by K. E. Blaski
“We are born knowing our purpose. Life is too brief and precious to be aimless. I was a caregiver for our children until they found hosts. I finished my training and was assigned to my first cohort well before others my age. I failed when all the children under my charge were captured by Noble’s soldiers.”
“I wouldn’t consider enslavement a failure on your part.”
“On the contrary. Entirely my responsibility. At night, caution dictates we keep our light restrained. The children and I were celebrating our group’s first host transfer. Our celebrations attracted the soldiers.”
“You should be able to celebrate without worrying about getting captured. Why don’t the people on this planet just use fire inside the lanterns? You have to have fire; you can’t have all the metal around here without fire.”
“We are easier to contain and control than fire. We don’t use fuel, we burn for centuries, there are plenty of us, and we are, regrettably, easy to catch. It only takes a few hawks to drop weighted gauze nets from above, and in one moment, hundreds of Cidrans are scooped up by the soldiers.”
“You’re the perfect resource. On Earth, you’d be green technology and belong to a labor union.” Jennica slid into another yawn. “I’m sorry. I don’t want to go to sleep. It’s nice to have someone to talk to.” She wasn’t good with the whole solitary confinement thing, and Joss was good company. Getting lost in conversation was much better than just feeling lost. She didn’t want the night to end. “Keep me awake explaining ‘host’ and ‘transfer.’ I don’t understand.”
“We are energy, beings of consciousness. Over time, we learn, we grow. When we reach maturity, we transfer into a host, animal or human, doesn’t matter. One or many of us may transfer into the same host at the same time.”
“I’m not sure I’m following you. When you transfer into a human—where’s the consciousness that was there first?”
“Usually? Passing through death into another realm. Although some residents agree to share their bodies while they are present in this life. For a select few, we may be strong enough to anchor their soul with ours and keep them from passing on.”
“Really? Then you share their body? Why?”
“Love. Trust.”
“Oh.” That’d be one way to make sure the people you love never leave. It was strange to think about more than one person crammed together inside a single body, controlling a single mind, like having multiple personality disorder. “Do you all get along inside your host? What happens if you can’t agree?”
“When we join our host, we intertwine. We become one. There are no longer any arguments.”
She wasn’t sure that was possible. She argued with herself regularly. “This world just keeps getting more strange. Souls switching bodies. Souls as food for Noble. Souls trapped in lanterns, multiple souls inside one body.” She wondered if Noble ever ate Cidrans, but before she could ask, Joss changed the subject.
“Tell me about your name: Jennica. How did you decide upon it?” Joss asked.
“I didn’t decide. My parents chose it.”
“An unfortunate tradition among the humans on Astrune, as well. Are you comfortable living with all the names thrust upon you? Jennica, Nyima, Nobless?”
“I suppose you get used to it. Then you look forward to having your own kids so you can name them the names you’ve always wanted. As long as your spouse agrees. My parents couldn’t agree on anything. My mom wanted to name me Jennifer, after her best friend from high school, and my dad wanted to name me Jessica, after his sister. Grandma said they fought about it the whole nine months until she suggested they compromise with a more modern name: Jennica. Could be worse—could’ve been Jessifer.”
Her eyelids fluttered shut for a minute. Finally, she had someone to talk to who didn’t have some hidden agenda. Exhausted and ready to drift off, she worried Joss might not be there when she woke up. She tried harder to stay awake. “So you got to pick out your own name?” she said, trying to make more conversation.
“Yes—we are born during star showers, and soon after, we have a naming ceremony. The name Joss means ‘happy.’”
“Happiness born from the stars. That’s nice.” She couldn’t fight the weight of sleep any longer. “Joss, if I’d known you and your people were trapped inside the lanterns, I would’ve gotten you out a lot sooner.”
“I know,” he whispered in her ear as sleep pulled her down. “You are more of our world than theirs.”
◊ ◊ ◊
Alone again. She should’ve known better than to get attached, even if it was to a tiny ball of light with a boy’s voice and a sweet personality. His spot on the pillow was cool to the touch, as if he’d existed only in her imagination.
Kornelia’s body was gone, too, but a red smear, like a giant check mark, remained as evidence on the ground outside the window, as did the six broken lanterns on the bedroom floor, their debris crunching under her feet.
She thought someone would’ve heard the glass shatter and come to investigate. But no one could come into her room until her sentence was over. She supposed house arrest was strictly enforced on planet Astrune.
Joss was real. He’d told her the name of this planet: Astrune. She carved another notch into the side of the bed. On day twenty-one, she finally knew the name of her new home. Astrune, where people worshipped the sun Aprica and two moons marked the night. What were their names? Candria and Taros. Damen had told her.
And what had happened to Damen? Another day gone by and still no sign of him. She hadn’t heard from him since she was locked up. He must’ve left, too. Moved on. Why should he stick around for the little purple girl who’d been sent to her room for a month-long time-out?
She sat cross-legged on the floor and waited for Marcis to feed the salve-covered parchment under the door. Yesterday’s leftovers had gone on her legs at daybreak, but it wouldn’t be enough to last the day: she could already feel the throb starting in her knees.
To absorb her mind and kill the time, she wrote in one of the books Damen had given her, the one with blue flowers resembling forget-me-nots on the cover. She was on the second-to-last page of the book; drawings, musings, and math filled the rest. Whatever it took to stay sane.
At last she heard the familiar sound of paper sliding across stone. But instead of the salve-covered parchment she’d expected, plump child fingers jammed a scrap of beige paper under the door. She read and reread the messy scribbling.
Be ready. Tonight we break our bonds. Durand rises against Noble Tortare. You will be free to lead.
Outside, the city lay quiet—a handful of people carrying baskets, delivering food and wrapped parcels, the faint hum of insects, a dog barking somewhere. These were the same early-morning activities she’d watched every day since her imprisonment began. This was not a city preparing for battle.
She read the note again. They wanted her to be their new leader? She’d done nothing to make them think she’d make a good leader. She’d even lost her run for student council secretary in the eighth grade. No one had ever seen her as a leader. What they saw as leadership was merely her desperate attempts to survive each day.
So now what? She couldn’t just sit and watch a medieval bloodbath from her window. She imagined hawks tearing the kitchen staff to pieces; she saw rolling pins and carving knives against soldiers’ arrows, swords, and daggers. Noble’s own clawed hands would torture whoever survived, sucking out their golden souls one after the other.
And children were involved. It was a tiny hand that had pressed the note through the gap. She remembered the children’s faces stacked against the kitchen doorframe, peering at her while she drank Amada’s chamomile tea. Ever since Damen had brought her there to escape the mess left behind from Alban’s beheading, the kitchen was by far her favorite place in the castle; warmth and sizzle, brown bread and yeast, the smells grabbed at her heart, shaking free memories of Grandma Lorinne pounding dough and pretending to ignore her as she snatched cookies off the cooli
ng rack. Jennica’s heart ached.
Grandma Lorinne would want her to do what was right. She’d want her to protect them. Any way she could. She tore a page from one of her books and clasped a charcoal stick in a shaky hand.
Please don’t do it. Now is not the time. You will all die. Please don’t.
The reaction came back quickly, in different handwriting than the first, scrawled on the back of her paper.
Everyone is ready. We can’t wait. We must strike before Noble can fly. Success will be ours.
They were foolish with their own righteousness, like the people involved in the revolutions she’d learned about in history class. Mr. Schmidt had told her all about the Paris students in the 1832 June Rebellion. The rebellion that had failed. And as in the June Rebellion—if her observations of the number of people in and around the castle were correct—soldiers here significantly outnumbered the servants.
Allies, reinforcements, weapons. She knew enough about battle strategy from listening to her great-uncle for hours on end to know that even as a combined force, the servants and citizens of Durand would fail without help. But what help could there be? She wasn’t a general, she couldn’t just summon backup. Even if she knew of anyone to summon, she was trapped in this room, hadn’t seen a friendly face since—
Joss! The Tribe of Cidra! They’d been grateful when she’d released them, grateful enough to help save her from Kornelia. According to Aingeal, they owed her. They could bite and sting, and there must be a thousand lanterns in the castle.
She tore off another page and wrote:
Break open the lanterns. Free the people of Cidra. They will help you.
The reply came much more slowly this time. She assumed they must be considering her suggestion. She was wrong. The delay was due to the length of the response.
Never trust a light bearer. They will scatter and leave us in the dark. They whisper lies and spread deception. They snatch our bodies while we sleep. We are safer with the Cidrans locked in the lanterns. Never let them out.
That couldn’t be true. Joss was kind; his story of the meadow, beautiful. His people had been captured and imprisoned because they were special, not because they were dangerous. His stories couldn’t be lies. What reason did he have to lie to her?
Now she didn’t know what to believe. But one thing was certain: if the rebels refused to accept help, she needed to figure out a way to stop them.
Half-formed ideas and jumbled thoughts fought in her mind as a hot wind whipped her hair into her nose and mouth. She searched for something to tie it back, finally finding a blue ribbon under the bed, from the wedding packages. Only a few weeks ago Nyima’s cousins had been fighting like cats in this very room. By now they probably knew their mother had fallen to her death. Did they think Nyima-Jennica pushed her?
If she ever saw them again, she’d try to explain. Although she suspected they wouldn’t believe anything she had to say.
Her hair pulled back from her face and secured by the ribbon, Jennica scanned the city again. Small groups congregated on street corners and in front of stores. As before, it appeared as if they were staring at her window. She wished she could shout a message to them, but she knew they wouldn’t hear her even if she screamed. She could fly paper messages on the wind. Tear out pages from the books, write words of warning and hope the breezes would carry the notes to those who needed them. Fat chance that’d work.
Come on. She could do this. She’d been thinking on her feet the entire time she’d been here, and against all odds she’d managed to stay alive. The last time she’d needed to be creative, she’d used her bedsheets. They hadn’t lead to a great escape, but they had gotten her the water she’d needed. Bedsheets had an infinite number of uses.
“Ha!” She untied one of the damp and crumpled sheets from the pile she’d left on the floor after wringing out the last of the water. She flattened it with her arms and hands. She had plenty of charcoal—she could write words, large words on a large sheet—a banner to warn them.
She settled on one word. A word that couldn’t be misunderstood.
NO
Hanging the sheet from the window was tricky. She weighted the bottom with the frame from the broken hand mirror and fastened it at the top by stabbing Kornelia’s dagger through the sheet and into a soft spot of grout between the stones of the windowsill. The sheet flapped and twisted, but once she shook it out, it lay mostly flat against the tower.
They had to see; they had to understand. They couldn’t use her as an excuse to fight. She waved her arms big and wide, filling the window with her robed body. See me. See my message.
The clutches of people separated, drifting away from each other until they became an integral moving part of the city again. Had they seen? She didn’t know—but they must’ve seen, because they chose that moment to scatter and disappear—maybe to spread the word.
One thing had definitely seen the banner: a hawk flew straight for her. Its child limbs reached for her, its sharp wings flapped. With tarnished claws it ripped the banner from its pinning and carried it away, the sheet a tangled kite tail streaming behind. The knife spun to the ground. Three minutes, maybe five at most, was as long as the banner had been visible on the tower.
She flopped on the floor with a groan and saw Marcis’s salve-coated parchment peeking through the gap, waiting.
◊ ◊ ◊
For a failed rebellion, it was quick and kind of quiet. Jennica pressed her ear against the door. Muffled shouting, a scream cut off mid-crescendo, soldier feet pounding down the hall in unison . . . followed by silence. Outside, two dozen hawks looped in synchronized flight. The city cowered, dark and motionless.
She tore the notes, the ones from Marcis and the others, into tiny pieces and ate them. She chewed slowly and thoroughly, forcing her teeth and saliva to dissolve any evidence, just in case Noble sent someone to search her room. Especially after his hawk brought him the banner she’d made; she was sure it had.
If only she could do more.
JENNICA
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
THE PROPOSAL
Rasping breath jolted her from sleep and her eyes popped open. This time she wasn’t imagining Grandma Lorinne. No, this time the witch queen from Snow White sat in the shadows at the end of the bed, one gnarled blackened hand holding a lantern, the other fingering Jennica’s metal feet.
“Who are you?” Jennica yanked her feet out of the old hag’s reach. A friend of Kornelia’s. Another relative determined to assassinate her.
“Who I am is not important. Why I am here is what’s important.”
“Are you here to kill me?”
“I want you to live as much as you do.”
“Then you’re a rebel? Come to release me?”
“Rebel? No, no rebellion, quashed in minutes. The fools rounded up and stored in the dungeons until their executions tomorrow for treason.”
Precisely what Jennica feared had come true. But maybe the reason they had failed so quickly was because most of the rebels had changed their minds and backed out. Maybe they’d saved themselves. She held on to the idea with a sturdy grip.
“I’m not allowed to have visitors, you know. Whoever you are, you’re risking your life.”
“Hardly.”
“You’re attracted to my skin then, like everyone else.”
“Don’t lump me in with the rest of these imbeciles. I could care less about your purple skin.” She even laughed like a witch, with cackles and a sporadic owl screech. “I do what I like.”
Jennica’s head spun from this pointless back-and-forth. “Then quit making me guess and just tell me why you’re sitting on the end of my bed in the middle of the night.”
“There’s the spunk I’ve heard about. I’m here to make you a proposal to save your life. Interested?”
She was interested, but she didn’t even know who this woman was. Or what her motivation might be. Jennica didn’t know if she should be evasive or honest. She decided to err
on the side of truth. “Yes.”
“I like you, Jennica. I see why Damen hasn’t run off yet.”
“You know Damen?” He hadn’t run away? He must still be in the castle somewhere. Maybe this woman could tell her where he was. All this time Jennica had been angry with him for ignoring her when he might’ve been recovering from some injury. Or worse.
“Know Damen? Like family.” She snort-laughed, spit flying in the lantern light.
“You’re related?”
“You could say that, although he doesn’t admit it.”
“Is he all right?”
“Fine as langor. But enough of the malcontented boy, and back to you. You, you, you.” She scooted closer on the bed, and Jennica sank back into the pillows. “Accustomed to your feet yet?”
“I don’t have much choice.”
“Hmm. Always a choice. Might not like any of them, but always a choice.”
“What choice—learn to live with metal feet, or give up and never walk again?”
“See? There’s a choice. You had a choice when you killed Kornelia. Let me see your feet. Come now, girl, I promise not to bite them off.”
“How do you know about Kornelia? And she fell. I didn’t kill her.”
“I know about Kornelia because I let her into your room. To test you. Now, now, don’t look so alarmed. I would’ve helped if you’d needed it. But you didn’t, which is why I’m here now. Your feet, girl.”
Jennica’s head swam with this new information. Before she could process what the witch had said, one leg extended and then the other, as if they had their own mind.