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Silhouine

It was, they said, carved up and carried back to the city in pieces, on greased sleds and low-riding ships, from the westward lands where the sun dies in winter. There was no stone with its strange green veins anywhere in Silhouine’s country; a dozen people could walk over it standing abreast.

She and Dulap make their way out of the nervous crowd around the remains.

“Were they making a point?” Silhouine asks.

“I don’t know,” says Dulap. “Do you feel pointed?”

“It was big and ugly. I never really liked it.”

Her bed is cold, and her kitten shivers.

Silhouine

It’s intoxicating, the freedom of living under terror, moreso than the cider or the lateness of the night. Silhouine and a boy she doesn’t know kiss shivering, and stumble from the embers down alleys that have always intrigued her.

Morning: she sneaks in the back door, coiffured like a thicket, because Ms. Imbri is ringing the bellpull at the front. Silhouine splashes stale water and makes desperate overtures to her hair.

No more bonfires, she promises, red-eyed in a tin mirror. She stays home for two nights. This is how she misses it when the Iron Heart bombs the Stolen Bridge.

Silhouine

Silhouine spends the night underneath her little pantry-tucked bed, fearful of dragons, with a cat who alternates between dozing and jerking itself awake to bury startled claws in her back.

In the morning she knocks next door, at Mlle. Sunanza’s, to find that she’s not the only apprentice left to literally mind the shop.

“There are a bunch of us stuck here, owners hied out to the country,” glowers Dulap, over buttered dumplings. “We’re having a bonfire in the square tonight. Want to come?”

“I’d like that,” Silhouine smiles.

They don’t burn the shop down that night. That happens later.

Silhouine

“Did you get one? Never mind,” says Master Isaam, hustling the corner boy out the front door with an improbably large bundle on his head. “I’m leaving you to mind things, can’t be hanging about with that beast in the skies. You know enough not to burn the shop down? If the pirates don’t, anyway—well, there’s food laid in, I’ll be back when it’s safe. Don’t forget the mice!”

Silhouine’s mouth starts to form a question, but her mind supplies no appropriate words. She stands, lips half-pursed, an alley kitten squirming warmly in the rough sack under her arm.

Silhouine

Silhouine sees the Iron Heart for the first time at the suq, buying a cat for the master’s mouse problem. They all see it. No shadow falls over them; no screech makes them cower. They just know to look up together.

Lanthorn’s skybeast is blood-red with cultured rust, and the tick of its mainspring smooth as a knife. Its wings and keel are taut orange silk. It is a dragon. It is fire, and greed.

Silhouine becomes aware that the market has, with silence and expediency, emptied out around her. One of Vertumn’s gang has stolen the money-pouch from her belt.