We ate the rabbits, as well as some foraged mushrooms and greens that Eva pulled from her bag.
‘Are you a seer as well?’ I asked her while we ate.
She snorted. ‘Hardly.’
‘Sorry,’ I said. Nobody wanted to be mistaken for a seer. ‘I just couldn’t see your mutation.’
Leonard’s face had turned serious.
‘She has the most feared mutation of all,’ he said. ‘I’m surprised you haven’t spotted it already.’
There was a long pause. I scanned Eva again but could see nothing unusual. What could be more feared than being a seer, with its promise of madness?
Leonard leaned forward, and gave a stage whisper. ‘Red hair.’
Our laughter startled two blackbirds, that took off, screeching.
‘Look more closely,’ Eva said. She turned her head to the side and lifted her thick braid. There, nestled into the back of her neck, was a second mouth. She opened it briefly, baring two crooked teeth.
‘Only shame is that I can’t sing out of it,’ she said, letting her braid drop. ‘Then I wouldn’t need Leonard for the harmonies, and I wouldn’t have to put up with his grumbling.’
When the fire was extinguished and the sun risen, Leonard cleaned his hands carefully before he took up his guitar.
‘Can’t get rabbit grease on the strings,’ he said, weaving his handkerchief between his clustered fingers.
‘If you’re going to be making a racket, I’d better keep watch,’ said Zoe. ‘If anything comes along the road, we’ll need to see them before they hear us.’ She looked up at the tree above her. Piper dropped to kneel on one knee and she climbed, without speaking, on to his bent leg, balanced for a moment with a hand on his shoulder, and then jumped up to grasp the branch. She swung herself upwards, feet pointed and body tucked. I could see what Leonard had meant, when he’d talked about the way she and Piper moved. The ease with which they inhabited their bodies.
When I envied Zoe, though, it wasn’t her unbranded face I coveted, or her confidence. Not even her freedom from the visions that shredded my mind. It was the way that she and Piper moved together, without even speaking. The closeness that didn’t require words. There’d been a time when Zach and I had been like that, long before we were split, and before he’d turned against me. But after all that had happened since, the intimacy of that shared childhood seemed as distant as the island. It was a place to which we could never return.
Eva took up her drum, and Leonard’s right hand plucked at the strings, tickling the music out of the instrument, while the fingers of his left hand moved more slowly.
He’d been right, I knew, when he’d told me that he’d heard my hesitant footsteps. I’d been taunting my body with cold and hunger. Avoiding every consolation, because there would be no consolation for the dead I’d left in my wake. But this music was a pleasure that I couldn’t dodge. Like the ash that had plagued us in the east, the music would not be denied. I leaned back against a tree and allowed myself to listen.
It was more noise than we’d permitted ourselves for weeks. Our lives had become so muted. We crept at night, wincing at the breaking of twigs beneath our boots. We hid from patrols, and talked often in whispers. We were at risk, every moment, until it began to feel as though sound itself had become something we had to ration. Now, even the most flippant of the bards’ songs felt like a small act of defiance: to hear the music ringing out. To permit ourselves something more than bare survival.
Some of the songs were slow and sad; others were raucous, the notes sizzling and jumping like corn kernels in a hot pan. Several had lyrics bawdy enough to set us all laughing. And when I glanced away from the fire, I saw that even Zoe’s feet, hanging from the branch high in the tree, were swinging in time with the music.
‘Did your twin have the talent for music as well?’ I asked Leonard, when he and Eva stopped for a drink.
He shrugged. ‘All I have of her is a name on my registration papers. That and the town where we were born.’ He fished the worn sheet of paper from his bag and waved it at me, laughing. ‘They can’t make up their minds, the Council. Can’t do enough to keep us separate, but then they make us carry our twins around in our pockets, everywhere we go.’ He traced the paper as if he would feel the word under his fingertip. ‘Elise, it says. That’s what Eva tells me – she can read a little. But that’s my twin’s name, on there somewhere.’
‘And you don’t remember anything about her at all?’
He shrugged again. ‘I was a baby when they sent me away. That’s all I know of her: those marks on paper, that I can’t even see.’
I thought again of Zach. What did I have of him, now? I had been thirteen when I was branded and sent away. Not long enough for me, and too long for him. During my years in the Keeping Rooms, he’d come to see me, but only rarely. When I’d last seen him, in the silo after Kip and The Confessor’s deaths, he’d seemed fevered, frantic. He had been hissing, cut loose, like the electric wires that Kip and I had slashed.
When the next song started, my mind was still lingering in the silo with Zach, hearing again the tremor of terror in his voice when he’d told me to run. Eva had swapped her drum for a flute, so it was only Leonard’s voice tracing the words. It was mid-morning, the sun through the trees casting stripes on the clearing. It took me a moment to realise what Leonard was singing about.
They came in dark ships
They came at night
They laid The Confessor’s kiss
On each islander’s throat with a knife.
Piper stood up. To my left, Zoe dropped quietly from the lookout tree to the ground. She moved closer to where we sat in a circle around the ashes.
‘I heard they didn’t kill them all,’ Piper said.
Leonard stopped singing, but his fingers on the guitar never hesitated, the tune continuing to unfurl from his hands.
‘Is that what you heard?’ he said. The music played on. ‘Well, songs always exaggerate.’
He went back to the song.
They said there was no island
They said it wasn’t true
But they came for the island in their dark ships
And they’re coming next for you.
‘You’d want to be careful who’s listening, when you sing that song,’ said Zoe. ‘You could bring down trouble.’
Leonard smiled. ‘And you haven’t got trouble already, the three of you?’
‘Who told you about the island?’ said Piper.
‘The Council themselves are putting the word out,’ Leonard said. ‘Spreading the news that they found the island, crushed the resistance.’
‘That song you’re singing is hardly the Council’s version, though,’ said Piper. ‘What do you know of what happened there?’
‘People talk to bards,’ he said. ‘They tell us things.’ He strummed a few more chords. ‘But I’m guessing you didn’t need to be told about the island. I’m guessing you know more than I do about what happened there.’
Piper was silent. I knew that he was remembering. I’d seen it too. Not only seen it, but heard