Blightborn (22 page)

Lane looks up. Eyes wide. Full of fear.

Rigo isn’t moving.

The realization hits him like a gale-wind of hissing pollen:
There’s no way out of this
. The raider’s right. Cael pulls that trigger, everyone dies.

He curses and lowers the barrel.

The raiders sweep over him.

THE CHOICE AND THE OFFER

THEY SAY TO HER
,
We’re the Sleeping Dogs.

She’s dizzy. Beaten up. Confused. She doesn’t believe them. The Sleeping Dogs can’t be on the flotillas. That doesn’t make sense. But they say it doesn’t matter if she believes them because belief doesn’t change truth, and this, dear girl, is truth.

They say,
We’re getting you out of this place.

Out of the sky. Off this floating island.

Back down to the Heartland.

She’s elated. At first. They say it’s time to hurry. They have a small dragonboat waiting. She can imagine the ground beneath her feet already. Hard dirt broken between pressing knuckles. She can hear the wind whistling a tune between the corn.

But then she says no.
I can’t go.

You’re going,
they tell her. They’ll tie her back up and chuck her into the boat if they have to. She tells them they can try. But she’ll kick. And bite. And scream herself raw and then scream
some more. And if they manage to get her off the flotilla, she’ll just find a way right back.

Because she has family here. Mother, father, and her little brother.

They sigh. They look at each other. As if they’re not sure. As if maybe she’s a burden, a heavy bag of stones around their hips, a bloody anchor dragging behind them—

But there’s that other look, too. The one that says maybe there’s something here. They watch her.

As if they’re looking for the fire in her eyes.

She tries to show it to them. The fire. The anger. That desperate, flinty spark in the darkness. She bares her teeth, too. Let them see. Let them imagine their skin between her teeth. Let them picture her hands around the Empyrean’s neck.

Fine,
they say.

You can stay.

But there’s a cost.

You stay,
they tell her,
then you’re one of us.

She nods.
I’m one of you,
she says. Spoken with some finality.

One of the Sleeping Dogs.

PART THREE

WOLVES AT THE DOOR

RETRIBUTION AND RECOMPENSE

PERCY GASPS AND SHUDDERS
and lays the flat of his hand on the naked expanse of Merelda’s back, the fingers splaying out and holding her firmly. She pants gently, delicately like a little bird, into the white cotton pillows.

She feels the peregrine bend down and forge a trail of small kisses from between her shoulder blades to her neck. Then he cups her chin and lifts—one final kiss on her cheek before he gets up.

Merelda turns over and straightens herself out. She pulls sheets up over her hips, sheets so airy they might as well be sewn from strands of passing clouds. She smiles. Overwhelmed by the luxury of it all.

Percy whistles a tune, heads to the washroom. She hears him pump water into the sink. Hears his hands splashing.

She feels sore. And warm. This was a nice moment. A break.

A break that ends with the short, sharp shock of a single question:

“You haven’t seen her, have you?” he asks, poking his head around the bend of the restroom. Water drips off his chin. Cleaning himself of her.

“Her?” she asks.

He senses her little deception; she can see it on his face. “You know who I mean, Mer.”

“Gwendolyn.”
Gwennie
.

“Yes. The Heartland girl.”

“No. I told you, Percy, I—”

“—Didn’t know her well, yes. I understand. I just thought—” He steps out of the bath now, a fluffy white towel around his midsection, still showing the clean handles of his hips, the sharp V above his . . . “If she would come to see anybody, it might be you.”

Gwennie has been gone nearly two weeks at this point. She escaped right out from under Percy’s nose. Merelda knows no other details except that this girl has crawled up under his skin. He’s been intractable all week. Cruel little jabs and jibes. Not just to her. But to his wife, Yasmin, too. As for his young son, Jace, well, Percy has barely acknowledged the boy.

Since Gwennie slipped the noose, it’s as if he’s been stomping around on dark clouds, flinging thunderbolts.

Today, then, felt like a nice respite from that—a break in the storm, a soft ray of sunlight through all that rain.

And now this. Back to Gwennie.

A grim thought slithers its way into her brain:
I wish they’d just find Gwendolyn Shawcatch and make her go away
.

The starkness of that thought—the coldness of it—horrifies her. She doesn’t mean it. Not really. But she’s not lying to Percy when she says how little she knew the Shawcatch girl. Gwennie was Cael’s age and came for dinner now and again (and of course the two were rutting around together like a pair of Ryukyu rabbits). They talked. They were friendly enough, and everyone in town knew everyone else. But they weren’t
friends
.

Still. Gwennie had to come
here
. Had to
complicate
things. Though Mer reminds herself that it wasn’t Gwennie’s fault. The Lottery—not as prime a prize as they’d long figured, a fact that disturbs her still, at least until she feels the softness of the sheets on her skin, smooth like milk. . . .

“So, you haven’t seen her.”

“I haven’t seen the dang girl,” she says, hearing the sudden pluck of a banjo string in her voice—as the saying goes, ‘The twang in your dang.’

Percy catches it, too. He hurries over to the foot of the bed and tilts his head the way he does when he’s about to impart a lesson.

“Careful,” he says, voice low. “You don’t want to sound like a Heartlander—”

Her turn to interrupt him: “I am not a Heartlander.”

“Yes.” He bristles. “And don’t interrupt me. I don’t care for it.”

“Sorry.” She tries to smile. “I am. Sorry.” This train needs to switch tracks. “Where do you think she went? The Shawcatch girl, I mean.”

But he’s not budging, not yet. “If anyone finds out you’re from the Heartland, you know I’ll have to disown you, yes?
I’ll have to put you out. Or worse, administer some kind of . . . justice. We don’t embrace refugees from the dirt.” He runs a small towel along his jawline. “They’ll have me drop you in some dark hole inside the Engine Layer, make you turn a crank for the rest of your life. Or worse, they’d make you serve in the Lupercal, working a whole different kind of crank, believe me.”

“I . . . understand. I don’t want to leave here.”

It’s true. She doesn’t.

She loves this place. Loves its comforts. Loves sneaking little luxuries back to the Heartland for her family.

And she loves Percy Lemaire-Laurent, the peregrine of this flotilla.

“I love you,” she says, struck by the need to confirm that to him—it feels desperate, blurted out like that. It’s not the first time she’s said it.

“We don’t know where the girl’s gone,” he says, choosing
now
to switch the tracks of the conversation. (It’s also not the first time he’s avoided her overtures of love.) “She was in the room. Then she wasn’t. One of my men—my best men, at least down that far—is dead. We suspect she’ll try to find her family. And when she does, we’ll have her. It won’t be long. She can’t stay hidden forever. Eventually the rat will come for its cheese.”

“Shuck rats don’t eat cheese,” Merelda says, pushing off those small but significant thoughts that threaten to darken her mood just as they’re darkening his. “They eat corn.”

“It’s a saying,” he says, irritated. “We don’t have rats on the flotilla. There hasn’t been a rat seen on this ship in the last ten years.”

“No rats. But you do have corn. A lot of corn.”

He narrows his eyes. “What does that mean?”

“We grow the corn. A lot of it. And it all ends up here. It’s why the Heartland life is a hard one. My father—”

He flings the smaller towel at her. It hits her in the face, and she bats it away. By the time it hits the floor he’s grabbing her chin once more—no gentle touch. His fingers and thumb are like pincers. She tries to pull away, but he’s holding her fast.

“You. Are not. A
Heartlander
. You don’t know anything about corn. Or rats.” His voice takes on a tone of forced whimsy, his free hand gesturing like a butterfly taking flight. “You are an
Empyrean
girl. A
house-mistress
to one of the most
powerful men
on this flotilla. So sit back. Enjoy it. Stop asking questions. Stop pretending like whatever happened on that pollen-choked dirt-farm you once called home is anything but a distant memory—or better yet, a total illusion.”

He lets her face go.

Then rips open a drawer by the bedside.

He flings a package down onto her breasts. A small box of chocolates—little truffles dusted with ingredients she’d once never seen before. Tongue-tickling spices. Smoky salts. Powdered flowers—violet, rose, dragons-ear. And none of that compares to the chocolate, which is so good, any Heartlander would slit his mother’s throat for a taste.

But right now it feels like a box of kiln ash.

“There,” he says. “Eat your treats. Stay in bed in this fine suite I allow you to have. And get shut of any notions of being anything but my curious, mysterious little
Empyrean
house-mistress.”

“You’re being mean,” she says. “I don’t like it.”

“So make me happy and do as I ask.”

She knows ways of making him happy. Her hand moves toward the inside of his knee. Her thumb draws circles. His gaze flits down.

“What are you—”

She lets her hand drift farther. Wider circles with her stroking thumb.

“I don’t have time,” he says, but the wind is out of his sails.

Her hand crawls up, up, up until it can grip him and pull him back to bed. He falls onto her. His mouth on hers. The chocolates swept aside.

KNIVES OUT

HER ARM IS SORE
, but she doesn’t care—the anger Gwennie feels hasn’t diminished; it’s a fire that keeps burning, keeps feeding on whatever she gives it, and so she grabs at her belt and flicks her arm three times in quick successions—
fwip fwip fwip
.

Three knives flung toward her victim.

Each clatters against the rusted metal wall behind it. Each drops to the ground. She curses. And spits. And kicks at the ground.

Her victim—a head and a torso made of sandbags and swaddled together in an extra layer of burlap—remains standing.

But then she sees a tiny whisper-stream of sand trickling from her target’s “shoulder.”

She whoops and pumps her fist.

Davies scowls. His brow furrows like a freshly dug ditch. “I’m not impressed. You want me to be impressed, but do I look
impressed?” He calls to the back of the room, “Squirrel, am I impressed?”

“No, Papa.”

“But I hit the dummy,” Gwennie says.