Page 49 of The Darkening (The Darkening)

“There was Iravai the Sly.”

“Yeah sure, if fairy tales count.”

“The thing I don’t understand is where will they get the food?”

They’ll hold the Trials in a grand arena in the third ring, and the streets will fill with festivities and food. Half the city will show up just to eat. I remember kids bringing back birds made of sugar—free treats, courtesy of the Regia. It makes me sick, remembering how jealous I’d been of them, and how furious I’d been with Pa for not letting me go.

That’s what it’ll come to. Pa will fight for his life, and the city will watch, entertained.

I get to my feet, ignoring the others. Izamal half stands with me. “It’s just speculation—we don’t know for sure it’ll happen.”

His mouth tells me kind lies, but his eyes are sure.

“I need fresh air,” I say, and push past them, out onto the street.

I head away from the gray lanterns at the market’s entrance, slipping through an alley that lets me out onto an empty street. I aim stormward for no reason other than wanting to be alone.

It’s like I’ve found myself in a dance that’s been going on for decades, and of all the dozens of people dancing, I’m the only one who doesn’t know the steps.

All I want is to get Pa back. Izamal can want to save the fifth. I’m not so noble. I’m selfish. How much more am I supposed to lose?

Pa’s not nice. He’s gruff, and he’s never once told me he’s proud of me. But he held me when I was small, when the stormsurges still made me cry. He did that for every one of the stormtouched who needed it.

How can he deserve being put to death in this way?

I walk on and on.

If I stop, the cold will find me, so I wander through the dimly lit fifth, until the Storm blocks my path. It hangs like a curtain, cutting off the street, slicing houses on either side in two.

A lazy streak of violet lightning zigzags through the black. The Storm is watching me. It knows what’s in me better than I know it myself. It tells me so, but not in words. Faintly, far more faintly than the sound of my breath, come three plucked notes. A sitar.

I step forward.

Something rustles to my right. Huddled together on the front steps of a long-abandoned house, half hidden in shadow, are two kids staring into the Storm. The elder of the two can’t be a day over twelve, a pointy-nosed boy with dark feathers instead of hair, feathers that coat his neck and peek out through the holes of his tank top. He holds the end of a thin rope that snakes into the black of the Storm.

“What have you got there?”

The other urchin, a sniffly red-nosed boy with big puppy eyes and floppy puppy ears, scowls at me. “It’s nothin’ to you, old lady.”

The rope twitches. There’s something, or someone, on the other end. “Who’s in there?”

“Nobody,” the puppy-faced kid growls.

I scowl at the boy holding the rope. “Is he your voice?”

He stares at the ground as the line twitches again. I seize it and pull. The weight at the end of the rope is light, too light to be a child. Whatever it is fights me, but I reel it in quickly.

A little cat pounces out of the Storm, the rope tied around its neck. It seems to pull a little piece of the Storm with it, a small wisp of black cloud wraps around its body like a living coil.

I can’t tell what its curse is. All I know is that it’ll suffer. There’s been enough suffering, all around. I’m tired of it.

I don’t have it in me to watch Pa suffer at Dalca’s hands. So I’ve got to stop it. It’s that simple.

“Why would you do this?” The rope falls from my hands.

The little kid lets out a big sniffle and rubs a fist across his nose, shielding his friend. “None of your business.”

The boy with feathers speaks quietly from behind him. His voice is as delicate as birdsong. “We were just... We wanted her to be like us.”