The Hidden Twin (19 page)

“Redwings are not lovely, intelligent, and kind?”

I snort. “Not traditionally.”

“You don't seem very traditional to me,” Corvin says. I am silent. He leans back, propping himself up on his arms. “What about your mother? She was an Other.”

“She died soon after I was born,” I say. “I don't remember her.”

“I'm sorry,” he says softly. “Do you know anything about her? What she was like?”

I inhale and sit up. Enough of this lying around. I swing my legs over the side of the cot.

Corvin straightens up. “I've offended you.”

“Offended me? Certainly not,” I say, color rising in my cheeks.

He nods. Then, in a gentle voice, he says, “My sister is going to ask you to do something extremely dangerous. She sees it as the only way to save Caldaras City, and maybe it is, but I want you to know that you can say no.”

I don't know how to respond. Instead I rub my thumbs along the edges of the wrench-box. “Would you like to see my mother's tablecloth?”

The corners of Corvin's eyes crease in a half smile. “I would love to see your mother's tablecloth.”

I click open the box, which utters a small creak of protest. The scrap of linen is neatly folded at the bottom. Corvin's gaze lingers on my stack of penny pulp redwings, but he doesn't say anything.

“Here.” I hand it to him with care. “She grew the linstalks herself, and my father spun it.”

“This is very fine.” Corvin fingers the brown edges. “But what happened to it?”

I had almost forgotten the tablecloth must once have been large enough to cover a table. For most of my life, it has been this scrap—just enough to swaddle a secret baby. “Our house burned down,” I say, avoiding his eyes. “My father saved this bit of the cloth.” But no one saved her.

“Can you weave, as well?” Corvin asks.

The heat in the bunk room is starting to make me light-headed. “My mother wasn't a weaver; our neighbor did that. My mother was a gardener like my father. Linstalk can be tricky, you know.” A meadow fluttering with flowers flashes through my mind—is it a memory, or did I imagine it? “You have to let the stalks rot from the inside for a long time, then you break it—smash it to wet hell—and then finally you're left with these long, smooth fibers that can actually be made into something beautiful.”

Corvin carefully folds the scrap of cloth and hands it back to me. It seems old and shabby in this light. It would have shone when it was new. “Thank you for showing me,” he says. “I'll leave you to your sleep.” He gets up and lowers the gaslight. From the doorway, he turns. “I've seen the lin growing in Val Chorm, before it's harvested,” he says. “Rippling with speckles of the loveliest purple-blue color. It's beautiful then, too.”

*   *   *

The Under House is dark and silent at last, but I'm wide awake, swinging my legs from a decrepit balcony overlooking the alley behind the Pump Room. Two wild raptors clutch the railing, night-alert.

I have two options: go or stay, as simple as that. Simpler. Go.

I would probably like the cliffs of Drush, where raptors eat lizards until their feathers turn green. I could cultivate a little desert garden and cook for the salt miners. I could live under the sky, away from the bonescorch orchis and the Beautiful Ones.

Yet Caldaras City feels like home, as greasy and poisonous as it is. I rest my face, still hot from the Under House's roasting bunk room, against the railing of the balcony. The iron is cooler than the steamy night air, but hardly a relief. Nara told me to get some sleep, that we would talk about it in the morning. She trusts me to be here in the morning, and right now I can't find a good reason to be.
Zahi …
I close my eyes. No. Zahi cannot be a reason. To him, I am Jey. Not me.

The back door to the Pump Room clangs open. Nara and Elena step into the alley, their features barely visible in the dim reach of light from Mad Lane. I still my legs, hoping the women will pass without noticing me. The raptors, however, launch themselves irritably, and though they move with the noiselessness of predators, they are large birds skimming the contours of a dark alley. Nara and Elena notice.

“You're not going to sleep up there?” Nara sounds like she is three seconds from scolding me.

“I'll come down in a few minutes.” We all know it is a lie. I may sleep up here. I may slink away toward the Path of Mol, the wide avenue that leads to the train station. But I'm not going back down to the Under House tonight.

“Come have a drink with us,” Elena says. “You've had a long week.”

“Thanks, but I'm fine.”

Nara nods and starts to move away, but Elena stands her ground, hand on hip, and says, “Balderdash!”

I jerk my head back, never having been confronted with “Balderdash!” before. Elena stares up at me from the gloom like a storm brewing.

Nara looks at me with a bemused expression. “She'll stand there like that all night,” she says. I suspect I was wrong about Nara being the more severe of the two.

We don't go to the Pump Room, but back to the office of the
Caldaras City Daily Bulletin.
Nara locks the door behind us and leads the way through the little curtain at the back of the office. The sizable space beyond is bright and noisy, with great clanking printing presses whirring out tomorrow's paper. People in dark jumpsuits move as precisely and purposefully as the cogs of the machines they operate. Nara and Elena pay them little notice as we make our way to a spiraling metal staircase in a corner of the room.

The apartment above the office is elegantly furnished—damask and deep colors—and Nara wastes no time decanting three small glasses of something precious and emerald green that completes the atmosphere of sophistication.

“I suppose I might have assumed you didn't live in the Under House,” I say, sipping. The fragrant, minty liquid prickles my nose. My eyes start to water. So much for sophistication.

Elena assumes an ornamental pose, one elbow resting on the mantel, and Nara seats herself on a red velvet settee trimmed with dark wood.

“We've no need to live in the Under House,” Nara says. “We are not in hiding.”

“In hiding?”

“There are things you do not understand,” Nara says.

“Thanks for that vague assessment,” I say. “But it is true, I must admit. There are many things I do not understand. How to darn socks, for instance.” I put a hand on my hip, cocking my head. “Do people go into hiding because they cannot darn socks?”

Elena chuckles. “I would have disappeared long ago.”

Nara downs her glass. “Fine, Redwing, then understand this: Those who would betray this city in the Deep Dark don't want their plans to be known, and they have powerful friends. Once their eyes are on you, you disappear or you die, and it's better if you get to make that choice yourself.”

“See, that wasn't so hard,” I say, suddenly entranced by a strange canvas on the wall: vibrant reds and yellows on a field of jet black. Now I can't tell if my eyes are watering from the emerald drink or the assault of color. I blink and turn my gaze elsewhere.

Next to the gaudy, jumbled piece of artwork hangs an exquisite landscape framed by twisting brass. I fold a hand behind my back as Papa taught me to do. “Very nice.”

“It's a Zan,” Elena says. “Fanny. Great-something-or-other to our dear Commandant.”

“Is it Val Chorm?” I take a step back, letting the green wisps and dots of purple-blue swirl in my eyes.

“It very well may be,” Elena says. “Nara inherited it from her grandmother, who lived in Val Chorm.”

I turn back to the room and Nara gestures to an armchair upholstered in the same red velvet as the settee. As I lower myself into the seat, she asks, “Have you been to Val Chorm, Redwing?”

“I'm from there, actually.” I take another minty-fire sip of my drink. “But I don't suspect we're here to discuss my childhood.”

Elena sighs and pulls a delicate coppery chair out from a desk next to the fireplace. She seats herself and says, “We're happy for people to stop by for a chat. Some of the reporters will come up, you know, or the occasional bridge club friend, but we don't get an excessive amount of visitors. So don't think that you aren't welcome. But, yes, the real reason you're here is that Nara wants you to save the world.”

“Don't be dramatic,” Nara says, draping an arm across the back of the settee. “Save the city, yes, and by extension, the rest of Caldaras.”

“What are we saving the city from?” I ask, half wondering if this is a joke.

“Mol,” Nara says.

Ah. Yes. A joke.
“And how do we do that?”

She looks as though I've just asked whether underwear goes on one's ass or one's head. “We kill him.”

I look from Nara to Elena. Both wear the same apprehensive, grave expression.
Not
a joke, then.

Kill Mol.

Don't they realize Mol is a
god?

Don't they realize Mol is
also
a
volcano
?

I gulp down the last of the emerald green liquid so fast, it burns. “Thank you for your hospitality, friends, but I must take my leave. I'm not in the god-killing racket these days.”

Nara rises, a polished finger already pointing at me, but Elena stops her with a gesture, sweeping over to a side table, where she picks up the decanter. “We will, of course, give you more of an explanation than that,” she says, refilling my refined little glass. Nara sits again, and I lean back in my armchair.
They get five minutes.

“Very well.” Nara fixes me with a somber gaze. Between rich tawny drapes, the dark window behind her starts to glisten with rain. “You know about the War of the Burning Land.”

This catches me off guard. “Just because I didn't go to school doesn't mean I got out of slogging through that bone-dry epic poem, you know,” I say. “Twice. A bunch of flowery nostalgia about Dal Roet defeating the monster Bet-Nef and his redwing minions so everyone could live happily ever after.”

“The monster Bet-Nef, yes,” Nara says, “who wanted to cover Caldaras City with fire. That was almost a thousand years ago, yet there are some who worship him still.”

“Worship
Bet-Nef?
” I snort. “That's lunacy. I don't believe it.”

“But you must,” Elena says, her green eyes glittering, “for they are within the Temple of Rasus. You've met them.”

“Ah. A good place to hide,” I concede. “Crazy masquerading as different crazy. They call themselves the Beautiful Ones, you know. And I hardly call getting thrown into a boiling lake ‘meeting.'”

Elena nods. “Yes, well. They, like Bet-Nef, believe Mol is Rasus incarnate on this world, just as he is the sun and the stars in outer space. They want to—free him. And the Deep Dark is when they will do it.”

I throw an arm over the back of the chair. “So they want to free a volcano, whatever that means, and you don't think we'll all get along? Is that it?”

“You can be as flippant as you like.” Nara's tone doesn't actually indicate that I should be as flippant as I like. “But the fact is, we need you to find and destroy Mol's Heart. According to legend—”

“According to legend,”
I say. “What a reliable source of information.”

“According to legend,” Nara snaps, “only a redwing can find the Heart.”

“I'm sorry,” I say, “but I live in one room, and even then I can't find my pants half the time.”

“The Beautiful Ones are powerful.” Nara's voice is even. “They grow more powerful by the day. We have reason to believe their leader is none other than the Onyx Staff.”

“That's a good theory, as he's the one who tried to poach me like an egg.”

Nara frowns. “You have proof, then. That is something, I suppose. I … I had hoped the cult didn't run that deep.”

I raise an eyebrow. “I'm sure we're all shocked that the Onyx Staff has turned out to be a dangerous lunatic.”

Nara cracks a smile at this despite herself, then clears her throat. “The Beautiful Ones must be stopped. The Burning Land below Mol is the realm of the Others. It will destroy us. All of us.”

“The realm of the Others?” I have never thought about what the realm of the Others might look like or where it might be. I knew only that my own mother rose from the lands below the surface of Mol.

“They say the Burning Land is not all bad,” Elena says gently. The fire in the little hearth glimmers in her eyes. “They say it's a place of blazing light and utter darkness. Quietness and gentle currents.” She inhales and stretches her neck, tamping down the emotion I can see anyway. “There is great beauty there, so it is said.”

Her gaze flicks to the strange canvas of reds, yellows, and blacks. I study it again. Could the jagged lines and wide curves be more than they appear at first glance? Am I seeing the fiery, underground world of the Others?

I try to find Nara's cold determination in Elena's face, but there is only sorrow there. And perhaps regret. “So why do you need me?” I ask.

“When Bet-Nef realized he had been defeated, he hid the Heart on Roet Island,” Nara says.

I shrug. “And?”

They exchange a look before Elena says, “We can't find it.”

This is tiresome. “So get better Fog Walkers.”

“We don't need better Fog Walkers,” Elena says. “We need a redwing. It is not a matter of cunning or strength, but of blood.”

“It always comes back to blood sooner or later, doesn't it?” I sip the green fire; it's getting easier.

“Look, we've tried stealth and coercion and threat and blackmail, and it's gotten us nowhere,” Nara says.

“Sounds like I missed all the fun.”

“We realized we just have to accept…” Nara trails off. She doesn't seem to know how to finish the sentence.