Tell the Wind and Fire by Sarah Rees Brennan Read Free Book Online Page A

mourners for the living trapped in their cages. Some of those who loved the caged were so racked with misery that they looked barely human, crouched around their pain, faces distended, screaming until their hoarse, cracked voices sounded like birds: they looked as bad as the contorted creatures in the cages.
    The other people standing there were the audience, people who came out of curiosity, out of macabre interest in someone else’s tragedy. Some of them were reading, or even making grocery lists, as they did so. This was only a stop for them, a diversion before they carried on undisturbed with their real lives. There were even a few women knitting.
    They were bored. And there were thousands of people in the Dark and the Light cities who were just like me, who were a little saddened and a lot embarrassed by the ugly, epic tragedy of this place.
    What I had to do was make everybody watch.
    I was wearing a long white dress. White was not a common color to wear, as it was seen as too plain next to all the colors we wore to contrast with the black of the doppelgangers’ hoods. I stood out like a ghost among the living.
    My Aunt Leila had brushed my hair until it shone like spun gold, and it floated behind me as I walked through the people and under the cages. I kept my face calm, so calm. I had to look right. I could not give anybody an excuse to look away.
    I took a deep breath and lifted my hands over my golden head, concentrated, and pulled the light and power out of my rings. Lucent power spilled out of the gems, out of the gold circling my fingers. I reached up to the nearest cage, and I touched the fingertips of the wreck of a woman inside it, and I pushed my power through her, soothing her pain.
    I didn’t have enough magic to do any real good, not for someone hurting as badly as this caged woman was, not for more than a half a second.
    But half a second was all I needed.
    The woman’s sobs eased for a moment. I moved on, touching everyone in every cage. It was exhausting. If you use too much magic, your body collapses so fast; I could feel the magic being tugged out of me as if I were giving blood, but I didn’t let myself look tired any more than I let myself cry.
    I moved through the blood-dark grass to my father’s cage. I reached up and touched his hand.
    He had not been in there long: his face showed human pain, and not the dumb pain of an animal. But he had been there long enough.
    He murmured, “Who are you?” as he touched my hair, a long ribbon of gold in his cold white hand.
    “I’m Lucie Manette,” I said, making my voice not loud but clear, so that it would carry across the graveyard and ring through the swaying leaves, the still waters, and the dead. “This is my father.”
    That was all I said that night. It was important to come in the evening, when there was the biggest crowd, as people went home from work and stopped to gawk at someone else’s tragedy. The next night, I returned and did the exact same thing, and that time people had questions for me. I answered a few, and the night after that I answered a few more: that my father was a Light citizen, that he was a doctor dedicated to helping people, saving people, that all I wanted to do was help and save people too. That my father was my only family, that I had never had a mother.
    Instead of explaining that he’d sought my mother, I said my father had been arrested because he was looking for a neighbor he pitied but whom I hardly knew. I said it whenever I was asked why my father had been arrested. I said it again and again. I called my mother a stranger. I denied my whole family. I never spoke their names. I never asked for justice for my mother. I never said that she had been taken by the Light for doing nothing but helping people. I never spoke of her murder or how our family had been devastated. I never even said her name. I let the Light get away with her murder. I let her be forgotten, I let her be lost. I lied and lied, and it