On his seventeenth birthday, Frey woke up knowing he would be shot in the village square next to the whipping post. All the people in Endwoode would come out to watch. They would stand united in facing him, a cruel smirk extending from one lip to another, each, no doubt having looked forward to the day Frey would take his lead, hoping that, rather than saving his life, it would end it summarily.

Frey had committed no crime, was guilty of less than most in such times and such places. He was facing the administration of lead because taking a bullet was preferable to what it prevented. There was a rampant illness known the land over as ‘the Frothe’ —so named for the most common sign that one had it: froth, like wisps of cotton, would pour from the mouths of the afflicted.

There had been a time when the telltale sign amounted to a brand for execution. Fortunately, those most sensitive to seeing the twine between cause and effect noticed that soldiers, most of whom bore lead in their bodies from their trade, fighting forgotten campaigns, embracing the speeding lead of opposing factions in their foolhardy flesh, were disproportionately unaffected by the disease. And in more civil circumstances, it would be recounted with mute sorrow how many a father had shot his Frothe-turned son only to see the son restored in mind but maimed in body.

In Endwoode, to prevent such things from happening, it was custom for all over the age of seventeen to receive a lead bullet in their bodies. To refuse was to accept exile, something few would prefer. The blank spaces between pockets of humanity was simply known as ‘the Outside.’ Just as it was swathed in pale secrecy and dread unknowing on maps, so it was thought that true monsters dwelled there off paper. Travel was not a luxury, but a punishment, and was reserved for the criminal, the outcast, or the sick in mind. The prudent in these times simply stayed put.

Frey could hear children roughhousing as they went about their morning chores. His eyes were sore from the fitful sleep he had had. The cots in the lodge were filled with slumbering adolescents, all male, orphaned like him. The boys took out their bereavement on Frey, as it was widely thought that Frey’s father was responsible for the death of their parents. Frey’s bed was removed from the rest, placed fast against the wall. He always slept with his back to it and with an antler-handled knife clutched close to his chest. He kicked his legs over the edge of the bed and ran a hand through his greasy black hair, grimacing as he brushed against a lump on his head that he had suffered from well-aimed stone the day previous. His knuckles were skinned and calloused from fighting. Dressing in his rough, work-worn garb, slipping on his doeskin boots, he left the longhouse and stumbled out into the soft light of early morning before any of the other boys had roused.

Outside, Frey saw children bumbling about, carrying buckets of water for drawing baths or kindling for lighting fires. Grim-faced adults swaggered among them, some limping, some with visible scars from where they had been shot. There were few that lived past the age of seventeen. Those that did carried an air of invincibility and insufferable pride with them everywhere they went. They had survived their lead administration and thought themselves immune to the Frothe in all its manifestations and some genuinely believed the bullet had made them immune to all harms.

Frey scratched his patchy cheek, drew a hand down his face as if his skin were a mask he could discard. He shut the door to the longhouse, taking care not to let it slam. A few long-legged steps took him past simple wood houses, thatched with straw. Already, the village was stirring. Passing adults regarded him with unfriendly circumspection, slacking children with awe. No one spoke to him, for which he was grateful.

He walked through the town and came to its wooded edge. A faint game trail wended a way through the scrub, and he could hear the brook bubbling from deeper within. Hesitating, he spared a look back at his hostile home. A few scorn-faced adults stood watching him, speaking hatefully to one another from the sides of their mouths. Frey rolled his shoulders and hung his head and stepped into the woods. He took a trail that led to a small brook. Without surprise, he noticed a nest of red hair, capping the lean frame of a girl about his age, maybe a year younger, sitting on the bank, holding something flat before her eyes upon which she was concentrating with knitted brows.

“Been waiting for me?” asked Frey flatly.

The girl remained invested in the flat object for a moment longer, turning her head towards him but keeping her eyes trained on the object. Then she looked up at him. Her frown reversed into a nervous, friendly grin.

A brief, tight smile flashed on Frey’s face. “How’d you know I’d come this way?”

The girl pursed her lips and tilted her head and shrugged. “I just knew.”

“Weird,” said Frey, scowling.

The girl continued to smile but made no answer. She turned her face away and watched the river anxiously.

Frey watched it too, face grave. “Nell,” he said, standing next to her, kicking a twig into the brook and watching the water carry it away, “I think they’re gonna kill me.”

Without turning to look up at him, keeping a steady green gaze on the silver-blue water, Nell continued to smile as if she would die if she stopped. “Think so?” Her voice was giddy, uncanny.

“Won’t be any better opportunity. They’ve been waiting for this day, I’m sure.”

Nell stroked the book she had on her lap.

“They’ve wanted me dead a long time.” Frey darted a glance over at Nell. She seemed engrossed in the passing water. A malicious shade darkened his face. “Might as well give them what they want. I’ve lived as long as I’d care to, anyway.”

Nell’s hands became still. “Don’t say that.”

Frey looked down at her from under his eyelids. “They’re going to kill me.”

“They’re not,” said Nell. She was clutching the edges of her book, white-knuckled.

“They are. He’s gonna point the gun straight at my head and he’s gonna pull the trigger and the bullet gonna go straight between my eyes and out the back of my head–”

Nell slammed her book on the bank and jumped up. “They won’t cause they know I’d burn each and every one of them alive in their own fucking beds. And I will. I will.”

Angling his body away from her, Frey listened with a carven face, one eyelid drooping where the muscle had been cut, giving him a permanently sleepy look in one eye. Without looking at her, he said, “No one’s afraid of you.”

Nell curled her lip, face aflame, and then turned away sharply. She sat where she had been and drew her knees up so she could rest her chin on them and stared at the water.

Frey looked at her. A brief smile twisted his lips. Then his face paled with remorse, and he grimaced at his own warped reflection broiling in the brook. He put hand to his forehead and pushed it up over his hair and held it there for a few seconds. He let go and walked over and sat next to Nell. “Can you read me something?”

Nell turned her eyes in the opposite direction and looked off downstream. They sat in silence for some seconds. Then Nell rubbed her eyes, picked up her book, and cracked it open to a random page, not looking once at Frey. She read aloud.

It behooves a man, a true man that is, to align his actions with virtues more befitting the better half of humanity. For, in man, are assembled the esteemed qualities that prove him of greater worth over and above all such inferior species and genders. So, go forth! O, bipedal magnificence! The world is yours to shape as you will.

When she had finished, her face had softened, and she immediately looked over at Frey to see what kind of impact the words had had on him. She saw that he sat with one leg drawn up, head titled, face clouded, the tempered thoughts inside his head all but boiling the air around his ears. He turned to look at her, quick and desperate. “Does that mean anything to you?”

Nell smiled and shook her head. “I just like how they sound.”

“How what sounds? The words?”

Nell nodded. “People don’t talk like that.” She cast an appreciative look at the open book in her hands. “I think it’s beautiful.” She looked back at Frey. “Isn’t that why you asked me to read it?”

Frey pushed himself to his feet. “No.”

Nell looked up at him in expectation, but he just stood rubbing his knuckles and staring at the earth between his boots. Nell was about to ask why he wanted to hear her to read when he spoke.

“Should I run?”

Turning away sharply, Nell looked at the book in her hands with a stunned expression. “I wouldn’t,” she hastened to say.

Frey looked down at her. “Why not?”

“Run where?” She looked up at him, wide-eyed.

“Anywhere. Out there.” He nodded toward the woods on the other side of the brook.

Nell looked where he had nodded and then looked back and shook her head.

“Why?” he demanded. “It can’t be any worse than here. Nothing can be worse than here.” He looked at Nell, remembering the day she had shown up, carrying the same book, abandoned by her mother here in this horrible place. He swallowed and dared ask the question: “Can it?”

“There’s nothing better out there.”

“You’re certain?”

Nell placed the book gently on the bank and got to her feet. She walked over to Frey and put her arms around him and said, “This is as good as it gets.”

Frey’s animated expression became wooden. Without returning the embrace, he stared bleakly at the woods across the brook. He put a hand on Nell’s shoulder and peeled her away like a leech. “Don’t watch.” He turned and walked back the way he had come, back to Endwoode. Without stopping or turning, he said, “Unless you want to see me die.”

Nell watched Frey go, his black-haired head hanging severely, and his shoulders seeming broken because of how much they hunched. She didn’t expect him to look back but she hoped he would. He disappeared among the trees, and Nell turned back to the brook. She placed a hovering hand over her mouth and breathed in deeply and exhaled with a shudder. She brought her hands to her temples and wept.

The sun was nearly at its peak when Frey walked back into Endwoode. He walked a spectral figure, pale as fine dust. His face was haunted by horrible potentials. Near the whipping post was a carnival throng. Children, unable to stand still, pushed and shoved, and adults scowled at them, sparing a few remonstrative smacks for any that got too close. They parted for Frey, murmuring scornfully like a hateful tide. He walked through them and stood near the post, which was weather-stained, thick enough that one could just barely wrap one’s arms around it. Hemp rope was coiled near its base. Dark scabs of sun-dried blood from a hundred shootings had stained the base and the dirt all around.

“Set yourself,” boomed the Administrator.

A bald man with a grizzled auburn beard streaked with grey. He held a flintlock pistol, barrel skyward, primed and ready to fire. He had been a soldier under the banner of a country that no longer existed and he himself carried lead swan-shot in his body from his time fighting a war that was forgotten, esoteric and pointless even as it had unfolded. Safe from the horrible symptoms of the Frothe, he had watched untold acts of madness unfold among his brothers in arms, each waging a brutish war against each, slavering all the while like rabid beasts. The experience had changed him, and not for the better.

How he wound up in Endwoode, no one remembers. The young weren’t there when it happened. The old have forgotten or otherwise would not tell. But he reformed the village, became the source of fear of all things Outside, because he himself was from there and knew first-hand that it was to be feared. He had brought his dragoon flintlock pistol with him and had set to proselytizing lead administration soon after his arrival, though none took seriously the idea that taking a bullet was good for one’s health.

Unlike the rest of the village, the Administrator bore Frey no ill will. Frey’s father, having obstinately refused the administration of lead and boisterously denied the existence of the Frothe, set the stage for his own timely and politic downfall, which the Administrator took full advantage of in cementing his place as head of affairs in Endwoode. Frey’s father turned in the courthouse, mid diatribe, during a customary assembly for discussing the distribution of food. Always full of caution and warning, having seen the disease firsthand many times over, the Administrator persisted in making it a topic of discussion whenever the chance presented itself, and even when it didn’t.

That day in the courthouse was no different. As always, Frey’s father, hearing the cautionary speech of the Administrator, listening with blood boiling to what he thought were false accounts of a fictional ill, railed and hurled abuse and gesticulated disparagingly, encouraging others to join in. In the courthouse that day, he worked himself into a particularly hateful frenzy. He spewed curses, oaths, and beastly language that made men and women blush and clap their hands to their ears. All eyes were pinned on him. When he stopped mid-word, coughing, wiping his eyes, the mob of onlookers did likewise and suddenly all were acutely aware that the courthouse was filling with smoke and that the building was on fire.

The rush toward the door was as chaotic as a dam breaking. People knocked one another over, trampled the fallen, pulled at those that were ahead and closer to the door. And in the middle of it all, Frey’s father froze. A single white, curdling mass of spittle gathered at one corner of his mouth. It detached and floated ceiling-ward like a small, viscous cloud over the boiling sea of the panicked. All who saw it stopped and stared with an awe that bordered on doomed certitude. And there was lull in the panicked mob, disbelief and horror stealing tongues and minds.

Then everything snapped into chaos and violence. A chorus of gibbering and howling and bleating and Frey’s father was like a blood-drunk wolf let loose among the sheepfold, his foaming maw hung with torn flesh, clumps of human hair, splattered with blood and human fat. His hands were tensed and talon-like and clawed and snatched at everything around him that moved and breathed and screamed. In his grip, bones fractured and cartilage popped, clothes and skin tore away in shreds.

Worse yet, there is a strange and horrible aspect of the disease in that it inspires in others, namely, those who have lost their wits to fear and panic, being unable to witness the deeds of inhuman violence committed against their friends and loved ones, to turn into that which they had not a moment prior feared and hated most of all. With flashfire quickness, a veritable cloud of froth, from many slavering mouths, had gathered and mixed with the smoke, whipped and whirled by the ever-increasing heat and the mindless milling of the soon-to-be slaughtered until it seemed a very maelstrom to presage the end of all things.

Among those who had gotten out was the Administrator. He stood away from the blaze that had by now engulfed the whole courthouse, his stomach turning with the smell of burning humanity, his face glowing with vindication despite the great loss of life he was witnessing. Already the survivors looked at him with sheepish looks of apology and hope. And in the days and weeks to come, it was no struggle to convince them to take a bullet against another tragedy such as this. Endwoode came to revere the Administrator and vilify Frey’s father and, by extension, Frey, though he had played no part whatsoever in the atrocity.

Now, many years later, Frey stood where his father would not and scanned the faces of the crowd. Frey would’ve given his life to see one friendly face in the crowd at that moment. He had known since he was young that one day he would be shot. But he didn’t truly believe it until he saw the sharkish, silver sides of the pistol glinting in the noontime light, right before it would vomit dark lead into his quivering flesh. His hands felt like they had been dipped into a frozen, scum-covered slough. Frey bade his legs to move and, miraculously, they obeyed. He turned and stood sideways.

From the corner of his eye, he could see the ambiguous shape of the Administrator hesitate. “Stand like that, I’m likely to miss.”

“I’ve made my choice,” said Frey.

Someone in the crowd called him a coward. Others encouraged the Administrator to aim for his head. The Administrator shrugged, levelled the pistol, closed one eye and sighted Frey with the other. “Suit yourself.” He inhaled and then held his breath and slowly pulled the trigger.

The booming report that split the air was followed by the screaming and shrieking of children, almost all of them putting their hands over their ears and turning to their neighbour with mirrored expressions of awe. The adults stood statue still with arms folded, waiting for the gun smoke to clear away with the breeze, standing with indifference and withheld judgement to see what matter Frey had been made of and to what inanimate state he had hopefully been reduced.

There were groans of disappointment when they all saw Frey, standing stiff and upright as if he were tied to a stake, his right arm blasted open, the blood running in red rivulets down its length, dripping from the tips of his fingers onto the ground. The bullet had hit the bone in his upper arm and stopped dead.

The interval between the bang and the bullet hitting his arm felt like it had lasted longer than he could possibly have lived. Then there was nothing but pain, colourless and searing, interspersed with the cloudless sky that seemed close enough to touch. A familiar face coalesced amid the bruised and blood-red haze that coated his vision. He had no sensation of moving, yet he knew the world around him was changing. The dirt road before him was flowing like a muddy river. Shadows jumped and slid into one another and came apart and he would have marvelled if not for the embodied agony of his right arm. Finally, mercifully, his fear and pain overwhelmed him, and the world snuffed itself out.

When he came to, he was lying on a feather-stuffed bed and a common stick was wrapped to his arm with strips of goat hide to keep it straight. It felt like the world on fire between his right shoulder and the tip of his middle finger. He wished he hadn’t woken up. Movement at the side of his bed caught his attention. He looked over and saw a freckled face wreathed in bronze-red hair.

“Water,” croaked Frey.

Without a word, Nell, set her book down on the floor beside her chair, got up and took down a skin full of well-water that was hanging on a peg, and tipped it carefully for Frey to drink. Frey raised a finger on his uninjured arm and Nell took it as a sign that he was done. Sitting back in her chair, she smiled faintly despite her concern. “Think you’ll live?” she asked.

Taking some moments to catch his breath, willfully keeping his expression lax to counterbalance the screaming agony of his right arm, Frey looked about the lurid candle-lit room, revolting at the garish colours and the nauseating shadows. Everything seemed to have a purplish outline that swelled and shrank in sluggish undulations. He tried to sit up.

“Just lie back,” said Nell, noticing the pale green hue that had risen to his cheeks.

Swallowing a cloying mouthful of saliva, Frey nodded at her, very slowly, and let himself fall back onto the feather softness of the cot beneath him. He stared transfixed at the dark ceiling, as if it had opened up and revealed some abysmal vision to him alone.

Nell shifted in her chair. “Well, they didn’t kill you.” She was holding onto the edges of her book tightly, knuckles like pearls. “But maybe it would’ve been better for you to run.”

Frey was near-senseless with pain. He could hear Nell speak, but her words had no meaning.

“I shouldn’t have put you up to this,” said Nell, sniffling. “I just didn’t want to be left alone again.” Slow-building sobs dropped one by one onto her lap, her tears staining the leather cover of the book which she always had with her.

Dimly aware of the shaking dark shape at his bedside, Frey forced himself through a crack in his own self-contained shell of suffering and became aware that Nell was crying. “Stop…” he whispered.

She looked up, wiping her nose with the back of her hand, making a sticky sound.

“Read me something,” said Frey through his teeth.

Nell stared at him as if the words were entering her ears at half the speed they were spoken. Then she rubbed her nose and her eyes and took a deep breath. She looked down at the tear-stained book resting on her lap and opened it to a random page. She read aloud what was written there, her voice becoming calmer and steadier as she did.

It does not become of a man to show upon his brow what is felt acutely in his heart. That is purview of beasts, idiots, and those in general want of reason. For man, in virtue of his rational nature, can and should adopt a stance of reflective calm at all times, submitting what passions that may arise to proper inquiry and calculation before giving them expression. Otherwise, he becomes no better than an animal, or a child, or a woman.

Nell looked from the page, the cadence of the written words pleasing to her ear, the content of the passage, as usual, passing without any consideration through her mind. She looked at Frey, eager, once again, to see what kind of impression they had made. She saw his mouth had been drawn into a tight, wry line.

“That really means nothing to you?” he asked. His face was lacquered in sweat, and he closed his eyes.

Looking down at the open book, Nell frowned as if she knew she were missing something but could not see what. She looked up at Frey. “I just like how they sound.”

Frey was silent for a moment, taking deep, deliberate breaths. Then he said, “They do sound nice.”

“Do they mean anything to you?”

He sucked in a lungful of air. He rolled his head over to look directly at Nell. “Did you carry me here?”

Nell nodded. “No one else would.”

The backs of Frey’s eyes itched with tears, which he fought hard to keep them from leaking out. “Thanks,” he croaked.

Nell looked at him, surprised. Then she broke out into a bright smile that she veiled by looking off toward the door. “You’d do the same for me.” She saw an agonized look pass over his face. “More water?”

Frey rolled his head from side to side. A tear rolled from the corner of his eye, and he snarled at it and turned his face away from Nell. “I need to rest.”

Passing a helpless look over his half-turned face, seemingly blue even in the orange candlelight, Nell picked up her book with both hands and stood up. “I’ll be back tomorrow,” she whispered before blowing out the candle. In the dark, her footsteps sounded on the creaky planks, leaving only silence in their wake.

The next day, Frey remained bed bound. His pain was bone deep but had lost some of its urgent, keen edge. He was able to stand and fetch down the waterskin by himself with his good arm. Nausea still filled his stomach like a foam, and he felt little hunger. He had no other way to pass the time other than stare out of the window at the bustle of children at work and play. He watched two boys duel one another with pine switches, smacking each other with relish, seeing who could raise the larger welt on the other. A young girl with tangled brown hair stood the lone spectator. She watched with an open-mouthed curiosity, as if she were seeing an interesting pair of animals perform a bewildering trick. He looked out at the dueling children and wondered if they would be willing to go through the same ordeal when their time came, or if they, like his father, would take absence of the symptoms as a sign that there never had been a disease at all.

Some hours later, Frey was counting the louses that crawled on the woolen blanket that laid on top of him when Grymes came in. He had one thumb tucked into the waist of his trousers, the other hand supporting his leaning frame with the doorway. His feathery brown hair seemed to float, light as dust, sticking up in individual strands which caught the sunlight streaming through the window, giving him a puckish appearance. A jeer as permanent as his nose sat on his face.

“Heard you pissed yourself and then puked everywhere,” drawled Grymes.

“Did neither,” growled Frey. He sat up in bed warily, bartering pain for a stoic face.

“I’m sure you didn’t. A brave, hardy man like you.” Grymes sauntered into the room and stood near Frey’s wounded arm. “They got you patched up like the sole of my boot.” Grymes reached out and squeezed Frey’s broken arm. Frey couldn’t suppress the wail of pain that rose up and out of him, globes of sweat instantly forming on his brow. “Oh, come now. It can’t hurt that bad, you fucking lily flower.”

Frey grit his teeth. His whole body was tensed. He cast a baleful stare up at Grymes’s leering face.

“Well, aren’t you just a prime example of how to grin and bear it. I’ve seen chickens a less sorry sight than you, and them with their heads cut clean off. Why don’t you try being a man and get up off your ass and get to helping out around here? Not that you’ve ever been much of a help anyway. I tell you what. The runoff needs a new ditch dug. Why don’t you go and get at that? You got one good hand. Start digging, dog.”

“What are you doing in here, you troglodyte.” Nell, who kept a vigilant watch over where Frey was recovering, had seen Grymes enter the convalescent’s hovel and had hurried in on his heels. She crossed the room and came to Frey’s side, obliging Grymes to step back.

“What did you call me?”

“I called you a ‘troglodyte’.”

Grymes scoffed. “Can’t insult me if I don’t know what the word means.”

“You insult yourself and everyone you know just by being who you are.”

Grymes stepped forward and looked down at Nell. “Oh yeah? And what am I?”

Nell set her jaw and looked up at him, unblinking. “A troglodyte.”

Grymes scoffed again and glanced at Frey as if to confirm whether he was hearing this foolishness as well. “Whatever.” He flicked Frey’s broken arm with his middle finger and then stomped across the room and left.

Nell flayed Grymes with her gaze until he passed out of sight through the door. “I hope he gets shot right in the face. When his time comes, I really do.”

“Forget him,” said Frey, grimacing, letting himself back down on the cot.

She turned away from the door, and Frey could see her freckles glowing like coals.

“Forget him, I said.”

Wiping her eyes violently, Nell threw herself into the chair near his bedside, and sat brooding. “Why do you think he does it?” she asked after some time.

“Who?” asked Frey, already having forgotten about Grymes, preoccupied with managing his pain.

“Him!” shouted Nell. “Why does he treat you like that?”

“Oh. I don’t know,” said Frey. “They all do.”

“I know but…” Nell’s features softened then hardened. “But he’s the worst.”

“He’s pretty bad,” said Frey, blankly.

Nell sat, still fuming, obviously thinking something over, dying to give it voice. Finally, she blurted out, “They have no reason to hate you.”

Frey left off answering for a few seconds, then said in a clipped tone, “I know that.”

Nell looked at him as if he were an idiot. “Then why do you put up with it?”

“You know, I think I know why your mom left you here,” snapped Frey. “You’re annoying.”

Nell drew away like she had been struck. She placed both hands on top of her book and stared down at them. Then she got up unhurriedly and left Frey by himself with his pain and his regret. The day remaining and the ever-extending night would be painful and sleepless and long. But the next day, Nell would come again, having forgiven him out of necessity, the fear of loneliness greater than the hurt he had caused her. Every day she would come, bring him food, clean his wound, and keep him company. And then, when Frey was well beyond the danger of infection, he got up and out of bed and began piecing together his old life, meagre though it was.

Arm dressed in a sling made from the hide of a stoat and some cedar bark twine, he busied himself with work that didn’t require the use of two hands or the company of people who wished he had died instead. Field work suited his talents. He took to gathering the fruits of the woods, picking up acorns to roast, gathering haskap berries that grew in abundance, pulling up tubers, head on a swivel, looking out for his many enemies.

As the days and weeks peeled away, his arm fused back together and became nearly as functional as before. It was maybe not as straight as it had been, but he never felt impaired by it. It was not lost on him, however, that the bullet remained where it had stopped, now partially absorbed by the bone, and that now the Frothe was just one less thing for him to fear. He felt, whatever his other failings might be, he had lived up to a principle, and a warm feeling of satisfaction and pride rose up in him whenever he thought about it.

He thought of his father, who was dead, who hadn’t believed the disease was real. He thought he was a better man than him. Frey thought he knew what it was to be a good person. And out of spite for his father’s failings, he made it his life’s mission to pursue that end.