Wolves Among Us (28 page)

Mia stroked Alma’s hair as she spoke. Alma did not seem afraid, because Mia was always there in the darkness with her.

Her closed, scarred heart broke open as she understood the truth of what she had said. Mia gasped and hugged Alma tighter, mercy and grace exploding in her heart so hardened from fear. Mia saw her past, illuminated at last, the brittle wall around her heart shattering and falling away.

Sitting in the dirty cell, she had never been so free.

As the hours wore on, Mia had nothing to feed Alma and no relatives to supply their meals. Surely, though, Bastion would think of this, even if Bjorn did not. Surely Bastion wouldn’t let Alma starve. He had made promises.

Mia could not be afraid, not for herself, not anymore. But Alma might still be frail. She needed food. Mia would wait. Someone would come, someone to help.

Hilda had not been brought here. Perhaps it had been better for Hilda that way. Perhaps her heart had given out, and no one had touched her. Mia hoped the men buried her. Most criminals were not buried. Their corpses were left out to be despised and abused.

She remembered that. She remembered how her father had hung from a beech tree until the birds came and picked him clean. She had stayed hidden in the streets, only coming out at night to steal, looking on his bones that fell, one by one, beneath the tree, watching as dogs carried them off, tails high and wagging.

It had all started, or ended, on a beautiful morning, cool air and burning sun. The miller’s grindstone had just begun its low growl as it started to turn for the day. Chickens pecked at bugs in the dirt outside her father’s shop. She had gone to fetch a remedy from the herbalist. Her father had been out drinking the night before, celebrating the completion of Tyndale’s forbidden Bible. Her father did not often have time to get drunk, so when he did, he did not do it well. He had no experience in it. He had been lying in bed that morning, groaning when the light hit his eyes, ignoring the other jobs begging to be done at the press. The last chapter of
How to Be A Good Wife
was yet to be printed. Mia danced around the press, yelling for her father to wake up and get on with it.

Mia knew the shopkeeper—a friend of her father’s—would have something to make him right again, so she took a few coins from their hiding spot and ran out the door. The shopkeeper began acting so odd when she came into his shop. His wife pursed her lips and poked him, prodding him to do something. Mia could not guess what. Without a mother of her own, older women were a mystery to her.

“Wouldn’t you like to look around?” he asked. “Surely that is not all you’re buying. We have excellent remedies for gout.”

“What gout? My father’s quite well. He’s just hungover—that is all.”

“Yes, I know.”

His wife butted in. “We all know, Mia. Your father was not himself last night. He told many tales, to many people.”

“What do you mean?”

The wife sighed a loud, laboring noise. Her husband tried again.

“Wouldn’t you like something for yourself, too? Maybe a treat for a good girl who serves her father so well? Have you tried these almonds my wife makes? They’re spiced and so filling. You wouldn’t even need to make a meal today. Come, I will fill a bag for you.”

Mia’s stomach had tingled as if she should be afraid.

The shopkeeper came round the counter, reaching for her with an odd smile. Mia didn’t think it was a good smile. It was a smile that hid something.

She backed up as he edged closer to her. She moved nearer the bottles of remedies left by the door. She knew the one her father needed to cure his hangover.

In a blur, he lunged. Before he could catch her, she threw her money on the floor, grabbing the violet-colored bottle she had spied, running out the door. Her heart pounded as he chased her out into the street.

“Do not go home, Mia!” he screamed after her. “I am trying to help you!”

People everywhere stared, something new in their eyes. They looked at her with something awful, something like pity.

She ran without stopping, losing the man easily. He threw his hands in the air and shouted after her, but she kept running. She did not slow until she turned the corner on the dirt path that led past the ivy-covered walls to her father’s shop and saw horse droppings on the path.

No one Mia knew rode a horse. Not to see her father anyway. His business involved too many rebels and revolutionaries, men who did not sit proud and obvious on a horse’s perch, men who had to sneak and hide and look over their shoulder.

Her father screamed. She ducked behind the wall, watching as men dragged him out of the shop, beating him until he fell and did not move. Smoke billowed out from the door of the shop, black and greasy.

“Where’s Tyndale?”

“He’d not be fool enough to hang round the place.”

“Is it all burned?” a man called to someone, someone still inside her father’s shop. The man emerged, his face covered in soot, marred by hatred.

“Not all of it,” the man said, kicking her father. She screamed, making the men look in her direction. Mia dropped the bottle, the glass shattering around her feet, the dark fluid wasted on the cold stone. God in His great mercy made her legs fly into a run, even before she knew what to do. Mia tore down the street, threading her tiny body through narrow passages and jumping out to run down other lanes. She ran until she found another village, where she stayed for days, coming out only at night to look for garbage to eat, to listen at windows for bits of news about her father and Tyndale.

Those men had raided his print shop on orders from someone important back in England. They had burned the press and everything in the shop. They had hung Mia’s doll in effigy as a joke, a warning to anyone who tried to scavenge through the wreckage. A black greasy hole stared at her where his shop had been.

Tyndale himself was never heard from again. Mia walked miles some nights to return to the shop’s empty space, thinking he would return for her.

He didn’t.

Tyndale became the most hunted man in the empire, in all of Europe. If caught, his fate would be unspeakable. People speculated on what tortures would be applied, which limbs would be torn, how slowly he would die. Mia understood why Tyndale didn’t want her. He would never allow her to be in his company again, not in these burning days.

Mia determined she would keep her promise. She would wait, if not for him, then for the burning days to end. And when they ended, she would read the book that stole her father and her beloved friend away. She would enter the new world their lives had bought her passage into.

But today, sitting in this dark cell alone with Alma, Mia had found her way to freedom. The burning days would never end; she saw that now. As long as the book was read, people would die for it. She had been wrong to wait, wrong to think a safer time and place to stand for the truth would find her. Truth made the world unsafe. Truth spurred evil into action. There would be no end to evil, not in this world, not while the book was still open.

And yet Mia found this one thing more to be true: She had been wrong to be so afraid, afraid of the darkness in the world, and afraid of the truth as well. She had survived the darkness, and she had survived the truth. She had survived the worst moments when she wished to die and the worst moments when she feared Alma would die. She had survived because God was not just in the church; He was in the world and in His Word. She had lost sight of that, frightened by the way people had responded to His Word, unwilling to lose another family for its sake. But He had never punished her for her weakness. He had healed and saved at wild, unpredictable moments, but He was here, and He was at work. They were together with God, right there, Alma and Mia, and they were safe.

Mia sat upon the bench, shifting her weight to ease the pain in her bones. Alma curled up like a kitten in her lap, and Mia bent over to kiss her head. Whatever happened now, Mia knew that this unpredictable, patient God was at work. She would choose to focus on this one thought and trust Him once more.

Worn by the streets, she had met and married Bjorn not many years after that awful year her father died, grateful for a constant roof and bed. She had stumbled into this good fortune and taken up his offer of marriage without question. And when her stomach swelled and the timely pains came upon her, she knew she had done the right thing. Her father and Tyndale, they would want her life to go on. They would want her to be a good wife and have many children and someday to teach them from the Book. If Mia survived this cell, she would do that.

She remembered Alma’s birth. She remembered lying in her bed, too weak to help, too filled with joy to even speak, watching a midwife rub Alma with salt and wine. Bjorn had come home drunk, elated.

Mia reached for his hand. “You do not mind it is a girl, then?”

“What? A girl? Well, have another.” He slapped his leg. “I heard news today, Mia, great news. A man causing much trouble for sheriffs, stirring up people—he got burned in Brussels last week. That’s the end of his work.”

Prickly black stars appeared in the corners of her vision. She could not focus on his face. The room shrank. Bjorn celebrated, but not for her. Not for them.

“Forgive me, Mia. I forget you are a good wife who stays home and doesn’t go wandering about the streets picking up gossip. That’s why I wanted you, you know. I knew you would serve me well. The man’s name was Tyndale, though he had tried to escape us by changing his name, always running from one city to another. Some say he came here—can you imagine? I’d have gutted him in the street. He came here, they say, looking for someone, though he would not say who.”

Mia was devastated.

Bjorn never spoke again of Tyndale or of her days spent near death after Alma’s birth. He had turned cold and watched her indifferently, the way one watches an old cow that’s gone dry, wondering if the meat is wasted too. He would have sold her in the market if he could—she knew that much.

Mia never told him anything of her past. She kept her eyes straight ahead, focused on days to come. She would be a good wife.

That was how she would defend herself. When Bastion called her to stand before him as an accused witch, it wasn’t her past that he would be judging. No one knew of it. She would insist that he judge her based on only one piece of evidence: Had she been a good wife to Bjorn? Had she not concerned herself, day and night, with being the wife all men taught as ideal?

That was the truth, and they would all see it. If they did not, if the truth did not save her, then Bastion would.

Chapter Twenty-three

Stefan tried to cry out as the hand forced against his mouth to silence him pressed harder. Another hand went around his ribs, dragging him out of the cell. His feet left troughs in the filth of the floor, and the jailer watched with amused interest. Outside the jail, Stefan saw the stars winking down on them all. He was flung to the ground and turned over on his back. Bjorn stood over him.

“What are you doing, Bjorn?”

“Let’s go.”

“Why? Where?”

“Where all good priests go.”

Bjorn’s boot came down on his ribs, then pinned him at the neck. “Get up.”

“Your boot seems to be in the way.”

Bjorn scraped his boot off Stefan’s neck. Stefan stood, in small increments, waiting for the boot again. Bjorn stepped back, motioning for Stefan to lead the way into the church.

“Why? Why now?”

“I did as you said. I found Mia. At the home of a witch. She had not run away at all. And you thought I should save her. Do you understand what you almost did to me?”

By the faint light falling in the familiar path across the altar’s edge, Stefan knew it to be about 3:00 a.m. No one else was there.

“What do you want me to do now, Bjorn?”

Bjorn sat on the first row bench. “Pray. Pray as if your life depended on it. Decide to join Bastion and me. Because we’re right. I do not want any more mistakes made.” Bjorn lifted his bag away from his belt, and Stefan saw the blade beneath it.

Stefan cleared his throat and knelt at the altar, his back to Bjorn. Years ago, the church fathers had moved the altar away from the people and turned it so the priest would work with his back to the people. If they’d had a parishioner like Bjorn, they would have been more cautious.