“Esme?”
“She left, with her baby, and took two of the young ones. She said we had to go back or be damned. But no one wanted to go with her. She left and said she was going back to the holy ground, to the sacred valley. And Jerome left, too. He took things from the place we’re living, and went away. He said I could go with him, but I didn’t want to go with him. It’s good to be warm and to have shoes, and the clothes that don’t scratch, and to eat the pizza and drink the ale. Before is blurred and hard and I was afraid and hungry and cold.”
“Well.” Duncan put another slice of pizza on her plate. “Now starts now.”
“Now starts now,” she echoed, and smiled at him.
She ate the second slice, and since ginger ale had to be rationed, Tonia gave her juice for the next round.
“I’m very thankful for the food and drink. I need to go back. They’ll worry and wonder.” She stood, hesitated. “If I don’t go with Clarence and Miranda to the women, and stay with Mina and her baby, will you still talk to me?”
“Sure we will. We’ll see you in school, and you can hang out with us.”
“I don’t know how to go to school.”
“Don’t worry, you’ll catch on. I’ll walk you out.”
Petra started out with Tonia, then stopped, turned back to Duncan. “It’s hard to talk to those I don’t know. It’s good, but it’s hard. You killed the men with your sword and your curse—your gift,” she corrected quickly as color rose up to her cheeks. “I know they would have taken my life. We’re taught the divine demands we never lift a hand to another, never take up a weapon, even when our life will be taken, or the life of another. It’s the greatest sin. But I was afraid to die. I was afraid.”
“To stand by and do nothing to help someone else? I’ve been taught that is cowardice, and if it’s not a sin, it’s the greatest weakness.”
“Then you’re not weak.”
He sat, brooding, while Tonia took her out. Brooded a little more when his sister came back. He knew Tonia dealt with the dishes right off, without pushing him to help, because she wanted her hands busy. Her way of brooding, he supposed.
“I could’ve been her,” Tonia said.
“Not in a million years.”
But Tonia shook her head. “She’s about our age, maybe a little younger. It’s hard to tell, but we’re about the same age. If we didn’t have Mom, and if she hadn’t had Jonah and Rachel to help her get all of us out of New York. If they hadn’t met up with Arlys and Chuck and Fred, and …”
“A lot of ifs that didn’t happen.”
“Ifs are about what hasn’t or didn’t. I’m saying I could’ve been taken to a place like that, forced to live like that, had my brain washed—because that’s it, right? Had my brain washed into thinking I was nothing. Just some nothing to be used to make babies and worship some asshole who claimed to talk for some divine bullshit. And I’d have just laid there while some …”
“Fuck’s the word you’re after. Mom’s not here so you can say it. Sick, twisted fuck.”
“Yeah, sick, twisted fuck raped me. Because that’s what it was. And I’d believe that what’s in me is evil, like she does.”
“Here’s where you’re wrong.” He rose then, put the plates she’d washed and dried away. “You’d never be like her because you’re strong and smart and you’d kick that sick, twisted fuck in the nuts before he raped you.”
Because he made her feel better, she offered him a smirk. “I thought I needed you to break hands and faces for me.”
“I didn’t say you needed me to, I said that’s what I’d do. You’d never be like her. Nothing and no one could make you like her. Maybe, and who knows, but maybe if she sticks here, if she lets herself, she’ll be who she’s supposed to be.”
“I’m glad we didn’t save him. That Javier,” Tonia said. “I know I shouldn’t be, and it goes against everything, but I’m glad the PWs dragged him off before we saved him. If we had, if he was here, she wouldn’t have a chance to be anything. None of them would.”
Duncan realized—and realized he should have realized before—the entire conversation with Petra had upset his sister even more than it had him.
“I know there’s this—what’s it called—school of thought? That. And some who go with that believe how things are meant, and fate and destiny and all that crap. I don’t buy it.”
He flicked the theory away. “People make things happen, one way or the other. But if I did buy it, I’d say we weren’t meant to save him. We were meant to save kids like Clarence and Miranda and her.”
Tonia wasn’t quite as sure either way. “Meant or not, that’s what we did.”
“We should tell Rachel—Mom, too, but Rachel because of the doctor deal—about the sex shit.”
“I’m pretty sure somebody as good a doctor as Rachel knows. Especially since one of the kids I loaded, again about our age, was pregnant. Pretty far along, it looked to me.”
“Jesus.”
“But you’re right. We’ll make sure Rachel knows. We could walk over, talk to her now.”
“It’s a girl thing.” And he’d had more than enough girl-thing talk for the day. For the freaking year.
“Girl thing?” said the born feminist, with dripping derision.
“You’re a girl, and since you’re on it,” he added, “it can be a girl thing. Anyway, I’ve got that stupid essay.”
But when he went up to his room, Duncan flopped down on his bed to stare up at the ceiling. He thought of Cass’s breasts. He thought of Petra’s golden hair.
And he thought, as he often did, of the tall, slim girl with the short dark hair and storm cloud eyes.
He didn’t wonder if she was real. He’d seen her in his head, in his dreams too often to believe otherwise.
But he wondered where the hell she was.
CHAPTER TWELVE
By spring Fallon could hold her own with a sword. Mallick knocked her down, disarmed her, and metaphorically beheaded her more often than she liked, but she reminded herself he’d had centuries of practice to her handful of months.
Spring meant planting, and the farm girl found comfort in the familiar. She knew as she worked the earth her family did the same. She didn’t need the math lessons Mallick swamped her with to calculate she’d passed a quarter of her training time.
Mallick schooled her in the basics—math, history, literature, and the practicalities of tactics and strategies and mapping. When he expanded her lessons into engineering and mechanics, she took some pride at his surprise over what she already knew.
She had, after all, helped her father build, had learned how engines worked, how to repair them, even build them from scavenged parts.
He pushed her further and harder on magicks than her mother had done, and this she welcomed. The more she knew, the more she opened, the brighter the beat inside her.
And still the crystal he’d given her when she was a baby remained clouded.
Her archery improved—partly from her innate desire to match Mick’s skill, or even outpace it.
As the air warmed and the leaves greened, Mallick allowed her to visit the elf camp, the faerie bowers, the shifter den. She took gifts of food and charms and healing balms, considered the visits a kind of reward for her progress, a break from tasks and studies.
But she also learned, as Mallick intended, of other cultures, rites, beliefs, histories. Though she liked talking to the girls now and then, she found herself more drawn to the boys, with their contests and races, or to the elders who spoke of hunts and battles.
Once when she ran the woods with the young elves, practicing her tree scaling, a young elf, no older than Ethan, fell when a branch cracked beneath her.
She landed hard, her right arm cocked beneath her. Dazed, she whimpered, but when the others ran to her and turned her, she screamed in pain.
“Bagger, get her mom,” Mick ordered. “Fast! I think her arm’s broken. It’s okay, Twila. It’s going to be okay.” He smoothed back her dense black hair from a face gone pasty under brown skin. Blood trickled from scrapes on her forehead and cheekbone.