Unraveller by Frances Hardinge

Author:Frances Hardinge
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan

CHAPTER 28

FURY

For Kellen, it didn’t feel like losing control. It felt like breaking through.

It was as though he’d spent his whole life bashing himself like a fly against the dull, smoky glass of other people’s stupidity. Their pathetic ignorance, their selfish blindness, their smugness, their cowardice. He was bruised and battered from the long, futile battle.

Now he struck the glass like a bullet and felt it shatter. Everything in his path, he suddenly felt, would splinter before his anger.

The gag in his mouth was shivering itself apart, its dry threads writhing against his tongue. Whoever was holding him screamed in terror and pain, and let go of him. The cords binding Kellen’s wrists spasmed and came loose.

He stood, spitting out a wad of loose threads, and felt his mouth fix in a grin of rage. At his feet the cords were twitching like baby eels as their fibres frayed. All around the room, tapestries were twitching themselves apart, the little girl’s cross-stitch tugging loose its stitches with a snick-snick-snick.

A few feet away, Nettle sat up, pulling the wriggling rope from her own wrists. The bloodied smudge on her forehead was more fuel for Kellen’s furnace of anger.

‘You tried to tie us up,’ Kellen said. It seemed very funny all of a sudden. ‘You tried to tie me up!’

The man who had grappled him was backed against a wall, gripping his own hand and gasping in horror and pain. There was something wrong with his fingers, Kellen realized belatedly. A quiver of pale feathery motion at his fingertips as the skin unknitted itself, a trickle of blood from knuckle to wrist . . .

‘Make it stop!’ shouted the master pactwright.

Kellen couldn’t. He couldn’t do anything but stare as the man began to scream . . .

‘Kellen!’ Nettle flung open the balcony doors and beckoned urgently. He sprinted after her, out on to the balcony.

If in doubt, do something so stupid your enemies won’t want to do the same.

He threw one leg over the rail, then the other, his rage still filling him with giddy white lightning. The drop from the balcony to the street jarred every bone in his body. There was a thud and a gasp of pain as Nettle landed beside him.

They broke into a limping, desperate run. Behind them were cries of Stop! and Thief! Others took up the cry. Of course they did. Hadn’t two young ne’er-do-wells just jumped from the window of a respectable house?

As Kellen passed, a tasselled canopy collapsed onto the stall beneath it. Flags came apart in the wind like multicoloured dandelion clocks. A wicker chair crackled and toppled sideways. He could hear people on either side giving gasps and squawks of alarm. Were their clothes unravelling, or their skin?

‘Your gloves!’ panted Nettle.

But Kellen didn’t have his gloves any more. He had put them down in the cursed girl’s chamber, and never picked them up again.

A rope hauling a large chest up to a high window suddenly snapped. There were screams as the chest hit the cobbles and smashed, scattering wooden shrapnel and broken glass.

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