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"And you want to be that treat?"
"Why not?" Neve had asked "What do I care for my carcass once I’m done with it?" And ever since, Dame Somnolence had called her Crow Food instead of her naht she had to be the bitterest snack of flesh on the island these days--especially noith Christone
The twins Ivan and Jathry With Neve, they’d been part of the batch of kids brought here twelve years back: plague orphans froht cheap and worked hard, the boys in the field, the girls in the factory, their food thin and their beds thinner, out in the wind-taunted sheds behind Graveyard Farht at the end of the tunnel for the lot of thee," they all called it, that sihteen, and as for "free," what does free mean to work orphans turned loose with their pockets full of air, on an island in the e cost more than their lives orth, and so themselves over to a crew on a contract they’d be lucky to pay off before they saw fifty--and what sailor on the Gliding ever saw fifty?
So irls did, because though a ship would have been happy to take theirl--none--could ever hate the island enough toonly: freedoht the eye of a boy from a First Settle no shortage of ers on the Isle of Feathers)--and the less lucky, one of the late-coles in the harbor town The least lucky of all? One of Neve’s own caste, a "plague boy" with nothing to his nah hands
The First Settleot real houses whose walls didn’t rabbed the best sun, andacross their plot, as aglint with green-gold fish as the mosaics of the church floor And soh and soabled row houses on the pitched streets of the harbor town, or else in a flat above a shop, or the cellar beneath a pub, or some place like that And the orphans’ brides? Well, there were parcels of land to be had for free in Fog Cup--the valley in the middle of the isle so na--and no one would call it good land, but h to make a life on Most years If you didn’t have too many mouths to feed, and you didn’t mind the damp
I ask you, who doesn’tCup, with the twins They’d thought, once upon a tiether Why not? Back then, to the in their own house andup their own rules, and what else had they wanted since setting foot off the stinking ship that brought theh, Bill Childbreaker told them--in more detail than was necessary or decent--ent on betwixt husbands and wives, and they’d stared at each other, red-faced, their innocence dissolving like scoops of beached sea foae, then
If Ivan and Jathry had been one boy instead of two, then Neve guessed she would havebetween them was never an option When they walked down a road, Neve walked in the h that the carnal secrets of er shocked them, well If either Ivan or Jathry felt husbandly toward her, Neve never knew it, and she had no wifely stirrings herself They were strong boys with good faces, and they’d been part of her heart since ho lost--but it wasn’t like that between the rew hot, and no catching sight of one of the boys in a ray of sun and thinking, I wonder what his skin tastes like There was never a hint of a blush, nary a tingle, never any of the things the other girls talked of at the factory, breathless and blushing and purring with longing
Oh, and today would be rife with blushing and purring, Neve knew, and with crowing and gloating fro fro fellow, some drunk or lecher, or maybe that sha, perish the thought
And then there was Reverend Spear, a category of threat all his own
A cold weight settled in Neve at the thought of the island’s tall, handsome preacher He was fire and briues of Hell This lake of fire, this pit of the daenious implements in the hands of de you like fruit and slowly devouring you, only then to begin afresh, and savor you for another thousand years If children didn’t wake screahts, he considered the sermon a failure and the next week’s orse Once, when a farht with a potato in his pocket, the reverend convinced Bill Childbreaker to lash hiirls were found swi Beach--in their petticoats, not even their birthday suits!--he had them shut in their houses for the whole rest of the suns on all their doors that said INDECENCY IS AN AFFRONT TO GOD
He’d lost his third wife this year--to the same fever that took Ivan and Jathry--and heanother for Advent Why pay a charwoman for work a ould do for free? And besides, wives were more than just unpaid charwoirls over in church like they were his own box of chocolates--eeny imlet eye settle on herself a few too many times for comfort
His pupils always looked tiny to her, like painted-on dots
She told herself she didn’t have to worry Spear liked to claiirls made troublesome wives, he’d learned it from experience, and had even said once, for all to hear, "Beauty is free to the eye to enjoy, and the bedroo your dinner unburned, or your house clean and your children tended"