As she stared, he went on. “I suspect you know these others. Perhaps you recall my warning that other smooth-faced girl what happens when people tell me lies.” He tilted his head, amused. “So often people forget the meaning of true genius.”
The wind blew hot on the hill, but as Jean peered into the corral, she shivered. There on the grass sat the fruit seller Liyla had spoken to that first day. Beside him, the soldier who had asked Max to bless him and the younger one, who’d been knocked out by the branch. Each sat as if made of stone, barely flinching as the soldiers dragged Jean and Liyla among them and unrolled two metal chains with cuffs at either end.
“Tie them to each other,” the Genius said to the guards, and they snapped an iron cuff on each of Jean’s wrists, then fastened her to Liyla so she was forced to face the girl. When they were finished, the soldier who’d done the fastening jerked the chain down and the girls fell to their knees. Jean lunged back up, flailing, trying to pull away.
“Please,” Liyla gasped. “Hold still!” Jean’s thrashing had pulled her forward, and, trying to balance herself, she’d fallen the other way, almost into her mother’s lap.
“Girl! Hold still!” Liyla’s mother wailed. “Please!”
But she didn’t lean down or reach to help Liyla sit up. Surprised, Jean stopped moving and looked at her again. A crust of dried blood ringed her neck, and despite the ragged clothes she wore, she had on a necklace, a bright silver ball the size of a fist that dangled from a black ribbon at her neck. Behind Liyla’s mother, Jean spied a basket full of the pendants, coiled in a nest of black ribbons.
Jean wondered why she hadn’t seen them before. The men, too, wore the necklaces. She looked up at the Genius and saw that, grinning, he was watching her. Without a word, he pulled the red-handled knife from his belt and leaned over Liyla’s mother. Jean flinched, but the woman didn’t move. With a laugh, the Genius snagged the necklace with the flat side of his blade and the pendant swung free, flashing in the sunlight.
“My lady Ker tells me you are small, and weaker than the others,” he said to Jean. “She says alone, you’d never be able to loose a strange wind.” He lifted the pendant higher, so it hung just before the woman’s eyes. “And yet even the graceful Ker can be mistaken.”
Liyla’s mother held perfectly still, and now the others had turned. All the dull eyes had brightened suddenly.
“It would be a shame to lose you a second time,” the Genius went on. “So let me demonstrate something for you.” With a flip of his knife, he let the pendant fall. Pop! It hit the woman’s chest and erupted. Fire leaped to her shirt and raced across the fabric. The woman shrieked and tried to raise her arms to throw the pendant off, but the fetters jerked her hands down, and all she could do was slap wildly at her chest and then throw herself onto the grass. The flames snuffed, she lay there heaving, the smell of charred skin in the air. No one moved to help her. Her husband trembled beside her but didn’t reach a hand. Jean burst into tears.
“As you can see, my little gifts of jewelry are sensitive to being jostled,” the Genius said. He motioned to a nearby soldier, who came and slipped a fresh necklace over the woman’s head, then put one on Liyla.
The man smiled down at her, then turned to Jean.
“Gifts for all your friends, you see? And they do look to you, don’t they? Such a good girl. They’re relying on you to care for them. So I expect you understand, now, how dangerous it would be if anyone were to loose another strange wind here.”
Jean.”
It was Liyla, whispering to her. The Genius had taken his dog and moved off to stand beside Ker at the edge of the ridge beneath the emblem he had made of Jean’s Barbie. At the corral, the captives were circled by a trio of guards, who gazed indifferently at the motionless group.
Jean tried to catch her breath. Liyla’s mother whimpered in the grass. The fruit seller had been sick, and Jean gagged on the smell of it. Everywhere she looked, there was something awful to see. On her right, the misery of Liyla’s mother and the wood behind her, clogged with waiting soldiers, on the left the hollow and its hundred men standing in grim silence.
“Jean!”
She’d tried hard not to look at Liyla, waiting there across from her, not with Liyla’s mother lying in the dirt and the awful pendant hanging round the girl’s neck. Now she was forced to raise her eyes.
“Jean, you can do things. They kept asking about it after they took us. Asking us if you did anything like make a wind blow. Can you do anything else?”
Jean shook her head. “No.”
“But they said —”
“I can’t. Susan can. Even Kate. But I was too little to learn all of it.”
“But something!” Liyla pleaded. “Anything. Let us loose!”
Jean didn’t know what to do. She glanced over at the ruddy-faced soldier who’d let them go on the mountain. There were tears in his eyes.
“The boy blessed me,” he whispered. “I thought he meant it.”
Liyla’s father moaned and shifted gently, gingerly plucking at his shirt with a shaking hand. The cloth peeled away to reveal a weeping section of raw skin. The second captive soldier nudged Liyla and pressed a torn piece of his cloak into her hand. “Give him this,” he said. “Slowly.”
Jean watched Liyla pass her father the rag. Careful not to move too quickly, he dipped forward and slipped it between the wound
