Words on Fire

“No, there’s not.”

“There is, trust me.” Lukas smiled and began, “Do you remember the story of Rue, the beautiful daughter of the wealthy man who was injured by the overturned cart?”

“Of course.”

“Well, because of his injuries, the man was confined to his bed for a very long time, so much that Rue had to take charge of his estate. Her father had a great deal of land and she knew nothing of how to manage it all. Finally, she thought of the bear and wondered if he was still waiting in the forest for her to come. The bear had seen her father manage the estate for years, so she was certain he must know what to do.”

“Was he there?” I asked.

“Yes, because he hoped if he was patient, that Rue would eventually come.” Lukas leaned in. “The bear knew of a peasant boy who lived on the land, a boy who had worked on that estate for his entire life. He told Rue to trust the boy, which, naturally, Rue could only do if she also trusted the bear. But the bear had saved her father, so Rue decided to trust them both.”

I sighed. “And the boy saved the estate for her?”

Lukas grinned. “No, the boy had his own troubles. But he taught Rue everything he knew so that she could run the estate until her father returned.”

My eyes narrowed. “ ‘Returned’? You mean until her father recovered.”

“If you wish.”

I nodded at him, then looked away, ending his telling of the story. I was pretty sure he had made up all of it, and if he had hoped to make me feel better, it worked, maybe a little.

Thankful

ly, there were no more problems that afternoon, and by evening, we ended up in front of a church in Šiauliai, a beautiful white building with a tower in front that seemed to stretch to the sky. As if he had been expecting our arrival, almost immediately a priest in long black robes walked out front and followed my gaze. “It’s impressive now. But probably around the time you were born, it was struck with lightning. Destroyed a most precious clock, so few people in this town ever know what time it is. Except we all know it is time for the Cossacks to leave, no?”

He started to laugh at his joke, but Ben only grunted. “Enough talking. We need to get inside.”

“Of course.” The priest pointed to some stables near the church. “I believe your delivery of straw belongs there.” He winked at me as he spoke.

“The church is smuggling too?” I was genuinely surprised that men who preached of honesty and obedience on the Sabbath day would spend the other days of the week breaking the law and encouraging others to do the same. The priest gave me a knowing smile, then walked ahead of us.

Once we had ridden into the stables, Lukas began tugging at the canvas covering the straw, preparing for us to unload the wagon, so I did the same. As we worked, he said, “It was the priests who started the book smuggling. When their prayer books were banned and burned, what else could they do? It wasn’t about breaking the law; it was about protecting the right to pray.”

I closed my eyes and whispered a prayer of my own. Maybe Lukas was a thief and he certainly was a smuggler, but he was also a nice person who seemed to have a good heart. Whatever he had done, it couldn’t be awful enough to deserve the punishment Rusakov surely had in mind for him.

But nor did my parents deserve their punishment.

And I could not save them any other way. There was no other way.

Lukas dug through the books below us and found a thin one with a large printed A on the cover, the same as my name. “You take this book—it’s yours.”

“It’s for the priest.” I wouldn’t accept a book from Lukas even as I was considering turning him in for handing out books.

But Lukas pushed it toward me again. “This book is for someone who wants to read in her own language. Someone like you.”

“This is an illegal book! Doesn’t that bother you?”

“Just because it’s a law does not make it right. This is how we fight the Russian Empire, Audra. Words are our weapons, and protecting these books is a noble defense of our country. Join us, or don’t, but at least understand what we’re fighting for, and why.” He dropped the book in my lap, then jumped from the wagon.

He and Ben began hauling books where the priest directed them, covering each stack with the straw so that it would blend in with the stables. I merely sat in a corner of the wagon, turning the book from Lukas over in my hands, unsure of what to do.

Since coming to Milda’s, I’d tried to figure out what made these books so important. There wasn’t much to them, merely a stack of pages with letters scrawled onto them, bound into a soft leather or fabric cover.

For books like these, the tsar of the Russian Empire condemned people to death or to a lifetime of imprisonment. I wondered how many hundreds—maybe thousands—of smugglers he’d punished.

And despite that, year after year, the smuggling continued. I couldn’t understand why.

Nothing in these pages could be that wonderful, that satisfying. If it were, then of all the books my parents smuggled, why had they never kept a single copy in our home? If it was so important, shouldn’t they have enrolled me in a school like Milda’s? Shouldn’t my parents have allowed me to work with them?