1
Tamsin Henry clutched a wooden matchbox that fit neatly into the palm of her hand. The initials M.H. were carved on the bottom, and inside was a single match. The box had rested on the shelf near the woodstove in her family’s cottage for as long as Tamsin could remember. In a few hours, her mother would reach for it to light the fire for the morning meal and her fingers would find nothing but dust.
Tamsin shivered inside her tattered coat, her breath visible in the air of the unheated warehouse. Inside her pocket was a scrap of paper with the word candlelight. A tiny cat face had been doodled inside the a so she would know it was truly written by her father, Michael Henry. There was a reddish smear on the back of the paper that looked like a partial bloody fingerprint. Maybe her father had been injured when he wrote it. Or maybe the blood belonged to the messenger who had carried it across the Midmark Sea to Tamsin. By now, the plan had been set in motion and there was no way to find out.
“Please be all right, Papa. Please be safe.” She mouthed the words over and over. Perhaps if she said it enough times, her father would be protected from harm. It was the morning of August fifth, and she knew that nothing was going to be the same again.
“When will I die?” Tamsin whispered to the deserted warehouse. She stared at the rough wooden planks and imagined her father’s face materializing out of the grainy pattern. “Not today,” he assured her. “Today is not the day.”
Tamsin gently shook the matchbox, listening to the rattle of the lone match. She was so nervous that she felt ill, but not because she was worried she’d be caught. The soldiers who normally guarded the warehouse had gone back to their barracks up the coast. The day before, a huge shipment of grain had been loaded onto four side-wheel steamers that had set sail for the main island. All that was left of Aeren’s harvest was the chaff littered on the warehouse floor. Although the grain had been grown by cottagers such as herself, it was now in the hands of the Zunft government, who had done nothing to earn it.
“I’m scared of fire,” Tamsin whispered to the wooden wall. Talking aloud calmed her nerves, but the only response was the scurry of rat feet behind the planks. “And I’m not sure if I can run fast enough.”
She reminded herself that it was her father who had sent her to this darkened corner, and she trusted him. Michael Henry had chosen August fifth for a reason, and he was the greatest man she knew. A hero to the cottagers, Michael Henry was a famous journalist who gave fiery speeches on the streets of Sevenna City. Since cottagers weren’t allowed to publish newspapers, Tamsin wasn’t able to read her father’s articles very often. Sometimes the illegal newspapers arrived clandestinely as packing material in shipping crates. Tamsin and her sisters would search through the crumbled pages for their father’s byline. Above it would be headlines such as “Zunft Arrest Innocent Man!” “Zunft Factory Fire Kills Fifteen Workers!” “Chamber Votes Down Freedom of the Press!”
It had been five years since Michael Henry had left to work in the capital while his wife and their daughters had remained on Aeren Island. When Tamsin was younger, it felt like her father had deserted his family, but now she understood that he had done it to protect them from the Zunft. She missed him terribly, but he was working for justice in Sevenna City. Her mother, Anna, tried to shield her from politics, but Tamsin refused to be passive and weak. As a cottager, she was destined to a life of blisters from doing someone else’s chores. Where there should have been open doors there were really dead ends. The Zunft believed that cottagers were born to obey.
Her father was going to change all of that—today, with her help. Tamsin rattled the match one last time. Then she gently opened the lid, but instead of looking into the box, she lifted her eyes to the stars that she could see through the greasy pane of the window. It was not yet dawn. Somewhere in the darkness—on Aeren and elsewhere—she imagined other cottagers hidden in dark corners, waiting for the first ray of morning light. Their tasks would be much harder than hers. Tamsin took a deep breath and began humming a tune, an old Aeren lullaby that mothers sang to their sleepy children: Alas, the emerald land of our fathers gone / Forlorn the empty hallowed home.
The match was poised to strike, ready to set the world on fire.
Text copyright © 2015 by Jenna Helland
