wounds, and a dark pool of congealed blood trailed out onto the clay tile that made up the bottom of the surround. Ever swallowed her shock and rushed over to kneel next to him. He wasn't breathing. She turned his face gently and saw that the far side of his skull was horribly misshapen.
"Someone caved his skull in," Jared said, sounding dazed. Ever jumped. She hadn't realized he had followed her back in.
"There were no birds singing," Jared said, as if that explained everything. "The whole glade was...just quiet. The woods are never quiet."
"There's nothing I can do," said Ever. She had known he was dead as soon as she laid eyes on him. The blood on the floor, which had begun to seep slowly into the hem of her apron, was thick and cold. She took his hand gently; it too was cold, his wrist stiff and unyielding.
"He's been dead for hours," Ever said, feeling as useless as she'd ever felt. She stumbled to her feet awkwardly, her shoes slipping in the blood. Her apron was a sodden mess. Near Elder Barrus's feet some of the blood had mingled with the spilled flour, creating thick pink sludge that looked uncomfortably similar to bread dough.
Healing was Ever's calling, but this made her gorge rise. She had treated wounds before, even injuries Bountiful men had gotten in fights with apostates and Damned, but nothing like this. The sheer brutality of it.... She swallowed hard and turned away.
"We have to..." but the words wouldn't come.
"We have to get out of here," Jared said, seeming to come out of a trance. "Now."
"But the body..."
"We have to tell the Council. They'll send men. Right now we have to leave," Jared said. "We messed up the tracks in the flour coming in, but this was more than one man. Whoever...whatever...did this could still be in the area."
Ever didn't object when Jared took her arm and hurried her down the path toward the trees, then stopped suddenly.
"What is it?" she asked.
"They didn't take anything," he said.
"What?" Ever said. Jared's grip on her arm was comforting, but now that the horrible spell the scene inside the cabin had cast over her was broken, she wanted nothing more than to follow his advice and get off of Golden Neck as quickly as possible.
"Whoever did this," Jared said. His eyes were unfocused, as if he were doing figures in his head. "Elder Barrus had three months of supplies in there, at least. There were dry goods on the shelves. The trap door to the root cellar was closed. He even had a bottle of firewater on the table. They didn't take any of it."
"Elder Barrus drank firewa—" Ever cut off mid-sentence and shook her head. It didn't matter. Elder Barrus was dead. Who cared if he had broken a commandment? "So what, Jared? You're right. We need to get out of here." She tugged on his arm, but Jared ignored her.
He frowned for a moment, then nodded his head as if he'd decided something.
"Look," he said, "I want to check around back of the cabin and do one circuit of the clearing."
"Jared, no," Ever said urgently. "You were right the first time. Let's go!"
He took her by the shoulders and looked her in the eyes.
"We'll stay together," he said. "Keep close behind me. This could mean something very important. We've got to check it out. I didn't see any tracks on the trail hiking in. There might be something...we might be able to find something to explain this. See where they came from, at least."
Ever's fear was mounting, and despite how sure he sounded Jared looked just as shaken as she was. Seeing that she wasn't going to change his mind, she nodded. Jared spun around, knocked his arrow again, and kept his bow at the ready.
There wasn't much behind the cabin other than a woodpile and a rain barrel. The hillside was steep on this end; there were fresh stumps along the edge of the hill where Elder Barrus had taken down more pines to make his view. Off to the left, toward the northern side of the clearing, was another trailhead leading north. This path was traveled less frequently than the trail to the beach, being useful only for Elder Barrus's own wanderings around the Neck, and even the very beginning of it was muddy and partially overgrown. Several feet in Jared found boot prints in the mud and broken underbrush where someone had cleared the path.
He crouched above the prints and examined them closely.
"They don't look more than half a day old," Jared said. "They're partly trampled, but you can see where they walked in and walked back out. At least three of them. Probably more." Staying in a crouch, he looked down the length of the trail, which disappeared in a dogleg to the right after a few dozen feet.
"We need to follow them," Jared said, looking up at Ever.
Ever squeezed her eyes shut and prayed for guidance.
"Jared," she said, as firmly as she could, "I don't even have the words to describe how stupid this is. What are you thinking?"
He sighed and rose from his crouch, transferring his bow and arrow to one hand and fingering the hilt of the hunting knife sheathed at his belt absently.
"You're probably right," he said finally. "It probably is stupid. In fact, I know it's stupid." The wave of relief that Ever felt was short-lived, however. "But if that storm passes this way, and it will, we might never find out where these tracks lead. The rain will wash all the evidence away."
"It's a trail, Jared," said Ever. "On an island. Whoever the Council sends can follow it whether there are footprints or not." Jared was already shaking his head.
"We don't know for sure that they kept to the trail," he explained. "For all we know they only came across it when they neared the clearing. They could have come from any direction on this side of the island. The Neck isn't huge, but it's big enough that even a large party could waste a day searching it for tracks. And they could be gone already, and we'd never know."
Ever could see that he was convincing himself even as he spoke the words. She needed to reason with him.
"And if whoever did this is still out there?" she pleaded. "You said yourself there are at least three of them. Three grown men, by the looks of it, who could do the same thing to you that they did to poor Elder Barrus." Jared's face grew cold.
"I can handle myself," he said.
"Don't be foolish!" Ever said, raising her voice.
"Besides, they'll never see me, even if they are still here somewhere. I know how to move in the woods."
"But what's the point, Jared? Why risk your life? For what? Some misguided sense of justice?"
"No, Ever—that's not what this is about. Look, I think there's more to this than it seems. You know how the Elders' Council held a special meeting last week? About the Marmack Apostates?"
"So?" she said.
"Scouts have been reporting movement. There are new settlements within two day's walk of Bountiful. The Elders are worried."
"Get to the point, Jared!" Ever shouted.
"Keep your voice down!" he hissed in response.
"Look...this could be related, somehow. They could be scouting us. Trying to find a...a muster point. Somewhere to attack from. Somewhere we'd never expect." He gestured widely, with both arms.
"Just wait here. Keep in sight of the clearing and the trail, but stay in the trees. I won't be long."
Before Ever could argue further, Jared turned and began striding down the trail. After a few dozen feet he disappeared into the surrounding woods and she couldn't see or hear him any longer.
Suddenly feeling cold and not quite believing that he had left her, Ever wrapped her arms around herself and moved off the trail into the underbrush, trying to make as little noise as she could. She found a tumble of mossy rocks near a large pine and sat down, facing the direction Jared had gone.
Sitting there, listening to the occasional chirping sparrow—the woods had seemed quiet, now that she thought about it—Ever wondered how her foster parents would react when she finally got home. Would her foster father be angry? Elder Orton—whom Ever called Father, out of respect—was a kind man, if an unimaginative one, but he brooked little nonsense. His wife was caring and sweet, but she had the ferocity of a field mouse and the depth of a trout stream. It wasn't a secret that Ever liked to leave Bountiful without an escort, but as it had never been an issue in the past—and because even years later most of the community still pitied her for the loss of her family—she had been allowed to get away with it. The Council changed the rules periodically anyway, depending upon how much of a threat the apostates were, though the most recent ruling did have a ring of finality to it.
Ever sighed, feeling overwhelmed at all that had happened today and not a little depressed at the fact that sneaking in a solitary morning hike might have cost her her freedom.
When the hand clamped over her mouth, she had no warning other than a sudden rank smell, which she realized in hindsight she had first noted a minute or so before. The man was suddenly on top of her, his grimy, crack-nailed paw gripping her face like a vise. She tried to scream, but he only squeezed her in a powerful bear hug until she felt lightheaded, and then she felt something sharp prick her side.
"Look down," a husky voice growled. Ever's eyes rolled frantically, hoping against hope that Jared was about to return, that God would strike the man dead, but all she saw was empty woods. They were alone.
"Look down," he repeated. He wasn't even lowering his voice. How had he snuck up on her so easily? Fighting down an overwhelming feeling of shame, shame at being caught so easily, shame at putting herself in this situation to begin with, Ever finally looked down.
Past the scarred, sunken knuckles of the hand over her mouth, Ever could just see the man's right hand holding the point of a rusty knife against her side. As she watched, he pressed it slowly but firmly into her flesh just below her ribs, and she saw a rosette of blood soak the light wool of her dress. She didn't even feel pain.
"Yeh scream 'gain, yeh move w'out my say-so, I shows yeh what yeh insides look like," the man snarled. He pushed his face forward over her shoulder and she could feel harsh whiskers scratching her cheeks. His breath was rotten, not unlike the odor that she had smelled from the turkey's wound a couple of hours earlier. "Yeh un'stan', baby?"
Ever had never considered herself fainthearted, but for the first time in her life she felt like she might pass out from fright. Through a supreme effort of will that she did not know she possessed, she gave two sharp nods to say she understood. Her attacker cackled in response.
"Goo' girl, baby, goo' pretty holygirl, nice pure swee' girl," he murmured in her ear, almost cooing. Ever swallowed and focused on breathing through her nose and tried her best to ignore the man's roving right hand.
"Now," he said, spinning her to face him—he handled her as easily as he might have a child—while keeping his greasy hand over her mouth, "I take this hand off yeh pretty lips, yeh gon' keep 'em press shut, ain't yeh baby?" Ever nodded frantically, snorting indelicately through her nose, unable to control the tremors rippling through her body. His hand was still clamped around the bottom half of her face, but she could see him now: his hair was long and greasy—it looked like it had never been washed—and the mangy black beard that obscured his face framed a mouth full of twisted brown teeth. He grinned when he saw her looking at them, running his tongue over them lewdly.
"So we straight then, baby?"
Ever nodded again and mumbled a muffled assent into his dirty palm. She found his apostate patois difficult to understand, but his meaning was clear. Slowly, his blade still pressing through the thin material of her apron and dress, he lightened his grip on her face and then slowly pulled his hand away, taking advantage of its freedom to scratch at his hairy neck. His hair was patchy and thin, and Ever could see where the scalp beneath it was red and irritated. He almost certainly had lice.
Now that she had a brief opportunity to look at her captor—for that was what he was, Ever realized suddenly; she'd been taken captive as certainly as a baby stolen in the night—she had to resist the instinct to recoil in disgust.
He was a short man, she saw, likely due to a lifetime of poor nutrition, but despite his general repulsiveness he was not one of the Damned. He wore a long, patched hide vest over a shirt of rough, dirty homespun and his boots were crude moccasins wrapped in rawhide thongs. Around his waist, however, he wore a finely made leather belt fastened with a bright brass buckle. It was the buckle that caught her eye, though the fine black tanning of the leather was also as good as a signature: it was stamped with the sun, moon, and stars sigil that Ever had seen every day of her life, in one form or another.
"Fine make, baby—you like?" the man grunted, fingering the buckle. "Yeh holy ones do da fines' makes." The Blessed limited their contact with the apostates as much as possible, but those who were called to duties outside of their communities had been known to do acts of charity for apostates who didn't threaten them. Ever found it hard to believe that the man's belt had been a gift, however. Likely he had robbed someone. It was a man's belt. Which means he killed whoever owned it, Ever thought. Her eyes dropped to his knife involuntarily. She could see now that it was as crude as the rest of him: a jagged shard of metal sharpened on both sides with a cord-wrapped grip.
A strange trilling sound pierced the air suddenly; it sounded like birdsong, but not from a bird she recognized. The apostate looked up suddenly, scanning the woods around them, then grabbed Ever by the arm and began tramping through the trees toward the cabin. He could obviously move silently when he wished, but he made no attempt to do so now. Ever told herself it was because of her presence, because she couldn't move the same way, if only to avoid thinking about the alternative: that there were enough other apostates on Golden Neck today that it didn't matter whether anyone had heard him, now that he had caught her.
They broke out onto the trail, where the man dug in his belt and removed a small, carved wooden cylinder. He put it to his lips and blew, producing the same trilling sound they had just heard, except in short, staggered bursts of sound. The distant call came again and the man responded.
They reached the clearing, which was still deserted, and waited just outside the trailhead. Another whistle came, closer this time, and another, even closer but from a different direction. This one cut off abruptly, sounding unfinished even to Ever. The man stiffened, and then they heard the scream. Ever's captor cursed foully and jerked her close to him, bringing the blade of his knife up against her bodice again. They backed toward the cabin until there was at least fifty feet of space on all sides. There was another scream, then shouting that couldn't have been more than a few hundred yards away, and then there was silence.
The clearing was again empty of wildlife; they waited in tense silence for whatever was coming to reach them. Ever felt a dim surge of hope: could it be men from Bountiful? Had Jared gone for help? Were they coming to rescue her?
Her captor was growing increasingly anxious. After a moment he wrapped his left arm around her waist and brought his knife up to her neck. She gasped, feeling the sharp, rough edge against the delicate skin of her throat. Her gorge began to rise as she felt warm blood run onto her chest and all thoughts of rescue fled her mind. She could only hope the man wouldn't slit her throat by accident. She tried to pray, asking Heavenly Father desperately for help, but her thoughts seemed to shatter as soon as they formed. All that seemed real in that moment was the knife, the stink of the man behind it, and the clearing around them, silent as a grave.
Just as the moment seemed ready to stretch into forever there was a dull snap from behind them, and for the second time that day Ever heard the controlled shriek of an arrow's flight. There was a spray of something warm, a quiet gurgle, and then the apostate was falling sideways. Ever brought her hands up to protect her throat but the blade only nicked her knuckles as it fell away. She looked down and saw the man on the ground, an arrow neatly bisecting his Adam's apple, the black fletching still quivering above his lifeless face. He'd been shot from the left side.
Sheturned and then Jared was there, only Jared, and he took her hand quickly andtold her they had to run.
Thank you so much for reading!
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The next chapter will be posted on Monday, February 1st.
Have a great weekend!