Give the Dark My Love(5)

“Your pa gave me coin to make sure your trunk got to Yūgen,” Carso said, nodding to the other man. “You can ride with him while he delivers the produce. It’ll put you at the school a little later. Or you can walk up on your own, and he’ll bring the trunk tonight.”

I looked up the hill. Everything about Northface Harbor was built on an incline; the streets wound their way higher and higher. Blackdocks bustled with activity, and the factories and mills that sprouted along the water spat out smoke that obscured my vision. But it seemed as if the houses grew nicer the farther uphill I looked, and I wanted to see my new city on my own terms.

“I’ll walk,” I said. I adjusted my hip bag and repositioned the tube from Papa—I wasn’t willing to entrust those for delivery.

Carso grunted in a way that made it clear he thought I’d made the right choice. “Take that street,” he said, pointing. “Go up—you’ll run right into that school of yours.”

“Thank you.”

“I make deliveries every week.” His eyes searched mine. “You need to come home, just meet me here. I’ll take you.”

“Did Papa . . . ?” I asked, patting my pockets, looking for my coin purse.

“You go on,” Carso said, nodding toward the street.

“Thank you,” I said again.

“Hurry it up!” the dock master shouted. “We need the ports!”

Carso and his friend turned back to unloading the boat, and I headed toward the street that would take me to my new home.

“Flowers for the governor!” a young female voice called. I watched as a girl with cropped hair and an apron full of red poppy-buds dashed up to a couple standing on the corner. They were well dressed; a hunter green suit for the man, a tailored dress with a sweeping skirt for the lady.

“Just two coppers,” the girl insisted, thrusting the flower under the lady’s nose. When she ignored her, the girl turned to the man. “Buy a bud for your lady,” she insisted. “The governor’s own flower, sure to bring luck tonight.”

“Go away,” the man said, not even deigning to look at her. He bore an accent I wasn’t familiar with, and I wondered which of the fine ships in the bay he’d come from.

The girl turned, eyes hopeful, as she heard me approach from the dock. But I was clearly not a lady from the mainland waiting for a carriage. She gave me one glance from head to toe, taking in my rustic braids and homespun tunic, and turned her back on me, not even bothering to offer to sell me a flower.

Overhead, the globes of the streetlamps had been slathered with shining mercury paint to display the new governor’s silhouette, and green-and-black bunting decorated the posts and many of the windows. In the bay, a ship with three masts stood proudly, the Emperor’s flag flapping in the wind. Several other ships bore the insignias of nearby lands.

Already, I was composing a letter home in my mind. The Emperor was in the city when I arrived, I would tell Nessie. The new governor’s inauguration meant that the streets were decorated, and people from all different lands came to visit. I would leave out how the rich couple awaiting their carriage were so rude, just as I wouldn’t mention the stench of the docks, the hazy air from the smokestacks in the factories, the crowded throng of people that overwhelmed me.

I readjusted my bag and headed uphill.

“Out o’ the way, out o’ the way!” a man with a deep voice shouted, his wagon thumping on the cobblestones. I stepped off the main street. The man’s cargo was draped in white canvas. He drew his horses up short in front of a whitewashed building a block away. Curious, I drew closer.

“Hey!” the wagoner shouted, clanging his bell in the direction of the building’s door.

People rushed out, and the man turned, whipping the canvas cloth aside to reveal his cargo. About a dozen people sat in the cart. Their backs were hunched as if their heads were too heavy to bear, and two children lay on the floor of the cart, their eyes open but their expressions blank, as if they weren’t aware of their surroundings at all. A man about Papa’s age sat near the back of the wagon, weeping.

“We have no room here,” one of the women who’d come from the building said.

“Whitesides has always taken care of Mackrimmik’s workers,” the man driving the cart said, frowning.

I peered closer, noting the clammy sheen on the people’s faces, the hollowed shadows in their cheeks, the hopelessness in their eyes. The blackened limbs they tried to hide in their shirtsleeves and beneath the hems of their pants.

“The Wasting Death,” a bystander on the street hissed, his accent like my own. My hand flew to the knotted cord at my neck, and I instinctively took a step back.

“We’re full,” the woman snapped at the cart driver. She didn’t wear the dark blue robes of an alchemist, but she did have a crucible in the crook of her arm. “Take them to the quarantine hospital,” she ordered, pointing down to the bay and the hospital on the island. The man grumbled but clucked at his horses and turned the cart back down the road.



* * *



? ? ?

By the time I arrived at Yūgen, I was exhausted from the uphill climb, and sweat had made my hair stringy. I noticed the school’s gate first. It wasn’t like the village gates in the north. Its wrought-iron doors had three runes running down the side, one in gold, one in silver, and one in copper, with the words YūGEN ALCHEMICAL ACADEMY etched across the top. Through the iron bars of the gate, I could see a group of brick buildings forming a square with a grassy courtyard in the middle.