The Fire Sermon Page 4

  “They haven’t found it yet.”

  “Because it doesn’t exist,” he said. “It’s just an idea.”

  “Maybe that’s enough,” she said, grinning. She was still grinning several minutes later when the fever tipped her back into unconsciousness.

  He stood. “I’m going to check on Dad.”

  I nodded, pressed the cool washcloth again to my aunt’s head. “Dad’ll be just the same—unconscious, I mean,” I said. Zach left anyway, letting the shed door bang loudly behind him.

  With the cloth resting there, over the brand in the center of Alice’s forehead, I thought I could begin to recognize some of my father’s features in her face. I pictured Dad, thirty feet away in the cottage. Each time I passed the cloth across her forehead, grimacing with every gust of the sickened breath, I imagined that I was soothing him. After a minute I reached out and placed my own small hand over Alice’s, a gesture of closeness my father had not allowed for years. I wondered if it was wrong, to feel this closeness to this stranger who had brought my father’s illness to the house like an unwelcome gift.

  Alice had fallen asleep, her breath gurgling slightly in the back of her throat. When I stepped out of the shed, Zach was sitting cross-legged on the ground, in the slant of afternoon sun.

  I joined him. He was fiddling with a piece of hay, exploring the spaces between his teeth.

  After a while, he said, “I saw him fall, you know.”

  I should have realized, knowing how Zach still followed Dad around whenever he could.

  “I was looking for birds’ eggs in the trees by the top paddock,” he went on. “I saw it. One moment he was standing. Then, just like that: he fell.” Zach spat out a splinter of hay. “He staggered a bit, like he’d drunk too much, and sort of propped himself up with his pitchfork. Then he fell again, face-first, so I couldn’t see him because of the wheat.”

  “I’m sorry. It must have been scary.”

  “Why are you sorry? It’s her that should be sorry.” He gestured at the shed behind us, from where we could hear Alice, her sodden lungs doing battle with the air.

  “He’s going to die, isn’t he?”

  There was no point lying to him, so I just nodded.

  “Can’t you do anything?” he said. He grabbed my hand. Among everything that had happened over those last few days—Dad’s collapse and Alice’s arrival—the strangest of all was Zach reaching out for my hand, something he’d not done since we were tiny.

  When we were younger, Zach had found a fossil in the riverbed: a small black stone imprinted with the curlicue of an ancient snail. The snail had become stone, and the stone had become snail. Zach and I were like that, I often thought. We were embedded in each other. First by twinship, then by the years spent together. It wasn’t a matter of choice, any more than the stone or the snail had chosen.

  I squeezed his hand. “What could I do?”

  “Anything. I don’t know. Something. It’s not fair—she’s killing him.”

  “It’s not like that. She’s not doing it to spite him. It’d be the same for her if he’d fallen sick first.”

  “It’s not fair,” he said again.

  “Sickness isn’t fair, not to anyone. It just happens.”

  “It doesn’t, though. Not to Alphas—we hardly ever get sick. It’s always Omegas. They’re weak, sickly. It’s the poison in them, from the blast. She’s the weak one, the contaminated one. And she’s going to drag Dad down with her.”

  I couldn’t argue with him about the illness—it was true that Omegas were more susceptible. “It’s not her fault,” I offered. “And if he fell down a well, or got gored by a bullock, he’d take her with him.”

  He dropped my hand. “You don’t care about him, because you’re not one of us.”

  “Of course I care.”

  “Then do something,” he said. He wiped angrily at a tear that emerged from the corner of his eye.

  “There’s nothing I can do,” I said. I knew that seers were rumored to have different strengths: a knack for predicting weather, or finding springs in arid land, or telling if somebody spoke the truth. But I’d never heard of any with a talent for healing. We couldn’t change the world—only perceive it in crooked ways.

  “I wouldn’t tell anyone,” he whispered. “If you could do something to help him, I’d not say a word. Not to anyone.”

  It made no difference whether I believed him. “There’s nothing I can do,” I repeated.

  “What’s the point of you being a freak if you can’t even do anything useful with it?”

  I reached once more for his hand. “He’s my dad, too.”

  “Omegas don’t have family,” he said, snatching his hand away.

  Alice and Dad lasted two more days. It must have been well past midnight, and Zach and I were in the shed, asleep, Alice’s jagged breath grating on our dreams. I woke suddenly. I shook Zach and said, without thinking of hiding my vision, “Go to Dad. Go now.” He was gone before he could even accuse me of anything, his footsteps racing on the gravel path to the cottage. I stood to go, too: nearby, my father was dying. But Alice opened her eyes, briefly at first, and then for longer. I didn’t want her to be alone, in the cramped darkness of an unfamiliar shed. So I stayed.

  They were buried together the next day, though the gravestone bore only his name. Mom had burned Alice’s nightdress, along with the sheets from both fever-sweated beds. The sole tangible proof that Alice had existed was hanging on a piece of twine around my neck, under my dress: a large brass key. The night she died, when Alice had woken briefly and seen that she was alone with me, she’d taken the key from her neck and passed it to me.

  “Behind my cottage, buried under the lavender, there’s a chest. Things that will help you when you go there.” She entered another coughing fit.

  I handed it back, loath to receive another uninvited gift from this woman. “How do you know it will be me?”

  She coughed again. “I don’t, Cass. I just hope it is.”

  “Why?” I, more than Zach, had cared for this woman, this reeking stranger. Why would she now wish this upon me?

  She pressed the key again into my resisting hand. “Because your brother, he’s so full of fear—he’ll never cope if it’s him.”

  “He’s not afraid of things—and he’s strong.” I wasn’t sure if I was coming to his defense, or my own. “He’s just angry, I suppose.”

  Alice laughed, a rasp that differed only slightly from her usual coughing. “Oh, he’s angry all right. But it’s all the same thing.” She waved my hand away impatiently as I tried to pass back the key.

  In the end I took it. I kept the key hidden, but it still felt like an admission, if only to myself. Looking at Zach’s face as we stood in the graveyard, squinting in the relentless sun, I knew it wouldn’t be long. Since Dad’s death, I’d felt something shift in Zach’s mind. The change in his thoughts felt like a rusted lock that finally gives way: the same decisiveness, the same satisfaction.

  With Dad gone, our house was filled with waiting. I began to dream about the brand. In my dream that first night, I placed my hand again on Alice’s head and felt her scar burning into the flesh of my own palm.

  Only a month after the burial, I came home to find the local Councilman there. It was late summer, the hay freshly cut and sharp underfoot as I walked across the fields. On the path up from the river I saw the blurring of the sky above our cottage, and wondered why the fire was lit on such a hot day.

  They were waiting for me inside. The moment I saw the black iron handle sticking out of the fire, I heard again the hiss of branded flesh that had sounded in my recent dreams, and I turned to run. It was my mother who grabbed me, hard, by the arm.

  “You know the Councilman, Cass, from downstream.”

  I didn’t struggle, but kept my eyes fixed on the brand in the fire. The shape at its end, glowing in the coals, was smaller than I’d pictured it in my dreams. It occurred to me that it was made for use on infants.

/>   “Thirteen years now, Cassandra, we’ve waited for you and your brother to be split,” said the Councilman. He reminded me of my father, his big hands. “It’s too long. One of you where you shouldn’t be, and one missing out on school. We can’t have an Omega here, contaminating the village. It’s dangerous, especially for the other twin. You each need to take your proper place.”

  “This is our proper place: here. This is our home.” I was shouting, but Mom interrupted me quickly.

  “Zach told us, Cass.”

  The Councilman took over. “Your twin came to see me.”

  Zach had been standing behind the Councilman, head slightly bowed. Now he looked up at me. I don’t know what I’d expected to see in his eyes: triumph, I suppose. Perhaps contrition. Instead, he looked as he so often did: wary, watchful. Afraid, even, but my own fear dragged my eyes back to the brand, from its long black handle down to the shape at the end, a serpentine curve in the coals.

  “How do you know he’s not lying?” I asked the Councilman.

  He laughed. “Why would he lie about this? Zach’s shown courage.” He stepped up to the fireplace and lifted the brand. Methodically, he knocked it twice against the iron grill to shake loose the ash that clung to it.

  “Courage?” I threw off my mother’s grasp.

  The Councilman stepped back from the fire, the brand held high. To my surprise, Mom didn’t grab me again, or make any move to stop me as I backed away. It was the Councilman who moved, quicker than I would have imagined, given his size. He grabbed Zach by the neck and pressed him against the wall beside the hearth. In the Councilman’s other hand, raised above Zach’s face, the brand was smoking slightly.

  I shook my head, as if trying to shake the world into some sort of sense. My eyes met Zach’s. Even with the brand so close to his face that its shadow fell across his eyes, I could now see the smirk of triumph. And I admired him, as I always had: my twin; my brave, clever twin. He’d managed to surprise me after all. Could I bring myself to surprise him? Call his bluff and play along, let him be branded and exiled?

  I almost could have brought myself to do it, if I hadn’t detected, beneath his triumph, that splinter of terror, insistent as the brand itself. My own face was screwed up against the sizzling heat that I could sense in front of his.

  “He lied. It’s me. I’m the seer.” I forced my voice into calmness. “He knew I’d tell you the truth.”

  The Councilman pulled back the brand but didn’t release Zach.

  “Why not tell us, if you knew it was her?”

  “I tried, for years. Nobody believed me,” Zach said, his voice half-crushed by the Councilman’s hand at his throat. “I couldn’t prove it. I could never catch her out.”

  “And how do we know we can believe her now?”

  In the end it was a relief for me to tell it all: how the flashes of vision came to me at night, at first, and later even when I was awake. How the blast tore open my sleep with its roar of light. How I sometimes knew things before they happened: the falling branch, the doll, the brand itself. My mother and the Councilman listened carefully. Only Zach, knowing it already, was impatient.

  Finally the Councilman spoke. “You’ve given us all quite the runaround, girl. If it wasn’t for your brother, you might have kept on playing us for fools.” He plunged the brand back into the coals with such force that it sparked against the metal grating. “Did you think you were different from the rest of the filthy Omegas?” He hadn’t let go of the handle of the brand. “Better than them, just because you’re a seer?” He pulled the brand again from the fire. “See this?” He had me now by the throat. The brand, only inches away, singed a few strands of my hair. The smell and the heat forced my eyes shut. “See this?” he said again, waving the brand before my clenched eyes. “This is what you are.”

  I didn’t cry out when he pressed it to my forehead, though I heard Zach give a grunt of pain. My hand was at my chest, clutching the key that hung there. I squeezed it so tightly that later, upstairs, I saw that it had left its imprint on my flesh.

  chapter 4

  They let me stay for four days, until the burn had begun to heal. It was Zach who rubbed balm on my forehead. He winced as he did it, whether from pain or disgust I didn’t know.

  “Hold still.” His tongue emerged from the corner of his mouth as he peered close to clean the wound. He’d always done that when he concentrated. I was extra aware of these small things, now, knowing that I wouldn’t see them anymore.

  He dabbed again. He was very gentle, but I couldn’t help but flinch as he touched the raw skin.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  Not sorry for exposing me—sorry only for the blistered flesh.

  “It’ll get better in a few weeks. But I’ll be gone by then. You’re not sorry about that.”

  He put down the cloth and looked out the window. “It couldn’t stay the same. It couldn’t be the two of us any longer. It’s not right.”

  “You realize you’re going to be by yourself, now.”

  He shook his head. “You kept me by myself. I can go to school now. I’ll have the others.”

  “The ones who throw rocks at us when we pass by the school? It was me who cleaned up the wound when Nick landed that rock right above your eye. Who’s going to mop up your blood once they’ve sent me away?”

  “You don’t get it, do you?” He smiled at me. For the first time I could remember, he was perfectly serene. “They only threw rocks because of you. Because you made us both into a freak show. Nobody’s going to be throwing rocks at me now. Not ever again.”

  It was refreshing, in a way, to be able to speak openly after all the subterfuge. For those few days before I left, we were more comfortable together than we had been for years.

  “You didn’t see it coming?” he asked, on my last night, when he’d blown out the candle on the table between our beds.

  “I saw the brand. I felt it burning.”

  “But you didn’t know how I’d do it? That I’d declare myself the Omega?”

  “I guess I only got a glimpse of what would happen in the end. That it would be me.”

  “But it might have been me. If you hadn’t said.”

  “Maybe.” I shifted again. The only bearable way to lie was on my back, so that the burn didn’t touch the pillow. “In my dreams, it was always me branded.” Did that mean that staying silent had never been an option? Had he known so surely that I would speak up? And what if I hadn’t?

  I left at dawn the next day. Zach’s happiness was barely disguised, and didn’t surprise me, though I was saddened to see how my mother rushed the farewell. She avoided looking at my face, as she had ever since the branding. I’d seen it only once myself, sneaking into Mom’s room to meet my new face in the small mirror there. The burn was still raised and blistered, but despite the inflammation surrounding it, the mark was clear. I remembered the Councilman’s words and repeated them to myself: “This is what I am.” Holding my finger just above the scorched flesh, I traced the shape: the incomplete circle, like an inverted horseshoe, with a short horizontal line spreading out at each end. “This is what I am,” I said again.

  What surprised me, when I left, was my own relief. Although the pain of my brand was still sharp, and although Mom pushed a parcel of food into my arms when I tried to embrace her, there was something liberating about leaving behind those years of hiding. When Zach said, “Take care of yourself,” I nearly laughed out loud.

  “You mean: take care of you.”

  He looked straight at me, not averting his eyes from my brand the way our mother did. “Yes.”

  I thought that maybe, for the first time in years, we were being honest with each other.

  Of course, I cried. I was thirteen years old and I had never been parted from my family before. The farthest I’d ever been from Zach was the day he journeyed to collect Alice. I wondered if it would have been easier if I’d been branded as a child. I would have been raised in an Omega settlement, never kn
own what it was to be with my family, with my twin. I might even have had friends, though never having experienced any closeness apart from with Zach, I didn’t really know what that might mean. At least, I thought, I don’t have to hide who I am anymore.

  I was wrong. I was hardly even out of the village when I passed a group of children my own age. Although Zach and I had not been able to attend the school, we knew all the local children, had even played with them in the early years, before our strange togetherness became a public problem. Zach had always carried himself with confidence, and insisted he would fight anyone who said he wasn’t an Alpha. But as the years passed, parents began to warn their children away from the unsplit twins, so we’d relied more and more on each other for company, even as Zach’s resentment at our isolation grew. During the last few years the other children had not just avoided us but had also openly taunted us, hurling rocks and insults if our parents were out of sight.

  The four children, three boys and a girl, had been riding on a pair of old donkeys, taking turns to race each other on their comically awkward mounts. I heard them from a distance and saw them shortly afterward. I kept my head down and kept to the side of the narrow road, but word of our split had spread quickly, and when they grew close enough to see my brand they were filled with the excitement of seeing the news confirmed.

  They surrounded me. Nick, the tallest of the boys, spoke first, while the others looked with undisguised disgust at my brand.

  “Looks like Zach can finally come to school.”

  Nick hadn’t spoken to either of us for years, other than to shout slurs, but it seemed my branding had immediately returned Zach to favor.

  Another of the boys spoke: “Your kind don’t belong here.”

  “I’m leaving,” I said, and tried to break away, but Nick blocked my way and shoved me back toward the others, who shoved me again. I dropped my parcel and instinctively shielded the wound on my head as the boys’ blows sent me stumbling from side to side within the tiny ring they had formed. A taunt accompanied each shove: “freak”; “dead end”; “poison.”