Four Roads Cross (Craft Sequence #5)(45)

“Are you done?”

“Done enough.” She capped her pen and slipped pen and notebook into her purse. Behind them the lockpick raked again, and a latch clicked open. “Let’s go.” She grabbed Shale. His wings spread, squeezing her ribs, and he lunged out over the city. Drunken students screamed as a half-seen shape swept above them through the dark.

“You were angry this morning,” she said as they gained altitude. She’d hesitated on this conversation’s edge all night, unwilling to bring up a subject fraught for them both. But they had worked well enough, and she did not want to leave the wound unstitched.

“I still am.”

“I told the truth. We’re weak. Exposed. We need to be careful.”

“We were made to guard this city. It is hard to hide and serve. You ask us to deny what we are. And your use of ‘we,’ there—you aid us, but you are not us. You are more at home in our own city than we are. You do not have to hide.”

“I suppose not,” she said, remembering.

Tara’s mom had first warned her to keep hidden. Tara had brought her a fallen star, crackling in her hand. The sky hung thunder-dark overhead, but not so dark as Ma Abernathy’s face. Tara’s mother never hit her, like most Edgemont parents hit their children. Tara had never squirmed on her village schoolroom seat from switch marks. Nor had Ma Abernathy honed a scalpel of guilt like the mothers of her classmates at the Hidden Schools. Concern was her tool.

Tara’d run out into the rain, age ten, beneath a tornado-dark sky. She heard whispers on the wind and singing in the stars, and talked back, sang up, calling to the voices until the storm came, all spinning noise and fire, a solstice festival in the sky. She chased the voices into the fields, through sheets of rain, through broken whipping cornstalks, clothes plastered to her skin, hair a tangle of heavy rings. Then the thunder spoke, and a star fell. She caught it in her hand and brought it home.

Her mother met her on the cornfield’s edge in the thrashing rain, as wet through as she. Her father had run into the fields after Tara and hadn’t yet fought his way out. Tara held the star. It danced as it burned. She didn’t know her mother’s story then, didn’t know about Alt Selene and the siege from which Ma’s people fled, didn’t know that to her mother the fire Tara held was a weed with roots in the guts of their history. Tara only knew that the light sang, and made her blood sing too.

Let it go, her mother said. Let it go and don’t pick it up again.

Tara closed her hands and the fire entered her. Water steamed from her skin and she felt herself burned dry. She fell into her mother, and looking up saw only fear. She was sick for a week afterward, and her parents waited until she got better to talk to her about the future, about small towns and discovery, about hiding. About being anyone but who she was.

“I will ask a question of my own,” Shale said.

Tara waited.

“Aev stopped you from binding me at the tower this morning. Yet with your glyph, you could have found me yourself, or cursed me from afar, without her knowledge. Why didn’t you?”

“Because Aev didn’t want me to,” she said. “And because it’s so easy for me to catch people, to force them. Too easy for me to think it’s right. But I’m still not certain I made the right decision. You’ve brought us to a dangerous pass.”

They flew for a while in silence.

“I have enough,” she said when she did. “Let me down.”

“Where do you live?”

She shouldn’t tell him, but she told. They swept above the Paupers’ Quarter market and north, where narrow brownstones flanked narrow tree-lined streets. He landed on her building’s roof. Her arms felt loose in their sockets. When she rolled them, her shoulders popped. “That makes up for skipping the gym today. Lady of Skies and Earth. I need to visit the sanctum tomorrow, do a records search.”

“What did you learn?”

“Why you can fly and I can’t.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I don’t want to go into detail in case I’m wrong.” She thumbed her notebook open and added a line to the glyphs she’d drawn there. “I’ll need you later. You’re right about translation. I can report your claims, but your testimony will help. The court’s not built for gods.”

“I noticed.” Shale let his wings furl and his arms fall and his face droop. She did not know what a sigh would look like coming from a creature without lungs, but she thought it might look a great deal like that. “If I can help, tell me and I will.” He had more to say, so she waited. “I did the right thing tonight, but I understand Aev’s anger. I was not selfless in my work. I wanted to help those girls, to justify their love of me. I asked the Lady if I could aid them, and She said yes.”

Tara looked up from the book. “She said yes for her own reasons.”

“Not entirely,” he said. “You’ll find me when you need me, I suppose. You always can.”

He took two steps toward the roof’s edge. She wanted to reach for him but her hands were full; she snapped the book closed, let the pen fall, and caught him by the wrist as he was about to fly. “Shale.” His weight almost pulled them both over. His talons tore silvery grooves in the brick as he steadied himself. “Hold still.”