Page 4 of Howling Eve

“Raskyuil!” he bellowed back, and Nathiel’s chuckle followed after him as Dwin led him through the camp to an extremely conspicuous red tent at its edge.

Home sweet home. For now at least.

ChapterThree

Not another one! MaryAnne had hoped that the flyer in the boys’ dorm was the last she would see, but that seemed to not be the case as she had stepped outdoors for a moment only to immediately encounter the brightly colored advertisement for the carnival. She scowled at the flyer, tugging it off the wall that protected the children’s home. How were the flyers finding them when it was rare for anyone to so much as notice—much less disturb—the forbidding structure concealed within the woods that served as a home for orphaned children? Not even the people in the town seemed to recall it was there most of the time since it stood far outside town within its own meager stone fortifications.

Or they simply wished to forget it was there since no one in town wanted to be responsible for the welfare and burden of children that were not theirs, not even enough to offer protection within the town’s fortifications. The positive side to that was that the children’s home was rarely disturbed. And yet, although she had no idea where the older boys had found the first flyer, it seemed that whoever was distributing the flyers had somehow found them.

She would have to say something to Tibby. Although the elderly woman who ran the home had more than enough on her plate trying to run the kitchen, garden, and small farm attached to the children’s home, her husband Jason would be able to check for any sign of the carnival nearby. He often patrolled the woods around the property whenever he set out to check his traps and hunt for game with his grown son, Max. As of yet the carnival itself hadn’t made an appearance, but that didn’t mean anything. MaryAnne suspected that there were forerunners for the carnival, which explained the first flyer turning up. With the sudden appearance of the flyer on the children’s home itself, however, she had a sinking feeling that the carnival had finally arrived somewhere within their woods.

“What’s a carnival?” Sally asked, peeking at the flyer in MaryAnne’s hand before she could crush it up into her fist. “Molly and Sabrina are all excited but won’t tell me.” Unlike her elder sisters, Sally was all of ten years old, she had known nothing of the world before the Ravaging.

MaryAnne cursed silently to herself, looking over at the children, only then noting how many of them now held identical flyers as they gathered in small groups to talk excitedly among themselves. Like a large cloud of disrupted crows, a number of them suddenly flew toward the children’s home in an excited gaggle, their voices raised with shrill eagerness.

“Fuck,” she hissed and then grimaced, remembering her audience when Sally’s hands slapped over her mouth in shock, her brown eyes going round in horror.

“Miss MaryAnne… you cussed,” she whispered from behind her hands.

“I know. I’m sorry, that was terrible of me,” MaryAnne conceded as she gently pried the girl’s hands away from her mouth and held them in her own. “I shouldn’t have cussed. I was just surprised.”

Sally gave her a doubtful look. “About the carnival?”

“Kind of,” MaryAnne agreed. “Come on. Let’s go inside before the other children overwhelm Miss Tibby.”

Sally gave the flyer in MaryAnne’s hand a longing look. “It looks so pretty, Miss MaryAnne. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many colors in my whole life. Do you think Miss Tibby will let us go?”

MaryAnne’s chest tightened painfully, and she gave the girl’s hand a tiny squeeze. “I don’t know. You know the woods aren’t safe.”

“But this is different. This is people,” the little girl lisped, her eyes shining hopefully. “You always say that we shouldn’t be afraid, right, Miss MaryAnne?”

Stopping, MaryAnne sighed and crouched in front of Sally, brushing the wispy brown hair that had come loose from her braids out of her face. “We shouldn’t be afraid ofpeople,” she agreed. “But this is a little different. This isn’t like joining a town or settlement somewhere when you’re grown. They are not… human,” she explained.

Thin brows furrowed on the girl’s face. “You mean we should only trust human people? What about all the other people out there?”

“Well, it’s like my stories. Fairies and monsters might look nice or even fun, but they can be very dangerous. You wouldn’t want to be eaten by a troll, would you?”

A solemn look fell over the girl’s face, and she slowly shook her head, but a second later her brows beetled further in confusion. “What about the bad man who hurt Molly? He was human, and he did something very, very bad.”

Molly, Sabrina, and Sally had arrived at the children’s home just three years ago, dropped off by some scavengers who had found them in the ruins of a larger town. Molly, seventeen at the time, had been in shock and needed medical care for the numerous violations she had apparently suffered.

If MaryAnne had known at that time what those scavengers had done to her, she would have killed them all before they left the doorstep of the children’s home. She had spent a large part of her time surviving alone by avoiding strange men—she should have known. The appearance of charity and kindness of the scavengers delivering the girls was just enough distraction to keep her from suspecting. And that was her own shame that she hadn’t paid more attention to the state of the eldest as she hustled them inside.

As it was, she discovered later that the scavengers had violated Molly but tried to keep her with them while dropping off the younger girls at the children’s home. If her sisters hadn’t managed to bring attention to the frightened girl huddled among the group of men, they probably would have succeeded too. It left a bitter taste in MaryAnne’s mouth.

That alone should have tipped her off, but MaryAnne had been only twenty-six at the time, and after two years working at the home she was still inexperienced in what to look for in regard to trauma among the children. All she had seen were scrawny, frightened kids who needed to be fed and bathed, and scavengers to be sent on their way with the customary bit of bread and cheese in thanks. When the truth finally came out, it took months before Molly would even crack a smile, and many months more before the girl started to heal enough to open up to others at the home.

Although she was now technically an adult and of age to go find her way in another town or village, Molly, like MaryAnne, appeared content to remain and help care for the younger children. That didn’t stop her, however, from listening with a smile as Sabrina talked excitedly about offers from town.

Sabrina probably wouldn’t be with them for more than another season or two, not when a boy from the nearby town was coming up the path through the woods every few days to see her. The romance between the two was sweet, sometimes so much so that it was easy to forget the monsters that were within men too. They were just more difficult to spot.

Nevertheless, MaryAnne tried to remain positive for the sake of her kids. She taught them to remain cautious and how to look for signs that someone might try to harm them, while also encouraging them to not be afraid of the townspeople or even scavengers and traders. She wanted better from and for her kids.

But the fae. That was too dangerous to ignore.

MaryAnne swallowed and gave Sally a tight smile. “He did do something very bad. And sometimes people are like apples. Sometimes a pretty apple can hide something yucky and bad inside, but that doesn’t mean all apples are bad.”

“But not fairies?”

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