❝ DEATH IS COMING.
BUT SHE DOESN'T FEAR HIM. ❞
For the people of Khaya's little village living amidst the woods is quiet, and even more, so it became since the creatures lurking in its shadows turned into mere fairytales. Little does Khaya know that...
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WHAT DEATH CANNOT TOUCH vi. where deep waters flow
❆ ❆ ❆
This evening, the dusk came with a blood-smeared sky as if the poor ewe's gore had not long seeped into Lasow's black soil but had been painted on the gloomy horizon—a herald of wrath no one beheld.
No one but Khaya stood there watching it, shuddering and with the metallic taste of injustice on her lips. She felt the ewe's death like a blade through her own throat and her missing like an orphaned lamb.
Not only because of her fight with the priest, Khaya could not bring herself to cheer up. All of her felt like mourning.
For the rest of the day, even after Majda had softly led her back inside, she hadn't spoken a word, not daring to look at the others who most certainly kept watching her the whole time. Even Majda's angelic voice that enchanted the entire room couldn't pull her out of her trance. In her sleep, she was once again haunted by the priest, his soldier, and the voice.
Let a wanderer in. Let in who you invited. And she woke up covered in sweat, with a pounding heart and the feeling of a claw on her throat.
No one talked about what had happened, and only now that she sat with Majda and Ulya alone in the little wooden bathhouse—the place where the people of Lasow cleaned their bodies and souls, children were born, and the dead were laid out, and thus, the circle of life and death closed—did her cousin break the silence the family had wrapped yesterday's events in carefully.
"What were you thinking?" she asked into the steam of the banya. "They want to help us, and yet you treat them like our enemies."
Khaya trying to hide her face from them sank her teeth into her chapped lips. Do they really want to help us? she thought but responded instead, "I know."
Warm steam and the smell of birches filled her lungs as Khaya took a deep breath. "It's just... I don't trust them."
"That you have demonstrated to us already," her cousin snapped but called herself to calm down instantly. A little softer, she added, "I simply don't understand why. What have they ever done to you?"
Nothing. Except for accusing me of being the witch they want to kill. It took her more strength to keep her composure and not simply blurt this thought out than Khaya expected. But this time she couldn't allow her feelings to destroy everything.
So, she fought down the urge to yell at Majda the truth of what had happened in the temple by reaching for a birch broom and lashing it against her skin more vigorously than usual to let the tender pain dowse the flame inside of her.
"All of this talk about a witch beneath us—can you imagine it? Can you believe that any of the women of Lasow could be that wicked?"
