The Bunny in the Fox's Palm novel · Chapter 9 of 24
Chapter 9: The Hollow
The Hollow smelled like rain on brick and yeast, and my chest hurt the second I breathed it in.
Soren drove us down the hill in a black car that did not belong on those streets.
My grandmother rode in the back seat with her hands folded.
She had not said a word since the gate.
He stopped at the mouth of the alley by the old tannery, where the Hollow wall began.
Rabbits stood in the doorways.
Dozens of them, in aprons and work coats, watching the fox lord's car with the flat, wary eyes of animals that have learned to count exits.
"This is as far as I can come," Soren said. "Foxes aren't welcome past the wall."
"No kidding."
"I'll wait."
"It could take hours."
"Then I'll wait for hours."
I got out and the rain hit my face.
My grandmother took my elbow, and I shook her off.
The warren hall was a long low room above the bakery where I had learned to knead dough.
Two dozen elders sat on benches along the walls.
I knew every one of them.
The old man who ran the fish stall.
The twins who kept the laundry.
The woman who had taught me my letters, and held my hand at my mother's funeral.
They all went quiet when I walked in with Agnes behind me.
I stood in the middle of the floor with rain running off my sleeves.
"Say it," I said.
Agnes shut the door.
"Hazel."
"Say it to them. Say it to my face with everybody here."
She was sixty-three, and small, and she had raised me.
Her chin came up anyway.
"I sold your Keeping to Linden MacMahon," she said. "Three weeks before the Midwinter. The tithe was forty thousand dollars, and the Hollow didn't have it."
A murmur ran through the room.
"Forty families," she said. "The bakery, the laundry. The fish stall. They'd have lost the buildings by spring, and the children with them. He said one rabbit for a year, and everything forgiven. I said yes."
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