Hans crawled out through the burning hay. The flames singed his hair and burned his fingers. Ash stung his eyes. He rolled out onto the hard ground, coughing and sputtering.
Dark shapes gathered over him.
‘That’s the one,’ said a voice.
‘Go on,’ said another. ‘It’s only a boy in his nightshirt.’
‘You see anybody else here?’
‘Ah, do you really think this lad did it all himself and then stuck himself into the midst of it?’
Hans beat the flames out of his nightshirt. He clawed back his hair and wiped at his face, full of ash and snot. His whole body ached and itched and burned. His ankle throbbed. But the men let him alone.
‘Don’t play the fool. ’Course that ain’t what I think. The others left him, that’s what. They must’ve held a grudge. But he was part of it. Here, you!’ A boot nudged Hans in his side. ‘Where are they, eh? Where are the rest of them?’
Hans blinked up at the men dark against the sky. It was day, and the dreadful night was past.
‘I don’t know what you mean. Rest of who?’
‘Don’t play games, boy. The rest of your fellow pranksters. The ones who burned the haystack.’
‘The soldiers, you mean? But aren’t you them?’
But now, as he rubbed the ash-tears from his eyes, Hans saw they weren’t the wicken-soldiers at all. They were tall straight men in plain work-clothes and boots. They held pitch-forks and mowing-scythes. They looked like farmers. Hans even thought he had met one of them before, an older man with a full gray beard and scowling bushy brows. He was the foremost farmer in the Upper Dimmerthal. His name was Groening and he had the sternest face that Hans had every seen.
‘Farmer Groening, don’t you know me?’
The man’s sharp eyes peered down at Hans. He made Hans feel wretched and ragged and ashamed so that he shivered and had to look away.
‘You’re the Forester’s boy, unless my eyes play me tricks,’ said Farmer Groening. ‘What’s your name, boy? Is it not Johannes?’
‘They call me Hans.’
Another man stepped forward, full-bellied with red cheeks and merry blue eyes. He winked and pulled Hans to his feet. The pain in his ankle almost made Hans faint but the fat man caught hold of him. ‘Whoa, now, steady lad! How did this haystack catch fire, Hans? Do you know who did it?’
‘Yes, sir. They were chasing me.’
‘Who were?’
‘The Charcoal Burners. Or rather, they looked like Charcoal Burners at first, but like soldiers later on. They seemed like wicken-things to me.’
The fat farmer laughed. Farmer Groening’s stare was more like flint. The other men shifted on their feet and looked one another in the eye. Hans read their scoffing looks quite well.
‘It’s true!’ he said.
Farmer Groening turned away. ‘Charcoal Burners!’ he muttered in his beard. ‘See the fire’s put out, lads. As for you, Hans Forester, you’d best come with us.’
‘I don’t think he can go far, brother,’ said the fat man. But Hans eased his weight from the man’s arms and took a step or two.
‘I’m all right,’ he said.
Farmer Groening turned on his heel and strode away. Two of his men followed after. The fat man and the others stayed behind to watch the burning haystack and see the fire didn’t spread.
Hans struggled to keep pace with them.
‘You must send to hunt the wicken-men,’ he told them, but nobody answered him or even looked at him. He felt his spirits dragging.
They reached the Road and began to follow it. The farmers quickened their steps and left Hans trailing a stone’s throw behind.
It came home to him that he was alone now in the world. Father was dead. Mother was dead. Granny and his sisters were all dead. And he had killed them.
‘What have I done?’ he wondered. ‘Dear God in Heaven, what have I done?’
He had laid hold on the Mankiller tree, and fulfilled the evil destiny of his nightmare. It had been there warning him and waiting for him ever since he was little. Now he had done it. His home, the house he had grown up in and lived in all his life, was no more. A new evil marched upon the Dimmerthal.
‘Why?’ he wondered. ‘And why me and my family?’
The farmers walked up the Road with easy strides. The woodcutter’s son limped after them. The Sun was already high and the last of the fogs were burned away. The day was bright and warm. It looked to be fair and splendid.
But Hans felt the bitterness of his loss, of his life gone forever, and the emptiness that would abide with him forever.
He felt weak and weary and all alone. ‘But I won’t cry,’ he told himself. ‘There will be no more tears for me.’
He knew the others were tied up in it, too. Whatever it was that he himself had done, those others – the boy with the yellow socks, the Charcoal Burners, the green crow and even the fair White Lady – they had played their parts as well.
He saw his hands drooping from his wrists. He stared at them as they swung with his steps. He made the fingers bunch up into fists and he squeezed his fists tighter so that the flesh went pale and bloodless and he felt his fingernails digging into the flesh of his palms and the pangs pushed back even the aching from his ankle. ‘Not tears but fists are what I’m in need of now,’ he thought.
The only way that he could think to make up for the one thing he had done and for the many other things that he had not done, was to defend other homes against what had happened to his own. So he made up his mind to fight those wicken-things for as long as he lived, and make them pay for what they’d done.
And in that hour, Hans Forester grew up at last.
