Last First Snow Read Free Page B

didn’t take leave,” Chel continued. “Things have been hard since the strike. We read the broadsheets, same as everyone. If this deal goes through and our rent goes up, we won’t be able to live here anymore. Moving costs. Traveling to work costs. Worse if you have a family. This was the best bad choice. You know how that goes, maybe.”
    â€œI do,” Elayne said, though she hadn’t planned to say anything. “What do you mean, broadsheets?”
    Chel plucked a piece of newsprint from the ground. The headline ran: “Cabal Plans District’s Death,” over caricatures of the King in Red and Tan Batac. Elayne read the first few lines of the article, folded the sheet, and passed it back to Chel. Now that she knew what to look for, she saw more copies pasted to the sides of tents. No bylines anywhere she could see, nor any printer’s mark.
    The camp woke around them. Eyes emerged from sleeping bags, peered out of tents, glanced up from bowls of breakfast porridge. Some of those gazes confronted Elayne, some assessed, some merely noted her passage and dismissed her. She heard whispers, most in Low Quechal, which she did not know well enough to suss out, but some in common Kathic.
    â€œForeigner,” they said, which didn’t bother her, and “Iskari,” which was wrong.
    â€œCraftswoman,” she heard as well, over and over, from women stretching, from men crouched to warm themselves at fires, from children (there were children here, a few) who stopped their game of ullamal to follow her. Others followed, too. They gathered in her wake, a sluggish V of rebel geese: a gnarled man covered with scars who might have fought in the Wars himself, on the wrong side. A pregnant woman, leading her husband by the hand. A trio of muscular bare-chested men, triplets maybe; she could tell them apart only by the different bruises.
    As they neared the fountain, she felt a new power rising. These people had made themselves one. The air tinted green beneath their unity’s weight.
    Angry masses. Torches, pitchforks, and blood.
    No. Approach the situation fresh, she told herself—these aren’t the mobs of your childhood, just scared people gathered for protection. And if what Chel said was true, about fights and arson and strikebreakers, they had reason to fear.
    Chel led Elayne past tents where volunteer cooks gave food to those who asked, past signs scrawled with crude cartoons of the King in Red as thief and monster, past the stage and around the fountain and its faceless god. Behind the fountain lay a stretch of square covered by dried grass mats upon which men and women sat cross-legged and rapt.
    Elayne’s heart clenched and she stopped breathing.
    An altar rose before the grass mats, and on that altar a man lay bound. A priest, white-clad from waist down and bare and massive from waist up, stood with his back to the congregation. Intentional and intricate scars webbed the priest’s torso. A long time ago, someone had sliced Quechal glyphwork into his skin.
    The priest raised a knife. The captive did not scream. He stared into the dawning sky.
    The knife swept down.
    And stopped.
    There had been no time for questions or context. Elayne caught the blade with Craft, and wrapped the priest in invisible bonds. Glyphs glowed blue on her fingers and wrists, beneath her collar and beside her temples.
    The crowd gasped.
    The sacrifice howled in terror and frustration.
    The priest turned.
    He should not have been able to move, and barely to breathe, but still he turned. Green light bloomed from his scars and glistened off the upturned blade of his knife, off his eyes.
    His eyes, which widened in shock, though not so sharply as her own.
    â€œHello, Elayne,” Temoc said.

 
    3
    In a respectful universe, crowd, parishioners, sacrifice, and guards would have all kept still, but of course they didn’t. The faithful cried out. Temoc stepped toward her, but he was