by Jenn Polish
“And you’re trying to make an argument that Banion doesn’t have a point there, Sade?”
I fix Kashat with a deathly glare as I drag myself up from the ground, feeling Osley hop off me and hearing Zaylam hum in amusement. I point a groggy finger up at her. “I don’t want to hear it from you, Zay.”
She hums louder. I close my eyes and hold my breath, trying to calm myself down. They think I’m joking around.
They’re wrong.
I sigh deeply, letting the breath out through my mouth like Mama taught me. It doesn’t help much, so I suck in another big breath and hold it again. Longer this time. Thankfully, Kashat just hovers there, waiting, not interrupting.
When my head starts getting hazy, I let out a massive exhale.
“What?” I ask him again.
He gestures upward with his head, and we fly up into Banion’s branches, leaving Osley watching with quer ears craned up after us.
“Are you all right?” he asks me without preamble when we’re safely above Banion’s canopy, Zaylam hovering nearby.
“Yeah, grand. Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Oh, I don’t know. You haven’t left the Plains for sunups on end because it was just Lunamez but instead of celebrating all night, you watched helplessly while your little brother’s best friend, the young one of your mom’s best friend, who you tried to save from quer Slicing but couldn’t and your family was arrested for your efforts, died right in front of you, and your own best friend isn’t talking to you in all this because you’re in love with the Controller.”
It’s only the last thing that wipes the boredom off my face. “I’m not in love with—”
Kashat laughs, a deep, rich belly laugh, and I wonder how many harvests the stress of all of these events have put on him.
“I’m not in love with anyone,” I insist. Zaylam hums in amusement and I glare at her again. Kashat waves me off, and I try to shove him in the gut. He flies backward, out of my range and into Zaylam’s underbelly.
“Kashat!” He just laughs again.
“Listen Sade, say what you want, that’s all right. But look, I… did Osley tell you the Controller’s locked herself up since Blaze’s ceremony?”
I nod in the human fashion.
Kashat glances around furtively, and Zaylam flies closer to us.
“Blaze wasn’t the first person she knew to die of the blood plague, Sadie.”
I shrug, numb. “Lots of nons must have known people from when they were little.”
“No, I mean…” He looks around again. “So you know I’m trying to learn how to remember my Dreams from before my Slicing, so maybe it could reconnect me to the Energies so I can Dream again?”
I nod irritably, my brow furrowed.
“It worked. I’ve been working on it extra hard since Blaze, you know…” He clears his throat, trying again. “Can I show you? Give you the impression of my Dream? One I had before I was Sliced?”
“Why would I need to see—”
“Sadie, please.”
I shrug. I have nothing else to do, and he’s at least made me curious. It feels almost pointless, the curiosity, but at least it’s something to distract from the pain.
“Go for it. Same like when you gave me that spell? Just take in the impression?”
He shakes his shoulders back and forth, and I motion for him to follow me. Jorbam is a bigger tree than Banion, older, and has better leaf cover. If we’re going to be doing something like share old Dreams, we should be hidden better than Banion could hide us in his sparse canopy.
We settle into the cover of Jorbam’s leaves, and I put my forehead to her bark, breathing in her sun-soaked scent.
“Aon will be all right, Sadie, and absolutely none of this is your fault, nor a weakness of some kind. And I hear rumblings that Lerian’s been asking about you. That she sent Kashat to help you feel better. She’s angry, but she’s worried, Sadie. She’s worried about you.”
I pull back and glare. “Why do you always know what’s on my mind?”
“I don’t always. But you are my hatchling. And you don’t have much of an impassive face.”
I put my forehead to her bark again wearily, and Kashat waits, swinging his legs irritatingly off her branches. His kicking interrupts my numbed peace, and I sit bolt upright, glaring.
“All right all right, what? Just show me what you want to show me.”
Kashat looks unfazed. “Remember how I conjured an image of a non girl with a horse during the accounting?”
I nod.
He asks with his arched eyebrow if I’m ready to receive the impression of his Dream.
I still don’t understand why he’s so eager to share this Dream with me. It’ll be a few seasons old by now, since he didn’t become a near that long ago. I can’t see how any of this matters. But he looks so eager, almost pained.
And it’ll be nice to be someone else for a while.
I consent, and with a whoosh, I am no longer in the Plains.
Stone walls surround me, the stone floor resonating, echoing, under the rapid clanking of my heeled shoes. They pinch my feet slightly, but I keep moving. She needs her journal. She wants to write things down before…
She needs her journal. I ignore the scandalized look from the uniformed soldier keeping guard outside the shifting entrance to the kitchens. I burst in and call out an apology in stilted Highlander faeric, so that the head of the kitchen, an elder faerie with little patience for anyone interrupting his schedule, doesn’t give me too much of a problem.
“Fiora needs…” I rifle through the small corner of the preparation room off the kitchen, overturning a blanket and a sack of flour. “I’m sorry…her journal…” I look up at the indignant Grovian, but his eyes are softer than usual.
“Has she reached the final stage?”
My hands stop their search, and I nod helplessly.
He reaches into his robe, with his berry-stained fingers, and slips Fi’s journal into my shaking grasp. “I was keeping it safe, Madam. Please tell her…Tell her she will not be forgotten.”
I bow my thanks before remembering my station. He looks shocked, and I turn to leave. He grabs my shoulder. We meet eyes.
“She’s not the only reason you’re welcome here.”
I nod again, and sprint, almost slamming the heavy wooden door in the face of the soldier nearby, doubly scandalized this time. I can’t bring myself to care if the soldier reports it to his superiors.
I know nothing but the path to the stables, where she stubbornly refused to leave, even when the worst of the pustules started overtaking her.
My stable girl, until the end.
Someone will have to clean up all her blood.
I run faster.
“Fiora!” I burst through the heavy doors, my shoes sticking in the hay, in the dirt. At her impromptu bedside, I rest my hands on my thighs, catching my breath, her journal between my fingers.
When she smiles at me, blood creeps out of her mouth, her nose. I wipe it with my fingers, and glance up at the surrounding horses, at the wary-looking healer. She shakes her head at me, and the horses, especially Balthazar, look away in despair, pawing at the ground in pain.
I gulp and stroke her face, speaking in Highlander non. “I brought your journal, love. You wanted to write, remember? You…you wanted to write, love.”
Fiora laughs softly, which turns into a monstrous cough. Her blood spurts onto my face, but I barely notice. I caress her forehead, link my fingers through her stiff, puffy ones. Once the most beautiful earthen brown, her skin is gray now, still beautiful, but sickened, only visible in the spots where it’s not covered in blood, in pus, in crusted wounds.
She reaches a hand out for Balthazar, who trots forward and bows his head so she can pat his face. “Don’t forget, Evy, you understand me? You go after what…” Another cough, more of her blood makes my hand slippery. Balthazar nudges the left side of her face with his own, and his warm breath coats mine as I lean forward, pressing
my cheek against her blood. “You go after what you need. Don’t let him… Don’t let him run your life, Evelyn. You promise me?” Her breath rattles, and her chest quakes.
“Fi—”
“Promise me, huh? It’s rude to keep a dying girl waiting, don’t you think?”
“Don’t say that, Fi, don’t—”
“It’s all right, Evy. It’ll be all right. I…I love…”
“I love you, Fiora, I love you, I love you I love you I love you.”
She dies with a small smile on her face, my words washing over her as much as they wash over me, convinced that the more I say them, the more they could protect her, the more she would feel it, the more…but it doesn’t matter. Nothing does. Balthazar lets out an agonized whinny and I think I do too, as I run her blood dripping from my hands, from my clothes, from my face, and I ignore the calls of her horse friends, I ignore the calls of the healer, I ignore the sound of my shoe’s heel snapping off in the cobbled stone path between the open air of the stable and the stale air of the sterile stone walls, I ignore the calls of the soldiers stationed outside each door, to keep an eye out for nothing, to keep an eye out for me, I ignore everything until I come to my own reflection, in my own mirror, in the room he gave me when he brought me to this Lunara forsaken place.
My wild, swollen eyes stare back at me, Fiora’s blood on my face, in the hair she twisted out for me just last week, her blood dripping down the lips that she once kissed, and I hate myself for not having kissed her one last time, for not—
And then there is no more reflection. There is no more mirror.
There is only a loud shattering sound and the scream that must have come from my mouth. There is only my blood, now, dripping down my crushed knuckles, joining in my veins with Fiora’s blood, dripping onto the shards of glass that my fist has sent all across this beautiful room, this beautiful prison.
The door bursts open, and Iema is standing there, mouth agape, breathless and wide-eyed.
“Oh, Evelyn,” she breathes with tears in her throat as she takes in the broken mirror, my broken hand, my broken heart.
She approaches me, her hands out, tentatively. I’m doubled over my destroyed hand, panting in pain, the tears finally threatening to take over my body, but I won’t let her heal me. I need this pain. I need it. Iema opens her mouth, and she says my name again and again, as she gathers my broken form into her much smaller arms.
“Sadie, Sadie, Sadie.” The voice is at once too deep and too young to be Iema’s. I jolt awake, holding my right hand out in front of me. It’s my own shade of brown, now, rougher than the hand in the Dream, veinier, but unbroken, bloodless, the knuckles all aligned in the usual way.
But the ghost of the pain remains.
I look up at Kashat, at Zaylam. I look back at my hand. My chest is heaving like I’d just sprinted as much as the woman I’d Dreamed.
“What in Lunara… Kashat, what was that?”
“You didn’t recognize her?”
I fight to get enough air into my body, rubbing my left hand over my right, rocking back and forth slightly.
“Kashat, what—”
“It was the Controller, Sadie. Come on, I know you recognized her in that mirror. I Dreamed the Controller before I was Sliced.”
I just look at him, and my eyes must be wild. Kashat swallows, the growing ball in his throat bobbing up and down. His eyes search mine curiously. “I didn’t realize until… Throughout my time in the experiments with Jax and the others, I only caught snippets, but the last few sunups, with Blaze…” He trails off for a moment. “Everyone’s miserable, Sade, and the rebellion is fracturing, people thinking it’s worth it to be Sliced just to avoid deaths like this, even after my accounting performance, people aren’t listening, they’re not getting it, I figure if I can just prove to them once and for all that the palace lies aren’t true, that it’s not Dreaming that leaves us vulnerable to the plague…so I tried and tried, until I got it. I restored the Dream. And I thought, especially because the Controller’s locked herself away since the service…I thought you’d want to know.”
I furrow my brow, clinging to one last hope that he won’t force me to face this. “Why me?”
Kashat sighs like he’s one of my growns. “Lerian knows you, Sade. If she thinks you’re being disloyal, there’s gotta be a reason.” I bristle, and he throws up his hands, palms up. “I’m not calling you a traitor. I’m saying, you love our people. You’re a faerie, no matter what you look like.”
“Yeah, and?”
“And…”
“You must have some reason to defend her as much as you have been, Sadie,” Jorbam finishes for him. Kashat exhales his thank you awkwardly.
I throw up my hands, tears stinging my eyes for some reason I don’t quite understand.
“All right, so now, what? The Controller had servants, and one of them…one of them worked in the stables, right, and she died of the plague?”
“Even though she never should have gotten the plague, because everyone had been Sliced by then. By the time I Dreamed it, everyone around her should have been Sliced, immune. But the girl she loved, that Fiora girl, she got sick anyway.”
“And?”
“Just like Blaze. And the rumor is, the Controller’s all cut up about Blaze’s death. I just thought you’d want to know.”
“Why? What am I supposed to—”
But Kashat’s sped off before I can even finish.
I slump back into Jorbam’s branches and stare aimlessly at Zaylam’s serious face.
Evelyn was in love with another non near. A Highlander servant, it seems like. And she died… Fiora, she died of the plague.
Evelyn, in love with another woman, who died of the blood plague. Like Blaze.
And now, her obsession with Slicings make sense, with finding Dreamers and locking us away. I say nothing, even when Zaylam sings after me.
I don’t think. I don’t know why I’m doing what I’m doing.
I just know that I finally know how to reconcile the girl I met in the Forest and the mask that has been the Controller. And I’m not sure why—maybe because I’m nauseous now, for accusing her of not caring that Blaze was dying, not caring about any of the plague deaths. Maybe because I need to apologize.
Whatever it is, I just start flying.
I think of Evelyn’s agonized yell; her repeated declarations of love, like her words could save Fiora from death itself; her broken fist, like a small, wounded creature she had to cradle to her body; the music box she brought to Blaze from the land she missed so much, the way she wiped blood away from quer mouth; her nails, digging into her arms as she listened to Blaze’s rattled breath. Tears sting my eyes again.
I fly faster.
Chapter Twenty
IT FEELS GOOD to have some sort of purpose again, even if I can’t figure out exactly what that purpose is. But that listlessness, that hopelessness, it’s all been carved out of me now, replaced with the burning need to get to Evelyn.
Because Fiora died, and Blaze is dead, and I can’t get her scream when Fiora breathed the last time out of my ears, and I can’t get the look on her face when I accused her of not caring about any plague deaths out of my eyes.
As I approach the Lunavic River, which I know has been guarded at night since the uprising after Rada’s arrest, I slip above the Forest canopy, too high up for them to make out my form. Too high up, normally, for me to breathe easily, but tonight is not like other nights.
Tonight, I need to slip into the Controller’s dwelling undetected.
Lerian’s voice in the back of my head screams that that’s exactly what nights like tonight call for. You don’t know, I tell her, even though she’s not here. Fiora was legitimately friends with the horses in the stables—she cuddled close to one of them as she died. You think Evelyn could love someone like that and not be at least sympathetic to us?
Oh, so she’s Evelyn now, not the Controller? Lerian’s sarcastic tones play in my head.
The imagined conversation only goes downhill from there. I try to shush my own mind. My own guilt.
It doesn’t work well until I start my descent into the small restricted area of the southern Forest, slightly back from the Lethean border, where the Controller’s dwelling sits a few stone throws away from the rest of the clustered Hand dwellings.
I swerve low enough to look down on the configuration of Hands guarding their homes, the Controller’s home, below the trees. I trace their patterns, their concentrations, and it leads me straight to her dwelling. I weave my way carefully through the thick mass of branches, of budding leaves, until I’m staring down at what must be her dwelling, separated from the others, in a tiny clearing close enough to the river to hear its soft roar. Guards are only posted at the borders of the clearing, and half of them are sleeping on the job. It’s too easy to slip past them.
Non dwellings, like the Lethean Inn, are usually constructed from dead trees, like the ones we dismember at labor. But the Controller’s dwelling is different. It’s constructed of stones, mostly gray, mostly smooth, looking like they came from the river bottom. The angular roof is made of thatched faye glass, and a wide, tall window that serves as the entire top half of a wall faces the river itself.
That window’s been thrown open all the way, probably—based on what Os and Kashat have been telling me—by Iema, and I fly up to it cautiously, tentatively, the sounds of the river at night rushing through my ears.
My eyes sweep around the inside of the place. Next to the unlit fireplace—which I notice headily is only full of shed branches, rather than chopped body parts—there’s a desk with a rolling top that dominates most of the single room. Littered with parchment, berry ink, and quills though it is, it’s still elegant enough to make me think she brought it here directly from whatever fancy Highland dwelling she was running through in Kashat’s—my—Dream. Some faintly flickering lamps hang from the faye-glass ceiling, and though there aren’t too many other personal things lying around, there are books lining each corner, and scattered across the elegant chest of drawers, topped with paint for her lips, with a large non-glass mirror. Like the one she’d broken in the Highlands, but smaller. Simpler. With a design around the edges that reminds me of the Flowing-like patterns on the music box she gave Blaze.