Trial by Fire

“Trying to get back to where he was. He’s been at it for months.” Tristan shivered, then flipped a cushion on one of the two pieces of deck furniture before sitting.

This area wasn’t really for recreation. Most of the roof was covered in potted plants, long dead now that the year was so deep into autumn. All of the roofs, terraces, and windowsills in this city functioned as growing space for edible plants. People grew what vegetables they could for themselves, and the best apartments—like Rowan’s—had rooftop gardens. Few farms existed outside the walls of Salem, and those that did were surrounded by high walls and used mostly as pasture for horses and oxen or for luxury meat sources like cows, chickens and pigs. They were called luxury meats because they came from entire animals that had lived and breathed, and not been grown one part at a time down in the Stacks.

Tristan had explained the Stacks to Lily, and since then they had occupied a particularly eerie place in her psyche. The Stacks were subterranean caves where the witches grew wearhyde on something they called skinlooms. If that wasn’t creepy enough, it was also where they grew cuts of all kinds of meat, like chicken breast without the chicken, and pork loin without the pig, inside things called wombcombs. Wombcombs were shaped like giant honeycombs, but inside the hexagonal cells they grew either cuts of meat or the tame Woven who still protected the city.

Even the thought of the Stacks gave Lily the creeps, and if she hadn’t been vegan before coming to this world, she was pretty sure she would have converted once she got here. Tristan and Rowan had both worked in the Stacks alongside Lillian, and Tristan’s description of the place had not made the thought of eating meat appealing in any way. However, he had stressed how important the Stacks were for the survival of the city. Rowan had told her that the Coven barely broke even on the Stacks.

The Coven purposely tried to keep all of the basic needs services that they offered relatively inexpensive and accessible to all citizens. The Coven owned most of the greentowers and greenhouses in the city. They paid the farmers who worked them good wages, and they kept the price of food low, as they kept the price of werehyde low. Hungry and cold people riot, which was something the Coven had learned to avoid at all costs inside a walled city that was surrounded by bloodthirsty monsters.

Most importantly of all, clean water and basic health care were completely free to all citizens. The last thing the Coven wanted was an outbreak of cholera or a crippling infectious disease inside such a closed space. Food, clothes, and health care: This was how the Coven had won the love of the people.

It was a system that kept the peace, refined over two centuries of confinement inside the thirteen walled cities, but of course there were still malcontents and rabble-rousers. This is where the Coven really showed their power. They had the right to banish anyone who disturbed the peace, and banishment meant a loss of citizenship from all thirteen cities. If you crossed any one of the thirteen Covens who ruled the Thirteen Cities, you found yourself outside the walls with the Woven.

Of the banished, only the useful, the honest, and the strong were invited to join Outlander tribes. Once solidly Native American, after two hundred years of assimilating all the different races banished from the cities, the Outlanders weren’t any one particular race anymore, but a blend that was unknown in Lily’s world. Only the lucky among the banished made it into a tribe, while the vast majority got mangled by the Woven on their first night outside the wall. Fear kept the people from rioting. Fear, affordable food, clothes, and health care seemed to be enough for the general populace to tolerate Lillian’s hangings.