Page 3 of The Wicked Lies of Habren Faire
I swallow and nod. “We all are.”
As I settle, the door to the cells opens. I lurch up, only justremembering to offer my hands to Ceridwen and Gran. Their thin, bony fingers wrap around mine as I pull them to their feet.
We hear the rattle of chains before we see him.
Father is a pile of bones with scraps of leftover meat barely clinging on, and his old suit is worn thin at the elbows and cuffs, but his hair, as blond as mine, still glows like a lantern in the gloomy corridor. His hands are unbound—just for this goodbye—and we run to him. He takes his mother in his arms first. Gran wilts into him, then it’s Ceridwen’s turn. He holds them and his words are lost to their hair.
When it’s my turn, his embrace is a rock. I rest against him, feeling for the coal miner, the laborer, the thousand things he has been beneath this new uniform—convict—and find only Dad. He once told me that I was the trunk of the family tree, Gran the branches and Ceridwen the leaves. They rustled and bent in the wind, but not me. Not him. I am the trunk and he the roots.
“Your mam is the soil around us,” he had said then, over candlelight the night before I started working at the shop. “I’ll hold you in place, Sabrina, so you can keep our girls aloft—even in a storm.”
Now, three days into sixteen, I’m to be trunk, root and earth. The only person holding our fractured family together.
In my ear, he says, “You know what you have to do.”
“Keep Ceridwen and Gran safe,” I say. Tears sting my eyes, though I will not let them fall until tonight when I find a moment alone in the pantry. “Work hard, bring money home.”
“Wages from the shop won’t be enough,” he warns me. “You can’t go down the mines; they won’t take girls no more. You’ll need to find work up the big house.”
“Dad!” There’s nothing worse than working for the spoiled aristocrats who are the very reason we are here today.
“We made a promise, didn’t we? Gran is too old to work, Ceridwen too infirm. It falls to us—to you, now.”
I swallow my fury. It tastes metallic.
His arms tighten around me, roots diving deeper. “You forgot one thing,cariad.”
I pull back slightly to meet his eyes, blinking.
His stubbled face softens as he presses a kiss to my forehead.
“You have to stay out of trouble,” he reminds me. “I know it finds you no matter what you do, but you must always be smarter than trouble, Sabrina.”
“I’m smarter than everyone.” I force a grin, but my words ring hollow.
“And don’t we know it. Go on now, my girl. Go on.”
Dad lets me go first and my arms cling to his shoulders. I cannot move them, so Dad does it for me and steps away. The police seize him, and with each step he takes away from us, the ax descends—once, twice, thrice, and our family is severed at the trunk.
The journey back to Llanadwen is disjointed and silent after the doctor returns with medicine. We stumble blindly to Cardiff Taff Vale station. By the time we haul our numb bodies onto the rumbling steam train, we’re all yet to say a word.
It’s the second time I’ve ever ridden a train; the first was this morning. I’ve longed to leave our paltry village since I first saw a map of the world at school and Mrs. Cadwalladr loaned me an encyclopedia to navigate by candlelight, and now I’ve done it. I wish it were under better circumstances, but even as we trundle back to the mines and the sheep of the valleys I cannot help but marvel at it all. At the iron beast we are piled inside, bodies pressed together and rocking with perpetual motion; at the countryside rolling by unstoppably.
“This train could take us anywhere,” I remark to Ceridwen asGran naps on the bench opposite. “And here we are letting it drag us back to Llanadwen.”
Ceridwen doesn’t look up from her threadbare gloves. “Where else would we go?”
“I already told you. Anywhere.”
Her shoulders shake as if she is laughing, or crying, or both. I cannot tell with Ceridwen these days. The last year has been brutal on us all, but Ceridwen has receded into herself so deep that, even as she sits next to me, I’m not sure if she’s really here. She stares out the window—at the gray clouds gathering ahead and the fat blobs of rain that strike the pane.
“Anywhere is a rather big place,” she says.
The world in maps and encyclopedias can be held in two hands, and yet I still can’t quite grasp it. Not that it matters, not really, when the world passes me by on this train, and I am back in Llanadwen before it even knew I was gone.
3
degwm
