Glasswrights' Progress by Mindy L Klasky Page B

to make Serena understand. The words would not come, though. Shea could only manage, “Serena, he’s a child.”
    â€œWe’re all children!” Hartley spat. “We’re all children, and if you let that one live, then all the rest of us will die.”
    Serena looked from Hartley to Shea and back again. A look of wonder brightened her pinched face. “You’ll do whatever I say?”
    â€œAye,” Hartley vowed promptly.
    â€œAye,” Shea managed after a much longer pause. Serena was a swangirl. Swans must be obeyed. That was what Shea had always believed, before the Uprising. Before the Little Army. Before children had their tattoos carved from their faces.
    â€œThen I say the soldier ... dies.” Serena’s eyes grew wide at the release of pent breath from the children. She smiled as if she’d just discovered a new game. “Kill him at dawn.”
    Â 
    All through the night, Shea lay on her cot, listening to her own slow breathing. She had been a fool to bring the matter before Serena, before a six-year-old child who had no concept of life and death. What had Shea been thinking? Why had she thought that Serena would have the maturity, the grace, of a grown, trained swan? Certainly, Serena was not evil , she just did not recognize the power that she held in her silver-winged tattoo. She had had no swans to teach her, to show her the way.
    It had taken Shea hours to get the excited children into bed, to calm them after the confrontation on the hearth. She had finally resorted to brewing a posset, surreptitiously adding a fistful of slumberleaf to the dregs of the day’s thin milk. She covered the taste of the sharp herb with a generous dollop of honey, the last in the bare pantry. Even Tain had not suspected her duplicity.
    Now, Shea dragged herself to the door, grabbing her ragged shawl against the night’s chill. The Lion was low in the sky.
    Sunchildren gave way to the sky in all things. So many suns were born, born to toil in the daylight hours. Born to a hard life of labor, simple, good labor, like the simple, good light of the sun.
    Sun, then Lion, then Owl, and Swan, that was the order of the stars, the order of the world. That was the truth that Shea had lived since she was a girl. She had taught that truth to Hartley and Tain, to Pom and Larina, to all her skychildren.
    Another star rose on the horizon, the first tip of the Swan’s wing unfolding into the night. Shea closed her eyes and took a deep breath. As she exhaled slowly, she turned back to the cottage. The floor creaked as she walked toward the hearth, but she knew that the drugged children would sleep through any disturbance.
    Crestman was watching her, his eyes glinting above his gag. His scar stood out against his pale flesh, glistening reminder of King Sin Hazar. As Shea knelt beside the youth, she could smell the sweat on him, the cold, adult fear that slicked his flesh beneath his bonds.
    â€œI can’t let you go back to the king,” she hissed into the still night. He blinked, as if he understood. “I can’t let you lead that man to my babes.”
    Shea thought of the river that flowed through the woods, the cool, clear water that could steal this boy’s life. Her hands shook as she knelt beside him. She could not trust him alone in the world; he’d surely bring King Sin Hazar’s men. Even if the boy did not intentionally seek out the king’s soldiers, he’d be found, tortured.
    He needed help. He needed Shea.
    The lion’s eyes were bright as she tugged at his bonds, and she shook her head as she slipped off his gag. “Silence, boy,” she hissed. Then, almost to herself, she muttered, “It’s time we changed things.”
    Change. So much would be different. The other children would be on their own. Alone. Abandoned.
    No, she told herself. Not abandoned. Shea had trained Tain and Hartley. She had raised her oldest sundaughter and