R Is for Rebel Read online

  Bread and meat. Again.

  I take a single sandwich with two pinchy fingers, like it’s dirty. It looks small on my tray. I’ve got to eat something, but too much bread and I’ll get grainsick, and I don’t think I can be any kind of sick without my ma to make me ginger tea and warm my blankets by the fire and nudge my hammock with her foot so it sways just the smallest, calming, comforting bit.

  Back at the table, I station my breakfast in front of me and take a deep breath. The sandwich bread is damp. It smells a bit like shoes, which makes me suspicious of the meat inside. There’s a smushy yellow goo as well. I peel the bread apart and touch the inside to my tongue. The yellow stuff doesn’t taste too bad. It’s not vegetables, but—

  “Kem!” Sab whispers sharply. “Knock it off and eat before the novices see!”

  “Whuh?” My tongue is still on the bread. “There’s rules for how I have to eat as well?”

  “You can’t waste food,” Tal says. “You have to finish everything you take.”

  “Best reason to make third rank.” Fee smiles sympathetically and nods at my plate, then casually forks a bite of spicy greens into her mouth. I know they’re spicy because I can smell them from here, even over the leathery whiff of the bread. Apparently, eating actual food is a privilege that has to be earned with compliance, which means each of my chambermates is doing as she’s told without fuss or protest—Fee most of all, if she’s first rank.

  “No,” I whisper, because maybe I am alone here. Maybe there’s nothing to do but wear a babyish gown with the empire’s stupid crest and behave myself so things go well for me and only cry for my ma and da under my covers long after the lights go out.

  “Kem, what are you doing?”

  I look down. I’ve squished the sandwich in my fist. Worms of soggy bread and meat and yellow spread curl between my fingers. I open my hand and flick the mess onto my plate. “How can you all go along with this? Someone’s going to get grainsick! Haven’t you ever been freaking grainsick before? Haven’t you seen someone die from it?”

  A nudge to my ribs. It’s Sab, and she’s panicking. “Just eat, Kem! Please! We’re in enough trouble. You’re only making it worse.”

  Two novices are threading through the dining hall, demerit pads already in hand. Fee and Tal look like they’re chewing live bees. I wipe my hands on a napkin and pick up one of the less nasty pieces of sandwich so it at least looks like I’m eating, even though I can’t imagine why my chambermates would care if I got in trouble.

  “One demerit for bad language,” the taller novice says. “Two for slander, and another four for conspiracy.”

  I lift my chin. This is when someone else will speak up. Someone else could well become everyone else. We’ve all seen what happens to Mileans who can’t afford the garden tax and have to survive on Wealdan bread from the markets.

  “Conspiracy?” Sab wails. “I don’t want that on my record!”

  “Seven demerits,” Tal mutters. “On top of the three you brought us. Unbelievable.”

  I turn to face her. “Wait. What do you mean, the three I brought you?”

  “She’s going to eat it,” Fee says to the red-cheeked novice writing primly on her pad.

  The novice ignores Fee and frowns at Sab. “You’re perilously close to losing a rank, 145.”

  Sab’s eyes fill with angry tears.

  “But they didn’t do anything!” I feel bellysick and I haven’t eaten a bite. “I’m the one who—”

  “Shut up,” Tal hisses. “You’ve done enough.”

  “As for the rest of you,” the taller novice says, gesturing with her scribbled-on pad, “if you don’t like 1076 racking up demerits for you, you’d best make sure she learns the rules. Quickly.”

  Fee, Sab, and Tal mutter, “Yes, honorata,” while I glare at my ruined sandwich and try to keep from crying. It’s not like I expected my chambermates to tell off the novices—even if the Relief Act took some of the worst abuses off the books, challenging a Wealdan never comes consequence free—but they could have stood up for me, at least a little. They could have stood up for themselves, and for every girl in this room who has to risk getting grainsick when there are clearly enough vegetables to go around.

  “Do you get it now?” Tal asks bitterly.

  I nod. I’m trembling. Anytime I step out of line and get demerits, my entire chamber will end up with them too.

  The gray-gown lady rings the bell and girls throughout the room push back their chairs and leave the dining hall in a stream of white dresses and unbound hair. They leave their dishes, too, like none of their mas or das ever made them come in from playing to clear a forgotten plate or mug. I follow my chambermates down a gaslit corridor. My stomach’s so twisty-sloshy it’s hard to do anything more complicated. I can’t look at these girls. Any of them. Not a one has said a cross word to me, but they’re doing what the nuns want without even a whisper of resistance.

  Maybe I’m alone here now, but there’s no reason I have to stay that way. These girls have been stuck at school longer. They’ve forgotten what it is to wear trousers and sleep in hammocks and look people in the eye. They’ve forgotten what a songworthy act even is. Maybe they didn’t have as much hedge school as I did. Maybe none at all, if their parents couldn’t bear the risk. Chances are good they never had Master Grenallan to wink and smirk and remind them to be ungovernable. They likely don’t even know how to resist. If not for my ma and da, I’d be just like them. These girls are asleep, and I won’t be worthy of my name if I let them stay that way.

  We end up in a long hallway lined with doors, and I follow Fee and Sab and Tal into a room that’s bare and whitewashed like everything else in this place. There are perhaps thirty girls clustered four to a table. Chambermates, probably, like we are. This must be a classroom, and I can’t help but look toward the window, though all I can see is a muddy yard with a pump and not a fragrant, prickly hedge.

  Maybe the window opens. Maybe just a breeze would be enough.

  The nun at the front of the room is young and rosy-cheeked, but her expression as she looks us over is absolutely venomous. When we’re all seated, she snaps, “First rank.”

  Fee and the other red-scarf girls go to a shelf at the back, where they each retrieve a book covered in brown paper. When the fourth rank is finally called, the only remaining books are tattered, and they’re all different sizes, so I have no idea which one I’m supposed to choose. I only know what books are because Master Grenallan told us the Wealdans write everything down and don’t bother to memorize anything.

  Books look flimsy. They look fragile and flammable.

  We may have lost the ancestors to the pyre and the grands to the workhouses, but the songs are all in my head because memory is the only place where something so precious can truly be safe.

  “Crogen!”

  I flinch. I can’t help it. I flinch and then fist up both hands because I should be used to that slur and I’m not, and I have to let out a long steady breath like my da taught me instead of pouring out the rude retort that would open my back under a whip.

  The nun prods my haunch impatiently with a riding crop. When I turn, she sighs. “Oh. The new girl. I clearly don’t have enough to do without you being dumped in my lap. Well, get a primer and get to work.”

  “What’s a primer?” I gesture at the shelf.

  She brings the crop down hard across my fingers. I suck in a breath and clutch my stinging hand to my chest.

  “Try. Again.” Her eyes are narrow, her scowl vicious.

  I grit back tears. The other girls are bent over their books, even my chambermates. A few sneak glances at me sidelong, but none of them is helpful.

  “I don’t—ow!”

  The nun smacks my thighs—twice—fast—and I stumble backward, out of reach. She aims the crop at me and growls, “If no one’s taught you manners, I will. You want to speak to me? Don’t. If you have to speak of me, it’s Sister Chlotilde. Also? Don’t you ever look me in the eye again.
” Then she grabs a book off the shelf and slams it into my belly, sending me staggering. “This is a primer. A pri-mer. Now go sit with those other dimwits and don’t make another sound till I say you can.”

  I clutch the book with aching hands and stumble back to my seat beside Tal. Sister Chlotilde watches me go like I just peed on her shoes, then clumps back to her desk and sits down with a newspaper.

  She’s like the inquisitors, then. At least now I know where I stand. You resist inquisitors at your peril.

  Books are a mystery to me, but this one has clearly seen better days. The pages are dirty and smudged, and they dangle from the center where they’re stitched together. Sab has her book open to the middle. I do likewise, but Fee discreetly reaches across the table and flips the pages back to the beginning. The first one has a series of symbols in three neat rows. On each of the pages that follow, there’s a single symbol and a picture.

  I have no idea what to make of it. Little kids must learn this stuff in lower school now, but Master Grenallan never mentioned it. Chances are good I’ll get whacked again if I don’t at least pretend, so I turn pages. The pictures are interesting. I like them. The first one is an animal of some kind with orange fur and a long, slinky tail. Then a smiling Wealdan baby sitting in an oval pen dressed in a ruffly gown and surrounded by factory-made toys and frilly blankets.

  The next one is a graycoat standing at attention with his rifle at his shoulder, bayonet sharp and ready, and the classroom falls away and it’s the Sutherland Fair and the music and chatter stop abruptly as a magistrate barks out the Assembly Restriction Act, but the graycoats don’t wait for the fairgoers to comply and bayonets catch sunlight as they slash and stab till they’re too gummed with blood and my small sticky hand gets wrenched out of Da’s and the screaming—

  Fee reaches over and turns the page so fast it’s a blur.

  The next picture is a flowery meadow, and I pull in breath after breath while the classroom grows back around me, brick by whitewashed brick.

  It’s just a picture.

  My da found me eventually. I have no memory of being shut in a kennel for my own safety. He wasn’t even mad about having to pay that sly-handed Wealdan merchant to let me out.

  It’s just a picture.

  Most of the blood wasn’t mine. The bruises all faded. The nightmares mostly went away.

  I swallow hard and close my eyes and sing outlawed songs in my head till I can be here again in this room with these girls.

  Time crawls by. The room is perfectly silent but for the soft rustling of pages being turned. The gaslight whooshes and crackles. My legs ache from the sitting, from being crimped in a wooden chair, and my thighs still throb from the crop. A leaf blows across the mud in the yard and sticks to the pump.

  This is nothing like hedge school, where Master Grenallan would ask us questions about edible plants or how to spot a flaw in someone’s reasoning and we’d all fling our hands in the air with the hope he’d call on us. He’d have each of us rise and share the story of our name-kin, who we could no longer honor openly. We’d sing the old songs and the new songs and recite the Roll of Honor so every last one of us, down to the tiniest kid who toddled up holding a bigger kid’s hand, would remember who had tried to keep our homeland and what had befallen them for it.

  “Intermediate readers.” Sister Chlotilde’s voice is bored. “Rise and read from Willa the Happy Factory Girl. Don’t make me use the crop.”

  Girls with all different colored scarves form a line along one side of the classroom. I sit up straighter. This is more like it. No ranks. No privileges to set us against one another.

  The first girl opens her book and clears her throat. “Willa works at the porcelain factory. She paints flowers on the teacups with a cute, tiny brush. When—”

  “Shut up, you’re done,” Sister Chlotilde cuts in. “Next. Hurry this up.”

  “When the foreman says the girls must work overtime,” the second girl reads, “Willa is happy because she knows the glory of the em . . . empee—”

  “Empire.” Sister Chlotilde sighs hard enough to scatter her bangs. “Any fool knows that! Sit down and stop wasting my time.”

  The intermediate readers keep going one after another. I hate Willa the brain-dead factory girl before they’re even halfway done with the story. Willa is grateful to the Crown for her job, and she would never risk losing it by complaining or doing poor work. Twelve-hour shifts are no problem for a sturdy New Wealdan girl like her! When her painting hand starts to hurt or she gets dizzy from the fumes, she thinks how her work appears on tables across the empire, and that makes it all worthwhile. She knows boys are trouble and plans never to marry or have children—the empire needs her at work, and she will devote her life to it. She chooses not to associate with bad influences that might lead her off the path of right living that she learned from the nuns at her beloved national school. If all books are this full of rubbish, they can stay a mystery.

  A bell rings somewhere outside, like a clock tower, and Sister Chlotilde slams both palms on her desk and groans, “Finally! Now get out, all of you, and leave me in peace.”

  The girls put their books back on the shelf and file out of the classroom. No sidelong sneers in her direction. No rolling their eyes. Sister Chlotilde rattles her newspaper open and deliberately blocks us out with it, so I make a rude face at her as I pass her desk. Sab and Tal are already gone. I put my primer away and wait for Fee, but she doesn’t exactly look happy to see me.

  “Lunch,” she says briskly, nodding me down the corridor.

  I trot at her elbow. I have so many questions. “This is what we’ll be stuck doing here? Reading? From books?”

  Fee plows down the hall, not looking at me. “There’s no reading group beyond advanced. After that, you start learning deportment and something they call civics. Basically, why the empire is so great and why you should love it.”

  “I suppose we’ll be made to learn to write, too,” I mutter.

  “Nah. The nuns are pretty sure we can barely manage reading. They don’t want to make us do things that are too hard for us. They say its bad for our adjustment.”

  “But what—”

  “We’ll get demerits if we discuss our studies,” Fee cuts in. “No offense, but I don’t want any.”

  I almost ask how the nuns would even know, but it doesn’t matter. What matters is that Fee believes it. Everyone seems to. Someone’s always listening. Instead I say, “You have to help me do something about this place.”

  Fee smiles, strained and polite. “Kem . . . look, you just got here. It’s hard. The rules. The scarves. The ranks. I won’t inform on you, but you can’t talk like that. It’s better to do what they say. Not because you buy into it. Because it’s easier.”

  “No. That can’t be right. We’re Milean. That’s not what we do. That’s not what I’m going to do.”

  “Really?” There’s an edge to Fee’s voice. “You’re going to take us down with you, then. Three girls who never did anything to you. You’ll drag us all below or land us in the workhouse.”

  The workhouse. Where we’ll be stripped and shorn and herded into a big walled yard with desperate men and women, and every night we survive, we’ll be rewarded the next morning with a pickax or a boning knife and eighteen hours’ hard labor down a mine or in a slaughterhouse or on a road crew. The longest anyone’s ever lasted is five months, and he only lived that long by turning cannibal and burying the gnawed-clean bones of other inmates in the privy trough until parasites finished him off. The woodcuts of the scene from the newspapers the inquisitors posted on the chapel doors gave me nightmares for weeks.

  Fee could be exaggerating, or wrong, or simply a knuckle-under, but I can’t help asking, “Below?”

  “How many demerits do you have now?” she asks. “Ten at least, and they should have told you what happens when you get to thirty.”

  “Some vocational thing, right?” I shrug, but I’m starting to feel bellysick. “Everyone h
as to do vocational training.”

  “This isn’t training. This is basically the workhouse in the basement of our school.”

  I fold my arms and try to look unimpressed, but that word gives me shudders and songs start going through my head and Fee has to be wrong because the Education Act states exactly how Milean children spend their time while in the Crown’s care.

  “Who do you think is behind all the food that appears in the dining hall three times a day and the clean dishes we eat off?” Fee asks. “Those tidy parcels of bed linens? Shiny-scrubbed floors and wash stations that aren’t all moldy and foul? The tables cleared after we eat? Girls who’ve been sent below who you never see. Girls you never will see.”

  The inquisitors did this too. Tried to convince us how a terrible fate awaited nonbelievers, how our survival in this world and the next depended on complete obedience both to the Nameless God’s teachings and the leadership of his chosen representatives, all of whom happened to be Wealdans who profited from our land and labor.

  Yet that first day I was hustled past girls with no scarves scrubbing doors—the only girls with no scarves I’ve seen since I left holding.

  “Also?” Fee gets right in my face. “Your demerits go away at a quarter of the regular time when you’re below, so it takes four times as long to work them off. That’s the official line, anyway. No one knows, because girls never seem to work off those correctional sentences.”

  “All the more reason for us to resist!” I snap. “The nuns are breaking the rules—rules they made themselves!”