A year went by. Tomorrow, Nell would be shot by the whipping post in the village square. Frey walked with her along the game paths that they both knew so well. His knuckles were still skinned and calloused. He had a yellowish bruise high on his cheek. He had had three of his teeth on the top right side of his mouth knocked out, but nobody knew that but him. None of the admiration or deference that usually clothed the lead-bearing settled on Frey’s shoulders. If anything, the brutish animosity of Endwoode had only increased, as if his surviving the rite was a grave offense.

The pride and complacency at having proved himself a better man than his father had not withstood the reality that he was still as hated as he had been. It hurt all the more, now, that he had done the right thing yet continued to suffer the same, if not worse, as before. He was becoming embittered, embattled against all, secure only in his thinking that he was a good person and that he deserved none of what he had been forced to live through.

None of this was lost on Nell. She suffered in her own way. Her flesh was not bruised, she was not missing teeth, she had no scars on her body. But she felt like she had been carved out from the inside. She was treated like the wind in Endwoode. No one ever spoke to her. No one looked at her except when she knocked something over. Every act of the villagers was tacit in the shared thought that she didn’t belong, that she wouldn’t be missed, or her absence even noticed should she leave or die.

Frey was the only one who acknowledged her existence, though he was not always kind about it. Nell appreciated it nonetheless because she was desperate for her being to have some substance in the mind of another, and because it hurt her more than anything to be left alone.

She walked with Frey along a creek over which wicked willows bent, skin thick, shaking Frey’s acerbic remarks off like dust from her clothes. She fought hard to keep a smile on her face. She fought hard to keep her head above the dark lagoon of fear that had been rising and rising within her as the day of her lead administration approached.

“Stand side-ways, like I did,” said Frey, tossing a stone into the creek.

Nell watched the ripples wash away instantly with the current. “Won’t that make me a smaller target?”

“Yeah, but it’ll have to pass through your arm before it hits your heart or something.”

Nell shook her head and continued staring at the place where the rock had been swallowed. “I don’t think I can handle it if he misses.”

“He’s a good shot. He hit me dead on the bone. Look.” Frey rolled up his sleeve and showed the pale, raised splotch where he had been shot a year previous.

“I remember,” said Nell without looking.

Frey rolled his sleeve back down. “He won’t miss.”

Nell said nothing.

They walked further along and came to rest under the boughs of a green-branched willow. Frey looked up at the wiry fingers of the tree. “You know, you can make whistles out of those.”

Nell looked at him, looked up at the tendrils above her head. “Is that so?”

“Yeah. You just snap off a length and then whittle out the inside until it’s hollow like a reed. Then you make a notch in the top and, when you blow on it, you can make it sound like a whippoorwill if you know how.”

“Do you know how?”

“No. I just know how to make one.”

“I see.”

“Do you want me to make one for you?”

“Up to you.”

“Here.”

Frey stood up and selected a length of bough. He snapped it off and then snapped the other end so that he was left with a length of about his middle finger. He sat back down next to Nell and pulled an antler-handled knife from his boot. Its blade had been scoured with pumice to make it gleam, and the handle had been polished. It had been picked from the ashes of his father from the general rubble of the courthouse. The Administrator had given it to Frey the day after, its blade scorched with soot, the handle peeling from the heat. He told him to take it and go in the woods and don’t come back. He told him it was the least he could do. The animals would take care of his corpse, and he would be forgotten. Frey was just boy. But he took it, went to the woods, and thought he could do it. He sat out there with the blade on the forest floor before him, motionless, swaying with grief, a far off, magical look on his face as if he expected the blade to plunge into his heart of its own accord.

He didn’t do it. Nell had found him and made him promise he wouldn’t.

Near dark he headed back to Endwoode. The bereaved threw baleful glares at him. The glares turned to curses and the curses to stones and Frey took shelter in his late parents’ home and his life had not much improved since.

Nell eyed the knife but said nothing.

The sun arced along the sky until it was past its midpoint and had begun its descent down to the land’s edge. The water of the creek bubbled and bounced and continued on its merry way to dance among sticks and stones further downriver. Shreds and flakes of willow wood covered Frey's lap and at last he handed the willow whistle to Nell. He had adorned it with symmetrical geometric markings by exposing the white pulp beneath the green bark.

“Try it,” he said.

Nell put it up to her lips and hummed into it.

Frey squinted at her. “No. You have to blow into it. It’s a whistle.”

“I know. I’m not stupid.”

“Then why were you humming into it?”

“I wasn’t. Shut up.”

“You were, I saw y–”

Nell blew into the whistle, and it made a shrill sound that carried far beyond the little brook where they sat.

“Ow, my ears,” said Nell.

“Well, it works.”

She held it between her finger and thumb and studied it. “It’s so loud.”

“Suits you,” sneered Frey.

Nell laughed though she didn’t think this was funny and didn’t feel like laughing.

Frey let a slight twinge of mirth turn the corner of his mouth but didn’t smile fully. His face slid into solemnity, and he asked, “So, do you want me there or not?”

Nell glanced away and lowered the whistle. She looked at the creek. “If you could, I’d appreciate it.”

Frey nodded. “I can,” he said, looking up into the willow’s canopy, away from her. He rubbed his brow and drew his mouth into a thin line. “If that’s what you want.”

“It’s not too much to ask.” Nell glanced at him. “Is it?”

Frey stood up and swatted the wood shavings from his shirt. “Sun’s going down.”

Making no move to get up, Nell gripped the whistle. She looked from his impassive back to the creek and back. “You promise?”

Frey stopped mid-gesture as he was scratching the bridge of his nose and turned and looked down at her. He nodded and raised his eyebrows as if Nell needn’t have asked what she had.

Nell smiled, thin as mist, disappearing as quickly. “I have your word,” said Nell in a small, choked voice. “You have to carry me. Like I did for you.” She looked up at him. “Do you remember that?”

Frey turned away from her and scowled at the water. He turned around and held out a hand. “Get up.”

Nell wiped her eyes with the back of her hand then took Frey’s and he pulled her to her feet with a jerk. He wiped his hand on his trousers and said, “Don’t forget your book.”

Nell turned and crouched to pick up her book and when she turned back around, Frey was already walking away.

The day passed and so did the night and Nell was awake to experience every long moment strung together like the braids of a noose. With the rise of the sun, her simmering fear rose to a boil, and she began to feel giddy and sick. She chose to forgo eating anything. Her knees shook, her tongue was bloodless, she couldn’t speak and couldn’t stop blinking away the sharp rays of the sun. Outside, vaguely shaped children plagued her vision, and she regarded them with nervous apprehension, carefully stepping around and away from them.

She clutched her book close to her chest, felt her heart beat against the unliving leather. Without realizing it, she had come to the spot near the whipping post where she would be shot in a matter of hours. Possessed with the fear of death, standing in the place she most wanted to avoid, mourning the loss of her own life before it had even been taken, she watched wide-eyed as her hands moved and cracked open her book to a random page.

Reading had been a source of estrangement in Endwoode, but it remained her only connection to her family. Her mother taught her the sounds the signs made, showed her how the signs composed themselves into words, the words into thoughts, pictures, arguments, and poetry.

“Your grandfather taught me,” her mother had told her. “He taught me so that I might know my ups from downs, lefts from rights. Direction in life is important. It’s important so you can know how you can become who you ought to be.”

Nell, a young girl, covered in dirt, hair matted and filthy, shins bruised from climbing trees and playing in streams, looked up at her mother’s face, trying to gauge whether she was being punished or praised.

“The old ways were better for everyone. People knew who they were, and they acted like it, too.” A pained smile spread across her face as she looked Nell up and down from her bruised shins to her filthy hair. “Do you know who you ought to be, Nell?”

Nell shook her head and put the hem of her shirt in her mouth and looked up at her mother.

“You’re a little girl. You ought to act like it.” She turned and sat down at a wooden table. “Come, let’s learn how to read.”

What began with fear soon developed into awe and even love. Her mother hadn’t started with the dry-worded tome that she eventually left her with when she abandoned her in Endwoode —she started with fairy tales, with stories meant to entertain, with stories meant to elicit a love of sound and language.

Nell had kept the book all these years, even though her mother had hurt her beyond endurance by leaving her in a strange place without any given reason. She read it front to cover many times, gaining little understanding of what her mother had wanted of her, why she had left her this book in particular, or why she had brought her to Endwoode and never come back for her.

Frey was always asking her if the words meant anything to her. There was nothing in it, as far as she could see, of any instructive value or. The words had always sounded nice. The language was unlike anything anyone would hear in ordinary life. It had an engrossing, complicated cadence. She thought it was wonderful until she started to think about what it meant.

Standing next to the whipping post, she read what was written on the arbitrary page to which she had flipped, hoping that the words would be of some comfort, some source of the courage she so desperately needed.

As in Nature, we find in the human animal no pretensions to equality. The sparrow fears the hawk. The fawn, the wolf. The perch, the pike. So it is that the fairer sex not only fears, but ought to fear the nobler. The gifts Nature dispenses appear contingent only to those She has not equipped and enabled to see that they are necessary. And so, it is prime foolishness and folly to claim that men and women are of equal esteem. For who can seriously doubt the latter ascend anywhere near the heights of intellect and strength of the former?

Nell read this and looked up as if her eyes were filled with lead. For the first time, she read not with an ear to how the words sounded, not in remembrance of her mother and family, but with a mind to what thoughts the words were meant to convey. She looked at the blood-stained whipping post as if expecting an explanation from it.

Some children, curious despite their parents’ instructions to pay Nell no mind, had stopped to watch her but now shied away, seeing the violent red that had suffused her face. When Nell turned, grasping the book like a brick, she was not met with a single glance. She stood there, grim, standing tall even though she was short, appearing like a vengeful, thorned shrub grown out of the blood-soaked ground itself.

She waited and boiled. The whipping post, broad and sun-scorched, stood like a marker or a tombstone, casting a puddle of shadow around its base from the sun pouring down from straight above. Through her veil of wrathful and wronged tears, Nell could make out only the empty streets, animated briefly by a passing, disinterested villager. They would not even come to see her shot. There was no crowd as there was for Frey’s lead administration. No one in Endwoode cared whether she lived or died this day. Except Frey, she hoped.

Gritting her teeth, grabbing her shirt in a bunch with one hand, pressing her book close with the other, Nell cast a baleful look at her own stunted shadow at her feet. The dusty earth dimpled where her tears fell and made small circular craters. When she looked up, she saw a bulky shadow. The Administrator was standing a stone’s throw away, going through mechanical motions of loading and priming the flintlock pistol that would either prevent her from coming to worse harm or kill her outright.

Nell began to shake. She looked at the ground as if her end were spelled out there in grotesque detail. Tears trembled on her chin and broke away in small globes that caught the sunlight like amber before smashing and spilling it upon the dust.

She looked for Frey and didn’t find him. She looked and looked, but there was no one other than the Administrator. The terrible thought that he had forgotten her split her down the core. A fissure in her mind cracked open, belching forth buried memories that were even more painful in the rarefied light of day. She remembered a life-loving, red-haired boy, who was her brother and whom she had not seen or heard of for such a long time that she had forgotten his name. A long, long road over earth unfamiliar, the sky ever darkening, her mother’s hand letting go of her own, pushing her way into a sea of faces unfriendly except that of a dark-haired, heavy-lidded boy who stared at her with curious eyes and who, she knew at a glance, would suffer woes as permanent and scarring as her own. The swirling dark bubble of her fatal condition swelled and swelled, displacing all poor attempts at calming herself, pushing everything but fear out of her.

“Set yourself,” called the Administrator. He stood impatiently, face twisted as if speaking to her had left a bad taste in his mouth. “Don’t got all day.”

Two words that crashed upon her brow. Nell pressed her lips tight together until they paled like the underbelly of a frog. She felt for the willow whistle she had put in the front pocket of her breeches. She brought it out and traced the angular designs that had been carved on its exterior with her thumb. She held her mother’s book to her chest with her other hand.

“Can you wait?” she asked, but her voice shook so badly and was so faint that it had no hope of carrying far enough to hear.

“Set yourself,” barked the Administrator.

Nell looked around wildly, delusional with hope, mistaking every shadow for Frey. She ground her teeth and looked almost directly at the sun, then turned sideways, holding the whistle tight in her right hand, the book in her left.

The Administrator didn’t remark on how she set herself, though he seemed to stiffen. With a mechanical, well-practiced motion, he levelled the gun and inhaled and aimed down the barrel. He squeezed the trigger, and the plaza erupted in sulfur and thunder. The billow of smoke hung long in the deathly still air. A few people down the street and from around corners or from out of windows peeked to see what had happened, most of them being unaware that Nell was to be shot today. They saw a dispersing screen of grey smoke and Nell still standing as she had been.

“You knew I could miss if you stood like that,” said the Administrator in reproachful tones. He clicked his tongue and put one fist on his hip.

Nell didn’t answer. She looked straight ahead to the left, eyes peeled wide, face white as starch.

“Fuck’s sake. Stay there. I have to reload,” said the Administrator. His face was red, and he had begun sweating under the yellow noon sun.

Nell couldn’t have moved if she wanted to. She did turn her head slightly and, eyes welled with terror, looked for Frey but didn’t find him.

“Turn this way!” shouted the Administrator, gesticulating violently with one hand in a corkscrew motion. He had re-armed the flintlock and was ready with another shot.

Nell turned to face him, so afraid she would’ve done anything anyone told her.

“It was a waste using one bullet on you. It’s a fucking travesty having to use another.” The Administrator levelled the gun with a jerk. He pulled the trigger as soon as the sight lined up with the center of Nell’s body and, again, the air cracked and smoked.

–––––

Frey woke up early and did his chores early so that he would have time around midday to be there when it happened. Though he kept his hands busy splitting firewood, hauling grain, and feeding livestock, his mind felt loose and untethered. He had played the steadfast friend the day previous but, in truth, he did not want to be there when Nell was shot. He did not want to carry her body, dead or alive.

Mired in his mundane chores, Frey, nonetheless, recognized that his life was hurtling towards the moment at which his character would be tested in the gravest way. Promises held great weight with him and his promise to Nell was a pouring of his very worth as a human being into a few short and airy words. They sat in the skyline of his mind like vindictive judges, sights trained, and rifles primed to fire at the slightest intent of backing down on his word.

The sun rose on and on despite his earnest desire that it wouldn’t. He was scattering feed to chickens, alone among the birds. The chickens around him clucked and scratched and eyed him, it seemed, circumspectly, as if they guessed at the shameful thoughts that ran through his head. He took a fistful of feed and chucked it at a particularly judgmental-looking chicken, which fluttered off and then came running back and began pecking at the scattered seeds.

He wondered why he was so tempted not to do right thing when no one was watching. Shame flushed his face and he seemed to see himself insidiously deliberating whether to honour his promise to his one and only friend. He shook his head at the hollowness of his own character and felt self-loathing for what thoughts he had allowed run loose in his head.

The sun was beetling across the sky, and Frey knew it was nearing the time. He swallowed his nerves and focused on the words which were to determine his worth in his own eyes. He would be there, against all desire not to be, not out of any fond feeling for Nell, but because he wouldn’t be able to live with himself otherwise.

As he was leaving the chicken range, which was secluded and a little way from the main village, he noticed a pack of gangly shapes, cajoling and play fighting and coming his way. His mind became wordless. Only the horrible, impish shapes, dancing in his head like jolly murderers on a stage. Grymes and his mangy gang were coming up the path, jostling and hooting. Frey’s face darkened, and he hiked up his shoulders and the hair on the back of his neck stood on end.

“Well, look who it is,” said Grymes. “Mama Hen’s looking after her chicks. What do you think you’re doing leaving the coop, Mother Hen? You can’t leave the coop. The wolves will get you.”

Frey made to pass, but they stood four abreast and blocked the road.

“Move,” said Frey, keeping his head angled to the side, not looking directly at them.

“Well, since you asked nicely,” said Grymes.

Not one of them moved.

“She’s standing by the post as we speak, you know,” said a swarthy young man named Amis.

“I would hurry if I were you,” said a scrawny, but mean-looking kid named Bathcat. “She looked awful lonely standing there by herself. Just that flat thing she always caries around for company.”

A cold panic seized Frey’s guts. He stepped forward and tried to push through them, but they grabbed him by the shoulders and threw him back.

“Don’t think that you’re just gonna walk right through us,” said Thule, the son of the apothecary.

“You gotta fight for it,” said Grymes.

“I’m not gonna fight you,” said Frey.

“Why? Cause you got shot and lived? You think you don’t have to fight cause you been shot?” said Bathcat. He shook his head and laughed. “Anyone can get shot and live.”

“Imma do it next year,” boasted Thule.

“It’s nothing. Nothing but luck is what it is,” added Amis.

“That’s right, Frey. You’re lucky,” said Grymes. “Lucky you’re still alive.”

The air bristled like the hackles of a dog. They were all still, some were holding their breath.

“It’s true. She’s up at the post right now,” said Grymes, tilting his head back. “I thought you woulda been there, being her friend and all.”

Frey’s vision jumped. His heart flopped in unusual patterns. Then he heard the gunshot barking out over the tops of trees and echoing in the howling chamber of his head.

They all came together, like the sound had ripped them from their roots and thrown them into a cauldron to boil. Frey clocked the first one in and Amis fell to the dirt and didn’t move much after that. But then the three remaining were on him, some squared and throwing punches, some grappling close, trying to bring him to the ground. In the crosswinds of wild and random forces, it took some time for the struggling structure of bodies to fall to the ground.

On his back, Frey tucked his head between his forearms and twisted and writhed. His nose was bloody, his lips split. All he could hear was ringing. And still he had the peace of mind to curl and reach for the antler-handled knife he kept in his boot. He felt its unmistakable grooves and burls and he drew it out and stuck it to the hilt into the side of the body that sat on top of him. A hoggish squeal like the kind sometimes heard coming from the abattoir on feast night rent the air and the body fell off of Frey and lay on its side, kicking up dust in a fit of agony.

In the stunned lull of the brawl, Frey had the sense to take any quarter he was given and quickly stood up. An arm lunged out at him, and he slashed with the knife and the arm withdrew with a crimson sash cut sideways, accompanied by a disembodied scream.

Stumbling backwards, Frey saw the writhing body of Thule on his side, holding onto his other side while blood oozed between his fingers and down his forearm. Amis was face-down where he had fallen and Bathcat held his left arm into his gut and folded the rest of his body over it, staring at Frey with clairvoyant and fearful eyes. Grymes alone was relatively unscathed. He stood panting, not looking at any of his fallen gang mates.

He was looking at Frey, his face carved out of wood.

“You’re fucking dead,” he said, snarling. “Just like her.”

The words landed like a shank to Frey’s gut. The pain in his body was a pleasure to what he felt. He backed up, pale faced, away from Grymes. The antler-handled knife was sticky up to the hilt, glued with blood to his palsied hand.

He heard a second shot. He imagined Nell, on the ground, not moving, alone, with no one to carry her, his promise unfulfilled and impossible. He saw his father, beside himself with unnatural rage, burning alive in the courthouse, chewing and tearing at those that burned with him.

–––––

When the smoke cleared for the second time, the Administrator saw that Nell had brought up her book and that the bullet had been stopped by its layered pages. Her face hovered above it, dead-looking and fragile, ready to break into jagged pieces at a touch.

“You can’t be fucking serious!” cried the Administrator.

Nell just stared.

“Giving me that fucking thing! It’s going in the fucking fire and I’m getting that bullet back and you know what? You can find your own way.” The spittle flew from his lips, his face was purple and swollen, his beard quivered like a mass of bees. “We’ve let you suckle here long enough, girl.” He started to walk toward Nell. “To think you would have the gall to stand for a bullet when there are precious few to go around as it is. You don’t deserve it, you know. You aren’t one of us. Never have been. Never will be.”

Nell took a few stumbling steps away to the left. She held her mother’s book close.

The Administrator stopped in his tracks. He looked at her as if he couldn’t believe she was real. “What are you doing?” he asked, his voice low and murderous.

Nell stood completely still and watched him.

They stood in this way for some seconds. The Administrator’s face had clouded. “Give me that bullet back.”

Nell tilted her head, her nostrils flaring with the air rushing in and out of her lungs. Her eyes were livid with hate. “I’ll be back to put it right between your fucking eyes.”

The Administrator made a go at her, but he was a large man and the distance between them was too great to even come close to grabbing her. A slingshot-shaped vein pulsed under his fleshy brow, and his yellowish teeth were bared under his bristling beard. When he saw Nell turn and run, he pulled up and thought about priming and loading his gun just to shoot her in the back. But he didn’t go through with it.

“That’s right!” he bellowed after her. “You go on back! Fucking little leech. See how long you last without someone’s blood to suck! You won’t last the week. And no one will know you even died. No one will remember you even lived!” He cupped his hands to his mouth so that his voice would carry as Nell ran toward the woods. “Live alone, die alone! Leech!”

Nell did not look back. She ran with more desperation, as though the words were bullets hitting the dirt all around her. Sucking air through her teeth, she broke through the brush surrounding the village and disappeared from sight and sound. She had no food, no water, nothing but the clothes on her back, the willow whistle in her right hand, her mother’s book in the other, the still-warm bullet nestled in its center.