I ignored her and kicked my horse forward. Piper rode after me, shouting. But I wasn’t listening to him. The music in my head—I knew what it was: the refuge song. The closer I got to the swinging man, the more the music was out of tune—the notes of the melody were wrong, as if played on slackened strings.
It was Leonard who had been hanged. His guitar had been smashed and then the strap looped back over his head. The arm of the guitar made a crooked scarecrow out of him. When the wind spun him, I could see his hands tied behind his back. Some of the fingers stuck out at strange angles. I wasn’t sure whether they’d been broken in the struggle, or in torture, or whether it was just his body’s stiffening. I didn’t want to know.
Piper and Zoe flanked me, looking up at Leonard as the wind turned his face away.
It wasn’t even Leonard’s broken body that I mourned—it was all those tunes still inside him. All those words still to be sung.
“We need to take him down,” I said.
“It’s not safe,” said Piper. “There are Council soldiers about. We need to leave the patrol and get out of here.”
I ignored him, dismounting and looping my reins around a low branch so I could set to work untying Leonard’s hands. The twine was fastened tightly, the fibers rasping against one another as I tried to work the knots loose. The squeaking sound of it set my teeth on edge in a way that the touch of Leonard’s cold flesh didn’t.
“Can you take his body back to New Hobart, bury it properly?” I called up to Crispin, who was still surveying the road to the west.
He shook his head. “They’ve enough bodies to deal with. This is a patrol, not a grave-digging service. I’ll send a man to the town to report, and two to scout the area. The rest of us need to finish the patrol.”
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll bury him myself.”
“We don’t have time for this,” hissed Zoe. I ignored her and kept on at the twine holding Leonard’s hands behind his back.
When they were freed, Leonard’s hands didn’t fall to his sides but stayed bent behind his back, stiffened or frozen into place.
I couldn’t reach the rope from which he hung. I jumped a few times, swiping at the rope with my dagger, but all I succeeded in doing was startling my horse, and setting Leonard’s body spinning.
“It’d be quicker if you helped me,” I said to Piper, “instead of just watching.”
“There’s no time to dig a proper grave,” he said. “We’ll take him down, but then we have to move.”
“Fine,” I said, out of breath.
We did our best. From his saddle, Piper cut the rope while I held Leonard’s body up, then together we lowered him to the ground, his weight unleashing fresh pains from my half-healed arm. Zoe held Piper’s horse when he dismounted and lifted the guitar from Leonard’s neck. The wood creaked, splinters snapping. I leaned over him and tried to loosen the noose that clutched at his neck. I slit the rope; the flesh beneath it was dark purple, and didn’t spring back, instead preserving the rope’s indentations.
Together we carried him to the ditch at the side of the road. When we lowered him to the ground, his body bent at the waist with a creaking sound. Every minute on that road was a risk, and there was no time to bury him properly, with our bare hands, and in the frozen earth. In the end I cut a small section from my blanket and laid it over his face, grateful that he had no eyes to close. We were about to remount when I ran back to the tree and retrieved the smashed guitar from where Piper had let it drop. I gathered the fragments and laid them next to Leonard in the ditch.
Ω
We headed north with Crispin and two of his soldiers, as they continued their circuit around the town, but once we were half a mile from the road Piper turned his horse west, and Zoe and I peeled off to follow him. The others didn’t even slow their horses, though Crispin looked back and raised a hand. “Go safely,” he said. Piper raised his hand, too.
We rode far, and fast. In the snow and the darkness, it felt like we were traveling blind, and I thought of Leonard, and his perpetually dark world. Twice my horse almost lost its footing in the snow. Once I sensed people not far to the north of us, and we sheltered in a gully, glad of the snowfall that covered our tracks as the mounted men rode along the ridge above us.
We headed west until it was light enough to negotiate the rocky gullies that lay to the north. By noon, we were approaching the foothills of the Spine Mountains. The snow that we’d been thankful for earlier was now setting as a sheet of ice on the rocks. The horses, already tired, were shying and hesitant; several times we had to dismount and lead them.
As we rode, I kept thinking of what Piper had said: Lucia was good with weather. It was the first time he’d willingly raised the subject of the dead seer. Usually, he and Zoe edged around Lucia’s name as though it were a thornbush. When Piper had spoken of her, back in the tithe collector’s office, Zoe had snapped at him. I remembered the loaded glances he and Zoe exchanged, whenever Lucia was mentioned. When Xander had asked after Lucia, Zoe had stiffened, while Piper’s voice had been thick with grief. She’s gone, he’d said.
It was like the Ark: it had been there the whole time, beneath the surface. And now I understood it, it changed everything. Now that I’d realized how Piper had felt about Lucia, so many things fell into place. How quickly he’d warmed to me on the island. His willingness to free me, against the will of the Assembly. It wasn’t me who he’d warmed to: it was his memories of Lucia.
It explained, too, so much about Zoe. Her hostility to me, and her frustration with my visions. Even with Xander, she had been silent and brittle in the face of his brokenness.
All their lives it had been just the two of them: Zoe and Piper. I knew that bond, because I’d lived it myself, with Zach, before we were split. How much more intense the bond must have been for Zoe and Piper, who had chosen to stay together, even after he’d been branded and sent away. For Zoe, especially, who had made that choice, leaving her parents, and the ease of an Alpha life, to follow him. Choosing him, even though it meant a lifetime as a fugitive. And then he’d left her. He’d not only gone to the island, where she could never follow, but had also found a closer bond with somebody else. I understood how Zoe might still feel unmoored by this. I knew from experience that there were different kinds of intimacy, no less binding than the kind shared by lovers. I remembered Zoe’s face when I’d come across her at the spring, listening to the bards’ music with her eyes closed. It was the only time I’d caught her looking so unguarded. Her face had been turned upward, showing her loneliness to the sky. Before she’d snapped at me and stormed away, she’d told me about how she and Piper used to sneak out together, as children, to hear a bard play.
When the dark came, we stopped in a copse through which a stream ran, frozen at the edges. We tethered the horses downstream and managed to get a fire started, though winter had stripped the trees and they gave little cover from the snow.
I waited until we’d eaten before I broached the subject. Zoe was sitting beside me, reaching her gloved hands so close to the fire that I could smell the singed wool. Piper sat with his back to us, looking out between the trees.
“I know what it’s like to be close to your twin,” I said to Zoe. “And I know you two are closest of all, sticking together the way you did.”
“What are you going on about?” She poked the fire with a long stick. Sparks darted upward and were snuffed out by the darkness.
“I understand that it wasn’t easy for you,” I went on. “How the two of you must always have depended on each other.”
“Is there a point to this little monologue?” She still grasped the stick. The end had caught fire, and she held it upright, like a torch.
“I understand, now, about Lucia.”
She raised an eyebrow. Piper had turned so quickly that the knives on his belt clattered. I waited. The words I was about to speak were stones,
and I tested their weight before I dropped them into the pool.
“You’re jealous,” I said to Zoe. “Because Piper loved her. You didn’t want to share him then, and you don’t want to share him now. Piper and I aren’t even lovers, but having another seer around is too much for you, isn’t it? That’s why you always snap at me, always criticize me.”
“Cass,” said Piper, his voice measured as he stood and stepped toward us. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Zoe had dropped the flaming stick. It glowed, half an inch from my foot. Piper bent and tossed it back onto the fire.
I’d thought that Zoe might hit me, but she just shook her head slowly. “You think you understand my life? You think you understand me and Piper? Screaming about the blast in your sleep doesn’t give you any special insights.” She leaned closer, speaking very slowly and clearly. “You’re pathetic. You think you’re so wise, and so special, so much better than Xander and Lucia. I wish you’d hurry up and lose your mind entirely. You’re harder to be around than Xander—at least he doesn’t think he’s special, and he shuts up sometimes.”
I had to raise my voice to compete with the wind. “Did you hate Lucia as much as you hate me?” I asked. “I bet you were glad when she died. Then you could have your precious Piper to yourself.”
Her hand moved toward her belt, and I wondered whether she would throw a knife, and whether Piper would defend me. If it came to blades and blows, who would he choose?
She turned her back on me and walked away. I watched her go until the night claimed her, and I could see nothing but the fire’s light thrown against the tree trunks.
Piper took a few steps, too, as if to follow her.
“I’m sorry,” I called after him. “Not sorry about what I said to her. She’s had it coming for months. But I’m sorry for you.” I paused. “I know how hard it is. I’m sorry that you lost Lucia.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.
“I lost Kip,” I said. “If you’d told me about Lucia, I would have understood. You act like you want us to be close, but you didn’t even tell me about her. You had to wait for me to work it out.”
Of all the responses I might have expected, his was the last. He looked at me, for a long moment, and then laughed. He arched his head back, his Adam’s apple bobbing with each gasp of laughter.
I didn’t know how to respond. Was he mocking Kip? Mocking the comparison I’d drawn, between my loss and his? His laughter echoed back at us from the tree trunks and the fire, until even the flames seemed to be laughing at me.
Finally he lowered his head again, and exhaled deeply.
“I shouldn’t laugh,” he said, wiping his face with his hand. “But there’s not been much to laugh about for a while.”
“And this is funny to you, is it? Kip and Lucia are dead.”
“I know.” The creases around his eyes disappeared when he stopped smiling. “And it’s not funny. But it’s not what you think.”
“Then tell me. Tell me what it is.”
“I can’t speak for Zoe,” he said. “You know what she’s like.”
“Apparently not,” I said, my voice rising again. “Apparently I’m so wrong about everything.”
“I know you meant no harm. But you’ll need to make this right with her.”
He walked to the lookout spot, leaving me alone with the fire.
Ω
We’d rigged a canvas sheet against a tree trunk, to keep the snow off. I crawled into the space beneath, though I didn’t sleep until Zoe came back, after midnight. She slipped, unspeaking, into the cramped space beside me. I felt her shivering as she fell asleep.
She dreamed of the sea. We’d slept apart for weeks, while I was in the holding house; now we had no choice but to sleep close, and I shared again her dreams of the sea, reliable as tides. Perhaps that was what made me realize my mistake. When Piper shook my shoulder to wake me for my lookout shift, I understood the truth about Lucia.
chapter 30
Sitting at the lookout post, while Piper and Zoe slept, I traced each clue that I’d missed, or misinterpreted.
I thought of how Zoe knew how to deal with my visions, better than Piper. She can’t talk yet, she’d said to him, when he tried to badger me about what I’d seen. She’ll stop carrying on in a minute. I’d registered it only as dismissiveness. I hadn’t recognized the confident familiarity of someone who’d seen this many times. Someone who’d passed many nights with a seer.
Her words to me: You’re not the first seer.
Her reluctance to sail, and her clenched hands on the railing of the boat when we’d left the Sunken Shore.
I had taunted her: I bet you were glad when Lucia died. But it was the bones of her own lover that Zoe was searching for every night, when she slept.
I looked over my shoulder to where Piper and Zoe lay, sleeping. The canvas above them was sagging with the weight of snow. They slept back-to-back, just as they’d fought in the battle. In the cold, with the blanket pulled high around their necks, they looked like one creature with two heads.
I was always getting things wrong. I was more blind than Leonard. I’d been wrong about the Confessor, thinking that it was me she was hunting, instead of Kip. I’d been wrong about Zoe’s dreams, and about Lucia. Getting the visions was one thing, but interpreting them was another. My visions had led me to the island, but our presence had led the Confessor there, too. My visions had showed me the silo, and allowed us to destroy the database—but that had cost Kip his life. My visions had shown me so much, and I’d understood so little.
I didn’t need to wake Zoe for her shift—she woke herself, as she usually did, and crawled from the shelter to stand behind where I sat at the lookout spot. It was still dark. Downstream, one of the horses gave a small whinny.
“Go to sleep,” she said. “There’s hours yet until dawn.”
“It was you, wasn’t it,” I said. It wasn’t a question. “You loved Lucia.”
It was too dark to see her face clearly, but I could see the white clouds of her breath.
“We loved each other,” she said.
It was strange to hear her talk of love. Zoe of the rolled eyes and the shrugs. Of the poised knives.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ve been an idiot.”
“It’s not the first time. I doubt it’ll be the last.” There was no spite in her voice, just tiredness.
“I don’t know why I didn’t realize,” I said.
“I do,” she said. “Because I’m a woman. Because I’m an Alpha, and she was an Omega. Because although you like to think you’re so far above the assumptions and prejudices of the rest of the world, it turns out you’re not so different from them after all.”
I had nothing to rebut her accusation. It settled on me like ash.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked eventually.
“It was mine.” She paused. A glimpse of her eyes, white in the dark, as she looked at me, and away again. “I feel like there’s so little that’s left of her. I don’t want to share it around.”
I thought of how I had been reluctant to speak about Kip. There’d been times that I’d felt as though his name were a relic—it was all that I had left of him, now, and it might be worn out if I used it too much.
“When you heard the bards’ music, back at the spring that day, and told me about the bard you and Piper used to listen to when you were kids. I thought it was Piper you were thinking of.”
She snorted. “I’d always remembered that bard. When I first met Lucia, that’s who she reminded me of. They both had beautiful hands.” She gave a small laugh. “And Lucia used to sing, too. She was always humming away to herself in the mornings, when she brushed her hair.”
She was quiet for a while.
“I wish you’d told me,” I said. “I would have un
derstood.”
“I don’t need your understanding.”
“Maybe I could’ve used yours,” I said.
She shrugged. “My relationship with Lucia didn’t exist just to teach you a lesson about grief. She didn’t die just so you and I could bond over our sob stories.”
She sat beside me on the log and leaned her elbows on her knees. I could see her hands, the lighter skin of her fingertips, five pale points in the night as she reached to push her hair back from her face.
“I was used to not speaking about her, anyway. We had to be careful all the time. Working for the resistance, the last thing we needed was any more attention. An Alpha and Omega relationship is a whipping offense, even without it being between two women. All that crap about Alphas having an obligation to breed.” She snorted. “Like that would have made a difference with me. As if I’d otherwise have found some nice Alpha guy and started pumping out babies.” The chilled air seemed to absorb her laugh.
“It was hard for her, on the island. You know what people are like about seers at the best of times—always a bit suspicious, standoffish. Then they found out about the two of us being together. After that, they just cut Lucia out.” Her hands tightened into fists. “It didn’t matter to them that I’d been working for them for years. That I’d done more for the resistance than most of them ever had. Or that Lucia was risking her life working for them, too. They stopped speaking to her. They were happy enough to keep benefiting from her visions, and the work she did. But they wouldn’t even talk to her. They forced her out of the house she’d lived in. They called her a traitor, an Alpha-lover.
“Piper did his best for her—found her somewhere to stay in the fort, and tried to tackle the worst of them about what they were doing. But he had the resistance to run. There was only so much he could do. That’s when her mind started to go. I know it was the visions that did it, really, but she’d been able to manage them better, when she had friends—people to talk to. Once they left her on her own, she didn’t have anything except the visions.”
The Refuge Song Page 28
