Her mother pushed her away, still holding her by the shoulders, and studied her face.
“Nothing else?” she said.
“Not really,” said Kestrel, certain that her face was turning red. The harder she tried not to think about the yellow eyes, the more brightly they burned behind her eyelids. “Can I go now?”
“You’re hiding something,” her mother said, so softly that it took Kestrel a moment to notice the threat in her voice. “I know my daughter’s face when she’s lying.”
“Why don’t you just leave me alone?” Kestrel burst out.
With one hand still gripping Kestrel’s shoulder, her mother snatched one of the candles sitting next to her and pressed it to the side of Kestrel’s face. “Get off!” Kestrel yelled, trying to pry her mother’s hands away.
“I’ll teach you not to be rude,” her mother hissed. “You think you’re so strong, but you wouldn’t be anything without me, you little—”
There was a clang outside the door, and the sound of something shattering. One of the villagers had dropped a bowl of soup. Her mother hesitated, then lowered the candle. Kestrel fell away from her and opened her eyes. Red splotches floated in the middle of her vision. She touched her eyelids frantically. If she didn’t have her vision, she’d lose the thing that made her a good hunter.
“Remember what you are,” her mother said. She had the calm, glassy voice of someone seething with rage. “You’re a selfish brat who fed your own grandmother to her grabber. If your father knew, he’d never come back.”
Kestrel’s stomach curled.
“If you continue to be rude, I don’t see why I should keep your secret,” her mother continued, in that horribly flat voice. She put the candle down. “Now,” she said, “let me give you a kiss.”
Kestrel leaned forward, feeling like a puppet, and stiffly received a dry peck on the cheek. As she did so, she caught a glimpse of herself in a shard of mirror nailed to the wall. There was a red mark on her face and half her right eyebrow had been scorched off.
She kept her rage down with superhuman effort, and forced a smile.
“Sorry,” Kestrel said lightly, but the word was sour in her mouth. “I didn’t mean to forget my manners.”
“There, sweetie,” her mother said, looking pleased again. “It’s not hard to apologize. Now won’t you stay and share some food with me? I can smell cake outside the door.” She sniffed the air. “And cream.”
Kestrel noted, feeling slightly disgusted, that her mother’s face was already shining with delight at the thought of the feast outside. “It’s all yours,” Kestrel said. Her stomach was growling with hunger, but she was determined not to take food from her. Not with her knowing, anyway. Getting angry drained her mother, and she always fell asleep shortly after. She slept so deeply she never heard Kestrel making off with biscuits and bowls of stew.
“Why so keen to go?” her mother asked lightly, but there was a sharp edge to her voice. “You’re not meeting someone, are you? Ike tells me you were climbing trees yesterday.”
“I was alone,” Kestrel said, her stomach plummeting.
“You weren’t with that nasty Finnigan boy, were you?”
“No,” Kestrel said weakly. But Finn’s milk teeth were hanging over her mother’s head, and she couldn’t help looking at them. Her mother reached up and brushed her fingers over the row of them. Kestrel tried not to react, desperately ignoring the horrified lump in her throat.
“You know I can hurt anyone,” her mother said.
Kestrel nodded numbly. Years ago, her mother had made her go door-to-door collecting the teeth. Now, when one of the villagers got hurt by her mother, Kestrel knew it was her own fault.
“There will be consequences if you get distracted and forget your purpose,” her mother continued, staring right at her. “Which is hunting.”
“Friendship is weakness,” Kestrel said, repeating one of her mother’s mantras. She could almost feel the sweat rolling down her nose. “A person shared is a person halved. I know.”
Her mother continued to stare at her. What did she want?
“I don’t want to be distracted, either,” Kestrel said, desperate to make her stop. “I just want to hunt, and one day find Granmos’s grabber. You know that.”
At least it was true. Her mother finally blinked.
“You will,” she said. “One day. Her grabber is still out there, Kestrel. I see it in the weave. Just be patient, and do as I say in the meantime.”
“I promise.” Her feet were itching to run. “Now can I go?”
“Wait,” her mother said. She eagerly touched Kestrel’s arm with her long fingers. “At least stay while I eat. I know you doubt it sometimes, Kestrel, but I worry about you. I don’t like to think of my daughter being hungry.”
For a moment Kestrel believed that she really was concerned. Her mother looked troubled, maybe even guilty. Then she touched her missing eyebrow and shook herself out of it.
“I’ve got monsters to catch,” she said. She was already backing through the weave. She had to find the grabber that took her grandma. She was going to get rid of the dog and find the path out of this place, so she and Finn could run away. So they could be free.
“If you’re worried about your silly eyebrow—”
But Kestrel was already out the door.
Kestrel slid into the shadows behind the dark, soulless houses. She wanted to get across the village and find Finn, but Ike had already gathered the villagers together to look at the woodchopper’s ax. The black dog had dragged it to the wolf fire for everyone to see.
The villagers were leaning in, staring at Ike so intently it looked like they were going to eat him. Several kids had crept up to the fire as well, nudging one another and whispering, delighted that their parents hadn’t noticed them. Kestrel was going to slip past, but then she heard the word grabber and froze.
“That’s when my father knew he was a goner,” Ike whispered to his terrified audience, enjoying himself. Kestrel wished she hadn’t stopped. Ike’s dad’s grabber was the first one she had been sent to hunt. Whenever she thought about it, it was so vivid she could almost smell the blood on its claws. “It was the loss of his snuffbox that tipped him off,” Ike said. “He always carried it inside his coat. He woke up one day and it was gone.”
“You saw it, didn’t you, Ike?” Rascly Badger, the fireworks maker, said, his eyes wide.
“I watched it carry him away,” said Ike, lowering his voice ever further. The villagers were deathly quiet, terrified but unable to move. Kestrel couldn’t tear herself away, either. “My mother tried to stop it. Then—”
He clapped his hands and they all jumped back. Ike didn’t need to say anything else. They all knew how it ended. Ike’s mother had tried to stop the grabber, but it had scrunched her up and thrown her away like a ball of paper.
“Poor Alice,” Rascly Badger muttered. Walt touched something in his pocket, a compulsive checking of his lucky charms. Kestrel instinctively touched the holey stone in her pocket, too, to check it was still there.
“Don’t speak the names of the dead,” Ike muttered. “It’s bad luck.”
Mardy Banbury screamed in the distance. The villagers looked at one another, horrified. Kestrel grabbed her spoon without thinking. Was it a grabber? Had one actually struck again? They were coming more frequently than ever before, but two in a day?