Fearsome Dreamer (26 page)

‘Something wrong with you? Where d'you think I'm from?'

‘I'm sorry,' said Rue, trying to placate him. ‘I don't know where we are.'

‘Rue, my dear,' said the silver-eyed boy. He sounded sad, and she turned to look at him. ‘We're in Angle Tar.'

‘What?' she said, and laughed.

‘We're still in Angle Tar. We never left. Why do you think you can understand what they're saying? No one can speak Angle Tarain outside of Angle Tar. We're still here.'

Rue's stomach rolled over in fright. ‘Are you playing?' she said.

‘No, I'm not. These tunnels are right underneath Capital City. They've always been here, but no one knows about them, with a few exceptions. The city guard knows they exist, which is why our friend the ex-prostitute here was given the generous choice of leaving to find them, if she could. Better than death.'

‘Not much,' said the woman, and a few amongst them cackled.

‘I don't understand,' said Rue. ‘Stop, wait a minute. Stop walking, I don't understand.'

‘Rue,' said the silver-eyed boy. ‘Listen to me. There are things you don't know about Angle Tar. Things they keep from you. You might think that because you're special and Talented, and because you're taught things that are taught to no one else, that they tell you everything. They tell you only what you need to hear in order to be loyal. They know, without doubt, that sweet souls like yourself would never pledge to work for a country that lies to its own people.'

Rue shook her head. ‘Maybe there are good reasons. Maybe I don't need to know.'

He put a hand out to stop her. ‘To your left.'

There was a door beside them, an ordinary-looking thing. On it was a small plaque with a series of numbers.

‘The location,' said the silver-eyed boy. ‘All the doors look alike. It can get very confusing, so of course they've all been given a location number. This one is plain-looking because it's the artisan's area. The people they had to keep.'

The door was opened by someone from the inside.

‘People they had to keep?' said Rue. She did not want to go through the door.

‘Indispensables. Builders. Tradesmen. Cooks. Other doors and areas were more lavish – inlaid with gold, that kind of thing. Now they're not, of course. Anything valuable was pawned long ago.'

They were filing through, one at a time; the door was open only a sliver.

‘How do you know so much about this place?' said Rue, wanting desperately to doubt him.

The silver-eyed boy smiled before he moved through the door. ‘Because I used to live here.'

Rue watched him disappear, shock freezing her. Someone behind her snorted impatiently, and she squeezed through the gap.

The room beyond was bigger than her old village. An enormous hall, divided into sections with walls, metal railings and curtains. So many people milling about. The ceiling was higher than she could believe. Powerful smells. Noise. Light.

‘We're still underground?' she breathed.

The silver-eyed boy took her hand. ‘Come on. The pen will count for a lot. Let's get some food.'

‘No!' she said, horrified. She wanted to take nothing from these people.

‘Hush. They have food to offer, and now they all know I've brought them something more precious than a hundred meals.'

It was the worst thing she could think of. But he took her hand and led her onward. There were tables with enormous cooking pots set on them, lined up. They reached the nearest. A vast man wearing a sweaty, stained shirt eyed them.

‘I'm the man with the pen, in case you were wondering. Two bowls of your finest, please,' said the silver-eyed boy.

The serving man sniffed, but ladled a steaming liquid out into two bowls. Rue watched his arms as he worked. She couldn't help it; they were covered in spiky black tattoos.

The silver-eyed boy gave her a bowl and led her to a bench, pushed up against the nearest wall. They sat.

The silver-eyed boy cleared his throat. ‘I've been lying to you, and for that I'm sorry. I'm not proud of it, but I have my reasons.'

The meagre soup Rue held in her hands was doing little to comfort her. The outside of the bowl was greasy and slid unpleasantly in her hands. One of the silver-eyed boy's arms was draped over her shoulders, hugging her close as he talked.

‘My name's Wren. Draper Wren,' he said.

So finally, she had his name. Wren. She rolled it around in her mind. It seemed like such an ordinary name for someone so strange-looking.

‘I'm from Angle Tar, originally,' said Wren. ‘New Nantes. You know it?'

Rue shook her head silently, afraid to speak in case he stopped spilling his secrets.

‘It's on the east coast. A small city. I grew up knowing there was something wrong with me, probably the same way you did. Only you like your differences. I didn't like mine. Neither did anyone else, much. My parents kept sending me to doctors, who couldn't see what the problem was. Luckily, I was bright too. I held my ground and spent most of my teenage years begging my parents to send me to university. Of course, you have to have a lot of money, unless you're so special they'll take you on for free. I didn't know about the Talent, then.

‘Anyway, this man came to our school one day. Said he was recruiting for the university from the less wealthy areas, looking for the cleverest students who couldn't afford to get in. We could take a couple of tests, see if we were good enough. I couldn't believe it – like a helping hand from the gods, like all my years of praying and temple-visiting had finally been answered. My parents were nice enough people, but I couldn't be more different from them.

‘Well and so, I signed up for it. We weren't given any indication of what they might be, so I sweated and studied for three days on any subject I could think of. When it came to it, one of the classrooms had been cleared of everything except two chairs, and the recruiting man was sat on one of them. He told me to sit on the other, and the tests began.

‘All he did was ask me questions. But he kept asking the right questions, as if he already knew everything there was to know about me. He asked me about the dreams I had that no one else seemed to. He knew about the times when I was awake and felt like I was being pulled into another place. He asked me to close my eyes and try to do impossible things, like tell them what was written on the notice they'd put on the wall in another room a moment ago.

‘It seemed fast, but when it was over I was exhausted. Then I noticed that I'd been in that room with them for over five hours, and I spent the rest of the evening in shock.

‘It happened quickly after that. The man came back after a week. I was brought into the head tutor's office and told that I had passed their tests and was offered a place at their university, subject to certain conditions.'

Rue had drawn back while he talked and was watching his face. ‘That you couldn't ask questions about what you were going to study until you'd said yes and signed the contract. And then even after that they wouldn't tell you really anything about it.'

‘Exactly,' he said, smiling. ‘I've heard other people's recruitment stories and they're always much the same. So only a short while later I'd left home and was taken to the university. Those first few weeks were the most exciting of my life.'

‘Did you miss your parents? Do you miss them now?'

Wren looked at her, a brief frown flitting across his face. ‘I don't believe so,' he said. ‘I don't think I thought of them once. I send them a card from time to time, but it's quite expensive to communicate in the old-fashioned Angle Tar way. Do you know physical post doesn't exist outside of this country? Hasn't for centuries. And the nature of my work now means I have to be careful who I talk to and what I say. But I'm sure they're fine.'

Rue wondered why she had asked him that. It wasn't as if she missed her adoptive family. She hadn't thought much on Fernie either, since arriving in Capital. It had all been too exciting. But now she wondered if Fernie thought of her much, and decided she needed to write a letter to her as soon as she could.

‘I met others who had similar differences to me,' Wren was saying. ‘I'd never before known people who dreamed the same way I did, or had the same mannerisms and thought the way I thought. At times it was unpleasant, like a mirror that shows you in a way you'd never seen before.'

Rue nodded, eyes gleaming. This was so right! Why had he never talked about this to her? It would have been comforting to know that this was something other Talented had felt, too. None of her group seemed to care about that sort of thing at all.

‘And then I met Frith.'

Of course.

Stupid girl. There was only one place in Angle Tar that trained the Talented. Of course he would have been at Capital. She couldn't quite believe it, though. The thought of him there, amongst all the reams of ordinary faces and attitudes, just didn't fit.

Wren was watching her with a sly half smile. ‘De Forde Say Frith. What an interesting character, wouldn't you agree?'

Rue shrugged, feeling inexplicably nervous talking about him. ‘He's the one who recruited me.'

Wren looked surprised. ‘So you really are special, aren't you? I've never heard of that before. But then he's quite the string-puller. Wants to do everything himself. Can't have anything happening he doesn't know about.'

That sounded accurate enough, though Rue had never considered those traits of Frith in quite such a negative light before. ‘I like him,' she said defensively. ‘He was nice to me when he didn't have to be. He's been my friend even though he's busy and important.'

‘I don't doubt it. He was my friend, too. He has a way of making you feel like you're the only one he thinks is worth his precious time. Then you find out that he plays everyone he knows in exactly the same way.'

She watched him, searching for something recognisable in his face, something to latch on to. He talked about her life as if it were his own. He knew the people she did, the places she did. She wanted to know what had taken him away from here, away from Frith and the university and to a life she could not even imagine.

‘There's someone else we have in common, you know,' said Wren slowly. ‘The only one in this country with an ounce of decent Talent.'

Rue realised that she had been waiting for this, and hoping that he wouldn't bring it up. She would have thought it a relief to find someone, a confidante to whom she could spill her thoughts about White, before they threatened to burst her open. But not here. Not now. Not with Wren, this stranger.

He was looking at her expectantly.

‘You're talking about Mussyer White, I suppose,' she said.

‘Who else?'

He was silent, then, as if unsure what to say next.

‘What do you think of him?' he said eventually.

Rue's heartbeat felt faint. She struggled to keep a sudden burst of aching emotion inside her and swallowed.

‘He's all right,' she said. ‘A bit rude.'

His face came into her head and she tried to push it away.

‘He's a genius,' said Wren. ‘He's also a bastard, and I swore once that I'd kill him if I could.'

Rue looked at him in shock. His jaw was stringed with tension, and he was smiling in that way that she'd noticed people did when they were angry. She'd never understood that. When she was angry, she was angry. She supposed she didn't have the control of herself that others did.

‘Why?' she asked, knowing it was expected, but taken in by the drama.

‘He ruined my life. But I can't hate him. Not now. I can hate him for what he did to me, but not for the turn my life took because of him.'

‘What did he do?'

Wren sighed, as if it pained him.

You brought it up, Rue felt like saying.

‘We trained together,' said Wren. ‘I was in complete awe of him. He knew things about the Talent. No one understood it in the way he did. No one could fill you with such excitement about such a vague thing. He could tell you anything and you'd believe it; he was such an authority, even though he was the same age as most of us.'

Rue nodded silently. It was a perfect picture.

‘I liked the fact that he was different to everyone else in our class. He didn't care about being rich or having fine clothes. He didn't think like anyone else. He didn't go out drinking with us. And his Talent was extraordinary. I'd been the most Talented one in the class until he joined, by far. But I didn't mind that he was equal to me. He acted like a catalyst. Made us all want to do better. Made us push ourselves. We were friends. So I thought.

‘Then I met someone.'

Wren looked away from her and out across the hall. People had left them alone, preoccupied with their steady business of survival. She'd become used to the smell without noticing. The first man, to whom the pen had been promised, was nowhere to be seen.

‘Her name was Areline. I'd noticed her before, but tried to put her out of my mind. She was aristocratic and I was from nowhere, with nothing fine to wear and no money to spend. She had her friends, people she'd grown up with who were not Talented, but nevertheless secured places at the university to study the mundane subjects. By secured I mean paid for, you understand.

‘So, I'd put her out of my mind, but that didn't stop me thinking of her from time to time. That was one thing I could do without anyone knowing. She was queen of our Talented group, even if she was hardly ever there, always off out at parties with her non-Talented friends. But when she was, the whole group became exhilarated trying to impress her or get her attention. I found the whole thing embarrassing. I suppose she must have started to notice this. One day she stopped me as we were coming out of class.

‘She told me I was to come with her that evening for dinner out in the city. Didn't ask – told. She did it sweetly enough, and did anyone ever refuse her? I doubt it. Mostly we were glad to be noticed. I said I'd think about it, but it was all a lie and she probably knew it.