R Is for Rebel Read online

  To my grands

  Sylvia

  Sody

  Mary Lou

  Hilding

  In memoriam

  DAY 1

  IT TAKES HALF THE CONSTABULARY to bring me in to national school.

  I lead them a merry chase, though.

  Over croplands new-sown with barley and through a gap in the hedge that puts me in a sprawling, manicured pasture—they expect me to head for the greenwood, ha!—past the hanging tree with its lingering noose and toward the broad, rushing river. I’m halfway across the covered bridge when two of the big oafs appear at the other end, hulking against the flat gray sky beyond.

  There’s no question of going back the way I came. There’s only one other choice, but it’s a good ten feet of drop, that current looks treacherous, and I can’t swim.

  Captain Lennart pulls me off the guardrail as I’m about to jump into the surging black water below.

  I want to say I see a ripple of sympathy cross Captain Lennart’s face as he’s marching me toward the school’s detention wagon. He’s the one who argued for clemency when my parents were convicted of treason, who insisted that the only decent thing to do was transport me to the penal colony with them.

  But the judge took one look at me, trussed up like I was in that silly pink dress the lawyer made me wear, and announced it would be cruel to sentence me to my parents’ fate when I was still a child with a moldable mind, and a victim of their disgraceful influence as well. The whole point of the Education Act was to give Milean kids a proper chance in life by sending us to national school so we’d learn the deference and compliance and proper work ethic that would ensure our successful future in the Wealdan empire—things we’d never learn in our ignorant, superstitious households. My parents were already in violation of the act, and it was the Crown’s solemn duty to take me in hand and preserve my future from any further damage. That, said the judge, was the only decent thing to do.

  Captain Lennart marches me up the wagon steps. His grip is secure but not painful, and I don’t bother trying to break away. Not with a dozen constables around and not without a head start. Once I’m in, Captain Lennart swings the door behind me and bolts it shut. It’s musty but dry inside, not nearly the stinking, jam-packed crates from the Burning Days when Milea first fell. I must know a thousand songs about how the grandmas and granddas were hauled off to the workhouses where they labored till they died, carving out roads and mining coal to pay back the Crown for the cost of the invasion and seizure of their homeland.

  This wagon has two small barred windows, one on either side. Now that I’m catching my breath, it’s starting to sink in. All of it. Those days on the run. Sleeping rough. Eating rougher. How far away my parents are already. How I’m ending up in the very place they fought so hard to keep me out of, where I won’t know a soul. My eyes start to sting, so I put my face up to one of the windows and sing “The Noble-Hearted Three” as loud as I can. I’m just at the part where the heroic rebels are hacking the locks off a prison wagon very much like this one to free their comrades bound for the gallows when a constable drums his fist on the outside of the wagon, right by my ear.

  “Shut it!” he shouts. “Or it’ll be lashes for singing outlawed songs!”

  I bite my lip, hard, because twenty strokes with a whip marks you in more ways than one, and most of these constables are using their service to fulfill the Crown’s military entrance requirements so they can train to become one of the graycoated butchers that pass for soldiers. I retreat a few paces while muttering swears in Milean, but real quiet so the big ox can’t threaten me with lashes for speaking an outlawed tongue as well.

  The constables are laughing now, wondering what kind of medals the Crown will pin on them for chasing down and bringing in the only child of the murderous, machine-breaking arsonists who were recently transported to the empire’s most notorious penal colony for the rest of their natural lives. Those brutes are talking loud so I’ll be sure to hear.

  Well, they can send me to national school. Whether they can keep me quiet is another matter.

  DAY 2

  I HAVE TO PEE. I hold it as long as i can before banging on the front wall to ask for a privy stop. There’s a murmur of chatter, then a harsh laugh, but soon the wagon lurches to a halt. The back door swings open and I’m given a chance to get down and do my business.

  “Unsupervised,” the constable says, “but don’t make me regret that mercy.”

  I nod, looking him in the feet like I’ve been taught, and duck behind a hedge. The crisp, woody smell, the damp ground underfoot—all at once I’m back home, sitting for secret lessons taught entirely in Milean by a raggedy scarecrow of a man we called Master Grenallan, though even the tiniest kids knew that wasn’t his real name. Hedge school was about the only thing that could lure me away from our homestead and its greening croplands and excellent climbing trees and long, dusty deer paths crowded with berry bushes humming with a million-million bees. I never missed a lesson once I learned I was breaking at least three Wealdan laws each time I went.

  Milea fell but three generations before I was born, quickly and decisively, and each time I do something Milean—even small things—I feel a subtle wash of warmth, like my ancestors are placing gentle hands on my head in a blessing. Like they’re comforted to know that their despairing, doomed defense of our land hasn’t been forgotten. Their songworthy acts taught me everything I know about resisting. Survival, too. Where I’m going, the tighter I hold on to the past, the more likely I’ll stay someone my ancestors and my parents can be proud of. The more likely I’ll stay Milean, no matter how hard the Wealdans try to make me forget.

  Later, when the sun is slanting lower through the window bars and lighting up the inside of the wagon a golden tawny color, a big whiff of new-turned earth brings me to the nearest window. Sure enough, we’re rolling past a length of cropland, where Mileans are running narrow plows up the furrows while folds of dirt spill out behind them. If I didn’t know better, I’d say they were cheerful and content and industrious, especially considering there are few things more glorious than running a plow on a bright spring day with the breeze at your back and the sun on your topknot.

  I do know better, though. Those men and women are tenants on land that once was theirs, and now they must work it for Wealdan landlords.

  There are also no kids clod-busting or weeding or playing alongside them. No one over three and under seventeen. Not since the Education Act emptied homesteads and villages of children, one by one.

  DAY 5

  MY SHOULDERS AND LEGS ARE throbbing when the wagon heaves to yet another stop. The back door swings open to reveal a tidy green lawn and the slanting shadow of a huge square building. In the distance there’s a low bank of hills, and none of it looks familiar. Not even a little.

  I’m nowhere near Trelawney Crossing anymore.

  “We’re here.” The bigger constable blocks my view. “You gonna climb down?”

  I look him in the feet. I grip my shirttail so my hands won’t tremble. Being manhandled out of the wagon by aspiring graycoats is going to end in bruises and sore ribs and crushed toes, but my first act here will not be one of compliance. When I give no response at all, the constables haul me out and march me up a broad pebbled path.

  I’ve known for months this moment would come. My parents never kept any of their plans from me, and they couldn’t dodge the constabulary forever. My da with his big farmer’s hands and my ma all curves spilling everywhere, with forty ribbons in her topknot. They would not want me to cry. Not for them. Not for what they did. If my parents were here now, they’d start humming outlawed songs about Mileans whose sacrifices were greater than theirs—one-handed Everard forced to watch his children hang, Ja
sperine with her rifle and a price on her head—and soon I’d be humming along. I wouldn’t be thinking how I should be reroofing the chicken run on our homestead on a brilliant sunny day or filling pail after pail with cider apples as the season turned. I wouldn’t keep expecting to hear Master Grenallan’s bird-whistle call that drew us behind the hedges for lessons out of sight of Wealdan inquisitors.

  So I won’t cry for what my parents did, but I can’t promise I won’t ever cry for them.

  Forswelt National School is big and brick and sprawling, hemmed in by a tall bristle of iron fence, but it’s well kept and even has the look of a factory. Nothing like the bleak, squalid workhouses that chewed up the grands during the Burning Days and now do the same to criminals regardless of their birth. The door I’m being marched toward is twice my height, made of sturdy weathered planks crosshatched with thick metal. The constables bang a knocker, and after a few long moments, a nun in full habit heaves the door open. She’s holding a riding crop, and she’s frowning.

  Songs start running through my head and the Burning Days feel like yesterday, with the shrines of our name-kin all smashed and inquisitors forcing our ancestors to accept the Nameless God and speak the Wealdan tongue or face the pyre.

  “Another straggler.” The nun sighs and steps aside so the constables can carry-drag me in. “I’ll take it from here, officers.”

  The constables let me loose, and one respectfully murmurs “Sister Gunnhild” as he tips his hat. My upper arms throb where the brutes gripped harder than they needed to, and my legs have gone watery after all those days on my rump. The massive door makes a deep, ominous thud as it closes, and the nun steps past to me to secure three complicated locks, one after the other after the other.

  Locks that look hard to defeat. Locks that are likely on every door leading out of this place.

  “Best get you accounted for,” says Sister Gunnhild. “Follow me.”

  Five days in a prison wagon. Nothing to eat but bread and ale, like they don’t know that Wealdan food will make me queasy. I just want a bed and a decent plate of broccoli.

  But the nun demands an act of compliance too. They all do. Constables, landlords, inquisitors, tax collectors.

  Graycoats.

  I fold my arms and shake my head, even as my legs are seconds from dissolving and my belly churns like a boiling kettle.

  Sister Gunnhild turns her eyes skyward like she’s asking her Nameless God for patience. “I’ll say this only once. All of this”—she gestures around the dim entryway—“the Crown is doing for your benefit. At a considerable cost to the taxpayers, too. Many of whom petitioned against the reforms allowing your lot this opportunity, as they think it’s wasted on you. So behave yourself and things will go well for you. You won’t like what happens if you can’t manage that.”

  I hold my pose. Just a little longer. It’s not compliance if it’s exhaustion.

  The nun sighs impatiently and whacks her riding crop against her palm, lip curled. I don’t take my eyes off that razor-thin curve of leather. She’ll aim for my haunch, too. Like I’m a horse. It will sting like blazes and draw blood and I will cry in front of a Wealdan like my parents said never to do.

  “Ungovernable girls,” Sister Gunnhild mutters. “Not worth the rope to hang ’em.”

  My heart flutters, because I’m not sure I heard her right. Ungovernable is an old word that I’ve heard no one but Master Grenallan say, and only when telling stories of Milea as it fell, stories about the men and women and girls like me who fought to keep it ours. Wealdans meant it to be shaming, but when Master Grenallan said it, there was a cheeky mocking that took out the sting, like the word belonged to him now and meant something new. Like all of us in hedge school should do small, mostly harmless, noncompliant things just so Wealdans would call us ungovernable.

  At length Sister Gunnhild calls, “Bluebell! Lilac!”

  Two novices appear. They’re not much older than me, but training to be a nun must age you, because they stand without the slightest bit of curiosity or good cheer, like graycoats in a firing line.

  “This girl requires our guidance,” Sister Gunnhild says to them in a tight voice. “Escort her to intake.”

  Novice Lilac and Novice Bluebell hustle me down the hallway to a small wood-paneled room. There’s a fat book on the lectern and a worn spot on the floor where the novices put me. Sister Gunnhild opens the book, flips a few pages, then takes up a pen and dips it in ink. “Where are you from? Do please answer. I would prefer not to give anyone demerits on her first day.”

  It’s the please that gets me. It’s one thing to be made to kneel and plead like my grands all had to. Another thing entirely to do what I’m asked.

  I shake off the novices and say, “Trelawney Crossing. Lavender Province.”

  Sister Gunnhild looks up abruptly. “Your parents are those terrorists! The ones who smashed the grain threshers and set all those horrible fires.”

  I nod once and swallow hard because even though I might cry for my ma and da, I won’t do it in front of a nun. Instead I square up and reply, “After Lord and Lady Gaude evicted us.”

  “My brother and his two little children burned to death in the parlor of Highworthy Hall. Right in their own home.” The nun grips her pen like a weapon. “All those lovely historic manor houses, gone forever. Along with good, decent people who gave your kind an honest day’s work! Your rotten baby-killing parents ought to be hanging in chains right now. Dying slowly, day by desperate day.”

  Only the Crown doesn’t martyr Mileans anymore. The Wealdans learned that lesson well enough—there’s nothing to be gained from horror-show executions but more singers and more songs. They figured out there are worse punishments, especially for a people who hold their babies so close.

  Their mas and das, too.

  “And no one was evicted.” Sister Gunnhild scowls. “Evictions have been illegal for years, and there won’t be any slander in my school, especially not of the nobility.”

  “It’s not slander if it’s true,” I mutter.

  The nun’s face goes pinchy-fierce. “You can still be sent to the workhouse. That most definitely can be arranged.”

  She’s bluffing. She has to be. It was proven conclusively at trial that I had no hand in the machine breaking or the arson, that the worst thing I’ve ever done is fail to report my parents to the magistrates for keeping me out of national school. That’s a fining offense, not a prison offense.

  Not a death sentence.

  “The judge said he’d be watching my case with interest,” I reply, and it’s a lot calmer than I feel. “The newspapers all reported where I got sent. Someone will notice if I’m disappeared.”

  “Perhaps.” Sister Gunnhild stabs her pen at the book a few times, and I shiver because I get the sense she’d really rather be stabbing me. “Let’s get on with it. Your name.”

  “Malliane Pirine Vinnio Aurelia Hesperus.”

  Sister Gunnhild scowls, then flips to the front of the book and runs a finger down the page. “Malliane is third on the list of prohibited names. Hmph. Be grateful unauthorized births no longer carry a sentence of correctional servitude. Your new name is Kem.”

  “No—it’s Malley,” I insist, because I can’t have heard her right. A kem is a greasy Wealdan meat pie served to hired farm laborers.

  But the nun merely scritches her pen across the page, blows on the ink, and lays the pen aside. “Now take down your hair.”

  I clap both hands over my topknot.

  “You can take it down or we will cut it off.”

  Novice Bluebell pulls a huge pair of shears out of her pocket and shinks them open and closed. I’m panicking, but I force trembling fingers into my piled braids. One by one, I untie the ribbons and slip them into my pocket. There are a lot of things worth resisting, but without my braids I won’t have any right to my name. I’ll dishonor Malliane, the girl who made our name holy when she refused to empty a chamber pot for a Wealdan lady and died thirsty and ravi
ng, bound to a pole in her town’s public square two generations before I was born. We are all named for someone on the Roll of Honor now, those fighters and rebels who met their end at Wealdan hands for some act of resistance. The Burning Days shattered families, and the workhouse did its best to finish them off. Sharing ungovernable names brings all Mileans into one big family, and even if you have no one else, you always have your name-kin.

  I blink back tears. Everyone else’s hair will be unbound. The grands went through much worse. I can replait my braids in the right pattern once I’m not here anymore, but with no hair at all, I’ll have nothing to bind and Malliane won’t recognize me as her own. She’ll turn her back on me, and without name-kin I won’t be Milean anymore.

  All my pigtails tumble down. It feels like surrender. It feels like failure. Like the sidelong disgust of every Wealdan inquisitor who insists it’s idolatry to revere men and women and girls like me who were done away with for resisting. Like Malliane is already wondering if I’m worthy of her name.

  “Hurry,” snaps Sister Gunnhild.

  I unplait my pigtails one after another. Little pieces of binding twine litter the floor at my feet like dead worms. I can barely breathe. My hair is heavy, like a rippling sheaf of barley, and when I’m finished, it’s floating everywhere like it hasn’t since I was too small to remember.

  The nun nods briskly. “If your hair is discovered bound in any way, it will be cut off. Shorn to the scalp. No warnings. No exceptions.”

  Novice Lilac holds out a handkerchief. This must be when a lot of girls start crying. Boys, too, maybe, at whatever schools they get sent to. I feel empty enough, but I cried myself out during the trial. That’s probably what really kept me off the penal colony transport ship.

  “Right, then, you’re done.” Sister Gunnhild turns to the novices. “She’s number 1076. Get her a uniform and take her to holding.”

  “A uniform?” My mouth falls open and I forget to look her in the feet. “But this is school! Not the workhouse! I thought . . .” But I can’t say what I thought, because my throat has closed all the way up, and it doesn’t matter anyway. No one here is going to care what I think.