Free Tide King by Jen Michalski Page B

fingers. A flower. She put it in the pocket of her dress and then lay her hand near the hand of the skeleton, relieved to find it too big to be her matka’s.
    But she was not relieved long. She looked around her and saw that the road of the hill to their hut, normally well traveled and flattened into the earth, was overgrown with weeds and grass. She crouched and listened very hard to the ground like her matka had shown her. Silence. A silence that comes with time, forgetting, settled heavy over her like a humidity. It pressed at her chest, her eyes, and she did not know what to do.
    The bone house had become porous. From holes in the arc of the ceiling, swords of light crossed through the center of the room, as if exposing the tumult that had occurred. Her mother’s tinctures and herbs were missing. The mattress was stained with old blood, rust colored and faded. Their few pieces of furniture—stools and a table—were broken and splintered. A damp, earthen smell of absence lingered. How long had she been in the dirt? She was no bigger than she remembered—it could not have been for long. She shut her eyes and groped for her mother—her scent, her voice, the intangible weight of her presence. But something had closed in the world, a door, a window, and she could no longer feel even the dimmest breeze of her. She dropped on the mattress, away from the blood, shut her eyes tightly against her tears, hoped things would be different when she woke up. She would have to be a big girl and wait.
    She dreamed of fires, an herb flower, chalky in her mouth, her mother. And she also dreamed of Antoniusz.
    He would know where her matka was. Perhaps she was with him. Although she’d never been to Antoniusz’s house, she walked toward the town to find him. At the first house she came to, on the outskirts of Reszel, a woman hung blankets in the green valley. The grass was lush and alive and so unlike the charred hill of her house.
    â€œAntoniusz? Do you know where he lives?” Ela asked her, and the woman looked at her with soft, wet eyes. She patted the ground near her damp bundles.
    â€œLooking for your father?” She pulled at Ela’s clothes and pinched her cheek. “No meat on you, that’s for sure. So many families torn apart after the fire.” She clucked her tongue. “It’s a shame.”
    The woman went in the cottage, stone with a thatched roof, and brought out some goat’s milk and bread. A man, her husband, followed.
    â€œShe’s looking for her father, she says—Antoniusz.” The woman ruffled Ela’s hair as she tore the bread with her teeth.
    â€œAntoniusz?” The man scrunched his dry, brown face at her. “Antoniusz has no children. He lives with his sister.”
    â€œWhere?” Ela stood up, wiping the milk from her face.
    â€œUp aways, a good afternoon’s walk.” The man pointed up the road. “Too far to walk on little legs. I’m going to town later. I’ll give you a ride in the wagon.”
    When he was ready, Ela climbed on the bench of the hay-filled wagon beside him. The town grew before them, the red roofs and stone walls, in various stages of construction, and they were different from the ones she remembered from the older, finished stone ones.
    â€œWhy is the town different?” she asked.
    â€œFrom where you come, little one?” The man asked. He rapped the reigns softly against the behind of his horse. “Did you hear of the fire?”
    She remembered the dream and shook her head.
    â€œDo you have parents?”
    â€œI want to see Antoniusz.”
    â€œAntoniusz hasn’t been well since they burned the witch.” The man shook the reins and frowned.
    She choked; her chest trembled. Witch was what some of the villagers, the mean ones, the ones who spread gossip or thought her mother overcharged for her tinctures, called Matka. Did he speak of her mother? She felt everything