The sinewy texture of the fiber ate away at her fingers as she spun it into thread. The motion of the wheel was nauseatingly repetitive. Each clack was an added weight to her dipping spirit. She continued moving the cheaply blended strands through her hands, small hairs jumping from her work into the air. There was at least some satisfaction in knowing that the quality of the materials she produced would do nothing to aid the murderers and traitors who wore them as uniforms.
"When summer comes to the Southern Coast, they'll be screamin'," Innis whispered bitterly. Her feeble limbs shivered as she spun the fiber.
It had been six months, and Innis was remarkable. Most of the older women withered during the first month. Yet, she was still here. Briar – now Aurora - kept as close watch over the old woman as she did her. They were alive, but they were shells. Hunger ceased its ache over their bones long ago.
She missed the days of misty romps through the meadow with her brother. No longer could she gather heather and moss, and drink from the river, full of the fresh spring rain. She missed thumbing through her mother's old healing journals and collecting bark and leaves to help restore her friends and neighbors. Just as the raven-blooded man had disappeared into a pile of dust, Briar's healing abilities were being crushed into sediment under the Magistrate's thumb.
He'd disappeared, yet she felt his aura lingering. She remembered his shifting pewter eyes and felt a mixture of longing and anger. It wasn't the aura of the man, but of the raven. It was a tangible change in the atmosphere that refused to leave, like a sickness that leaves you weak and hollow for months after it subsides.
"Midday meals!" A supervisor shrieked.
The women left their spindles, faces ashen and hair pulled back by stained linen. They assembled in a uniform line, each handed bowls with a fork and spoon by a reluctant attendant. They went through the line begrudgingly, waiting for the woman behind the gruel counter to fill their stomachs.
Innis went directly before her. She faced the woman behind two tall pots, eyes locked with the loyalist. They were of similar age and appearance, but two completely different worlds. Seeing Innis tremble, the woman scooped a small morsel and threw a hard, dark roll onto her plate. It was from the very bottom of the tray, clearly burnt through.
Briar stepped forward. She tried to see what Innis saw, but couldn't. All that she saw was an old woman, tired just as her friend. There were crow's feet surrounding her deep set, amber eyes. She was perhaps a little over sixty and lacked Innis's durability. She couldn't find the hate within herself, yet she still flinched as if she were about to receive a lashing.
She placed a generous serving of wild rice in the young one's hands. On top of it, she ladled a heap of meat that was swimming in chunky red stew. She could smell the flavors melding – tomato, basil, and parsley. It made her ravenous and confused, the usual rations barely enough to keep the skin on her bones.
She wanted to think clearly about the gift and its repercussions, but she couldn't. The food overwhelmed her senses. It reminded her of something her mother would make, a woman from the land of Romalan. It was a far-off country situated at the base of the ruined lands, on the border of desert, mountain and sea. She kept notes and stories in her cookbooks, and was as devoted to them as her apothecary journal.
"We'd run through the hills in the summertime, our faces hot and red from the Middern sun," her mother once told her. There was a rolling quality to her voice, heavily accented after learning her husband's language. "I would come home, and Mother would have strips of dough boiling in a pot on the stove. On my birthday she would cut them into little stars and cover it in savory white sauce. She called it 'a bowl of morning stars.'"
Briar's stomach grumbled as she took notice of the excess. Her senses came back to her, euphoria subsiding when she saw an unfamiliar and burly man glaring at her. He had ruddy cheeks and a dark grey beard, and stood taller than the door. She'd expected little more than Innis had received, yet...
"But, why?"
The server dropped a half loaf of bread onto her platter, instructing her to save it for later. The inside was immaculate, smothered in butter and chives. The crust was covered in seeds and nuts and so fresh it was steaming.
"You are to eat well, little one." She stared into Briar's eyes and bit her tongue. The girl grabbed Innis by the arm, pulling her back up through the line and placing her half empty bowl before the cook.
"Then, give Innis some more. She needs it more than I do."
The little one now risked herself. She was standing before a superior with the power to take away her meals altogether– all for the benefit of someone who probably wouldn't last another day. But, she had to keep her promise. The cook saw Briar's sweet nature and was pierced by it. Before saying her next words, she looked away, aching at the sight of a lamb heading to slaughter.
"She's too old for them to care. The younger girls are to be kept looking well...under the orders of your new officer, Peter Haggs."
The officer snickered, and the group of men supervising the line dissected her. Their eyes wandered up and down her slender figure, stopping at her breasts. One of them raised an eyebrow as he looked at her quivering lips. He rolled his own into a smirk, revealing a set of brownish yellow, tea-stained teeth. Briar shivered, dropping her bowl and splattering hot stew on the wooden floor. Fearing for the girl, the cook quickly created another bowl and filled it twice as high.
"My mistake," the woman said loudly. Innis clutched the girl's hand gravely. The cook presented Briar with another bowl, but she was frozen.
"Take it, sweet Aurora. Take the food and we'll share it. It's more than enough," Innis whispered.
Briar grasped the bowl and shook. The old woman guided her to their usual spot on the floor. Innis struggled to position herself among the older women, arthritic hips making it difficult to sit down. The scraggy women eyed her bowl jealously, seeing the extra food as a gift from the enemy.
Briar shivered, realizing that the men still gawped. Tears burned in her ducts and ran down her face, stinging and salty. She wished that she had a veil to cover herself from head to toe, the way that some women still did in Middern.
Most of all, she wanted Cal by her side, her eternal protector. She'd never liked his sense of violence, but it was the only thing that kept her safe on the Moorland frontiers. If he was around, their ravaging eyes would already have been gouged out and thrown to the crows.
"Eat your food, ," Innis beckoned. Briar's stomach formed a blockade.
"You need it more than I do," she looked to the grandmother, then at the others. "Please, just take it from me."
They needed no coaxing. The women were half-starved and went at the bowl like animals. The half loaf was broken up and dipped into the stew by five emaciated hands. When that was gone, they dug into the rice with dirty, bare fingers. It was gone within a minute, Innis and Briar receiving not a single bite. The old woman forced a bite of her own brown bread into Briar's mouth.
Live, she prayed over the girl. Let this one live!
It did no good, as the bread went into her stomach as pure acid. She knew what would become of her if she was a glutton. Better to be ugly and gaunt with everyone else than sold as someone pretty. As soon as the fragment of burnt crust entered her body, it was rejected as poison by her primal defenses. She ran outside and vomited.
Once the sickness subsided, she felt a wave of relief. She looked back through the windows of the schoolhouse-turned-sweatshop and saw that the men were no longer staring. When her face entered their minds and suited their fancies, she'd be worse than dead.
A thought entered her mind.
"The girls are to be kept looking well," she remembered the cook saying. She also remembered the stories Cal had told in the weeks before he'd been taken away. He'd told her of women in the Upper Villages cutting their hair and scarring their faces with hot oil and sharpened branches to avoid being sold to the invaders.
She looked over her shoulder. There was no one at the windows, nor was there a man with a gun guarding the door. She took off. She ran across the flat and swampy marsh for what felt like miles, her hair escaping its tight binding. The grey blanket of mist served as the perfect cover. She ran into a thicket and began filling her apron with wild herbs.
It was instinct to go for the most helpful flowers first. She habitually picked at the purple heads of thistle, milking latex sap into a small container on her hip. She picked up pieces of heather and stopped herself when she realized that she wasn't foraging for reasons of healing. Her eye wandered over to the carpet of little black flowers and felt a lump forming in her throat. It went dry and was overwhelmed with a metallic taste.
Wolf's Tooth. The plant she'd been warned from birth to never handle. Its flowers were the color of ink. One petal was as potent as hemlock. However, it wasn't without its uses. For apothecaries, there were two things it could do. A tea made from the root was often used in suicide. The same tea was so caustic that, when poured over the skin, could suture an open wound and clean the blood in small amounts. Small amounts. Any more than a couple of piqs of liquid over a vessel and your heart would stop beating. It was used as a last resort and on patients that were knocking on death's door. Not only was it risky, but it always left a deep red scar.
She took the plants up by the roots and tucked them into her undershirt, beside the place where she hid her fox pendant from the greedy hands of the overseers. Innis appreciated that it was one of the few items not to be smelted into bullets for the good of the Empire.
"I gave it to the right lass," she told her after the women had their jewels taken. The overseers plundered anything of value on the new prisoners, but Briar slipped the pendant deep into her frock while an officer looked the other way. "Ya've the cunning alright."
Briar took care to place the plants in such way that a piece of fabric kept the roots from touching her skin. Even so, the petals rubbed against her chest. They weren't enough to burn clean through her, but they caused a scalding rash to spread up her sternum. It was painful, but less than it would be if they found her.
"I will come for you." She heard a voice, clear and audible, yet almost certainly in her mind. It felt nothing like the voice of God. Something between angel and devil. It sent a chill up her spine as she fell to her knees.
"God, if you're there, show me what I'm supposed to do. Don't let me harm myself unless it's the only way."
Once she uttered the words, she was almost certain. She felt a presence looming over her head. There was a raven perched in the tree overhead, much like the one that accompanied her at the start of her journey. It stared at her intently, following her eyes with its own. He opened his mouth and created a spark. It was her raven.
The floodgate on her memories opened, and she saw it all. The griffin that carried her on its back, the man in the metal mask, the arrow in the blackbird...she heard that name. Outside her dreams, Briar's mind was cloudy. She heard the name, but couldn't remember why.
"You're alive," she shook. "But...it's not possible. You, you were dead."
She heard a scream. It came from across the moor. Out here, sound carried across the flat grasses with an echo comparable to that of a canyon. There was nothing to impede it, so hearing the conversations of passers-by had always been a regular occurrence. It was the unmistakable scream of a man followed by what Briar thought to be the cracking of a whip.
Innis, Briar gasped, thinking of her old friend. What kind of trouble had she put her in by fleeing like this? She had been her sage and protector, strong even in her feebleness, ever since she'd been taken at Bahelin Forge. She dropped what was in her hands, realizing that she'd picked up the thorny edge of a thistle at the beginning and clutched it the entire time. Blood gushed from the spot on her finger, but it didn't matter. She ran back to the mill – poison in tow.