Skylark (38 page)

I get confused sometimes
, he had told me. I shut my eyes. How could I have been so completely, monumentally blind? He had all but shouted the truth at me, had I been listening enough to hear it.

What terror had he overcome to follow me, believing I might need his help? I opened my eyes again, to find that the creature behind the bars was still watching me, the white eyes steady and hungry. The bars, uneven and woven like the iron tree branches they were fashioned from, cut the thing’s face into tiny fragments of shadow.

He had been so like an animal that first time I’d seen him. Then, I would have believed him to be a monster. The way he’d gazed at me, as the ghosts faded into mist around us, with such shock and such hunger, had shaken me to my core. The blood-stained face, the bestial grace. Why hadn’t I remembered it later?
Because he saved my life. Again and again.
And because I learned, or thought I had learned, to see through the dispassionate exterior. Had I truly learned, or had he been growing more and more human, the longer he stayed in the aura of my magic?

There was little fanfare to mark the change. The creature blinked once, the white eyes vanishing for the briefest of seconds, and when they opened again they were blue. He was Oren again.

“Lark,” he whispered, blinking at me from where he squatted on the floor of the cage.

I moved forward, kneeling and wrapping my fingers around the bars. “Yes, I’m here.”

“What’s going on?” He didn’t remember what had happened. He didn’t
know
. His eyes darted around the confines of his cage, the expressionless exterior rippling under the strain of captivity.

“It’s a precaution.” I wanted to kill myself for lying to him. “Everything’s going to be okay, I promise. You’re in the Iron Wood. With me.”

He swallowed, but it didn’t help the rasp in his throat. “They did this to you, too?”

My own throat was dry, my eyes burning. “Yes,” I lied. “It’s to wait and make sure we’re not one of Them.”

He bowed his head, coming toward me and pressing his forehead against the bars, between my hands. I could smell the wild tang of him. “I’ll kill them for locking you up like an animal,” he said, through gritted teeth.

“No,” I said quickly. “It’s not—it’s okay. They’re wonderful here. They’ve taken me in like I’m family.”
Wonderful
, echoed a bitter voice in my mind.
And they want to execute you
.

“I can’t be in here,” he said, his voice barely more than a groan. “You don’t understand, the bars—they’re too close.”

I shifted a hand so I could touch his hair through the bars. “Just take a deep breath,” I whispered, the scene blurring with unshed tears. “Remember what you told me when I said I was afraid of the sky? There’s nothing to be afraid of. This cage is just a thing in the world. Like any other. In the morning they’ll let you out and—”
Kill you
, whispered a voice in my head. I choked, and couldn’t finish the sentence.

Oren was trying to do what I said, breathing in and out in great, ragged gasps. He grasped the bars where I had held them, the iron still warm from my hands.

I took a deep breath of my own. “You’re going to love it here,” I whispered. “It’s an orchard—did you know that? An apple orchard. At the center of this place the trees are alive again, covered in leaves and blossoms and fruit all at once. Just wait until you get to taste one of the apples.”

I reached out and covered his hands with mine, and the whiteness of his knuckles eased. He lifted his head to look at me, the fierceness there tempered with something new that I couldn’t identify. “Why would they let me stay?” he snapped. “I’m not like you.”

Not like me
. It took me long moments to gather myself to answer without my voice cracking. “I’ll make sure they let you stay,” I said. “You’ll be fine.”

Oren shifted until he was leaning against the bars, one hand still pressed against mine. “Tell me more about this place,” he said.

And so I told him about the work the orchard tenders were doing, the slow pollination of each individual blossom. I told him about the market, how they traded work for goods, and the produce and fish and meat it offered. I told him about the paper animal I’d found, and that it meant my brother might still be alive. I told him about Tansy, and Tomas, and the scouts, and Dorian. I described the birds in the grove, and how they sounded like him when he made his birdcalls.

By the time the sky began to lighten in the east, my voice had grown so hoarse that even I couldn’t understand half of what I said. Oren’s eyes had long since closed, and his breath had calmed from the panicked, claustrophobic gasps of before. Carefully I slipped my hand from his and climbed to my feet, stiff muscles protesting and screaming at me. My foot kicked something half-buried in the dirt, and I stooped to examine the object.

Oren’s knife, the blade dirty and dull.

I picked it up, cleaning the dust off on my pants, and then carefully tucked it into my waistband. He was going to want it back, once I got him out.

Chapter 28

“If I didn’t know better,” Dorian said, rubbing at the bridge of his nose with thumb and forefinger, “I’d say you were causing all of this trouble on purpose.”

A week ago—no, even a day ago—that sentence would have had me cowering. Now, I merely stood, jaw clenched, hands balled at my sides. “He’s a human being,” I repeated. “And a good person.”

“He’s a
monster
,” Dorian said gently, taking my hand and leading me to a chair where he all but forced me down into it.

“He’s sick,” I corrected him. “Nothing more. Look at him now! He’s just a boy, and you have him locked in a cage—”

“Because otherwise he might try to eat one of my people!” he protested. “Lark, the last time I took your word that I could trust a stranger—”

He stopped, his expression briefly stricken. He must have seen the anguish in my face, for he rubbed a hand over his eyes and shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he said softly. “I trusted him, too. Look, I know what you must be feeling, but I can’t—”

“You don’t know!” I spat. I would have surprised myself with my own ferocity—when did I grow such a spine?— if I didn’t feel every word so strongly. “He saved my life. Repeatedly. At great risk to himself. I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for him, and I’m not going to let you kill him.”

“As much as he
seems
human to you, I promise you he isn’t.” Dorian squatted in front of me. “He’s a monster and a cannibal. He has killed people—and
eaten
them, Lark. And without remorse. There is no forgiveness for that. Just because he does not remember doing it doesn’t change the fact of what he is. And if we let him live, he will kill more people, countless people, through the many long years until he dies himself, probably turned on by his own kind when he’s too old and weak to fight back. The atrocities will never end. Unless we help end them ourselves, right now.”

Was this why Basil had left? My brother would never have stood for the mass murder of people who were only sick.
People
, not monsters.

I shook my head. “I’ll keep him safe,” I said around the lump in my throat. “I won’t use my power for anything but for him. I’ll stay with him at every moment.
I’ll keep him.
”

Dorian closed his eyes, bowing his head. “And you think he’d be willing to be kept? Maybe another day we could have tried—something, I don’t know. But we’re under attack. Just this evening the scouts reported machines approaching. They are clearing the mountain pass. Two days at the most.” He lifted his head again, the hazel eyes sober and still. “Your city is coming for us.”

My city.

“Have you decided what to do?” I asked.

Dorian rose with effort. He crossed the room to the low chest of drawers, covered with the curios and knickknacks collected over his years as the de facto ruler of these people. “I don’t have a choice,” he said. “Most of these people have either never been in the wilderness, or haven’t set foot outside the Wood in decades. We have children, infants, elderly. You’ve been out there. If we scattered, and fled across the landscape, what odds do you give most of us to survive on our own? Do you think even a quarter of our people would make it?”

I thought of my mad scramble across the wilderness, how very close I came to death, again and again. Only a monster’s intervention, and the invisible, guiding hand of the Institute, had kept me alive. “No,” I whispered.

Dorian nodded, as though I had only confirmed something he had already decided. “And so we must fight.” I started to protest, and he held up a hand. “I will, of course, try to talk to them first. But you know, I suspect, better than anyone, what results that will yield.”

I fell silent, biting at my lip. This was a search decades in the making. The sheer investment of energy to power the machines to travel this far meant that it would be a one-way trip for the architects—unless they had an energy source at the other end to recharge. There was nothing that could convince them to leave the Iron Wood untouched.

I tried to imagine Tansy’s mother wielding her kitchen knife against anything tougher than a melon. “Could you not—hide?”

Dorian shook his head. “The very iron that has concealed us all these years will be a beacon for them. No magic can hide that much metal. Not the way the metal can hide the magic. They already know where we are.”

“Then build your wall,” I said desperately. “It will mean no one else can find help here, but surely that’s better than a hopeless fight. Because it
will
be hopeless.”

“There isn’t enough magic here,” he said. “From what I understand, the Wall in your city is held up through machines powered by magic. Machines that can amplify it, use it as efficiently as possible. We don’t have this technology here. Alone we can’t hope to amplify it enough to hold them off.”

Amplify it. Something stirred in my mind, and I stayed silent, my thoughts whirling.

“And anyway,” said Dorian, straightening. “I’m not so sure it will be hopeless. They have their machines, but we have power, and strength. We have the home advantage. They will be on our terms, here.”

I glanced across at him. Though his shoulders were set, determined, there were lines on his face that hadn’t been there a week ago. His eyes were grim, resigned. He knew they stood no chance. But how could he ask his people to fight if they knew that?

I stood, my chair scraping against the wooden floor. “Give me a little more time with Oren,” I said. My voice shook—I didn’t have to fake the sound of emotion in it. “One more night.”

Dorian nodded, keeping his eyes on his collection of trinkets. “Done,” he said. I turned to go. “Lark,” he said. I halted and looked back. He still didn’t look at me, fingering a tiny carved stone creature—an elephant, I recognized from the history texts. “You could destroy them, you know. With what magic you have left. I’ve sensed it in you—you’re not like us. You could destroy them all and save us.”

I stared at his back, my heart thrashing against my ribs. What was he asking me to do?

I saw the desperation in the tension of his shoulders, the way he cradled the carved elephant in his palm. He knew what he was asking of me, and he couldn’t meet my gaze.

I left without another word, too shaken to reply. The sun was rising as I climbed down the ladder. Oren was still asleep—and still human—curled on the floor of his cage. He looked smaller, confined. I forced myself to keep on walking, past the cage and out of the square.

•  •  •

The day passed in a flurry of preparations to fortify the village. The town was in chaos, with the scouts doing their best to rally the people into some semblance of a fighting force. Kids stared wide-eyed out of the windows of their houses, while their parents and siblings converted the market stalls and carts into barricades and shelters.

Dorian, who I had never seen outside of his house before, came down to direct the madness as much as he could. Wherever he went the chaos calmed a little, as though his confidence was infectious—though I had seen his uncertainty in the droop of his shoulders that morning.