‘I dreamed you would be branded,’ I said. ‘Weeks ago. It didn’t make any sense, back then.’ I picked up a cloth and wiped the last of the salve from my fingers. It left a greasy film on my skin.
‘I would never have come to you, if I’d known you can’t even control your own soldiers,’ Zach said.
I shrugged. ‘It was your choice to come to us. You want to leave now?’ I looked at the doorway. Even if there were no guards behind it, we both knew that Zach would never dare to go. If she got hold of him, The General would not stop at branding him. The soldiers who had just attacked him were the only thing keeping us both alive.
*
It wasn’t only pain that kept me awake that night. Piper had stayed up at the Tithe Collector’s office to guard Zach himself, and even though Zoe was close by, I found it hard to sleep without Piper’s breath in the next bed, or his silhouette at the window, when he sat overlooking the courtyard.
I had been afraid, in different forms, for as long as I could remember. Afraid, when we were growing up, that Zach would expose me and I would be branded and sent away. Afraid, in the settlement, that Zach would come for me. And when he had come for me, and I was in the Keeping Rooms, I was afraid that I would never get out, and never see the sky again. The six months since my escape had been a collection of different fears: pursuit, hunger, imprisonment, battles.
For a long time after Kip’s death, I had cared little for my own life, or for anything else. But now I had fought my way through that, and found there were things in the world that I wanted, and relished. So when I’d seen Zach huddled on the ground, and felt his pain in my own skin, my fear had a new simplicity: I did not want to die. I did not want Zach and his enemies and treachery to snatch this life from me, just when I’d learned to occupy it again.
The next day, the soldiers who’d branded Zach were whipped. Piper had warned me, first thing in the morning, when he came back to the holding house.
‘Is it really necessary?’ I said. ‘Most of them are Omegas. They joined the resistance because they wanted to fight the Council, and they’ve found themselves taking orders from The Ringmaster, and now seeing Zach here too. It’s hard for them.’
‘If we can’t control our army, we’ve no hope of beating the Council’s,’ said Piper.
I couldn’t argue with him. I knew that it wasn’t only my own life, or Zach’s, that depended on our army holding together. But through those long morning hours as I worked with Elsa in the kitchen, Zach’s brand still pulsing on my forehead, the sky outside was smeared grey, as if the news of the whippings had spread an ugliness over the day.
I refused to watch the whipping. Paloma, too, had scrunched her face with distaste when Zoe asked her if she wanted to see, so she waited with Zoe in the holding house, while I went to the Tithe Collector’s office to check on Zach.
When Piper and Elsa and I passed the square on the way, the whipping post was being fixed in place. Months before, Kip and I had witnessed a man whipped bloody by Alpha soldiers in the same square. The raised platform they’d used had long since been torn down, and probably burned for firewood. Now, two Omega soldiers were sinking a thick post into the ground. With each pound of the mallets, the ground spat back dust. I walked faster, yanking on Elsa’s arm as she craned her neck to see. The soldiers who weren’t on patrol had all been summoned to the market square. They were gathering already, the crowd thickening as we shouldered our way through.
In the main hall, The Ringmaster was waiting, along with Simon. To my surprise, so was Zach.
The Ringmaster stood as we entered. ‘I’m leaving him here with you,’ he said. ‘Piper and I are needed in the square, and I want you both properly guarded.’
I knew I was being protected, and that I wasn’t wearing shackles like Zach, but I still looked to Piper for reassurance.
He nodded. ‘Simon will be here the whole time. And three guards, hand-selected, on the door.’ He gestured at the doorway, where soldiers waited. Two of them were The Ringmaster’s, but I was relieved to recognise Crispin, too.
At first, after Piper and The Ringmaster left, the massed soldiers in the square beyond the northern window were a background hubbub of noise. But at noon they fell silent. The cries of the market traders, too, were hushed. And even from where we sat, with the shutter closed, we could hear the strokes of the whip. Ten strokes each for the four soldiers who had attacked Zach. Five strokes each for Meera and the other soldier who had been guarding Zach, for failing in their duty.
Simon sat by the door. He was leaning back, arms crossed over his chest, but one of his hands rested on his axe hilt, and he didn’t take his eyes off Zach.
Zach and I sat on opposite sides of the room, and heard each stroke. It seemed to take a very long time: a pause after each blow, and then the crack of the next. The noisiest thing of all seemed to be the silence between me and Zach. We stared at each other, him on a chair at the table and me on the windowsill, my back against the closed shutter. Zach fidgeted from time to time, reaching up to his burn, and prodding gingerly around its edges.
‘Don’t touch it,’ I snapped. ‘You’ll only make it worse.’
There was another stroke of the whip. I couldn’t stop myself from wincing, a sharp intake of air through my closed teeth.
‘You can stop glaring at me,’ Zach said. ‘It’s hardly my fault that your soldiers attacked me.’
I kept my expression blank, my eyes on his. ‘It’s your fault that they wanted to.’
‘And your army’s weak discipline that meant they went ahead with it.’
Another thwack. I didn’t want Zach to know how I felt. That his arrival had left me exposed, as though the walls of New Hobart had fallen.
‘He’s whipping them himself, you know,’ Zach said. ‘Piper.’
Yet another whip stroke cracked the silence.
‘You didn’t know that?’ Zach said. His voice was like a knife, probing flesh.
‘I knew,’ I lied.
Zach just raised an eyebrow.
I ignored him. We sat there together, under Simon’s gaze. The pain in my head had lessened already, just a reminder of last night’s searing, but periodically Zach would ignite it again by touching the burn, grimacing as he tested the tautness of the blister.
When the whippings were over, Piper came back. He let the door slam behind him. He was sweaty, but I was relieved to see no blood on his clothes, or on the leather whip that he tossed to the ground. Whatever he’d done, it had not been as brutal as the whipping I’d witnessed with Kip. The length of plaited leather lay on the ground between us.
Zach had stood as soon as Piper entered; he moved to the far side of room, eyeing the whip as though it were a snake that might strike at him.
‘You can stop cowering,’ Piper said. ‘I’m done for today.’
He came to stand by me at the window. I kept my voice low, aware of Zach watching us from the far side of the room.
‘Couldn’t it have been The Ringmaster who whipped them?’ I said. ‘Or couldn’t you have got one of the other senior soldiers to do it? What about Simon?’
‘I don’t ask my men to do things I’m not willing to do myself,’ he said. ‘And it had to be me, not The Ringmaster. Can you imagine the response, if we put The Ringmaster up there, to whip mainly Omega troops, in defence of The Reformer?’ He exhaled. ‘It had to be me.’
He was probably right. But when he put his hand on the windowsill, close to mine, I couldn’t help thinking of the whip.
‘This