“Meggie?” It was the first time he’d dropped his guard enough to name his daughter. “Tell her the truth,” she suggested, raising her chin as he strapped her to the boards. “Tell her that you are a cruel man who has nothing but dark designs.” She screwed her face up, eyes squeezed tight, and braced herself for his inevitable retaliation.
Finally she opened her eyes and relaxed her jaw.
He stood a few feet away. Silent. His eyes seemed fixed on the floor as if he’d suddenly discovered some great secret about its construction. No hand was raised against her, no tool was poised to bite into her flesh. “I wish things were different,” he muttered.
“You are certainly not alone in that wish,” she scoffed.
He puffed out a deep breath and stepped forward to check that she was cinched tight. “But we are both the products of our environment and our parentage—whatever yours might be,” he added. “And so we must do some unpleasant things from time to time to get by. Sometimes we have no choice.”
Then he did a new variation of her treatment. Still she remained Grounded and unMade. When the Wardens finally came to take her away, she was crying.
Bran stumbled to a bucket in the laboratory’s corner and, crouching before it, watched everything he’d eaten earlier in the day rush back out the same way it had been put in.
Jordan was an aching lump in her Tank. Today the sunlight was not enough to lighten her mood and being surrounded by the same grim walls was far from inspirational. Her right hand flopped out, limp, on her lap, wrapped in a hasty bandage that had soaked through with a stinking salve. “To heal the burn,” the Maker had promised.
The burn he had given her with the brand.
Even blind with pain she hadn’t produced a mist or a drizzle.
The Maker had said she must have a tremendous will to continue to hold out so fiercely.
Pain was her constant companion now. Long gone was her naïve belief that Weather Witches were just a segment of society that worked hard for their living, a segment of society that had some small control over their destinies. Maybe no one had choices.
Further gone was her halfhearted hope Weather Witches held some modicum of respect from society.
Hope was no longer a word she recognized.
There was a flutter of sound at her windowsill and a shadow fell across Jordan, marring the crisply split beams of light that divided her curled form in slices cut by the bars that kept her from the outside. She stirred, raising her head off her knees. Something had changed. She looked toward the morning’s light and the thing that now blocked part of it.
A hawk paced the stone sill, its tail feathers and wing tips brushing the bars in a soft and rhythmic way that reminded Jordan of the lightest touch of Rowen’s fingers across the strings of the guitar he’d shown her once. It was beautiful, this hawk—large and covered with feathers full of various shades of brown, cream, and red. It turned and cocked its head, looking at her. A beak the color of old butter and tipped with ebony hooked cruelly between two golden eyes that glinted as brightly as her mother’s favorite earrings right after a good polishing. Its pupils were broad and dark, black pits marring its shining eyes, and Jordan shivered but unwrapped her arms from around her legs and slowly pulled her feet beneath her so that she could crouch there.
Hearing something, the hawk hopped, turning its back to her.
What was it like, Jordan wondered, to have such freedom and power you could soar through the sky, wind ruffling your feathers? Did it tickle your skin—the pull of air on your feathers? Did it make your eyes tear as the wind whipped past? What did eyes like that see from high in the heavens?
Carefully she stood.
The bird cocked its head.
Something interesting in the courtyard so many stories below or had it spotted something in one of the trees lining the lake that fascinated it?
She took a step forward.
And another step forward, quietly closing the distance between the bird and herself.
It gave another little hop, excited by whatever it had spied. Then it froze and only the faint breeze that always twisted around the tower and through her Tank gave it the appearance of life, teasing the edges of its feathers.
What were those feathers like when stroked against the skin—could you feel freedom in their touch? Did they carry the sensation of rising winds as easily as the winds carried their owner? Her hand stretched out, fingers open and trembling at the question and the desire that now tingled at their tips.
Straw crackled beneath her foot and the hawk’s head spun, its eyes widening and glinting, seeing her so close. With a shriek it leaped off the sill, plummeting. Jordan’s heart dropped into her stomach and she lurched forward the last few feet, hands wrapping around the bars as she pressed her face between them and watched the bird throw its wings open—the movement audible—and slowly, lazily loop over the crowd below before beating its wings and climbing, rising above the shop rooftops and up above the wall that hemmed in Holgate and kept it from the bridge, the lake, and the outside world.
From freedom.
The hawk soared over the wall and shrieked again as it headed out over the water and teased the treetops with its wing tips.
She sighed.
To have that freedom … She’d never had that. Society did not allow for a young lady to just … go anywhere or do anything on her own. Even her time with Rowen had been chaperoned.
Mostly.
She smiled and remembered.
Rowen had stolen her away one morning. It all seemed so innocent.
One moment they were seated in the parlor sipping tea and munching on delicately crafted watercress sandwiches and then Rowen (who delighted in balancing his cup and saucer on his knee) had broken them both, sending their chaperone scurrying for a mop. He stood then, grinned in that devilish way that was only Rowen’s, set her cup and saucer aside, and, grabbing her by the wrist, tugged her out the back door and into the glassed-in rooms where the thick-scented exotic plants thrived.
“Quickly now,” he urged, his smile so deep it dimpled. He took the lead, his hand slipping down her wrist to grasp her hand. “And quietly,” he added, giving her fingers a gentle squeeze.
What could she do but follow, her heart racing and the most insane smile stretching her lips?
Out the back of the glass and steel building they’d gone, Rowen tugging her along and only glancing back twice to make sure he wasn’t going too fast for a companion in heels and a tightly cinched corset.
But each time he looked back he’d snared her with those changeable eyes of his and she’d quickened her pace. Because wherever he was leading she wanted to go. In Jordan’s book, Rowen was synonymous with adventure.
They’d raced through the gardens dotting the Astraea estate’s back lawn and into the hedge-maze, Rowen guiding her through with such accuracy it seemed he’d often made the trip blindfolded. Or in the dead of night, like Jordan had several times when she had needed to clear her head.
Out the back of the hedge-maze they went, only pausing at the very edge of her family’s property—the edge with the walled lip that overlooked the Below so dramatically it made her clutch his arm and close her eyes a moment to quell her sense of vertigo.
The Astraea holdings had been built as high into the granite face of the Hill as anyone could get and was nicknamed “the Aerie” for more than one reason.
Rowen had grinned down at her, his eyes lingering on the way she held his arm so tightly before he slid his fingers under hers, pried them free, and wrapped them into his hand. He gave her hand a little squeeze and said something.
At the time she hadn’t heard what he said and for weeks after, when she remembered that moment, she tried to convince herself that the loss of his words meant nothing since she could read so much in his face. But now, her hand aching and her head pounding, she wanted nothing more than to know what words his lips had formed at that instance a heartbeat before he led her through a narrow break in the hedges at the wall’s edge and onto a set of stone steps she had never even known existed.