The Fire Sermon Read online

  My hands still over my face, I turned to Ruth, a dark-haired girl who lived only a few houses from us. I whispered, “Stop them. Please.”

  Ruth reached forward, and for a second I thought she was going to take my arm. Instead, she bent down, grabbed my flask, and emptied my water slowly onto the ground, where one of the donkeys made a futile attempt to slurp at it as it sank into the sandy soil. “That’s our water,” Ruth said. “From the Alpha well. You’ve been contaminating it long enough, freak.”

  They left me without looking back. I waited until they were out of sight before gathering my things and making my way down to the river. Emptying the flask had been a harmless act: the river water, though brackish and warm, was perfectly safe to drink. But even as I crouched at the river’s edge to fill the flask again, I knew the significance of Ruth’s gesture. To the Alphas, perhaps even my own mother, my life up to now had been a lie, my place in the village kept through deceit.

  For the rest of the day I avoided the road, instead scrambling along the banks of the river. I fastened my shawl over my head, flinching when it touched my burn. The one time I passed a farmer, an Alpha woman bringing her goats down to the river’s edge to drink, I scuttled past in silence, head down. I didn’t stop when I reached the gorge leading west to the silos but pushed onward, farther south than I’d ever been.

  It had taken Zach more than half a day in the cart to reach the Omega settlement when he collected Alice. For me, on foot, avoiding the roads, my footsteps never quite keeping time with the throbbing of my head, it took nearly three days. Several times a day I stopped to bathe my forehead in the river and to tear off some bread from the parcel Mom had given me. I slept on the riverbank, glad of the midsummer warmth. On the second morning I rejoined the road, where it curved away from the river to climb up the valley. Although I was still afraid of encountering people, it was for a different reason. I was in Omega country now.

  The landscape itself was different. The Alphas had always claimed the best land for their own. The valley where I’d been raised was good farming country, the soil plush with river silt. Up here there was no valley to shield the land from the harsh light, which glared from the rocky soil. The grass, where it grew at all, was brittle and pale, and the roadside was covered with brambles. Their barbed leaves glistened with spiderwebs, a thick mist that did not lift. There was some other strangeness, too, that I couldn’t work out until I looked about to refill my flask and realized that, for the first time in my life, I couldn’t hear the river. Its noise had been the backdrop to my entire life, and I knew it intimately: the surge of the high water in flood season, the heavy buzz of insects that drifted over the still pools in summer. The river had always provided the spine of my mental map of the area: upstream from the village was south, past the gorge and the silos that Zach and I used to dare each other to approach. Farther upstream lay Wyndham, the biggest city and the Council’s base. I’d never been that far but had heard stories of its size and wealth. Even the refuge outside Wyndham, Mom had told me, was bigger than any town I’d seen. Downstream led north, through the fields, larger villages. A day’s walk downriver was Haven, the market town where Dad used to take us when we were smaller. Beyond Haven, the shallow rapids took the river beyond my knowledge.

  Now, in Omega country, I was still confident that I could find my way—I could usually sense the landscape, just as I could sense emotions and events. But without the river, I felt cut loose, turning about on this unfamiliar plain. There was only one road, and I followed it as my mother had told me. I left it only once, following some telltale birds to a small spring that bubbled from a crack in the rock, from which I drank quickly before scrambling back to the barren road.

  By the time I saw the settlement, night was lowering on the plain, and the first lamps had been lit in the windows. The cluster of houses was smaller than my village but substantial enough that there could be no doubt. A huddle of low buildings, surrounded by a spread of fields, where the recently harvested crops were bald in patches and interrupted by large boulders. I pulled back the shawl that covered my head, waving away the flies that made busy with the still-seeping burn. This is what I am, I reminded myself, one hand on the key that hung at my neck. But as I approached, a small figure on the wide and broken road, I wished that Zach were by my side. A stupid thought, I reprimanded myself. Nonetheless, he had been like the sound of the river to me: always there.

  chapter 5

  In the years that followed, I was grateful at least for Alice’s cottage and the stash of bronze coins that I’d found in the buried chest beneath the lavender. After six years at the settlement there were few coins left, but the money had allowed me to eke out the leanest months of the bad season, to pay the Council’s tithe collectors (who came without fail, regardless of the success or failure of crops), and to help some of those who might otherwise have gone hungry. Little Oscar, from my parents’ village, was there, being raised by his relatives in a cottage near my own. He’d been sent away much too young to remember me, but whenever I saw him it felt like a link with the village and with those who I’d left behind. But although the others at the settlement still referred to the cottage as “Alice’s place,” I gradually began to feel settled there.

  The other Omegas had grown used to me, too, though they tended to keep their distance. I understood their wariness: arriving there, newly branded at thirteen, meant that I would never quite be seen as one of them. That was compounded by the fact that I was a seer. Once or twice I overheard mutterings about my absence of any visible mutation. Easy enough for her, I heard my neighbor Claire say to her wife, Nessa, when I offered to help them with the rethatching of their roof. It’s not like she’s had to struggle like the rest of us. Another time, at work in my garden, I heard Nessa warning Claire to steer clear of me. I don’t want her sitting in my kitchen. We’ve got enough troubles without a neighbor who can read your mind. There was no point trying to explain to her that it didn’t work like that—that being a seer was a series of impressions, not a neat narrative, and that I was more likely to catch a glimpse of a town ten miles east, or of the blast itself, than to be privy to Nessa’s thoughts. I kept silent, went on picking the snails from my broad-bean stems, and pretended I’d heard nothing. I’d learned, by then, that if Omegas were seen as dangerous, seers were doubly so. I found myself spending more time alone than I had at the village, where I’d had Zach’s company, however grudging.

  I’d been surprised to find books at Alice’s cottage. Omegas weren’t allowed to go to school, so most couldn’t read. But in the buried chest, along with the coins, were two notebooks of handwritten recipes, and one of songs, some of which I’d heard bards sing in our village. For me and Zach, forbidden entry to school in our unsplit state, reading had been a furtive and therefore somehow intimate act. The two of us, under our mother’s tutelage or, more often, alone together, scratching out the shapes of letters in the clay banks of the river, or in the dust of the yard behind the house. Later, there were books, but only a few. A reading primer with pictures that our father had kept from his own childhood. The Village Book, held in the Village Hall and laboriously inscribed with histories of the area, of the local Councilmen, and of the laws they oversaw. Even in our relatively well-off village, books were a rarity: reading was for making out instructions on a seed packet bought at market, or reading in the Village Book the names of the two traveling Omegas who had been fined and whipped for stealing a sheep. In the settlement, where few could read and fewer would admit to it, books were an indulgence we couldn’t afford.

  I didn’t tell anyone about Alice’s books, but I read and reread them so many times that the pages began to come away from the spines as I turned them, as if the books existed in a perpetual autumn. In the evenings, when we’d all finished working in the fields and I went home to the cottage, I’d spend hours in Alice’s kitchen, following her compact, scrawled guidance for adding rosemary to a loaf of bread, or the easiest way to peel a clove of garli
c. When I first followed her instructions, and learned to crush the garlic with the flat of my knife so that the clove slipped from its dry husk like a sweet from its wrapper, I felt closer to Alice than to any of the others in the settlement.

  In those quiet evenings, I thought often of my mother, and of Zach. At first, Mom wrote to me a few times a year, her letters carried by Alpha traders who wouldn’t even dismount at the settlement to drop them, instead tossing them from their saddlebags. Two years after I arrived at the settlement, she wrote that Zach had an apprenticeship at the Council, at Wyndham. Over the next year or so, more news filtered through: that Zach provided good service. That he grew in power. Then, after five years in the settlement, Mom wrote that Zach’s master had died and Zach had taken over his post. We were only eighteen, but most Councilors started young. They died young, too—the rivalries and factions within the Council were legendary. The Judge, who’d been in charge as long as I could remember, was a rare exception, as old as my parents. Most of the others were young. Stories reached us, even in the settlement, of the rise and fall of various Councilors. In the brutal world of the Council fort at Wyndham, it seemed, ruthlessness and ambition counted for more than experience. It didn’t surprise me that Zach had been drawn to it, or that he should have done well. I tried to picture him in the splendor of the Council chambers. I thought of his smile of triumph when he’d exposed me, and what he’d said afterward: Nobody’s going to be throwing rocks at me now. Not ever again. And while I feared for him, I didn’t envy him, even in the year the harvest failed and we went hungry in the settlement.

  By that stage Mom’s letters were rare—a year or more between them—and for news of the rest of the world I had to rely on the gossip picked up at the Omega market to the west, or shared by the itinerants who passed through our settlement. Along with their small bundles of possessions, they carried with them stories. Those heading west were seeking better land to farm, as the bleak land closer to the deadlands in the east barely produced enough to pay the Council tithes, let alone to live on. But those coming from the west spoke of Council crackdowns: Omegas forced out of long-held settlements, where the land was now deemed too good for them; Alpha raiders who stole and destroyed crops. More and more people forced to seek out the refuges. Rumors of harsher treatment of Omegas came steadily. Even in our settlement, which had decent land compared to many, we were feeling the impact of the ever-higher tithes demanded by the Council collectors. Twice, too, Alpha raiders had attacked us. The first time they came, they’d beaten Ben, whose cottage was at the edge of the settlement. They’d taken everything they could carry, including the coins he’d put aside for the next month’s tithes. The second time they came was after the failed harvest; not finding anything to steal, they’d contented themselves with setting fire to the barn. When I suggested to my neighbors that we should report it to the Council, they rolled their eyes.

  “So they can send some soldiers out to burn down the rest of the settlement?” said Claire.

  “You lived too long in that Alpha village, Cass,” added Nessa. “You still haven’t got it.”

  I was learning, though, with each story of brutality that found its way to the settlement. There were other rumors, too, though these were rare and were shared more furtively: murmurings about Omega resistance, and whispers about the island. But watching my neighbors’ resignation as we rebuilt the barn, these ideas seemed far-fetched. The Council had ruled for hundreds of years; the idea that there could be any place free of their control was nothing but wishful thinking.

  And why bother with the resistance, anyway? The fatal bond between twins was our safety net. Ever since the drought years there’d been more and more restrictions on Omegas, but at the same time as we griped about tithes, or the limitation of settlements to ever poorer land, we knew that the Council would ultimately protect us. That was what the refuges were for—and after the failed harvest, more and more Omegas considered them. That winter had left my bones straining toward the outside of my skin. It had worn us all down to bones and teeth, and finally one couple from our settlement left for the refuge near Wyndham. We couldn’t persuade them to stay, to gamble on the promise of new crops in spring. They’d had enough. So the whole settlement stood together in the dawn light, watching them lock up their cottage, before trudging off down the rock-strewn road.

  “Don’t know why they’re bothering to lock up,” said Nessa. “They won’t be coming back.”

  “At least they’ll be fed,” Claire replied. “Only fair that they should have to work for it.”

  “For a while, sure. But these days they’re saying that once you’re in, you’re in for good.”

  She shrugged. “It’s their choice to go.” I looked again at the retreating figures. The meager packs they carried looked bigger on their wasted bodies. What choice did they really have?

  “Anyway,” she continued. “You can’t tell me you’d rather there were no refuges. At least we know the Council wouldn’t let us starve.”

  “Not wouldn’t,” Ben, the oldest at the settlement, joined in. “They would if they could get away with it. But could not. There’s a difference.”

  In spring, when the new crops had come in and the hunger was receding, my mother arrived in a bullock cart. When Ben showed her to my cottage, I didn’t quite know how to greet her. She looked the same, which only made me more aware of how much I must have changed. Not just the inevitable growth of six years, but the fact that I’d lived as an Omega for that time. That had changed me more than the hunger ever could. I’d encountered a few Alphas since coming to the settlement—the Council’s tithe collectors; the shady merchants who sometimes came to the Omega market. Even among Alphas there were the outcast and the poor, passing through the Omega settlements in search of something better. All of them looked at us with contempt, if they met our eyes at all. I’d heard the names they called us: freak, dead end. More hurtful than the words was their manner, the small movements that revealed their contempt and their fear of Omega contamination. Even the most ragged of the Alpha merchants, those who stooped to trade with Omegas, would wince at the touch of an Omega hand when passing a coin.

  Although I’d been branded an Omega when I left the village, I hadn’t really known what it meant. I remembered how hurt I’d been when my mother hadn’t hugged me good-bye. Now, as she stood awkwardly in my small kitchen, I knew better than to even reach out to her.

  We sat opposite each other at my kitchen table.

  “I just came to give you this,” she said, passing me a gold coin. Zach, she said, had sent her six of them, each one worth half a year’s harvest.

  The coin warmed quickly in my hand as I turned it over, then back again. “Why give this to me?”

  “You’re going to need it.”

  I gestured at the cottage around us, at the vines, heavy with figs, visible through the small window. “I don’t need it. I’m doing fine. And you’ve never cared, before.”

  She leaned forward, spoke quietly. “You can’t stay here.”

  I dropped the coin on the table. It spun noisily for a few seconds, settled with a clunk on the scratched wood. “What do you mean? Wasn’t it enough for you to drive me out of the village?”

  Mom shook her head. “I didn’t want to have to do this. Maybe I shouldn’t have. But you have to take the money and go. Soon. It’s Zach.”

  I sighed. “It’s always Zach.”

  “He’s powerful, now. That means he has enemies. People are talking—about him, about what he’s done at the Council.”

  “What he’s done? We’re nineteen. He’s only been on the Council for a year.”

  “You’ve heard of the General?”

  “Everyone’s heard of the General.” Omegas in particular. Each time a new anti-Omega policy was rumored, it was her name people were whispering at the market. When the tithe collectors had demanded higher rates from us over the last two years, it was always based on the General’s latest “reforms.”

 
“She’s only a year older than you and Zach, if that. People make enemies on the Council, Cass. Most Councilors don’t live long.” Nor did their twins, though she didn’t need to state it. “You know what Zach’s like. Driven. Ambitious. He’s going by the name the Reformer now. He has followers, works with important people. It won’t be long before somebody tries to get to you.”

  “No.” I shoved the coin across the table to her. “I won’t leave. And even if he has enemies, he wouldn’t let them get to me. He’d keep me safe.”

  She reached across the table, as if to take my hand, but stopped herself. How long had it been, I wondered, since anyone had touched me with tenderness?

  “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

  I looked blankly at her. “What do you mean?”

  “You’ve heard of the Keeping Rooms.”

  This was one of the many stories that had blown through the settlement, like the tumbleweeds that snagged and rolled across the plain. Whispers that somewhere beneath the Council chambers at Wyndham was a secret prison where Councilors would keep their Omega twins. It was called the Keeping Rooms: an underground complex where Omegas were locked up indefinitely, so that their powerful counterparts wouldn’t be vulnerable to any attack on their Omega twins.

  “That? It’s just a rumor. And even if it were true, Zach would never do it. He wouldn’t. I know him best.”

  “No. You’re closest to him. It’s not the same thing. He’ll come for you, Cass. He’ll lock you away, to protect himself.”

  I shook my head. “He wouldn’t do it.”

  Was I trying to convince her, or myself? Either way, she didn’t argue with me. We both knew that I wouldn’t leave.

  Before going, Mom reached down from the cart and pressed the coin into my hand again. I felt it in my palm as the cart receded into the distance. And I didn’t spend it; not to run, or even to buy food. I kept it with me, as I’d once kept the key from Alice, and I thought of Zach whenever I held it.