Chapter1 I'm not selling the farm

Wren Hale's POV

I woke before the sun came up. My body had learned that time on its own. The sheep were waiting on me, and the wind had snapped two rails off the fence the night before last, so I had to fix them before the dew dried.

I fed the sheep first, then fixed the fence, and last, I went to turn the irrigation valve. The pipe had rusted through the whole winter, and when I opened it, it only made a dry, hoarse sound while water seeped out from under the joint.

I cut a short piece of wire and wrapped the joint three times with hemp rope, pulling it tight.

There was still an old notice nailed to the outermost stretch of fence, its corners curled, a Blight Zone boundary warning printed on it and dated several years back.

But there was nothing to worry about. There were mages whose job was to handle that kind of thing. All I had to do was keep this farm running well.

I changed clothes after the sun came up. There was only one black outfit in the closet, washed until the color had gone pale. I shook it out and held it up to the window twice, checking for tears and holes apart from the ones age had already put there.

This was what I was going to wear to my grandmother Ruth's funeral.

I laid it flat on the bed and smoothed it with my palm until the wrinkles gave up. Then I sat down at the kitchen table with the paper in front of me and a pencil I had to sharpen twice.

I had the funeral arrangements written out on a piece of paper, and I checked it three times from top to bottom. Then I folded the paper in half, put it in my pocket, and went back out to keep working.

I carried the bucket out to the barn and fed the cows. The barn was still full of wet hay from the storm, and I had nowhere else to put it, so I dragged it to the back corner past the cow stalls, armload by armload, until my hands stopped shaking from the funeral and started shaking from the effort instead.

That was when something moved in the haystack behind the cow stalls.

I lifted a corner and saw a cat with short fur, cream-white gone gray with hay dust, crushed flat by the wet hay, a notch missing from its left ear, ear tips and tail tip washed a pale pink, and a deep tear in its hind leg where the edges of the wound were tinged with a faint gray-purple, pale like a bruise and not quite like one.

Plenty of injured animals had been coming onto the farm lately. Ruth had never let me deal with them. I hesitated for a moment, then remembered that Ruth was dead, and I never had to follow her rules again.

I crouched down first, then reached out. I tore hemp rope and an old shirt into strips for a temporary binding and cleaned around the wound with warm water, a little at a time.

It didn't cry out, and it didn't flinch, only fixed its bright green eyes on me. Ordinary medicine wouldn't treat it. The wound had been eaten by the Blight and needed magic, and it happened that I knew some.

That was the other half of why Ruth had kept me away from them. She never said it out loud, but she didn't like me using magic on the farm — not on the animals, not on the fences, not for anything that could be fixed with my hands instead.

She'd watched me do it once, years ago, and after that she made me promise.

I broke the promise anyway, because the alternative was leaving a living thing to rot in my barn.

After I treated it, I piled the hay back up and left the door open. If it wanted to stay, it could stay on its own.

After a stretch of time I couldn't measure, it stood up by itself and limped out past the edge of the farm, and when it reached the stand of dead oaks, it turned its head and looked at me once — the way an animal looks when it wants you to follow.

I didn't follow it. I just waved after it, put the leftover cloth strips in my pocket, and went back to carrying chairs. I still had Ruth's funeral to get ready.

More people came than I'd expected. I had set out seventeen chairs in the barn and wound up bringing more stools in from the kitchen. Neighbors, the deacon from town, and a few faces I didn't know at all.

I knew they were only there for the free food. More and more land was being hit by the Blight, and several farms had already shut down, and everybody was hungry.

Only a handful of farms nearby were still healthy, and Ruth's was one of them. And now she was dead.

Ruth's old neighbor took my hand and told me how sorry she felt for me, how young I was to have lost every person in my family. Someone asked, in a low voice, why I didn't just sell the farm.

"I'm not selling the farm," I said. "This is my home. If I sell it, I'll really have nowhere to go."

"You're sixteen," said one of the men near the door. "Sixteen and alone out here. Plenty of families in the city would take a girl like you in."

"I'm fine here." The farm was the only place I was safe. Out there, I'd just get laughed at and pushed around.

"My mother used to say the same thing about this place," the old neighbor said, still holding my hand. "And then she was gone, and the land went to the bank. Don't do that to yourself, sweetheart."

"I won't," I managed a smile.

She let go of my hand and patted it twice, the way you'd pat a dog you'd given up on.

While I turned to pour milk for them, I heard them talking about me. That I'd dropped out of high school in my first year and gone back to the farm. That I wasn't likable. That I hadn't even shed one tear when my grandmother died.

They said all of it while eating the food I had put out for them, the bread and the milk. I wasn't sad, though. They always said the same things, and I'd run out of ways to feel it years ago.

The barn was crowded, and I was looking at the ground, the way I usually did when people were talking about me, so the face in the crowd meant nothing until it did — and then my whole body went still, because Bonnie Fern stood there in a puffy coat and a knit scarf, her cheeks flushed pink from the cold.

I hadn't expected her to come, and when I saw her, I got so nervous that my arms and legs stopped working together — the same thing that always happened, a thin ringing starting up in the back of my head, my feet stopping where they were.

I'd seen her and told myself to keep pouring, keep my eyes down, pretend I hadn't noticed.

"Wren." Bonnie was the one who called out to me first, when I'd meant to pretend I hadn't seen her. "It's been two years since you dropped out, right? You look the same."