Still she stood at the window, her fingers wrapped around the bars, her face pressed between them, feeling the heart on her sleeve, and she wondered.
The sound of metal scraping along metal grated in her ears and Jordan said, “What is that?”
A voice growled out from just on the other side of her wall and she scrambled away from it, her metal links rattling between her wrists. “Morning bell.”
Jordan spun when another voice, this one thin and high and most definitely of the female persuasion asked, “Bell?” with as much embittered irony as Jordan had ever heard packed into such a small word.
She went to her knees, briefly mindful of the straw and dust grinding beneath the golden fabric of her dress, but her curiosity won out and she pressed close to the wall, searching the dim area with probing fingers.
“We calls it the morning bell,” the female voice at her back explained, “as ’tis kinder than what it truly is. Gots to find a bit of kindness somewheres, you know?”
Footsteps echoed in the hall running between the Tanks, and Jordan tried to focus. Heavy boots … two pairs.
“And what’s the morning bell for?” Jordan’s fingertips swept an opening and she pressed her face close to the seam between floor and wall where a small hole was—just the width and length of a single stone.
Jordan squinted into the blackness of the hole, pressing close to it. “Is it for breakfast?”
Laughter echoed harshly in her ears. “Ain’t she just the optimist?”
“Optimist? Fresh meat is all she is.”
“Do we not get breakfast, then?”
“Not all of us.”
“And not anything most’d dare to qualify as worthy of breaking your fast.”
“So what is it then—this morning bell?”
A door clanged open and there was shouting, the sound of an argument and the noise of a scuffle.
The noise became so loud, the words so fierce, Jordan shrank in against herself, her eyes wide.
“Breakfast she asks us,” the voice from the hole directly before her said with a wistful tone that twisted in on itself and became a grim snicker. “It’s certainly not that. The Maker—he calls it exercise. Count yourself lucky if you never experience it firsthand.”
Philadelphia
“The Kruse family?” the old man asked, looking up from a spot where he leaned against a large planter. He squinted up at Marion, keeping the much taller man in a position to best block the rising sun. “You mean old Francis Kruse, his wife Sarah, and his boys?”
Marion nodded. If there was one thing he’d learned from his travels it was that if you wanted the most complete story about anything, you found the oldest man nearby to ask.
“You must not be following the ways of our world, son,” the man said. “You know their eldest—a lad by the name of Marion was found to be a Witch? They were Harboring.” He shook his head sadly and leaned forward to rest his chin on his gnarled hands as they gripped the top of his cane. “Pity. Nice folks. Handsome family. Still astounds me that things are as they are. Imagine what possibilities our world has if only the Maker, the Witches, Wardens, Wraiths, and Reanimators joined forces…”
Marion cleared his throat, determined to steer the old man from such fancies and back to the conversation at hand. “I heard about the eldest,” Marion said, careful to keep his voice steady and his tone relaxed.
“Then you know what happened next.”
“I don’t. Tell me where I might find them?”
“Halfway up the Hill.”
“Truly?” Marion raised his gaze to trace the territory of the Hill’s slope. They must have survived the disgrace better than he thought if they were that distance above the Below. “Do you think they’d be there now?” he asked.
“I daresay they never leave,” the man muttered, smacking his lips together in thought.
“What?”
“Surely you know the story—everyone knows what happened next.”
“I’m not exactly everyone … Tell it true.”
“Shortly after the eldest was taken away for witchery—it was a day of celebration there, if memory serves—not unlike the recent problem at the Astraea estate…”
“Fine, yes—a day of celebration. Go on.”
“Actually—is that today’s paper?”
“Yesterday’s.”
“Here, then.” He grabbed a newspaper resting by his hip and waved it in Marion’s direction. “Page three. The writer tells it far better than an old man might.”
“Thank you,” Marion muttered as he grabbed the newspaper and turned to head back up the Hill, his eyes distracted between trying to scan the printed text and find the place his family now called their own.
He paused on the roadside not far from a stand of houses that all nearly leaned one upon the other but still managed somehow to have individual yards at their bases. Ahead the trees and buildings gave way for a clearing enclosed by a twisting metal gate. On its other side more houses sprouted up, straighter in stature, though no taller than their companions slightly down the Hill.
He froze when he saw it—the headline naming his household—and the article beginning with the name of his family’s most faithful servant and the woman who kissed his scrapes and sang him songs. The woman who fed him biscuits and sneaked him sweetmeats. His nanny, Chloe.
Chloe Erendell has been convicted by Council Court for the ruthless murders of the Kruse family five years ago and is scheduled to hang until dead Wednesday hence.
He had barely gotten to a spot to sit down when his knees gave in under the weight of reality. Murdered? His eyes squeezed shut and he was reduced to nothing but a rocking lump of humanity at the roadside as he struggled to make sense of news he should have known years earlier. Forcing his eyes open, he plunged one finger into the pages and shoved them flat on the ground to better read them through his blurring vision. At the roadside on his hands and knees he was suddenly as broken as a cruel child’s toy.
Spots of moisture appeared on the pages below him and he snorted and sucked air so harshly through his nose it rattled with snot. He raked his sleeve across his eyes, equally as angry as he was confused. Why now?
He hadn’t cried in years. He had trained himself out of it, regardless of what method the Maker had tried. Coaxing with the cat? Nothing. The brand? Not a noise did Marion utter. He had curled it all inside, stomped down the pain and the cruelty and packed it around his heart cold as the ice that crawled free from his fingertips.
He jerked back, shoving his hands into his pockets and looking at the ground near where his left hand had rested—and the way the grass began to discolor and wilt. He needed to get up. To move away from the evidence.
He stood shakily, clutching the paper before him to obscure his face. He took a step and then another until he found himself standing across the road from the twisting iron gate—
—and the tombstones dotting its plot, halfway up the Hill. His shoulders slumped and his face fell again. The man hadn’t lied. This would be where they were now and they certainly never left … He glanced up and down the road and strode across it, pushing the gate aside to step within.
It was oddly quiet there in the negligible shade of the few remaining trees that stood as silent witness to the dead. He wandered the rows of graves, knees weak, not quite sure what to expect and certainly unsure where to find them. They were in a small section slightly down the Hill and tucked away near an old pine. Needles covered their grave beds like a coppery quilt and sap had dried in glistening beads and long slow tears on his mother’s headstone.
He dropped again, realizing.
There would be no more sitting at her feet and reading boisterous stories. There would be no more moments spent telling tales at bedtime or learning the good and proper way to sip tea before a lady. There would no longer be any niceties in his life. Or in theirs. They had all been stolen away when he had been discovered. His mother and father’s graves flanked that of his little brother and he silently read the inscription on each and found them to be good and accurate if not too simple. How could you boil down any one life to only a few words carved into stone? There was so much more to a life …