For two days, the stone burned brighter than anyone in the city had ever seen it.
The winged people came down into the hall in groups to look at it. They stood outside the iron bars with their wings folded, and some of them touched the bars with their fingers. Mav heard them talking in their hollow voices. A rank C beast had not touched the stone in a hundred years.
Some of them looked at Mav with something close to wonder. Children followed him through the corridors at a distance, giggling when he turned around. An old man brought a basket of the sweet fruit and left it at their door without a word.
Ronald ate the fruit. He was still quiet. At least he had stopped looking at Mav as if Mav were a stranger.
But the cage was still closed.
The girl was still inside it. Mav saw her at last, on the morning after the hunt. She was small and thin, with short white hair like her sister’s. She was sitting in the corner of the cage with her knees pulled up and her wings wrapped around her. When she saw him looking, she turned her face away.
He went closer to the bars. A guard stood beside the cage. He didn’t stop him.
"Nia," Mav said.
She looked up, surprised that he knew her name.
"I’m Mav. Your sister came to see us." He crouched down so that his face was level with hers. "You’re not going on the stone this month. I brought a beast instead."
She stared at him for a while. Then she said, in a small, hollow voice, "Will you bring one next month too?"
He didn’t know what to say to that. So he said the truth.
"I don’t know yet."
She nodded, as if that was what she had expected, and she turned her face to the wall again.
Mav stayed crouched by the bars a little longer. He wanted to say something else, something that would help, but nothing came. In the end, he stood up and walked out of the hall. He felt the guard’s eyes on his back the whole way.
That night, he told Ronald about it. Ronald listened, then lay down on his bed with his face to the wall, exactly like the girl.
-----
"Why is she still in there?" Mav asked Hessan the next morning. "We had a deal."
"She will not go to the stone this month," Hessan said. "That was the deal. But the lot has fallen, and she belongs to the stone until the next one. It is the custom."
It sounded reasonable. It was exactly the kind of answer that made Mav uneasy.
Tova came to the terrace that evening, in plain sight this time, with three other young ones behind her. She didn’t come close. She only stood at the far end of the terrace and bowed her head to him, very slightly. The guards watched her, and she let them.
Mav understood what she was saying. She was thanking him in front of everyone, because thanking him in secret would have been worth nothing to her people.
Afterward, one of the young came past him on the stair, a boy no older than Juno, with a bandaged wing. He didn’t stop, but he whispered something as he went by.
"The roost-keepers changed tonight. There are six of them now, not four."
Then he was gone up the stair before Mav could answer. It made him proud, and it also frightened him a little. Now the whole city knew that the young were looking at him.
-----
Old Hesk found him the night after that.
He was alone on a terrace below their room, looking at the stars. They were different from Earth’s stars, and he couldn’t find a single one that he knew. He heard a slow, dragging step behind him, and he turned.
The old woman was standing in the doorway, leaning on the wall. She looked even smaller than she had on the day they arrived. Her torn wings trailed on the stone behind her.
"They are watching you," she said. "They are not watching me. Nobody watches an old woman."
She came closer, very slowly, and stopped in front of him. Then she reached out with one thin gray hand and touched his scarf, exactly where One lay under it.
"He carried it here too," she said. "Around his neck, like you. It was green. By the end, it was gray. I saw it."
Mav’s heart was beating very fast.
"Who was he?" he asked.
"Our master. I never knew his name. He never told it to anyone." She let her hand fall. "But that’s not why I came. I came because you’re a good boy, and they’re going to kill you."
The wind seemed to stop.
"You asked Hessan what happened to the others who fell from the sky," Hesk said. "He told you that the serpents found them. He lied. A few of them were found by the serpents. Most of them were found by us."
"What happened to them?"
"The stone ate them." Her black eyes didn’t move from his face. "A beast feeds the stone for a month. One of us feeds it for a month, sometimes two. But an Awakened is different, boy. An Awakened carries a whole World inside him. When an Awakened dies on the stone, it drinks all of that. The last one fed it for 10 years. That was before the young were born, so they don’t know."
Mav thought about the Speaker’s face, when he had said that a rank D beast was nothing. He thought about the look that had crossed it when Mav promised something stronger, and the way that the old man had watched him while he talked about his Subjects. He had taken that for interest.
"The rank C beast," he said slowly. "It wasn’t enough."
"It was a good gift. It bought him time." Hesk shook her head. "But he doesn’t want a month. He wants 10 years, and three of you fell from the sky 10 days ago. Why do you think that he let you hunt? He wanted to see how strong you are. Now he knows."
Mav felt cold all the way through.
"The girl is still in the cage," he said.
"She is in the cage so that you will stay. As long as she’s there, you won’t leave without her." Hesk turned slowly toward the door. "That’s the kind of man he is. He’s not cruel. He only counts better than the rest of us."
She stopped in the doorway and looked back at him.
"I knew your kind once," she said softly. "I would like to see one live."
Then she was gone.
Mav stayed on the terrace until the cold drove him inside.
On the stairs, he touched One through his scarf. The master had carried something like it, and it had turned gray by the end. Mav didn’t know what that meant. He didn’t want to think about it now, with everything else, but he couldn’t stop himself. He wondered whether One would turn gray one day too, and what would be left of him if it did. Somewhere below him, in the heart of the mountain, the stone was beating.
He was angry, and most of the anger was at himself. He had been so pleased with his own cleverness. He had made a deal with the Speaker, and he had brought him a beast. He had stood in front of that old man and boasted about his Subjects, about how much they could hold, while the old man listened and measured him.
The Speaker had never meant to let them leave.