Aelindra Moonwhisper's Arc

Chapter 5 of 9

They walked her down the lane between two gray coats. The crowd did not follow. Her rain cloud drifted at her shoulder, quiet, watching her face. The council hall sat at the far end of the square, stone steps worn smooth. She thought of the boy on the bottom stair in his shawl. She thought of the room above the shop she had promised him. She thought of winter coming and a boy who had already counted the weeks he had left. Her hands were loose at her sides. Inside her chest something old turned over and woke up. "Don't," the cloud said. He had read her face. "Whatever you're thinking. Don't." "He needs a roof," she said. "He needs you alive." "He needs a roof by first frost." The cloud said nothing after that. He stayed close. They brought her into the hall and stood her before a long table. Seven councillors in gray. The officer she had refused took his place at the end and would not meet her eye. They read the charge. They asked if she denied it. She looked at the wood grain on the table and saw the boy's face instead, the way he had set the spoon down and asked why. She did not answer the question they asked. She reached, instead, for the thing she had buried the day she left her mother's house. It came up easy, like it had been waiting. Heat rose in her palms. The sparkle on her cheeks caught fire and did not burn her. The air above the table shimmered and warped. A councillor stood. Another shouted. The officer drew his blade halfway and stopped, because the room had gone red. She held a heart of flame in her cupped hands, cracked and glowing, hot enough to bend the iron sconces on the wall. She thought only of the boy. She opened her hands. The fire went out from her in a clean ring. It did not touch the walls or the windows or the wooden beams. It touched the seven gray coats and the officer at the end of the table, and then it was done. Ash sifted down onto the polished floor. Her cloud hung above her, weeping a thin rain onto her scalp. Aelindra lowered her hands. They were steady. Her knees were not. She sat down on the floor beside the table and pressed her palms flat to the cool stone. The council was gone. The charge was gone. The officer who had promised to come back was gone. Somewhere across town a boy in a shawl was waiting on a bottom step, and outside the hall a crowd was about to learn what she had done. She had a bakery to open by first frost. She stood up.