The Heartless

The night before we were set to head out, having mapped out an ideal route through a couple of neighboring villages to the southeast, I simply could not silence my thoughts long enough to fall asleep. Fear had bound me to the limits of the Village and the surrounding woods for years. Who could know how much the rest of the kingdom, so far removed from the tiny, isolated village I knew, had changed in that time? Petra would know what the outside world was like, but admitting my fears to her was out of the question; as the older one, who was supposed to keep her out of trouble, I needed to save face.

I stood up from my cot and began pacing circles around the dining table. I needed to relax; if a child could have that kind of courage, then certainly I could, too. Granted, she was young and naive and had a vastly different childhood than mine--but was that fair of me to say?

My pacing was interrupted by a door creaking. Bertrand emerged from his study, scraggly beard more unkempt than usual. He studied me briefly, grey eyebrows raised.

“You’ll wear a hole into the floorboards,” he mused.

My shoulders sank. “Of course, the floor is your main concern.”

Bertrand paused, eyeing me from across the room for a few silent beats. “You leave in the morning, yes?”

I nodded. “Only for a week or so.”

Several carefully concealed emotions passed across Bertrand’s face; his mustache twitched almost imperceptibly. Then, his usual stony expression returned, and he reiterated, “I was being serious about the floorboards,” and said nothing more before returning to his study and locking the door behind him with a resounding click.

I shook my head dismally and returned to bed.

I woke up to the same drab, brown ceiling as always, the wood rotting away rainy day after rainy day. Blinking away sleep, I rolled out of bed and changed my clothes in the glow of the rising sun pouring through the window. The door to Bertrand’s study was left ajar, and for a moment I thought about saying goodbye—but I decided against it, for fear he’d only try to change my mind. So I stuffed a few stale crusts of bread and supplies into my satchel and left, not daring to look back.

The heat had begun to set in, and the air was thickening with each passing day as summer tightened its grip on the kingdom. I met Petra at the village gates beyond the great oak tree just after sunrise, with my over-stuffed satchel slung cross-body and my bow and arrow at the ready on my back. Petra greeted me as giddily as ever, bouncing on her heels with unyielding energy.

“Are you ready?” she urged, already hopping the fence to the other side.

I willed my legs to move, but they wouldn’t. “Petra… Are you sure this is safe?”

Petra frowned. “I leave the village all the time. Much longer than you’ve been aware, in fact. No one’s ever watching.”

What did she mean, no one’s ever watching? “Petra, the royal guard patrols this area all the time.”

“Have you ever seen them?”

“I— What? No, I’ve never really—”

Petra gestured broadly with both her scrawny arms. “I have walked through here every hour of the day and I have seen a guard perhaps once or twice, and never have they questioned me. They keep the gates locked as a scare tactic, sure, but nothing is stopping you from hopping the fence.” She put her hands on her hips and frowned. “Have you really never even once tried to leave, just to take a walk down the road?”

I felt exposed. She, a child, had seen right through me. Sure, I had taken walks through the woods on the opposite end of the village, and I could see the gate from the oak tree where I spent most evenings. But never had I even considered the possibility of leaving until Petra had convinced me, and not once had I stopped to wonder whether the royal guard were ever really watching, or if they ever really cared who went in or out so long as we didn’t cause them any trouble. Perhaps as long as we kept our mouths shut and vowed to stay in the shadows and on the fringes of society, they did not care what happened to us. After all, clearly no one was truly preventing Petra’s escapades, nor the entrance of the sorts of troublemakers who chased after her.

“No,” I finally admitted. “I’ve never done this before. This is the first time.”

“Why?”

I did not give a response, and after a few moments Petra seemed to decide not to press me for one; perhaps she already knew the answer. Instead, she stepped back and gestured expectantly at the fence. Steeling my resolve and taking a deep breath, I hoisted one leg over the fence and then the other. My feet hit solid ground, and the world did not come to an end as I once expected it would; for the first time in seven years, I was outside the boundaries of the Village of the Heartless. It felt every bit as anticlimactic as you might expect.

We headed southeast on foot, down to a border village not unlike my own hometown, full of tiny cottages and dirt roads and street vendors selling their wares in the market square. No one paid us much attention; to the townspeople, we were no different from them, save for perhaps our appearances. Petra’s ill-fitting clothing and my bow and arrow made us stand out far more than the secret we were harboring seemed to be able to. This, of course, had been how I was able to conceal my identity as a child: from the outside, no one can tell how empty you are--it’s only when they get too close that our true selves come out eventually.

From the look of it, none of this was on Petra’s young mind at all. She waltzed through the town’s bustling streets as though she were its divine ruler, with all the undue confidence of someone young enough to believe themself untouchable and the track record to support it. I had once expected that her brief run-in with death those many weeks ago would have deterred her to some extent, but I had been wrong; whereas I was cautious, eyes always peeled, trigger-happy hands itching for my bow at the earliest sign of trouble, Petra was unabashed, brazen, a master of quick escapes and daring pursuits.

Or maybe she was just lucky, and too young to fear consequences. But then again, if there was anything my 17 years had taught me, it was that age and experience are often two vastly different things.

We browsed some of the market stalls from a safe distance (neither of us had more than some spare change to our names). There were farmers selling their early summer crops, bakers with baskets overflowing with still-warm loaves of bread and pastries stuffed with fresh jams. There was even a vendor selling medicinal potions in tiny glass bottles, which reminded me briefly of Bertrand, but I quickly pushed the thought from my mind and continued walking. At the far end of the square, there was a counter lined end-to-end with sweet cakes and fresh-baked raspberry pies that glistened red and moist in the summer sun, just like the ones that once sat sparkling on kitchen window sills as a promised reward for clean plates and helpful hands.

Petra’s stomach growled audibly. I reached into my bag and retrieved two not-quite-stale rolls, one for me and one for her.

“Come on,” I prompted, nodding at the stretch of dirt road that led back out of the market square. “We should go.”

When we stopped to rest that evening, it was up in the trees on the edge of town, where we would not be disturbed by animals nor discovered by late-night passersby. I watched the people pass by below; workers returning home, couples strolling hand-in-hand, gaggles of laughing children running through the streets, doting parents walking by with their babies. I thought of the Village of the Heartless, its unlit lamps and perilous nights, but also its peaceful mornings and quiet afternoon laughter, and tried fruitlessly to reconcile the two images in my head.

“What was your home village like?” Petra asked quietly, eyes fixed on a group of kids about her age that were playing a game in the street below.

“Not all that different from this one,” I answered simply.

“I see.” Petra fussed absentmindedly with the hem of her shirt, mouth set in a soft frown. “Were there a lot of other kids your age there?”

If I’d had a heart, I imagine it would have clenched. Instead, I felt an aching sort of sadness set deep into my bones. “There were,” I confirmed.

“So you must have had a lot of friends,” Petra pried, both a statement and a challenge in one. She stared firmly into my eyes expectantly.

I sighed. Petra’s budding interest in my past was only going to end poorly for the both of us. “I once thought so,” I replied honestly. “But in the end, when the veil was lifted, maybe it was only ever just Basil.”

Petra hummed thoughtfully, but she did not ask any more questions. Instead, she leaned into the crook of the branches she was perched in, and we sat in silence as the moon rose high above the horizon. Petra closed her eyes and drifted off to sleep, while I listened to the steady heartbeat of the village below. I barely slept a wink.