eyes that followed us, and some people that shouted joy and luck to me, but we was moving too fast to exchange more than a word. Fer and Mardew didn’t even give me that much: just marched at my left hand and my right hand like the angel and the devil did for Dandrake. The Middle and the Span was so quiet and so still, our footsteps come back to us from all the walls. We sounded like an army.
We got to the mill and went inside, for though the workshop was kept locked the door of our house was only ever on a latch. “I can keep a hold of that tech for you,” Mardew said, “while you grab your stuff.” Them being the first words he said to me since we left the gather-ground.
“No, thanks,” I said. “I’ll keep it by me.”
“It’s best if you give it to him,” Fer says to me. “For safekeeping.” She put her hand on the bolt gun that she was wearing in the holster across her shoulder to make it clear she meant to be obeyed. Mardew done likewise, touching the cutter where it sit on his belt. He must of grabbed it out of Veso Shepherd’s hands right after Haijon said his promises, though I didn’t see him do it.
It seemed like I hadn’t got any choosing. But still my thoughts rebelled at handing Monono over into Mardew Vennastin’s hand. I stood there, looking from one of them to the other, until finally Fer run out of patience. “It’s your tech,” she said. “Nobody’s going to steal it from you. But it’s valuable and it’s dangerous, and you’re not to be trusted running around with it until we figure out what it can do.”
You seen that already, I thought, but I had took this as far as I could. With a heavy heart, I drawed the DreamSleeve out of my belt and give it to Mardew.
“How do you get it to work?” he asked me.
“Hush, Mardew,” Fer said. “That’s not a thing to be talked about here.” I wasn’t meaning to tell him in any case, but Fer coming in so fast on my side, as I thought, surprised me. Then I thought about what Ursala had said. The way the tech could be waked, by a word or a switch or what Monono called an axes code, was the Vennastins’ biggest secret. They was used to holding their tongues on that score.
“Go on,” Fer said to me. “Get what you need. We’ll wait here.”
Well, it was a five minutes’ task, or less than that. Outside of what I was already wearing, there was maybe a dozen things to gather up. I wrapped them in the sheet from my bed, and as I did it my stomach give a kind of a stretch and a heave. I seen for the first time, deadly clear, what I had done. This was my home that I was leaving. My room. My family. My life from when I was born right up to that moment. That thin, sharp moment, as it felt to me then: as though I’d climbed up onto the blade of a knife and was balanced there, puzzled whether to go forward or back but feeling the blade bite into my feet and knowing I had got to jump.
“Are you done?” Mardew said. He had come up the stairs and was standing in the doorway of my room.
“Yeah,” I said, my heart as heavy as a stone. “I guess I am.”
“Then let’s get out of this stinkhole.”
I followed him downstairs again. Fer was holding the door open. I stepped out and she shut it behind us.
We walked the long way around, not by the Span but by the Yard. That took us to the gather-ground by the gate side, and first of all to the west wall of Rampart Hold. I could hear the singing and the dancing, but I couldn’t see nobody.
“Might as well drop them things off inside the Hold,” Fer said. “You don’t want to be holding onto an old bedsheet while you’re at the feast.”
There was a side door I had never seen opened before. She unlocked it with a key she took from off her belt. Mardew was standing between me and the angle of the house. He had got the cutter on his hand now, and the bar of it was shining bright. If I decided to make a run for it, he could bring