C. Redwine: Outcast

“He won’t hear anything if we keep our voices down.” I step closer as I see the dark gleam of blood on the serrated edge of her knife. “Your knife is bloody.”

“That’s what happens when you stick it in somebody.” Her voice is as quietly controlled as mine, but her fingers grip the hilt with white-knuckled ferocity. She grabs a rawhide cloth from her dresser and carefully wipes the blade clean, while I cross my arms and stare her down.

I’ve spent my days scouting, and all has been quiet. No highwaymen. No lone thieves prowling for an easy victim. No travelers looking for a shortcut to Rowansmark.

When I haven’t been scouting, I’ve used my time to read poetry and think about how to change the course I’m on and rescue Willow at the same time.

I haven’t come up with any answers, and the longer we’ve gone without threats to put down, the harder it’s been to dodge the restless violence that simmers in our father like a cauldron about to boil over. When he took Willow with him to “check the perimeter” twelve hours ago, a knot of worry blossomed in my gut. As I look at Willow now, that knot turns into a stone.

“What happened?” I ask.

“The usual. Killing people. Hunting things. The family business.” She avoids my gaze and sets her weapons against the wall beside her bed.

“Willow, this isn’t the usual. There were no reported threats. And when there are threats, we deal with them just outside the village borders. You should’ve been gone three, maybe four hours.” I glance at the graying light seeping in past her curtains. “You’ve been gone for twelve. What happened? ”

She sits on the side of the bed and concentrates on unlacing her boots. “We found a threat.”

I frown. “Where? There were no reports—”

Her gaze snaps to mine, and the darkness in her eyes is an accusation I don’t know how to answer. “Dad needed a threat, so we found one. Took us hours of moving through the Wasteland looking for travelers, but we found some. And we made an example out of them.” Her voice shakes, and she presses her lips closed. A shaft of light leaks past the shutters and illuminates a bruise swelling along her cheekbone.

“Did a tracker give you that?” I gesture toward her face.

She shrugs and refuses to look at me. My heart thuds heavily in my chest. A tracker didn’t do that to her. Dad did. Without me there as Dad’s favorite target, he took out his rage on her instead.

“Willow.” I breathe her name while rage pushes against the dam I’ve built to contain it. “I’m sorry. I should’ve—”

“Come with us?” Her tone is hard, but the fierceness in her face is a mirror of the protectiveness I feel toward her. “You can’t do it, Quinn. We both know that. This life is destroying you.”

“It’s destroying us both.” I sink to my knees beside her bed and meet her gaze. “Every time we hurt someone who doesn’t deserve it, we lose something we can’t get back.”

“The men tonight were bounty hunters searching for a Baalboden courier who stole something from Rowansmark. They want the price that’s been put on the courier’s head. You know bounty hunters will cut through anyone who stands between them and their prize. I’d hardly call them innocent.”

“Were they a threat to the village?”

Her eyes drift away from mine. “No.”

No, they weren’t, but it hadn’t mattered because Dad was more interested in killing than he was in protecting our borders.

“I’ve been thinking—”

“I was afraid of that.” She rolls her eyes.

I nudge her knee with my shoulder. “Just listen. I’ve been reading the book you gave me.”

She flops backward onto her bed. “If you’re about to give me advice based on a poem written by some dead guy, you can forget it.”

“Not advice.” I lean my elbows against the frayed quilt that covers her bed and then hold my breath when I hear footsteps on the stairs that lead from the main room to our bedrooms. Seconds later, I breathe again when I hear the unmistakable shuffle-scrape of our mother’s steps heading past our rooms and toward the cupboard where she keeps the corn liquor hidden behind a set of fancy sheets we once took from a dead highwayman.

“I’m tired, Quinn. I want to go to sleep, not listen to poetry.” Willow keeps her voice down as we hear Mom fall to her knees in front of the cabinet.

“No poetry. Just . . . you’re right. This life is destroying us. And now you’re taking the brunt of Dad’s sickness instead of me and—”

“And you’re afraid I’m going to end up just like him.” She barely whispers the words, but they seem to grow larger, filling up the room and taking on a life of their own. I clench my fists and remember the Willow of my childhood—the sister who laughed and loved with wild abandon until she killed her first highwayman and earned the black feather she still wears dangling from her ear cuff.

I can’t tell her she’s right. I can’t put into words the fear that haunts me when I see how easily she obeys Dad. How quickly she shakes off the things she’s done in the name of protection. Instead, I say, “We have to stop this. We have to stop him .”

“How?” Raw desperation is on her face.

“Maybe the elders can help. If we show them that Dad is more interested in torture than in obeying them, they might—”

“Try to lock him up and get killed for their trouble?” Willow sits up again and looks at me. “There’s only one way to stop Dad, and we both know it.”

I swallow hard as we stare at each other. Killing Dad is a fantasy that lurks at the edges of my thoughts on the really bad days, but it isn’t something I can truly stand to look in the eye. Not if I want to stop being the murderer he’s raised me to be. Not if I want to choose a different path for myself. Before Willow tells me she can handle the task herself, I say, “If we’re there to protect the elders, Dad will be outnumbered. They’ll see him for what he really is. They can lock him up, and all of this will stop.”

Slowly, Willow nods. “That could work. One problem, though. How are you going to force Dad into revealing his true self in front of the elders? It’s not like they’re going to agree to come on a hunt with us. And if they did, Dad would just be on extra-good behavior and then punish us—punish you —afterward.”

“We don’t need a hunt,” I say as the plan that’s been taking shape inside my head for the past three days clicks into place. “All we need is for one threat to make it past our borders and be imprisoned instead of killed. Dad won’t be able to leave that alone.”

“Dad won’t let a threat get past our borders.”

“No, but I will.”

Before she can argue, I head out for the day’s scouting mission with one goal in mind: find someone worth taking as a prisoner. Someone Dad won’t be able to resist trying to kill no matter who’s watching.

Two days later, I get my wish. Once again, I’ve spent my day scouting to the south of the village. The afternoon sun softens the chill in the air, though my fingers still ache with cold as I sit in an enormous white cypress holding the book of poems in my hands while I eat the chunk of bread I packed for my lunch. I’m engrossed in a poem about a dreamlike land filled with lotuses when the woods suddenly fall silent around me.

Someone else is here.

Quietly, I lay the book aside and pull my legs beneath me so that I’m crouching high up in the center of the tree, looking down on the forest below. A whisper of sound drifts from my right, and as I turn my head I catch movement. Instantly, I run the length of a thick, twisted branch, my footsteps landing silently out of long practice, and then leap onto the back of a tall, broad-shouldered man as he passes beneath me.