The Other Lands Read Free Page A

face.
    “Yes,” he said, glancing between them, “you’re two sides of the same coin. You two are one, together in the womb, together in your fate. Your councilmen told us true. Come on. On your feet, both of you. We’ll not harm you if you come quiet.”
    He was so matter-of-fact, so casually intimidating that before he knew what he was doing Ravi was standing. He and Mór were pushed through the doorway into the main room. What Ravi saw there stayed in his memory only in fragments, disjointed images captured between the jolting motion of being shoved, stumbling. He saw his mother’s face, openmouthed, her teeth looking like the fangs of a wolf or bear. His eyes shot around to find his father. He couldn’t find him. He saw a commotion of men near the cook-stove, their arms and legs moving like those of some monster. He never did see him or pick out his body from among the motion, but Ravi knew that his father was at the center of it.
    Ravi was roughly conveyed through it toward the door. His foot caught the side of the doorjamb, and he sprawled out into the night. He hit the ground hard on his forearms and elbows, rolled, and had a clear moment of thought as he watched the figures striding out after him. Red cloaks. They wore red cloaks! And that meant he and Mór were to be taken by the eaters! Older boys had told stories about such things, saying that from time to time the king to the south sent hunters through Candovia in search of the children his god loved to devour. Ravi had never believed it. It had never happened in his lifetime, and he knew older boys were cruel and liars. But now a man was reaching down for him; his father was pinned beneath a seething mass of limbs; his mother wore a wolf’s face; his sister was crying out at some roughness.
    The anger was in him complete and instant, like oil on a fire. He kicked at the man reaching for him, a glancing blow off his shin. This made him angrier and he kicked again and again, his legs churning as hesquirmed on the hard-packed ground. The man cursed and jumped back, then came in again, his entire bulk trailing behind the point of his boot toe. Ravi tried to wrap himself around it and pull the man off balance, but the boot tore free and came on again. In a moment others joined it.
    That was the first time they beat him senseless. Because Ravi was unconscious he remembered nothing of how they were bundled into a wagon waiting by the road. He did not hear his mother’s wail or see her appear in the doorway, held back by a soldier’s arm. Nor did Mór ever tell him of it. Yet somehow he knew. He knew as certainly as if she had lent him her eyes and her ears.

    T wo days after the soldier squashed his nose—two days of travel, of beatings, of sleepless nights and numbing days—the children were herded with other groups from other villages near the coast. Many of them had been gathered in the coastal towns to celebrate the return of spring. Perhaps that was why they could be harvested in such great numbers. How the red-cloaked soldiers dealt with the children’s parents Ravi was not sure. They could not beat them all, could they? Perhaps this was why they marched the children so mercilessly. Perhaps, but Ravi also felt certain there was more to it. Sometimes he could smell the pungent scent of mist carried on the breeze coming from the towns they skirted. It struck him with the melancholy that smoke from burned ruins would have. But the towns were not in ruins; not, at least, in the physical sense that was easiest to envision.
    None of the children understood what was happening. Yes, they all knew the stories of the red-cloaked men, of the vanishings, but the stories had never been like this. They had heard of a child or two going missing every few years. Nothing more. And the tales had always said it was young children who were taken, none as old as Ravi and Mór. Whatever was happening now was a thing beyond even the nightmares that the older boys tried to