Sarah Driver - Sky

‘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 ask.

‘Oh, many years,’ she answers, eyes resting on mine. ‘But there was a tense half-truce we grew used to. Then, four years ago, the tenseness exploded.’

Before I can ask why, she presses a handful of snow to my cheek and eel-quick her needle pulls through my skin. I ball my fists to keep from screaming.

She pinches the edges of my wound together with her right hand and uses the iron fingers of her left to stitch. Her sleeve is by my eyes, and I swallow back a gasp cos the stars and moons are unpicking themselves into loose strands of golden thread.

Could it be cos of her being so close to the Opal in my pocket? I pray to all the sea-gods that she don’t notice anything.

Kestrel mops my bleeding face with linen and keeps stitching, poking out the tip of her tongue. ‘I have fresh skirts for you, as well.’

‘I ent wearing no skirts!’ Despite the pain that’s making my eyes stream, a sudden laugh punches out of me.

‘Stay still!’ she commands. ‘Those are men’s breeches, and they are in tatters, and—’

‘They ent men’s breeches – they’re my flaming breeches.’ I screw my eyes tight and suck my teeth. ‘Can’t you patch them for me?’

She sighs. ‘Very well.’

Beast-chatter greets my ears. Men’s breeches. Ettler scuffles about inside the chute. Witches call to me, atop the Wildersea! he yodels. My neck prickles. That’s a line from the old song – the song that makes magyk when my brother sings it. Why’s this squidge chattering those words?

When the wound is stitched, daubed with ointment and dressed, the light has thinned to a greyish murk. Dawn is coming. Kestrel lifts my sleeve and starts washing the brand Stag cut into my arm. Heat spills across my cheeks, cos I didn’t know she’d spied it, and a deep shame crawls through my bones when I think how I’m marked for life with the sign of the Hunter , slashes for the hate Stag showed my Tribe.

Kestrel fixes me with a look that stops me wrenching away from her. But when the blood and grime are cleaned away, the antlers show even stronger and I curl my tongue.

She gently rubs ointment into the brand. ‘So. What’s it like out there, in the great wide?’ Yearning swells in her eyes.

I pull my arm away. ‘What d’you mean? Don’t you know?’

She shakes her head. ‘Used to. Well, I knew the sky above the Iron Valley, at least.’

Hunger to rove makes my toes itch. ‘The great wide is the best thing since cinnamon buns,’ I whisper.

Kestrel props her chin in her hand. ‘Our Protector says travel is dangerous.’

I shrug. ‘Travel’s how my Tribe live. It’s who we are .’

Kestrel gazes at me with a gentle, eager fierceness. ‘I think it might be who I am, too.’

Suddenly footsteps ring in the pipes. Kestrel jerks her head towards them, all the life falling from her cheeks. She hauls herself up and runs to the door, pressing her ear flat against it. ‘Oh no, no, no, not now!’

The steps bang along the passageway outside, growing closer to the cell with every beat. Then a rider garbed in raindrop mail barges inside and stares at Kestrel. ‘What are you doing in here?’

‘Greetings, Pangolin Spearsister,’ says Kestrel breathlessly. ‘I was sent to shear the prisoner’s head and I thought, whilst I was here—’ Her voice trails off.

I stare at her. Is she lying?

‘So why does the creature still have a headful of rat’s tails?’ spits Pangolin. ‘Our blessed Protector will be displeased when she finds out you’ve been treating an outsider.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Kestrel says quickly. ‘Please, do not tell anyone you found me here. Remember when I helped heal your wounds so you might still be chosen as a Spearwarrior?’

Pangolin watches her coldly. Then she blows out her cheeks and rolls her eyes. ‘I won’t tell the Protector or Lunda this time. Probably.’

‘Oh, thank you, Pangolin!’ Kestrel stoops to collect her things. The light dims as she tips the moonsprite out of the glass jar, into her pocket. Ettler plops down from the chute and scurries into her bag. Then her skirts shush against the stone as she hurries off without looking at me. My heart punches my chest once , twice , and she’s sucked into the gloom.

Pangolin’s brown eyes stare dully through her raindrop armour. ‘Looks like you’re alone again,’ she says calmly.

When I rush at her, snarling, she brings her spear up to her chest to block me and then uses it to shove me roughly onto the floor. ‘I’ll be back for you tomorrow.’ Then she turns and leaves.

Fright gnaws away my insides, leaving me with a gutful of shame. Once, I was fearless – or at least I made myself believe the lie that I was brave. Now it’s like my scars have cut so deep that all my hurt shows up on the outside, and I hate it.

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