by C. L. Polk
“Yours,” he said, and the last sound was a sigh.
Jacob died. I knew it, the same way I knew in the operating theater—the weight of his soul, lighter than a feather, had left. I could pump his heart, fill his lungs, but he had fled the shell of his body, his light squeezing around me, seeping into me, filling me with might—
I was young. I danced with Winnie, and she spun from my arms into Duke’s, who took a kiss before Winnie was back in my hold, and I kissed her too. I sat in the stern of a tiny boat, my senses woven into the air around me as I directed a wind to fill the little skiff’s single sail. I stood on a stage and thanked every volunteer who worked so hard to elect me. I stood behind the stage and rehearsed the last speech I ever gave … the speech I hadn’t finished.
The Deathsinger visions faded. But the words trampled over my tongue to get out.
Jacob was dead. He had bound his soul to me. And it wasn’t quite my hands that lifted from the wound. It wasn’t quite my limbs putting me on my feet and walking back to the edge of the stage, carrying the bellower.
The crowd had come creeping back. They had watched as I tried to save Jacob. They had seen the power winding around me, and they watched as I lifted the bellower to my lips and pitched my voice to the back of the crowd:
“You will have a voice. You will be the power.”
I saw a woman lift one hand to her mouth, her eyes wide.
“This dream is scary. It scares me. It maybe scares you too. But I know it scares the factory owners and the landlords and the noble order of the Royal Knights. I promise you, they will try to stop it.”
A nudge inside me, not mine, prompted me to talk over the crowd who stared at me in disbelief and awe.
“I can’t do it alone. I need your hands. I need your help. We need to do this together—because when you stand as one lonely voice, you will be silenced.”
I swung the bellower away from my face and let them see the blood staining my hands. Jacob’s blood soaked into the protective charm of my clan sweater and smeared against my cheek.
Everyone was listening now. All those eyes were on me. I trembled, but the words came, the right words, and I let them ring over the crowd.
“But dreams of a better Aeland, of an Aeland for everybody—that dream will never falter.”
“Uza!” Zelind cried.
The crowd took it up. “Uza!”
Now I shouted into the bellower, roaring over their voices. “Together we are louder than thunder. Together we are stronger than steel.”
Did Jacob feel this, when he spoke to the people? Did he feel this pull between him and those who listened to him, this glowing feeling when the words touch them? Did he feel this, when they shouted and raised their fists in the air? I felt six feet tall. Jacob’s spirit in me made me brave, made me welcome the focus of the crowd. This was how it felt to be the face, to be the one who the people saw, the one who carried all the results of the people behind them.
I had always been too afraid to stand here. It made me tremble. Ecstatic with terror, flush with elation, I lifted the bellower again.
“And when we win, when the sun shines on a better Aeland, when we gather once more in victory, in triumph, in gratitude—then we will join hands and dream again, and lift our voices to the sky.”
They screamed. They raised their hands. I had them. I had them all.
“Louder than thunder! Stronger than steel!” I shouted, and they shouted it back as I stood before them with my fist in the air. The crowd shouted, one thought from a thousand mouths.
“Louder than thunder! Stronger than steel!”
NINE
The Interview Room
Full of Jacob, I stood and chanted with the crowd. His power filled me to overflowing. I felt the breezes playing over the park, knew the pressures of warm air and cold, and gazed at the three tall, narrow tenements across the park. I touched the spot on my chest that had hurt, breathed freely and without pain.
Then someone darted across the stage. Winnie knelt on the boards, her arms around Jacob’s body. She rocked his corpse as if she were sending him to sleep one last time.
Oh, Winnie. An ache unfurled in my chest. Duke knelt by her side, and Winnie buried her face in his shoulder while Duke clung tight, murmuring comfort into her hair.
I wanted him to take care of her. She shouldn’t be alone, and neither should he. They would need each other more than ever now.
The feeling of containing Jacob Clarke eased and left only me, caught between the chanting crowd and the distraught widow. I moved closer to Winnie and Duke.
“He loves you,” I said to her. “He’s glad you have each other. He’s sorry.”
Winnie nodded. “He has nothing to be sorry for. But whoever did this has to pay.”
Another mourner, vowing revenge. But I understood. “We’ll find them.”
Winnie took my hand and stood up, then backed away as medics swarmed around the body.
“Dead,” one of them said. “Ballistic trauma. Someone tried to treat it.”
“That was me,” I said. “Robin Thorpe. I was a nurse at Beauregard Veterans’. His lung collapsed. I couldn’t save him.”
I couldn’t. Not alone. But I had been standing right next to someone who could—where was Miles? I had shouted for him. Had he heard?
“Miss?”
Brown-coated police constables surrounded me. I looked at the only man with insignia on his shoulder and nodded. “I’m Robin Thorpe. I tried to save him.”
“Would you come with us, please? We’d like to ask you a few questions.”
I nodded consent and they marched around me, ignoring several out-of-the-way corners where we could have talked to stand beside a sidecar trike. I stopped, planting my feet so hard they grew roots.
“What’s this about?” I asked.
“You’re an important witness,” the corporal said. I looked for his name badge. Moore. “We need to know exactly what you saw, and what happened on that stage.”
“And you’ll be safer at the station.”
“Safer? Why do I need to be—”
I shut up. Jacob hadn’t just been murdered. Jacob had been gunned down in front of a thousand people. Jacob had been assassinated. And I had rushed to the stage, tried to save him, and then, after our soul-binding, stood up and finished the speech that had been interrupted by his death.
You didn’t go through the trouble of a public assassination just to eliminate people. You did it to destroy symbols. And if Jacob had been one, then I had just become one too.
“Someone needs to find Zelind Thorpe,” I said. “Khe’s my spouse. We came together. Khe’ll be looking for me.”
“We’ll find kher,” a constable said. “We need to get you to the station.”
I climbed into the sidecar and helped the corporal pedal us across the snow and onto the street.
* * *
I stopped at the threshold when I spotted the mirror-coated window. “This is an interrogation room.”
“We use interview rooms for witnesses,” Corporal Moore said. “There’s little chance of interruption. The calm helps witnesses recall more accurately than trying to recount the event in a busy staff room.”
“We still have some tea, if you’d like,” the constable who had stayed with us said. “There might be wheat cookies too.”
“Thank you, I’d love some tea,” I said, and the constable left.
Corporal Moore pulled out the chair for me. “I don’t have any of the forms I need for your interview. Will you excuse me?”
“Of course.”
They left me alone, and I wished they had let me stop in the restroom. Blood had dried on my hands, on my face, had soaked the cuffs and front of my clan sweater. I was restless with the power brimming inside me, the full heft of Jacob’s soul bound to me.
I looked at my reflection and, to witchsight, a softly glowing distortion floated just in front of my head. It made me a stronger witch, but did a Deathsinger have need of
a deeper reservoir of power?
Jacob hadn’t bound to me for no reason. He wanted something.
Nothing. The sense of his presence had faded back at the park. Now that I was at Central … Why was I at Central? There was a neighborhood station a few streets away from the park. Why come all this way just for an interview?
The door opened, and the constable carried a tray with three mismatched clay cups. The sugar bowl held three half-size lumps, barely enough to go around. I dropped one in my cup and let it dissolve in the too-hot tea, which was a little lighter than it really should have been. There was no milk, not even canned.
“Thank you. I appreciate the tea.”
“It was the least I could do.” The constable—Brewster, his name tag said—slid a writing board out from under the tray. “I need your information for the forms.”
“The tyranny of paper,” I said. “I used to work in a hospital; I know how many forms go into a day’s work.”
“Where do you work now?”
“I don’t,” I said. “I was supposed to attend medical school, but—”
“The term was cancelled,” he said. “Bad luck. How have you been keeping busy?”
“I’m the operations manager for Solidarity,” I said. “It’s volunteer work, and that’s why there’s always so much to do.”
“Operations manager,” he said. “So you organize civic disruptions?”
Careful. “That’s one way to put it,” I said. “We usually call it direct citizen action.”
“But you fill up the streets with people and stop traffic,” he said. “You organize gatherings in front of the palace, where people stand around all day with signs. Don’t you think you should turn all that energy into helping people find jobs?”
“These people were all dismissed from their positions for taking actions against unsafe working conditions, grueling hours, and unfair wages.”
“But they had jobs before you filled their heads with the idea that they’re entitled to more,” Constable Brewster said. “Did you organize the celebration in Clarence Jones Memorial Park today?”
“I didn’t,” I said. “But I supervise the committee that did. I had to take time away for family reasons.”
“Your spouse,” Constable Brewster said, and unease twinged in my stomach.
“How did you know that?”
The door swung open.
“I hope I haven’t kept you waiting too long,” Corporal Moore said, bearing another writing board full of forms and a file folder already thick enough to hold a criminal case. “How’s the tea?”
I took a quick sip. Weak. Bitter with tannins the sugar couldn’t touch. “It’s lovely, thank you.”
“Good! Now that we’re all here, I want you to tell me everything you remember about this afternoon’s events. Even the trivial details. You never know what’s going to be important.”
“Certainly,” I said. “I was close to the stage, but not right next to it. I had a partial view of Jacob as he spoke to us.”
“And what was he speaking about?”
“He was telling the people what he wanted Solidarity to do now that the Witchcraft Act has been abolished, and all the witches are free from asylums.”
“And what is that?”
“Jacob wanted to hold a shadow election. One where anyone over sixteen had a vote, with no need to buy an expensive poll ticket.”
“All this for a symbol?” Constable Brewster asked.
“Symbols are powerful,” I said. “Jacob Clarke was a symbol. He represented change. And fairness. He was the face of gaining greater rights and protections for the people. And someone wanted that symbol extinguished.”
They both watched me very carefully. They didn’t touch their pens.
“They say you stood up and finished the speech he was giving,” Constable Brewster said. “You stood in the very spot where he had been shot and picked up what had fallen from his hands.”
Did they want me to explain that? “It wasn’t me,” I said. “It was Jacob.”
They glanced at each other. “How is that possible?”
“Since it’s no longer illegal to tell you, I am a witch,” I said. “I have the power to speak to the dead. Jacob was a Windweaver. Like those Royal Knights you read about in the paper a couple of weeks ago. He could control the effects of the weather. When he died, his spirit bound itself to me. He was the one who knew the rest of the words. I just spoke them.”
“I’m not sure how I’m supposed to believe that,” Constable Brewster said. “He possessed you?”
“Yes.”
“Because he bound his spirit to yours,” Corporal Moore said. “I don’t really understand anything about magic, but that’s important, isn’t it?”
“It can be,” I said.
“And you weren’t important before today,” Constable Brewster said. “You weren’t anyone important.”
I shrugged. “Not really. Not in the sense of being prominent.”
“But you were vital to the operations of your protest group,” Constable Brewster said. “Operations manager. That’s how you described your unpaid position.”
“Yes,” I said. “I was the lead organizer of our group. Jacob worked his side in Parliament; I oversaw our citizen efforts.”
“So you were partners,” Corporal Moore said. “You worked together to make your protest group work.”
“Yes.”
“But he was the leader. You worked your fingers to the bone, and he shook hands and thanked people and got all the credit,” Constable Brewster said.
“Did anyone know how much of his greatness came from the person standing right behind him?” Corporal Moore asked. “Did anyone even realize how much of his success was actually yours?”
What was this?
How many times had I heard about these kinds of tactics? How many times had I imagined that I would never fall for them, that I wouldn’t be gulled? I wasn’t any cannier than the next person.
“Why don’t you tell me what you’re implying?” I asked.
“Just an observation,” Constable Brewster said. “You weren’t important before.”
“But you’re certainly important now.”
“And you think I conspired with a rooftop sniper to kill my friend so I could catch a little fame?”
They leaned back as if they were one body and traded a glance. Blast, and blast again.
“We never said anything about a sniper,” Corporal Moore said.
I shut up. I was being clever. I was being so clever I was telling them how it was done, and they were taking my conjecture as involvement.
“Do I need an advocate?” I asked, and the police in front of me went sour around the mouth.
“We’re just talking about what happened.”
No. No, we weren’t. “Am I under arrest? If I am, would you be so kind as to tell me the charge?”
“This is an interview. It will be easier if you cooperate,” Constable Moore said.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I would like an advocate. Please send for one. I’m not answering any questions until they are present.”
“That will take time, and we’re nearly finished,” Moore said. “Just a few more questions.”
“Advocate,” I said, and said no more.
They didn’t look friendly anymore. They got up and left the room, leaving me with only a cup of lukewarm, bitter tea for company.
I knew, from fetching out dozens of Solidarity members, that those men weren’t making any effort to find an advocate. They were probably grumbling to each other. They’d leave me to stew in here for hours, and the pressure on my bladder didn’t have hours.
I closed my eyes and reached out.
“Joy,” I said. “Mahalia. I need you.”
I stretched my senses west and south, and the clan house was in easy reach. I would have had to strain to spread my senses that far before Jacob bound his soul to mine. I touched them both, and they came, swifter than birds could fl
y.
“What happened to you?” Joy asked. “Are you in trouble?”
“I’m in deep trouble,” I said. “Please find Jean-Marie. Tell her where I am. Tell her I need an advocate. Hurry. I don’t have a lot of time.”
* * *
I was pacing around in little circles by the time the door opened again.
“What’s your advocate’s name?” Constable Brewster said.
“Why does that matter? I asked you to get an advocate, not my advocate. Now let me—”
“There’s someone here claiming to be your advocate,” Brewster said. “We need to know if that’s true.”
“It’s irrelevant.” I said. It hadn’t been that long. If they’d had to go to get Orlena, they would have had taken hours. That meant someone on the spot had volunteered to do it. Someone who had reason to stick around with Jean-Marie and Zelind.
Jarom? No. He was a doctor of laws, but he was no advocate, and he wouldn’t help me anyway. Who?
Only one choice left.
“Do you mean to tell me you’re making the Chancellor of Aeland cool her heels in the station?”
“You guessed.”
“I reasoned it out,” I said. “I had been with her before the shooting happened. I’m not surprised she took an interest. I think you had better let her see me.”
He didn’t quite slam the door when he left. I went back to pacing around. Grace was here. She was going to get me out of here.
But I didn’t know why I was in here in the first place. Did they think I hired a sharpshooter to stand on a rooftop and kill my friend because I was jealous of his spotlight? It was ridiculous. It was something out of a cinema matinee!
The door opened again, and Corporal Moore blocked the way out.
“You’re free to go.”
“Thank you,” I said. “I would like to visit the restroom and wash—”
“Water’s out,” he said. “Sorry.”
Of all the petty, childish—“Then get out of my way, please.”
He stood aside with a flourish, and I hurried down the hall.
“You have a habit of collecting powerful friends, Mrs. Thorpe.”