Four Roads Cross (Craft Sequence #5)(38)

She sat back on her haunches astride him. “You don’t even understand”—that last word even more a growl than usual in Stone—“why I’m angry.”

“Can you get off me?”

She bared teeth.

“It’s hard to talk this way, is all.”

One wingbeat drew her to her feet. He stood more slowly, exaggerating submission. She’d seen him kip up from worse falls. “Your stunt risked the Lady’s life.”

He picked gravel out of his ears and brushed more from the hollow between his neck and collarbone. Across the street, a billboard man with improbably orange skin blew smoke rings into the night. The rings, swelling, faded to air. “Let’s not do this here.”

He flew slowly, painted greens and oranges and browns by billboards and streetlights. She followed. A late-night worker gaped from a high window at them both, and Shale waved. Aev landed after him, on an observation deck beneath a towering nightmare antenna. The city lay below, river flowing down to bay and blackly glittering ocean. Out there, Captain Pelham’s crew guided the captured Dream and its foul cargo to port.

“I’ve seen the view before, Shale.”

“But it’s no less beautiful for your knowing it,” he said. “They pay to come up here these days, the humans I mean. In the forty years since we left the rooftops, they’ve learned to love them.” He patted coin-op binoculars mounted at the observation deck’s edge. “Five-year-olds press their faces to this lens and stare out to the edge of the world.”

“Wearing skin has fogged your mind.”

“The Lady made me to walk among them, with your hands. Will you blame me for that?”

“I blame you for your meathead stunt tonight.”

“I know those girls. Their father’s a broken man—all the anger inside his skull has left a calculus of hate. We want followers for our Lady. Do we serve Her by deserting her people?”

“You did not intervene in the market to serve Her.”

“She asked me to go there.”

“You petitioned Her! You wheedled and convinced because you didn’t want to let that girl down. You had to be the hero. And now we all might die because of your pride.”

“As if I’m the only one.”

“What are you saying?”

“You saved the reporter.”

Aev walked to the high railing, vaulted over, and let herself fall.

She grabbed the roof’s edge and jerked to a halt above the windows; her talons scarred the concrete, leaving grooves that caught moon-and city-light.

“Mother?” Shale asked from behind her.

She said nothing.

He lowered himself over the edge and hung beside her in the calm of the wind.

“I have risked us all,” he said after a while.

“No,” she said. “And yes. You’re right. Last night I tried to let her suffer. I thought: this reporter tempts fate and tests Seril. Let her save herself. I made myself watch her suffering, because I owed that much at least. But in the end I only hurt the ones who hurt her. I am angry at you because I am angry at myself, and I am angry at myself because I cannot fault my actions—or yours, though they send us teetering across a narrow bridge.”

“I was proud,” he said. “And I did not want to disappoint her.”

The ledge crumbled beneath Aev’s grip. Concrete dust rained down sixty stories. She caught a chunk large enough to cause damage when it reached ground level, crushed it to sand, and let the sand drift. “Humans would not find this calming,” she said.

“Fear is different for each being that fears.”

“And stone fears change,” she said. “Change for us is a permanent unmaking. But our Lady is of the moon, and change is Hers: new life from death, waxing from waning. She waxes now, and we tremble. This may be blasphemy, but it is also right, for though She is Herself, we are still stone.” With her free hand she indicated Kos’s black tower. “Great Kos stands alone and strong. He has power, and privilege by virtue of his power. But His power comes, as ever, from mortal fuel—and so mortal strictures bind him. We are free, and poor, and dangerous—to our enemies, but also to ourselves. In my anger and fear, I might have hurt you. I am sorry.”

Shale did not answer.

Aev heard a scraping sound, and smelled the sharp tang of spent lightning.

She looked down. A cold blue blade jutted from a window beneath them. She watched it slice a circle in the glass. A human head emerged from the hole, black curls bobbing. Then the head disappeared, only to pop back through the glass facing up. Tara Abernathy looked frustrated. Then again, she often did, at least when Aev saw her. “Aev! Didn’t expect to find you here.”

“Ms. Abernathy. Good evening.”

Beside her, Shale tensed.

“Shale,” she said. “I’m sure Ms. Abernathy means well.”

“Her good intentions rarely come with deeds to match.”

“Cut off a guy’s face once,” Tara said, “and he’ll remember for the rest of his life.”

“It left an impression.”

“And you’ve thrown us all into the fire tonight. We’re even, maybe. I hoped we could start fresh.”

“What do you want?”

“Poetry lessons.”