Gregory Grey and the Fugitive in Helika

by Stanzin

CHAPTER 14

  Family Fervour

  It is the next Wednesday, late afternoon.

  Gregory and Zach fly west over the bright red rooftops of Coffer Street to the Blood Tree; Susannah and Mango are already there, checking in on Mango’s Uncle Rafi. Unusually, a sullen silence has replaced the cautious camaraderie that the boys usually share. They have quarrelled, not with each other, but with the girls, and are on their way to make amends.

  As the bright red canopy of the Blood Tree looms closer and larger, Zach speaks:

  ‘I’m not saying sorry.’

  ‘You shouldn’t,’ Gregory tells him.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Would you mean it, if you said it?’

  ‘’Course not. I said nothing wrong.’

  ‘Then you shouldn’t say sorry, should you?’

  ‘Yeah. Fact is, if anyone’s saying sorry, it’s her.’

  ‘Let’s not go there again.’ Gregory had suggested as much a few hours ago, and it had turned out badly.

  ‘Then why are we going, anyway? About turn, I say, and leave them to wallow!’

  ‘Naw, fighting’s no good,’ Gregory sighs, though a small and hateful part of him, which had many times accused him of being over-eager to replace Reggie and Alf with his new friends, disagreed. ‘It won’t make sense for anyone to say sorry anyhow.’

  ‘What! Why not?’

  ‘No one feels sorry. You think they feel sorry? If we all went about saying we’re sorry, we’d all be lying.’

  ‘But they were wrong!’

  ‘Don’t matter. I don’t like saying or hearing sorry. It’s never real. No one’s ever really sorry. I’m never sorry.’

  ‘You’ve never been sorry?’

  ‘No. If I was going to regret doing something, or if I thought I might want to do things differently if I could, I’d do them differently the first time around.’

  ‘You’ve never done something you wish you could take back? Really?’

  Gregory thought back to the theft of the Bobbin’s staff. Never mind how guilty he felt afterwards, if he were put into the same situation again, he’d have stolen the staff anyway.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t do or say things I might want to take back. If I did, I’d be being dishonest with myself in the first place, wouldn’t I?’

  ‘Then for the third time, what are we going over for? No one’s sorry!’

  ‘We’re going over because us fighting is stupid. We’ve been having a bad week, that’s all. Mango may be an idiot, but we don’t have to chew her out for it. ‘Sides, it was bothering you a lot more than it was bothering me.’

  ‘Then why’d you let loose on her?’

  Gregory sighed, and thought back to his week. Their week. It would have been hard to say who was the most sullen of Gregory, Mango, Zach and Susannah.

  The reason behind Gregory’s belligerence was apparent enough: he magical prowess, or lack thereof, had by now put him squarely in the bottom of the class. For a dreadful week he had watched, with increasing dismay, as the other laggards had come to terms with their magical ability, and improved their fine control over those wretched domino tiles.

  Gregory’s performance had, if anything, worsened every day.

  On Monday, Gregory, focusing harder than he had ever focused in his life, had thoroughly failed to knock over dominoes in the direction he’d wanted. It was the most basic of the thaumic techniques; this had just been the revision exercise before the class moved on to better things.

  He’d known, without looking up, that he was the only one who had failed. He’d known he was going to fail before even he’d pushed his intended tile. He had felt his thauma condense in eddies and whirls around him, drawn to the spot of his focus, veering wildly like an overlarge axe in the hands of an overly small man.

  A small part of him was viscerally afraid that this was his eternal punishment for the crime of besmirching another man’s instrument – for dishonouring the Bobbin’s staff. An absurd guilt further twisted the knife, that he’d been given this chance to become magi, and he couldn’t even get the first lesson right. He just knew it – that Reggie, Alf and Mixer would have performed better in his place.

  To his horror, the Headmistress had called him out, and him alone. No one else’s weaknesses or shortcomings had been called into attention so far… and she had begun with his! She’d asked him to accompany her to her office. Following the Headmistress through the corridors of Gurukul Caverns, he imagined all the ways in which he was going to be told off.

  Would he be made to take extra classes? Would he be told to try next year? Or, Gregory wondered miserably, would he be told that he wasn’t magical enough to be a mage, and kicked out of Gurukul Caverns?

  Feeling abjectly sorry for himself as he got on to the Blooding Dais in the Dome (which ascended to the Headmistress’ office), Gregory wondered if they’d even let him become Hero if he wasn’t magical enough to be mage. They’d be too embarrassed to suffer him. They’d make Uncle Quincy send him back to the orphanage. At a command from the Headmistress, the dais smoothly levitated up to the very top of the dome, and into the circular shaft that led to the top.

  People descended into their graves, but Gregory was sure he was ascending into his.

  He would have never have dared look so forlorn if Reggie had been around – he would have been laughed at and scorned till he was no bigger than an ant, and told to ‘stop being a wuss’, but Reggie would never tell him anything again…

  Gregory had wrenched his thoughts away from that path.

  The Headmistress had led him from her office out into the sunlit balcony. With the blue waters of Little Finger stretching away below him, a cool and inviting blue, and with the Spire piercing feathery clouds to his right, the Headmistress had poured out tea and given Gregory the most unusual lecture of his life.

  ‘Do you know what a heuristic is?’

  When Gregory shook his head, she’d said:

  ‘‘Give someone a fish, you feed him for a day. Teach someone how to fish, you feed him for a lifetime.’ That’s a heuristic – a tool or technique of thought – by which we guide our own learning. They are not perfect, but they are right more often than they are wrong. Used correctly, they usually lead us to good answers.’

  ‘You mean, like rules of thumb?’

  ‘Rules of thumb. Trial and error. Common sense too. Some heuristics, Gregory, are more powerful than others. If you learn to use them wisely, you will learn to learn far more quickly than you would otherwise.’

  ‘Um…’

  ‘The heuristic of immediate positive reinforcement is one of my favourites. It’s based on a very, very powerful insight into the human mind: that the human brain craves quick rewards. Our minds, left to their own devices, prefer to think in favour for what’s good for us here and now, rather than then and there.’

  Gregory had said nothing; it seemed like a very obvious thing to point out. As if the Headmistress had read his mind, she had gone on to say:

  ‘It’s hard to call obvious things powerful, but this is powerful, like a sword that lets you carve your brain’ – she had chopped the air with her hand – ‘into behaving the way you want it to behave. Also, like a sword, it’s double sided.’

  He saw where she was going with this.

  ‘When it comes to learning something, success becomes the reward. But sometimes… sometimes you fail. And sometimes, you go on failing, even when you’re trying you’re hardest, so you end up learning the wrong lesson. You tell yourself that the grape is sour, but what you actually end up learning is to give up trying, because you’re scared of the answer. That’s the wrong lesson Gregory. I don’t want you to learn that.

  ‘I’ve been studying magic for twenty years, and I’ll go on studying it for the next hundred,’ the Headmistress said. ‘You never really stop learning magic. And if someone told me that the my first week of lessons was the most important week of my life, I’d laugh them out of the country.’

 
; Gregory said nothing. He was getting good at saying nothing.

  ‘And yet, your first week has been devastatingly important to you, albeit, in all the wrong ways. You’re learning, perhaps, that you and magic are not compatible. If so, then that’s the wrong lesson.’

  ‘But we’re not compatible. It’s not working!’ Gregory burst out.

  ‘Know this – you’re not sick! Physically and magically, we’ve found no diseases that could cripple your magical potential. Not even the injury you suffered on the Voidmark impaired your magic in any way.’

  The Headmistress was politely calling him a cry-baby. Fantastic.

  As if she had read his mind, the Headmistress said, ‘We are allowed to grieve, Gregory. Grief isn’t a weakness – rather it is strength! It is a mark of our humanity… yet for some reason, you won’t allow yourself to grieve, to cry – because that would mean acceptance?’

  ‘Nearly everyone in that class lost someone!’ Gregory said, trying his hardest not to snap at one of the most powerful people in the world. ‘They’re not flaking out.’

  ‘How would you know? People…flake out, did you say? - in different ways. Perhaps someone is just crying a lot. Perhaps someone isn’t talking very much. One of your classmates has discovered that it feels better when she’s bullying something. And some people can’t focus on their magic. These are all solvable problems Gregory, but the solutions are all different.’

  ‘Don’t make me stop coming to class. Please,’ Gregory whispered. He fixed his eyes on Little Finger, too afraid to look at the Headmistress.

  ‘Look at me, Gregory.’

  Her eyes had been kind.

  ‘I’m not going to make you stop classes. Whether or not you take a break is your decision. All I wanted to tell you was to not learn the wrong lesson from your slower progress. Can you do that? Can you not tell yourself that ‘this grape is probably sour’?’

  Still unwilling to look at her, Gregory nodded, and then said, ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good!’ The Headmistress Eavesmother beamed at him, though he could not see it. ‘Then I will introduce you to another extremely powerful heuristic. Would you like to know what it its?’

  Gregory finally turned back to her and nodded.

  ‘It goes thusly: ‘Stupidity is doing the same thing over and over again, yet expecting different results each time’. In other words, learn to recognise quickly which tactics do not work for you, and replace them with tactics that do! Classroom training isn’t improving your fine control. We’ll figure out why later – for now, let’s approach your fine control from another way.

  ‘Gurukul Caverns offers an optional class – a class different from every other! Yet it combines the best characteristics of every branch of magic the Caverns have to offer – the fine dexterity that drives powerful Sorcery; the theoretical structure that governs precision Runecraft; the intuitive scientific understanding demanded by Alchemy; the creativity without which Enchantment is redundant; a class which is, I’ll freely admit, my favourite, and has strengthened my magical ability, as a whole, a great deal more any single class that I’ve ever been taught. Would you like to take it up, Gregory?’

  An enigma had infused her voice and her eyes; Gregory found himself transfixed as her words soared over him, around him, and through him. He could not remember deciding to agree – the moment she had asked, his head had nodded in acceptance all on its own.

  And so music was added to Gregory’s curriculum.

  As his mother before him, he chose to learn the piano. The classes wouldn’t start immediately – the Cavern’s own musical instructor had not survived the Voidmark – but the Headmistress had provided Gregory with a tome of musical history to read while she hunted another instructor to recruit, and Gregory had transferred the book into his Index. In the meanwhile, Gregory would continue to attend class.

  The talk did nothing to improve his performance in class, but outside of it, it helped a lot. Just knowing that the Headmistress – that anyone – was willing to invest in him, had faith in him, did a lot to shake him out of his doldrums. Now, when he stayed up an extra hour every night to write detailed notes of his lessons for Mixer, he felt less of a fraud. And on Tuesday, when they were tasked with stopping the fall of the dominoes once it had been started, Gregory met the near-sneering looks with a steadier gaze.

  But Gregory’s magical inadequacy had only caused him to lash out – it had not been the core cause of the fight.

  The second of their quartet, Mango, also had clear reasons for her belligerence. She was worried about her Uncle Rafi. And though the source of her tension and worry was a lot more specific than most others, she shared her anger with all of Domremy.

  Gregory hadn’t quite realised quite how much hostility Domremy felt for Helika. Sure, everyone in Pencier knew that Helika was Domremy’s big and bad neighbour, held at bay by the formidable mountain massif of Murder, Monk and Virgin, and Domremy’s sheer magical strength. But people in Pencier were far more concerned with the going-abouts of their actual neighbours than countries hundred of miles away.

  Not so in Domremy City.

  Everywhere at school and in the streets and hamlets around Domremy City, one topic of conversation dominated people’s voices: the riot. But Gregory had not needed to look at them to see the hate in bright and blazing gazes, or in the clawed and gesticulating fingers, or in the speech spat through thin lips.

  To see all that, he had needed only to look at Mango.

  The wiry girl had thrummed with nervous energy when he had seen her on Monday. ‘They won’t be able to explain it away,’ she had assured him. ‘They won’t be blaming a crossfire… or a quake… or spectres.’

  The rest of the day, she filled the ears of everyone who would listen (and a few who would rather not) about all the ways in which Helika had it coming…

  … and about the times Helika had pulled a fast one on Reflective peasants.

  … how Reflectives in Helika were not allowed into government.

  … the number of sly ways in which Helika swindled Reflectives.

  … the time when Helika had outlawed Reflective festivals.

  … the time when Helika had outlawed Reflective fashion.

  … the time when Helika had claimed a Reflective temple had originally been Observant and then had taken over it.

  … how Helika told Reflectives to pay a ‘faith tax’ or convert to Observancy.

  … and how Helika forbade Reflective women from inheriting lands held by their mothers and annexed them.

  … or when Helika taxed Reflective inheritance.

  … the time Helika forbade Reflectives from purchasing land in urban areas.

  … the time Helika made it mandatory for Reflective landowners to grow only certain kinds of crops.

  … how Helika forbade marriage between Reflectives and Observants.

  … or the time Helika decided Reflectives could not use public infrastructure such as government schools.

  … or even private ones funded by Observant bodies.

  … the ban on Reflective newspapers.

  … the ban on printing Reflective ideologies

  … the edict making it mandatory for Reflectives to live within specific areas.

  ‘Unholy hells, you’d think anyone Reflective would have left Helika by now,’ Gregory muttered to Zach once Mango had finally gone home.

  ‘Yeah. And I thought she’d never stop,’ Zach said, rubbing his temples.

  ‘I don’t think she has.’

  ‘I can’t take another day of that!’

  ‘Let’s hope she’s gotten it out of her system.’

  The next morning, Tuesday, they quickly found out Mango had not. Susannah did not have to deal with her rants as she was the at the Blood Tree anytime she was not at the Caverns – her father Asclepius Coffey was having a devil of time arbitrating between the Helikan and Domremin branches of his fledgling organisation. Gregory and Zach were not so lucky, but after three whole hours of this, t
hrough classes and break-time and yet again through lunch, they found different ways to deal with it.

  Gregory buried his nose into his Index and began to methodically collate all information he could discover about ‘Brightapple’, something he has been putting off.

  Zach simply disappeared.

  Mango went on speaking to Gregory, oblivious to his inattention, but perhaps that was because she was getting a lot of attention from the other students. The Grotto, where everyone usually unwound after classes, was always packed with students. These students, walking by Mango’s table, would stop to listen to her.

  When Gregory looked up from looking into Brightapple, he found himself surrounded by a ring of a dozen students, some of whom were seniors, who were hanging on to her every word, with their eyes narrowed, and their lips tight and their heads nodding.

  ‘….The King warned them to look out for us,’ she had been saying, ‘and they haven’t. Heck, they’re likely the ones doing us in. And when we can show it for sure…’

  She’d punched the air a vicious uppercut with her gloved hand.

  Indeed, that had seemed like a foregone conclusion, and the whole country had held a tense and bated breath, waiting for an excuse, any excuse…

  And the Helikans had managed to surprise them even so. It had come right after classes were over: an unapologetic and vehement accusation levelled against the victims themselves – or Rioters as Helika had branded them. Traitors of the Emperor’s Peace. Seditionists! Bandits! Terrorists!

  Domremy’s outrage had been swift and decisive. Word had filtered through the classrooms, and the streets and the forests and the alleys of Lotown: A Peoplesmeet was to be held.

  ‘This will mean war for sure,’ Mango had said. ‘Everyone’s gathering at the Arenas. I’m going now.’

  ‘We’re coming too,’ Zach had said, withering under her gaze. Gregory followed suit.

  ‘You don’t really think there will be war do you,’ Gregory had asked Zach quietly.

  ‘It’s not the best of times for it, with the quake and everything. No… but then, it’s never the best of times between Domremy and Helika, is it?’

  ‘What’s the Arenas?’

  ‘You’ll see when we get there.’

  The Arenas, Gregory quickly learned, were a patchwork of clearings cut into a hillside, haphazard constructs with raised and circular seating space around each clearing. The crown of the hill though, had what looked like a massive and ancient circular amphitheatre gone to ruin, dilapidated galleries towering over the stage in the centre.

  ‘Domremy’s got a bunch of informal duelling teams,’ Zach said. ‘Technically the clearings are all public spaces, but each team’s staked out its own arena. The teams issue challenges to each other based on a notoriety system, and they fight to rank at the top. I come watch them sometimes – the fights can get pretty epic. See the arena on top of the hill? That’s the Grand Odeum. They used to hold concerts there, once upon a time. Now, it’s where the top ranking duelling team holds court. At least, they do that when things are friendly.’

  ‘Interesting… but things don’t look too friendly right now,’ Gregory said. They were on a carpet, high above the Grand Odeum, which teamed with ant-like people in the galleries. Even from high up there, Gregory could sense the aggression within the gathering, pockets of rigid stillness forming from fast moving lines of assembly. A solitary figure stood unmoving in the centre of the white-sanded stage.

  ‘Hells bells, how many people are there down there?’

  ‘Forty, maybe fifty thousand?’ Zach said. ‘Come on, let’s not keep Mango waiting.’

  Sure enough, the wiry girl snapped at them as soon as they landed close to her: ‘Where were you?’

  But they did not have a chance to reply: a hush descended all at once, and tens of thousands of eyes focused themselves on the figure in the centre. It was a woman, impossibly tall, decked out in the simplest of black duelling robes, standing with a bearing worthy of any Queen, a mane of hair flaring behind her, framing her.

  She imploded the silence with a roar:

  ‘The people be heard!’

  ‘The people be heard,’ the crowd roared back.

  ‘The people be heard!’

  ‘The people be heard!’ Mango threw her voice as hard as she could into the roar.

  ‘Kin for kin, mind for mind, heart for heart!’

  ‘Kin for kin, mind for mind, heart for heart!’

  ‘Look! Look south! See beyond The Brothers! There, live a handful, and only a handful, of those we’ve called our own. Not in blood, or in deed, but in spirit! Kin of our faith, who endure what we fled! Symbols of our history, guarding our heritage. Today, they are beset. Beset from all sides from by a corrupt spirit, a nation too ashamed to look our kin in the eyes. I tell you now, we have a duty to them, those guardians to our faith, those carriers of our heritage. A greater threat faces them now than ever before – an opportunistic Empire, shrouding its crimes behind common disaster. They act from subterfuge. The Emergency is a sham. They know that we won’t let it pass, that we won’t just stand by. So they accuse our kin of treason. If it had not been for our King, every Reflective in Falstead would already be swinging from their necks. Only one thing keeps them from bay – the Blood Tree. By it, we knew Helika had failed our kin, failed to keep them safe. Even as we speak, our Emissaries are at the camp. By tomorrow, we will know the truth. And when Helika fails to restitute those of our kin that it has wronged, we, People of Domremy, will be ready to wrest it from them. We are resolved!’

  ‘We are resolved!’

  That pretty speech was merely the preamble. Over the next hour, all of Helika’s wrongs were summarily listed, and contrasted to Domremy’s clearly superior character, much as Mango had done over the past two days, only this time, in a rhetoric much more flamboyant, by a speaker much more charismatic.

  Gregory and Zach would not have stayed, but did so for two reasons. One, so Mango would have no excuse to kill them. Two, there was something powerful in the air, a sense of something important happening, that they would be remiss to miss. It was there in the blazing looks of the audience, and in the silence between the tall woman’s words. It was a strange sense of promise, a resolution, a commitment to an end, whatever that end might be.

  ‘How long is this going to go on?’ Gregory asked.

  ‘I think this is going to turn into a proper Peoplesmeet,’ Zach said. ‘Two weeks or so, I guess?’

  ‘Two weeks? What’s a Peoplesmeet?’

  ‘Sometime I forget you’re not from around here,’ Zach said, frowning. ‘It’s a sort of a festival… only there’s no fixed dates… or any fixed organisation. When something important builds and builds over the whole city for a time, and it doesn’t get resolved quickly enough, that’s when a Peoplesmeet could happen. It usually starts off with little speeches like this, usually by the most interested parties, like Mango, who’s Uncle is in Helika.’

  ‘The idea is to keep the mood going,’ Mango said, making them jump. ‘And to get everyone’s input – which is why it takes time. Somebody decides to organise things… usually it’s someone in the Throne’s service… and things just take off. Music. Plays. Book fairs. Food fairs. More speeches. Debates. And it’s all centred around the reason for the Peoplesmeet happened – in this case, the abuse of Reflectives in Helika.’

  ‘Right. You wait and see,’ Zach said. ‘In two or so days, this whole hillside’s going to become a big, sprawling mess… there’s going to be loads of tents everywhere, with more and more people coming in… every arena here is going to be put to use – plays in one, dances in another, music, markets.’

  ‘Wow.’ Gregory looked around at the forty thousand or so already gathered, and imagined heir numbers swelling. ‘And what’s the point?’

  ‘I told you – the mood,’ Mango said. ‘It’s about taking measure of the people’s mood. At then end of it, there’s usually some sort of decision… that decision is presented
to the Throne.’

  ‘How come the Throne lets people do that? This is… well, anarchy, isn’t it?’

  ‘Not really. The Throne serves the people… and besides, Peoplesmeets are sacred to Domremy… and to every Reflective country.’

  ‘At the risk of sounding stupid… why?’

  ‘Well… the first Peoplesmeet there ever was – it led to the birth of Domremy. The whole idea of having a country based on Reflective philosophy at all came from a Peoplesmeet.’

  ‘No kidding.’

  It was quite dark by the time they finally left, and Gregory was glad to go.

  At home, Uncle Quincy knew all about the Peoplesmeet, as did Johanna, who, as it turned out, was incredibly excited about it.

  ‘It’s loads and loads of fun!’ she said at dinner.

  ‘As a matter of fact, the Throne has asked me to organise it, and gave me some funds for it too,’ he told Gregory. ‘You should come around after your school hours. Peoplesmeets can be quite fun.’

  Gregory grunted non-committally. There was something unsettling about the mood at the Grand Odeum, though he couldn’t have said what it was (he wouldn’t come across the term ‘mob mentality’ until much later). All he knew for certain was that the mood was getting to be too much.

  But Uncle Quincy did notice his reluctance, for he went on, ‘We’ve got gypsies coming in – you might even know these ones Greg – they stop by Pencier at least once a year – the Merlot Tribe – I believe.’

  ‘What? Those guys?’ Gregory’s interest was sparked at once. Perhaps he could show Mango, Zach and Susannah around. And there was something else he could do…

  ‘Yes, they ought be rolling in tomorrow – I’ll see if they can help liven the Peoplesmeet up. You’ll love that, won’t you, Jo?’

  ‘Gypsies and a Peoplesmeet?’ she asked, looking delighted. ‘This is going to be epic. The last Peoplesmeet was four years ago… and I haven’t been to a gypsy fair in over a year!’

  ‘You come with me then,’ Gregory said. ‘I’ve known these guys for ever – I’ll show you around all the fun.’

  ‘It’s happening,’ Johanna said happily.

  It was, Gregory thought to himself, his mind going to the frail looking blood-frond still carefully tucked into his jacket. This took care of a not-so-little problem that had been buzzing in his head – to find a discreet Scryer. Fortunately, he knew exactly who the Scryers were in this particular tribe, and how much they charged for a session. He could be speaking to this mysterious Lesley Greene within the week!

  Of course, he would have to be careful about it. No one who knew Gregory personally could ever, ever find out about it – he’d be in the most fantastic trouble if they did! And that also meant that he would have to get it done before he was formally knighted.

  What if the gypsies recognised him? Impossible, he thought. He had not gotten close to any of them, and they would have no reason to singularly remember him out of all the hundreds of boys at Pencier. Plus, he’d cleaned up! He didn’t even look the same. He’d cut his hair! No, they wouldn’t recognise him.

  Later that night, Gregory came across his second stroke of good fortune – something so unexpected and startling, that when he first saw it, he thought his eyes were playing tricks on him.

  Over the past week, Gregory had decided that the Index may be the finest thing to ever be invented. He called it Alexandria, after that ancient and mystical library. He felt like giving Remy a kiss.

  He’d finally finished gathering from all the newspapers, all the meatiest articles about Brightapple and compiled them into a single Indexed folder. After dinner, he had begun to read them. Ink flurried across Alexandria’s smooth and grey surface. Gregory pulled up a fresh parchment and began to read and make notes.

  The name Brightapple had niggled at him constantly since he had first read of it. He was surer than ever he had heard that name before, but try as he might, he could not remember where. The small village had belonged to no country, but had nestled and flourished as a spiritual centre in the very middle of the no-man’s-land between Domremy and Helika. It had been founded in the thirteenth century by a Helikan scholar-sage who had renounced every faith, preferring, instead, to find enlightenment in scholastic tradition and empirical observations. His name was Roger Bacon, a man so famously charming, that he had somehow managed to get along with leaders of both Reflective and Observant faiths, and even more fantastically, had somehow wrangled the protection of both countries for his fledgling village.

  Roger Bacon and his disciples had made Brightapple famous as a place of learning and peace, and had actually trained the Dravidian scholar Nithya Ravi who would go on to found the first Gurukul in her own nation. This, ironically, had spelt out Brightapple’s own slow decline, as prospective students began to flock to the Gurukuls for their learning. Two hundred years ago, Brightapple had dwindled in reputation and in population to a village of ascetics.

  On the 3rd of July 1903, a mere three days before Gregory’s arrival at the Pencier Orphanage, a band of roving bandits had razed Brightapple to the ground.

  There had been no warning. By the time the border forces had arrived, the bandits had vanished. Strangely, there was no indication about which band it had been. Bandits were notorious for showing off, yet not one had come forward to claim the attack. Investigations went on for a year and turned up nothing. It could have been a religious attack; most of the villagers had been Reflectives, but Observants hadn’t been spared either.

  When families and friends descended on the village to burn or bury the dead, the heavily charred and mutilated bodies made identification near impossible. The papers ran missing person posters ran alongside obituaries, but there were far fewer of the former.

  And that was where Gregory found it, among the portraits of the missing, a face – much younger, but unmistakable – staring back at him. The portrait was not a photograph, but a charcoal drawing…

  … of Gregory himself.

  He stared at the drawing almost as if he expected it to speak and explain itself. When it did not, a strange feeling gripped Gregory – triumph and terror entwined – he clutched at the Index, almost willing it to speak, to answer.

  What?

  What? What? WHAT?

  The poster gave a name to go along with the face – but it wasn’t his own – instead, it called him Melvin Schuyler. There was also an address:

  Schuyler Inc., Gimmel, Domremy City.

  He started. His seeker was from Domremy? And Gimmel… he had heard that name before… but where…

  Barely five seconds later, he stood at the large mural of Domremy City in the Appleby drawing room, tracing with his finger, but carefully not touching, all the different names on it.

  There it was, Gimmel, a small hamlet someway up the valley up from the eastern end of Lake Little Finger.

  ‘Who are you?’ Gregory whispered, peering at the red knob that marked the hamlet. What did this mean? Questions flooded his mind. He scrambled back into his room to jot them down, and when he had, he curled up with his knees pressed tightly to his chin, the flabbergasting queries scrawled untidily across the parchment, which he’d kept at his feet. His eyes moved to the first question.

  Who was seeking Gregory? Who posted the missing person notice? Who could have had any reason to expect seven-year-old Gregory in Brightapple? Not his uncle – Gregory and his parents had disappeared a full year before the attack. His parents? No, they would have used a picture, not a drawing. Someone else then?

  Why didn’t they mention Gregory by name? Did the seeker not know who Gregory was, or was he or she deliberately obscuring Gregory’s name for other reasons? If the first, then the Seeker must have met Gregory only very briefly, and yet something important enough had happened that they wanted Gregory. If the second, then was the Seeker trying to protect Gregory’s identity? The first seemed more likely; they’d drawn his face instead of posting a picture, which meant they probably had no idea where to look
for his picture, which in turn made it more likely that they had no idea who Gregory was.

  The poster was dated after Gregory’s deliverance to the orphanage. That could mean two things, that the Seeker did not know Gregory’s whereabouts and someone else (possibly Gregory’s parents) had tried to hide Gregory from (possibly) the Seeker; or the Seeker had been the one to deliver Gregory to the orphanage and was trying to throw someone off by pretending otherwise. If the Seeker really didn’t know who Gregory was, then the first was again more likely.

  The next question: what had Gregory been doing at Brightapple (and did he have anything to do with why and how the village was attacked)? It was a very uncomfortable thought. Had his parents been with him, and had one or both of them survived the attack? Possibly, considering someone had gone and hidden him away, but it was a weak argument.

  Better weak arguments than nothing, Gregory thought.

  Was the attack in any way related to Gregory’s mysterious illness? Had something triggered it then? Did the Seeker curse Gregory somehow or cause it in some other way?

  So what was the most likely scenario?

  Gregory answered that easily enough: the Seeker was an unknown person or persons, probably hostile, who wanted Gregory for reasons that were likely tied to the mysterious illness; and they had no idea of Gregory’s true identity; but they strongly suspected that Gregory had survived the massacre (or else they wouldn’t have bothered with the missing poster); and that Gregory had something they wanted.

  That begot another question: why or how had Gregory survived the attack? For now, there was no way of finding out.

  Gregory uncurled and wrote down his thoughts and went over them again slowly before putting the paper down and staring into the distance. If his theory was true, then there ought to be some way to confirm it… and there was! The address! He needed to visit it soon, and discretely. And he was NOT going to be stupid and send a letter to the address before at least knowing whom he was dealing with.

  Or…

  He could just tell Uncle Quincy what he had discovered, couldn’t he? His Uncle far better equipped to deal with this, wasn’t he?

  It would be the smart thing to do…

  Something inside Gregory seriously fought the idea. If he told Uncle Quincy… then the investigation wouldn’t be his anymore. Heck, Uncle Quincy might even tell him to stay out of entirely, because it was too ‘dangerous’. It’s what grown-ups did, after all.

  But seriously, there’s nothing more you can really do, Gregory’s brain told him. Wasn’t there? Gregory wondered. Perhaps he ought to make sure. Yes, he ought. Everything he could reasonably and safely discover, he would. For one, he could probably find out who lived at the address.

  It was sometime before Gregory fell asleep, and he did not sleep well. Perhaps that was why, on Wednesday, he was that much more susceptible to get into a tiff with the girls than he otherwise might have been.

  Susannah’s distress was less her own, and more a reflection of her father’s. Asclepius Coffey was in a very difficult position diplomatically – stuck between loyalty to the country he called his own, and the Helikan partners in enterprise who had invested in his dream. Both were out for blood over the riot.

  ‘What have the Helikans got to complain about?’ Mango had asked incredulously.

  ‘They’re accusing Domremy of using the Blood Tree to subvert Helikan sovereignty,’ Susannah had sighed. ‘And they’re accusing Dad of enabling it… and now they’re threatening to pull their investments from future projects.’

  ‘Why’d he have to go the Helikans in the first place?’ Mango said.

  ‘The Helikans approached us,’ Susannah snapped. ‘They were very friendly then… we didn’t know they’d start flaking out like this.’

  Gregory had read up on the Blood Census.

  The project was a huge political landmark in Domremy-Helika relationships. Most of the tiffs between the two countries were usually sparked off by the Empire’s mistreatments of its Reflective citizens. Before the Voidmark, the Blood Census had been intended to allow for an unprecedented level of access into Reflective conditions in the country, without the heretofore-required military intervention. Both countries got to keep their respective faces and everybody was protected and happy.

  And now fifteen hundred were dead, and the delicate little overtures both countries had been making were almost certainly as dead.

  ‘I don’t get it,’ Gregory had said on Tuesday, right before Susannah returned to her father. ‘If they were so willing to be transparent before… why the sudden change of heart? Why the riot?’

  ‘Haven’t you been listening to me?’ Mango had said crossly. ‘With Helikans, it’s all about land – Reflective land, that is. They saw the quake and figured it’s an excellent excuse to herd us together – all the easier to kill us off we’re in one spot – and then turn around and frame us for rioting. You’ll see the truth of it tomorrow.’

  But when Wednesday dawned, it was to grim news: against all expectations, the riot was real. Domremy’s own emissaries had confirmed it. The refugee Reflectives of Falstead Forest had attacked the Helikan Whites, and killed about four hundred of them and hundreds of more civilian Observants, before the riot had been halted by lethal force.

  When the arrived at the Caverns, they found that Preparatory had been cancelled for the day. The huddles around the Caverns were less grim then, and more confused. People were leaving.

  ‘Where are they going?’ Gregory asked.

  ‘The Tree,’ Susannah said hollowly. ‘They’re going to watch the fronds fall… and hope I guess… that it doesn’t belong to anyone we know.’

  ‘Watch the fronds fall? What does that mean?’ Gregory asked.

  ‘It means, you idiot, that Helika’s executing the rioters. About ten on the hour,’ Mango said.

  ‘They’ve shown the riot was real,’ Susannah said. ‘They figure they can now prosecute – we don’t really have much grounds to challenge them on this.’

  Gregory’s blood cooled; he had to force himself to not check Lesley’s blood frond in his Jacket.

  ‘But… there are sixteen thousand people in the camp – how can they even tell who rioted and who didn’t?’ Gregory asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Mango said.

  ‘Shall we go there too?’ Zach asked.

  ‘I can’t,’ Susannah said. ‘Not right now. It’s too much. Later, perhaps.’

  They made their way to the Grotto, where some of the students still huddled. Zach got them some sandwiches and juice, but no one really had an appetite.

  ‘They were provoked,’ Mango said. ‘They must have been. Why would they riot otherwise?’

  ‘The emissaries asked that too,’ Susannah said, ‘and this is messy, because somehow the Tree didn’t detect it… but as it turns out… the refugees really were sick from the White Death, and when they found out that the Helikans weren’t giving it out for free, they rioted.’

  The messages raced across and through the Domremin sky all morning, and the updates kept streaming into the Grotto, where the student body huddled; Mango was not the only one with family in Helika – those were old lands, and many families who had followed Occilox into Domremy had left behind blood and memories there.

  It was the most unbearable afternoon Gregory had yet spent in Helika. The air was cloying, the silence almost suffocating, as the numbers of those executed climbed. A hundred eyes fixed themselves to the grotto’s open ceiling every time a message flitted through, carrying a fresh toll of those executed. By noon, the number stood at a hundred.

  ‘A hundred,’ Mango raged tearfully. ‘Those complete bastards. How dare they.’

  ‘Calm down, firecracker,’ Zach soothed.

  ‘That a hundred of us dead. That’s not counting the fifteen hundred who died last week! Don’t tell me to calm down!’

  ‘Hundreds of Helikans died too,’ Zach snapped. ‘Don’t scream about one if you’re not screaming about th
e other.’

  And that’s where Zach, Gregory later suspected, who was simply an easy-going fellow, had gotten tired with being around the perennially angsty, or angry, or exhausted.

  Mango looked stunned. ‘Don’t yell at me,’ she said, more surprised than angry.

  ‘I’ll yell at you all I like! You’re making me sick, mouthing off about Helikans every other minute.’

  Gregory and Susannah had both dropped their jaws. Seeing Zach angry… it was like waking up to find sunlight was blue. It just didn’t happen.

  And now Mango was rallying.

  ‘What are you going on about? You think its fair that they’re murdering our people out there? You want to let them get away with that?’

  Zach cut her short, hard.

  ‘Get away with what? Were you there? Did you see what happened? What kind of picture are you cooking up in your head, Mango? That the Reflectives just stood there looking around sweetly at the flowers, and hundreds of Helikans just decided to drop dead? They were murdered. Didn’t you hear what the King said? The Reflectives killed them. Are you okay with that?’

  ‘No one does riots just like that! The Helikans must have done some thing to deserved it… held the antidote back…’

  ‘To die? They did something so bad it was worth killing them? You want to make that call yourself, Mango? You don’t even know what happened. You want to take an axe to their necks?’

  ‘They’d deserve it! Not just for now, but for every time they’ve pulled this nonsense on us!’

  ‘Stop saying ‘us’! You’re not even there!’

  ‘What!’

  ‘You’re not a prisoner in Helika! What’s all this ‘us’ business? Stop making out like you’re one of them!’

  ‘My uncle’s there!’

  ‘You don’t even know the man! You only met him once – years and years ago! You never met his family.’

  ‘MY FAMILY! They’re still family! Maybe blood doesn’t matter to you-’

  ‘Hey,’ Gregory said sharply.

  ‘You’re taking his side?’ Mango said, incensed.

  ‘There’s no call to take potshots at what his mum does like the rest of this bloody city-’

  For a second, Mango was so enraged she could not speak.

  ‘I. Wasn’t. Saying. Anything. About his family,’ she sputtered. ‘How could you… when have I ever… you’d think that of me? You think I’m that hateful?’

  ‘All you’ve been since last Saturday is hate,’ Zach said bluntly.

  ‘Don’t you… you’ve no idea what it’s like – you’ve no idea what it’s like to be on edge all the time, waiting and waiting-’

  ‘And you do? You’re thirteen, Mango-’

  ‘Blood is blood, Zachary. It’s not something you turn your back-’

  Zach cut across her words, speaking so furiously and intensely, that Mango was left without words.

  ‘There’s a difference between being there for your blood and wishing murder onto others, and that’s hate. Your uncle’s still alive isn’t he? Then what’s your damage? What’s got your goat so bad that you’re going around calling for war? You say you wouldn’t think hatefully of my family – well, that’s very nice of you, thank you very much. Why though? Why not hate me like you hate the Helikans? Be a good little Domremin Reflective – hate the Helikan, hate the necromancer – it’s the only thing that’s mattered to y’all all these years, isn’t it?’

  He jumped to his feet suddenly. ‘I’m out of here.’

  ‘What’s with him?’ Mango said, watching him stride away.

  ‘He’s right,’ Gregory told, his face expressionless.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You used to be fun to hang around, but since the Blood Bureau trip, being around you is like hanging around acid,’ Gregory said unsmilingly.

  Mango looked wounded.

  ‘That’s enough, Gregory,’ Susannah said, but Gregory went on.

  ‘The King’s own envoy confirmed that the camp rioted,’ Gregory said coldly. ‘The Reflectives struck first, and no one can give a single good reason why. You do not know the reason why.’

  ‘You don’t always need to know why,’ Mango said heatedly. ‘It’s enough to know that Helikans always pick the first fights. They draw first blood. Always!’

  ‘Are you deliberately not listening? The Reflectives drew first blood this time! During Emergency! They’re not being charged with murder, they’re being charged with treason.’

  Mango opened her mouth but Gregory cut her off, ‘And no, you can’t say it was Helika’s fault without proof. You know nothing of what happened. Don’t pretend you know better – you just don’t.

  ‘But all that isn’t even the important. Everybody has an opinion. But for the last few days that’s all you’ve been – a hateful opinion. You’ve got no right to fill his ears, or anybody else’s, with your opinion all the time, not when we haven’t asked for it.’

  Clearly this wasn’t something Mango was used to hearing; her expression had gone from angry to confused.

  ‘What I’m saying on the bottom line is this – you were rude. And you ought to go to Zach and tell him you’re sorry.’

  But at that point Mango had had enough.

  ‘Sorry?’ she shrieked. ‘You’re mad if you think I’ve got to apologise. He’s the pansy who can’t handle anything that matters. He started it, and if anyone’s apologising it’s him.’

  Even as she was yelling, she’d been shucking on her shoes and seconds later she’d stomped away.

  ‘ Why couldn’t you leave well enough alone?’ Susannah asked coldly, getting up to go after Mango.

  ‘She was starting to bug me too,’ Gregory called after her retreating back.

  Suddenly, he was aware of a lot of eyes that focused at the table where he now sat, alone. Scowling, he gathered his stuff and stomped off to find Zach.

  After a minute of walking the Cavern aimlessly, he realised he had no idea where Zach was.

  This is how it’s supposed to be, he thought darkly. This is what you expected, and this is what it came to. You can’t force friendship just by hanging out together all the time. You can’t just make it happen because some old man with an overlarge nose said you could. And you can’t just forget where you came from by putting on nobby clothes and talking to nobby people. Every time you open your mouth, it’s clear that you don’t belong. Everyone’s got sides to take, and you don’t know enough about any side to even have an opinion. You’re just a sideshow. Hero – pfah! You’re a character out of a storybook that everyone’s dressing up nice so they can look at you and feel better. You’ve got no stake in this place. You’ve got nothing.

  Most of this was, of course, untrue. It is an unfortunate trait of imaginative minds that they frequently fall into an internal monologue of self-pity that must run its course, and Gregory was getting quite good at it. No passing grown-up questioned the sometime glowering, sometimes stone-faced Preppie as he stalked around the corridors. So it was a while before the grey haze at the corners of Gregory’s eyes faded, and he found himself once again at the Grotto, as hungry as he’d ever been (feeling sorry for oneself is tiring work). To his luck, Zach was there too.

  Without a word to the other, they each loaded up with buns, butter and homemade jam until their plates towered. Mango and Susannah would have called the next twenty minutes of eating unimaginative. Gregory and Zach would later call it soulful. After each plate had been cleaned of the last crumb, Gregory finally said:

  ‘I bet they’re at the Tree.’

  Resolving on the flight over to the Blood Tree that no apologies would be given or asked for, Gregory and Zach reached the Blood Tree.

  There was a crowd at the base of the Tree, and they seemed to be very excited.

  ‘Why is everyone waiting down there, instead up at the top like last time?’ Gregory asked.

  The carpeteer, not Zach, answered: ‘The Tree isn’t public property. You can’t see it, but there’s a ward all around i
t. If I tried to fly up there now, I’d just be turned aside.’

  ‘Ah, thanks… but then how are we supposed to find the girls?’ Gregory asked Zach.

  ‘Wait till they come out, I suppose? What’s got all the folks at the bottom so excited?’

  They quickly found out.

  ‘The King’s put a stop to the executions!’ cried an overjoyed man. ‘Sonja will be safe!’

  ‘Excellent!’ Gregory and Zach said automatically.

  They were genuinely pleased, for both Mango’s faraway uncle, and for Sonja, whoever she was.

  Two figures came dashing down the Blood Tree’s spiral body.

  ‘We saw you flying in!’ Susannah yelled, running over. ‘Did you hear? Did you hear?’

  ‘Yeah! They’ve stopped the executions!’ Gregory said, just as excited.

  ‘They’ve stopped the executions,’ Mango squealed, waving something bright red in her hand. ‘I’m going to write Uncle Rafi a million letters!’

  ‘Is that his-’ Zach said, pointing.

  ‘His Blood Frond, yes. Susannah’s been keeping it aside, so we could check anytime if…ah!’

  Mango’s hand convulsed, as if something had shocked her. The Blood Frond flew out of her hand; she snatched it back out of the air.

  ‘What in the world… Susannah, it’s…’

  The bright red frond lost its bloom, turning grey within heartbeats, then black.

  ‘No…’

  The frond didn’t hear her; they all watch the frond shrivelled into black dust, and blew off into the wind.