“No, it’s not true. Sometimes it doesn’t matter how long you’ve been somewhere. Before that, always, the land belonged to someone else. Or was shared by someone else. That’s true almost everywhere.”
“So Tyssia’s not right.”
“They’re right that there was a history of Tyssian people living here. But they weren’t threatened into voting a certain way. We have a long tradition of open and fair democracy; we’re known for it. He’s been presented with a version of history his government chooses for him, to convince him that there’s a reason to fight us. Really, we think they want our sea access and to pose a bigger threat to Eilean’s empire.”
“So they don’t have a claim to this land?”
“A lot of peoples could put historical claim on this land. On any land. It just depends on how far back you want to go.”
I nodded.
She leaned forward. “His belief that he is right—that is one thing he brought from home.”
—
The next day, I went up to Rainer’s cell with my arms full. I passed the items carefully through the bars. While our fingers wouldn’t touch, I was able to get things through far enough for him to reach them and draw them over to his side.
First, a scroll of paper. He unfurled it, turned it over; both sides were blank. He looked back toward me.
I held up three paintbrushes.
He nodded.
I reached through with the brushes, and then tried to hand him the small tubes of paint, but they weren’t long enough to get through the gaps, so I ended up tossing them so they landed on his side, and he reached through to retrieve them.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t easily get you the rest of the things.”
“It is okay,” he said. “I will use my dishes.”
He got his empty breakfast plate, squeezed out and mixed the colors. Set to work.
I knelt by the fence, watching.
Brown with jagged streaks of red and black. And an orange glow.
Like the nights of bombing.
It wasn’t fond memories of home that he’d decided to paint.
Rainer filled the paper quickly.
Then he rested on his heels, looking at it.
“I’ll be right back,” I said.
I ran to the art room and grabbed sheets and sheets of paper. Arriving back in his room moments later, I scrolled them up as I had the first one and passed them to him.
He nodded, and painted and painted. The images and colors took shape a little more—I could make out a sort of wheeled warcraft, the khaki-beige outfits of his comrades, faces black with mud but with eyes stark white—swishes of orange added into the red showed fire—white and black together showed smoke—black naked trees, stems of what would have once been thriving with life, burnt and ruined.
Paper after paper lined the floor.
Then he suddenly stopped painting.
My heart was pounding.
His brow and upper lip dripped with sweat; his breath came in uneven gasps, as if he had been running through those fields and their smoke just now, finding no refreshing leaves to cool him, only the machines of war.
He looked at me for just a second, as if I passed into his thoughts only momentarily, then back at the pages. He made a roar from deep in his throat and picked up one of them, about to twist his hands in opposite directions.
“Wait!”
I threw myself against the fence, my fingers gripping the wire hexagons.
“Don’t. Don’t ruin them.”
“They are garbage. It’s all garbage. Everything is garbage.”
“I—I want them. I’ll take them out of here, but, please, just let them dry.”
“You are my captor. You made me do this. You are in charge. If you say so, I will not destroy them, but I won’t look at them anymore.”
He dropped the painting, went to the wall farthest from me, and stood with his head against it.
“I am not your captor.”
“You keep me here. You have keys. You could let me go.”
“I have keys only for this side. I didn’t lock you up.”
“But you think I deserve to be locked up.”
“I’ve seen the houses of people I know bombed to bits. It looks like what you’ve painted. And you did that to us.”
“Not me. My country. And only to reclaim what was ours.”
“It wasn’t yours. You’re only believing what you’ve been told.”
“Maybe you’re only believing what you’ve been told!” He turned around. “You’re just a stupid little girl anyway. You have space and food that belongs to Tyssians, that we need!”
“You’re the ones who’ve cut off our food.”
I sat down with my back to the fence. The hexagons pressed into me; under my thin sweater and my blouse, they made their imprints, which would stay on my skin for far too long.
I turned to find him sitting with his back against his fence, as I had been, the same hexagons pressing into his back through the big red X on his clothes.
“Were you really hungry, before?” I asked.
He didn’t answer.
“You made my family afraid for our house and for our lives. You made my parents send me away. I don’t even know if they or my sisters are still alive. I may never see them again. You understand?”
He nodded.
Maybe he would never see his own family again. And maybe he had thought that he should go in order for them to have enough to eat.
No!
I pushed those thoughts away.
“We—me and my family—did nothing to deserve that, no matter what someone told you about the past.”
He nodded again.
I knelt on my side of the fence, my head level with his.
We each believed it was the other’s fault we were in this room.
I WALKED THROUGH AN open space, an uncertain landscape of odd slashes of red and brown and black.
A road formed beneath my feet, the gritty gravel looking sharp at first, then fuzzy, then sharp again, as it crunched beneath my steps.
I looked up; the landscape had been brushed through with a smeary gray, changing all the forms, as if wind tugged at their edges, making them indistinct and drifting.
And only when I thought wind did I feel it on my skin, whipping roughly by, raising up a howling noise.
Up ahead, on the road, a figure started to take shape, first built out of the grayness itself, but with dark gashes indicating eyes and mouth. Then brown hair became visible, and, in a surprising splash of color, a green cap.
“Father!”
The wind tore my breath from me.
“Father!”
But the fuzzy face turned, the figure stepped and shrank, moving away from me.
“NO!”
He would disappear into the great swirl of color and rush of noise; he would no longer exist.
“Wait!”
I fixed my eyes on the green cap, somehow growing dimmer and smaller as I ran toward it, my feet shoving the black gravel as I hurtled.
He was smaller, then bigger; nearer, then farther.
“Father! Wait! It’s me! It’s Mathilde!”
Finally he was within inches, his back still turned to me.
“Wait!”
I threw my hand out, and, while it looked as if my hand touched his elbow, I felt only air and that terrible whipping wind.
And when he turned to me, the features of his face were still black gashes, and they expanded to engulf him—until he disintegrated.
“No! Wait!”
—
My own screaming woke me up.
But as I came to, sweaty and thrashing in the immense darkness, a figure appeared in front of me.
I might have reached out, but fear that he or she was made of only wisps gripped me.
“It’s Annevi.”
“Oh,” I choked. “Annevi.”
My mind filled in her form, sitting at the end of my bed, and, though my hea
rt was still thudding hard, my panic faded.
“Why are you in my room?”
“You were screaming. For your father.”
“I’m sorry for waking you.”
“You didn’t. I was up already.”
She hadn’t tried to wake me, or comfort me. She was just observing me as if mildly curious.
My neck was hot and sweaty. I’d soaked my pillow.
“You aren’t the only one who screams at night, you know.”
“No?”
“No.”
“Do you go into their rooms?”
“Not usually.”
“Why mine, then?”
“You sounded particularly terrified.”
“Well—good.” Why didn’t she just go away? The show was over.
“What happened?” she asked.
Not to soothe.
Because she was curious.
I fell back against my pillow.
The wind, the swirling colors…
It hurt even to try to grasp it again—setting my head and my heart tight and racing.
Even if she didn’t intend to help me, that didn’t mean that it wouldn’t help me to talk about it.
As the dream warped even further, I tried to recall it. To explain.
“I couldn’t catch him. I couldn’t hold on to him.”
“Your father?”
“Yes.”
When we’d both been silent for a short time, Annevi moved to stand up.
“Wait.” The word caught in my throat, as if I was still in the dream, trying fruitlessly to shout it. “Stay—stay with me.”
Annevi sat back down.
She didn’t touch me, she didn’t tell me it would be all right or even that she, too, worried about people from home, but curled up like a cat at the end of my bed.
For the first time since I’d left home, I fell asleep to the sound of someone else breathing.
A REAL CAT MIGHT have wandered away in the night, but Annevi was still there when I woke and pulled up the black curtain.
She even stretched like a cat, and was still for a moment, looking around, remembering where she was.
“What are those?” she asked, taking in the one decoration in the room.
“Our handprints. Mine and my sisters’.”
“I don’t have sisters.”
I wanted to smooth her rumpled hair, but I didn’t. I’d never seen Annevi touch someone that way, gently; she always played so rough.
“Annevi? What did you bring from home?”
She paused for a minute. “I won a race once. Best in the school. Even better than the older boys. They gave me a medal for it.”
Something in my core went warm and cold at once.
“Congratulations.”
“Thanks. I wish they had races for us here.”
“You should tell the Examiner. I bet she’d like that idea.”
“The who?”
“The Examiner.”
“Who?”
“You know, the woman in charge.”
“Miss Markusen?”
Was that her name? I must have missed it when she introduced herself to the children lined up for the test, because I was late, talking with Kammi. And she must have told my parents, when she was taking away their daughter. I hadn’t been listening.
“Why do you call her that?” Annevi asked.
“Because she gave us the examination, I guess.”
And she had been examining us ever since.
—
Annevi stayed quietly beside me for our morning walk, but she left to eat with Tommy, who had come to breakfast with us after an overnight shift, and Hamlin.
I peeled my boiled egg slowly, and ate it with big gulps of milk between bites.
Thoughts of going to talk to Rainer seemed like reentering the bad dream.
But after breakfast, I marched myself to the second floor, unlocked the door, and entered.
His paintings, now dry and warped, lay between the fencing. When I slid them to my side, they crinkled and crackled.
Rainer sat, knees up, in his own corner, his breakfast untouched. He, too, had a boiled egg, though his glass was filled with water rather than milk.
Milk was for children. Especially these days.
Even the egg seemed generous, as there weren’t a lot of those, either.
Generous to give a prisoner.
The enemy.
Dark circles surrounded Rainer’s eyes, as if he had been up the whole night crying. As if his dreams had been as colored by the paintings as mine had been.
But that wasn’t right.
The paintings hadn’t colored his dreams; his dreams had colored the paintings.
He wasn’t much older than Tommy, after all.
“You should eat your egg,” I said.
He looked at me.
“You should eat your egg.”
He picked it up, cradling it, warm and smooth, in his hands. Then he gave it a brisk knock on the floor and started peeling it. He made it last six bites, and finished up with a swallow of water.
I studied his paintings. Something that looked like a house appeared in many of them.
“Is that your house?” I asked.
He didn’t answer.
That wouldn’t have made sense, for it to be his house.
If he had been fighting on the ground…“Were you in the Skaven lands?”
He knew I was there—of course he did, he had eaten the egg when I told him to. It was the opposite—he was making a point of knowing I was there, but choosing not to acknowledge me.
Which was an acknowledgement in itself.
He lowered his head, still making as if he was ignoring me.
—
My own dreams wouldn’t go away.
Chasing, and failing to catch, Father.
Mother, Kammi, and Tye, Megs—all twisted red and black and gray as if burnt.
I wandered a road through blackened trees, or hollow shells of buildings, back on the bombed streets of Lykkelig. Looking for our house, which didn’t seem to be anywhere.
—
I went to see Rainer a few times, but we didn’t speak.
I stopped going so much.
I trailed through the living room instead.
Brid and Caelyn asked me to sit with them, but one afternoon Caelyn slid my papers back in front of her when I was staring into space instead of marking them.
She also finished my dinner for me, when I couldn’t eat it.
—
The next morning I plopped onto a couch in the living room, not even pretending to do anything.
Gunnar eventually came over. “Mathilde?”
I stared at him.
“Lykkelig was okay last night.”
I rested my head back on the armrest.
“Do you want to come help us?”
He stood there, waiting for me to answer.
“No!” I yelled, sitting up. “I don’t want to talk about who’s being bombed!”
Gunnar walked away.
When he returned, he had the Examiner with him.
She sat down next to me on the couch and felt my forehead.
“Thank you, Gunnar,” she said. He went back to his group and sat down. “Did you find out something?”
“No.”
“Are you sure? Something’s changed. Something’s upset you.”
I didn’t know if it was the kind of information she wanted, but it was the only thing I could think of. “I got Rainer to paint.”
She raised her eyebrows.
—
I brought the paintings to the Examiner’s office.
She looked me over carefully, fixing on my face.
Could she see the dark circles under my eyes? I must have had them when she met me at school and when I arrived here; they had faded only to reappear.
When she was done looking me over, she turned to the paintings.
“Thank you very much,” she said, as if I had just given h
er a thoughtful birthday present, one that touched her.
“There’s a house—or something, a building—that shows up again and again.”
“Yes, I see. Do you know anything more about it?”
“No.”
“Maybe you could find out? And also what his mission was in Sofarende.”
I sighed. “I can try.”
“Are you sure you’re well, Mathilde?”
“Yes,” I said, but my voice did not come out very strong.
THE EXAMINER DISAPPEARED for a few days.
Had she gone on a mission? Was she recruiting new kids?
I didn’t have any news about Rainer anyway.
But then she was back, and just after lunch, she pulled me aside.
“Anything new to report?”
I shook my head.
“I don’t want you to visit Rainer this afternoon. Or be in the main room. I would like you to spend the afternoon in your own room.”
We didn’t get sent to our rooms. Was I being punished?
—
I sat on my bed with a book. After a while, I started to feel sleepy. It was easier, safer, to feel sleepy in the daylight.
While I dozed sitting up, my door flew open and arms squeezed my middle, a dark head of long, braided hair pressing into me.
Holding me so tight.
With so much love I could burst.
—
I must have fallen asleep.
Or maybe we’d been bombed. It was all over, and this was what came after life. Visiting those we loved.
Did that mean that she was gone from life, as well?
And finally she turned her face up to look at me.
I ran my thumb over her eyebrows, down her nose.
“Megs.”
—
The daylight insisted it was still afternoon; I was still in my bed, in my room.
Miss Ibsen appeared in the doorway. She had probably been behind Megs the whole time. She shut the door, leaving us alone.
“They cut your hair,” Megs said.
I blinked, but she didn’t disappear. I blinked again, and she laughed at me.
“What on earth are you doing here?”
“Miss Markusen said they needed more kids after all! I wondered if some of the kids who had gone before had been—well, you know—but my papers had been signed, so what could I do? I still wanted my mother to have the money. I hoped the whole time that I would be going to the same place as you, and as soon as I got here they said, ‘Mathilde’s here, we’ll take you to see her,’ as if they knew I had been waiting to hear just that!”