Louise shook her head, bristling. “They’re a waste! So much food and resources left to rot out in the woods. Do you know how even a fraction of that could benefit families in the village? Could benefitmyfamily?”
“They’re not left to rot. The offerings are always taken. There’s never a single one left,” Greer snapped, though she knew she was skirting around the uncomfortable truth.
Therewerefamilies in Mistaken whose gratitudes were a hardship, families who missed the extra bushel of apples, the side of venison, the bags of flour in the dark months of winter. The Beauforts certainly. But the gifts returned to the town well outweighed such a minor cost.
They had the Warding Stones.
They had the Benevolence’s favor.
No other outpost up or down the coast could claim such fortune.
Louise sighed. “There are a thousand things in these woods ready to snatch up whatever is left on the altars. Ospreys and kites, martens andlynx. Black bears. Foxes. Wolves. I…” She trailed off with a strangled noise of frustration. “The Benevolence is not what takes them. In all the years since our supposed truce, no one has ever seen a hint of them. Because they’re not there,” she spelled out.
“Then who is protecting us from the Bright-Eyeds?”
Louise rolled her eyes. “Those aren’t real, either.”
Horror unfurled in Greer’s stomach, making her queasy and sick. “But they…! Of course they are! Martha has seen them. They killed her entire family.”
Louise had the decency to look uncomfortable. “We don’t know what killed them. We never saw it.”
“What about the survivors from the other towns? They all say the same thing. You know their stories as well as I do,” Greer said, imagining the bloody chaos, the cries for help, the sky shattering into violence.
“Stories told by the men in charge. Men who have a vested interest in keeping everyone on edge so that they’ll be better listened to, so they’ll be better obeyed. Men like Hessel Mackenzie.”
“What does my father have to do with any of this?”
Louise pinched the bridge of her nose, smearing rabbit blood across her face. It made her look wild and feral. “How do you not see it?”
“See what?” Greer could feel anxiety thrumming within her, could hear the racing cadence of both her heart and Louise’s. The air between them felt charged and heavy, like in the moment just before a thunderstorm crested the mountaintops, ready to unleash its torrents. Greer was bewildered by how quickly her insistence on today’s gratitudes had turned into such a tangled, barbed mess.
“Our differences! The way you came trampling through the woods today in a dress nicer than my Sunday finest. The way you can carelessly leave an entire dinner behind on a tree stump. The way I’ve been foraging and hunting and trying to store up my family’s winter rations while you spend the whole day messing about in that damned book of yours, doodling pictures and notes and maps that will never matter!”
Greer’s mouth dropped, stung by the harsh words, stung that they’d come from her best friend. She turned, unable to take the weight ofLouise’s fervent glare, and crossed her arms, holding back the tears that wanted to come.
Only then did Louise soften. “Greer, I didn’t mean that.”
Her spine stiffened with resolve. “You said we were sharing today’s hunt.”
“I say that every trip,” Louise began uneasily. “You never take me up on it.”
“I am today. I’ll leave my share as a token.”
Louise huffed with disbelief. “Are you…are you in earnest?”
Though it pained her, Greer kept still.
After a long, taut moment, Louise cast the organs to the ground, letting them land near Greer’s feet. With a snarl of disgust, she grabbed her bag and stalked off.
Greer glanced back in time to see the flayed rabbits swinging from Louise’s rucksack like broken marionettes.
“Louise,” she started, but her friend had already disappeared into a thicket.
To Greer, each footfall was as loud as cannon fire, reverberating down her sternum and making her heart ache. She wished Louise would come back. She wished Louise would come and apologize. They’d lay out the tokens and go home, their friendship cleanly restored.
Though they’d certainly fought before—they’d been best friends since they were schoolgirls—the fights had always been small and incidental. Squabbles over dolls, hurt feelings on summer afternoons when the weather was hot enough to spark anyone’s temper. The week of silence after Louise learned Ellis had kissed Greer on the little footbridge spanning Curstag Creek. Greer hadn’t told Louise, because she knew it would upset her, and because, after over a decade of sharing every single thought with her friend, it felt delicious to keep one small thing for herself.
But this fight felt different.
