The Fire Sermon (6 page)

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 known 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.”

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.