Words on Fire

o burst from your chest, go hungry, and be lonely and more afraid some nights than you can possibly imagine. And more than once, you will ask yourself why you are doing all of this.”

On the other side of me, Lukas said, “Smuggling is in your blood, Audra. Adventure is in your blood. If all you want is a simple life, then forget everything you have seen and everything you’ve already done. You can grow up without ideas or dreams or knowledge of a world any bigger than your own home. Do you want that, a life of small, safe dreams?”

“She wants to live!” Ben scowled. “Stop filling her head with hope. Her parents kept her away from all of this for a reason and we should respect that.”

I stared down at the book in my hands, the one with the A on the cover. Was that all I’d ever be, just that single scrawled letter? Perhaps the simple life I had laid out for myself wasn’t really the life I wanted. “That’s the first letter of my name,” I mumbled. “The only letter of my name that I know.”

“The rest is inside that book.” Lukas smiled as if he had won some sort of contest against Ben, when in fact, it wasn’t about either of them. It was about me.

Was it enough for me to simply be a letter A? Maybe it had to be enough. I wasn’t ready to risk my life to know the letters that followed it.

“You can finish the job we’re on now,” Ben said. “But this life isn’t for you. If your parents had taught you better, encouraged you to read rather than hiding information from you, then you might have made a very good book carrier. As you are now, I do not think you are up to the task.”

“I am,” I mumbled. And when he didn’t seem to hear me, I looked up. “I can do this, Ben.”

Or at least, I had to. Just until I got my parents back.

After that, I could return to the life I’d had before. The one where my mother insisted on protecting me from the world beyond my home, where my father believed I knew and understood less than I truly did. I could return to being a girl who stared at the first letter of her name and wondered if there was anything more to her.

And that was the problem. More than anything in the world, I wanted my parents back. But I did not … could not … return to being the same girl they had left behind.

I closed my eyes and tried to contain the emotions rising in me. I’d seen a glimpse of myself as I wished to be, a reflection of who I might become if I allowed courage to enter my heart, or ideas to enter my head. I saw myself as the girl who defied any hold on her future because she refused to acknowledge the limits others placed on her.

When I imagined the girl I wanted to be, it was the girl who smuggled books.

I looked down at the book in my hand.

“What do you think?” Lukas asked Ben. “We really could use her help, and she was good back there on the road, you know she was.”

“She was,” Ben grunted at me. “But I still don’t like this one bit.” He hesitated a moment longer, rubbing the scruff on his chin as he considered what to do, then said, “Until I can get you back to Milda’s, I suppose you’re a smuggler now.”

We slept in the church that night, each of us taking a separate pew with a blanket and a bundle of my fabric scraps for a pillow against the hard wood seats. Ben fell asleep immediately, but I rolled until I caught an angle of my book against the moonlight streaming in through the church’s tall arched windows.

My book was meant for a much younger person, but I was unable to sleep and had nothing better to do, so I began thumbing through the pages. They listed thirty-two letters, each letter making a different sound. Combining the sounds completed a word. So all I had to do was figure out the sound associated with each letter, and the word would unfold before my eyes.

Each page had a series of pictures and the words to describe each one below it. Well over an hour later, I had made out the first three words on the page.

Vaikas. Child.

Namai. Home.

Motina. Mother.

I stopped there and closed the book, my heart pounding as if I’d just finished a race. My mother was so much more than a series of six letters. It didn’t describe her enough, didn’t identify her in any way that contained the uniqueness of how she spiced a beet soup, the warmth of her smile, the tender touch of her hand on my back when I needed her most. Ben was wrong. There was no power in a word that failed to encompass who my mother really was.

I looked over to the pew where he slept to ask him about that, and only then noticed how low the candle had burned. I should have been asleep myself. I dropped the book on the floor, frustrated by how those words simplified the clash of emotions inside me when I thought about my mother. How I missed her, loved her, desperately wished for any news of whether she was safe, whether she was afraid of going to Siberia. But I was also angry that she had kept a secret life so separate from her life with me, never once letting on what she was doing, never once trusting me to help her, or now, to save her.

And for all those thoughts, the only word the book offered me was “motina.” Little comfort as I finally closed my eyes.

I couldn’t have been asleep for long when the doors of the church burst open and a man ran through the door, calling, “Kunigas, Kunigas!” for the priest to come.

Both Ben and Lukas bolted straight up from their benches and Ben tore off his blanket to rush over to the man. Although he asked the man to lower his voice, the tall open ceilings of this room created an echo, making it easy to hear their conversation.

“A search is coming,” the man said. “They’re looking for you. By morning, the Cossacks will be here. Are there any books in this church?”

Ben glanced at Lukas. “Get the priest.” Then to me he said, “Gather up our blankets. We must leave at once.”

I began stuffing the fabric scraps back into my sack, then folded up the blankets, pulled my boots on to my feet, and followed Ben and the man who’d come out of the church and into the stables.