A Hatred Most Pure novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Road North

Tied to Bram's saddle, then Ansel's, Cora tries to slip her cord and fails; at Dunmarrow's gate every Urekai adult turns their back on her.

On the second night I got the cord off my wrist.

It took me most of an hour, working it against the edge of my belt buckle while the fire burned down and the riders slept in their cloaks.

Bram Hartley had tied me to his saddle that morning, with a knot he said his daughter taught him.

"She's nine," he'd told me. "She'd have made you cry trying to get out of it."

I proved him wrong a little after midnight.

I walked into the trees without a sound and counted a hundred steps before I let myself breathe.

Then I came around a pine trunk and found Ansel Rooke sitting on a fallen log in the middle of the path.

He had his hands on his knees, the black glove on the left one.

He didn't look surprised, and he didn't get up.

"The hundredth step," he said. "I wondered if you would make it."

I turned to run the other way.

"Cora."

He said it quietly, and my feet stopped on their own.

"There are eleven of us and one of you, and there's a river two miles east that's in flood," he said. "Come back to the fire."

"Or what?"

"Or I come and carry you." He stood. "And I'd rather you walked."

I walked.

He fell in behind me, close enough that I felt the heat of him against my back the whole way.

At the fire Bram was awake and sitting up with his beard in his fist.

"Told you," he said to nobody. "Told every one of you. Ten coppers each, pay up."

A man on the far side of the fire groaned and dug in his pocket.

"You bet on me?" I said.

"On how far," Bram said. "I said a hundred. Nobody believed me. You're a very orderly runner, Miss Tarrant."

"I've had practice."

"I know." He tossed me a heel of bread. "Hester packed that. She said you can't stand the crusts, so eat around them."

I held the bread and didn't eat it yet.

Ansel crouched in front of me.

He took my right wrist in his bare hand and turned it over and looked at the red line the cord had left.

"You rubbed it raw," he said.

"You tied it tight."

"I didn't tie it."

"Bram's knot, then."

"Bram's knot is meant for horses." He pressed his thumb flat on the inside of my wrist, over the pulse. "Not you."

His thumb stayed there.

I could feel my own heartbeat knocking up against it, and I knew he could feel it too.

"You're slow," he said. "I thought you'd be scared."

"I am scared. I've been scared since I was fifteen." I looked at his hand. "It stopped being new."

His thumb didn't move.

The glove was still on his left hand, resting on his knee, and I saw the fingers inside it shake.

It was only a small shake. It was cold, I told myself, and he had been sitting on a log in the frost for an hour waiting for me.

He saw me looking and closed the hand into a fist.

"You got big," I said.

I don't know why I said it. It was the first thing in my head, and my mouth was tired.

His eyes came up and held mine.

"You said that on the pier," he said. "I was eight years old. You stood over me and said, look how small he is."

"I remember."

"And then?"

He waited.

I had a whole list of ways to answer that, and they all sounded like lies.

"And then I pushed you in," I said.

Nobody around the fire spoke now, and Bram had stopped fiddling with his beard.

"Yes," Ansel said, and let go of my wrist.

It was a plain word, with nothing in it.

He stood and went back to the log, and he sat down with his back to me and his bad hand pressed against his thigh.

I ate the bread. I ate around the crust.

On the sixth evening the road climbed out of the pine woods into bare hills, and the hills ended at a wall of black stone.

Dunmarrow Hold sat against the mountain with its gates standing open and torches already lit.

The Urekai were waiting inside.

There were hundreds of them, men and women in black wool, with children held in front of them or pushed behind.

They stood in rows along the road, silent.

Ansel rode through the gate without looking back at me.

Bram led my horse in behind him.

And as we passed, one by one, every adult Urekai on both sides of the road turned around and showed me their back.

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