Page 51

Slowly, slowly she began to piece together the outlines of her life. There was a puzzle in the mansion’s parlour, a faded picture of a tree and a house and a stream, cut into hundreds of interlocking pieces. Some toy of the wealthy children who had once lived very different lives under the same roof as Eldest. To put the puzzle together you started at the edges. Eldest had learned that lesson well. She started at the edges.

Later, when Night-Father began his hunt, Eldest and the older children concealed themselves in the kitchen, having left clues that led away from the younger ones in the West Lounge. Tune she kept with her. The girl was too likely to give herself away and, by extension, all the younger siblings.

Eldest slept in one of the tall cupboards, beneath collapsed shelving and an arrangement of pans. Or rather she lay there, drunk on lack of dreaming, plagued by a bladed hunger, turning bright new memories over and over in her mind. The kitchen didn’t seem to have been used in decades, and yet its association with food somehow lingered. It was here that Eldest’s self-imposed famine gnawed hardest at her bones.

“I had a family.” She whispered it into the mansion’s night, quiet so that her siblings wouldn’t hear, but loud enough for the darkness to challenge. Some truths must be spoken or else they are not properly true. “Father is not my father. That thing in the basement is not my mother.”

“Eldest?” A voice from the next cupboard. Milk-Eye—the sister who was not her sister. “I think he’s coming.”

“Quiet then. Make yourself nothing. All of you.” Eldest wasn’t sure why she still cared. They weren’t her family. She could run and Father would waste the night hurting them while she found sanctuary. But she did care. Something, some annoying band around her heart, wouldn’t let her desert them. “Look into the blackness. The dark inside. Let it unwrap and cover you.” She felt their struggles, and the slow release of a fraction of the power that had been put into them. “Tune!” She woke the girl with a careful kick, displacing none of her own cover. “Tune, you should run. The barrels by the trapdoor to the West Wing cellars. That’s the best place. He looked there last night.” Tune had often tried to erase herself too, but she’d got nowhere. Night-Father would find her in a heartbeat if he came close.

Eldest sank into her own void, deeper and faster than she had before. “A family. I had a family.” This time nobody heard her, though she spoke without whispering. The words entered the ears of her false siblings, only to erase themselves before comprehension settled across them. Eldest could almost see their faces, her true mother, her true father, and…one other…a true sister, older than her. She must have been stolen from them. Taken by force. The details of that, she could still not remember. Was her older sister one of the names on the rafters? Had she been overwhelmed by Megaera’s dark gifts and scrubbed from history like a stain washed from a smock?

The morning bell’s discordant clangs jolted Eldest into the waking world, gummy-eyed and with a hollow belly. The children scrambled from their hiding places, hastening to the parlour, where after another broken night the day’s lessons would proceed in the semi-delirium that prolonged sleep deprivation brings.

It had never made sense to Eldest, but now she remembered something Day-Father had said: if you wish to reshape something, break it first. She found herself remembering many things on her journey down the flights of creaking steps. She had a family. She remembered that. Their faces still refused her summons. She saw them only as if they were pressed to a curtain, the taut cloth revealing the planes of their faces but hiding all detail.

The children lined up beneath the flicker of the parlour’s chandelier, eyes slitted against the light. Eldest stood at the back today rather than taking her place at the front. Yesterday’s discovery had driven a splinter of hope into her heart. She had managed to separate herself from the awfulness of her existence, to sever the unwanted bonds of kinship with Father and Mother. She had felt a momentary sense of worth and belonging. The ghost of actual love had warmed her, not at the hearth of memory but a reflected heat that promised more if only she could sweep aside the remaining veils.

Today new worries stalked her, as if there had been room for them in the queue all along. Had her family given her up? Had they placed her here, unwanted, a reject from their perfect lives? Starving and sick now with a thin cough trying to burrow into her lungs, Eldest sat silently and let the waves of Father’s lesson wash over her. Today he wanted them to know about pain. As if he were describing nothing more than a recipe for a cake, Day-Father laid out the theory behind the practice that Night-Father demonstrated to the unlucky during sleeping hours.

When at last they were released from their lessons, Eldest once more resisted the gruel, though the reek of the loathsome stuff had become a fragrance and her sunken belly cried out to be filled. The others watched her, aware now of her abstinence as they were aware of her weakness. She knew it wouldn’t be long before she lost her place as their leader. She shouldn’t care, they were an anchor on her, not the prize that Lip-Scar and others with ambition might think. Without her the youngest would suffer, but…She walked away from the table.

“I’m not a good person.” Perhaps that was why her family had given her up. Had they let her be cast into this hell because they saw the evil in her, or was it her weakness? “I’m not a good person.” A good person would fight to lead because she knew it might save the others. A good person would care more, do more.

None of her siblings asked what she was doing when she hauled the mirror from the grand bedroom down the stairs, one loud, jolting bump at a time. There were shards littering many of the rooms, but this mirror, cracked as it was, was the only one still entire in its frame. Brother Small had killed Sister Quick with one of the shards from the Music Room. He’d driven it up through her chin during an argument over something…Eldest couldn’t remember what, something…small. Brother Small had died weeks later. The injuries Night-Father inflicted on him were no worse than the rest had suffered, but something inside him broke. Eldest thought maybe Small had died from fear. Perhaps it was fear that led him to kill his sister. Fear was the author of many crimes.

The scrape of her dragging the mirror through the dining room into the parlour felt loud enough to fill the whole house like one of Night-Father’s maniacal screams. At last, weeping at her weakness, Eldest brought it beneath the candlelight.

She had wanted to see herself whole, not her eyes staring through a wedge of fractured mirror. She had wanted to see all of herself at once, and now she could. She stared at herself, skeletal in the bundle of her scarfs and the stained satin of a dress repurposed as a cloak. Sunken eyes returned her study.

She hadn’t performed this labour to admire her features. Rather, as she approached the silvered surface, setting her fingertips to the razored webs of cracks, she hunted for whatever it might have been that had made her parents reject her. For surely, she couldn’t have endured years in this place if they had truly wanted her. They would have come for her by now if she were worthy of them. Was the imperfection visible among the hollows of her face? Could the guilt that had condemned her be seen at a glance? She thought she saw it there, in her eyes, a shadowed hurt that invited the blows that had changed her life.

Satisfied, she toppled the frame, letting the last mirror burst into bright fragments. It was easier this way. The hope had been too painful. If Father had planned this, if he had seen her waste away and known her purpose, then he had excelled himself and found a new cruelty that outdid all those that came before.

24

Rue

“I was wondering where you’d got to.” Rue rolled Isik’s head into the ditch and turned back to the bloodstained round stone where Senna now perched, having landed in an inelegant thrashing of wings. In truth Rue had forgotten all about the bird and the attendant strangeness of it also being Senna. But exposing weakness wasn’t something she’d ever been inclined to do.

“It’s not just here. Trens Town is burning. Smoke in the east. Probably Ginta, and that little place on the Ripple,” the crow said.

“What about survivors? From here?” Rue asked. “Someone must have got away.”

She wanted to sit down, needed to: age had never weighed on her so heavy. Yet she stood with the crackle and spit of fire all around her and the sting of smoke wafting over every time the wind shifted, pausing the upwards gyre. She stood like a spike driven into the hard soil, and though she wanted to sob and to rail against a world that allowed such horror, she did neither.

Bek watched Rue from the fire, Einsa looming at her side, though both seemed small now, reduced to little girls who should have been at play, chasing through forests, running through alleys, doing the thousand and one soft things that the girls of Pye had done despite that many would have called their lives hard. Two little girls who should have been doing literally anything except learning to murder each other. Though Rue thought of thirty-year-olds as girls now.

The shades of her friends, standing now as shadows among the flames, didn’t see Rue, didn’t see the creature that the years had fashioned. Their eyes saw through time. It was Mollandra they watched, bent and twisted even then, but not yet broken.

I’m not her—I carry around the imprint of that child. Her hurts and truths are my foundations, but I am not her. I was the castle built upon that hill, and now the ruin. I am haunted by the ghost of myself. By the ghosts of myself. By the little girl, the young woman, the mother, wife, by the widow fresh in her grief. Even yesterday watches with a stranger’s caution as it stands at my shoulder.

Rue returned her gaze to the crow, who seemed hardly to have moved at all. “What about survivors, damn you?”

Senna cocked her head. Whether the bright beads of her eyes held sorrow or a hunger for the carrion her fellow villagers had become, Rue couldn’t tell. “Didn’t see any.”

“Dammit, Senna, these are your people, not mine. Your son—” Rue bit the words off, aware that she was being cruel, trying to force out of Senna the emotions she couldn’t find in herself.