Fair Rebel

by Steph Swainston

  My Fusain reeve arrived and related the horrendous details of the gunpowder works. A hospital representative brought me a report of the wounded. So far, nearly a hundred people had been killed in the five explosions, and the women of Fusain were still bringing in pieces from as far away as Thorne Hill. The injuries from burns, debris and shrapnel were the same again, and more victims were likely to die.

  I half-sat, half-lay, against the scroll iron arm of the bench, while the sky behind the smoke grew a more assertive blue. I watched smoke billow into the South Wing, destroying our carpets, our double four-poster bed, tapestries, Tern’s clothes, her haute couture wardrobe and the office of her designer label.

  The head fireman came to explain whatever the fuck it was they’d been doing. ‘The North Wing won’t burn much longer,’ he said.

  ‘Oh … right.’

  ‘It’s damped down, but our tanks are empty.’

  ‘Ah … Okay.’

  ‘And it’s all gone, inside. It’s unsafe. It’ll have to be dismantled.’

  ‘Gosh … Really …?’

  I think I thanked him. At any rate, they left and I sat and stared blankly at wisps of smoke rising from the black façade of the palace until Saker and Raggiana returned.

  Saker dismounted by the blown-out windows, glanced inside and left Raggy to lead away his sweating horse. He approached, down the ornamental steps, between the monkey puzzle trees. I got up and walked away, the length of the lawn with my back to him, but he followed anyway. ‘Poor Tern,’ he said.

  ‘She’d only just finished rebuilding it!’

  He glanced at the smoke issuing from behind broken mullions, rising past the blackened beams. ‘How could Connell dare?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know, because Raggy fucking let her go!’

  ‘Don’t be hard on him. He doesn’t know about Litanee.’

  ‘Everyone will have to learn!’

  ‘Jant. You’re shaking.’

  ‘No shit I’m shaking. Look at my fucking house!’

  The shards of the great bay window drew our gaze. Smaller bays in the north and south wings were shattered but their frames were intact. I set off abruptly, up the slope towards it, and Saker joined me. ‘Why would Connell want to blow us to pieces?’ he said.

  ‘How am I going to tell Tern?’

  ‘Does she have a grievance against Wrought?’

  ‘People … actual people. You and me …’

  ‘Or Awia, or the Castle?’

  I snapped out of it and tried to follow his conversation, ‘It could be to do with money. The powder mills paid Connell just enough to keep working. The Castle doesn’t pay them well, either.’

  ‘Simoon never digs into the treasury if he can avoid it.’

  ‘Damn him! Does he think Litanee want to live in wagons?’

  ‘They don’t?’

  ‘Saker, who the fuck would live in a caravan if they had a bloody choice?’

  We crunched over the rubble and bits of wainscoting, fragments of beams, and pieces of piano. The firemen had trodden the tulips flat into muddy water under the bay window. I put a leg into the window frame and eased myself into the hall. ‘I read Connell’s tattoos. I know a bit about her.’

  ‘I only saw roses.’

  ‘Roses. Right.’

  You don’t look at the roses entwining her arm. You look at the pictures between them, framed by the briars. All the gypsies from Litanee tell their life story in their tattoos. They are either in the Rose or Oak tribes. They start at the right wrist, inscribe tattoos up their arm as time progresses, to their right shoulder, then across their chest and neck, and down their left arm. When that’s full, by about age forty, they tattoo their back, and then – if they live that long – their face. They record their life events, their most proud moments, their relationships, achievements, adventures or abilities, and there’s a symbol for each one you can read if you know the code. It obviates the need for introductions when they can scan each others’ life stories at a glance. They often need to team up quickly and knuckle down to work, for example when wagons gather for the harvest, so they display their strengths and preferences, and all the subtleties of their life history because, as I keep telling everybody, a Litanee will always help another one, regardless of law. It’s an intelligent rule, given their lifestyle: if your fellow Rose saves you from starving, another day he might call on you for help. And it’s just rescued Connell from the noose.

  ‘They put blasting powder in the cellar …’

  ‘Early this morning,’ said Saker. ‘Or Raggy would have found it. Watch where you’re walking. The joists have gone.’

  There was just enough space to stand before the floor opened into an enormous hole. It had been splintered upward by the force of the blast. Peering into the cellar, I saw nothing but the pitted wall. It stank of wet, burnt timber. Tern’s wine cellar, together with any evidence of barrels or fuses, had been blown to atoms. So had the hall’s oak panelling, the table where I’d been sitting, and the piano.

  I walked gingerly round the hole, through the scorched doorway and back to Saker. He said, ‘Tell me what you read on her arms.’

  We wandered around the house and peered in the other windows while I spoke. ‘Connell’s about thirty, because she has one sleeve and half her chest completed. Her right wrist was first; it has the date she left Litanee, back in ’25 when she must have been roughly fifteen. Obviously, she joined the Rose tribe. Her parents weren’t gypsies but stayed in Vertigo. They died soon after: inside her arm there’s two graves with an anchor and distaff drawn on them – a sailor and a spinner.

  ‘She worked on the harvest in the Plainslands and Awia, you can see from a haysheaf, a sickle and some grapes. Probably your grapes, Saker. Our assassin has sailed twice to Tris; over her elbow there’s a clipper with two tallies. She worked with the Ghallain gauchos herding cattle: there’s a lasso and a steer skull. She’s exceptionally good with horses and loves them. There’s a big piebald cob rearing inside her biceps and a horseshoe, too. So, she can do farrier work. Above is a bowtop wagon – she has her own and probably built it herself. The huge rose on her shoulder says she leads a troupe. I guess you shot four of them. The heart on her breast says she’s married. Quite recently.’

  ‘You read all that at a glance?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And the bodies of the other Roses? Who were they?’

  ‘I don’t know. They were covered in soot.’

  Saker picked up a fragment of martlet glass. ‘Our Connell is very accomplished.’

  ‘Most gypsies are. They have to be.’

  We walked towards the stables, and I think he was contemplating the great chasm between them. A gypsy girl might gather brushwood to sell, and it becomes the fire that roasts his venison. Between her roses she might depict an olive branch, when it’s his Donaise olives they pick, or a twisted sheet, when it’s the linen of Tanager Palace they come to wash. The great strength in these humans’ precarious existences suddenly seemed threatening. ‘God!’ he said. ‘Could it be an uprising of Litanee?’

  ‘Maybe,’ I said.

  ‘Can you find them? Can you find Connell?’

  ‘I can find anybody.’

  We were entering the stable courtyard towards the gable end of the main coach building, across the cobbled yard. Raggiana came out of the gap in the sliding barn door, wiping his hands.

  Without any warning, the Circle broke.

  I felt as if I’d been torn apart. Ripped across the middle. A feeling of vertigo, dislocation – I lost sense of myself – and felt the vast freezing space of infinity. An immortal died.

  I dropped to my knees and my field of vision blacked down to just one cobble. I’m fainting. Oh, god, not now!

  The Emperor relinked the Circle and suddenly I felt my lifeline again, but I couldn’t shake the feeling of a body ripped apart. I felt the hard cobbles pressing my knees and a drag upwards on both shoulders from Saker and Raggiana trying to stop me falling. They l
eant forward into my widening field of vision.

  ‘Comet?’ said Raggiana, terrified.

  I fought to drag my mind up through layers of consciousness. I saw an image of an eel shaped like a large intestine swimming away to my left. Then my mind presented a clear memory of Connell’s tattoos. And then my sight cleared. I was in Wrought stable yard, and I struggled to speak.

  Saker helped me to a mounting block and sat me on top. ‘Steward,’ he told Raggiana, ‘Go give some reassurance to your staff.’

  Raggy dashed away.

  ‘Now, Jant. What happened? The Circle broke, didn’t it?’

  I nodded.

  ‘You got that distant look.’

  He dropped on one knee, the better to see me, for my head was bowed and wings winnowed out. My long hair caught on the surface of my feathers. I felt weak all over.

  ‘Who was it?’ said Saker.

  ‘Not Tern …’

  Anger and fear broke through his patience. ‘Of course you can feel Tern! Who else? Feel for them … You said you could! Who’s missing?’

  Doing this isn’t second nature to me, the way it used to be for him. I closed my eyes and concentrated. I could feel thin, gold threads, shimmering and tenuous, radiating from my chest to all the other members of the Circle. I nebulously sensed them, as when someone’s close beside you, you have an impression of their personality. Mostly I was loved and warmed by the earthy dark red of Tern, and it was difficult to penetrate her succulent colour to detect the others. There was the formless but intense white light of Capelin Thunder, the stolid tan of Tornado, the optimism and pragmatism of Ella Rayne, which I rendered as the brown of her pinafore dress; the brilliant glacial blue of Hurricane, and Mist Fulmer’s flippant gin pink. By now I should have traced Cyan. Cyan is pale jade. I tried a little harder and located everyone else, but I couldn’t feel her.

  ‘It’s Cyan, isn’t it?’ said Saker, his voice breaking.

  ‘Yes.’

  He let out a tremendous sob. ‘My girl!’

  He collapsed onto his knees, face buried in his hands, and cried loudly.

  I put a hand on his shoulder. What else could I do?

  I thought of Cyan at eight years old, when I smuggled her from Ata’s Tower on Grass Isle to the rowing boat at night, and lifted her on my shoulders over the wet sand to the darkened coach. Or when I found her bound to the mast of the Honeybuzzard, as the ice-cased flagship stove and groaned.

  Saker wailed in earnest and it was ugly to see him cry. His shoulders heaved, he covered his face. But I was too numb to speak and, even if I could, I didn’t know what to say. I remembered Cyan running out onto the lawn at Awndyn, her honest face turned up, begging me to fly carrying her. I lay in the warm sun while she climbed all over me, and made daisy chains, and I braided my feathers in her hair. She loved my juggling. I taught her how to read a map. And Saker taught her riding and whisked her off on a purebred hunting with the bow.

  And she grew up. Brought up by Swallow, and neglected in favour of sonatas, she missed her mother who never returned from Tris. She believed her step-sisters’ propaganda, and despised Saker through her teenage years. Tern showed her how to play poker and bezique and I taught her how to drink tequila slammers – one, two, three! – on her sixteenth birthday at the Caterwaul Club. Then, later, defiant at the Front … I could remember her taste, and scent on my fingers like the faintest tang of the sea.

  I pressed Saker’s shoulder but nothing could stop him weeping. Cyan wrote to me when she fought with him, and disappeared to Hacilith for weeks on end.

  Everyone had a hand in saving her from herself. I saved her in the city when she overdosed on cat as if it was a brand new drug. And I nearly lost her then. Cyan Dei, Cyan Peregrine, then Cyan Lightning: Saker gave up everything for her, and now she was gone.

  ‘First Swallow, now Cyan,’ he managed, and dissolved into sobbing.

  At length, he tried to stand but his legs were too unsteady. He sat, leaning against the mounting step, staring unseeing at the cobbles. His fingers were white on the block’s edge and his wings unfolded like a cloak. ‘Cyan … dead?’

  ‘I’m sorry … I know it’s inadequate but …’

  ‘I put her in the front line …’

  ‘She wanted to be Lightning. She knew what it meant.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to kill her!’

  ‘It’s not your fault.’

  He wasn’t listening. He was fighting for breath, his face contorted and puffy. Eventually he wiped his nose. ‘I’m supposed to die. Not my girl … She’s seventeen.’

  ‘Thirty-two.’

  ‘Seventeen! I love her. I love my little girl … She’s clever. Smart … Oh, Jant – everyone I ever love dies. Swallow. Sav’ry. Linnet. I try to save them but they won’t. They won’t …’

  He disappeared into his hands, screwed up his handkerchief and pulled his wings about him, dragging the feather tips on the cobbles.

  I rubbed his shoulder. ‘Saker.’

  ‘Not Cyan … I thanked Dunlin for her. Just … why.’

  ‘I’ll fly to the Front.’

  ‘Yes. I need to know!’ he gasped, trying to be businesslike but unable to breathe. ‘I … I’m riding to Micawater. Whatever killed … my girl. My … lovely girl. Must not kill Leon.’

  ‘Don’t worry.’

  ‘Don’t let her die! I can’t live without her! Come back and tell me … was it Insects?’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Was it Roses? If they killed … her … I’ll hound every bastard human from Gilt to Tanager. That’s what I’ll do! I’ll round up every gypsy in Awia and hang them in the Grand Place.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘They’re humans covered in flowers. They’re easy to find.’

  ‘Not easy to understand!’

  ‘Is the Sturge big enough?’

  ‘Think what San would say!’

  ‘San …? Did he see this coming?’

  ‘It’s probably only Connell’s troupe.’

  ‘Could San have stopped this?’ He jumped up and raced into the stable, into the tack room, and tore Balzan’s saddle and his rifle holsters from the peg.

  ‘Wait till I return before you do anything,’ I said, but I might as well have been talking to the hayrack.

  He settled the saddle on Balzan’s back, crouched down to buckle the girth and suddenly spoke quietly. It sounded like composure, but it was shock. ‘Listen, Jant. This is most important. Bring her to me …’

  ‘Cyan?’

  ‘Her … The body of my little girl, my precious girl, you must bring to the palace … to the Lake Mausoleum.’

  ‘I see. Yes, if you wish.’

  ‘Forget the rubbish about the Starglass. I want her in Micawater. She was my daughter. She always was … really … no matter what she called herself.’

  His broad, powerful body wilted. He kept his head lowered, wouldn’t look at me. Trying to find a purpose, any purpose, he took out a brush and worked on the horse’s withers, then its back in long sweeps from the cantle to the tail. Then he folded an arm on the saddle and rested his face in the crook of it, his hand still through the brush strap. His voice came from a great distance. ‘I try to prize them, but they won’t … Tell Eleonora to join me at Micawater. If she’s still alive … she must be …’

  ‘Of course. But will you stop this nonsense about humans?’

  ‘I liked wingless. I married one, once.’

  He fixed Balzan’s headstall and clipped the rifles and quivers on the saddle. Then he clicked his tongue and Balzan followed him from the straw-sweet air, into the courtyard. He mounted, looked down. ‘There might be a gunpowder charge hidden in my house. I’ll have it searched. Connell won’t kill Lory and Ortolan!’

  ‘Please stay calm.’

  ‘Everyone knows we move the children there in June. They know Leon calls it the summer palace.’ He sobbed and glanced at the ruined house. ‘Hurry and tell me what happened. By then, I’ll have all the roads blocked. Al
l the woods combed. I’ll have every gypsy wagon searched. If Connell’s in my kingdom I’ll catch the bitch.’

  ‘Saker, no.’

  His eyes were bleak, just intense pain. ‘Eske owes me a favour, too. Connell won’t escape …’

  ‘We should tell Aver-Falconet.’

  ‘Fuck the Governor of Hacilith. Fuck the fucking Morenzians.’

  ‘This isn’t the battlefield. This is a new kind of problem.’

  ‘It’s my country, Jant. We do what I say, now.’

  He walked Balzan slowly under the stable arch, and the clop of hooves became a flinty squelch as they reached the gravel avenue pooled with firemen’s water. They quickened into a trot, then a canter, and broke into a gallop, which faded fast away.

  Oh, for fuck sake. Damn it, damn it, damn it, Saker. If all you have is arrows, everything looks like a target.

  I soothed Raggiana, instructed him to telegraph the Castle, and left him in control of our injured staff and our mourning families. It was an unenviable task. When I jogged out to the avenue Balzan’s hoof prints were still there, filling with water. Before, boys with rakes would have smoothed the gravel immediately. Where were the gardeners’ sons now? I hoped they’d survived.

  The elaborate curlicued gates stood open, black paint peeling off the sinuous metal. I ran at them, took off halfway down the driveway, and my wings whacked the topmost swirls as I passed above.

  It was going to be an arduous flight. Cyan Lightning was dead. My best friend was cast so deeply in grief that he didn’t know what to do – and he wasn’t in control. Fortunately his rare and brief storms of violence wear off quickly, in my experience, leaving him desolate and morose, which is unpleasant but a good deal safer as far as the humans are concerned. In one night Connell had destroyed half the gunpowder presses in Wrought and my wife’s mansion. How could I describe this to the Emperor? Fuck it, how would I explain it to Tern?

  CHAPTER 16

  Flying to the Front

  I’d always thought that Litanee were fine people. I admired the way you find them everywhere – if you’re broad-minded or lowly enough to glimpse the invisible human being behind the menial task. Whether rolling up in time for the harvest, carting arrows to the Front or olive oil, figs and dates out of Tambrine, they know where seasonal work is found. They wash pots for the Quartermaster at the Front, or dishes in the restaurants of Fiennafor. They lock barges through the Awndyn-Moren canal. When work dries up they roll away and live off their pennies till the next news of labour trickles down their grapevine.