The Seeker - Isobelle Carmody [6]
He whitened and shut the door behind him. “Keep your voice down. There are people outside.”
I bit my lip and forced myself to be calm. “What do you want?” I asked him coldly. I knew I was being stupid, but I didn’t care. Jes was the only one I could strike out at. And that, I thought, looking at his stiff face, was becoming increasingly dangerous.
“Maybe you don’t care about being burned, but I do. Much as you scorn it, caution has kept us safe until now. No thanks to you,” he added, and I was bitterly reminded that our plight was my fault. “A headache is nothing, but you know how little things are blown out of all proportion. It is a short step from gossip to the Councilcourt in Sutrium.”
“You have been made an assistant,” I said flatly, and now he reddened. A look of pride mingled with shame came over his face. “How could you?” I asked him bleakly.
He clenched his jaw. “You will not ruin this for me,” he said at last. “It is my sin that I do not denounce you. But you are my sister.”
“You would not dare denounce me,” I said. “Your own life would be ruined if it was known you had a Misfit for a sister. Don’t pretend you care for me.”
A queer flicker passed over his face, and I suddenly felt certain that this was the truth.
When he had gone, I lay back, my head aching dully, partly from tension. For all my bravado, I was afraid of Jes. There had been a time when we were close. Not so much when we were young, for he had been a dutiful son, and I too much of a wanderer to please anyone except my beloved mother. But after we had come into the orphan home system following the trial and execution of our parents, we had clung to one another. Jes had vowed then to have revenge on the Council and the Herder Faction for their evil work that day. He had wiped my eyes and sworn to protect me.
He had not known what that would entail. In those first years, we regarded our secretive behavior as a game. It was only as we grew older that we became increasingly aware of the dangers. Discovering the truth about myself made me more solitary than ever, while Jes developed a near obsession with caution. In those days, his one desire had been to get a Normalcy Certificate and get out, then ask permission to have me with him. But somehow we had drifted apart, till the bonds that held us were fragile indeed. I knew Jes had become fascinated with the Herder Faction and its ideas. But as an orphan, he would never be accepted into the cloister, so I had thought little of it.
Recently, we had fought bitterly over his explanations for why the Herders had burned our parents. I had called him a traitor and a dogmatic fool; he in turn had called me a Misfit. That he would even say the word revealed how much he had changed.
Aside from Jes, people thought my recent headaches and bouts of light-headedness were the result of my fall on the path to Silent Vale that day, and I let them. I’d intended to hide the pain altogether, but I had cried out in the night, and the guardians had come to hear of it. In the end, I told them of my fall, because I did not want them to speculate, and had been given light duties and some bitter powders by the Herder.
If not the fall, then the headaches might have been simply a reaction to a change in the weather, for winds from the Blacklands did cause fevers and rashes. But deep down, I knew they had nothing to do with either the fall or the weather.
I shook my head and decided to go for a walk in the garden, slipping out a side door into the fading sunset. Jes had called me a Misfit, and according to Council lore, that was what I was. But I did not feel like a monster. In a queer mental leap, I thought about my first visit with my father to the great city of Sutrium. We had gone all that way for the fabulous Sutrium moon fair, and we weren’t alone. Everyone who could walk, hobble, or ride seemed to be on the road to the biggest town in the Land, bringing with them hay, wool, embroidery, honey, perfume, and a hundred other things