by Jenn Polish
I squint at her, wondering if she knows about our mission last night. Her lips curve more clearly—of course she does. Lerian might be a near now, but Rada’s kept an eye on her since her growns were killed in the blood plague. And she’s got her ears in the Centauric Council. She doesn’t know I can Dream, but she’s one of the few who know I’m a spy. One of the few who doesn’t hate me.
“Don’t scarf it all down in one sitting now, you two,” she teases.
I grin and Lerian gives a soft whinny as we shift past Rada’s growing platform toward the Forest.
The Controller’s standing nearby, still listening to whatever Tacon’s telling her, eyes still fixed on me. I tug at Lerian’s arm.
“Labor time, Ler, c’mon.”
We slip out of the Gathering into the throng of faeries and centaurs trudging to labor before Evelyn can do anything more extreme than glare at me.
“OH, GOOD SUNUP to you too, E’rix, how are you?” I roll my eyes as I fly above the Way—a system of paths through the Forest that the centaurs rotate each season to spare the plant life and confuse the Hands—and listen to Lerian’s voice below me, oozing with false sincerity. I glance at E’rix, flying toward us, heading to harvest as we head to logging, the two major labor functions in the Grove.
Like pretty much everyone else, she avoids my eyes. Lerian is unimpressed.
“Yes, that’s right, you know Sadie, we’re all age-mates, we were in the language learning pod together when we were young ones,” Ler continues overenthusiastically, twisting to say that last bit to the back of E’rix’s retreating sapphire wings. I fly a little lower so I can grab Lerian’s forearm, careful to avoid her permanent bruises from labor, and try to pull her forward, cart and all. No easy task when I’m trying not to slap her in the face with my wings.
“Come on, Ler, this is every sunup. Why’re you always acting so surprised?” Her attention flits around furtively, and then without warning she pulls me nearly out of the air, so I’m practically riding her like nons ride horses. I squirm to get off, muttering wordless disclaimers to the offended-looking centaurs on the Way and to the faeries who are flying single-file through the thick network of trees and underbrush just off the path—anything to avoid interacting with someone like me. Flurries of soft snow burst down into our faces as faeries jostle branches to give me a wide berth. I touch each tree they bump into, muttering apologies for them. Lerian doesn’t care about any of this. She’s got me locked in her grip, and when she speaks, it’s an urgent whisper straight into my ear.
“Look, I get the ones who don’t like you ’cause you’re all kinds of non-style ugly. Looking like the enemy and all. And I know you’re all grateful to him, but Sachin didn’t do you any social favors by not locking your somewhat faerie butt up when your moms tried to avoid Aon’s Slicing.” I glare hard. She ignores it and shoves me so my ear is even closer to her thin lips. “But E’rix’s growns are resistance, she’s one of the ones who knows you spy for us! You put your freaky neck out for us, Sade, even though you’re dark enough to make it extra risky for you, and those ungrateful—”
The distinct crunch of skin boots on the snowy path just ahead, rising above the din of trotting centaur hooves, jolts us both. She lets me go with a backhanded shove and I fly wayward into a low hanging branch. Instead of trying to catch me, a few faeries flying nearby actually snicker. I glower as I wipe a small stinging cut off my cheek, twisting the Energies to heal it roughly, and tug my wings out of the bramble of leaves. Fingering the axe in my belt loop, I groan internally. The wearer of the skin boots is Tacon, his long skinny nose glistening in the sun and his permanent sneer widening with pleasure when he notices the blood on my face.
Lerian yanks me back toward our assigned labor spot, and we say nothing more.
We don’t speak as we file into the small clearing just off the beach by the eastern steam pools and find a premarked tree to start murdering.
Mercifully, I do not know this one’s name. As gushes of sap leak out of quer branches as I hack away, killing quer body limb by limb, I feel the Energies release like a coiled spring—this tree is ending quer own life, now, separating quer body from quer soul, so que doesn’t have to endure the drawn-out, sharp death blows I am dealing, one branch at a time before the trunk.
This tree is sparing querself—sparing me—from the agony of the soul being tortured by my axe until it is wrenched forcibly out of the body. I almost vomit. I almost slam the axe down into my own body. I almost slam it into the nearest overseeing Hand. I almost scream.
I do not. The Hands have creative ways of making us comply. Making us kill each other.
Making the trees have to choose between ending their own lives or letting us end them, through hours of torture.
My growns say that when they were younger, if ever a tree needed to be chopped in some way—whether because of disease or some need of another being—soul keepers would come and host the soul of the tree until the pain of the body was done. The soul keepers would strengthen the soul and give it additional power, to heal the body when it returned.
But now, when this tree thrusts quer soul out of quer body, there is no soul keeper to host it until the pain is gone, to give it the strength to slip back into a newly healed body.
There is only me, and though I can Dream, I was not born with soul keeping abilities. There is only me, and I say nothing.
I say nothing throughout the day as I slam my axe into my assigned tree over and over and over again, taking only small comfort in the fact that que is no longer feeling any pain. I’m quiet as I sweat, as my faye glass axe’s translucent, azure-speckled blade gathers sunlight and magnifies the heat on my face, giving me a small scrap of warmth amidst the snow. I grunt in time to the labor songs surrounding me, gathering the chopped flesh into my both frozen and sweating, calloused hands and loading them into the cart Lerian and the other centaurs have to strap themselves into every day. Throughout the day, the hum of faeric tunes rise to match, exactly, the rhythm of centaur hoof beats, everyone in the labor space working in time to each others’ sounds. Even rests, we take musically, timing the collapse of our bodies into the muddied snow to sync in tiny gaps of silence between axe thuds, hoof beats, and the clatter of tree flesh into and out of the carts. We can at least send them to their factory graves in the Grovian way. But still, I say nothing.
My mouth stays sealed and my body refuses to talk as we break for lunch. I give the extra rations Rada had slipped us to Lerian, who passes them off to a young faeric near, Kashat, barely old enough to be at labor, as yet untainted by being kind to the two of us. He passes the extra grown food to his fellow first-time laborers, the ones who should be in their learning pods but instead are murdering trees under the threat of death.
More hacking, more threats from our Hand overseers follow. My muscles ripple but my mind stays controlled until the dusk cannon goes off, telling us all we can stop our government-mandated slaughter for the day. I follow along limply as Lerian and I set out for the Gathering.
I’m still quiet when a horde of faeries coming from harvest speed past us and completely bowl me over, knocking the wind and a wingful of blood of out me like I’m not even there. That kind of thing isn’t too unusual. Lerian and I exchange furrowed glances, though, when a small stampede of centaurs flashes by us on the Way, also speeding toward the Gathering.
“What gives?” Lerian shouts after them.
“The new Controller… Dreamers!” is all I catch of a huffed, over-the-shoulder answer from one of the nears.
And Lerian’s grip is viselike on my arm and Osley is on the ground beneath me, leaping up to tap my ankle and get my attention. I don’t have to hear or smell what que is stomping out. Quer ears are flat against quer body, and que’s primed to race us to the Gathering.
The pit in my stomach is as big as the Plains, but if something’s happening in the Gathering to do with Dreamers, and everyone else is racing to see, the most suspicious thing I can do is avoid i
t. Better to act like the rest of them.
So the three of us race off after all the others, flying, leaping, and galloping through the snow until, winded, we skid to a stop at the edges of the Gathering, unable to go further. The crowd, both on the ground and in the air above, is too thick. There’s an angry murmuring rising, and all I catch is words like Sampians and weapons and Izlanian and Dreamers.
The wind still whistling under my wings, I topple into Lerian’s still carted shoulders and a pair of brown hands catches me, halting my tumble forward. Mama.
“Sade,” she starts, in that mollifying tone, the one she uses when I’m about to see something I don’t like.
I twist out of her grasp and fly up and over the crowd. I peer down beneath everyone, through the thick maze of faeric bodies. No one pays me any mind. For once, I’m grateful.
Below the crowd of spectating faeries, in the center of the Gathering, are two chained up Sampians, pink gashes on their faces. Evelyn is standing over them, her chin raised and her sword drawn, surrounded by a wingful of her smug-looking, pale-as-snow Hands.
They’ve captured Leece and Mara.
Chapter Five
“FAERIES AND CENTAURS of the Grove, you have traitors among you!” Evelyn’s voice sounds nothing like it had when she was thanking me for saving Iema’s life. Her face looks nothing like it had when we were standing so close that we were inhaling each other’s exhales.
“We have been informed that last night, some among you assisted these two criminals, formerly employed in good faith by our righteous King Xavier, in sabotaging a caravan full of supplies vital to the assistance of hundreds of helpless Sampians, who are once again at risk of falling victim to the blood plague.” Evelyn pauses and Mama settles into the air next to me, slipping her hand underneath my wings, at the base of my wing sprouts. My body relaxes somewhat. But my heart is still slamming so hard I think I might collapse at any moment.
“Though this is my first day serving as your Controller, I am confident that you are all aware of the dangers posed by faeric dissidents like these, who would have you all join them in refusing to allow their young ones to receive the blessing of Initiations, who would have you believe that Dreaming is worth more than your very lives, and the lives of all your families. Without Initiations, Lunavic life as we know it will cease to exist. If you insist on glorifying Dreaming, you insist on falling victim to the blood plague.”
I grind my teeth and glare down at the Controller. Initiations. I scoff. The palace’s euphemism for Slicings.
They made Slicings mandatory sometime after the first outbreak of the blood plague, harvests ago. They say the purpose is to cure the plague. Jax says if they stopped poisoning the Lunavic waters with their development, the plague would probably stop on its own. Slicings are really just to stop us from Dreaming.
“In a misguided, criminal attempt to withhold the curative Initiations from Sampians in need, these prisoners disrupted a palace caravan in ways that profoundly place all of Lunav at risk. They must therefore suffer the punishment. ”
Stirrings of whispers run through the Gathering, and I scowl at how everyone can understand her Highlander non; but if we tried speaking Grovian faeric in the Highlands, the nons wouldn’t understand our words. I can’t tell if people are agreeing, angry, or just excited to see some punishment. Jax says that kind of excitement’s become more common since people stopped Dreaming. He says that other than preventing dragon hatches, that’s exactly the point of the Slicings to begin with.
Nobody moves, except Mara, who tries to reach out for Leece’s hand through their chains.
“But first we must weed out who assisted them last night in their attack. Hands, place the suspects under immediate arrest.”
Without warning, Mama spins me around and slips her hand over my mouth, softly but firmly, encouraging my lips to open. She slips something past my teeth and a soft, nectar-flavored tablet starts dissolving on my tongue. She catches my eyes and removes her hand as quickly as she put it there, spinning me back around casually as she does so.
“From your other mother. Just keep calm, my love. You will be safe, I promise you. It’s just in case,” she whispers to me, her eyes wide and her jaw set.
Before I can open my mouth to ask her just in case of what, a pair of enchanted arrows attached to thick ropes lasso around me, pinning my wings painfully to my sides. Mama catches me as I fall and holds me as we both are pulled to the ground, where a group of centaurs rapidly parts for the tumbling pair of faeries careening their way.
P’Tal, loyal always to my growns, to me, doesn’t move with the rest of them. As Lerian yells and screams somewhere out of my range of vision, P’Tal’s arms close around my mom’s, taking the weight of both of our falls.
“You’ll be okay, Sadie,” he whispers as they both release me, helpless, as the arrows twist around yet again and tug the ropes now binding my entire upper body forward. I crane my neck to look back at Mama, and her eyes are peeking out from P’Tal’s disarrayed blonde hair. He’s holding her close to him with one arm and catching a galloping Lerian with the other as she screams all kinds of curses and what she’ll do if they don’t let me go. P’Tal puts his hand on her mouth as Hands start surrounding her. His fingers start bleeding, but he holds her until she stops struggling enough to listen to whatever Mama is whispering in her ear. The wild look on Ler’s face calms somewhat. She nudges at P’Tal’s hand so that Mama can heal it, but she doesn’t stop struggling to get away, to get to me.
I shake my shoulders at her as much as I can. “Don’t get yourself arrested, Ler,” I tell her with my body as the Hands back off her, seeing she’s gone down from tantruming to seething.
I wink at her. She glares at me. “It’s not funny.”
I swallow and turn back around, so I can face whatever it is they’re arresting me for. “I know.”
Low murmurs are rising rapidly above and behind me. I catch chaotic glimpses of shocked faces. A grim sense of satisfaction floods into me. Everyone seems shocked that I’m being arrested, that the Hands aren’t doing me any favors because I look so much like a non. I almost roll my eyes, but I’m too busy being yanked along by enchanted ropes to have the energy to spare on sarcasm.
I find that I’ve been dragged in front of the Controller, and that she seems much taller when you’re tied up and on your knees in front of her.
She looks down at me without lowering her chin, and there is barely contained fury in her face. I dare to glance left and right. Mara’s next to me on one side, and we keep our expressions very clean, very not familiar. On my right, there’s a row of assorted faeries and centaurs. Most of them I don’t know by name. An elder grower or two, even a couple of young ones, one of whom is bleeding pretty heavily from her cheek. And that near that Lerian yelled at for ignoring me, just this sunup, E’rix. She meets my eyes apologetically, fearfully. There’s a long, elegant cut under her thin eyes. I grimace at her. She grimaces back.
A rush of energy surges through me, and I spare a thought for the tablet Mama shoved into my mouth. I glance at Mom and Jax’s infirmary. They’re both on the edge of the open platform, watching. Aon is rocking in Mom’s arms, and Jax is gripping the wheels of his chair, hard. He nods at me so subtly I almost think I’m imagining it. Mom does the same, even as she’s cooing to soothe a crying Aon.
I swallow, but feel a little calmer. Somehow, whatever Mom gave Mama to give to me will keep me safe from… I glance left and right again. From whatever this is.
“I’ve heard that your former Controller was quite…lax…in his enforcement of the word of the good King Xavier. It is precisely this leniency that has allowed the blood plague to have a resurgence in the Samp, and even in the Highlands themselves. This ends today.”
A murmur rushes up amongst the crowd; we haven’t heard that anyone has fallen to the plague in the Highlands themselves lately. I stare up at Evelyn, and for a moment, I think there are tears in her eyes. I blink and they’re gone. I flin
ch as a stream of dampness runs down my face.
Maybe the tears were mine.
“It is the belief of His Royal Majesty that only those who dare to hang onto faith in dangerous, deviant practices like Dreaming would join the rabble-rousing against his holy reign. We are going to test these suspects to ensure they have not resisted or subverted their Initiations. If they Dream during this test, we will know they are guilty of dissent against the palace, and they will be taken to the Pits along with these Sampian criminals.”
Whispers spread around me, especially amongst the elders. Mama used to tell me stories of public tests to expose soul keepers. If they suspected a person of having the special ability to host another’s soul inside them, they would kill someone close to the suspect; if the suspect saved their loved one with soul keeping, they’d be arrested or killed themselves. If they didn’t, either because they weren’t soul keepers or because they refused to reveal themselves, well…someone would be dead by the end of the test anyway. That is, unless a soul keeper in the crowd came forward to host the soul of the threatened person, to heal it through contact with their own soul, and put it back into the body, reviving the person. But then that soul keeper would be killed too. An impossible cycle.
Soul keepers used to be the perfect healers, rare and sought after for their powers all across Lunav. Until they were all hunted down by the palace. Like Dreamers, they threatened the palace’s control. The tests for soul keepers haven’t been done for a couple faerie generations, though. Everyone’s either been caught or goes to great lengths to conceal their abilities. Like I do, with Dreaming.
But I’ve never heard of any tests for Dreaming. I’m nauseous.
An arrested young one down the line from me starts crying, in small little high-pitched gasps. I wonder if quer growns have told quer about the soul keeping tests too. I hold Lerian’s wide eyes with mine and set my jaw.