Five

The Fingerbluffs became my home, and Mors Brandegor the Rancid was gone for years.

Those of us too young to serve the Choir outright didn’t work as such, but we had our chores. We woke at sunup, the seven or nine of us that shared a room on Loveday Mansion’s third floor (me a bit beforehand to say the bleed when I was good). We made our beds and beat each other with pillows and play smothered each other and put on our trousers and washed our faces and stretched until our blood moved right. There were other kids elsewhere but I don’t know when they got up. We, the kids from the corner room, slid down the grand mahogany banisters and clambered into the tapestried dining room with its sea glass chandelier and scary mosaic floor. Its smashed tiles showed the beasts of Below: the Stellarine understanding of the Bellonan understanding of the Tullian understanding that something is alive and awake and in pain underground.

We got our bowls, then split off. I was no good in the kitchen. After we ate I went around back and chopped wood with a few boys younger than me. Sometimes I sat on the edge of the cliffs and looked over the edge at the rough green water. The whitecaps looked like skirts on dancing girls. Sometimes I would watch the ships come in, and I’d scramble down to the jagged unsafe lovely pier where the smugglers brought their big blond crates and helped sort and haul them ashore. Only pirates around here. All the Choir.

Other times I’d just watch until my heart felt wrong, I didn’t know what to do with my free hands, I’d go busy them with something. I’d go into town. I’d help the sellers put out their wares, arrange cockles on ice or belts on hooks by the buckle. I’d sort units in spoils and help pack moving goods. I’d let myself be swept into rooms with younger rougher sweeter kids and pretend to learn my letters. I’d be assistant dealer in the dance halls, I’ve got a good head for counting and liked being around the glorious robber warriors, who’d tell stories while they gambled of what they’d done. Everyone is rich in the Fingerbluffs. When bands came home they’d proffer up a portion of their spoils, at least a third, or an honest handful we’d say, often more. Selling was for fun and pride, not to stave off starvation. For the good stuff the pirates brought in before it was ushered down to Tasmudan or up toward Cisra. For special favors.

I liked the way cards felt in my hands and liked how the light glanced off the sticky cosmetic gloss gamblers wore on their lips and eyelids. I liked when women who won reached across the bar and mussed up my curls. I ran around and gathered up bits and pieces from the road, there was a man who lived above the cobbler who’d reward gathered trash with thimbles full of laudanum and thumbprint cookies, and I cleaned ’til I earned my treats.

I kept to myself and was friendly in no specific way. I danced with girls in alleys beside lounges where we could hear the music, older girls mostly, but I didn’t ask for names, and I played games with the other kids around the Fingerbluffs but rarely spent time with anybody alone. After dusk bleed I’d keep to myself. I didn’t keep track of what was and wasn’t folly. I became a worse and less rigorous Tullian, I guess. I saw Valor sometimes. Uthste more rarely. I wondered if she’d gone where Brandegor went. I had the suspicion they were lovers. The thought would flicker around my head sometimes. I wondered about how they would look astride each other.

I wept constantly but felt little. I suppose I felt hollow, something different but not dissimilar to hunger. I wanted for nothing and everything was lovely. I learned to tie and climb ropes. I learned to scale buildings for sake of sneaking out when called upon to do so. I watched the bandits return from their raids and fantasized about getting my first tattoo done, but in the Fingerbluffs coming of age meant Veltuni coming of age, age-wise, not until somebody hits sixteen seventeen eighteenish, not the Tullian thirteen. At some point I hit the Tullian thirteen but I didn’t feel it happen, then passed it. I didn’t have the ceremony, anyway. I never learned the full burden of Tullian worship. Maybe I was stuck a kid forever. I never got myself a bonnet to wear. There were Tullians around, a few of them, but I felt odd about acquainting myself. Most of them were locals, Choir protectorates, not bandits. I’d picked something else. A bandit future felt mutually exclusive with my heritage’s faith. I was too shy for my own good.

I wondered about Beauty’s house. I wondered if Sunny remembered me. She’d been so sweet to me. I wondered about Ignavia City and the Industry Foundry. I wondered about Yann Chauncey. I wondered how he walked. I wondered if he was a breathing, bleeding thing like any man. In my head he was a block of ice. In my head he was a viper. I wondered about where the pirates went when they left the Fingerbluffs.

The Fingerbluffs are called such because the bluffs themselves are these massive rain-gray pillars, basalt columns someone told me, with knuckles and nails carved a thousand years ago along each shaft. Hands of something giant reaching out of the water, holding our city up. Cradling it or shoving it off itself. Birds nested in the knuckle crevices. I balanced along the rough rock cuticles. I wondered sometimes about falling off. Whether it’d kill me, what it’d feel like if it didn’t. It was a steep drop. The water underneath was very pretty. I watched it all the time. It was easy not to think about Burn Street, looking down. Otherwise I sometimes faltered, and I wondered about Burn Street. I wondered about what we’d looked like from above.

Bandits died often. They’d return like kings to calamitous applause with sacks of stolen gold to toss among their gathered comrades, or they’d come limp on the backs of lurchers, or they wouldn’t come at all. There weren’t funerals, I learned. There was just the party. The party never ended and was always in celebration of, memorial of, the Choir that kept dying all the time. Dying young, at that. Fresh bandits with tattoos still scabbing would fall their first outing. People wept all the time. They drank and danced and clung to each other and wept. They feasted and wept. They bejeweled themselves and wore elaborate brocade and rich creamy silk and linen so fine that light shone through it, and they watched the sunset sea kiss the basalt hands that held them, and they’d weep themselves into a stupor. I wasn’t so unusual. I didn’t tell anyone what happened and for a while nobody asked.

Again, I rarely saw my saviors, they were constantly out raiding, though they were kind when they were briefly home. When I was found weeping by Choir strangers I’d be given a little sip of whiskey and I’d hate it and suffer and everyone would laugh, then I’d laugh, and we all carried on. I did my chores. I assumed Brandegor was dead. I didn’t think or feel a thing about it. If I did for even a moment my chin started shaking and I felt I’d cough up all the organs inside me and turn into paper mush and gravel. I hoped she wasn’t dead. I sat sometimes on the steps of the mansion and waited for her to come home.

I gave you a tour. Why I fixated on you more than my family wasn’t clear to me, but I was so devotedly not thinking or feeling that I didn’t press the strangeness. I buried Edna Honeycutt under the covered bridge. I didn’t bury you. I didn’t see your corpse. There was a daydream future I could build for you. Your death was so mercifully ambiguous.

I showed you the ring where pirates and train robbers boxed. Everybody loved land against sea. I showed you the tailor’s shop; you’d always liked Tlesana’s Treasure, that dress shop where the gowns looked like divine substance made real and spun and draped. The tailors in the Fingerbluffs made garments from fabric so luxurious it made my ribs hurt to touch them and sold them cheap enough that everybody wore them. You liked fashion’s craft, you’d said. I liked the craft too. I liked imagining how it’d lie on the women who wore them.

I showed you the mansion, lush and gilded and busting at the seams with Choir members initially too numerous for me to name, who felt fewer and more discrete as some died and I got to know the currently living. In the mansion, all the Veltuni bandits hooked their cast ancestral hands on the same wall, so the ballroom became the ancestral parlor, where every Veltuni bandit might watch and guide the house when they themselves had died. It was a gorgeous sight. The bandits who came of age here, or had some money around when they took their ancestral name, had polished bronze hands, and the poor ones from beyond the Fingerbluffs had clay ones, fired black. All the reaching was reassuring to me. It must be a comfort, being Veltuni, the dead so able to touch you.

Tullian death is like this: when you die, your spirit returns to heaven, men to day and women to night, and your body returns to the Torn Child below, who knows flesh is androgynous and inescapable, a part of its vast material nothingness. You’re distinct and individual in life alone. The burden of selfhood is abandoned once you’re gone. Unless you’re a revenant, you as you don’t exist anymore. You’re unhewn. The closeness I wanted with you and my family would rob you all of restful edgelessness. Asking you to haunt me is cruel to you.

I showed you the bathhouse. I showed you the orchards and the theater. I took you down to the base of the fingers, on the little stretches of salt white beach, and let the water sweep over the backs of my knees.

I met Tricksy that way.

I was on a jutting broken finger column throwing little finger chips down at the water. The water was rough and splashed high enough to get at my face. Cold and clingy. I had been there for a long time. I’d chopped firewood all morning and my hands were raw and red. I squeezed them and pinched at them. The pain was low and dull under the milky heavy calluses. I pinched harder. Tingly. Experimentally, I rolled the skin of my palm between my opposing thumb and forefinger and twisted. Feeling slipped up my wrist toward my elbow. Whole beams of life between my bones. I tossed more pebbles into the water. I liked watching them be swallowed up.

Then Tricksy said, “How many flips can you do?”

I turned around and there was a girl. Tricksy. I didn’t know that yet. She wore a gingham pinafore and her knees were skinned. Her bangs were in her eyes. She crossed her arms and showed me her teeth.

I’d never seen her before, or if I had, just in passing. She wasn’t in my bedroom of seven or nine kids.

I didn’t say anything fast enough, so she tossed her hands up toward heaven, took a running stride, and spun through the air four five six times in a row. She stuck her landing, missed a step, caught herself, then set off in the other direction. Three more flips. One of her stockings fell down around her ankle. She hopped on one foot while she yanked it back up over her calf. She spat on the sand. She glowered at me. She put her foot down and smoothed her dress and shimmied her shoulders like, ta-da. “Could you beat that? Could you do more flips than that?”

“No ma’am,” I said. I put my chin on my knee and hugged my arms around my shin. “I don’t think I could.”

“That’s boring. D’you know how to do them?” She smiled again, bigger. She looked me right in the eye when she smiled, which made her look crazy. She had very thick eyelashes on her lower lash line. They touched the freckles. She had so many freckles. “I can show you how. You should know how to do flips. I love doing flips.”

“I don’t know if I know how,” I said. I’d never tried. “What are you called?”

“Tricksy thu Ecapa.” She kicked sand. “Answer!”

“I did,” I said.

“D’you want me to show you how!”

I got off the rock and waded to the beach and stood next to her, sopping. I hugged my arms around my ribs. “Hi.”

“We’re past that. Are you Stellarine? Your posture is lousy.”

“Tullian,” I said.

She looked at my hair. “Okay,” she said, “You look like a babydoll. Did your mother drink a lot when she was expecting you? It makes you look like a babydoll in the face when that happens.”

I blinked at her, taken aback.

“I’m being cute,” she said. “I’m saying you look like a babydoll because I like babydolls. Also it’s true. Did you like it when I did all the flips?”

“Yeah,” I said, in awe. My jaw worked over nothing. “Yes’m.”

“It’s all about momentum and being sure about things. You decide you’re going upside down and you throw yourself forward really hard and the motion just goes. It’s fun. It’s easy. You’ll be really good at it.” She stuck out her hand for me to shake. “Hi.”

I took her hand. I examined it. Rough, which surprised me. She didn’t skimp on chores. “Thought we were past that.”

“What’s your name? How are you doing today?” She flipped my hand and pecked my knuckles.

I stared at her.

“If you don’t have a name, I’ll make one up!”

“Marney,” I said somehow.

“Hi Marney.” She beamed. “Tumble with me?”

I looked at my hand in hers. I felt an enormous and ridiculous urge to cry. I pulled my hand away and flexed my fingers, and before she could look sad I took a long stride and stuck my hands out like she had, I threw my body up, my shoulders hit the sand, then my tailbone, then my legs in a pile. Sand smudged up against my cheek. The water rushed in and got in my nose.

She laughed and clapped and helped me up. She dusted me off to no avail. “Again! Like this!”

She flipped and I followed her. Eventually, I got it. It was like we had won a war.

I followed her up to the mansion. It was dark now, I said the bleed as we went. She asked what it meant and I told her I couldn’t tell her, on account of she wasn’t Tullian, but my version of saying that, which was, “Pardon. Wish I could.”

She didn’t press and instead took us to the kitchens, we were served our bowls, and we found a space on the steps to eat together. Another girl joined us, a friend of hers who immediately became a friend of ours, a tall quiet girl called Georgia Candor Blake. She preferred her Virtue, so we called her just Candor. She wore her pearls around her wrist and sucked on them when she was nervous. She shared her bread with me when I finished before her.

The two of them were in the same bedroom on the floor below me. There weren’t so many kids in the mansion, all things considered, and they told me I hadn’t known them because I was shy, not because they were elusive. Candor and Tricksy were legacy bandits. Both of them were orphans. Candor maybe had a father around, given that who her father was wasn’t a certain thing, there were a few men who’d been around her mother, and they all tended to Candor where they could, given that her mother died on a raid about a month ago. Her mother had been important to the Choir, a strategist. Still hard.

Meanwhile, Tricksy’s parents were a pirate and a Hereafterist. The Hereafterist, she told me, was executed in Cisra when she was very small. Her father had been the one to smuggle her mother across the sea to refuge here, but her mother was proud and loved the cause, and went on and continued her work north until it was taken from her. Her pirate father died as pirates sometimes did. She spoke about this lightly. They were part of the ancestral congress. They were downstairs with their hands in the ballroom. Then Candor and Tricksy looked at me like, so do you have parents, or what?

I told them about the massacre and you.

Neither of them said anything. It was a good silence, a serious one. Then they asked if I had met the butler.

We put our bowls away and they took me to a part of the mansion where kids generally weren’t invited, not by edict, but by custom so clear that nobody dared question it. It was the part of the mansion where bandits discussed the already inevitable end of the charade, when the baron’s senate would vote unanimously to send great military force to the impostor barony of iniquity and theft and destroy everything that’d been built here with deadly force. Old-school Ignavian revolutionary total warfare. It was certain. It was just a time game. Not a place for flipping around and impressing girls. I tried to conduct myself with the dignity and solemnity I would if I walked through a Tull Shrine with the Idol out. Tiptoe with my shoulders back, not ogling any of the luxury that studded the walls and ceiling. Someone was getting tattooed on a fine settee while we passed. He watched us without turning his head, just a roll of the pupil from tear duct to lash point. The ship etched on his shoulder sported beautiful sails.

Tricksy and Candor stood outside a tall door and knocked twice. Tricksy subdued a little, but bounced on her toes. Candor looked ashen. I put my hands behind my back and felt vaguely ill.

“Come,” said someone on the other side.

The door slung open. None of us touched it.

Sitting around a table were a few stern bandits with diagrams and unfolded telegram sheets and big leatherbound volumes laid wide open. They had been speaking tersely, the flavor of what’d been said hung in the air, but they stopped talking abruptly when they saw us. One tried for a smile. Across from the door, facing me, was an elder. He wore his hair long. There was a smudge of pink paint in the middle of his eyelids, like someone had swept their thumb through rouge and pressed the pigmented pads in a line from his brows down to his cheekbones. He had a lean face and a slim jaw under his beard. He was Tullian, clearly, but the paint should be blue. Tullian men wear blue paint, women wear black. He was one of the only bandits I’d seen this old. He looked at me.

I tried to fix my posture.

“Candor. Tricksy.” He inclined his head. I could see myself reflected on his eyes. Hollow-eyed babydoll revenant under his lashes. The pink paint made me dizzy. “What can I do for you, little one?”

“Pardon. Hello sir. My friends said I oughta meet you.” I spoke barely above my breath. I moved my hand across my chest, hand stretched down and backwards, wrist toward the sky. Gesture of morning deference. “Are you the butler?”

The other bandits around the table snickered. One closed a book.

He said, “You’re Tullian?”

I felt my age and that I was shorn. I wanted to fall down and cough up my insides. My knees locked instead. “Yessir.”

“Come sit at the table,” he said. “When we’re done I’d love to talk with you.”

I looked over my shoulder at Tricksy and Candor and they looked in equal measure elated and very nervous. Then they both darted off, and I was alone in the doorway. I looked back at the table. I loped to a vacant chair there and sat. There was a map in front of me, the full stretch of continent, the Crimson Archipelago in the Amandine Sea, far-off Delphinia and Raphnia and Laodamia warring across the water. I looked at the hook promontory of the Fingerbluffs, our mean perfect part of the coast, and the seam with Tasmudan and Cisra, at Royston above us, at the Drustlands’ sharp diagonal. I looked at the little script I couldn’t read. The hand was too sprawling. I looked at the sea monsters woven between the islands and wondered if any of them were real. I didn’t look at the bandits for shame of drawing attention. I’d love to talk with him too.

There was a hearth behind the Tullian man. It crackled and cast warm shadows on the walls. Someone at the table called the man Amon, which I took to be his given name, and as they spoke about the contents of a telegram—an ask from Baron Glitslough if Horace Veracity Loveday’s daughter was going to Wilton School in Cisra, some academy for aristocratic brats around Loveday’s daughter’s age—and degrees of urgency that might be alive behind it. “Of course,” said a bandit to Amon, “Horace’s agoraphobia only gets us so far. The girl will come of age eventually. It’ll be suspect, even if he’s possessive and cruel, for nobody to ever glimpse her. We’ll need to produce the girl. Candor’s not ready for that.”

“I could be,” said Candor very softly from behind me.

“Letters are so much easier to leave unscrutinized than a girl in the flesh in the room with you,” said another. “Too much risk to our own. I’m sorry about your mother, Candor. I say we kill the girl and spare us all the trouble.”

“Baron Glitslough and Baron Montrose would insist upon funerary gifts,” said a third, “and making the trip to see those gifts received. We’d be fucked. Baby Loveday needs to be alive and skittish. She could have her father’s condition. Delay the necessity of Candor’s charade for a decade or so and minimize the demands of the song and dance. Doesn’t need to show face in social scenes if she’s inherited the family weirdness.”

“Not appearing at all stretches belief,” the first said. “Surely the girl Loveday would show her face eventually. She’s the only heir. She’ll need a spouse and offspring. She can’t just cloister herself away.”

“Or we could proceed per Jody Honesty Blake’s wishes, rest her spirit. Let little Candor do her work. We send baby Loveday off to school and plan an affliction like her father’s first week. Big show that proves her inherited madness. Then we have her shipped back home, so that the kid is seen and known to be real, and the longer performance is put off ’til Candor’s grown,” said a bandit who hadn’t spoken up yet. He had a pad of tobacco in his lip that lisped his voice. “What do you say, sugar? Do you feel ready?”

Glancing at her, Candor looked worried. If she repeated that she was ready, everybody would know better. Her chin wobbled. I wondered what her dead mother Honesty had intended for her. If Candor wanted it. Doesn’t always matter what the kid wants. Wasn’t like I’d wanted to work. Beside her, Tricksy scuffed her toe. This distribution of attention was neither of their preference. Why couldn’t Tricksy do whatever it was instead?

The adult bandits caught the silence’s tone. They looked at each other, grim and certain. Someone spoke up. “She could stay here for the duration of her schooling. Horace could educate her personally. He’s a paranoid man and an unkind one, mistrustful of his only daughter in some other teacher’s hands.”

“Or we can admit to ourselves that the charade’s not sustainable and plan for war.”

“The homeschooling story would get us a decade. After that, if the story fits, it could last a good long time! It’s not like provincial aristocrats are important anymore, it’s all about liquid cash now, which the Lovedays sorely lack. The charade works. It’s lasted us so far! Have faith in our tricks.”

“That’s right. We jump right to war and we’re smithereens, understand? We’ll be like a border town up in the Drustlands. Candor’s not ready. That’s fine. We’re not ready either. We make preparation for a fistful of futures and keep our heads clear.”

“Baby Loveday will be a debutante afterward that decade’s up. Someone will seek her hand for land’s sake, even if she’s crazy. We’ve got a stretch of the sea. Someone will want it. If anything, she might seem easy pickings, insane and isolated out here with her tyrant father. They’ll come here. They’ll find out.”

“I can do it,” Candor said, but nobody seemed to hear her.

Aiming to be helpful, I said, “Where’s the real daughter?”

Amon looked at me kindly. “I threw her off the bluffs some years back.”

My jaw dangled. I breathed through my open mouth.

“A plan for the next decade gives us a decade to plan,” Amon said. “That’ll mark a predictable end. We’ll be decisive when we must be about the Loveday charade and our aims against annihilation. Write the letter back. I think curt is best. Short, cold, formal. Wilton decadence won’t serve our daughter. She’ll remain home where her duties demand her. Give you more time to mourn, Candor. I regret we’ve put this on you.”

Two of the bandits started scribbling. They compared when they wrote. They snipped about preposition placement. I thought I heard Candor sniff.

“What’s your name?” Amon still looked at me. “How’d you find your way to us?”

“Marney Honeycutt,” I managed. “How little was the daughter?”

“Little,” he said. He deliberately opened his hands and laid them palm up. “An ugliness that demanded doing.”

I felt a swell of ghastly nothing. It was a slimy lump in my chest.

Bandits around the room started standing. They had reached some consensus over our heads, the script for the telegram they ought to send in response. Delayed decision was the decision. Quickly the room just held Amon and me and my two friends.

Amon spoke. “You’re a good daughter, Candor Blake. Your mother would be proud of your resolve, but she’s dead, and you’re nigh a woman. You can chose for yourself if you’re up for the charade.”

Candor grunted. I got the sense she disagreed. Borrowed grief hit me and my head swam. I fought bile back down my throat. Hands on the arms of my chair, squeezing hard.

“Let’s talk about it,” Tricksy said, then whispered not-so-quietly, “Come on!”

“I’ll think on it, sir,” said Candor. “Appreciate the time.”

There was a noisy shuffling behind me, hissing and pleading, then the door shut. I was alone with Amon.

The fire glow behind Amon tinged his hair pink. His lined face fell slack, solemn. He flipped one hand over, put his thumb on his opposing palm. It was a day gesture, but not one whose particular meaning I knew. Tull Shrine reverends have a whole choreography of poses around the table, and only adult Tullians are burdened with knowing the moves and their meanings. I didn’t know what he wanted. I didn’t know what to do.

Hoarsely, “How old are you? Why are you here?”

“Dunno. Fourteen I think,” I managed. Fifteen, maybe? Surely not sixteen. I hadn’t had my menses yet. Without the wage clock looming above my head time had lost all texture. I put my hands on the table the only way I’d been taught how. “Mors Brandegor and Uthste thu Calaina and Mallory Valor Moore brought me here. Everybody else I know is dead.”

“Uthste’s a good woman,” he said. “Dead how?”

“By strikebreakers outside the ichorite foundry in Ignavia City. We worked there.”

“I remember word of that.” Amon pressed his thumb harder, rotated his hand like he was snuffing something. “Are you in the faith?”

“I don’t know how I’d leave it.” My hair wasn’t covered. I felt stupid, underdressed. “I am. It’s hard.”

“Your parents were murdered at dawn that day. Or was that journalistic dramatics?” He inclined his head. There were shadows in triangles under his eyes. He seemed bigger than he was. Head stooped, shoulders braced against the ceiling. Every breath pulled the whole air from the room. I wanted to bolt. I held still.

“Yessir,” I got out. “Dawn.”

“Tell me what happened.”

“My sister was preaching to nobody that we deserved more than what we got. She was talking about how I’m sick. Then they shot us from the rooftops. It wasn’t dawn by the time it was done. It was,” I watched the woman climb out from under my mother and remembered the way her hair looked, the fern shadows it cast on her jaw and her neck, but couldn’t remember if it was brown or bruise pink, it couldn’t have been pink, it must’ve been the light, like with Amon’s hair, but I couldn’t remember how my mother looked aside from lying down, or otherwise being on the street, I couldn’t be sure it was my mother, I didn’t see her face, which maybe meant she was alive, but I am not so stupid, and suddenly my mouth was dry and my insides pinched and flipped. I felt vile. “It was awful,” I said. “It was awful. It was awful. I ran away.”

“Your survival should make you proud,” he said. “It was no cowardice.”

I hadn’t realized it could’ve been. I was suddenly too sour for the grave. The ground would spurn me or else I’d kill the crops.

“You cut your hair unwed.”

“I let it be cut.”

“Are you Torn given?”

I didn’t know what that meant. I looked at him helplessly. His edges blurred.

“Our myth, Marney. There was substance which was nothing in the dark. Call it god. Eternities turned over and uterine god nothing started thinking. The contemplation was unbearable. It could not understand or be understood. So the uterine god nothing split itself, made a baby to be its equivalent, so that it had a partner to see and be seen by, so that there was something to know, and something that could behold the uterine god nothing’s glory in becoming a something, minded and dignified, distinct from the other it had made, and be impressed. With this creation disharmony brewed. The second thinking thing was repulsed by having been made, rather than having been the maker. Jealous and inferior, it became luminous to distinguish and exalt itself above the other. Day and Night,” he said, moving his hands.

“While Day claimed superiority it was clear they depended on one another. Without each other, they’d be alone, which Night knew and Day believed to be unbearable, but so long as there were two, there’d be strife. So together they made a baby. Their child would decide which god was stronger, better, and bow before the victor. The child did not want to bow. It loved Day and Night with perfect symmetry and by the force of this love it would not kneel. Day and Night couldn’t bear it. If the child wouldn’t yield to one, they’d fight to dominate it. They each took a limb and yanked,” he parted his palms, “and ripped the child in twain.

“The Torn bled enormously, ceaselessly. The bleeds of dawn and dusk overcame Day and Night, wed them, gated them, defined them and bound them in place. They saw their own tyranny, that their want for control required subjugation and was therefore worthless. They produced dirt to cover the child and hid its brokenness from their sight. We awoke on the dirt to tend the shroud over the body. We work in the day and we rest in the night, to suit the governance of the Father and Mother, to appease them in their grief. Men are Day given, they come of age and devote themselves to the toils the Day entails, and women are Night given, with their own attendant responsibilities. So goes the gospels.”

There was a hymn about Night and Day burying the body that I had sung at the Shrine for an equinox bleed. Simple, pretty. Lamentations for the little one! They dressed me in a floaty shroud and crowned me with wheat spikes and poppies. Only time I was ever picked for a solo. My family’s rigor with spiritual teaching had softened with each successive daughter, such that at the time I’d hardly understood what I was singing.

Something changed in Amon’s shoulders. He sloped nearer to me. It was like his head had grown heavier. When he spoke again, he rasped.

“What hideous violence has been visited on you. What incomprehensible pain you’ve endured. As you mourn and rage and grow up, you do so here in this house where I was servant. It was my Day-given duty. I served Horace from the time he and I were boys. He became a man and inflicted himself on this barony. The bad telling of our myth, the version we use to hurt each other, says that trying for more ruins everything. That change leads to carnage. We are forbidden conflict. When we hurt each other, it is assumed we are like Day and Night, but the only reading of our myth worth telling is that we tend the Torn not to placate the warring weeping heavens, but because we are like the Torn. We endure the many hurts that power demands imposing on others in order to become itself. The Torn is alive. It wakes beneath the ground, otherwise there’d be no bleed. The blood comes from a still-beating body. The story isn’t done, it ends in a yet-to-come vengeance with the Torn awake and wrathful, striking its gruesome twin parents from the sky.”

He slammed down his hands. His knucklebones strained against his translucent skin, I thought they’d burst through into the air. “I’m Torn given, Marney Honeycutt. Neither Day nor Night. I killed Horace and his family and those servants who’d stand against the creation of our home, where the Choir now rests, and poverty is gone, property and the scarcity it makes replaced with abundance. Luxury for all. I struck down my tyrant. You, Marney. You’re old enough to give. Do you want to strike down yours?”

I gasped and pressed my hands down. I could’ve bent the table. “Yes,” I said. “I need to kill Yann Chauncey.”

“I’ll guide you through the rite,” he said. “You’ll be Torn given. Old enough to help us plan around the Fingerbluffs and to decide how you’re going to kill Yann Chauncey.”

I brought my head low. I was shaking.

“Look at me. None of that,” Amon said. “The Torn demands no deference of us so we needn’t give it to each other. Our respect can be proved in better ways.” He stood. “We’ll prepare the table for evening bleed. You’ll set it to honor the Torn, you’ll tell me why, you’ll vow to kill Yann Chauncey. When the table is set, I’ll unwrap the Idol, and we’ll speak the bleed. Then you’ll be an adult. Be back before.”

Out of shame, I couldn’t embrace him, so I snatched my hands off the table and knotted my fists in the front of my shirt. I turned and ran. I got the door open somehow, my blood foamed in my face and scalp, and I whipped my head around in the comparative coolness of the hallway until I saw Tricksy and Candor clearly listening. Candor looked worried. Tricksy looked rapt.

“I need to find things,” I said too softly and too quickly. “I need to find gifts.”

“Gifts for Amon? What gifts do you get for somebody who doesn’t believe in owning stuff?” Tricksy thrust her hands in the pockets of her dress and rocked back on her heels. “Fruit, I guess. Does a body own the stuff it eats?”

“For religion,” I said vaguely. I looked between the two of them, suddenly sure that I needed help, not because I needed assistance, but because I didn’t want to be alone. “Will you come with me?”

They looked at each other.

“Yes,” said Candor. I wondered if she’d decided something about the charade. I wondered if I would be right to ask. She caught my look and sniffed. “Soon.”

“Duh,” said Tricksy. “I love something to do.”

So I took their wrists and dragged them through the mahogany halls, and I brought them outside, we clambered down the big luxurious steps of Loveday Mansion and onto the overgrown lawn, through the pale whisps of flower and brush, toward the dark pink shivering city. I kept a hold of them. Candor held me by the wrist and Tricksy hooked her pinkie in mine. Gulls flew above us and screamed and Tricksy screamed too. We peeled down an alley. Candor rubbed my wrist with her thumb, which was so kind of her. She was so precious. If I understood right, she would pretend to be the dead heir to the dead baron when she was older and I couldn’t imagine a baron looking so kind as her. We’d only just met and I felt so sure about her.

Around a corner, Tricksy laughing now, the three of us going so fast that her skirt flew around her knees. I wasn’t sure what we were trying to find. Not grain, that was cultivation work, Day work; not mushrooms, that was foraging work, Night work. What was Bleed work?

“Where are we going?” Candor’s voice was small. She was taller than me, her strides were longer, it was funny for her to trail behind me. “Can I help look?”

“We’re looking for something that’s just for pleasure. Not work, something given. Or taken.” I spun once, tried to take in the whole city at once. I felt heartsick and nauseous and like I might fall apart. I could blow to bits in the breeze. Like a dandelion. “A symbol of resistance having been made.”

Bandits flew by us on lurchers, hollering, revving and standing with one hand thrown back. Their fingers and the smiles on their faces were blurs. We huddled close while the engines roared past. I felt Candor and Tricksy breathing against me, bellies swelling. I watched the lurchers vanish.

“Marney,” said Tricksy.

“Yeah,” I said. “We should steal a lurcher.”

“Seems risky,” said Candor.

“We’ll give it back,” I said.

“Yeah,” Tricksy said, clearly more eager for the doing of a scheme than its outcome. “Nobody will notice it’s gone.”

“Nothing elaborate,” I said. “Quick and true.”

Candor breathed shallowly. “Like that one?”

A lurcher had been leaned against a wall. Music pounded inside, the swell of brass and rhythmic stomping. It could belong to anybody. I could see my face reflected in its polished body, distorted into ripples. Something shifted in my belly. Tricksy and I sprang for it, I watched her braid swing out of the corner of my eye, and we put our hands on the horns and the body, it was cold and deliciously solid, it sang under my palms, and Candor covering us, she was broadest of us, she turned her back to us and faced the moving street to keep us safe, and thus protected we walked the lurcher down the street toward the mansion with our heads ducked low. Candor tucked in behind us, followed us close at heel, whistled along to the raucous music an octave above. Tricksy was trying so hard not to laugh. Her shoulders worked under her dress. I felt very sure that I was alive. I liked the weight of air on my tongue. It was humid, substantive.

We struggled with the lurcher up the stairs. It was frightfully heavy and the wheels only went so far. Candor pushed from the back and Tricksy and I pulled from the handles, and when that made little progress, I joined Candor and put my hands on the deep purple tire.

I jerked back like I’d been bitten.

The tingles started. The prickling of a fit.

I looked at my throbbing palms, then at the tires, which seemed closer to leather than metal. I hadn’t had a fit in years. Ichorite doesn’t make its way to the Fingerbluffs often. The trade had legitimate passage along the Flip River, its smuggling routes ran north toward the Drustlands and south toward Tasmudan, the barony here hadn’t been touched by the ichorite industry. The feeling gushed up with bile and a scream that miscarried, I stood there panting, I could hardly breathe. I scrubbed my hands together. I looked at the tire helplessly, murderously.

“The tread is smudged,” said Candor carefully. “That’s funny.”

“Push! What’s the holdup!” Tricksy screwed her face up and gave the handles a fruitless yank.

“S’ichorite in the tires,” I slurred. My tongue felt fat. I gnawed on it and tried to force it back to normal. “Allergic.”

“To ichorite? You can’t be allergic to ichorite. That’s like being allergic to wood. Or water. You’d be fucked,” said Tricksy.

“I am,” I said. The tingles were fading. It was just a brush, after all, and this wasn’t pure ichorite. This felt muddy. I didn’t get a glimpse of its making, and usually ichorite always carries its memories with it. Maybe I was outgrowing it? I reached forward again, put the heel of my hand against the tire. I pressed and thought, move move move move move.

The tire swelled like a blister. It pressed back against my hand, ballooned between my fingers. It moved. It oozed up the stairs, Tricksy yelped and leaped to the wayside as I pushed it higher, aware of its weight but unaffected by it. It rolled toward, then through, the mansion door. The world shimmered. Pink motes globbed across the foyer, dripped from ceiling and up from the floor. Every edge broke the light. I tongued my soft gums, and I noticed but couldn’t parse the hands on my back. I went toward the room where I’d met Amon. The gallery where fun was forbidden. The mansion undulated around me. It was like being underwater. Somewhere, in the back of my mind, I felt the distant factory sounds. Rhythmic thudding, squealing. The cyclical clacking noises of some obscene device. Lots of tinny clicks and one heavy thud in a circuit. I felt like I was being scraped into ribbons. I felt like I was lying down on an oily leather belt while the ceiling rolled real slow above me. Chugging, chugging. I watched the rafters move like ribs on some snake.

The door shut behind me. Amon made a sound of concern. The pink marks on his eyelids looked gorgeous. I dropped the lurcher and my whole hand twitched at its absence. I shook it like the fit would come off. “For the Torn,” I said.

“We’ll sit ’til dawn,” said Amon. “What’s wrong? You look faint.”

“She’s allergic to ichorite,” said Tricksy behind me. “There’s ichorite in tires.”

“Are you okay?” Candor, so I assumed, touched my arm, then my waist. “Marney?”

“It’ll get better,” I said. I watched Amon’s face shimmer. “Just takes a while.”

Amon took the lurcher and heaved it onto the table. He groaned but otherwise showed no strain. He twisted the handles, pressed the whole machine as flat as it could go, and then he waved his hands and Candor helped me into a chair, where Tricksy soon joined me. She perched on my lap. Candor sat on the floor beside the chair and leaned her head back, sucked the pearls on her wrist. I blinked fast.

“There’s no formal ministry around the Torn. It’s fringe, what I’m giving you. Traditionalists in the faith would call it illegitimate.” He folded his hands, I watched the shadows they made flutter over the lurcher on the table. Stunning pulsing birdlike shapes. I scrubbed my palms on my trousers and then held out my hands, mirrored him. “The Father,” he moves his wrists, “under the Mother’s heel,” he spreads his fingers, “with the Torn in his fist.”

I closed my hand. I felt so sick.

The door opened. Amon didn’t look up. His eyes were on me. Candor tucked herself under the chair and Tricksy whipped around and said, “Hi Rancid!”

I looked at the lurcher. Reflected on the lurcher in ripples over my shoulder was an oil-paint impression of Mors Brandegor. She got bigger. Her face became distinct across the steel, I saw her wide mouth and her black brows. She put her hands on my shoulders. She squeezed, I heard her glove leather squeak, and I looked up at my savior and felt twelve again.

“You stole my fucking lurcher,” Brandegor said.

“Yes ma’am,” I said.

Brandegor was drunk. She had a slowness, a deliberateness I didn’t remember her having. Plus the smell. She peered down at me, wiggled her jaw. “Little fawn’s not so little anymore. I’d beat you for it.”

“I’m coming of age,” I said to her. “After dawn it’ll be yours again.”

“Mine now,” she said. “You’re funny, Honeycutt.”

“You’ve been gone,” I said. “You’ve been gone for a very long time.”

“Don’t fight in the home,” said Amon. “Have some propriety about you.”

Brandegor barked a laugh.

“Pretty fingernails,” said Tricksy, admiring the claws by my neck.

“We helped, Tricksy and I,” said Candor from under the chair. “You’d have to fight all three of us.”

“Little gang.” Brandegor released me. She walked around the table’s edge, leaned over Amon and kissed his temple. She left a smear of rouge there. She whispered something, and Amon made some low sound. His hands didn’t stop moving. He had elegant knobby knuckles. All reverends I’d known did. Brandegor took a fistful of his shirt now, dripped something low and poisonous in his ear. She was bigger than him. If they came to blows I suspected Amon would fall. I thought about the knife. I still carried the knife, always wrapped in leather now so that the metal didn’t touch me. I put my hand at the small of my back. I felt the handle. Then Brandegor straightened. She folded her arms across her broad chest. “Precious. When you’re done growing up, I’ll show you how to shoot and knock you upside the head for taking what’s mine. You’ll be good for the Choir. You’ll be baby Loveday’s valet. Proceed.”

Then she left, and she dragged Tricksy and Candor with her without touching them, propelling them through force of will alone.

I stayed alone with Amon.

He put his hands on the table with the lurcher.

Shaking, so did I.

Praise the Torn Child. I have nothing to offer you besides what I’m always offering you, my breath, not the fruit of my thievery but the practice of it, the gesture which is an object in and of itself. I give my love, my grief, my cut red hands. Praise be the blur you leave in your wake. The smear between dignity and indignity, kindness and unkindness, the prefix and its root. There is no religion about you but I will loyally and devotedly pretend. I grow up, my band goes out, we pillage together and bring home our spoils, and I recite the story of your torture and of mine. I say your name every time I’m tattooed, when I’m branded, when my wounds are sewn shut and patched over. We go out on our lurchers under the enormous skies, we wear your redness on our backs, and with my comrades at my shoulder I praise you. By the pulse in my neck I praise you. I wear the rouge on my eyelids not always, forgive me, but when I seek quietude, and contemplation of your pain which is our pain, I prick my thumbs and daub my eyes and I remember you. I remember you, Gwyar. Forever gone from heaven, you fury of the earth, I lay my cheek upon the ground and hear you screaming. It is a low hum through all the rocks. It sounds like an oncoming train.