“You could write?”
Her gaze sharpened on me. Then softened. “Not in letters.”
I took the journal and opened it to the first page. Line after line of familiar shapes greeted me. “It’s the script,” I said. She’d spent hours teaching me her special script when I was a little girl. A “code between us,” she’d called it. I hadn’t seen it in years, but I could still read it. The written language of a woman who’d never been to school.
Tears touched my eyes. She could have kept me here, baking as her mother had done with her. But she’d seen how it bored me. Instead, she had sent me off every afternoon to learn to read and write from Elisabet.
Maybe it was her defiance of the choice she’d never gotten. Maybe she’d been more like me at one time.
I closed the journal. “I promise, I’ll never sit.”
CHAPTER FOUR
The acid rainwas done in under an hour. Mama sent me off with the rewrapped wheaten half-round under one arm and the journal tucked under the other. “Take this to Elisabet,” she said of the round. “She probably hasn’t spoken to anyone all day.”
I sighed. “Your soft heart leaves you poor.” I knew what this half-round meant, precious wheat and flour given over to me.
“But not in what matters.” She tapped the top of the round. “Tell her she’s welcome here, will you? The girl’s reed-thin.”
“Of course.” I threw an arm around her, pressed myself against her soft body, and inhaled the scent of dough. “See you soon.”
She pulled away. “Go, or you’ll be late.”
Outside the sun was low, gilding the walls a faint green. The acid rains always left a mist in the air, sulfurous and thick like fog.
It was part of our kingdom’s curse.
The acid ate away at any surface it touched—rooftops, cobblestones, human skin. Not immediately, but over time; that was the true insidiousness of it. Stand out in a storm and it would feel like rain. But afterward, your skin would itch and burn. Do it daily and your skin would dry and slough away layer by layer.
But the greater curse was in how the rains starved us. Theyprevented us from farming outdoors; they destroyed nearly every crop with a single storm, eating into watermelons and pumpkins. Only the wheat lived. Why were the rains especially corrosive to our produce? Only the gods knew. Maybe we humans had offended them, and so they had decided on the cruelest punishment of all: endless hunger, a never-full stomach.
Long ago, the kingdom had cultivated a special, glass-covered area in the northern district where all crops grew. Though no one I knew except Aldric had ever seen it. From there came our corn, our tomatoes, our weekly rations. Without it, we would have nothing but bread. All that grew beneath the acid rains were the hardiest grasses, the hardiest trees, the wheat.
Well, and all of us sons and daughters—thick-skinned and hardscrabble.
I jogged through the streets of the southern district, following the alleyway route to the inn. I burst through the door into the empty quiet of the bar room and filed past the sounds of clattering dishes in the kitchen. I peeked in; not Elisabet at the sink, but the older woman who owned the bar. I took the narrow staircase up and marched to the end of the hallway.
The last door was shut. It was always shut.
I rapped three times. “Lis!”
No answer. Only a sudden thudding on the other side of the door, followed by a curse. I shifted the round to my hip and waited through the commotion.
When the door finally cracked open, Elisabet squinted at me from the candlelit panel of light. Her long brown braid hung over one shoulder like a thick serpentine pet, and her glasses were smudged with fingerprints. “Eury?”
If possible, she was thinner and paler, like a whippet of a tree that never saw sunlight. Hollows sat under her eyes. After she’d lost her parents, she’d never been healthy; grief seemed to have its own appetite.
And, for as long as I could recall, she’d been sick. A wastingillness. No one could figure out the source of it, and in the southern district, no one much cared.
I held out the wheaten half-round. “Mama says you need to eat.” I pressed it into her hands as I stepped into her room. “Why are all the shades drawn?” I followed the narrow path between stacks of books to the closest window—the one over her desk—and reached for the pull cord.
“No!” Elisabet appeared at my side and set her hand over mine. “It’ll ruin the papers.”
My gaze lowered to the mess of books and parchment atop her desk. The markings on them were as inscrutable to me as the ancient writing on the spire in the southern district. “More old… ink-stuff?”
“Records,” she said in her breathy way. “From hundreds of years past. I’ve been entrusted with their interpretation, and the sunlight would damage them.”
“Of course.” I turned toward her, feeling stiff. As children, Elisabet was always at my home. Her parents had been members of the patrol until they’d died on a mission beyond the walls, and she had become almost like my sister. She’d taught me to read and write, and never complained about it.
