Free Grace by Elizabeth Scott

must sleep, then.” He turns to me, points toward the back of the train car. “Go to the last seat and sit down.”
    I do. I sit and now I’m close enough to the door that if a soldier comes I could slip through, following him, and perhaps make it to the end of the train. I will say I need the washroom. Something. Anything.
    But once I am off the train, if I live past the fall onto the tracks—where will I go? Keran Berj teaches many lessons to his followers, but the main one—and one Jerusha helped him teach—is that no one is safe. The man I saw back in the last village wished me luck, but he would not want me in his house, not even for a night. It would be noticed, a stranger coming in. It would mean death for him and everyone who lived with him.
    It would mean death for me.
    So I do not move. I sit instead and force myself to think, remind myself that I know Jerusha wants to leave. What he said about the Minister of Defense does match what I saw in the paper in the train station, the dead body with all the medals, the poem Keran Berj wrote in the Minster’s memory.
    So Jerusha must know that if he tries to sacrifice me, I will name him.
    It is not much safety, but I stay in the seat the soldier told me to because, at least for now, I hold Jerusha’s fate in my hands as much as he holds mine in his.
    I watch him, though.
    I watch him settle into his seat. I watch him turn to the woman who has new, clean clothes on. I watch him smile at her like I didn’t know he could, with warm charm, and see the woman smile back. I wonder if Mary smiled at him.
    I wonder when she knew she was going to die.
    I wonder when she realized she would not be taking Jerusha with her.

CHAPTER 29
    K eran Berj had Mary hanged from the largest statue in the City, wrapped a rope around her neck and then made her swing from the statue’s head, her face turned so all she could see was Keran Berj’s face, his eyes made giant and gleaming gold. It was in the paper for days, brought in by the Rorys when we all came down from the high Hills after that bitter winter.
    Mary’s things were burned, as was proper, but no one sang for her. No prayers were offered to make sure the Saints had caught her soul. She had failed and could not be praised. She would never even be mentioned again.
    Ann and Lily and I looked through the papers again and again. We wanted to see how she had failed, because Mary was the surest of us all. She had studied so much, and she had been able to walk and talk like she was Keran Berj’s flesh and blood better than any of us.
    There was nothing about what she did in the papers, though, nothing other than the usual reports of how savage the Angels were, how they and the People killed those who begged for mercy and then danced in their blood, pictures shaping us into twisted, howling monsters.
    “Keran Berj is the monster,” Ann said, crumpling the paper in one hand. “She must have done something right to get him saying such fierce lies about us all, don’t you think?”
    “He always lies,” Lily said, pointing at the years of papers we’d had to go through, to learn. “Still, she at least got close enough to Jerusha to make Keran Berj angry. That’s something. I would have finished the job, though.”
    She took the paper from Ann and pointed at the picture, her finger resting on Jerusha’s face.
    “I would have blotted him out,” she told us, and we looked at the photo again.
    It was blurry, as if Jerusha was turning away from the camera, but we all knew it was him. He was who Mary was sent for. He would have been there to watch her die.
    “I’ll do better,” Ann said. “I’ll break the shackles that bind this land to Keran Berj, I’ll—”
    She kept talking, but I looked at the picture. At Mary’s face, swinging close enough to Keran Berj’s gilded one that their lips could have touched.
    I thought that if there was a way for Keran Berj to make the statue swallow Mary, he would. He would swallow all of