Page 88 of These Divided Shores
Jakes’s eyes split open. “What?”
“Rebels made it up during the war.” Lu hummed a few bars. Teo had sung it to himself more times than she could count. It had been a popular song among revolutionaries, a bawdy tune sung during dark nights. Teo loved it because his mother had sung it as a lullaby to him. A memento of a time Teo didn’t know.
He knew it now, though. He was living it.
“It isn’t a revolution song.” Jakes’s face hardened.
Something about his tone—disgust, maybe—made pride swell in Lu’s chest. She started to sing.“Dirt and sand, all across the land; the currents are ours, you see.”
Jakes hesitated, but started alongside her—in Argridian.“Prayer is ours, devotion too; so we do not fear the flames—”
They united on“No god, no soldier, no emperor, no king—”
And gaped at each other.
Jakes’s face grayed. “How... how do you know that?”
“I told you,” Lu said, easing into a raging river. “Revolutionaries made it up.”
“No. My sister wrote that. In Argrid, when I was a child.”
Lu looked at Nayeli, as though she would have anexplanation. But Nayeli’s eyes were wide. “It became popular among the rebels,” Lu said. “Perhaps it spread to Argrid, and the people there changed it?”
Rosalia groaned. “This is all fascinating—give him the potion!”
Lu glared at her, fury heating her face. Rosalia faltered back a step.
“No.” Jakes’s insistence pulled Lu back to him. “My sister wrote that song. She wrote itfor Argrid. For the people there who wanted more than Elazar’s tyrannical rule. She sang it to me, and her daughter, when we were scared, when the Church did horrible things around us, when we couldn’t escape the hell it was to grow up in Argrid. And when Elazar killed her and my niece with Shaking Sickness in Deza, when priests burned my parents in front of the cathedral my family had gone to for years, I had only that song. It’s all I have left of her. Revolutionaries on Grace Loray do not get to change Bianca’s song just because—”
Lu grabbed for Nayeli, clutching her for balance. “What did you say?”
“I said, the revolutionaries—”
“No. Bianca. Your sister’s name was Bianca?”
Jakes’s eyes narrowed. “Why?”
Bianca and her daughter, dead from Shaking Sickness. Bianca, who wrote that song.
Lu’s palm was sweaty around the vial, her heart thudding. “Bianca. And Annalisa.”
Jakes teetered back, his cheeks blotchy. “How do you know those names?”
It was impossible—it wasmad—
“Elazar didn’t kill them in Deza,” Lu whispered. “I watched them die here. On Grace Loray.”
“No,” Jakes protested weakly. “No, Elazar killed my sister and niece in Deza when I was thirteen. They’ve been dead for seven years. How could you—What is this?You got this information somehow, didn’t you? You’re trying... you’re trying to...”
He bent double, his manacles clanking against his back. Tendrils of hair twisted around his face as he spoke fast and low to himself in Argridian.
There was a knock on the door and the handle rattled. Nate must have thrown the lock.
Rosalia cursed and stomped over to deal with it, but Lu knew nothing outside of this defensor at her feet. Bianca’s brother. Annalisa and Teo’s uncle.
“Bianca and Annalisa fled Argrid,” Lu told him. She didn’t owe him this. But she did, somehow, her heart unable to start again until she spoke. “They came to Grace Loray with other refugees. I was young—ten, eleven. Bianca became one of my parents’ supporters. She helped them fight Elazar here. Annalisa was... a light.”
Jakes looked up at her, his eyebrows rising.
