City of Night

by Michelle West

  She had played the game again, when Lefty disappeared, adding to it the desperation of fear. She had listened for the door, watching Arann and Jay as if they would unravel at any second, and with them, the fabric of the life they’d helped build. She was silent, both times, because there were no words she could add that would have changed the outcome.

  But with Lander, she’d played maybe pathetically, because they knew. Even without Jay’s gift behind them, they knew he would never be coming back. Then? She had worried for Duster. For Duster, who hated worry and loathed fear and spit on signs of concern.

  Duster, who had told them to run, wielding the dagger she had sworn she didn’t want, and turning her back on anything but the man she had called a demon. Duster, who took risks with her own life when she was in a foul mood.

  She hadn’t been in a foul mood then. She’d been almost peaceful.

  In the silence, Finch lifted her hands over the folds of thick, heavy down, and ran them across the softest sheets she’d ever slept in. Duster would have crowed at the size of these rooms and the weight of the silver, the shine of the magestones that were littered throughout the manse. There was so much here. Duster who would have told Ellerson to take a hike unless Jewel was standing on her feet, glaring.

  No one had mentioned Duster by name. Not when Jay was there. Not after. There was too much guilt, too much shame. She’d told them to run, yes—but she regularly told them to drop dead, and that was on her good days; they never paid attention, then.

  This time, they’d run.

  They’d run and because they’d run, they were here, in the most powerful House on the Isle. They each had beds, and each bed was as tall, as heavy, as finely made as the one Finch now found herself in. They didn’t need bedrolls—thank Kalliaris, ’cause they didn’t have ’em—they had these thick, heavy comforters instead. They didn’t need them either; they had real windows made with solid glass, and the wind didn’t whistle through the boards. The rooms were warm—there were fire grates here, and the fires were fed heavy wood that burned long and slow.

  But the rooms were empty. There was no Teller and no Jay lying on the floor in arm’s reach. No Duster, her dagger beneath her pillow, or sometimes curled in her sleeping hand. There was no magelight, no steady, soft glow alleviating the worst of night’s darkness.

  Just Finch, alone.

  Oh, she knew the others were safe. But if she got out of bed, if she tripped on the way to a door that seemed impossibly far away and actually opened it, it wouldn’t open into Jester’s shoulder or arm; she wouldn’t have to step over Carver or Angel.

  She couldn’t sleep, though. It was too strange here, and her throat ached in the silence. So she got up. She made the long walk to the door. She opened it. It probably didn’t swell in summer, jamming in the frame; it didn’t even creak a warning when she pushed it. It just slid, in unnatural silence, into the hall.

  She would have said she had no destination. She would have believed it, while saying it; Finch was never much of a liar, and the only lies she told herself were the ones she believed—or the ones she desperately wanted to believe.

  But she wasn’t surprised to find herself outside of Jester’s door.

  Jester was not a person to whom one went for comfort, unless by comfort you mean an awkard joke, or even a good one. She hovered there, her feet sinking into carpet, her hands on the doorknob. The doors here were heavy, but they weren’t hard to open. It was the permission she lacked.

  Idiot.

  She’d never needed permission to wander about her own apartment before. She’d needed caution, of course, because Arann slept in the outer room and you did not want to wake Arann—but she’d often risen, especially on the nights Duster was absent from her spot near Jay on the floor. How was this different?

  The answer, of course? This isn’t our home. This isn’t our place.

  And on its heels, another answer, one even less pleasant: We don’t have a home anymore. She took a deep breath to quell panic. It wasn’t the first time she’d lost her home, and this second time? No one had sold her.

  Duster had saved her the first time. Duster had given her the chance to run, and she’d run to Jay, and to the only home she wanted.

  Duster had saved them all the second time, because Duster had given them all the same chance. And they’d run to Jay. But this? This wasn’t home. This was a place full of people who were so far above the den that even the servants were better dressed, better educated, and better behaved.

  They weren’t needed here; it was hard to believe that they were even wanted.

  She took another breath. Did it matter? In the twenty-fifth, no one had needed them either. They had needed each other. She pushed the door open and slid into the room. Like hers, it was huge, and like hers, the walk from the door to anything else made it seem almost empty.

  “Hello?”

  She froze. After a few seconds of awkward silence, she said, “Jester?”

  “Finch?”

  She nodded. “You’re awake.”

  “Yeah. Too much food.”

  She made her way across the room, shuffling her feet; her eyes had mostly accustomed themselves to the darkness, but his room was slightly different. Still, Finch reached the wall and the windows there with only a couple of stubbed toes and no cursing.

  His curtains were closed and she struggled with them in the dark, pinning them back to let moonlight, even cold moonlight, add silver and texture to shades of gray. Then she turned to where he sat. He wasn’t in bed; he was resting, back against the wall, in the corner of the room farthest from the door. His legs were stretched out before him, his feet turned slightly toward each other; his hands were in his lap.

  “I hate rich people,” he said, and she almost didn’t recognize his voice.

  “Why?”

  He was silent. She walked across the room, passing the windows one by one, until she was five feet away. There she sat, folding her knees up to her chin and hugging them with both arms as if she were cold.

  He didn’t answer; she didn’t ask again.

  Because she suddenly knew what the answer would be, if he could ever put it into words. They had been captives, after all, at the same mansion. Jester had been there longer than Finch, and Jester had had visitors. Not like Lander’s. Not like Duster’s. But it didn’t matter. No one without money had visited that manse. No one.

  There was no magelight here, but Jester had never slept in a room with the magelight; he’d slept as far away from Jay’s nightmares as he could. He had, she realized, his own.

  “It’s just us,” he said, when the silence had grown too long, too deep. “Just you and me. The others are gone.”

  She started to tell him that the others were in their rooms, and again, she stopped, wondering why she was so damn tired and so damn thick. Jay had rescued Jester, Duster, Fisher, and Lander from the manse in which they’d been locked in rooms, or chained there. It was the manse to which Finch had been sold, and from which she’d barely managed to break free.

  Jester was silent again.

  Minutes passed; moonlight continued to shine. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, at least not on this side of the mansion. She glanced up at its bright face; the second moon was almost entirely eclipsed. Hidden. Shadowed.

  She had no words to offer him. He had always used words, and when they were absent, physical humor. Where Duster and Jewel raged in the open, others found their own ways to hide. She, like Teller, Lander, and Lefty, had retreated into silence. Jester was the only one who hid behind laughter, when he could force them to dredge it up.

  He was silent, now. She wondered if this was like her silence: a way of hiding. A way of avoiding causing—or receiving—either conflict or pain. But when she looked at his face, she saw he hid nothing; the darkness did that, and in the moonlight, now, it wasn’t enough of a mask.

  She started to rise, aware that for Jester, this silence was akin to what vulnerability would have been for Duster, but ev
en as she gained her feet, he lifted his hands. Not his voice; his lips pursed in brief pain, but he didn’t speak.

  And yet, he did.

  No. Stay. He very seldom signed. They all could, of course—but the den-sign was so basic it was harder to convey humor with the familiar gestures.

  She lifted her hands as she once again sat on the carpet. Stay?

  Stay.

  Her hands rested above her lap; Jester’s rested just in front of his chest. But they weren’t still. They moved, slowly and painstakingly, through the vocabulary created by Lefty and Lander in the corner of their home, in silence. Lander had words for food, water, pain, injury; he had words for silence, for running, for magisterians, for rain. Those were used seldom, and Finch struggled with them herself, remembering them as her fingers shifted, tapping her palm or each other.

  There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to Jester’s den-sign, not at first. But she realized, as she struggled with gestures, that he was trying to remember the ones they almost never used, because the only two people who would otherwise remember were now gone. So she joined him, and an hour passed, maybe more. When they spoke at all, it was to agree—or disagree—about what different signals meant.

  At the end, Jester tilted his face toward the ceiling, took a deep breath, and left his gaze there. His hands spoke.

  Fear. Death. Fear. Lost. Den. There was a sign for Jay’s den and a sign for everyone else’s. He used theirs.

  She swallowed. He wasn’t looking at her hands, now, but she responded anyway. Yes. Afraid.

  He continued. Angry. Lonely.

  She closed her eyes. Opened them. Crept slowly across the carpet, the five-foot separation like miles because of her hesitation. The den did not, as a general rule, touch each other; they pushed, shoved, smacked, but everything was staccato.

  But Jester signed. If he heard her, he didn’t look down.

  Because he didn’t, because she didn’t have to meet his eyes, because he was still speaking, in silence, his hands moving steadily, she joined him in the corner, and she very carefully put her arms around his neck and the front of his chest.

  He didn’t startle, didn’t look down, and didn’t stop, although his hands slowed. Where. Home.

  She caught both hands in one of hers and he did look down then, but she didn’t speak. Instead, she drew back just enough to sign two words. The first: Home. The second: Our den. She was crying, but she didn’t care; she wasn’t Duster. She wasn’t Jay or Carver or Angel. She wasn’t even Jester.

  He answered: Home. Our den. And then he reached out for her, hugging her as tightly as any of them had ever hugged her.