THE FAMILY COUNCIL

I passed the second trial. I passed the third.

I will not narrate them. The Gauntlet, like all spectacles, repeats itself once you have seen the pattern. There was a canyon of falling stones. There was a hall of mirrors where I was forced to fight a thing wearing my face, which proved, in the end, to be a simple matter of burning the glass. There was a night in which seven hundred pounds of live scorpion were released into a pit, and I climbed out of it by the simple method of setting the scorpions on fire. I was a little tired by the end. I was no longer in the least interested.

By the end of the first week the list of survivors had thinned from two hundred to ninety. By the end of the second, to thirty-one. The remaining contestants were sent to a training retreat in the hills above Ravenport, a canvas city called Camp Lantern, where the next phase of the contest would be prepared. We were given tents, meals, doctors, and a stern warning not to murder each other before the cameras were ready.

The Free list had four survivors. I was the only one who could still lift a sword.

…

"There is something I should like you to see," said the Shade.

It was past midnight. I was sitting on the edge of my cot, in a tent that smelled of canvas and lamp-oil, wrapping my hands. The camp was quiet. A few lanterns hung from the guy-ropes, swaying gently. In the distance a sentry was whistling an unhappy tune.

"Another lesson?"

"No. A glimpse." He stood at the tent flap, with his arms folded, a pale shape against the night. "Your cat has been out for two hours."

I paused with the bandage half-wound.

"Nimbus?"

"I asked him to carry out a small errand. He was reluctant. He is an animal of principle. But I believe he finds you interesting, and I believe he has an excellent head for heights." A flicker of dryness. "He is now on the roof of the Whitlock town house, in Gilt Row. I thought you might care to see what the family is saying."

I looked at him.

"I'd have to share his eyes."

"You'd have to close your own."

I considered it. The pact between a bonded beast and its master is not magic in the way the Houses mean the word. It is a wire, a thread of understanding laid down in the first hour, and over the months it had thickened. I had noticed it at odd moments: a flicker of hunger, a flash of cold at a high perch, the sense of a small hot heart beating in rhythm with my own. I had never used it on purpose.

I lay down on the cot. I closed my eyes.

Nimbus, I thought.

"Quiet," said a small dry voice at the other end of the wire. "I am working."

…

The world turned silver.

It was the oddest sensation, being in Nimbus's eyes. Everything was brighter and sharper than a human sees. The night was not dark but pearl-gray, textured with faint colors. A chimney pot six feet away stood out as clear as if lit from within. The slates under his paws were cold and gritty. The wind carried a thousand smells at once: tar, wet stone, cooked fish, horses, the sour tang of the harbor.

He was crouched on the ridge of a high steep roof, among a forest of chimneys. Below him, through a lead-paned skylight, a long room glowed with candlelight. A table. A dozen men. The sound reached me through his ears, a little distorted, as if heard under water.

"The window is loose," said Nimbus. "I have put a paw in the crack. They will not notice. Do not move. You are making me dizzy."

"I'm lying in a tent."

"You are breathing too fast."

I stilled.

Through the skylight the council chamber of House Whitlock looked like the inside of a vault. Dark wainscoting. A great oval table of black oak. At its head, in a high-backed chair, sat the Patriarch. He had a cane across his knees and a heavy, gray, unmovable face. To his right, a half-dozen men in dark coats: uncles, cousins, a lawyer. To his left, Torrance Whitlock, with a bandage across his left cheek and a stiff arm, glowering at the table like a bear that has been refused a fish.

At the foot, standing, with his head bowed, was Alden.

"Repeat it," said the Patriarch.

"Yes, sir." Alden's voice was low and rather colorless. "She has the Emberheart. She took it at the Ceremony. It's in her chest."

There was a long, shocked silence.

"You are certain," said the Patriarch at last.

"She broke the Covenant Band with a touch. She burned Cordelia's wards with a wave of her hand. She took the Lance apart in the air." Alden lifted his head. His eyes were rimmed with red. "It is no trick, Father. I've seen it. There is nothing that she cannot unmake."

A murmur ran around the table.

"That's why Crane let her go," said one of the uncles, slowly. "He wanted it to happen. He wanted to see if it would hold."

"That's why he's been so calm," said another.

"Gentlemen." The Patriarch raised a finger, and they fell silent. He turned his gaze on Alden, and for a moment his gray face softened. It was a very odd softness. It was the look of a man regarding a broken tool that had once been valuable.

"Sit down, Alden."

Alden sat.

"You realize," said his father, "what this means."

"Yes, sir."

"It means the girl is the most valuable asset in the Republic. More valuable than the Senate. More valuable than the Chancellor himself. It means that every House in Halvern will be reaching for her within the month." He turned the cane in his hands. "It means that we, who had the closest claim, have failed."

"I—"

"Be silent."

Alden shut his mouth.

"The question before us," said the Patriarch, "is how to correct the error."

…

It was an ugly hour.

I watched it through the eyes of a cat, from the roof of a house I'd once thought of as a home. I watched them circle, as such people do, speaking in the soft, polite, measured voice that powerful men use to say monstrous things. They did not call it kidnapping. They called it retrieval. They did not say hostage. They said guarantor.

They proposed first to buy me.

"A betrothal," said the lawyer, a dry man in spectacles. "Renewed. A good dowry. A position in the House. She was fond of the boy once, perhaps she can be made so again."

"She broke the Band."

"She broke the Band. Not the engagement. A matter of law. We could present it as a misunderstanding."

"She has her foot on his face on a hundred million screens."

"The public has a short memory."

"The girl does not."

They proposed next to flatter me. To offer me a seat in the Senate. A grant. A title. A patent for my formulae. A cottage by the sea. The Patriarch dismissed these with a wave. He did not think I could be bought.

"She is a Frontier girl," he said. "She is proud. She will not be bought with cottages."

"Then force," said Torrance Whitlock, bluntly.

It was the first word he had spoken. He leaned across the table, his bandaged face flushed. "I have eighty Marshals at my disposal. I can have her in a cell by Thursday."

"She threw you off a train."

"She had a head start."

"She burned your net to threads, Torrance. She is Bronze, and she did it with her hand. I do not think your eighty Marshals are the answer."

"Then what is?"

The Patriarch was silent. His fingers drummed on the head of the cane. He looked at the black oak of the table, and at the candles, and at his son.

"A bargain first," he said slowly. "A fair offer. The boy will make it. We will give her every chance to come home." He looked up. His eyes were hard. "If she declines, then we do it the other way. The way we should have done it in the first place."

"With the Chancellor's blessing?"

"With his instructions."

The table stirred.

…

"Look to the door," said Nimbus quietly.

I did.

There had been a servant in the corridor, a young man in livery, who had been standing by the door all evening. He now opened it, bowed, and stood aside. Into the room, without hurry, stepped a tall figure in a plain black coat.

I would have known him anywhere. He had the same stillness I'd seen in the Great Hall: the stillness of a man who has never needed to hurry. He carried a pair of gray gloves in one hand. His silver hair was damp from the night air.

Every man at the table rose.

"Pray be seated," said High Chancellor Crane, in his mild voice. "I regret the interruption."

He took the empty chair at the Patriarch's right, as though it had been kept for him. He folded his gloves. The candlelight fell across his lined, kindly face, and for the first time in a hundred nights I felt the hairs rise on my arms.

"Everett," said the Patriarch, rather stiffly. "We did not expect you."

"No. I thought it best." Crane glanced around the table, and his eyes passed over Alden without interest. "I hear you have been discussing the Reeve girl."

"We have."

"And?"

"We believe a bargain may be possible."

"I am sure it may." Crane smiled faintly. "I will be brief. The girl is to be taken alive. I do not mind how. I do not mind what you promise her, so long as she is delivered to me intact, and quickly, before the finals." He looked down at his folded hands. "She is needed for a ceremony."

"A ceremony," said the Patriarch.

"A very important one."

There was a pause. In the pause a number of men at the table, I noticed, looked suddenly at the wall.

I felt Nimbus's heartbeat quicken in my chest, and a small dark certainty settle in me like a stone in a pond.

The Tithe.

I did not say it aloud. I did not need to. I remembered the words on Hale's wall, cut deep: They draw it by night, a little at a time. They feed it to the Houses. And I remembered the quiet room, and the drain in the floor, and what they had been waiting for in that room. A season. A conjunction. A particular night of the year, when the Engine had to be fed.

"It is coming due," said the Shade. He had joined me, I realized, in the dark behind my eyelids. "The Tithe is harvested in cycles. They are close to the next. They need the Heart for the peak."

"When?"

"I do not know. The last time I was awake, it was every seven years."

I counted. Five years from the Ceremony in the old life to the day I died. Plus the five years since, in the old life, before the Menagerie.

It was, I thought slowly, very nearly the right time.

…

"Of course, Chancellor," the Patriarch was saying. "It shall be done. But I should like to understand the terms. If the girl refuses—"

"Then you will bring her to me by other means."

"By force?"

"By any means." Crane's voice had not risen. It was as mild as milk. "She is a thing of immense value, Matthias. I do not wish her broken. But I should rather have her broken than lost."

A chill went down the table.

"If she will not come back," said the Patriarch heavily, "then we will take her as a criminal. As a thief. As a girl who stole a relic of the Republic, and who has now been exposed as a fugitive and a danger to the public." He turned his cane over in his hands. "We have the warrants. We have the story. Nobody will question it."

"No," said Crane. "Nobody will."

He rose. The others rose with him. He drew on his gloves, finger by finger, with a precision that made my skin crawl. At the door he paused, and looked back, and for an instant, though it was impossible, though the skylight was blind with grime and Nimbus was crouched in the shadow of a chimney, I had the feeling that his eyes had gone up, to the roof, to the dark, and that they were looking straight at me.

Then he smiled, and went out.

…

The meeting broke up soon after. I watched them go, one by one, in their dark coats, down the long stairs into the night. The Patriarch stayed behind, alone at the foot of the table. He stared at the candles for some time.

Alden remained too.

"Father," he said at last.

"Yes?"

"If she will not come back." He hesitated. "If she will not come... must we treat her as a criminal?"

The Patriarch looked up.

"She is not a person, Alden," he said coldly. "Not any longer. She is an asset. You will do well to remember it."

Alden said nothing. He bowed his head. But as he rose to go, he cast a single glance toward the table, toward the empty chair at the head of it, and in his eyes, for the first time, I saw something that was not hatred, nor fear, nor bruised vanity.

It was a flicker of grief. Honest, bewildered, and entirely genuine.

I did not forgive it. I did not even consider it. But I noted it, in the cold ledger of my mind, as one notes an odd entry: a figure that did not tally.

"Nimbus," I said. "Come home."

"Finally," said the cat.

I opened my eyes in the tent. The lantern had burned low. My heart was beating hard. My hands, I noticed, were trembling, very slightly, around the bandage.

The Shade stood at the flap, looking out at the stars.

"Well?" he said.

"They're going to come for me," I said. "Soon. And Crane wants me alive."

"Yes."

"For a ceremony."

"Yes."

I rose, and went to the water-jug, and splashed my face. The water was very cold. In the cracked square of mirror over the basin a girl looked back at me, narrow-faced, dark-eyed, with a streak of soot on her cheek and a small bright thread of something red at the center of each pupil.

"Then," I said, to the girl, "I had better be difficult to catch."