Craft (16 page)

“Your family sent my family a message.
They’re saying we kidnapped you. They’ve kidnapped my aunt,
Rachel’s mom, and say they’re going to kill her if we don’t hand
you over,” he replied.

“Oh no!”

Ellie was guilty in an instant. She
had not thought her family would assume she had been kidnapped. She
thought they would assume she had run away or was lost in the woods
because she was too stupid to find the way back. She did not assume
they would think she had been taken by the Coopers. She had
underestimated her family’s ability to make leaps in ill-formed
logic. She had underestimated their ability to blame the Coopers
for everything that went wrong. She should have known better than
to think they would blame her. There was always a Cooper to
blame.

Thane took a deep breath. He looked
nervous about sharing the information with her, but he ignored the
feeling. Not sharing was deadly. He wanted to help his aunt as best
he could. He wanted to save his family from a fight.

“But, the thing is…my dad thinks
they’re going to kill my aunt anyway and that your sister is making
up the kidnapping to try and justify their act. He thinks they’ve
already taken her tongue.”

“What’s that mean for you and your
family?” Ellie asked. “What’s he gonna do about it?”

“My family is getting ready to attack
your house as we speak,” Thane said.

Ellie’s eyes narrowed at his
admission. Were they enemies again? Was it foolish to ever think
otherwise? “And you’re okay with that, I suppose?” she
asked.

“I don’t want my aunt to die,” Thane
said.

“Well, it’s gonna be a bloodbath if
they attack again,” Ellie said. “My family’ll be expecting an
attack. Believe that.”

“You don’t have to rub it in,” Thane
said.

“I'm not rubbing it in! My family is
gonna be part of the dying crowd, too,” she said. “They have your
kin…your auntie. People fight hard for that sort of thing. I don’t
want any of my family to die either.”

“So where does that leave us? We just
let them fight it out?” he asked.

“You could take me prisoner and use me
as leverage with your family,” Ellie suggested. “Tell them that’s
where you were. Let them trade me for her.”

Thane looked shocked at her
suggestion. He was surprised Ellie would so willingly step into
danger for his aunt. He was also skeptical. He had more experience
with the inner-workings of the war. His family had not kept the
violence and the plotting from him. He knew it would never
work.

“They’ll just kill you,” he said. “And
blame me for escalating things. It won’t stop the attack they have
planned.”

“Then it looks as if you’ll just have
get your auntie back before the fighting starts,” Ellie
said.

“How?” Thane asked.

Ellie crossed her arms thoughtfully.
She could see one way out of the bloodbath. She was the only one
who could take care of things and make sure no one else got hurt
because of her. For the second time in a week, she would have to
disobey Neveah.

“Can you drive?” Ellie asked
Thane.

“Of course,” he said also crossing his
arms.

Thane was looking at her suspiciously,
not following her logic or understanding why she looked so
determined all of a sudden. It was as if she had decided to
shoulder the weight of the world.

“And a car?” Ellie asked.

“Yeah, I have one of those,” he
said.

Ellie nodded at his confirmation, not
catching his sarcasm. For the first time in her life, there was no
sense of questioning wonder or doubt of her abilities to do
something. She knew what they had to do and she was prepared to do
it.

“This is what we’re gonna do. You’re
going to drive me to my house and drop me off before we get there.
Then, you’re gonna wait and I’m gonna get your auntie for you,” she
said as if it was as easy as her words.

“How do I know…?” Thane started to
say.

Ellie was fed up with Thane’s
second-guessing. It just delayed what they had to do. She talked
over his words with unaccustomed impatience.

“You gotta trust me. I don’t want
nobody dead, especially on account of me,” she said.

Thane had a brief moment of doubt.
Then he went with his instinct. He decided to trust her. He knew
she was not a cold-blooded killer. The fact that she had saved him
was proof enough of that truth. She was not the same as her family.
Thane had to hope that difference would be enough to save his aunt,
to save his whole family from a fight they could not
win.

“Alright. Let me get my car. Wait
here,” Thane said.

He was back with his car before Ellie
had time to work up the proper worry over the situation. She jumped
into the passenger side of his car without realizing it was a
hundred times nicer than Cousin’s truck and waited impatiently for
him to get going again. He did not need her impatient taping to
feel the urgency of the situation. He peeled away from the corner
and sped out of town.

Nothing stood in their way on the
two-lane highway that led to Ellie’s house. It was just the roar of
the wind from the open windows and the feel of the deserted highway
speeding past them. The same woods Ellie had walked on her way into
town sped past in the opposite direction.

All Ellie could think about as they
drove was the situation she had caused. She had not meant to make a
mess of her adventure, or drag others in on it. She had just wanted
to see something she had never seen before. She had wanted to do
one brave thing in her life. She thought the adventure she had
found was not worth the mess it had caused. She had been selfish
and someone she did not even know was paying the consequences for
her actions. She vowed never to be so selfish again.

Ellie was impressed at how quickly
they were able to get to her house driving in Thane’s car. What had
taken them almost two days of walking only took them forty
minutes.

When the landscape finally shifted
into trees and bushes as familiar as her hands, Ellie forced Thane
to pull the car over. They were still a quarter mile from her
house. It was the closest she trusted him to be without running the
risk of discovery. When he pulled over, Ellie was ready. She set
aside her doubt and focused on the task.

“Give me ten minutes,” Ellie told
him.

“What happens after ten minutes?”
Thane asked.

Ellie shook her head, not wanting to
think of the alternatives. There were no alternatives. She would
not let there be. “Ten minutes and you’ll have your auntie back,”
Ellie promised.

Ellie hopped out of the car without
giving him a chance to reply and ran for her house. The wet heat
made running difficult, but she did not slow. She focused on the
feel of her feet against the pavement and what she would find at
the house. She hoped she was not too late to stop a
murder.

The house appeared around a bend in
the road. It had not changed. The old wood and white paint had not
shifted any with her adventure. The only difference was that her
yard was full of her family. They were stationed at strategic
intervals, to watch for any sign that the Coopers were coming to
claim back their kin. They talked, smoked and drank hooch from
their mason jars as they watched the road and forest. Ellie knew
they would not miss much. Their calm appearance was an illusion. A
Cooper would have underestimated them. The craft of the ward
Eugenia had put around the house welcomed Ellie home.

Ellie ignored the lookouts, who stared
at her in shock as she passed. She heard them start talking in
excited tones about her sudden reappearance as she let the
screen-door slam behind her on her way inside. She took a deep
breath to steady her panting as she came to a skidding halt in the
kitchen. Then, feeling nervous and worried her plan would not work,
she searched out her sister and the woman her sister had kidnapped.
Her feet pulled her toward the living room, where she felt Neveah’s
craft in the air.

Neveah, Careen, Cousin and Eugenia
were in the living room. A woman Ellie assumed was Thane’s aunt was
in the corner. She was tied to a wooden chair Ellie usually used to
stand on to clean the tops of the furniture. Neveah was taunting
the woman with her craft. She held seven knives in front of the
woman. Each time Neveah flicked her wrist, the knives came a little
closer to the woman’s face. As she flicked her wrist, Neveah made
comments about her uncertainty of maintaining the knives stability.
One or all of them would eventually pierce the woman. Ellie thought
Neveah was telling the truth. She sensed tenuousness to Neveah’s
craft. The feeling of the craft was erratic; Neveah’s meanness was
distracting her from true control.

The woman’s eyes were wide with panic.
Ellie could tell that she was thinking about the Bumbalows’
reputation of cutting out tongues. As Ellie stepped into the living
room, one of the knives cut into the woman’s face on the chin. The
blood trickled down the woman’s face. Her look of horror grew at
the feeling of pain. She did not cry out or try to beg for mercy
around the gag bounding her mouth. Her hatred of Bumbalows
prevented her from voicing her fear.

Ellie was not so bound to silence.
“Stop!” she cried.

The knives vanished with a startled
puff of smoke as Neveah turned to look at Ellie. Neveah’s eyes were
full of surprise and something else Ellie could not place easily:
relief, disappointment, a combination of the two? It was impossible
to tell. Careen smiled slightly at Ellie. Her smile was not warm.
She had thought her sister long dead. The smile was more an
expression of surprise than welcome. No one hugged her or welcomed
her back. It was almost as if they were disappointed that their
reason for kidnapping Thane’s aunt was no longer valid. They were
disappointed in the Coopers for actually agreeing to their demands.
The Coopers were supposed to be more devious than that. They were
supposed to kill Ellie and leave the body as proof of the murder.
It was the whole basis of the war. Killing the aunt would be harder
to justify with Ellie’s return. Not that justification would have
been too hard to find for them. They would find a way to reason
away the murder.

“They let you go?” Neveah asked
incredulously.

Ellie hesitated at the question. She
figured that if she told the truth, Neveah would hurt her, would
punish her beyond anything she had ever known. Running away from
home was not the sort of honesty Neveah cared to hear about.
Agreeing with the lie was an easier answer. It was the healthier
answer. Neveah had provided her with a lie that meant her secret
stayed her own.

“Yeah, they did. You can let her go
now,” Ellie said.

Neveah started laughing. The others
laughed with her. In their laughter was pity for Ellie’s ignorance.
She was too simple to understand; letting a Copper go was worse
than killing one. Things like that were just not done in their
world. It would be seen as an act of weakness. The Coopers would
think they had grown soft.

“Let her go? You’re kidding, right?”
Neveah asked.

“No…You said if they released me, you
would release her,” Ellie pointed out.

“We all say things we don’t mean
sometimes,” Neveah said. “I’m shocked the Coopers thought letting
you go would change anything. They must be getting
soft.”

The woman started saying things
through her gag, insults and denial that the Coopers would ever
‘get soft.’ Her eyes were full of fear, but she was brave. Her eyes
reminded Ellie of Thane when they had faced off in her shack. They
were the same dark color. The resemblance was easy to see. It was
easy to feel connected to the woman.

Ellie bit her lip. Her encounter was
not going well. She had hoped her appearance would be enough to
stop the bloodshed and free Thane’s aunt. In her heart, she had
known better. She was used to the feud being messy. She was even
used to the idea that sometimes Neveah and the rest of her family
stirred up fights that got bloody, but she was not used to the idea
that a woman was going to die in her living room. And it was all
Ellie’s fault. It was her fault for dreaming of a world outside her
house.

Angry at the thought, Ellie decided
she was not going to let Neveah get away with what she had planned.
She was not going to do nothing, not when she had the power to
change things; and especially not when she could craft her way out
of the situation in front of her.

It was not as if Neveah had to know
about Ellie’s role in freeing the woman. Ellie could hide her help.
She could disguise it. Neveah would never dream that Ellie was
capable of craft without a gesture. She would never expect her to
practice such a strange thing. Ellie knew that Neveah was expecting
the Coopers to attack. Their craft was what she had planned
against, not Ellie’s. It was all the advantage Ellie
needed.

Ellie ignored their laughter and
focused on the first thing that came into her mind: fire. Her eyes
narrowed in concentration as she searched for her craft without the
gesture. Her hands clenched at her sides as she resisted the
impulse to raise her hand. It was difficult without the immediate
threat of Thane killing her but it was not impossible. The terror
in the woman’s eyes and Neveah’s mocking laughter was
enough.