Page 4 of The Quiet
He’d taken Crow, Alex, Jade, and her to all of those places, giving them tours with a natural and voracious hunger to know and educate about the world.
A blended wave of anger and confusion washed over her and she sunk her head into her knees. Her body shook with every breath, so she trained her ears on the droning of his voice, the only sound in the vastness of the building. It kept her in a manageable state until certain words tugged on her attention.
“We all have these inborn connections with the Spirits. We’re driven by Joy, Sadness, Hope, and Happiness because of our connection with them. Madness, on the other hand, is the essence of brokenness and disfigurement,” he said. “The energy is volatile and hungry, quick to eat anyone it infects, butcenturies ago, there were a select few, the Strike, who not only became hosts, but manipulators of it. They subjugated humanity until the extremesist of that day, known as the ROSE, burned them all at the Burning of the Strike. As brutal as it was, it marked the end of the war.”
Guessing Kay was still in the middle of his lecture, and in no mood to hear more about history, Ella pulled herself up from the ground and wrote a quick message using the pen and board outside of the door. Not all instructors checked their messages after classes, but Kay could never help himself.
“Luckily, no one has been able to channel Madness for centuries since the death of the Strike,” he continued on as she wrote.
“The one comfort we can take from all of that is that the secret to channeling Madness died with those that discovered it.”
Ella backed away from the board, glancing down the hallway to see a guard still observing from a distance.
She’d see Kay soon but had one more person she had to visit first.
CHAPTER 2
DOOR OF THE MOON
IN ALL OF its preceding features, the day replicated the others before it. Baker awoke as the adults in the cripples’ cottage hobbled to work or beg. Valentine ushered her out to attend to her job at the local cobbler. After hours of arduous, dusty labor, she picked flowers from the fields nearby.
She spent so much time in the fields, the other children in the village had accused her of living in them. With tangled vines of sun-bleached hair and a deep constellation of freckles across her nose and cheeks, she found it hard to disagree. The fields were her stage to act out stories of love, romance, and heroism, and under the derision of the other children, she told herself that she adored the fields because she was part tree and part nature spirit. She’d stolen her skin from the wheat, her hair from the sun and her eyes from the earth. She danced and cast silent spells with her hands, and the other children didn’t quite know how to make fun of her after that.
Part of her enjoyed believing her own tale, looking out at miles of gently rolling hills checkered with crops that rotated each passing season. Fort Kit was a remote village and the crops were one of the few things that ever changed. The horizon never staged coming travelers. Nothing ever left town but the sun, and even that they could expect back each morning.
It was the reason the presence of a visitor caused a stir. That, and Valentine’s enraged yelling from the cripples’ cottage. Baker stood at the cottage threshold she’d crossed a thousand timesbefore, now with a fistful of yellow wildflowers clasped to her chest.
The sheer volume of Valentine’s voice vibrated through the doorway, causing Baker to miss the words he’d spoken.
If she was his mischievous, ragged cub, he was her groveling, protective bear, and in such a way he looked wounded, heaving in the center of the cottage. Pearls of sweat lingered on his thick, red beard, teeth bared in a snarl. His back looked broken into a hunch, as if he’d been shot in the gut.
“I’m not something you fix!” Valentine yelled to the stranger standing in the center of the cottage, back to her, the inky silhouette like a phantom. To Baker he became Death. She’d always imagined that Death lived near Fort Kit, sneaking in late at night to take souls like it had when illness struck last winter. Perhaps Valentine was such a respected man that Death had come for him in broad daylight.
Valentine stumbled away, peg leg clattering through empty bottles of alcohol. Startled by the sound, he took a sharp limp back and flailed into a cot. His body thrashed as if wrestling an invisible opponent. Other strangers inched forward from the back of the room.
“No!” Valentine objected and the roar of his voice burst forth like a lion’s. His fighting settled, and now he looked at Death with a wicked glare. Baker had never seen him wear such hateful eyes, and his speech matched the look as if Valentine had been arrested in a dark trance. A strange and complete calm settled on him, and from it marched the words, “They always come from the North and the North is always there.”
“Hold him, now, hurry!” Death commanded as if Valentine were casting a spell, and the strangers in the room rushed.
Valentine’s voice carried higher with the melody of a chant. “Prophets of Madness, the Strike, the Strike, the broken arrow always points North!”
She felt the recoil of terror in her chest as if Valentine had finally crossed a line he’d only walked in the past. No one in their village spoke openly about Madness or those who were said to channel it. Valentine had once said that the very idea of their existence permeated everything like radiation, forbidden secrets vibrating through the rocks, trees, and air.
“They always come from the North, and the North is always there!” He screamed now, and she wanted to cover her ears, but her arms felt frozen beside her.
Each repetition of the phrases rang like a nail in his coffin, truths he’d only ever whispered to her in bitter secrecy when he’d been drinking. She never understood their meaning but sensed their gravity.
The group knocked her aside as they pushed toward the door, Baker dropping her flowers across the floor before they wrestled Valentine through them.
She sat up on her elbows, staring at her flowers with a grave sense of loss as his heels made two paths in the dirt. They dragged Valentine toward a compact bundle of trees in a nearby field.
He shouted so loud that he drew a collection of villagers, fighting a cloth as they wrestled it around his mouth. Baker watched thedrama of the play escalate with the beat of her heart, her feet glued to the dark obscurity of the audience as she lay where she’d been cast along with the trampled flowers she’d picked for him. Terror arrested her into a trance as she heard the drama play out.
“Tie them up and toss with tar!” Valentine shouted out. “Frostbitten fingers play the chords. Burn! Burn, the Strike! The broken song sings on! They come from the North, and the North is always there!”
The cloth sunk into his mouth, and he groaned through it as if the dreadful song had been trapped inside him for years. She felt the groans inside her soul, her body locked in place like a cage that forced her to watch the scene unfold. The group kept him in the field, but there was no violence, just stillness as they stood around him. One member of the group hunkered down on a knee and appeared to be speaking with him as his thrashing tired into heaving desperation.
As he settled, so did her heart, and at last, she was thawed from her frozen state to look around.
