DUALITY /#Wattys 2021

Chapter 4

Ridley walked onto the main street of town past tired clapboard houses shuttered against the night. The homey scent of smoke from everyone's fireplaces tickled her nose. Here and there, old pieces of pebbled asphalt, left over from when the road used to be paved, jutted up into her path. She was so tired she tripped over one and nearly fell.

The homes here were all at least two hundred years old, built during more prosperous times, before the United States had split into Mannaz and the United Confederation of American States. Two hundred years of weather were hard on a house; roofs, walls, and stoops were intact or not depending on a family's skill with wood and nails. Paint was a thing long gone. Tattered, corroding piles of rust sat next to people's walkways, overgrown with ivy and weeds. Ridley's mother said they were machines that used to work inside the houses, doing things like washing clothes and dishes. Only Guildsmen had such things now.

A dog barked from a close side street. Only the moon lit Ridley's way; electric street lamps clustered mostly around the town square, which held the Market and the weathered Community Center with its two large television screens. Too close to the Center for anyone's comfort stood The Tavern, Holstonia's one bar and dance hall. The King's father had spent far too many nights there, along with many other citizens of the town; it was the only place to get a beer or a glass of cheap wine or whiskey. What went on in back of the place was sternly preached against in the churches held in the breakrooms of every Guild workfloor, unless it was a preacher employed by the Guild. Guild preachers ignored that the watering holes existed; town preachers denounced the places.

In Holstonia, Ridley's mother and all the neighbors she associated with never went near there after dark, and they certainly wouldn't allow their daughters near the place. Those women who did "go out back" there could stretch their food budgets a little further; individual families made their own choices about what they were willing to do for a little extra.

The Crown provided each home with its own small television screen, through the generosity of the Guild. But, when a family couldn't afford electric service, the devices didn't work, hence the need for a Community Center with two public screens. The banking terminal was there, and a small, empty appellate court building with conferencing equipment for a magistrate in Midgarde, along with a few unused jail cells. Justice in the workingtowns generally never reached a courthouse.

Ridley put her hand on her spine, where the strained muscle was really beginning to throb. As a lean, sinewy former athlete about to turn twenty-nine, who still made sure to get in some running and a gymnastics workout most days, Ridley didn't get injured often. It took a lot to pull a muscle and when she did, it hurt.

The house she shared with her mother and daughter—and used to share with Simon—lay at the south end of town. As Ridley walked, a gap in the row of houses yawned on her left. Moonlight silvered the ghostly outline of a charred foundation, ruined in a terrible fire long ago. The King of the Confederation, the commoner husband of Queen Eira II, had himself been raised here in that very burned house. Like Ridley, he had been selected for training in a sport, and had been a gold medalist in the Games himself, popular long before his royal marriage.

Ridley had been eight then and remembered neighbors screaming in the middle of the night, the tamping of running feet, being swept along in her mother's arms, the smell of smoke and the terror of orange flames roaring skyward in the night. The King—then Chiron Alder, the teenaged gold medalist—had been home at the time visiting his parents, but he had only been able to get his mother out of the house, and then she had died anyway. 

The image haunted Ridley's mind every time she passed by here; the sports star's tall frame, silhouetted against dazzling, roaring orange, bent double with coughing and with wrenching sobs Ridley could still hear.