But I also knew that the quicker we could make our first decision as a community, the sooner we could get on with turning this place into what it could become...a place of dreams and legends.
“Well? Have y’all decided yet what to do with Steve there?” I asked, staying on the porch on purpose now to show the decision was up to them, not me.
The huddle of informal jurors grew tighter for a minute, then broke up.
Pamela slowly climbed the steps back up onto the infirmary’s porch and to Cassie’s side. She waited until she stood behind her daughter, her hands wrapped in comfort around the girl’s shoulders, before she lifted her chin and spoke.
“We’ve reached a decision. Steve, your punishment is to be sent from this place, banished forever from our village. Before you will be sent away, you will be marked with a permanent tattoo containing a spell binding you from ever revealing the location of this village.” Pamela swallowed, finally looking her husband in the eye. “You may never return.”
The crowd surged forward, a hundred hands reaching for Steve. A blade glinted in the light from the porches and windows, and I started forward, thinking they were going to kill him after all. But then I saw the red string fall away and realized they’d only cut the yarn from around him.
Steve was resolute, accepting his punishment in silence, which seemed to keep things relatively calm. He walked down the steps off the porch, and Pamela guided the village into a giant, rough circle around him. Some merely watched; others actively chanted with her as she mixed herbs then applied them in a small tattoo of some kind behind Steve’s right ear.
It was only when the crowd moved forward to take Steve away that he became visibly upset again, fighting for the chance to hug his daughter goodbye. Pamela hesitated then hugged him too, pressing a quick kiss to his cheek before the villagers swept him down the stump-littered avenue between the houses, past my house where Tarah and I had stood watching it all, and down the village road.
At the end of it, the villagers stopped and Steve continued on alone, a solitary figure, shoulders rounded in defeat as he walked through the moonlight towards the nearest town. Part of me wondered if we had all done the right thing. What if Steve somehow found a way to beat the binding spell and tell others where we were?
But I also knew the reality of our situation here...we would always run the risk of discovery. All we could do was try to keep our village as well hidden from the rest of the world as we could.
Which was why our second act as a community was for Mike to teach several others how to help him put up a shielding spell that deflected intruders and cloaked our village with the semblance of unbroken trees and treetops all around and above us. From that moment on, Mike and his aides worked in shifts to maintain the shield’s spell, becoming our village’s first official Guardians.
Once the shield was in place, I ventured out and up the nearest mountainside for a few minutes in the moonlight to make sure we were truly hidden. The shield was an amazing creation, completely hiding the clearing from view. From outside its boundaries, our land looked untouched for decades, nothing more than a thick forest that swayed correctly in both the gentlest of breezes and the strongest of winds that I could conjure up.
For now, we were safe.
That night, the village threw its first New Year’s Eve party, not just to celebrate the end of probably the hardest year any of us had ever known and the beginning of a new year, but also to celebrate life and hope, remembering and honoring the dead, and sealing the communal bond that kicking out Steve and creating our village’s protective shield had started. Our village had been tested and tried, challenged in ways both envisioned and unforeseen, and yet we’d emerged as survivors with a true appreciation for freedom, family, safety, and love.
As for Tarah and me, we spent the night in a much quieter way, asleep in each others’ arms and thankful for life itself. And that was more than enough celebration for us.
THE END