For Darkness Shows the Stars (15 page)

B
ARON
N
ORTH WAS NOTHING
if not civil to his tenants, but declined to stay more than a few moments at the party on the Boatwright lands. He paid his respects to Felicia Innovation and made arrangements for a more thorough meeting with the admiral the following day. Then he crooked his finger at Elliot, who’d trailed forward a few steps from the near-melee going on at the North Posts’ blanket. Had he seen what had transpired among his servants? Had he recognized Kai? Elliot got the distinct impression that she was very close to making a bad situation much worse.

“You will meet me in my office in half an hour,” said Baron North, in a voice barely audible over the few instruments still in use.

Elliot nodded. “Yes, sir.” But her father had already climbed back into his carriage. Elliot caught a glimpse of another male figure inside as it drove away. He hadn’t even offered her a ride back to the house. She should leave quickly, if she hoped to make herself presentable before she was required to meet with him.

“I’ll take care of Ro,” said Dee, coming up to her. “You should hurry.”

Gill and Kai were still glaring at each other as if they’d come to blows the moment she turned her back.

“I won’t let them fight,” Dee said. “Gill wouldn’t risk it now, anyway.”

No one knew what the baron might do, least of all Elliot. He couldn’t hold the concert against them, could he? They were merely listening to the music provided by the Fleet, Olivia, and the Grove Posts.

Elliot quickly took her leave of her hosts and turned toward the path leading home. If she ran, she’d have more time to prepare herself, but then again, she might be in worse shape.

What was certain, however, was that she had no time to think about Kai. She rubbed her hands over her wrists, which still tingled where he’d touched her. His grip hadn’t been hard enough to hurt, but it had hardly been tender, either. And his words . . . she’d known he was angry, but now she wondered if he hated her. If he’d always hated her.

Had he hated her the day her mother died? Had he hated her the day after?

No. She refused to believe it. Hating her now was bad enough, but she could survive it. She’d been doing well these past four years, like a fallen tree that clung to the ground and continued to grow, despite all odds. Elliot’s roots were buried deep, and nothing Kai could say would convince her that the soil was any less solid.

The temperature had plummeted in the hours since the sun had set. They’d have a frost tonight. Above her head, branches waved in the autumn wind, sending dry, crackling leaves into the air, and swirling them into eddies and tiny tornadoes at her feet. She couldn’t see them well in the darkness, but she heard their crunch and whisper, and caught glimpses of their movement. They were lucky in the islands, she had always learned. Lucky to be free of wolves and bears and giant, fanged-toothed cats. There were rabbits, and possums, and egg-eating stoats, but nothing that could hurt a person. She’d read stories, growing up, where children were attacked by lions or eaten by wolves, but she’d never feared the darkness or the forest. The Luddites ruled the world.

Elliot was barely one hundred meters down the road when she heard the crunch of gravel beneath wheels. She turned, and saw a sun-cart gaining on her, its headlights unlit, even in the darkness. The cart pulled up beside her. Andromeda and Ro sat inside.

“Get in,” said Andromeda. “I’ll take you back.”

Absolutely not. “This isn’t necessary—”

“Of course it is,” the older girl said. “You’re terrible at protecting them, but you’re all they’ve got.”

Elliot climbed into the car. “I am doing this because the cart will get me back to my house more quickly.”

“I am doing this,” the Post girl said, her tone world-weary, “because I don’t think I’ve been entirely fair to you.”

That was putting it mildly. In the privacy of the darkness, Elliot thought it safe to roll her eyes.

“Yes,” Andromeda said, as if in agreement. “I don’t have too much pride to admit that.” She took off. Within moments, the sun-cart seemed to have reached full speed—or at least as fast as it went on reserve power. They whizzed past the shadowy silhouettes of trees and bounced hard over tree roots and dips in the trail. Elliot couldn’t even see the path in front of the wheels, but it didn’t seem to slow Andromeda down. At least she could be certain of reaching home in time. She might even catch up to her father.

“Besides,” Andromeda went on, “there must be some reason you can collect all these Post admirers. And I hear Ro here has excellent taste.”

In the darkness, Elliot squeezed Ro’s hand. How much of their conversation could the Reduced girl pick up? “I thought the prevailing opinion would be that someone Reduced doesn’t know any better.”

“My mother was Reduced,” said Andromeda. “Still had more sense than most people I know.”

She steered them around a corner at a speed Elliot found imprudent, given the darkness. She couldn’t see a thing ahead of her. “Don’t you want the headlights on?”

Andromeda grunted and flicked a switch. Elliot and Ro flinched in the sudden glare, but Andromeda didn’t slow down at all.

“Care to tell me what your father has against music?” Andromeda asked abruptly.

“It’s not music,” Elliot replied. “It’s control.” It was always control.

Three years ago, Baron Zachariah North had caught wind of the unofficial orchestra operating on the North estate. Where some of the estate lords would have taken advantage of the spontaneous resource—as if they’d come across a patch of natural gas or a seam of coal—Baron North had been displeased. He’d not authorized any such endeavor, and he wouldn’t have approved of it at any rate. Music was a distraction from his laborers’ duties, much like school or books or more than the allotted number of feasts. Things were bad enough on the estate already, and they’d been getting steadily worse since the death of the baroness a year earlier. Baron North had had far too many duties to take over and concerns to keep himself occupied with. If someone was going to get more leisure time, it would be him, not his servants.

He’d forbidden the concerts and practice sessions and confiscated the instruments from all the Reduced on the estate. Elliot could still see the bonfires—the flames that had once been a hallmark of harvest celebrations turned into pyres for the laborers’ only joy.

Yet the restrictions had had little effect. More pipes and string-boxes had appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, and the practice sessions had gone on in secret. When the baron discovered that his own daughter was helping his people in their treason, he’d finally had an object toward which to aim his wrath.

The first and only time Elliot had been glad that Kai had left was when the bad time came. Her father had come first for the Posts she’d liked best. Kai’s position on the farm had already been too precarious to have survived.

“You hear some pretty scary things about the North estate down in the Post enclaves.”

Elliot squeezed her hands together in her lap. “From him?”

“From everyone.”

Elliot grimaced. She could well imagine the stories that followed the affair. Reduced who disobeyed the baron’s orders were shown no mercy and no quarter. He extended the restrictions to the CORs, and when he learned that they were hiding their instruments, he dissolved the COR family housing units that had been in place as long as Elliot had been alive, and relegated all the CORs to single-sex, age-organized barracks alongside the Reduced. Children were taken from their mothers, common-laws were separated, and that’s when the real trouble started.

And Elliot couldn’t protect any of them. Not then, not alone. She’d messed up badly, and the estate was still paying for it. It wouldn’t happen again.

“Of course,” Andromeda said, “bad as you are, the estate where I was born was far worse.”

“You left when you were quite young, I understand.”

“Had to,” she replied. “Where I’m from, the lady of the estate believed all Posts were the product of . . .
relations
between the Luddites and the Reduced. We were made to bear the punishment for her husband’s sins.”

“That’s horrible!” Elliot cried. And of course, since her mother had been Reduced, she could hardly have protected them—not like Dee could protect Jef. “Was your father Reduced, too?”

Andromeda hesitated. “My father
was
the master, Elliot. Our lady wasn’t wrong about everything.”

Elliot was glad for the darkness, glad Andromeda couldn’t see her mouth hanging open. Such things did not happen on the North estate. Hadn’t happened since she was young and Benedict had been sent away. Her father wouldn’t have it.

“But even my father could not account for all the Posts that started crowding his estate. And you know Luddites. They wouldn’t do genetic testing to prove their theory one way or the other. My lady’s belief was that her God would never allow anything other than Luddite, Reduced, and the abominable combination of the two. To her, we were as abhorrent as a hybrid plant.”

Elliot stiffened. Why, of all comparisons, had the Post chosen that one?

“Here we are,” said Andromeda as she pulled up in front of the big house.

Elliot looked over at the Post girl, but now that they were bathed in the light from the house window, Andromeda had once again fallen silent.

“I am very sorry for what you were made to endure,” Elliot said at last.

“Don’t be sorry for me,” said Andromeda. “Be sorry for those who still live there.” She stared down at the controls in her hands. “I hate the estates, but you are no monster. As long as there are people under your care, I hope you will care for them.”

Elliot’s jaw tightened at her words. She didn’t need the blessing of this Post, no matter what Andromeda had been through. She’d known her duties since she could pronounce the word “Luddite.”

“Be strong, Elliot.”

Elliot didn’t respond, and instead turned to Ro. “Good night, Ro. I hope you enjoyed the music.”

Ro nodded and leaned over the edge of the cart to give Elliot a hug.

“She’ll show you where she lives,” Elliot said to Andromeda.

“I’m serious,” said Andromeda. “Everything . . . else aside, I am aware that you are all that stands between your Posts and your father.”

She was wrong. Elliot knew that now. The Posts themselves stood there. Dee stood, without her common-law. Gill stood, a forty-year-old laborer willing to fight a teenager for saying Elliot was useless. Or worse than useless—complicit. Thom and so many others had stood, willing to walk away from the farm rather than let Baron North continue with his reign of terror. She may have made those instruments, but it was the Posts who wanted to play them. It was the Posts who were willing to hide them, the Posts willing to defy her father as his punishments grew ever harsher.

No, she couldn’t protect them then. Not then, at fifteen, still reeling from the loss of her mother and Kai and trying to figure out how the baroness had managed her father with such finesse all those years. She couldn’t stop her father from putting Gill’s eleven-year-old daughter in the women’s barracks, from slapping Dee in stocks for two days after she was discovered sneaking instruments out to the Grove estate, or from beating Thom for trying to break Dee out of those stocks.

And perhaps she couldn’t protect them now either, but she’d learned something important back there at the concert. She might do her best to protect them—and fail—but she hadn’t realized until now they were also protecting her.

Dee chose to sneak those instruments. Thom chose to rescue the woman he loved. And then, when so many of the Posts left the estate, Dee and Gill and Mags and the others chose to stay behind. Maybe they chose like Elliot had one year earlier. They chose to save the estate, to protect the Reduced that had even less agency than they did.

Maybe they chose to protect Elliot herself.

She’d always told herself that the reason Dee wouldn’t reveal where Thom had gone was because she didn’t fully trust Elliot. But maybe Dee didn’t tell her about Thom so it wasn’t possible for Elliot to get in trouble for keeping it a secret. Elliot was a Luddite and their superior on the estate, yes, but it was Dee and Gill and Thom who were the grown-ups.

Elliot turned away from Andromeda without another word and marched into the house. She didn’t change her clothes or redo her hair but went straight up to the door of her father’s office and knocked. If he sought to punish her, she wouldn’t hide. If he hoped to punish the others, she would fight.

Dear Elliot,

Where have you been? You haven’t come to the barn in days. Tell me when you are coming back.

Your friend,

Kai

Dear Kai,

I guess by now you have heard the news. Benedict has been sent away from the North Estate. I don’t know what it is he did. Mother won’t tell me, and all I’ve been able to find out is that it was very bad and has something to do with the Reduced. What is the word among the CORs?

Your friend,

Elliot

Dear Elliot,

I haven’t heard anything at all here. My da never listens to gossip. Where did he go? Another estate?

Your friend,

Kai

Dear Kai,

I don’t know. No one tells me anything. Tatiana said he was turned out into the cold, but I don’t think that’s true. She always makes up stories. Like she tells me all the Posts that run away end up in butcher shops. I didn’t eat meat for a month, and then my mother found out what Tatiana had said.

I can’t think of what Benedict might have done. Beat a Reduced?

Your friend,

Elliot

Dear Elliot,

If I know your father, it was probably because Benedict didn’t beat the Reduced enough. You know where that butcher shop story comes from, don’t you? Long ago, before there were CORs, before the Estates could manage to feed themselves, there were Luddites who ate Reduced. At least, that’s what the legends say. The older Posts tell that story on feast nights to scare the rest of us.

So, when can you come back to the barn? I have something to show you!

Your friend,

Kai

Dear Kai,

I’m not coming to see you until you take that back. Luddites never ate people!

Your friend,

Elliot

Dear Elliot,

Did so.

Your friend,

Kai

Dear Kai,

TAKE THAT BACK NOW.

NOT your friend,

Elliot

Dear Elliot,

I know why Benedict was sent away. I will tell you if you come see me.

Your friend,

Kai

Dear Elliot,

Come on. I know you want to know.

Your friend,

Kai

Dear Elliot,

Fine. Be that way. I never want to see you again. Though you are really missing out.

Not your friend, either,