Tell the Wind and Fire(75)
I watched them in their turn: I memorized the number of guards, the length of their shifts, when they came to the tower and when they went away, how each of them acted around me.
On the last day of Ethan’s imprisonment, his day of execution, I went to my hiding place in the wall. I slid out the brick, and among the gray ashes I saw the pure, true light of my mother’s diamond. I drew out the necklace, and the sunshine caught the jewel. Sparks were tossed in the air, like confetti made of dancing points of light. The room was suddenly bright, and as I held the diamond, light lanced through its sparkling facets, rose and gold like a fire waking between my palms. I hung the chain around my neck.
When I left the apartment, I took my sword with me.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
It had been a long, bad time, but I had slept every night when I went home and not lain awake worrying about what I was doing or what I had become. The sans-merci had called in every one of us—me, Dad, Penelope, Jarvis, even little Marie—for questioning at the hotel, more than once, but they had let every one of us go. Sometimes, though, Penelope or Jarvis came back bleeding.
Marie woke up screaming every night, knowing the monsters were coming, and we could not tell her they were not.
They had not let Ethan go. They never would. And more and more victims for the cages were being brought in a grotesque parade through the shining streets of the Light city every day: the rich, those from the Light Council’s families, prominent Light magicians and public figures, but also people the sans-merci disliked and who could conveniently be accused of collaborating with the Light. A lot of people were being killed. Nobody seemed to have any more to eat in this just new world.
I wore a long, dark coat to hide the sword as I made my way from the Light city to the Dark. The coat’s severe lines and metal buttons made me look like a soldier, and my long, loose, fair hair made me look like a fairy-tale damsel. If people found that incongruous, if they did not know what to make of me, I had not known what to make of myself for a long time either. They could learn.
I was wearing my mother’s necklace outside my coat. It was the first time I had ever seen the jewel in the open light of day.
It was morning, and the air was crisp and golden as a fresh apple. The clock tower was a stark line bisecting the lucent sky: a tower with a hero in it, and perhaps I could be like Ethan now that I finally understood him. Perhaps I could be a hero too. Perhaps I could save him—save someone my way, and no one else’s. I felt as clean and purposeful as the blade I drew as I walked toward the door and the guard standing by it.
He was thin and tall, and his hair stood up in clumps. I had noticed him before, the worried one who would be easy to intimidate. He always took the morning shifts, when there were fewer people.
But quite a few people were already here. They came to watch me.
They could watch this.
“Out of my way,” I said, and brought my sword around in a slow, gleaming arc. “Get help. You’re going to need it.”
He stood there for a moment as if he had been slapped, took a step toward me, and watched the crowd surge restlessly in his direction.
He took a step back. He obviously did not want to be responsible for killing the symbol of the sans-merci. He called out, and three guards from inside the tower came streaming out the door to his side, just as I had hoped. I moved in front of the door so they could not get inside the tower again.
“I am Lucie Manette,” I said. “I am the Golden Thread in the Dark. I am the only child of a murdered mother, and I will not let anyone be taken from me again. I am going to stand at this door with a sword all day, and I will fight anyone who tries to take Ethan Stryker away to the cages. That means you can do one of two things. Go convene the Committee of the Free and bring him a pardon, or come and kill me.”
The guards called in reinforcements. With every extra soldier, the mob increased by ten or twenty people. One of the sans-merci drew a weapon, and then glanced toward a light—not the light of my rings or my sword, but the light of someone’s camera.
Everyone in the crowd knew that a picture or a video of me being murdered by someone wearing the colors of the city’s liberators would be seen by every soul in both cities within a day.
I lit my sword with fire and struck down the guard’s weapon, and nobody else drew one. I let myself breathe.
I looked up at the tower, at the shining glass and gold. I wondered if Ethan could see me. I had never hoped more that he could.
The mob grew and grew, greedy for a spectacle. I knew how easy it would be for the mob or the rebels to get out of hand, for someone to decide that eliminating me would solve more problems than it caused. I knew that I did not have long before Aunt Leila came.
I was not expecting who came first.
I saw her coming from far away, the saffron yellow of today’s hijab like a small sun, and her eyes sparkling beneath it. I expected her to stay a discreet distance away, but she kept moving closer. I thought she had come to watch, but she had come to speak.
Others made the same mistake I did, and they let her push to the front of the crowd. She did not stop there. She only stopped when she was standing beside me with her feet planted and her chin up.
“I am Nadiya Zamani,” said Nadiya. “The Golden Thread in the Dark is my friend. And Ethan Stryker was my comrade in arms. We were the ones who passed out pamphlets against the rule of Light in the Village, who discovered where the Esmond girl was being kept, who helped the Robesons get to the Light city when the guards were after them. Ethan Stryker is our ally.”