Tell the Wind and Fire(31)

Some of the cages had bodies still huddled in them. Some of the bodies were skeletons, left in place as a warning to others not to cross the Light. Some of them might have died last night, died of terror at the idea of freedom.

Some of the cages lay twisted and empty, the black iron melted, the cage doors gaping open.

The cages were down. Nobody would ever be strung up like my father had been, ever again. They were the symbols of the Light’s power, the awful threat of the Light’s worst punishment.

Nobody had ever dared attack the cages before.

I remembered that guy at the club who had told me we might have something to celebrate soon. Was this what he had meant? Had somebody planned this?

Why had he thought I would know?

A shrill sound of laughter rang out, and the camera zoomed back up the hill, through the gates, to the bloodstained street.

There were people there, and one side of my brain just said, Yes, normal people. That’s what people look like, and the other side of my mind, the side accustomed to the Light, said that they were gaunt scarecrows. Food had to be brought in past the walls, and the Dark city was never given quite enough. I’d been overwhelmed by the lunatic abundance of food in the Light city when I’d first arrived, but I hadn’t realized how used I had become to the Light citizens, smug and sleek as housecats.

There were people laughing, dancing, people openly wearing the black and scarlet of the sans-merci. Dark magicians were on their knees, doing spells with the spilled blood. Ethan and Jim would not be able to differentiate between Dark magicians—one would look the same as another to them—but I could see from the edges of their clothes under their dark robes that they were not among the Dark magicians who served the Light Council. They would not have been permitted to drain people often. They were holding more magic in their hands now than they had ever before touched in their lives.

My own hands were twisted together in my lap. They felt colder than my rings, shivering flesh under a weight of metal. My Aunt Leila, whom I loved and who was the one person I knew I could count on, was a Dark magician. I had only ever felt sorry for them, known that they suffered for something that was not their fault, and that they were starved of their power because people feared it.

I was afraid, I realized, of what they would do with power now that they had it.

Over the shoulder of a child, his cheeks fat with a grin and daubed with blood, I saw a message glistening on bricks.

Scrawled upon a wall with a finger dipped in blood were the words FREE THE GOLDEN ONE.

It was as if I was seeing the words of Carwyn and the man from the club written on a wall, a message spelled out all too clearly now that it was too late.

“Oh God, they mean me,” I whispered. Ethan took my hand and held on: Ethan was all I had to hold on to. “They did this for me.”





CHAPTER EIGHT



hen I got home from Ethan’s house, I waited until Dad was asleep. Then I crept into the long skinny hall that we didn’t call a corridor, the wood floor forgivingly quiet under my bare feet, and listened outside the door of the other bedroom. I could hear Jarvis’s deep breathing and Penelope’s faint snore, and I was almost sure I could make out the soft sound of Marie sighing in her sleep. I was the only thing moving in that dark narrow apartment, shadows on exposed-brick walls, with a beam of moonlight and the orange slant of a streetlight filtering through a tall, black-trimmed window.

I stole back into my room and opened my wardrobe, snaking my hand under the mountain of clothes and shoes at the bottom to the very back, where I had hidden the doppelganger’s hood. For a moment, I could not find it, my fingers making a blind, futile journey over the fuzz of a sweater and the rubber sole of a shoe. Then my skin caught on one of the metal slots, fingertips brushing the cracked leather. My rings almost hummed in recognition.

I pulled the collar out and heard the tumble and slam of a dislodged shoe against one of the wardrobe walls. I stayed frozen in a crouch as my father murmured, disturbed and discontent, and then settled back into sleep. My pajama top stuck to my collarbones with sweat.

At the train station, the guards had said somebody who looked like Ethan had been distributing security information to a member of the sans-merci. And a few days later, the cages were shattered and the prisoners had gone free.

Anyone under suspicion of consorting with the sans-merci would be suspected of involvement with the attack on the cages. Ethan was going to be under investigation, and his connection to me would make it worse. The sans-merci were acting in my name: the Light Council might decide we were both in league with rebels.

I knew that I had done nothing, and I was certain Ethan had done nothing. I had another suspect. Carwyn had been talking about revolution and blood in the streets. Carwyn must be involved.

And I had made it easy for him to move about the city, unmarked by his hood, people all around him never dreaming what he was or what he was planning.

I should take this hood and collar to the Light guards, should explain the threat I had unleashed on the city. But what would they do to me then? What would happen to my father without me?

I knew better than to expect mercy.

I wrapped the collar in the hood to muffle any betraying clink of metal, then crawled across the floor with it clutched in my fist, to my school bag. Inside my bag was a small brown leather pouch containing a handful of ashes I had taken from the fireplace in Ethan’s living room. I tucked the doppelganger’s collar into the little bag, blindly fumbling, and then crawled around the side of the wardrobe, to the brick wall.