“Trying to get back to where he was. He’s been at it for months.” Tristan shivered, then flipped a cushion on one of the two pieces of deck furniture before sitting.
This area wasn’t really for recreation. Most of the roof was covered in potted plants, long dead now that the year was so deep into autumn. All of the roofs, terraces, and windowsills in this city functioned as growing space for edible plants. People grew what vegetables they could for themselves, and the best apartments—like Rowan’s—had rooftop gardens. Few farms existed outside the walls of Salem, and those that did were surrounded by high walls and used mostly as pasture for horses and oxen or for luxury meat sources like cows, chickens, and pigs. They were called luxury meats because they came from entire animals that had lived and breathed, and not been grown one part at a time down in the Stacks.
Tristan had explained the Stacks to Lily, and since then they had occupied a particularly eerie place in her psyche. The Stacks were subterranean caves where the witches grew wearhyde on something they called skinlooms. If that wasn’t creepy enough, it was also where they grew cuts of all kinds of meat, like chicken breast without the chicken, and pork loin without the pig, inside things called wombcombs. Wombcombs were shaped like giant honeycombs, but inside the hexagonal cells they grew either cuts of meat or the tame Woven who still protected the city.
Even the thought of the Stacks gave Lily the creeps, and if she hadn’t been vegan before coming to this world, she was pretty sure she would have converted once she got here. Tristan and Rowan had both worked in the Stacks alongside Lillian, and Tristan’s description of the place had not made the thought of eating meat appealing in any way. However, he had stressed how important the Stacks were for the survival of the city. Rowan had told her that the Coven barely broke even on the Stacks.
The Coven purposely tried to keep all of the basi
c needs services that they offered relatively inexpensive and accessible to all citizens. The Coven owned most of the greentowers and greenhouses in the city. They paid the farmers who worked them good wages, and they kept the price of food low, as they kept the price of wearhyde low. Hungry and cold people riot, which was something the Coven had learned to avoid at all costs inside a walled city that was surrounded by bloodthirsty monsters.
Most importantly of all, clean water and basic health care were completely free to all citizens. The last thing the Coven wanted was an outbreak of cholera or a crippling infectious disease inside such a closed space. Food, clothes, and health care: This was how the Coven had won the love of the people.
It was a system that kept the peace, refined over two centuries of confinement inside the thirteen walled cities, but of course there were still malcontents and rabble-rousers. This is where the Coven really showed their power. They had the right to banish anyone who disturbed the peace, and banishment meant a loss of citizenship from all thirteen cities. If you crossed any one of the thirteen Covens who ruled the Thirteen Cities, you found yourself outside the walls with the Woven.
Of the banished, only the useful, the honest, and the strong were invited to join Outlander tribes. Once solidly Native American, after two hundred years of assimilating all the different races banished from the cities, the Outlanders weren’t any one particular race anymore, but a blend that was unknown in Lily’s world. Only the lucky among the banished made it into a tribe, while the vast majority got mangled by the Woven on their first night outside the wall. Fear kept the people from rioting. Fear, affordable food, clothes, and health care seemed to be enough for the general populace to tolerate Lillian’s hangings.
“Come here,” Tristan said behind her, his voice rough. “I’m cold.”
Lily turned to see him sitting again and noticed that his breath was a smoky cloud around him. Frost was settling into the dark corners where the falling sun failed to shine. She went to Tristan, sinking down next to him into the cushions of the patio furniture. He picked up her hand and turned it over, exposing the underside of her wrist.
“May I?” he asked quietly.
After a moment, Lily nodded and Tristan laid the tips of his fingers against the pulse point on her wrist. He sighed deeply and leaned back, his eyes closed, and Lily felt her perpetual fever cool a little as he took some of her heat. She hadn’t claimed him so they couldn’t share mindspeak or memories, but there was something intimate about warming another person with your body. Feeding them with your heat.
“What does this feel like for you?” Lily asked. To her it felt like stepping into a cool pool on a hot day. It was refreshing, but there was something so rapturous about the look on Tristan’s face that it made Lily think there was more sensation in receiving than in the giving. Lily couldn’t help but remember how Rowan had looked when he’d taken some of her heat in the cabin. How his head had tipped forward and his eyes had closed with pleasure.
“Like drinking sunshine, I guess,” Tristan answered. He turned and opened his sparkling eyes to look at her. “I can think of a few things that feel better. But not many.”
Lily watched Tristan’s face. His lips fell apart expectantly and his breath deepened. She’d seen this look on his face before, and she wished she felt something more.
Lily pulled away from Tristan, purposely ruining the mood, and looked out over the city. Her eyes skipped around, trying to take in everything that this huge walled city encompassed, all six miles long and three miles wide of it, and in some places, hundreds of stories high. Something strange caught her eye.
“Is that building over there empty?” Lily asked. She pointed to an elegant seven-story brownstone a few streets over that seemed to be shuttered. Real estate was the single biggest commodity inside the limited walls of Salem, and Lily couldn’t recall ever seeing a tenantless window, let alone a whole empty building before. Tristan stood from his seat and joined Lily at the balcony wall.
“Oh,” Tristan said, following her line of sight. “That’s the technical college Lillian started.”
Lily looked at him, surprised. “She can afford to leave it empty?”
Tristan smirked. “Oh yeah. The Coven is the biggest landowner in Salem, and they don’t have to pay taxes. Real estate is where they make their real fortune. They have lots of buildings that they can just sit on. Lillian took that one over when she outmuscled everyone else in the Coven and became the Salem Witch when Olga, the last Witch, died.”
“How did she do that?” Lily interjected. “Wasn’t she only sixteen?”
Tristan shrugged. “Didn’t matter how old she was. The Coven chooses their leader in a simple way—the strongest rules until someone stronger comes along and knocks her off the throne. And no one has ever been stronger than Lillian. Especially not with Rowan as her head mechanic.” A dark look crossed Tristan’s face at the mention of Rowan.
“Go on,” she urged. “Why did Lillian take over that building?”
“She was going to change the world, she said,” Tristan continued quietly. “Lillian turned it into a school where promising non-magical youngsters—mostly Outlanders—were given full scholarship to study all of the Coven’s writings on natural phenomena and apply those theories inside the newest and shiniest laboratories.”
Lily let the words sink in. “She fully funded a college for scientists?”
“She did. Lillian started out as the most liberal Salem Witch in history. And then she changed.” Tristan’s face fell suddenly, and his blue eyes filled with sadness. “They were the first people she rounded up, you know. The people in her own college. The kids she sent to work camps. The older ones she hanged.”
Lily stared at the dark windows, and imagined the horror of that last day of school. She could nearly hear the sound of marching boots and screams echoing through the now vacant rooms.
Tristan stood, ending the conversation. “Come on. He’ll throw a fit if you stay out here any longer.”
* * *