38

The day of the executions came. My curiosity overwhelmed my good sense and I wandered toward the square with the apple trees. My nettles had been gathering in the lough, and every few minutes I had to stop and fight the ache from my fingers and nausea from my stomach.

The light shone dim through a thin drizzle, and the lamps hissed. The estuary was hidden behind a wall of fog. Omben soldiers gathered in the middle of the square, their black cuirasses and red cloaks dim in the half-light. The folk who had to pass close to them went quickly, with a drawn hood or wooden face.

I could almost hear the fog creeping closer. The air felt stifling, horrible, and I looked at the gallows and stopped. There were no gallows. Stakes, rather, three of them, with faggots bundled round so they looked like three besom brooms. The stakes were empty, yet.

I turned away. "A burning." My stomach squeezed––not with the usual nausea. "Did he know?"

"He didn't," said Floy. "He couldn't have."

A few Elde, half-hidden in the gloom, were writing on the shop windows with muddy rags. I ventured close to them, but not so close as Floy.

She flew back to my shoulder. "They'll get themselves into trouble," she said. "Think now's a good time to threaten them. Padlimaird's over there. Maybe you can talk sense into him."

I wasn't optimistic. Even so, I walked over and stood behind Padlimaird and another boy with a tightly drawn cowl, and watched as they painted a window with mud. 'Break the bastards,' read the caption above a skillfully drawn caricature of an Omben officer, and then the human's name: 'Magira Quyporel'. The other windows were similar, except the names were, 'Gratra Chureal', 'Perchevor Herist', and someone else I couldn't make out.

Magira Quyporel's stomach wasn't quite vast enough for Padlimaird, who reached forward and painted a loopier line into the glass.

"Look what you've done, mongrel." The boy in the cowl shoved Padlimaird aside. "Destroyed perfectly expressed sentiment and demolished a priceless work of art."

"No, just weighed it down a bit." Padlimaird snapped the boy's stomach with his kerchief. "Gonna be smashed to pieces, anyway."

"But folk'll have to look at it till then––"

"Forbechel Garredy," I said, "your mother'll belt you blue." Both boys jumped and turned round.

"Just having a bit of fun." His eyes shone gold through the hood.

"Fun?"

He must have seen my face, really seen it, because he looked down at his shoes, properly abashed; I saw that he was fingering a smooth, green stone.

"What he means is he wants to be useful to the side in the right," said Padlimaird. "And if he's lookin fer fun, too, where's the harm?"

"Right there, Paddy, you nutsack––" I began, but just then Wille tore round the corner with a bucket of water. Sal came close behind with another . Wille's slopped over the sides as he poked at Padlimaird's chest.

"Quebbits told me you had a head full of suet. Me poor old mam's ripped her eternal nightie and donned sackcloth, and here you are turnin the death of liberty into a carnival."

"We weren't looking fer fun," yelled Padlimaird. "We're risking our heads, sure enough."

"You're risking a lot more heads than just your'n," Wille said.

Sal set her bucket down. "Come help us draw water, Padlimaird." She tugged Wille's hand down to her protruding stomach. "Some excitable fellow's set the ice house alight. Thought he was gonna flood the city."

Wille glowed in the rain, and addressed Padlimaird more kindly:

"I promise I won't knock you around if ye help out. But only if you mop this window up." Padlimaird scowled. Wille continued, "And this job in't half so stinky as when some coward flooded the city long Crewald and them canal ways. But we put things to rights with lots of willing folk. More folk is less labor. You should come too, Lally. Nobody will see you. It's foggy."

I scowled with Padlimaird.

"And what about the other scoundrel?" asked Sal, wringing her soaked skirts and taking up her bucket. But Forbs had disappeared.

Sal and Wille left us with Wille's bucket of water and two shreds of Sal's petticoat.

Padlimaird scraped away an M and threw his rag into the bucket. "Hasn't even said his vows and he's already acting like an old wet fart." He walked jerkily away, and I doubled over in a bout of nausea.

When I righted myself he'd disappeared around a corner, and the dizziness traveled to my head so that all was confusion in the next few seconds. A low horn sounded far off, muffled in the fog, or maybe it was a moan; and I jumped a foot in the air. All four windows had shattered behind me. Heart leaping, I glanced through the window, saw the smooth, green stone.

I stepped away from the glass. "Aloren," Forbs called, "get out of there, idiot." I should have taken his advice, but my head was ringing and I looked around for him––and a big grey dog jumped onto my shoulders. I pushed him away, and Floy was there, picking at the dog's nose and eyes.

He snapped at her. Scared, I batted her behind me, and the dog pushed me into the shop door. Someone called something, some foreign word, and the beast stood guard before me with hot breath and raised hackles.

A thick man in a black cuirass grabbed my hair, pulled me against him.

"Obid," he snapped at the dog, who in turn snapped at my legs. I stopped kicking. Omben soldiers made a dark circle around us, and I ground my heel into the human's boot. His grip tightened painfully. "Anger ill becomes you, little dove." He breathed his stink right in my face, and pushed me towards the shards on the pavement as if to grind me against them; but Floy got at his nose, and the dog turned from me to leap at something else. I twisted away.

"Call off your dog," said a boy. I knuckled sweat from my eyes and made out Forbs fending off the dog with his cloak, and Andy behind him, struggling with his horse's leads. Forbs fell over backwards. Sandal jolted the leads from Andy's hand, and Andy pulled a dagger. "Call him off or I'll rip out his throat."

The man barked at his dog, and the dog shrank and crawled to his side. My hair remained firmly in the man's fist. Floy hid in the collar of my tunic.

"He's a hangnail," she said, "with perfect timing." I told her to shut up.

The man eyed Andy's broach; his posture tightened, looked almost resentful "She was breaking windows."

Andy wiped rain out of his eyes, looking at the glass. "You broke these?"

I forced my face into a blank. Forbs climbed to his feet. "No, she didn't," he said loudly, half to Andy and half to the soldiers. "I saw the ones who did."

My captor coughed, spraying spit. He shoved me forward. "Nonsense. Look at her hands."

"What?" Andy took one up and dangled it in front of him. It was ragged and oozing, as usual. "Give her here," he said. "This one's wanted specially, and you're not familiar with the system." The officer gave me a lecherous look, as though he were indeed familiar with the system, and Andy took my hair from his fist. "If you'd excuse us––Forbs," he yelled over his shoulder

"Yes?"

"I'm certain there're little insurrections just like this popping up all over the square. Would you take the horse and put them down before more people start dying?"

"Aye, m'lord," said Forbs cheerfully, and he prodded Sandal before him out of the arena. The rest of the men scattered at the officer's word. Andy shoved past him and dragged me down a side street by my hair.

"Forbs broke that window, didn't he?" he said. "This is strike three." He trapped me in a corner. "So we'll stand here until you give me a explanation for this––this silently reaping the consequences of other people's idiocy." He crossed his arms. "We've got all day."

I turned around and studied the threads of water darkening the wall. Floy's claws ran over my feet.

"What should I tell him?" I asked her.

"Damned if I know."

I bent over to retch, turned to face him, wiped my mouth, and said, "Piss off."

But he just stood there, his jaw ticking. "You think I had a say in it," he said. "Pleasing the Southerners. That's impossible, though, because I'm not sixteen yet." His voice cracked. "I know nothing. And it's really sticking in my arse, see, because I'm on the outside of everything, losing sleep, because of you, mostly. You're so dumb you cause me indigestion––and this!" He held up and looked at my forearms, and his face took on a color that roiled my stomach. "What is this from?"

I looked past him––at Wille Illinla, lugging his bucket from the harbor. Water sloshed over his pants. He marched over and poured the water over Andy's head.

It crashed on the pavement, ran down the gutter, and there was a short silence.

"Thought I wasn't wet enough?" said Andy.

"It did put a damper on things." Wille clobbered Andy in the left eye. The street corner was ill lit, and I don't believe the boys recognized each other even after Andy rebounded and punched Wille in the stomach. Wille staggered into the wall.

"Thank you," Andy said, "for doing your utmost to keep me clean and fit." He blinked rapidly with his left eye. "Now do let me finish my conversation with this block of wood in the corner."

He walked back to me, hair dripping over his face, and continued right where he had left off: "You never tell me anything. You never tell anyone, and you never––It's as if you think it's horrible or wrong coming to your own defense, talking about yourself, even. But you're stubborn as a bad smell and very loud, so I don't get it––why do you act like half a person?" He turned to Wille, who had sat down against the wall and was watching interestedly. "You know her, obviously. Have you ever heard her do it?"

"Do what?"

"Defend herself."

"She can't." Wille rubbed his jaw.

"Why?"

"I dunno. In't allowed to say that either, I suppose."

Andy chewed his tongue. I stepped out, but he held me against the wall.

"Then say this, Aloren." His eyelid looked very swollen. "Do you really want me to piss off? Would it've been better to be smeared into the pavement back there? Raped by a bunch of drunk rubes? Your hand cut off? If that's what you want, you'd better make yourself scarce, because I can't, I can't, I can't stand by and watch you be tormented."

His hand fell to his side and hung there. I thought I might laugh at him.

Instead my face crumpled. I turned into the dark of the corner and sat. Neither of them looked away, so I pressed my head into my knees, and felt the tears come. Big tears running down my nose and into my mouth. I took gulps of air, and to my great shame, wept heartbrokenly, harder than I had in three years.

I smeared my tears with the back of a hand, and when Wille couldn't find it in himself to watch anymore he climbed to his feet, I thought, to leave.

But he didn't leave. He walked over between us, knelt down, and lifted my chin with a blackened finger.

"I'll always come to your defense," he said. "Until you can. And even then I'll still do it, cause you'll be so out o' practice you'll be telling folk you're the one strangled the big owl with my bootlaces, when it'll really've been me did it." He grabbed my wrists and swung me to my feet. And then, clicking his tongue at Andy, he walked back the direction he had come with his empty bucket.

Andy had resolved not to look me in the eye. He moved his hand very slowly, until it disappeared inside his cloak. He pulled out a handkerchief and gave it to me. It was wetter than my face.

"I've been looking for you," he said. "You're impossible to find when you're not dancing. I wanted to ask you––" He broke off with an ironic look. "I need your help stealing something."

"Ghast, Andy," I said immediately. "This is an awfully one-sided relationship." He shoved me, and must have miscalculated his strength because I went running backwards. "Stealin? Low, in't it?"

"Stealing something back."

"From who?" I ran a hand over my sticky face.

"Daifen."

"Who's he?"

"The former Chancellor."

"Oh." I remembered now. "He tampered with laws about weapons. Folks' right to carry weapons." I remembered writing that letter to Ederach. "And the garrison confiscated em, the weapons." I put my hair out of my eyes, and said sharply, "Which led to organized resistance."

"If you'd call Celdior's raid on the armory organized."

"It was stealing something back. And they hain't been re-confiscated."

"You strike fear in me," said Andy, smiling. "But isn't that more because Ederach questioned Daifen's law?"

"Ederach's dead." I sighed, wiping my runny nose. "No one's left to question anythin. Opens the way for more organized resistance."

"There're quieter ways of getting what you want."

Rain slid down my back, and I moved under an eve.

"That's what Daifen thought, and the Queen, and Herist and Caveira. All you courtiers think alike."

He shrugged. "Then there's little difference between a courtier and a thief."

I couldn't decide if he was lowering himself to my level or raising me to his.

"What's Daifen stolen?"

"You'll help?"

Neither of us answered the other's question, and after setting a later date to meet up and connive, we parted in the rain, which had begun to pour.