Scar Night Page 0,25

you can fight like that, untempered—”

“I had no choice! They don’t trust me, won’t accept me. I had to give them grounds to wait for your consent. If you don’t sign those papers, they’ll get rid of me, kick me out—or worse.” She paused, looked hard at her brother, and a sudden realization came to her. “That’s what you want, isn’t it? You want them to boot me out. You want me to fail.”

“I want to protect you,” he muttered.

“You callous bastard.”

“Callous?” Mark’s face reddened. “That’s marvellous, coming from you. How many Shetties did you clear from Hollowhill?”

Trust Mark to use a word like clear . His killing was done from an airship, from a distance. Whole tribes of Heshette were cleared by poison deployment. Men, women, and children were cleared by judicious, precise, carefully managed, cost-effective use of incendiaries. Mark was never close enough to hear them cry or beg. He never saw them bleed or foul themselves. They were simply cleared —never killed, never murdered . Her hand tightened on one of the bamboo tubes at her belt, then she relaxed it. She took a deep breath. “Please,” she said quietly, “sign the papers. Let them temper me. I can’t live like this any more. I can’t do the things they want me to do.”

“No, Rachel.”

“Then get out. I want to be alone.”

“You’re always alone . Do you hate company so much?”

Did she? The monks didn’t exactly forbid relationships. It was never that simple. They just kept her down here, training, focusing, or had her moving from one dark part of the world to the next. She remembered the very first time she’d held a sword, how she’d laughed, spinning with it like a dancer while her father looked on, grinning. That had been one of the last times she’d laughed. But she’d danced with it again: in Hollowhill and the Shale Forest, in Heshette caves and gin dens and Sandport brothels, until the sword had become as much a part of her as faith was to the tempered. She’d danced a hundred times before they’d assigned her to the rooftops, to Carnival. You aren’t ready, they’d warned. But it won’t make any difference .

She squinted up at the painfully blue sky beyond the foundation chains. Her eyes were not accustomed to the daylight, for to hunt at night, she’d had to live at night and train in darkness. For four years, she’d woken after dusk, and gone to sleep before the dawn.

“Sypes wants you to stay here,” Mark said. “To look after that sparrow of his.”

“Dill.”

On the window ledge below, the rook pattered along, ripped up a scrap of moss, then took off. Rachel watched it soar toward the sunlit city. The Church had hobbled Dill as surely as Mark had hobbled her. After Gaine, the temple had forbidden its archons to fly. With the Heshette war quashed and the introduction of airships, Battle-archons were no longer required. Or so the Presbyter claimed. Rachel suspected there was more to it than that. Gaine’s older brother, Sewender, had died young, without heirs, and Gaine, who under the circumstances should have taken several wives, had married only once. Sypes, to the horror of the clergy, had not pressed him to marry again. Now that an unknown bowman had killed Gaine, the bloodline had again been reduced to a solitary angel. And what an angel. As Gaine, for all his notoriety, had been but a shade of his ancestors, so Dill, poor awkward Dill, was a mere shade of his father. Callis’s blood had evidently thinned. No wonder Sypes kept him locked out of sight in that tower.

The Church had enemies everywhere. With Deepgate said to be full of Heshette spies, the Presbyter strived to hold on to his community’s last tangible link to god. This interdict, this cruel, immutable law, had been impressed on Dill since he’d been old enough to fly.

Or to fly away?

Sypes had been foolish. Chaining a person would only make him more determined to break free.

“You’ll enjoy that, though,” Mark said. “You like animals, don’t you?”

“Are you trying to annoy me? Is that what you’re doing here?”

“Fine!” He slammed his hands together. “I’m going. I’ll leave you to your knives and bolts and your dark little cell. Just make sure you get yourself to the Sanctum for the ceremony.”

He hesitated at the door. “You’re not going to wear that stuff, are you?”

Rachel didn’t reply. She was thinking about Dill. By hobbling him, had the temple