“Are you going back to the men’s camp tonight?” she asked.
“That’s where I’ve got a bed,” he said. “And Elthor knows I could use the rest.” Kyrie looked down at her hands, and Jaysynn went on, “I’ve been hauling manure from one giant pile to another—we’re taking it from outside a horse lot to a field where it’s gonna be spread. Some of the guys have wheelbarrows but there aren’t enough to go around, and I’m the new guy, you know. I just partner up with somebody and we carry a big load of it on an old door. I guess there’s a carpenter here who’s making wooden wheelbarrows, so I keep thinking I’ll get one, but they don’t hold up very well, so he’s got to keep repairing them and that means they don’t get built very fast. How about you?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said.
“I mean what have they had you doing?”
“Pulling weeds,” she said.
“Yeah? Like in a garden?”
“No. It’s a field. It’s huge, but we’ve got to do it all by hand.”
“How about your sisters?” Jaysynn asked.
“We’re all working together. They’re doing well. It’s tough on them, working hard all day in the sun, but I think they’ll…”
Jaysynn shrugged, waiting for her to finish. When she didn’t, he ventured a guess: “You think they’ll… like it?”
“Yeah.” She nodded. “They might.”
“Yeah….” Jaysynn waited for her to say more, or to ask about the men in her family. When she didn’t, he offered it up: “I’m not working with your brothers. They’re picking stones out of pastures and stuff like that. The guy that works with them seems really good with kids. And your dad is holding up okay. He’s…” Jaysynn cleared his throat. “Hey. Is there something wrong?”
“I don’t know,” said Kyrie. “We’ve been here not even four days and we’re already okay with it. I mean, this is slavery, right? Isn’t that what it is?”
They listened to the frogs for a minute.
“Last night I went into the city,” Jaysynn said. “There’s a lot of damage, you know. The Well looks the same as ours. Some of the buildings are in bad shape, some are okay. It looks like there’s been a lot of looting and vandalism. But they are in better shape than Thyrion. There’s no doubt about that. But it doesn’t change the fact that…all the jobs disappeared overnight. Their economy was all mines and factories, and all their equipment is just dead. People are scared, and a lot of them are hungry. And I don’t have the royal pantry to share from. I wish I could help, but there’s nothing I can do.
“Now, I think it’s pretty selfish of Remirion to not let refugees in the city, but I can see why they’ve got that policy. If we were in the city, we would just be two more mouths combing the same garbage cans for food. Frankly, as long as things outside are running the way they are, we’re better off in here.”
“But shouldn’t we be doing something to solve the problem?” Kyrie said, the tension of tears climbing her throat.
“We’re making food,” said Jaysynn. “There are a lot of things people need right now, but if they don’t eat, nothing else matters.”
Kyrie didn’t look at him. She breathed deeply once and then again. Then she said, gazing past him and beyond the trees on the outside of the fence, “What do you think is your purpose in life?”
“To live another day.” Jaysynn let out a quick burst of laughter, but it was nervous and feeble. Kyrie shook her head and he answered again: “My purpose is to help others by doing the best I can with what I’ve got. Right now my purpose is to make sure there’s manure ready to spread so the fields will make a little better yield and a few more people will get to eat.”
“That’s the Emperor’s purpose?” she said, angrily. “That’s the Watchman’s purpose?”
“Look,” said Jaysynn. “When we first got here I was worried people would know who I was, and a lot of people recognized me—I know they did. I got to thinking about that and I don’t know why I was worried. There is no Emperor. There’s no royal family. There’s no Thyrion. There’s no nothing.”
“There’s no nothing?” Kyrie said. “Well, I think you’re wrong about that.”
“Oh,” said Jaysynn playfully. “So you think there’s not no nothing?”
“I’m being serious,” she said, and crossed her arms. Jaysynn said nothing, but waited for her to calm down, for her shoulders to drop a little, and for her eyes to gaze up at the moon.
“Some of the women in the camp…” she said, “they say Elethem is at work.”
“Elthor, you mean,” Jaysnn corrected her.
“No,” she said, still looking up. “Elthor is just a token of religion, they say. Elthor is the god that made Thyrians better than everyone else. They say he blew up two weeks ago and there’s nothing left but a hole in the ground.”
“Hmm,” said Jaysynn. “I wish I could argue….”
“But they say there’s something bigger at work,” Kyrie went on. Something that makes Elthor and Thyrion and everything else look like a joke. They say Elethem saw how proud people got and he kind of started to laugh, and one little chuckle sent cracks through the land and toppled skyscrapers and blasted the wells to pieces. I don’t know much about that. I mean I don’t know if all this destruction is really for the good. But I do know that there’s miracles going on.
“Before we got here one of the women got her foot run over by a cart—it slipped back down a hill when she was taking a sack of grain off of it. Everybody heard it crunch. She cried and said it was smashed to pieces, and blood soaked through her socks and shoes in no more than a second. So they put her on a table and gave her a piece of wood to bite on while they took her shoe off. And when they got it off, there wasn’t even a bruise. No broken bones, not a break in the skin. After they washed the blood away, all they saw was a nice, clean foot. And since we’ve been here there was an older woman who was really sick but they made her keep working. Well one day she…”
“Those days are over,” Jaysynn said. “It’s easy to think that we see something like that—some trace of magic—just because we can’t make sense of the world without it. We expect it. But the age of magic is gone.”
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