“The child that you described, he could be any one of them,” Shel overheard Peula say through the back wall of her house.

“Or she,” the priest said, her voice was soft, almost a whisper, and Shel leaned his ear closer to the door to better understand her words. “It could as easily be a girl child.”

“I need to know more about the child. How can I watch for him or her if you don’t tell me more than a vague range of dates for when he was born? You must have more details you could share.”

“How dare you question,” the man roared. A loud crashing noise sounded within the house and Shel stepped back from the wall as it moved outward from the force of the crash and hit him in the side of the head. He let out a loud yell and cut it off when he realized he had made a sound.

“What was that?” the man asked. Shel heard footsteps approaching the back door. He stepped closer to the back of the house and leaned against the wall in the direction the door opened. He doubted either the man or the priest would come out in the back road. There was no porch area, and the thickness of mud should discourage any investigation. Many stray animals moved about the back of the house. Shel thought briefly about making a nose like a cat, but decided against it. Instead, he held his breath and tried not to make a sound. He twisted his head and placed his ear against the wall, bracing his head for any additional crashes in the house. He thought of running for the alley, but after a few moments where he heard no additional sounds, he felt safe and his curiosity won out. Peula was somehow involved with the Church, and her involvement had put his name and perhaps Neal’s name on her list. With what Audrel and Samuel had told him about the Church, the kidnapping of the young people and the bribing of the old people, the one thing Shel was sure about was that he did not want his name on that list.

He expected the back door to swing open, but it remained closed. He did not hear any voices, and wondered if perhaps they had left through the front door, or if the noise had spooked them.

“It’s rare that you make such an open visit,” Peula said, breaking the silence, her voice sounded louder and her words more deliberate. “Usually you send your men in at night, and except for the services, I rarely see priests.”

“Shush,” the priest said. “Tell me more about the orphan situation here. I had heard rumors of the movement of children, but I did not think the children had come this far north already.”

“It’s the wars, your holiness. After the men returned home from the Empress’s draft, childbirth boomed, and we now have more brats per house than ever before. The wars didn’t only bring childbirth, it also brought great poverty as many of the jobs the men had before the wars were gone when they returned. I think the orphans are the results of the wars.”

Shel had never wondered where the children came from. It was part of his life, for as long back as he could remember, Varis had been overrun with them. To think that they had something to do with the wars began to make some sense. Peula was always an inquisitive old woman, and she offered the boys treats if they would speak to her. When she had first started doing this, the boys had willingly taken the treats, treating her, as most of the orphans in the Builders District did, as a lonely old lady who had nothing better to do with her time than to watch the children running about the district and share treats with them in exchange for a few moments of conversation.

“Let’s get this over with,” the priest said.

The house was quiet for a few minutes, and Shel decided to risk looking in to see if they had left the house. Across from the door was a small window. Shel moved slowly through the mud and crossed to the other side of the house. He ducked under the window and slowly stood up until his eyes were level with the bottom of the window. He moved slowly, and when he looked in, he made sure nobody was looking in his direction. The window was made of a bubbled glass that distorted the view. Small brown imperfections in the glass competed with the warping bubbles to create a mosaic view of the back room of the house. He moved his head slowly until he found a piece of glass he could look through with less distortion.

Shel saw Peula again kneeling on the floor in front of the priest. The priest held out her iron necklace, but Peula’s head remained bowed down, and she did not attempt to kiss it. The priest’s mouth was moving but Shel could not make out the words she was saying. The priest’s back was to Shel, and he studied her. She had let her black robe fall to the floor in the house, and the edge of the robe was marked with mud spots. Her feet were spread apart as she stood in front of the kneeling Peula. Peeking out of the bottom of her robe was a barefoot, which looked surprisingly clean for having walked through mud.

As the priest chanted, Peula’s arms spread apart until they were straight out to her sides. Shel felt warmth coming from the direction of the priest, and the air around him felt unnaturally warmed. Shel took quick shallow breaths, but he could not seem to take in enough air. He felt as if he was suffocating. He knew the feeling unwarranted, since he felt the air pass through his mouth and into his lungs, but even as the air made the same trip it had always made, he felt as if what was taken in was no sufficient, as if he had run a long way and his muscles demanded oxygen he could not supply through breathing alone. Where he expected such a lack of oxygen to overwhelm him, his thoughts on it were rational, and he did not worry about suffocating, or even wonder why he was not getting enough oxygen. It was more that he just knew it was the way it was and he left it at that, having other things to think upon, such as the scene unfolding through the glass in Peula’s back room.

The Church’s symbol the priest held began to glow. The glow reminded Shel of the glyphs he had seen on the sweet bun earlier in the morning. Peula’s face, which was full of the loose skin folds of old age, began to glow. Shel squinted and was almost able to make out glyphs forming on her face. He leaned his face closer to the glass, sure that if he was able to get a closer look, he could see what the glyphs read, and that, somehow would explain what was happening between the priest and Peula.

As the priest continued to chant, Shel watched a subtle change overcome Peula. Peula was one of the oldest woman in the district. Not even the old man Francis, who lived near the Pretty Beak tavern and spent his days like Peula, sitting and watching in his front chair, looked as old. Neither had family, Shel remembered, and nobody outside of the missionaries visited them. As Shel watched, Peula’s face began to change. At first, Shel thought it was a trick of the unnatural light emanated from both the priest’s symbol Peula’s face. But as he watched, he realized it was not the light that caused the change, but something subtle in Peula’s face. The wrinkles, which marked Peula’s face like the glyphs marked Audrel’s books, seemed to shrink and become less defined. Her face was smoothing out, growing younger. The light shining from Peula’s face began to pulse and Shel heard a sigh escape Peula’s lips, which looked fuller and brighter. The fullness and brightness of her lips were not the same as when the elderly painted their lips in an attempt to bring back their youth. Instead, the fullness and brightness looked like her lips like her face had grown younger.

Shel watched in amazement as Peula grew younger. Her back straightened as her face smoothed, and although she still kneeled with her arms held out to her sides, her muscles holding her arm looked stronger, and her wrists, which had been limp moments before, now held her hands out straight, with her fingers pointed to the sides.

“Let me stay,” Peula moaned. “Just this once, please, just let me stay!” Peula’s voice sounded young, the edged crack, which had accompanied her words only minutes before, was gone, and her voice sounded sweet, almost melodious, its bitterness, which Shel had always felt arose from her anger at the young people she seemed forced to interact with, was gone. But mixed with the sweetness of her voice was something else, a kind of desperation Shel had never heard in Peula’s voice. Always before when she spoke, she sounded resigned to what she was saying, as if no matter what she said, it would do nothing to change the way of the world. But now, with her physical change, she seemed to realize that there was something more in the world, something else she could hope for.

As fast as the light had appeared, it disappeared. First, the symbol the priest held stopped glowing. Her lips stopped moving and she let the iron chain fall against her chest, where it bounced jingling until it came to a rest. The priest let her arms drop to her side and she took a step back. Peula then scream, and Shel looked back to her. Her face had stopped glowing, and her face no longer had the look of youth. The wrinkles had returned, and along with them, the skin flaps and deep almost rouge lines. Her hair had returned to its white color, although it was now mussed on top of her head. As Shel studied her through the glass, he saw that while she looked the same as she had before the priest’s chanting, there were subtle differences. Where before the bags under Peula’s eyes had reached down to almost the middle of her cheeks, they now seemed tighter, having shrunk to above where her nose met her upper lip. Her back, which moments before had been straight was now bowed, but it was not as bowed as before. She seemed younger, younger for an old person, that is.

Peula dropped to her other knee and bowed under her forehead touched the wooden floor. “I’m sorry, your holiness. I am but your servant and I am sorry for screaming out and demanding more of you. It is just so painful, a pain I cannot begin to explain, to be that close to youth and have it ripped away.”

The priest did not respond. She remained standing before the prostrate Peula, looking down at her with what looked like sympathy in her face. She seemed to glow, as if a holiness surrounded her. Shel realized that the warmth he had felt earlier had disappeared, and the air, which had seemed thick and unsatisfying, was normal again, although he breathed deeply and felt his heart pound in his ears as if he had been running a long distance.

Shel was about to step away from the back door when he felt a pressure on his shoulder.

“What do we have here,” a gruff voice asked. It was at that moment that Shel wondered where the armored man that had accompanied the priest into Peula’s house had disappeared to. Shel turned around slowly, knowing the answer to that question even before he saw saw the armored man standing behind him with one hand holding onto Shel’s shoulder. One of the guards with the halberds stood on Shel’s other side, the halberd held low and the blade’s point hovering close to his midsection. The armored man squeezed Shel’s shoulder, and his metal gauntlet bit deeply into his neck. “Have you no respect for the Church, boy? Don’t you know that it is rude to spy on others?”

Word count: 2,182

Words remaining: 36,478

Caffeination: A mocha from Banana Bread (again). This time I dragged the Doolies with me to BB.

Feeling: The first half of the writing was tough. I had some good thoughts on where this was heading, but Banana Bread didn’t inspire me, and I think that was reflected in the way I dragged out parts of the story. I wrote the second half of the scene on the plane ride back to Seattle. It came out much easier (and with many more words than it probably warranted—but isn’t that one of the goals of the Marathon?).

The story has gotten a little away from me. Things that I had planned to happen later (such as that last part), happened before I expected, but I’ll find a way to work it into the story. I’m generally happy with the way things are developing. I see much room for improvement in the rewrite, but that’s the point, I guess. Still, all in all, I feel much better about this story than the abomination from last year.