Sky. Sarah Driver

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СКАЧАТЬ cos I don’t want Kestrel knowing about it.

      The beast is all kinds of oddness. It looks like a tiny round squid, no bigger than a sea-hawk’s egg, covered in shiny gold feathers. It moves through the air by wiggling and flapping, pooing ink behind it that grows an icy crust on the floor.

      ‘Ettler, you must learn to hold your ink!’ Kestrel scolds. ‘You know I need it. Use an ink-pan if you want letting out.’

      ‘What is it?’ I ask. ‘You called it a . . . squidge?’

      She nods, eyeing the not-quite-squid. ‘We’ve scores of the grumblesome things, working in the pantries, but this one kept stealing food—’

      Not true! shrills the offended squidge, hooting anxiously at the girl. Then mischief gleams in its round black eyes, and it chortles.

      ‘And so,’ she says to me, wrinkling her nose, ‘when trouble came sniffing he hid in my clothes chest. By the time I found him, all my things were covered in ink, but he was too afraid to leave my room. So I took him on, as my so-called assistant. What a fantastic decision that turned out to be.’ She turns back to the chute and rummages inside the hatch. ‘So shall we stitch that foulsome wound on your face?’ she asks, voice muffled. ‘You’ve been up to strugglings, huh?’

      ‘I was trying to save my brother,’ I tell her, curling my tongue over the edge of my teeth. ‘Not that it even worked.’ It don’t matter if you save Sparrow, cos you ent never gonna save him from his sickness, snickers a wicked voice in my head.

      Kestrel pulls an oiled leather bag from the chute and sits cross-legged in front of me. She roots through the bag. The squidge farts anxiously around her, dripping ink into her hair. ‘Aagh, Ettler !’

      He flaps stickily away and hides in the chute, whimpering.

      ‘Here are the things we need,’ chirps Kestrel. ‘A tear-vial, for catching your tears.’

      I frown, shame prickling my scalp. ‘Tears are for weaklings and babs. I don’t need—’

      ‘Pish,’ she says. ‘Our Tribe used to wear these ’til our tears were swallowed by the air – that’s when the mourning has passed.’ She takes my hand and balls it into a fist, then places it against my chest. When I open my fingers there’s an empty glass vial inside my hand, with a bone stopper.

      She wrinkles her nose and squints at me. ‘And . . . what else?’ she wonders aloud. ‘A spool of silk and a needle-clutcher.’ She pulls a thin roll of leather from the bag, opens it and draws out a sliver of white bone. ‘A needle and some—’

      ‘Why would I let you practise your pox-ridden dabblings on me?’ I blurt. My gut boils at the thought of anyone touching my face.

      ‘That cut is too deep to be left alone.’ She raises her coppery eyebrows. ‘Always think you know best, huh?’

      I clutch the bandage tighter and turn away from her. ‘You ent touching me.’

      ‘’Twill fester.’

      My forehead burns fierce, even worse than my sore throat. I know I’m already getting sick. I sigh, then nod quickly.

      ‘Good.’ She unwraps my face from the bandage I made. The cloth has stuck to the wound, so she opens her cloak to reveal a leather circle strapped to her chest, holding six daggers with leather pommels. She pulls one out and uses it to carefully slice my bandage off.

      Hot, sharp pain stabs into me as the skin underneath is torn. ‘Argh!’ I hiss as she pulls the last of it away.

      ‘Sorry.’ She winces, and takes my chin in her hand to peer at my damaged face. ‘Claws, looks like?’

      ‘A terrodyl,’ I whisper. ‘Must look grim.’

      ‘Some folks will fear to look at you. But I say away with them! What counts is on the inside, no?’

      I nod. ‘In heart-truth, a captain could use a frightful face.’ Even as I say it, I remember how I won’t be captain now, and how I don’t wanna tell her anything about me.

      ‘Captain?’ she whispers in an awed voice. ‘Are you to be a sea-captain?’ Curiosity shines through her.

      Hawk-swift, Grandma’s face appears. A voice deep inside me whispers, over and over, you’ve got no home, you’ve got no home. The deck flashes into my brain, clear as lightning, with Grandma bundled on the plank and Stag pointing his gun at her. Sweat coats my palms and I begin to tremble.

      ‘I’m sorry.’ Kestrel lays cool fingers on my wrist. ‘Try to breathe. We will not talk about it now.’

      My tears blur her face. She twists round and gives a soft whistle. Ettler pokes out of his hiding place and whizzes up and out through the hole in the wall. He quickly puffs back in again and thuds down beside us, a ball of snow gathered in his tentacles. Then he dumps the snow onto the floor and huffs back to the chute.

      ‘For numbing,’ she tells me. As she reaches for the snow, her left sleeve slips and I notice there’s something different about the arm. It’s the same dark grey as the glove, and it’s got the sleekness of a gun. I feel my eyes widen.

      She stares me down, the slush dripping through metal fingers.

      ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean—’ I start, but her face splits into a grin.

      ‘You noticed my iron-arm,’ she says, gleeful as anything. She pushes up her patched, fraying sleeve to show me. The arm’s made of a smooth metal, and when she wriggles her fingers, it’s like some kind of magyk is letting her thoughts control them, just the same as with flesh and bone.

      It’s the best flaming thing I’ve laid eyes on. ‘What’s it like?’

      ‘Ever had a dead arm?’ she asks.

      I nod, remembering the times in our bunk when me or Sparrow slept on our own hands. Sparrow proper hates waking up with a numb arm.

      ‘It’s like that, much of the time.’ She flexes her metal wrist, watching it in wonder. ‘Until I whisper to the runes that our runesmith keyed into the metal. Then it comes back to me in a wave of warmth and tingles. For a while I thought I’d never feel it again.’ She takes a bottle and a swab. ‘First, a saltwater cleanse.’ She starts to wash my wound.

      ‘What happened to you?’ I hiss through the stinging.

      ‘An accident,’ she replies vaguely. ‘So my mother travelled to the city of Nightfall to find a smith gifted enough to forge a new arm for me. That was before, though.’

      ‘Before what?’

      She watches my face, like she’s quietly deciding all kinds of things about me. When she blinks, a clear membrane slicks up and down her eyeballs like on the eyes of a hawk. Did I imagine it? ‘Before the conflict sharpened its teeth.’ She dips her needle into a flame and threads it with silk, then brings it towards me. ‘Before the banning of books, and study.’ She drops her voice to a breath. ‘Before I was forbidden to leave the mountain. Before everything changed.’

      ‘So how long you been scrapping with these Wilderwitches?’ I СКАЧАТЬ