Gilded Cage (Dark Gifts #1)(44)
From her vantage point in the garden with Silyen, Euterpe let out a choked sob. Tears coursed hotly down her cheeks.
‘Stop her!’ Thalia yelled at Winterbourne, looking half deranged herself now. Her hair was plastered across her face by the raging storm. Overhead, sheet lightning lit up the blackened sky. ‘I can’t. I’m not powerful enough. But you can.’
Euterpe watched her lover bend over her crumpled other self. The girl was shaking violently with the uncontrolled Skill that coursed through her, venting itself in havoc and destruction. But even so Winterbourne gathered her up and held her to him, tight against his chest. He placed a soft kiss upon her forehead.
The words he spoke were too quiet to be heard by the watchers in the garden. But Euterpe knew them.
Remembered them.
‘Hush,’ he told her, his voice charged with Skill. ‘I love you. Be still.’
The girl in his arms went limp. With shocking suddenness, the storm ceased. Thalia rubbed both hands over her face and pushed back her hair. She looked in disbelief at the devastation around her, and at the clear blue sky above.
In the sun-drenched garden, Euterpe’s memory cracked open. A hideous understanding crawled out.
She felt Silyen’s hands upon her shoulders. The young man – her sister’s child – turned her towards him, and she looked up into his face.
‘So now you know,’ he said. ‘And soon, it’ll be time to leave this garden. They’re both waiting for you. They’ve waited for years.’
11
Gavar
Millmoor slavetown might be going up in flames, but Gavar Jardine failed to see why that was his problem. Particularly not at eight in the morning.
How could a few incidents and arrests up north necessitate an emergency convening of the Justice Council? What was important enough to drag Gavar away from Kyneston and his daughter in the days before Christmas? It was bad enough that soon there’d be the long trip to the Second Debate at Grendelsham, without this summons to London, too.
Through the leaded windows of the overheated council chamber, Gavar saw that it was snowing. He wondered if the slavegirl Daisy would be playing outside in the Kyneston grounds with Libby. Perhaps making a snowman. They’d better both be warmly dressed.
‘Pay attention.’
His father’s whisper in his ear was like a gust of cold blown in from beyond, and it was all Gavar could do not to hunch his shoulders or turn up his collar. He shivered, and tried to focus on the speaker at the far end of the table. It would be easier if the woman’s voice were not so monotonous, her face not so unimprovably plain.
‘. . . seditious literature,’ she was saying, ‘distributed across the city, including dormitories, workplaces, even sanitary facilities. That’s toilets,’ she clarified.
Gavar snorted. Did the commoners think Equals never needed to use ‘sanitary facilities’? Though it was true that some he’d met regarded his kind as hardly human. Gavar had done nothing to disabuse them of this belief. Ignorance bred fear, as Father was fond of saying, and fear bred obedience.
Except something had gone wrong with that pithy maxim, if what the woman was saying was to be believed.
Gavar had listened carefully enough for the first few minutes. Word of Zelston’s asinine Proposal had somehow not only leaked, despite the Silence, but had reached at least one of the slavetowns. The inhabitants of Millmoor were kicking up a fuss and demanding that parliament vote in favour of the Proposal.
It was all too ridiculous for words. What on earth did they think they’d achieve? Nothing, except years on their days. And for the ringleaders, perhaps slavelife and a generous re-education at the hands of Lord Crovan. Anyone insane enough to risk that was probably a danger to society by default.
Crovan was an honorary member of the Justice Council, but thankfully never attended. He rarely left his Scottish castle, Eilean Dòchais, which stood on a small island in a large loch. There he lived alone, apart from a few house-slaves – and the Condemned, the very worst of those sentenced to slavelife.
Whatever Crovan did to the Condemned (no one ever asked) kept him pretty busy. He only turned up at Westminster once a year for the opening of parliament, which was once too often in the opinion of his Equals. Even the House of Light seemed darker when he sat in it. And of course, the man always attended the Third Debate at Kyneston.
When Gavar became Chancellor he would necessarily have dealings with Crovan, he thought unhappily, tuning out the droning narrative of the Millmoor Overseer. The sentence of Condemnation was always uttered by the Chancellor, before the prisoner was delivered straight to his new master.
Gavar wasn’t sure when the practice of turning the Condemned over to Crovan had first begun. Had Father started it? But the man was present at every sentencing, eager to claim his new property. It was all faintly distasteful and one more reason for questioning whether the top job was all it was cracked up to be, despite Father’s insistence that the Chancellorship was a Jardine family birthright.
The whole point about birthrights, Gavar thought resentfully, and not for the first time, was that they came to you automatically. You didn’t have to do anything, except be who you were. To hear Father talk, the Chancellorship was just as much a Jardine prerogative as a place at Oxford’s Domus College. So if it was coming to him anyway, why did Gavar have to serve this tedious political apprenticeship? Did he really have to attend endless councils, committees and legislative debates?