Page 65 of Son of a Witch (The Wicked Years 2)

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“You gave me memory. That’s the past.”

She corrected him. “Memory is part of the present. It builds us up inside; it knits our bones to our muscles and keeps our heart pumping. It is memory that reminds our bodies to work, and memory that reminds our spirits to work, too: it keeps us who we are. It is the influence that keeps us from flying off into separate pieces like”—she looked around—“like this peel of orange, and that clutch of pips.”

“Play for me again.”

“I’m tired of playing,” she said. “For now, anyway.”

Before they went back inside, they explored the high-ceilinged barn. “I’ll look again in better light tomorrow,” said Liir after poking around a bit. “But I think this was a printing press.”

“Out here in an old farmhouse in the middle of nowhere?” said Candle.

“Maybe it printed seditious tracts,” said Liir. “Someone didn’t like what it was being used for, and expressed that opinion with an ax and a hammer.”

“From pressing cider to publishing broadsides.”

“Both are presses. This is Apple Press Farm. I’m naming it.”

They retired. Candle fell asleep quickly. Liir rolled up against her for warmth. I am not a soldier any longer, he said to himself; this is not my Qua’ati girlfriend. He stiffened, as a man will, but took pains to govern the appetite. She was his rescuer and not his concubine. He might be infected with something contagious, and he wouldn’t endanger her that way.

When it seemed that the sweet lettucey smell of her breathing, the roll of her breast in the moonlight was too much to bear—that he would sink his mouth upon it—he turned onto his side. A minute or two of envisioning the burning bridge at Qhoyre was all it took to restore him to the sadder state in which he’d spent most of his life.

3

IN NOON LIGHT, the mess in the main barn proved more severe. Dozens of trays of letters used by compositors in a back room—once a milking stall maybe—were overturned on the floor. The wheels and weights and great drum of the press proper, cabineted in well-oiled oak and well-blackened brackets and footings of iron, had been gashed, and fairly recently, by swords or axes. The metal cuts gleamed with as yet untarnished brilliance.

They saw no sign of blood. Perhaps the obscure printers had gotten wind of an assault and cleared out in time.

Liir poked about in the charred rubble of the barn hearth. He managed to dislodge a few scraps of a broadsheet. He pointed to the words, but Candle said that she couldn’t read the script.

“‘Pieties of the Apostle,’” Liir told her. “That’s the heading. Here, beneath, it says ‘The Virtue of the UGLY.’”

“I didn’t know the ugly had special virtue,” said Candle, “just a sort of misfortune.”

The print was small and Liir had to carry it to the open door in order to make it out. “It seems a blameless sort of religious tract, near as I can tell.”

“Perhaps the press was used for more incendiary publications, too.”

“Maybe.” He rubbed away char and declaimed from the parchment: “‘The Apostle boasts no special skill. For his humility the Unnamed God has blessed him with the reward of untroubled conviction.’”

“I told you,” said Candle, “we’re already converted. I don’t need a further catechism.”

She left to gather firewood, and when she returned a few hours later leading a goat, Liir said, “You are systematically raiding some nearby farm, aren’t you? Is that why you have been carrying your domingon with you?”

“There are a few holdings in these hills, farther up,” she admitted. “Mostly they’re abandoned at that time of the morning, but it’s true: the instrument helps lull any resident grandfather into his morning nap.”

“I hope you’re not beggaring them.”

“Should I bring it back?”

Milk. Cheese, in time? “No.”

But what were they doing here? Resting up—for what?

“I’ve been scrutinizing such flecks of pages as I could salvage,” he told her. “I’ve come to think this circular was not a missionary tract. I think it’s oppositional. You just don’t see it at first—you read some ways down and begin to find resistance to the notions of the Apostle. It’s a clever rhetorical device, in its way; it may have fooled some readers, or convinced others to join a resistance to—this Apostle, whoever he is. It’s seditious, this paper, that’s what it is. And whoever didn’t like it traced its origins here, and made their sentiments known.”

“I hope they don’t come back.”

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