The Iron Thorn - Caitlin Kittredge [13]
“Work, shirk.” Cecelia giggled. “Get it? Besides, you work too much anyway. Just look at your hair. You’d think you’d never met a brush.”
She tugged me along and we walked down Storm Avenue, the leaves from the oaks swirling around our ankles. The rain stopped as we walked and the sky turned bright. The stone in the houses along Storm sparkled diamond hard.
“This is exciting, huh?” Cecelia trilled, squeezing my arm. I managed to pull away, this time. Cecelia was small, every bit of her round and bouncy from her curls to her patent-leather pumps. She could be excited over everything from a concert to a burning. I was less excitable. Mrs. Fortune would say that was why I was an engineer.
“I suppose,” I said. I didn’t want to be here, out in the cold. I didn’t want to see a person burned. The Proctors would say that made me unpatriotic, but dead flesh and screaming reminded me too much of the madhouse.
I had to read Conrad’s letter. If he was in trouble, if he needed me … The thought that I wouldn’t be quick enough to do any good cut at me and I crossed my arms and tucked my chin against the wind.
“Heretics.” Cecelia pursed her lips, pink like her nails. “Is there anything more disgusting than trafficking in unnatural arts?”
I watched her wet tongue flick out and take off a patch of lipstick. I could think of a few things. “I suppose you could strip the skin off of corpses and wear it, like the springheel jacks down in Old Town,” I said aloud. Cecelia wrinkled up her nose.
“You are so strange, Aoife, I swear. I guess it comes from doing such mannish work in the School of Engines, hmm?”
At least she wouldn’t come out and call me trash, like Marcos. Cecelia regarded herself as refined. I regarded her as an idiot.
“Without the Engine, there wouldn’t be any burnings,” I pointed out. “The Engine creates the steam. The steam is the blood of the city.”
“All glory to the Master Builder,” Cecelia mumbled automatically, unwinding one of her curls between her fingers.
Banishment Square was half full of people, just normal-looking people, some of whom were eating a late lunch from twists of newspaper. The centerpiece of the square, the castigator, was deserted.
“I hope the scum’s accused of something good this time,” Cecelia said. “Not just conjuring or selling magic or fortune-telling.”
Cecelia had a gram of belief under her parroting of the Proctor’s laws. Most of the students did. They wanted to believe that magic could be real, something to be giggled over in secret, like smoking or kissing or wearing a garter belt instead of the ugly, itchy underthings the Academy issued us.
I had learned the day my mother was committed that crimes against the Proctors mattered very little, individually. Belief or disbelief in heretical topics mattered even less. Some of us were just unfortunate. I was supposed to be afraid of the man about to be burned, but I was more afraid of being next.
Two Proctors, their midnight black cowls around their faces, led a skinny man in iron shackles up the steps of the castigator. The brass fixings hissed as escaping steam met the biting air. A third Proctor, his cowl thrown back so that I could see he was just a young, dark-complected man in a black uniform with brass buttons on the chest, followed with a key. The pair of them, Proctor and heretic, could have been anyone. They could have been my brother.
Cecelia sneered. “Heretic looks like a deviant. What do you suppose he did?”
“I’m sure they’ll tell us,” I muttered. I knotted my hands together for warmth, and tried not to look, but it was impossible. It was like watching a person being hit by a jitney. You freeze, and you can’t even blink.
The Proctor with the key inserted it into the castigator, a contraption that resembled a brass coffin with three holes in the front and a gear assembly in the back. I knew from Mechanics in first year that a pipe connected it directly to the Engine, far below.
Heretic or not, the man in the shackles looked terrified. He sagged, gray, a puppet