Malya's Cloak

“Where is your cloak? Malya, where is your cloak!” Nona rushed down the hard dirt path to meet the slight girl walking up the hill, grasping Malya’s frail shoulders and shaking them anxiously.

Malya looked up, sea-blue eyes wide and watery, tears threatening to spill over. “I sold it,” she choked out.

Nona froze, her bony hands stilling on Malya’s shoulders, her puckery mouth working silently. The papery crowfeet wrinkles around Nona's nut-brown eyes pulled away from their normal laughing shape, into tangled wool-strings boiling in a dyepot.

Malya fumbled at her waist, then withdrew a small cloth bag, worn and dirty. “See?” She shook the bag, and it clinked. “Now we can buy you the shoes you need, so you won’t have to bandage your feet anymore.” Malya pointed at her grandmother’s feet. They were bare but for the soiled bandages covering sores from walking the many miles from their home to the large market in Vitalia to sell their meager stitchery wares.

Nona slowly blew out a sigh. “Oh, child, I was so worried for you. You shouldn’t have gone without me.” She reached out and covered the girl’s offering with her hands. “Oh, child,” she sighed again.

“Come, come,” Nona said suddenly, breaking the moment. “Who did you sell it to?”

“I got a good price for it,” Malya said, leading the way to their tent-hut on the top of the hill, built between two basilika trees. She stepped around their cook fire and lifted the heavy canvas flap serving as a door, holding it open for her grandmother to enter the dim interior. “I sold it to Dona Francisca.”

Nona jerked her chin up, fixing Malya with a burning gaze. “Liana Francisca is the last person you should have sold it to. Did she say what she was going to do with it?”

Malya swallowed. “I…I don’t remember. She said she was going to show it to a friend. She said it was lovely embroidery, and I should be very, very proud. She said that it made her very, very happy?”

Nona snorted. “I’m sure.” She flapped her bony hands impatiently. “Friend? Did she say anything else, anything about this friend? Anything at all?”

Malya closed her eyes, crossed her arms, then uncrossed them to brush at an errant tear that glistened in the trickle of orange light filtering through the open sun-flaps. “Something about…” her voice quavered. “Maybe something about a Don Leon? He’s coming to visit her? She talked about that at the very first, before she offered to buy the cloak.”

“Don Leon.” Nona’s voice was flat, heavy. Malya looked up at her, startled.

“Who is he?”

“Get your sewing pack. We’re leaving.”

“But Nona—”

“Now, child! If ever there was a time to obey, it’s now, now, now!” Nona stripped the threadbare blanket from the single pallet on the floor and hurriedly tossed items into it—hardbread, cheese, the precious copper tea kettle she had saved for ages to buy, her own sewing pack—before knotting the corners and hoisting it onto her shoulders. She glanced sadly around at the hut that had become home, then drew her rooting knife and sawed at the leather thongs lashing the main support pole to the ridgepole. Hurriedly, she ducked out of the collapsing hut, shoved her knife back in its leather scabbard, and placed a few long branches from the fire to the hut. She grabbed Malya’s hand—already the child was lost in thought, gazing toward the forest's clouds—and they began climbing over the hill, away from the well-worn path to the village, toward the sun just starting to descend below the forest’s tree line.

“Nona—”

“Hush, child.”

“But—”

“Hush, child.”

“Why—”

Nona paused, her breath already coming raggedly. “The time for questions—later. The time for travel—now!” She forged forward again, hoisting her pack up higher onto her shoulders.

Malya bowed her head and followed in silence.

The clouds were being painted in reds and golds and yellows when Malya dared to speak again. “Nona,” she asked in a confused whisper. “Where are my friends? Every time I walk out in the forest I see Pietro, and Cassia, and Nico, and… and none of them are here. I see no animals at all.”

Nona stumbled and Malya rushed forward, catching her arm, righting her balance.

“Nona?”

Malya waited for a response, but Nona only kept walking, tugging her coarse-spun skirt from a creeping bramble. Malya had to run to catch up.

“Never should have let you near the needle,” Nona muttered, angrily yanking her sleeve from another bramble.

“Why, Nona?” Malya’s voice began to rise in frustration. “Why are we leaving dear old Basilika Domici? And why was selling my cloak a bad thing? And what does Don—”

Nona suddenly sucked in a sharp, painful breath, and sank to a sitting position.

“Nona!” Malya dropped her pack, rushing to her grandmother’s side.

“It’s my foot,” Nona whispered, swallowing hard. “I think I stepped on a thorn.”

Malya turned to the wounded foot and took it in her slim hands, beginning to unwrap the dirty, slimy bandages. The smell of putrid flesh rose and clogged her nose, and she gagged before she could master the reflex. Gulping, she raised her tear-filled eyes to the elderly woman’s. “I wish we had water, Nona. Then I would wash them for you.”

Something over Nona’s shoulder caught Malya’s attention, and she pointed. “Is that smoke?” Malya asked.

Nona grunted.

“It is a lot of smoke, billowing into the sky like a great black kite.”

“Child, find the thorn and—” Nona broke off, raising her hand for silence while she cocked her head. “No! There is no time!” She yanked the rooting knife and scabbard from her waist and thrust it toward Malya’s hands, pushing Malya up, away from her. “Go, go, go!”

“But, Nona, I can’t—”

“Run! Find a stream and walk in it for as long as you can before getting out on the other side! Go!”

“But who will take care—”

“Stupid child! Go—”

And now Malya could hear what Nona had—the baying of hounds, the hoofbeats of mounts, the shouts of men. And now she was frozen, eyes wide, sounds echoing meaninglessly through her head as she watched these men and horses and dogs charge over the edge of the hill and pause before a final cheer and race toward them. The horses surrounded them from several yards away, the dogs were forbidden to touch them, but Malya’s knees shook at how tiny and weak she felt when surrounded by such large and powerful animals. The hounds looked big enough for her to ride on; the horses were unscalable mountains.

They waited, these strange newcomers, Malya, and Nona. The men didn’t speak, the dogs only snuffled at their keepers’ pockets and panted, their tongues lolling red and huge. The horses stamped their hooves impatiently, fur-lined saddles creaking. Malya eyed them each in the blue twilight, turning around in the circle. She realized her knuckles hurt—she was clutching the rooting knife and scabbard with clenched fists. One horse shifted, showing its saddle decorations of feathers instead of fur. Malya’s eyes widened as she realized that the saddles weren’t fur-lined, or decorated with feathers. Each saddle had strings of hunted animals—rabbits, quail, pheasants, a fox. Her stomach plummeted, and she thought again of Pietro and her other friends.

A man crested the hill on a dark horse. He rode down to them, calmly, slowly, the sleek horse reminding Malya of a panther hunting a rabbit. He entered the circle, the horsemen wordlessly pulling aside for him to approach Malya and Nona.

“Well, well, well,” the man said. “The best catch we’ve had tonight!”

Malya squinted in the dusk, trying to make out his features in the gathering gloom. As he neared, she gasped. “That’s my cloak!”

The man chuckled. “Was, my dear.” The cloak she had spent so many happy hours stitching together and then embroidering forest animals on the edges, the heavy wool a splurge that Nona had saved for, the dyes from roots and barks and soft stones and berries painstakingly harvested from the woods—that cloak, her cloak, was now fastened around the shoulders of this hawk-nosed, mustachioed man. It looked comically small on him, and if it had been any other cloak, Malya would have laughed, like she had at the carnival that had come to Vitalia when she was eight. But instead her stomach felt heavy and sour.

“Thank you for making it,” the man purred, petting the elaborate embroidery around the edges. “It cost me a pretty penny, but it has already paid itself back. We’ve had quite the hunting expedition this evening!”

Malya frowned, but then Nona spoke from behind her.

“You are mistaken,” she said, her voice ringing firmly in the clearing.

“I was the creator of the cloak.”

“Ah, you must be Nona. The seamstress. So kind of you to leave a smoke beacon to ease our hunt.”

Nona was silent for a moment.

“She is not what you are looking for,” Nona finally said.

“And do tell, how would you know what I am looking for?” the man said, smirking.

“Don Leon,” and steel could be heard in Nona’s voice, “I know you better than anyone else alive does.”

Even in the dusky dimness, Malya could see the anger burn in Don Leon’s eyes. The man dismounted from his horse and stalked to the elderly woman.

“You know nothing of me!” he spat, his mustache bouncing, and he backhanded her viciously across her face, sending her toppling over backward.

“Nona!” Malya screamed.

Don Leon turned back toward his mount, grabbing Malya’s arm in an iron grasp and dragging her with him, ignoring her resistance.

He mounted up in one smooth motion, then yanked Malya in front of him, up to perch on top of that frightening mountain, fastening her there with crushing pressure under his left forearm.

“Bring their packs,” he said to his men. “Kill the woman.”

“Wait!” Malya dug frantically at her waist, dropping the rooting knife as she drew out her money pouch. “Don’t! Don’t kill her! I can pay!”

Don Leon looked down, and Malya could feel his hot fishy breath on her neck as he laughed. “Well, boys,” he said. “Looks like there’s a little extra pay for you!” He drew a knife—gleaming in the near-darkness—from his thigh and took the money bag from her hand with the knife-tip, leaving a light score trickling blood on her hand as he did so. She gasped and withdrew her hand, sucking on the cut.

Don Leon tossed the money bag off his knife into the clearing, and the contents spilled out among the brambles. Several of the men rushed in while others stood aloof.

“Fakery!” one who had dived for the money yelled angrily.

“Beans—and metal cronks!”

“The only real ones is coppers in here!”

“But—” Malya sputtered. “Dona Francisca paid me—”

“Don’t worry, my dear,” the voice above the iron arm responded. “I have made a very good investment. Never fear, you will pay me.”

Don Leon chuckled as he reined his horse around and they began the lurching, stomach-roiling journey up the hill. Despite herself, Malya clung to Don Leon’s arm, terrified that she would fall and be crushed by the horse’s huge hooves.

Don Leon leaned down and the edge of her cloak brushed her cheek. It was an odd almost-comfort, even as his fish-breath was whispering in her ear.

“You will pay me very, very well.”