The Stone Statute

CHAPTER 1: AS IT SHOULD BE

All is as it should be. Rue plucks cotton bolls from their branches in an endless, thoughtless ritual – grab, twist, pull, drop – over and over, with a rhythm that pulls him through the hours. He doesn’t feel the weight of his basket, nor the cold rain that plasters his hair to his neck. His back may ache and his fingers itch and his wet shoulders shiver, but these sensations are far away, beyond the fog of thought. For while he grabs, twists, pulls, drops, his lips move in a ceaseless, muttering recitation of the Stone Statute – word for word, article by ponderous article.

“This Statute protects,” he grabs, “the right of man,” he twists, “to own property,” he pulls. “This protection,” he drops, “comes with a duty,” he pinches, “to improve that,” he twists, “which he owns,” he pulls.

The recitation is a habit that has become as rote over the years as the taking of cotton from branches. Mr. Mason had commanded him to know the Statute forwards and backwards, better than anyone else, and now he does. Rue’s old tutor would insist that while the students in Caledesca may have books and teachers in every subject, the Statute is the foundation on which the Empire is built, and even people like him have the right to know it through and through. In this area, at least, he will be on equal footing with them.

For many days, for many years, Rue has grabbed, and he has twisted, he has pulled, and he has dropped. He has worked his winters in the mines. He has worked his summers in the fields. He has studied, and he has researched, and he has recited. He is nearly sixteen, nearly a man, and the fated exam is less than a week away, but he isn’t ready.

“You’re going to fail,” the worry intrudes again, making him stumble in his rhythm, though he shoves it away as best he can.

People don’t tend to pass the exam, Rue has discovered. While there are a few, like Mr. Mason, who exercise their right to make an attempt on their 16^th birthdays, Rue has yet to find someone who actually passed the thing. Not a one. If it were really possible, shouldn’t there be at least one person living within a week’s journey of Creedmoor who managed it? If he were to pass, then this’d be the last week that he’d have to spend in a field. He’d be invited to Caledesca, the Empire’s capital, to study lititurgy and law, to make something of himself. But the more Rue learns, the more he finds left to learn, and the less hopeful he is of success.

Grab, twist, drop, raindrop. It splashes across the back of his hand, and Rue raises his head to find an empty field before him, his fellow farmhands all departed. Right, it’s raining; he’d forgotten. He stands and stretches out his spine, causing it to pop with a sound like corn in a pan, before fishing in his front pocket for his spectacles. Rue wears the same conjured overalls as every other farmer, though they hang as baggily off of him as they do off the scarecrow. Peering through his spectacle’s cracked lenses, he can finally see how a wave of pernicious storm clouds has rolled into the sky above him.

Although Rue is quite tall for his age, he always feels small on the long walk home. The conjured walls that fence in the fields reach up far above his head, so that the narrow alleys between them are shaded at all times except for the height of noon. Lititurges have the power to bind all things, and long ago they bound one grain of soil to another until these earthen walls stood as solid as stone. They are smooth to the touch, and impervious to the natural weatherings of wind and rain; even now, raindrops seem to race each other to the bottom to escape their surfaces.

The muddy road gobbles up Rue’s boots, seeping in through holes in the old leather until he might as well be walking barefoot. His jaw is clenched tight as a bear trap, and his heart thuds so loudly against his chest that he finds himself setting the pace of his footsteps to match its accelerated drumbeat. He is thinking of the exam, as usual, when he stumbles across a dead woman pinned to a tree with a pitchfork.

She is caked with mud and covered in bruises, with bloody punctures in her arms and chest. Through the rain and the cracks in his glasses, Rue can only barely make out her features, save for the brand on her cheek that shines through the mud as red as fresh blood. The mark – a coiled serpent with a triangular head – catches the corner of her mouth, searing the lips together there. It announces what she is, and why this is as it should be.

Rue sucks air through his teeth in instinctive sympathy and is hit by the scent of blood that sticks in his throat. He knows that outcasts deserve what they get. They chose to break the Statute; they chose to abandon the central code of laws that has protected and supported the Empire since its inception, and any punishment that they receive now is righteous. It’s supposed to feel righteous. But Rue has never had the stomach for violence, not even for outcasts. It reminds him too much of his father.

The woman groans, shifts, at the sound of his approach.  Her eyes flicker open, though they don’t seem capable of focusing on him, and he’s not sure that they can see anything at all. They are icy blue, just like Mr. Mason’s.

Rue’s heart stops beating for a breath. She’s alive. Barely.

“Hello?” she croaks through lips which barely part. “Help me. Please.”

He shouldn’t do anything. He should leave. Yet sympathy, ill placed as it might be, holds him back. Her desperation is familiar to him. It feels like his own, from back when his father died and his mother was left too ill to work, and Rue too young, when he had to beg at the doors of neighbors for his family to survive. It’s a pain that Rue can’t pull himself away from. He curses himself and his stupidity as he wraps his hands around the pitchfork’s slick handle, then he yanks it out and throws it away in disgust.

The outcast inhales in one breath that sounds as sharp and deep as if her soul were flying back into her body. She collapses to the ground, where she writhes in pain, pushing holes into the mud with her bare feet. Clutching herself around her elbows, she sputters blood into a puddle.

“Alive,” she mutters breathlessly to herself. “We’re alive, still alive.”

“Shh, don’t move around so much,” Rue hisses conspiratorially, though there is no one around to overhear him. “Come here, I need to see your wounds—”

“You,” the outcast whips her face around to meet him, and smiles the toothiest grin that Rue has ever seen. “You saved me?” She begins to giggle, and though it looks like the motion causes her pain, she doesn’t stop giggling. Rue flinches backwards, confused at the sudden madness. She moves in an articulated manner, like a marionette with strings attached to her elbows and wrists which sweep those limbs up in indelicate gestures. She raises a fist to her chest as if to strangle the quiet laughter there, massaging it with small, pressured circles, and as she does so her breathing grows more relaxed and her expression less pained.

“Do you know me?” Rue asks warily.

“How utterly adorable, isn’t he?” the outcast asks herself. “Or irritating. Both? All three?” She giggles again. Her arm, from elbow to fingertip, is covered with a web of thin, bleeding cuts that weren’t there a moment before. The cuts snag at a distant memory, though Rue can’t remember what. “I’m in your debt.”

“No, it’s nothing,” Rue says earnestly. “You don’t owe me anything.”

“No no no, you saved my life, and I will repay you.” Her voice is strengthening now. Her blood roils against her skin from the inside, flesh shifting and the color fading from purple and blue to raw pink. She giggles again, a small one. “Little dirt boy wears potato sacks and thinks he’s going to fit in.” She turns her head to the side and spits blood. “They don’t want you there. You’re going to fail.”

Rue’s skin goes cold. “What did you just say?”

“You’re going to fail,” she repeats, and, as she moves her arm down towards her stomach, Rue can finally see the mark in the middle of the web on the inside of her arm. It’s a pattern of seven deep cuts, looking like an hourglass with the lower-half broken out into jagged teeth. It’s the symbol of the shattered glass, cut over in the exact same place on her arm, over and over.

“Monster,” Rue says under his breath, as the memory is now not only snagged, but hooked and reeled in. Rue springs up to his feet, trips over himself, and falls down backwards in his hurry to get away. “Stay away from me. Don’t talk. Don’t speak. I won’t be tricked.”

“But we’re friends now, you and me,” the outcast says with her crooked smile. “You helped me, and I can help you. Help you pass. If you let me.”

“Oh no,” Rue says, scurrying away from her. “I know what you are. You’re a grimgrin, aren’t you?”

She grins. “You know me.”

“I know enough not to believe anything you say!”

Grimgrins are creatures of greed, broken from the Statute, who appear in fables to punish anyone foolish or greedy enough to make a deal with them. They grant wishes in exchange for parts of your soul, and it’s never worth it.

“Fair, very fair,” the outcast admits, hands swooping out into an exaggerated shrug. “My deals come with teeth unseen, and yet, I have what you need, don’t I? I passed the exam. A long time ago.”

“You passed it?” Rue asks, so affronted that he falters in his retreat.

“I wasn’t always what you see now, was I?” The womans voice pitches up in a singsongy soprano, “Nuh uh, I read allll the books. Made mommy and daddy so very proud.” A bitter scowl cracks across her face, sudden as a bolt of lightning. “But it’s all worthless to me now.” The grin returns. “Worth something to you, though, isn’t it? Worth a trade?”

The grimgrin steps up towards him, but Rue scrambles backwards in the mud, shaking his head from side to side.

“No, absolutely not.”

“But I can give you everything you need,” the grimgrin says in a coaxing tone. “I can give you all the knowledge of every book I ever read, every answer I gave; it could all be yours.”

Despite his intention not to believe a word this woman says, Rue can’t help how she makes him hesitate, even as he knows in his head that this is exactly what she wants.

“All for what?” he asks skeptically. “My ever-living soul?”

“Nothing so provincial,” she smirks. “No, no cost. You’ve already paid the cost. You saved me, so this is your payment.”

Rue’s eyes widen. If she’s to be believed…but no, she can’t be believed. They are liars by nature, Grimgrins, aren’t they?

“No,” he says, shaking the doubts out of his head. “I’m not making deals with a grimgrin. I know better than that. My mom raised me better.”

The woman gives him a smile soaked in pity.“You will fail.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I’m not lying to you, farm boy. You’re going to fail, and that’s just the plain truth.” Her expression jerks from one emotion to another with the speed of a bird turning its head: pity, rage, greed, disgust. “There’s a reason why books don’t make it out here. Why your arbiter has his own library, but won’t let you take a peek. They don’t want people like you to pass. But, you’re lucky. Because you met me, and I’m not a part of their plan. I hate them. And to beat them, all you have to do is trust me.”

“I’m not trusting you.”

“Then you’re going to fail.”

Rue shudders, as the rain-soaked chill seeps through down to his bones and makes him feel like dying.

The grimgrin approaches again, just as gently as if he were a frightened deer about to bolt. She moves with a sure grace of a woman in her prime, with no limp, no hint in her gait that she is anything but hale and hearty. She has long limbs and an angular face with shadowed cheeks and eyes, all of which conspire in the low light to give her a skeletal appearance.

“They lied to you,” she says. “They told you that success was possible, to put it on you – the failure – but the exam has changed. A century or two ago, maybe, as you are now, you’d have had a chance, but these days you can’t do it without the books. It’s impossible. Without someone like me. Like I said, you’re lucky. Blessed. Shake my hand.”

The grimgrin stands over him with her arm extended. She looks as strong and healthy as if she were never injured: no bruises, no puncture wounds. She smiles, and now Rue can see that her teeth are perfect. She has a highborn smile – white and even – like Arbiter Hadrian’s.

“No,” Rue says, resolutely holding her gaze.

The grimgrin’s expression flashes to ugly wrath and back so quickly that it might have just been his imagination. Rue stumbles backwards, trying to get back up to his feet, but the grimgrin follows him, shoving her hand again in front of his face.

“Don’t be stupid,” she says with a smile. “You’re going to fail.”

“I will pass or I will fail on my own merit.”

“It’s not a matter of merit,” the grimgrin snarls. “It’s a lie, a scam, you’re hopeless, always have been hopeless.”

“It’s not up to you to take my hope away.”

The woman lets out an ugly shriek of frustration up to the sky. She breaks away from him and, clawing her fingers into her scalp, she shouts, “Idiot, fool,” and much worse into the storm. Her screams are accompanied by a thundercrack too perfectly-timed to be coincidence.

Rue takes off in a sprint down the road. The puddles slap with his footfalls as he flees from the woman as quickly as he can; then she’s right in front of him.

She appears with a burst of wind, standing as still as a pond, with a magnanimous smile and her hands clasped before her. Rue rears like a startled horse, kicking up mud and almost falling down to the ground again.

“I’m sorry for the outburst,” the grimgrin says calmly. “I will, of course, respect your decision, whether I agree with it or not. I only ask that you give my offer some thought. Sleep on it, perhaps. I will be nearby if you change your mind. That’s reasonable, isn’t it?”

Rue nods his head, too startled to speak.

“It is, I know,” she says. “Then I’ll be seeing you.” And she ambles back down the road as casually as if she’d only stopped to chat about the weather on the way to market.

Rue watches the grimgrin go with his heart throbbing in his throat until she disappears around the corner, between two perfect walls and two perfect fields. Once she’s gone, the only evidence that she was ever there are a few shallow scars in the mud, and those should all melt away by morning. As Rue retreats down the road back home, he’s relieved to be alive, but an uneasy feeling sits in the middle of that relief – a shard of rotten doubt that the grimgrin planted in his gut. He shudders, looks forward, and tries to pretend like nothing happened.