by C. R. Grey
“She’s watching me,” he whispered to Phi. “Graves too.”
“It’ll be okay,” said Phi again, though her voice sounded a bit higher this time.
The team changed in the warmth of the locker room before lining up at the edge of the chilly field in two squads, Gold and Blue. Both Bailey and Phi wore blue-striped uniforms. The players’ animal kin, too undisciplined to fall into line, explored the edges of the field and, in some cases, darted out into the terrain ahead of the starting whistle. Bailey wondered what Viviana thought of the display—if she actually cared about the game at all, or whether she was carefully taking note of each and every student at Fairmount who could be the Child of War. As Coach Banter lifted the starting whistle to his lips, Bailey snuck one last look toward the stands. Viviana gazed down at the team, her eyes skipping along the line of athletes. Bailey ducked his head and looked away.
Coach Banter blew the whistle, and the players barreled out onto the field, scattering like leaves caught in a strong gust of winter wind. Cheers echoed across the pitch.
Bailey ran headlong into the trees with Bert in tow. He jogged until he came across an outcrop of rocks, several yards from the Blue Squad’s flag and partially obscured from view from the stands by long pine branches overhead. With his Flick in his right hand and Bert on his shoulder, he waited.
It didn’t take long: not even five minutes passed before Bailey heard a rustling in the dry, leafless underbrush nearby, and saw a flash of a gold kneesock. He readied his Flick, prepared to send a glob of bright blue paint at the player as soon as he had a clear view. But the Sneak must have heard him, and veered away. Bailey followed the sound of footsteps on the dead leaves, keeping his pace steady. A small movement in the corner of his vision caused him to stop—a tiny stoat, kin to one of the Gold Squad’s Squats, dashed away, presumably to warn its human kin that Bailey was on the hunt.
“Ants,” Bailey muttered. He’d have to speed up.
Applause sounded from the stands—somewhere on the terrain, a Sneak had been taken out.
Just then, the low-burning embers of his Animas bond seemed to ignite like the flame of a gas lamp. Bailey’s breath halted in his lungs. He knew that Taleth was edging the field, drawn by him to the most dangerous place she could possibly be.
“No,” he said, though no one could hear him.
“Bailey!”
He looked around—it was Phi’s voice calling him, but he couldn’t see her.
“I’m up here!”
Bailey craned his neck upward. Phi waved at him from halfway up a tall, spindly birch tree.
“Are you okay?” she half whispered.
The stands loomed at the other end of the field. They were out of earshot.
“It’s Taleth,” he said, keeping his voice as low as possible. “She’s going to get herself seen.”
Phi’s eyes widened in understanding. She stood on tiptoe and looked around.
“Hide,” she said.
“What?”
“Trust me. Hide!”
Bailey ran with Bert behind a flank of pine branches. He heard the sound of an approaching player, and understood—if he engaged, he’d be watched. Instead, he had to stay hidden and out of the game, so he could get to the edge of the field. He tried sending his intentions to Taleth, as he had near Gwen’s tree house. Get away, he thought. It’s too dangerous here. But he felt no clarity with the connection, just a jumble of emotions and sensations. He didn’t know whether she could possibly understand him.
The Gold Sneak ran past him, so close that Bailey could easily have tagged him—but he didn’t dare. The Sneak, a slim, brown-haired Year Two boy, paused and listened. Bailey held his breath, thanking Nature that Bert seemed completely uninterested in moving a muscle.
The Sneak peered in his direction, blinking.
Then Bailey heard a cry and a gasp from the stands: Phi had leapt from the branch above, her arms spread and her legs kicking. She landed just behind the Sneak and tumbled forward, catching him by his ankle.
Bailey froze. He wanted to cheer at Phi’s gutsy move, but she looked in his direction, just for the briefest moment, and her gaze told him to run. She’d made sure no one would be looking at him.
Still, Bailey’s legs felt like they were glued in place. He shivered, feeling a familiar sensation of gooseflesh. Turning to the stands, he saw a gleaming reflection on the lenses of a pair of opera glasses. Viviana Melore was holding them up to her eyes, and they were pointed right in Bailey’s direction. His ducked into the trees and ran. He stayed as close to the pines as he could, hoping that his blue uniform didn’t show through the veil of branches between him and the observers.
As soon as he was within a few yards of the edge of the field, he stopped and took cover behind a boulder. Closing his eyes, he frantically tried to get a sense of where Taleth was. “Get away; you can’t be here,” he whispered over and over.
He heard the snap of a twig to his left. Behind the trees, a flash of white appeared, then vanished.
“Taleth!” He barreled forward—he had to lead her away from the pitch, away from Viviana. He couldn’t see her, but the twinging in his chest, the perking of his own ears, told him that she was anxious, and had been pacing the edge of the pitch all morning, desperate for a glimpse of him, to know he was all right.
Bailey heard a scattering of leaves next to him. Looking down, he saw Fennel the fox running in the same direction. She narrowed her black-and-yellow eyes at him and darted ahead. Then, just beyond the next boulder, Bailey saw Taleth. She stood waiting for him between a pair of straight, tall pines. Her whiskers were flattened against her cheeks and her teeth were slightly bared. At the sight of her, Bailey felt his blood grow even warmer in his veins. Fennel rushed at Taleth, who stepped back, apprehensive.
“Go,” said Bailey, though every part him wanted to cry out Wait instead. Wait for me.
Fennel slowed and began to pace in front of Taleth. She barked, then jumped at Taleth again, never going so near as to attack her—only to force her back, blocking her from Bailey. Bailey watched, heartbroken, as Taleth padded backward into the trees, away from him. Her dazzling blue cat eyes met his own, and he felt a tug, as strong as if he had a rope tied around his chest, pulling him to the woods. Then she broke the gaze, and sauntered into the shadows. Fennel stayed sitting on a snow-dusted rock. She gazed at him with unblinking eyes.
“Walker, what are you doing?” Taylor ran up behind him. “Looking for ghosts again? You missed the end of the match!”
The scrimmage had ended in a tie, with the final Gold and Blue Sneaks getting eliminated at exactly the same moment—a record, Coach Banter said, amused. Bailey shook hands with his fellow players, and Viviana finally left her seat as the players congratulated Phi on her daring tackle. He watched as Graves and Finch led their illustrious visitor down the steep steps of the Scavage stands, and he could not be sure, from where he stood, whether she was watching him in return.
GWEN’S JOURNEY TO THE Gray City took several days, by way of the icy back roads. The motorbike was clunky and slow to start, but it was better than making the journey on foot in the snow. She’d made many stops to assess whether she was being followed. It had been a stressful ride—owls circled nervously overhead, since they could feel the Dominae’s presence growing stronger as they got closer to the city.
By the time Gwen reached the outskirts of the Gray City, several frightened owls had peeled off and flown back toward the woods. Gwen felt like a pauper again, her coat soaked, torn, and dirty. She’d lived as a pickpocket in the Gudgeons, the nastiest area of the city, before she’d been apprenticed to the Elder. Now she felt just as bedraggled as she had then. She parked Tremelo’s motorbike in a hidden alcove near the dockside marketplace where she used to steal pocket watches. Knowing the thieves who populated those alleyways, the risk that the bike would be stolen before she returned was high. But she couldn’t ride it through the bumpy streets and cobblestone steps of the Gudgeons withou
t attracting attention. She slipped her knife into her right boot, and tied the longbow and arrows to the motorbike. She wheeled the bike behind a pile of garbage bags, hoping that no one would come along to collect them.
She’d received a letter from Digby Barnes just after the Elder’s death, telling her in coded terms how to find him and the RATS. We’ve had to get a little cat to help find the vermin, the note had said. It might have seemed harmless to any other eyes, but to Gwen and Tremelo it had been a clear hint at how to find the RATS. Her tail twitches quite smartly, especially when she plays in the old papers. Neither Digby nor the other RATS knew that the Elder had been killed—and more important, they didn’t know Tremelo was the True King. Gwen was eager to tell the RATS the news. Would they believe her? Would they fight for Tremelo, the man they only knew as the myrgwood-smoking son of their former leader, the Loon? There was only one way to find out.
Gwen began her search in the market, where the walls were thick with dated political posters and flyers: “old papers.” Once, the market had been teeming with merchants and vendors, but now many of the shops surrounding it were shuttered and closed, abandoned by people who had fled the city. The only shop that remained was a bakery. In its front window sat a heaping basket of raisin bread, fogging up the glass with its oven-fresh warmth. Gwen’s stomach grumbled as she gazed through the window. She hadn’t realized how hungry she was—she had grabbed everything she owned the night before in the tree house, but she’d already eaten the tarts Phi had brought from the Fairmount dining hall.
“What do you want? Get away from there!” An angry woman with a flour-spattered apron stood in the doorway of the bakery. “Unless you’re buying, bark off!”
“I—I’m sorry,” Gwen sputtered, backing quickly away. But she wasn’t watching where she was going, and she tripped over someone’s foot. That someone glared down at her.
“Disrupting the peace, are you?” grunted the man who stood over her. “Can’t have that.” He didn’t wear the uniform of a kingdom guard, the officers who’d kept order under Parliament’s regime. Instead, he wore plainclothes, and a wide red sash that crossed his middle. Gwen couldn’t be certain who he worked for—but she was willing to bet that he was Dominae.
The baker woman disappeared, slamming the door behind her.
The man looked at Gwen’s muddy traveling boots, and the rucksack on her shoulders.
“Where you coming from?” he asked.
Gwen heard a growl by the man’s knees, coming from a skinny black dog with bared teeth, tethered to the man by a long chain.
“Who wants to know?” she asked him.
He grinned at her.
“This is the Dominae’s city now. It’s our job to know everyone’s comings and goings.”
Gwen heard a jittery hoot from above her—three owls watched her, clustered together on a window ledge.
“I…” She struggled to think of a story. “I’m going to visit my uncle,” she said. “He’s…been ill.”
One of the owls hopped down from the windowsill and came closer to Gwen. Don’t, she tried to tell it. Can’t you see you’re in danger? Gwen pushed herself up to stand and dusted off her pants.
“And by the looks of you, you crossed some nasty terrain to get there. I find that very sweet. And very interesting.” He winked at her, a gesture that was not at all comforting. Then he snapped his fingers.
The dog bolted on its chain at the man’s command, its teeth flashing. It leapt on the poor owl. Gwen cried out; she felt the owl’s fear behind her own eyes, and a wrenching pain in her side.
The man snapped his fingers again, and the dog let go of the frightened owl and trotted back to its kin.
“Since you’re new here, let that be a lesson to you,” laughed the man. He sauntered away down the market street.
Gwen leaned back against the stone wall. The pain ebbed.
“I’m sorry,” she said to the little owl. Its wing was clearly broken, and it had a bite on the side of its head. It hopped away. “Maybe I can help you,” Gwen called after it. But it was no use. The other owls flew away, hooting sadly. They knew it hadn’t been her fault, she could sense that. But they also knew that being around her meant being in danger. This is what Dominance does, Gwen thought mournfully. It eats away at the bond until it’s not just your own that’s broken—it’s everyone’s.
She limped toward an alley wall where the layers of outdated posters were thick. It didn’t take her long to find a white chalk drawing of a cat, no bigger than her hand, on an old poster supporting Parliament’s tax on fish. The tail of the cat in the drawing was crooked, pointing to the end of the alley. She walked in that direction, looking out for more white cats along the way. At the end of the alley, she saw one drawn on a flyer for Viviana herself, its tail pointing in the opposite direction of its head, to a curving stone stair behind a tenement building.
Gwen followed the signs, hugging the stone walls along the empty Gudgeons streets—only a few citizens, as bedraggled as she was, hurried past. Finally, Gwen found a drawing of a white cat curled up sleeping on an advertisement for a long-past concert. The advert was pasted onto a sagging wooden house the length of half a city block, with a sign over the door that said THE ALLEY CAT. She knocked anxiously. No one answered, but she could hear voices inside. She knocked again, and was sure that she saw someone looking at her from behind the shutters of a window on the main floor.
Through the door, Gwen heard a muffled voice.
“Did they have fruit at the market?” the voice asked.
Confused, Gwen stepped back. It was either a mistake, or the RATS were testing her. Digby hadn’t said anything in his cable about a password or secret question—but then, his message had been so vague, she wasn’t sure. It was best, she decided, to simply be honest.
“I don’t know,” she began. “But Digby Barnes would know who I am, and maybe he could help me…find the fruit?”
“No fruit, no admittance,” the voice said.
“Wait, please,” Gwen asked, her voice shaking. “I don’t know the answer to your question, but I want to help—I have some news—not from the market, but from—”
“Not interested!” the voice said.
“Please just tell Digby I’m here!” Gwen pleaded, but she received no answer.
She refused to be shut out, not after everything she’d been through. She began pounding on the door, hardly caring if anyone else heard. Luckily, the street was shuttered and barred. Everyone was afraid, just like her.
Finally, the door opened. Someone grabbed her arm, and pulled her forcefully inside.
“You trying to wake the dead?” a woman said as the door shut behind her. “Who are you? What do you want here?”
All around the room, mistrustful eyes worked her over. She didn’t recognize anyone from the previous fall, when she’d hid with the RATS and the Elder in The White Tiger bar or the underground tunnels below the city.
“Please, I’ve come from Fairmount. I’m looking for Digby,” she said, trying not to let her voice tremble.
“That’s right, you are!” bellowed a familiar voice. Digby Barnes, the massive bartender from The White Tiger pub, pushed his way through the crowd toward her. He put a meaty hand on her shoulder and squeezed it reassuringly.
“All, this here’s Gwen, and she’s the Elder’s main girl,” Digby said, turning to the room.
“What if someone followed her here?” asked one of the onlookers, a woman with a scratchy voice and dirty apron. “How do we know she hasn’t brought them right to our door?”
“There was no one else outside,” Gwen said quietly.
“And they’d have taken her off straightaway,” interjected Digby. “She’s smarter than that. Now, she gets whatever she needs, no questions.”
“Thank you,” Gwen said in little more than a whisper. “Can I have something to eat?”
A few minutes later, she was bundled in an armchair, with a bowl of hot soup in her hands and a blanket aro
und her shoulders. The citizens of the Alley Cat had warmed to her after Digby’s welcome, especially when she’d recounted the run-in with the Dominae guard.
“They’re all over the place, like cockroaches,” Digby said. “Viviana set them up just before the Midwinter holiday, in the name of ‘public safety.’ Public bullies is what they are.”
“How have you been getting on here, with them around?” she asked. “Are they spying for her?”
Digby laughed.
“You have to have a brain before you can report intelligence, don’t you? No, they’re just the lowest rung on Viviana’s ladder. Give the nastiest bunch the easiest job to do, and make them think they’re important. Their only job is to remind everyone that Viviana’s taken power.”
Gwen thought about the way the man had just snapped his fingers to make the dog attack, and shuddered.
“Still, can’t be too careful. We’ve had to keep moving each week to stay ahead of them. Someone’s always having to go ’round and change the tails on our little drawin’s. But we want to hear about you, lass,” said Digby. “And the Elder. Did you make it to Fairmount? What did Tremelo have to say for himself?”
Gwen’s heart began beating wildly, something she hadn’t expected. She took a deep breath.
“The Elder is dead,” she said.
It was the first time she’d had to say those words out loud. They sounded so final, so horrible, coming out of her mouth that she wanted to take them back and apologize. But it was the truth. He’d been a link between the RATS and the old king who they loved. What’s more, he had been the only person in the world who cared for Gwen herself. And he was gone.
She heard a gasp and many whispers from the RATS assembled in the room after she spoke. Digby’s ruddy face went pale, and he looked down at his hands. For a long moment, everyone was silent. Then:
“How did it happen? Was it the Dominae?” asked the old woman in the dirty apron.
