He skips over half her words, refusing to acknowledge them. The part of his heart that never stopped crying has never wailed louder, and he speaks over it with an effort. “What are you talking about? Remara…”
He wants to kneel by her, but he can’t. Not in this poison soil. He crouches, carefully cupping his hands a short distance above hers. “I saw them. Skytes planted the black marbles by the house. You weren’t even there. Nobody like you was there. I would have noticed.”
He has seen ripples pass over her face before, even the surface of her body. But now violent waves sweep through her from head to toe, distorting the form she tries to hold every few seconds. She weeps with the sound of a valley being torn in two.
Even so, her words flow separate from the ragged sounds of grief. “No Naeed I have done this to you and I have hidden down here for a very long time trying to forget and to serve without harming anyone but it will never go away and even here I am found and dragged back to it by the melody it never stops I can’t not hear it begging me Naeed—Naeed—Naeed I lived with the skytes who have no wings.”
His eyes drift to her bare back.
“They are skytes who were kidnapped by humans who use them to make clothing out of a poisonous substance called deathspill and any skyte who works with this deathspill will lose their ability to weave sunlight or flames or moonlight and also lose their wings and then those skytes believe they are worse than dead because they must present their wings to their Maker when they die but how can they do that if they have lost their wings?”
“But always there are some skytes that escape and we found that I could burn the deathspill out of their arms where it stained them and kept them trapped in their suffering and when I burned them it was terrible Naeed we gave them so much medicine for the pain but they screamed and screamed every time I did this but every time when they woke up days later and the deathspill was gone they still wept and thanked me and I would have done this forever just to see them smile like that again.
“The first skyte to do this was my good friend Arc Wildspeech and he was the first person who talked to me after I fell out of the sky and when he was healed from his treatment we traveled together to heal others who had escaped and we called ourselves the Traveling Keep it was our little joke because many of the wingless skytes who were healed joined us as we went from Keep to Keep we grew to be our own full sized Keep over time.
“But there were always more who needed my cure and I can burn out the deathspill but those skytes never regrow their wings and their beautiful hands are damaged forever so they can never weave good things and they scream in their sleep and what do I burn away to fix that, Naeed?”
Her fingers clutch the dirt and her head bows so low that her face deforms against the ground. He has no answer for her, so she continues.
“Well we found the answer and the answer was to burn away the sources of deathspill which was in the houses where humans chained up skytes there were several houses like this full of deathspill and if I could burn all those houses away then there would be no more deathspill for the humans to sell and I knew that it meant any humans inside would die and worse any skytes inside would also die but the humans were gladly doing this terrible thing and all my skyte friends told me that when they were slaves that every one of them wished they could die quickly and the decision felt like I was being frozen and broken over and over but I agreed to do it anyway.
“We traded to a firetongue who poured flames into me for many hours and I held it all and grew the heat even greater and I was hotter than I had ever been in my life so then we went away into a very dark cave where the best Weaver in the whole forest came and wove the heat from me and folded it into the same tiny space over and over and then another skyte wove a shell to contain the heat and the shell was made of shadow and all together it looked like a small black marble when it was done.”
Naeed’s hands jerk back. Another full-body shudder tears through her, but still she pours out the story.
“The shell was made of shadow and it would vanish the moment sunlight touched it and release the heat inside all at once so we tested the first few in the forest until we were sure of exactly how to point the weapon so that only one house would vanish and no house around it would suffer and then I helped make four of them for the first deathspill house and it worked because only that house vanished and nobody else was hurt at all.”
Naeed hears wingbeats overhead but doesn’t look up. Frozen in a crouch, he stares at Remara.
“So I made four more and they did the same thing to a second house that we knew had captives and deathspill and it was in a completely different town but something went wrong and while that house vanished so did part of another house farther away and this other house had nothing to do with the terrible things and two humans who were not part of the evil died and the day my friends told me that was the day I ran away because I had made destruction like the terrible humans had and I had to take myself far enough away that I could never do it again.”
Naeed shuts his eyes and grinds the heels of his hands into his face as she pleads, “I was wrong I had to be wrong because I caused a terrible thing to happen Naeed now I know even more about who those two humans were and how their death caused even larger terrible things in your life and I did not want to look at what I had done ever again but you are here and I have to and Naeed I am sorry I helped take them from you.”
Existence shrinks to the boundaries of his skin and the tightness of every muscle clenching him into a hunched-over lump. The part of his heart that has never stopped crying balances on the tip of his tongue, pressing against his clamped lips.
She looked at what she did, the thing she ran from. She did it for my sake. Because I was about to run away again.
How many times do I run from this?
It doesn’t matter. It always finds me, like it found her all the way down here.
It is like wrenching himself up from a deep rooting, but he forces his mouth open. His lips part, but the first thing out of his mouth is not words. It is a long keening sound, like a child who has fallen and knows the pain is coming.
He springs to his feet, seizing the moments before collapse to lurch toward the ramp. Climbing one flight, he crumples at the switchback, far enough from the ground to let the grief take him.
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In a moment, he is reduced to an eight-year-old human child, shaking and choking and trying to tell someone—anyone—what he buried in this piece of his heart.
“Naeed Naeed I am sorry please tell me to do anything—anything at all.” Remara’s voice is close by his feet.
A scrabbling of claws by his head announces Na’Stra’s landing.
“’Mara shush, now,” says Na’Stra, her tone firm. “Did good tellings, but shush. Is like bad shadow exit. If leg gets cut off, gots to cry a while. Will stop later. Just let it go.”
The grief pounds him in violent waves, each one shaking him like a branch in a gale. Each round washes away weeks, months, and years of stored up hurt that he had refused a voice.
Time no longer matters. He waits for himself to stop, as he used to wait for Yettle to finish a thought.
When the tears finally slow, he doesn’t sit up. He croaks, “Still… still here?”
There is a bone-chilling grinding sound by his feet. He turns his head enough to see a barely-formed mass of molten glass crouching there. She manages a bob that looks something like a nod along with the sound.
He lets his head fall back to the ground with a thump and shuts his eyes, squeezing a last few drops out. He gulps through his words. “Re… Remara. Na’St-stra. I… I skipped. Part of the. Story.”
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Near the thugs’ door, half-buried in the ground, lay a beautiful ebony marble. A curved mirror fragment was propped between it and the house wall, but he barely looked at that. The surface of the marble was black as a shadow. When he brushed a fingertip across it, the black gave just a little bit under his touch. It felt like relief from heat on a blistering summer day.
It was perfect. It was uncracked. The thugs didn’t care about treasures like these, it would be wasted on them.
In that moment, he closed his fingers around the marble. Maybe he could get all four—
There was a creak like a footstep on the other side of the wall, inside the house. He bolted to his feet and shot down the street, abandoning the stick and hoop. He could retrieve them later.
A plan took shape in his mind. He would be up an hour earlier than usual tomorrow to see if the thugs overlooked the marbles. Hopefully they wouldn’t notice anything. A set of four beauties like these would make him royalty among his friends.
The edge of the sky glowed with the promise of sunrise when Nail entered his father’s workshop. The man was working on a set of shelves with a sour expression on his face. He jerked sandpaper along the surface as if the wood had threatened him a moment before.
“Papa! Look what I found!” Nail held out his treasure, eager to show off.
His father glanced over, then flicked his eyes back to his work. “Can’t look now. Show me later.”
“Later!” Nail promised. He looked at the order his father had to fill, his grin spreading wider. “Lessons later, too?”
“Yes. I’ve got to finish this.” His father set down the sandpaper and wiped his forehead. “And sleep a little. Come back after lunch.”
Whooping, Naeed hurtled upstairs to his little slant-ceilinged room. There was a simple bed in the corner with a large wooden chest at the end of it. There was also a small table by the window where he kept his best treasures spread out to admire. His coinbox sat snugged up against the windowsill, and he set the black marble on top of the box, balanced over the coin slot. It made for a good display.
He was free until lunch. His friends would be waking soon. He decided not to show off the marble until he knew if he could get the rest of them. He ran back downstairs and out the front door, thinking about the shortest route that would take him back to the porch where he had stashed his hoop.
He made it three steps from the house when heat and light lifted him off his feet and flung him forward.
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“I brought it back,” he croaks. “Back home. They wouldn’t have… my parents wouldn’t have… the skytes didn’t put the marble in our house… they didn’t… you didn’t… and I didn’t listen to my father… he said to never go there… it wasn’t you… or them… the captain… when he said the skytes had done it… then I knew what I’d taken home…”
There is a long-suffering sigh by his ear. Sharp little claws tenderly comb through his mossy hair. “Stupidest nestling ever hatched to be running from own self. Could get away from voidflyer easier.”
A cracked laugh shakes him. He rubs his eyes and reaches a hand up toward his head. “I’m… I’m sor—”
“Shut up and keep sorrys to self.” A little muzzle thrusts itself into his hand and he strokes her jaw. “Not needing ‘em. All angry nestlings bite.”
He lies there a few minutes longer, letting the calm settle in, then pushes himself up. He trembles like an old man from the effort and leans against the cold cliff face for support.
Remara still crouches by his feet, silent and still once again, a shapeless blob.
He looks at her, and a thought comes to mind he would never have let himself hear before. “The skytes. They… they had friends. Family. In the thug’s house.”
For a moment, a face distorted by a scream boils up to Remara’s shapeless surface. It vanishes, followed by the horrible grinding sound.
“Na’stra,” he murmurs, “can you bring those wraps she left up there?”
“M’yep. M’yep. Back fast,” she sniffs, leaping into a shadow.
Naeed scoots close to Remara. “The skytes already suffered plenty, didn’t they?” he asks, quietly.
She doesn’t respond.
“You, too.” He looks out toward Underscoop as the lights grow brighter. “I knew something was wrong. My parents pointed out which men I needed to stay far away from and which house was theirs. Everyone walked with their heads down if a thug was around. Papa loved making useful things, but he hated working for them. Once, he spent all night making sure a table they ordered would sit evenly. The next day, they came to take it. When he asked for payment, one of them spat at him and said, ‘Maybe next time.’”
Na’Stra pops out of the wall next to him, dragging Remara’s wraps. One is a long cloak with a hood, which Naeed winds around his left hand and up his arm. “I’d never been ashamed of him before that. He was bigger than that thug. Why didn’t he hit him? Or refuse to take another order? But he took every order they placed, and they paid him when they felt generous. And the captain of the guard couldn’t do anything about it. Maybe that’s why he took me in.”
He reaches out to Remara. She flinches back, shifting down. He follows, brushing his wrapped hand across the top of her form. “Maybe you weren’t wrong. I don’t know. Nobody else stopped those men. Maybe this was all that was left to do.”
Two delicate, long-fingered hands emerge from the blob, clasping his hand and wrist. Arms form beneath them, then shoulders and a torso. Thighs, knees, calves, and slim feet follow. She raises a head of wild hair which frames a face that has studied enough anguish to mimic it perfectly.
His vision blurs again and he wipes his eyes with his free hand. “Thought that was done…”
He gulps again, trying to squeeze out a few more words. “A while back, a Remara let me walk with her. It kept me moving forward when I would have rooted. You look like you need that. Walk with me a while?”
Remara stares at him with that agonized face. Then, as if it was never there, it melts into a blank surface. She withdraws her hands and bows her head.
As his lungs squeeze together under another wave of grief, she answers.
“If that is what you want from me then I will come with you to the surface Naeed.”