The Pens

The animals had been arriving since dawn.

He heard them from the dormitory, faintly, as he dressed: a ragged, rising clamor from the far side of the kitchen garden, a muddle of cries that carried over the frozen grass. Ronald, lacing his boots, went white at the sound and said nothing. Karl turned his face to the wall. Even Albert, curled in his corner, lifted his head and listened with an expression of stricken blankness.

It was Sunday, the twenty-fifth of October.

By midmorning, Cassian stood at the rail of the back pens with the Deacon beside him and the wind in his face.

They were not what he had expected. He had pictured a sacrificial yard, a pit, an altar with a ring for tethers. They were just pens: plain, rough-boarded, whitewashed, the kind you'd find behind any farmhouse in Iowa. A row of low wooden sheds under a tin roof. A trough. A muddy yard, with straw strewn over it, and a smell, warm, rank, familiar, that went through him like a blade.

Pig.

Chicken. Goat. Feathers and dung and sweet hay.

He had not smelled that smell since August. His body knew it before his mind did. His shoulders loosened. His hands, hanging at his sides, curled slightly, as if around the handle of a bucket.

In the first shed, crates of doves, stacked to the roof. Hundreds of small round eyes, black and bright. The sound of their cooing was soft, endless, almost tender, like water in a drain. In the second shed, the roosters, red and barred and gleaming, packed shoulder to shoulder in wire cages, shrieking and stamping. In the third, a pen of seven kids on shaky legs, pressing together in a corner, bleating at nothing. In the fourth, a deep bed of straw, and in it, huddled in a pink heap, seven piglets.

They looked up when he came to the rail.

One of them, the smallest, rose on its stubby legs and trotted over and pushed its snout through the slats. It sniffed his sleeve. Its eyes were small and blue, with sandy lashes. It made a soft inquiring grunt.

He took a step back.

"Forty-nine," said the Deacon.

She stood with her gloved hands clasped before her, looking not at the animals but at the sky. Her face was gray and pinched. She had not eaten, he thought. Or slept.

"Twenty-one doves, fourteen cocks, seven kids, seven shoats. The count is exact. They are inspected by the Rector's own hand at dawn." Her voice was dry. "They have been well kept. Fed. Watered. Handled gently. It is a point of courtesy. One does not offer the Guest a thing that has been abused."

"Courtesy."

"It is a very old house, Mr. Hale. There are rules."

He didn't answer.

He was looking at his hands.

…

His father had taken him to the plant on his ninth birthday.

He remembered it perfectly. The gray bleak March dawn, the frost on the gravel. The long concrete shed at the back of the lot, where the pens lay. Edward Hale, in his rubber apron, huge and silent, chewing a toothpick. The sound of the pigs in the dark: not screaming, never screaming, just a low steady hum, a great sleepy groaning, as if the whole building were breathing.

Come on, boy.

He'd gone in. He'd stood at the rail with his arms wrapped around himself. Edward had lifted a piglet from the pen and tucked it under one arm like a football and said, "Hold out your hand."

He'd held it out.

"Now watch."

He'd watched. He remembered the knife. The small bright motion, almost gentle. The animal's quiet surprise. And then his father's rough palm, closing over his own, wrapping his fingers around the handle, and the warm weight settling into his grip.

Here. You try.

He remembered being sick afterward, in the gutter, with his father's laughter booming over his head. Good. That means you've got a conscience. Means you won't be careless. A broad hand on the back of his neck, steadying him. A rough proud squeeze. For years that had been the best thing he knew: that squeeze, that voice, that one moment each winter when his father was proud.

He'd hated himself for loving it.

He still did.

The wind lifted. Somewhere in the pens, a rooster crowed, cracked and thin. His hands lay open at his sides. They were large and square, with thick wrists and scarred knuckles, the hands of a man, not a boy. The right one still bore the faint white ghost of a gash across the palm.

They remembered everything.

That was the horror of it. His heart did not want this. His mind was a sheet of white terror. But his hands, standing at the rail in the cold bright air, were quite calm, and warm, and patient. They knew what they were for.

…

"Pay attention."

Tessa Quill had come up beside him. He hadn't heard her. She wore her gray cloak over a plain wool dress, and her cropped black hair stood up in the wind. A bundle lay across her forearms, wrapped in white linen.

She held it out.

"The Rector's compliments."

He took it. The linen was cold, and heavy. He did not need to unwrap it. He felt the shape through the cloth, the slight curve, the bone handle, the weight settling across his palm like a hand.

"You know the order," said Tessa. "You know the words."

"Yes."

"Then I'll show you the Hearth. We have a quarter hour. The Deacon wants you rested."

She walked him through it, in the draughty emptiness of the practice barn, with the sacks of straw and the stone lip of the oven. She was as cold as ever, as precise, as clipped. Left foot forward. Wrist loose. Don't look into the dark. The count is the Rector's; yours is only the work. She said it all in the voice of someone reciting a recipe. She did not mention his week in the cell. She did not mention the morning he had come back without his cloak.

But when she handed him a straw sack, her fingers brushed his, and she snatched them back.

"Don't," she said, very low.

"I didn't—"

"I'm not afraid of you."

"I never said you were."

"I'm not."

She stood with her fists clenched, breathing hard, glaring at the floor. A faint tremor ran through her. He thought of Karl in the dining hall, bending to whisper in her ear. Karl's glasses, winking. Karl's hand on her sleeve. He told her. And she took it straight to the Rector. The knowledge sat between them like a stone.

"Karl Brandt," said Cassian.

Her head snapped up.

"I know it was him." He kept his voice level. "I'm not angry. I just want you to know that I know."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"All right."

"I mean it." Her face was white. "I don't. He's a, he's a diligent boy. He wanted to help the Society. He came to us in good faith."

"Okay."

"Stop saying that!"

The door creaked.

…

Karl stood in the entrance, with a stack of folded towels in his arms.

He had been listening. Cassian could tell. There was a particular quality of stillness in the set of his shoulders, the angle of his chin, that spoke of a boy who had stood outside a door a few moments too long. But the smile was in place, bright and easy, and his voice when he spoke was the voice of a willing and cheerful aide.

"I thought you might want towels. For the, ah, for after."

Tessa took a half-step away from Cassian.

"Thank you, Karl. Leave them."

"Certainly." He set the towels on the bench, with great care. Then, with an air of casual helpfulness, he turned to her. "I wondered if I might stay and assist. I've read the rubric. I could hold the baskets, perhaps. Or count the offerings. I would be very quiet."

"No."

"I only thought—"

"I said no." Her voice cracked like a whip. "It's not your work. You're not Chosen, Karl. You're not asked. You'll do as you're told and carry your towels."

For an instant the smile slipped.

It was only for an instant. A flicker. But Cassian, who was watching, saw a flash of something raw and hot behind the glasses, the pinched, bright, avid look of a boy who has been offered a door and had it closed in his face. His fingers curled into his palms. A pulse jumped at his temple.

Then the smile slid back into place.

"Of course," said Karl. "Forgive me."

He bowed, and went out. And Cassian saw the line of his back as he went, stiff and quivering, and understood that it was not gratitude that drove Karl Brandt, nor even ambition. It was something thinner and hungrier and more dangerous. It was the knowledge that he would never, no matter how well he knelt, be asked in.

He would sell us all for one invitation.

…

Albert was standing at the door of the barn when he came out.

He must have been there some time. He had a bucket in one hand, a rag in the other, and a look of such exhaustion on his face that for a moment Cassian didn't recognize him. His eyes were sunken and red-rimmed. His scarf hung loose. The ring of white marks on his throat stood out in the cold light, as clear as brands.

"I was sent to scrub the troughs," said Albert.

"Okay."

He did not move. He stared at Cassian's hands, at the white-wrapped bundle he carried. His throat worked.

"You look like him," he said.

"Who?"

"Your father." The words came out thin and strange. "I never met him. But I've seen... I've seen the way you hold it. The knife. Like it's a, like you were born with it." His voice cracked. "It's the same. It's exactly the same."

Cassian's fist closed.

The old heat shot up his arm, bright and blinding. He had stepped forward before he knew it, with his shoulder drawn back, and Albert flinched, hard, and dropped the bucket. It clanged on the stones. Water slopped across the frozen mud.

Neither of them moved.

Albert stood with his arms up, shielding his head, his glasses crooked, shaking. His eyes were squeezed shut. A tear ran down his cheek and he made no move to wipe it.

And Cassian saw.

It wasn't an insult. It was not meant as one. It was a fact, bleakly stated, from a boy too frightened to hate. Albert was looking at him as he'd looked at the thing in the hallway: not with contempt, but with a dull, dazed, helpless horror, as though Cassian were a weather, a winter, a thing that happened.

The fist opened.

"I'm sorry," he said.

Albert opened his eyes.

"I'm sorry I scared you. I won't hit you." He lowered his arm. "I'm not him."

"I know." Albert's mouth trembled. "I know you're not. That's the worst part."

He stooped and picked up the bucket. Then he walked away toward the troughs, hunched and slow, and left a dark trail of drops on the frozen ground.

Cassian stood alone outside the barn.

The wind had risen. In the pens, the doves were cooing, and the roosters shrieked, and the piglets grunted in the straw. Beyond the garden wall, the chapel stood black against the white sky. He turned his hands over and looked at them. They lay there, broad, scarred, still.

They did not shake.

That's the thing, he thought. They never do.

Of all the dreadful things at Blackthorne, of the thing beneath the chapel, the wrapped head, the black Hearth, the blood, there was nothing so terrible as these two hands.