Maman said she should be nicer to Alden. He’s too little, she said. He’ll be nicer when he gets older. Well, he tore her doll on a branch in the forest. Ripped it almost completely apart! And younger or not, he’s a boy. He should play with boy things, like sticks or his bear. He always rips his bear up and she didn’t want him to rip her doll up, too. She liked her doll.

  She missed her doll. Her Rosemary.

  She missed Alden.

  Alden.

  Alden.

  Maud looked around her. This wasn’t her room but it was her bed. On the loft in the old house. Her window was open. It was spring. The leaves were green and slowly wagging in the trees. A bluebird had made a nest on one of the branches. She had a bowl of berries on her lap. Her skinny legs were thin ridges through her coarse yellow cotton dress that had grass stains on either side of it. Her bare feet stuck out from a bottom hem that was stained with mud. The soles of her feet were caked with dirt in the creases between her toes. She had been playing.

  She crinkled her brow. This was a memory. She remembered this day. Alden was…four. She had thumped him. Hard. Beat him black and blue behind the house while Ma and Pa were tilling the field. Ma was pushing while Pa pulled. She was supposed to help but had complained so much that they sent her away out of frustration to do other chores. Of course, she didn’t do them. She went into the forest to play instead. She brought her favorite doll with her.

  He was crying through the front door from outside, wailing at the top of his little lungs. She didn’t care. She hated him. Ever since he was born, she had been cast aside, no longer the one who sat on Pa’s lap after he came home from working in the fields or whatever he did in the village during the winter, no longer the one who got Ma’s attention the entire day. No longer the one who sat in the laundry basket. But at the same time…she wanted him to stop crying. She wanted him to be happy again. She did like it when he smiled and played. She didn’t hate him. She liked it when he followed her around or helped her get to the tallest cabinets where they kept the sweetest fruits. How he was always so eager to help her with her chores…

  Alden.

  Maman can toss her nice-nice to the rivers. And Alden with him. She wishes he had never been born. She tossed a berry to land in the nest. It bounced off the wicker edge and fell to the ground below. She tossed another, pouting her lips and narrowing her eyes. A plan was formulating. She was going to rip his bear the way he ripped Rosemary. Even use the same tree branch he had for good measure. That’ll teach him. Only, unlike him, she won’t bring it back to show him, pretending to feel bad. She’ll leave it there so that he begs and pleads, feels the loss even more.

  Alden.

  Maud’s eyes spilled down her face. She tossed the bowl and climbed in a rush down the ladder. Alden! She leapt half the steps. Who cares about some stupid doll she never thought about again? He was just beyond that door, crying because she had beaten him into the dirt. The way Jasmine had beaten her.

  Her feet landed in front of Balor’s gaping form, looking down at her in front of the hearth with a look filled with utter astonishment and disgust. It was night. She had done it! Alden was in Ma’s arms. Of course he was, spoiled brat. She was rocking him, quieting his sobbing, her fierce glare aimed at the glum glance Maud hesitantly sent their direction. Balor already had the switch ready in one hand.

  The bear lay on the table. Those black beads for eyes staring at her with cylindric arms outstretched and a belly spilling what was left of its stuffing across the table. The lower half lay beside it, deflated because squirrels had chewed and played with it, scattering its stuffing across the scene of the crime. Maud stared at those bead-eyes as the switch struck with a sting. Blood pooled beneath the stuffing. The table was smeared and dripping crimson. She screamed. She cried. Another sting from the switch.

  Ma lay the doll beside the bear and sat next to it with emptiness in her expression. A cloth was dropped over the bear’s upper half. Then another was put over the doll. The switch whipped again.

  “Stop! Please!” Maud screamed as the bear began dripping blood. Her knees collapsed to the stinging on her rear and the clenching of her heart. “I beg you! Stop! Pa, stop!” The switch struck her back, then her neck, then her face…

  Cold air brushed over her cheeks. Senna was laughing and goading her. Josey, too. The ice on the river was thick but translucent. She knew just by looking at it that it wasn’t thick enough for her to walk on. She had been outside for too long already. Her toes were beginning to feel cold through the wool wrapping her wood clogs. Her wool coat was beginning to soak through from the snow they had been playing in. She had, of course, won every snow fight, built the tallest snowman, and been the best sledder down Addie’s hill. She was the oldest, after all.

  “She won’t do it,” Senna said to Josey. “She’s too scared. Squirrel-head!”

  “Yeah, squirrel-head!” Josey began taunting with her.

  Maud didn’t pay them much mind. She wasn’t going along with it because of them. She knew that she wasn’t going to be able to cross it. She knew she would fall through. She knew that the water was cold during the summer, so it must be cold during the winter. Pa said that was how they killed grandpapa. They threw him into the river and he couldn’t swim. Ma could swim. She taught her and Alden how, but she had already decided. This time, she wasn’t going to. No one really wanted her around anyway. Not even Senna and Josey, who were her best friends. They were happier playing with each other than with her. She was their way of getting away from being looked after by the grown-ups.

  She took her first step. The ice cracked but didn’t give.

  Ma brushes her aside now. Pa is always tired and busy. Alden is…Alden. He doesn’t follow her around as much, he follows Pa or Ma, but not her. When she asks if he wants to play, he shies away from her or only plays for a few minutes and decides he wants to do something else. She doesn’t want to do anything else. She stays up in her bed as long as they will let her. Breakfast, chores, bed. She took another crackling step.

  “She’s doing it!” Senna gasped. “Maud, are you mad?”

  She didn’t look away from the cracks forming beneath her feet as she took another sliding step forward. Her twelfth birthday was lonely. Everyone was there, laughing and singing, enjoying themselves together, but not with her. Even their gifts felt like they were for them and not her. A basket from Aunty Coralin. An old dress from Aunty Leta that looked like it was a hundred years old. A braid bracelet that she helped Senna make. The same from Josey. She took another step. The cracks were like spiderwebs bursting out from beneath her feet, fogging the clear sheet between her and the pebbly riverbed below.

  They didn’t talk to her. She sat at the table, watching them, wondering if they would notice if she went back to the loft and went to sleep. They didn’t. Even Draka refused to look her way. She listened from her bed as the celebration continued without her. Listened to Ma tell Alden a story to put him to sleep without even a goodnight her way before following Pa into their bedroom. She was no longer part of the family. She was alone in a sea of family. Cast out because of what she did.

  The ice broke and she embraced the icy water that engulfed her. She wrapped herself in it, welcomed it. It was carrying her in its arms, rolling her in its current of warmth and ice, filling her lungs, clogging her ears, surrounding her. Her eyes burned. She smiled. She breathed it in. She wanted the ache in her chest. She wanted the pain that she felt shivering through her bones. She deserved worse. She knew that. For what she had done, she deserved worse.

  If only she had treated Alden better that day. It was just a stupid doll. If only she knew how precious he really was, how little time she would have with him. If only she had stayed with Ma instead of running off to find the guards. If only she had chosen a husband when she was supposed to. If only she had been a better sister. A better daughter. A better Christian.

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  The icy water was gripping her. She was in a whirlwind of soft pillows too strong for her to fight against. Her arms were caught forever reaching outward. Her legs were forever held exactly as they were when she had first fallen in. Her dress and wool coat were wrapping her, her leggings pulling tighter and tighter. She was starving for air, starving to see, reaching. Her fingers bent, grasping at the watery pillows that were wrapping and carrying her.

  “A truce…”

  “Are you making a deal with the Mother of Demons?”

  “Why weepest thou woman?”

  “I have taken my Lord away,” Maud said the words against the rushing water around her.

  “Woman, why weepest thou? Who are you looking for?”

  “I have sent my Lord away,” Maud let the water overtake her. “I can’t go back and fix it.”

  Stupid doll means nothing.

  “I can’t fix what I’ve done.”

  Treated a little brother better, been a better daughter, picked a husband sooner, stayed true and faithful.

  “I can’t bring him back.”

  They’re dead because of me, because I didn’t listen, didn’t learn, didn’t do better, wasn’t smarter…was too selfish.

  “I can’t make it right again.”

  All I’ve done is hurt everyone around me anyway. Now, it won’t just be Ma and Pa who will treat me like a stranger, like last time. It will be Draka. Adrian. Alice. Everyone.

  “I’m lost. I don’t want to hurt anyone else,” Maud pulled her arms from reaching. She tucked her chin and relinquished her body against the flow. “I would rather that I die than live and keep making the same mistakes.”

  “What did you do that would hurt those around you now?” A different voice was surrounding her, swirling her with the rushing waters. “What did the Mother of Demons say to you?”

  “Why weepest thou, woman?”

  “We are protected by her. I made a truce so that we could have peace and my family survive the siege,” Maud was adrift. “I gave her nothing. I only admitted that her marriage to Draka made me her daughter. But that’s enough, isn’t it? I conceded. I allowed myself to be deceived for what I wanted.”

  “Why weepest thou…”

  “What was it that you wanted?”

  Maud felt her tears splice into the whirling pillows around her, “For everyone to be safe! For no one else to die because of me! I didn’t mean for them to die! I’m sorry, Aldy! I didn’t mean to hurt you! I didn’t mean to rip your bear! I love you! I miss you! Why’d you have to go away and not take me with you? Why couldn’t it be me instead? If I could make it better, if I could go back…If I could change it, all of it, I would give everything. I deserve this. Let me die! I deserve to die!”

  “Why weepest…”

  “Maudeline,” the other voice sounded firm. She could almost make out someone walking on the ice, following her rolling drift in the current. “Why did she bring you to Gerard? What deal did you make for her to carry you to him and why? Tell me.”

  “Who are you? What are you doing in my head? In my dream?” Maud clawed at ice beneath his feet every time it came within reach. “Get out!”

  The ice beneath his feet shattered as she planted a fist into it.

  Maman said she should be nicer to Alden. He’s too little…

  “Whoa,” Father Hagen caught the Paladin before he rolled completely off the bed from the way he jerked awake. “What happened? What did you find out?”

  Paladin William put a hand to his head and rolled back onto the cot beside hers. His head was pounding already. He heaved to catch his breath. “She’s…not alone.”

  “A demon?” Father Hagen’s head was tipped, his brows pressing together in the dim light of the lamp that swung with the pounding of the bombardments that shook the ground.

  Even with them in the apartment above the infirmary, in the only room that allowed them privacy from the children and their mothers who filled the rest of the little living area, each strike at the walls was felt as if it were beside them. He was sitting at the heads of their cots in a chair, hunched over them with his hands clasped together.

  “No, I don’t think so,” William looked up to him with the stifling breath normally attributed to pain. “Something different.” After a scattered-eyed glance about the room, “Non-threatening, but powerful. And, she’s…lucid. She knows she should be dying.”

  “Then, see if you can root out what or who it is and what we have to do with it. And, what about her? What did you find out about that?”

  “She made a truce for peace,” He winced. “No offer on her part, but a truce with the Mother of Demons was made with a concession that she was her daughter by marriage.”

  “Which stays to yourself,” Father Hagen eyed him. “That marriage is being dissolved. Was anything else done? What else? What does she need to be absolved of?”

  The Paladin shook his head, “She’s just a girl. If what I saw is what weighs most on her soul, then she’s probably the most innocent soul I’ve ever ventured into. I need something to drink before I go in again,” he sat up and reach a hand to his throbbing headache. “Whatever is in there with her, I’m not sure it is going to be very welcoming when I begin to pry at it, too. She certainly wasn’t, once I revealed myself.”

  Father Hagen leaned back in his chair. “There’s something about her, always has been, of that I’ve been certain for quite some time. The entire family has been chosen for something beyond our understanding.”

  He reached for a cup on the table beside him and handed it to William before pouring steaming coffee into it from a pot he kept on a rack over the brazier that was close enough to keep them warm.

  “Well, either way,” William blew on it before taking a sip that burnt his tongue, “It was something I’ve never felt before. It…I don’t know how to explain it.”

  “It…what?” Father Hagen narrowed his eyes.

  Paladin William finished the cup with one last, big gulp, and handed it back to Father Hagen, saying, as he twisted his feet back onto the cot to lay down again. “It made her…” He stared up at the beams above him that dripped dust with another shuddering.

  “It didn’t like me interfering,” He finished with a concerned sigh and shut his eyes. He heaved a long sigh, “It made her aware I didn’t belong before I was ready.”

  “Trust in the commands of the Holy Spirit, but if it poses a threat to her eternal soul,” Father Hagen hunched over him again, “Remove it. Her life is precious but her salvation is paramount.”

  William cracked one eye open at him, “You don’t say.”

  Father Hagen rolled his eyes.

  “I’m well aware of my task here, Father,” he closed his eyes and wiggled a little to get comfortable, “I’m just not certain it’s something that needs to be removed or is within my capabilities to do so. Like I said, it’s powerful and not something I’ve ever felt before.”

  After drawing in a breath deep enough to make him yawn, William finished with a fading, “I don’t think she’s ever been alone in there.”