Free The Kept by James Scott Page B

she couldn’t bear being locked up with death any longer. Every time she glimpsed the wreckage of the house, her skin itched with her damnation. This limbo could hold her no longer. “Tomorrow,” she said, walking back to her bed, knowing he listened from the hayloft, “we leave at first light.”

C HAPTER 7
    T hough from the state of her injuries and the fact that she’d woken in Jorah’s clothes she presumed that Caleb had seen her body, Elspeth retreated into the back of the barn out of modesty and wrapped bandages around her chest, drawing them tight with her teeth until it hurt to breathe, the fabric groaning each time she did.
    Caleb paused at the top of the ladder, wiping sleep from his eyes. His mother fastened her bandages with a series of pins that made her look as though she’d been stitched together with metal. “It’s time,” she said.
    “What about the animals?”
    Elspeth put one arm and then the other into the sleeves of Jorah’s shirt, trying to ignore the pain, knowing that worse—much worse—would come. To leave the animals must be hard for the boy, she thought, and their eyes followed her with rapt attention, awaiting their fate. Their snorts and shuffling steps amplified in her head. “Perhaps we set them free?”
    “They’ll die,” Caleb said. While he stood within a yard of his bed and his feeble belongings, his heart begged for a few more moments of childhood. He forgave himself his whining. He pictured his animals roaming the hillside sickly and weak. He hoped he’d meant much to them. “They won’t know what to do.”
    “You could stay,” she said. He came down the ladder, his twelve-year-old form so small in that giant space. The animals didn’t care, she thought, that he’d buttoned his shirt incorrectly and it hung crookedly over his tiny frame, or that his hair stood on end in the morning and then flopped into his face by midday. He’d found his place. Her head and stomach eased at the thought of walking off by herself like she had a dozen times since she and Jorah had settled in their small nook on the shaded side of the hill.
    Staying had of course occurred to Caleb. His mother had said it aloud and so it pushed its way to the front of his thoughts and hung in the air in front of him, easy enough to grab. He could live like this forever, among the animals. But his mind had been made up and his family depended on him, and he walked down the rows of pens, unlatching them as he went, unable to look at the expectant faces. While the chickens milled about under his feet, he slid the pack over his shoulders and took the Ithaca and Jorah’s rifle in hand.
    They swung the doors open. The cold air gripped their skin and turned their lips dry, and they tugged their scarves up to cover their mouths. The snow crunched underfoot. Caleb fought the urge to look back. The faint sounds of the animals called to him, begged him to reconsider. But then he passed the small lump of snow where his brothers and sisters lay entangled in each other’s arms and his resolve hardened. He hitched his bags higher onto his shoulders.
    Legs heavy and head dull, Elspeth stared at the empty space where her home had once stood. She saw the four stone markers, and the line Caleb’s footprints had drawn to them. She prayed silently, asking for a safe journey for both herself and Caleb on their mission and also for her children and her husband as they sought their way to heaven. Abraham had been willing to kill his son for God, and so He spared them both. On the altar of sacrifice that receded with each step, she had given not one, but four children and a husband. She wondered whether God had become so much crueler with the passage of time. Instead of giving thanks for what she’d been spared, she grew angrier at what had been taken from her, and a hunger grew deep in the pit of her—in the imaginary womb where she carried and bore the children she’d taken as her own—to find the men responsible and