Free The Silver Sword by Angela Elwell Hunt

overflowing in awe and wonder, Anika followed her father out of the town hall and joined the others in praise and thanksgiving. A tragedy had been averted.

    The distant sounds of wailing broke the gray stillness of the next morning. Dropping her quill pen, Anika rushed to open the door, then beheld a gruesome parade: a dozen women holding bloodstained aprons and scarves to their weeping eyes, several men carrying broken bodies upon makeshift litters, others bearing woven baskets covered with crimson-stained cloths.
    â€œWhat has happened?” The cry echoed up and down the street from late risers and merchants opening for business. “Who has died?”
    â€œThe three students,” came the reply from a score of voices. “Beheaded!”
    One woman, seeing Anika’s startled gaze, stopped to tell the tale. “At sunset, scarcely an hour after the magistrates’ promise to MasterHus, they killed them. The council mocks us and would have concealed their crime, but the washerwomen found the bodies in the courtyard.”
    Anika felt a hand on her shoulder and looked back to see her father standing behind her, his hat on his head, ready to join the procession. Without speaking, she gathered her scarf from a basket by the door and slipped it over her hair, then followed her father.
    Plodding forward in the spontaneous procession, Anika tied the scarf under her chin, her vision still colored with the memory of Jan Hus’s victorious smile and the concern in his eyes. He had believed the magistrates, the church’s pawns, and they had utterly betrayed him.
    Behind her, someone began to chant the mass for the martyrs, and Anika lifted her voice, joining in. At one fine house a noblewoman with a basket of expensive linen rushed out to shroud the bodies; other women along the way dipped their handkerchiefs into the bloody baskets, creating a holy relic of blood and linen.
    Anika watched silently, knowing she needed no relic to remind her of this dark day. The heaviness in her chest felt like a millstone she would carry with her always. Her shoulders drooped, her pace slowed. For a bewildering moment she felt that she was mourning her own death, for something in her, some fragile element of trust and faith, was gasping in a dying breath, and she could do nothing to save it.
    The magistrates had lied and murdered. They had flagrantly deceived Jan Hus. If they would lie to a man of God, what prevented them from lying to the common people?
    The women’s keening wails rose and fell, cycling through cries of sorrow into screams of horrified anguish. And through the roaring din, Anika held her hand over her heart and wondered what sort of evil would next visit her city.

    All of Prague waited to see what Jan Hus would do to retaliate. “He will take his case before the king,” Petrov predicted, while Anika’s father thought Hus might finally urge his followers to armedaction. But the preacher did nothing. Overcome with grief for the three young men, he retreated into his small house for several days, then appeared to preach a funeral sermon in the students’ memory.
    On the Sunday following the martyrdom, Hus preached as usual in Bethlehem Chapel but did not mention the tragic events of the past week. Hus’s enemies, Petrov whispered during a lull in the service, were saying that he had been frightened into silence.
    But Anika had copied thousands of the preacher’s words, and she knew him better than either Petrov or her father did. She suspected Master Hus entertained neither fear nor anger, but he realized hundreds of soldiers now patrolled the streets of Prague, alert to any sign of trouble. If Hus uttered one word of vengeance or even hinted that retaliation might be a proper course of action, more innocent blood would stain the stones of the city streets.
    And so he said nothing but led the service as usual.

    â€œDo you think the king will continue to side with Jan Hus, or