When the Sea is Rising Red Read Online Free Page A

he’s made sure that I can do nothing but stare at his face. “I especially do not like it when the reason I have to come back up here”—and now he looks up from his manicure and around at the dark interior of the family home—“is because yapping Houses run to tell me they have spotted my sister in the city dallying with a bat.”
    My mother, who until now has been keeping white and quiet behind her precious son, finally takes the time to look up at me. “Felicita,” she says, “there’s been a terrible accident—”
    “That can wait, Mother.” Owen cuts her off.
    She frowns and changes tack as easily as the little fishing boats that litter the bay. “It’s not true, is it?” she says to me. “I told him it couldn’t have been you, that it’s just someone trying to make our House look bad.”
    It’s all she cares about. I feel defeated and irritated at the same time. “Of course it was me,” I snap.
    Cold threads of my brother’s power tighten around my throat. Finally, I think, I’ve pushed him too far. This time he’ll do more than lock me up in a cupboard for a day or leave me merely with bruises that will fade.
    He drops me. I collapse against the black slate floor, my ankle twisting painfully under the sudden weight of my body. I gasp, trying to make up for the lack of air, or to somehow store it up in my body for another attack.
    “Malker Ilven is dead,” my brother says.
    For a moment I think he’s attacked me again. My throat is filled with grains of glass.
    Then Owen walks past me, his boot heels thudding against the slate floor, and he is gone.
    I can breathe. I just don’t want to.

2
     
    “O H G RIS !” My mother grabs me in her arms and pulls me so tightly against her that it feels like my spine will crack. Finally, I manage to work one hand free and I raise it to wipe her clinging hair out of my face. My mother never wears her hair loose.
    “He’s lying,” I say. “Isn’t he?” I push at her stiff arms until she lets me go. Her face is blotched, the powder in damp patches on her skin, gathering in the fine wrinkles by her eyes and mouth.
    Her fear vanishes, and she presses her lips into a thin angry line. “You’re never to leave the estate, you know that.”
    I’m House Pelim’s little bird, the only daughter. After Father died, Mother kept me closed up, fearful that somehow I would go down like him—victim of a prole illness caught off a river-Hob or a hacking low-Lammer. “I wanted some fresh air.” I cough the words out, then rub my neck gingerly, trying to massage away the pain.
    She’s regained her composure, and she scrapes one thin hand through her silvered hair. “Never,” she says again. “We’ve talked about this.”
    No. You’ve talked about it. I just had to sit and listen. The only person I can talk to is Ilven. We grew up together, shared the same flight space. And now, if my brother is to be believed, she’s gone.
    I pull away from my mother and race up to my room.
    The turret room is probably my mother’s sole concession to my state as perpetual prisoner. Technically, I should be in the family wing and not in this drafty little tower. But I like it up here, and as I’m the only daughter, my mother has allowed me this indulgence. Or maybe she just understood that I needed what little artificial freedom I could get to keep me sane. So I have this room that overlooks the chalk cliffs and fills and echoes with the sound of the sea mews squabbling over fish. The white gulls look like scraps of paper buffeted about the cliffs.
    The rain has swollen the wooden frame, but a few hard shoves soon have the window open and salt-spray air and drizzle sweep in. The sea mews are louder, circling in great wheeling flocks, and below me is the rumbling crash of the surf.
    “Felicita.” My mother is standing outside my closed door. She’s keeping an even tone.
    I ignore her and pull up a footstool so that I can lean right out the window and stare down at