Fennrick Vex's Arc

Chapter 6 of 6

Fennrick carried the glowing book back to the skeletal girl. He had her answer about the dock children. Now he needed her rules. If she took the forgotten, then he had to know exactly what made a child forgotten. His kin hid in the sunken road, nameless and unclaimed. That hunger could turn toward them next. He had to learn the line before he crossed it by accident. He found her not at the orphanage but in a broken cathedral of bone and colored glass. Light poured through the tall windows in shifting patches. Hollow pillars moaned like voices. The girl sat on the floor, turning a brass device in her hands. Spinning rings held a swirl of violet mist. Beside her crouched her ghoul, its chitin plates flashing blinding reds and blues. "You came back," she said. "Most run." "I need your rules," Fennrick said. "How a child becomes yours. Tell me plain." She smiled with too many teeth. "I don't speak plain. Answer my riddles. Guess wrong three times and I choose one child from your road to balance the scale." His stomach dropped. She knew about the road. She knew about his kin. One wrong word would hand her a life. She held up the astrolabe. The mist formed a shape, a small house of floating glass. "First. A child sleeps behind glass walls, warm and fed. No one comes. No one calls their name. Is this child forgotten?" Fennrick thought of his kin, hidden but guarded. Warm was not enough. A name was not enough. "No," he said. "Not if someone means to come back for them." The mist shivered and cleared. "True," she said, surprised. A black butterfly drifted down and landed on her veil, its wings marked with orange eyes. "Second." The butterfly's eyes seemed to watch him. "A hundred people know this child's face. None would die for it. Yours?" Fennrick's false form knew crowds. Crowds forgot you the moment you left. "Yours," he said. "Being known is not being guarded." The girl laughed, delighted. "Two true. One left." Her ghoul rose on long legs. The glass pillars rang louder. She lifted a curved bone key that glowed low red. "Last. This key opens my house. I offer it to you. Take it, and you may lock one child inside forever, safe from me and from the Guild both. Will you take it?" His hand twitched toward the key. Safe forever. He could lock his smallest kin away and never fear again. Then he understood. A child locked away, hidden from every eye, claimed by no one who could reach them. That was her hunger exactly. The key was the trap. "No," Fennrick said. He pulled his hand back. "A locked child is a forgotten child. I won't give you one dressed as safe." The cathedral went silent. Even the pillars stopped their moaning. The butterfly lifted off her veil and flew into the colored light. The ghoul's plates dimmed to dull gray. "Three true," the girl said softly. "No one has ever answered all three." She lowered the key. "The rule, then, since you earned it. I cannot take a child who is claimed. Not hidden. Not locked. Claimed. Someone must stand in the open and say the child is theirs, loud enough that the world hears it." Fennrick felt the cost of it land. To save his kin, he had to stop hiding them. He had to name them as his, out loud, where the Guild could hear too. "Then I claim them," he said. "Every one in that road. Loud as you want." The girl stood. Her starry lower half faded into the glass floor. "Say it where it counts, hunter. Not to me." She pressed the astrolabe into his hands. "So you'll know I kept my word." Then she was gone, and the ghoul with her, and the cathedral held only light. Fennrick went to the sunken road at dawn. He dropped his hunter's slouch for good. He let his ears rise and his tail swing free before all of them, Saraphillia and his hidden kin and the traders who sheltered there. "I'm one of you," he said. "These are mine. I claim them, and I'll say it to the whole Guild if they come." The words cost him his cover, his lie, his safe gray life. He said them anyway, and watched the small frightened faces lift toward him. The violet mist in the astrolabe went still and clear. No door would be marked here. His kin were claimed, and the thing that collects the forgotten had no more hold on them.