Rowan awakens to a voice. He opens his eyes. Light around a girl’s head like a halo; he can’t make out her face, but she smells sweet. She’s saying his name, over and over.
For a glorious heartbeat he thinks it’s Ophelia.
“Rowan, what’s happened to you?”
Rowan shuts his eyes against the light. Ophelia is far away, in the city they grew up in. She probably thinks he’s taken off on her. A pang runs through him. It’s been days, and yet he hasn’t given a thought to how time must be unfolding for her. No texts, even, from him, nothing to let her know how he feels, how sorry he is.
If only he could tell her about all these things that are happening to him. Ophelia, it’s real, Antilia is real! He imagines her eyes opening wide, that slow, secret smile spreading over her face. The single dimple. I have a sword. I killed two people last night, Ophelia, I killed them. Will she hate him for that? It’s just like we imagined, only . . . it’s so hard, Ophelia.
“Rowan, Chosen. Can you hear me?”
Rowan forces himself to open his eyes again. He turns his head against the light. Every muscle in his shoulders and neck hurts, and his head is a heavy aching stone.
“I hear you.”
“You’re alive, at least.”
Rowan presses his palms against the stone and makes himself sit up. For one horrible moment he thinks his sword is gone again, but then he sees it, between his body and the stone wall against which he wedged himself last night.
“You’re covered in blood.”
“Sigrid.” His throat is dry. He looks around the city square. It is empty, and the sun is beginning to peer over the tall building to the east. It’s cold; God, he’s cold. “What are you doing here?”
“Market day; I came early to set up. Are you hurt?”
“My head . . .” Rowan feels at his skull; nothing’s seeping, but he has a big egg on the side of his head on top of the original gash, and no doubt he looks a scabby fright. “I’m all right.”
And then the evening comes flooding back to him.
“Sigrid, I met the Council. The leader—he said he will release the prisoners.”
“He what?”
“He said he’d release the prisoners, the people in the jail, the work camp, the Council farm, whatever you call it.” He’s almost stuttering. “At noon.”
“When?”
Ari could be walking free, right now. “Today.” He struggles to stand up. “I must . . . Which direction is the farm? Can someone take me there? We have to go—”
She looks frightened and overjoyed all at once. “It’s not possible. Today? They would never.”
“We have to . . .”
“Get up—you’re filthy!” She’s pulling him to his feet now, trying ineffectually to dust him off. “Are you still bleeding?”
“Sigrid, I need your help.”
Her face becomes so happy when he says this. He feels, obscurely, guilty.
—
Sigrid leads him to her home, dragging her cart filled with musical instruments behind her. “It’s not far,” she says. Then, more ominously, “They’re all very excited to meet you.”
“Who?”
“My family, of course! I’ve told them all about you.” She bursts into a few bars of “Fake Plastic Trees.”
Rowan thinks he’d better think more about what songs he introduces to these people, if they’re going to fasten onto every little thing.
Sigrid has convinced him not to charge directly toward the Council farm, but rather to come with her. “We will mobilize as many of us in the resistance as we can. You cannot do this alone.”
“But it might be a trap.” He can’t be responsible for more people dying.
“You must let us decide that. Hurry! The sun’s rising waits for no one.”
Fingers of rosy light are beginning to pierce the streets.
She lives in a warren of stone buildings in the heart of the city. The stone is black with age here, edges worn and rounded, like some ancient honeycomb. Laundry is strung back and forth across the narrow alleys, clumped in shafts of rare light like flowers. As they pass doors, Sigrid strikes out with her palm, calls softly. “Meet at my house! Now! The Chosen one is with me!” And people come out. They have over fifty following them now, and more and more come all the time, alerted by others.
“Are you sure all these people are trustworthy?” Rowan murmurs.
“As sure as I know my own name.”
Rowan wonders. He remembers the man Bob Song Tao, his suspicion. And indeed, Brandr knew exactly where to find him in the Great Night celebrations. But there’s nothing he can do about it now, is there?
They burst out into a small courtyard. “Here,” she says, and a door swings wide at her approach. The woman holding it open can only be Sigrid’s mother, so similar are they.
“I’ve got the Chosen,” Sigrid says, voice vibrating with pride. “And he needs our help.”