Free Thieving Forest by Martha Conway

but he will see Susanna through to the end even though she has not asked for help and it does not even appear to cross her mind to seek it from him.
    “I’ll go to Kentucky, then,” Cade says once the fire is banked and they are lying on the damp ground looking up at the stars. “Nothing for me here.”
    It is one of the things he sometimes talks about. Joining a militia. He has the weight and look of a soldier, that’s certainly true.
    “You would fight Indians?” Seth asks.
    “More like the English, the bastards. But Indians too if need be. I’m not one of them. Not like you.”
    “Cade, that’s ridiculous.”
    “What? You’re the one got it all, just look at you. Besides, one quarter, what’s that? Easy enough to throw that away.”
    “Amos will want you to work the forge with him.”
    Cade rolls over in his blanket. He is sleeping in his boots and they stick out from the bottom. A rafter of turkeys, gabbling aimlessly, crosses a corner of the clearing. Cade picks up his musket and, hardly raising himself, lets off a shot without aim. The turkeys scatter, gabbling louder.
    “Amos be damned,” he says.

    In the small back room in Eager Tavern, a few hours after Aurelia died, Susanna helps Liza prepare her sister for burial. Her stomach feels loose and watery and she now understands the phrase sick with grief , because that is how she feels exactly: her own body is both hot and cold and also somehow strange to her. Her hands are not her hands. They move with a will of their own.
    She finds herself thinking about something that happened to her years ago, when she was eight years old. They had been living in Severne only a couple of years then. It was a fine day in early summer, and her mother decided they should eat supper outdoors. A preacher was visiting the settlement with his wife and young son, and every evening they ate with another family. Tonight it was the Quiners’ turn. Ellen made her famous turtle soup, and Sirus and Beatrice carried their large oak table outside. Susanna found dry flat stones to hold down the tablecloth, for there was a wind. When they could see the reverend and his family walking over—three distinct dots, one in a black hat—Ellen told Susanna to go wash up but to find Aurelia first.
    Susanna went to the henhouse, the obvious place to begin, but Aurelia wasn’t there. As she turned to go she heard a noise, a kind of crackle, nothing unusual, just a hen turning about, but for some reason she looked closer and saw that next to the hen there was an egg waggling on the straw. It had a big crack all the way around it. A chick was hatching.
    Susanna had never before seen a chick coming out of its shell and since she thought it would be the work of a moment she stayed to watch. But it wasn’t the work of a moment. It was long and arduous: the widening crack, the first glimpse of the beak pecking out, and then a claw coming up like a long forked splinter of wood. How could such a weak creature possibly break through that shell? The longer she watched the more impossible the task looked, and Susanna found herself more and more engrossed. In the middle of it, one of her sisters came into the henhouse behind her—no doubt sent by Ellen—and exhaled impatiently. But still Susanna didn’t take her eyes off the egg. She said over her shoulder, “A chick is trying to come out and I want to watch. Don’t tell.” So together, silently, they watched as the chick worked and rested, chipping off more and more shell until it could finally unfold itself out onto the straw: a skinny, goopy, putty-colored baby bird with scraps of eggshell still stuck to its body.
    Susanna felt as victorious as if she had done it herself. She turned around to smile at her sister since together they had witnessed this wonderful thing. But there was no one behind her. She was alone. The exhale she’d heard was only the wind. And right then she realized that she had thought, or felt, that it was Lilith behind