I close my eyes before I kill him.

Just in the final seconds as my swordpoint hits fast and straight through the hole in the chain mail under his arm. In order not to see the expression on his face, his eyes bulge, the gasp of breath when he realizes it was a killing stroke. There’ll be pink bubbles on his lips as his knees hit the muddy ground, and his own weight jerks his body off my sword as long as I square my feet.

It’s the worst way to do it, to not watch. Anything could happen, but I can’t do it any other way.

As he falls I look again, in time to turn heavily and block another attack with my shield. But Deck knocks the new enemy over by grabbing his collar and flinging him back. My brother stands over the fallen soldier and guts him before grinning at me through a blood-flecked beard. He’s just managed to grow it.

I lower my sword because the enemy band is withdrawing back into their forest. It was only a score of them, down to a quarter of that now, and their long shadows stretch back toward us through the trees, promising more tomorrow. And the next day and the next, through the gods know how many more weeks. Here on the southern front, there’s almost no winter to speak of, and so no pause in the king’s war.

Deck bares his teeth at their backs. “Run!” he screams after them. “Run from us!” And he claps me on the shoulder, making me stagger. I sink the tip of my sword into layers of fallen leaves for balance, thinking of how Captain would cuss at me for it. Your sword is your life, boy, don’t treat it like a stick – what if there’s an enemy behind you and you can’t bring the sword up fast enough? You want to do nothing but fling mud in some banger’s face as you die? I breathe through my teeth, as if I can stop the thick smells from sticking to my tongue: blood and rot and that sharp smell of the evergreens around here.

“Let’s go, Half,” Deck says, not waiting before he begins tromping back toward camp. I kneel down, ignoring the ache in my right thigh from an old scar, and set down my shield beside Deck’s gutted enemy. He’s clutching at his stomach, where blood leaks through the wide round metal joints of his armor, and I smell his death easily enough. But it won’t be easy for him, and I pull my dagger from the sheath on my gauntlet. He’s hissing and his big eyes stare up at the purple sky as I tug off the helmet skewed on his head and set my blade against his throat.

He’s doomed, and this will be better than him gasping and bleeding here until the wolf-priests come to collect our dead and burn the enemy overnight. This is the right thing to do. The good thing.

But I close my eyes again, while the knife pushes gently into his dirt-crusted neck. It’s got to be done. It’s just another practice thrust, Half. Do it.

And I do. I should’ve taken my gauntlet off first, but it’s already got blood soaked into the cracks and this spray won’t make it too much worse.

***

As I drink thick broth at the fire that night, my sword hand begins to tremble.

I set down my mug and clench a fist, tucking the offending hand against my side. I’ve only been back at the front for eight days. I should be good for at least twelve more before fatigue sets in, before I’m anxious again and jumping at the cracks from the fire.
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There was a farm off highway 32, just north of the road, that the Linwood High School cross-country team drove past every Tuesday and Thursday during the fall semester on their way to the six-mile course near Lake Archer.

The farm was just a two-story cabin with peeling white paint and a collapsing barn out back. The silo’d been stripped of its tiles and looked like nothing more than a fat concrete smoke stack, and a massive old cottonwood shaded a pond covered in lily-pads. Between the silo and the tree was a fallow field a half-acre square, full of junk. It was organized in haphazard rows, and varied from tin can sculpture and tire flower beds, to trunks of porcelain baby dolls and old rotary telephones.
A hand-painted plywood sign declared JACK’S FIELD OF BARGAINS.

Tom Vanderpoel sat in the backseat of his teammate Evan’s rusty Chevy, forehead pressed to the cool window, as they sped at least ten over the highway limit. He’d only been running cross country for a couple of weeks, having moved to Linwood with his mom after she and his dad divorced over the summer. Up front was Evan’s girlfriend and star of the women’s team, Mary Jo. Her feet were up on the dash as she hummed along with some emo singer-songwriter and Evan performed a monologue on the injustice of Mr. Summers, the U.S. history teacher’s, epically long final exams. Tom didn’t mind, since it kept him from having to talk back, and he was struggling with himself for thinking Evan in no way deserved Mary Jo.

When he saw the sign, he interrupted. “What kind of bargains?”

Mary Jo set her feet down into the well and twisted around. “Oh, Jack’s. My mom says her dad used to be friends with Jack Dalling, and he used to say you could find your destiny in his field.”

“Seriously?”

Evan snorted. “It’s junk.”

She narrowed her eyes dangerously at her boyfriend, and Tom said, “Pull over.”

There was a dirt turn off about fifty yards down, and Evan swerved as his wheels fell off the pavement. He cursed, but continued on. The car filled with the crunch of gravel as the wheels kicked up a solid cloud of dust as they backtracked. He pulled to the side, the square nose of his Chevy pushing at tall yellow grass. Tom and Mary Jo shoved their doors open immediately, spilling into the same grass. It scratched at Tom’s track pants and he considered the likelihood of ticks.

Mary Jo was in shorts, and squealed as she dashed to the tractor path where all the grass was flattened out. “Asshole!” she called back at Evan, who snickered as he stepped onto the safe gravel and came around the car to join them.

Crickets chirped and tiny winged bugs scattered around their heads, buffeted by the dry breeze. Overhead the sky was pristine blue, unbroken by clouds. As sorry as Tom usually was to have come here instead of going with his dad to Wisconsin, he had to admit at least to himself that this much sky was awesome, in that old sense of the word his Junior High English teacher had tried to get her kids to understand.

The three of them stopped at the junk field, near where a man sat in a beach chair. His face was tanned and cracked with wrinkles like a dried up riverbed, and an old John Deere baseball cap shaded his sharp blue eyes. “Hey there, you kids. You come to trade?”

“Trade?” Tom said.
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When Bernadette was very small, she thought she was the only one who could see the Driver.

She’d been six years old when her neighbors had moved their old granny into their house along with a hospice nurse. For a week, Bern came home from school and helped her mama bake a pie or cookies or a casserole that they’d walk over to the Oswalds’ together. Everyone whispered, and the hallway smelled cold. Not like the bright orange feeling Bern used to get when she visited to play with the Oswalds’ old poodle.

The last morning, Bern was slowly tying her shoelaces on the small concrete step just outside her front door while her mama ran around the house after the right purse and her favorite earrings and – oh yes – grabbing a lunch from the freezer. As Bern finished her laces, a dark shape turned up her street: black as fresh asphalt, the carriage was square and windowless, with large silver wheels. The team of four horses pulling it were black, too, except where the sunlight caught them just right and they shimmered purple and blue and pretty, perfect yellow, in slick rainbows like spilled oil.

Bern stood up, clapping her hands together. But her little pink shoes stuck to the concrete as she noticed the man on the high bench, his gloved hands holding the reins loose as he drove. The sun shone hot, but this man wore a coat with tattered hems and a wide-brimmed hat, all of it black. He drew the horses up, and his carriage stopped in front of the Oswalds’ house.

And nothing.

The horses shook their flanks, sighing and settling. The man on the bench leaned back and tipped his hat down so the rim shadowed his face. Bern waved, and one of the horses turned its long nose to her, stretching out its neck. One of her feet lifted free, and just as Bern began to run, her mama snatched her up, saying, “Come on baby, time for school!” and tucked her up into their car. Mama kept her face averted from the carriage, never glancing that way or pausing even as she backed out of the driveway. But Bern pressed her little hand to the window and stared until they turned right at the stop-sign and the carriage vanished behind the houses.

***

What impressed her most about the carriage wasn’t that nobody seemed to want to talk about it, or that she saw it herself almost once a month, or how easily it slipped through traffic, never quite impossibly, but often only avoiding collisions in a way that had Bern wincing and on edge.

It was that the driver always wore a different hat.
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There he stands three steps higher than I, dark eyes locked onto my face and the scythe-like curve of his smile the way it has always been. I bow my head and step nearer, my slippers thin enough I feel the smoothness of the stone under the balls of my feet. I go deliberately, softly, hoping to pass him by.

He catches my right hand. I lean against the curving tower wall as he puts his face to my sleeve. I am nearly undone by the feel of his hot breath in the crook of my elbow, and then he pushes back my sleeves and touches his lips to my wrist.

His words slither up my skin, “I will kill you, if I must.”

It is a sharp thrust of steel straightening my back. Gripping my knife – only a small lady’s knife, for cutting her dinner, for showing off her father’s favor – I twist and stab it at his face.

My hope is surprise will win me the day, but I might’ve known better. He grabs my left hand, crushing my fingers under his and against the hilt of my knife. Slamming me back, he laughs.

He laughs.

I am pressed between the hard stone wall and his body. The metal of his armor coif shimmers dully in the daylight melting through one thin window over my head. It is like dragon scales, growing out of his forehead and spilling all down his body, changing him. With my hand still trapped in his, he puts the tip of my knife to his cheek and together we cut. I shove all my weight into him, into my arm, but he is too strong, and only a trickle of blood leaks from his skin.

He smiles at me again, and my knees are week. I will not bend, I tell myself. I will not bend. But through his smile he suddenly cries out, as if in fear and pain! “Aoife! No!” And before I can react, swings me down the stairs.

When he lets me fall, all the world falls with me.
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