House of Winter

Chapter 23, Part 2

"There don't seem to be many children here," Lumi said. "Are they in school?"

Eero stared at her. "We have lost many of our children."

Lumi felt a shiver of trepidation. "Lost them? Was there an illness?"

The two men looked at her for a while, and then they started talking to each other rapidly in the dialect that Lumi didn't understand. She could pick up a few words of the Fire tongue but most of it was almost gibberish to her.

Eventually Eero said in Starg, "Many of our children have been stolen."

"Stolen?" Tom said.

Lumi and Tom stared at each other, in panic.

"Your children?"

"My daughters," Armo nodded. "There are gone."

"Where?" Lumi asked. "Who stole them?"

"The last person who stole children from us was the Burning King."

Lumi stiffened. The Burning King was her father. He'd earned that name after his death, because it was a curse to say a dead king's name.

"You're talking about Lumi's mother and aunt?" Tom asked.

"My mother and aunt weren't stolen," Lumi said quickly, but as soon as she saw Eero's expression she realised again that she didn't know anything. A sense of reality crashed into her. "My mother and aunt were stolen?"

"Virani and Lumivara were just young girls when your father came to Reunsgar and took them away."

"But he was looking for recruits for the army," Lumi said. "It's tradition for children to join the army when they're sixteen."

"They were younger," Eero said. "But Reunsgar has never given our children to the Fire Army. The Starrlings of Reunsgar have a much more important role - to protect the liquid star."

Lumi found herself somewhat baffled. "So he recruited them for the army, when they were young. That doesn't mean anything."

"He recruited them, and only them. Twins. The importance of twins to starrlings is not well documented anywhere else in the world. After the great libraries of Zantiala were razed by the Stargarzen, what they knew about twins in the Ocean Age was lost. It is only us, in Reunsgar, who are truly aware of how important twins are."

"Because of the surge and the quell?" Lumi asked.

"A greater power than I think you understand," Eero said. "She who quells may control who has power. He who surges may control that power. And he who controls the twins will control both."

"But the Burning King is dead," Lumi said. "He cannot have stolen your daughters, Armo."

"He has chosen someone to continue his legacy, then. Someone has been stealing twins. Twins can be the making or breaking of armies. Twins can be the rise or fall of empires."

"Tai," Tom muttered. "It makes sense."

"It doesn't," Lumi said, baffled. "Tai can't have come here and stolen twins. We were in Lombardia!"

"But in Lombardia there were children going missing, too," Tom said. He stopped walking so suddenly that Lumi was forced to turn around and walk a few steps back to him.

"Lombardian children?" she asked.

Tom had a dawning look of horror on his face. "At the beginning of the school semester I remember noticing that many of the younger students hadn't turned up. A teacher even remarked upon it. They were mostly wards and we all made the assumption that the wards had gone somewhere else, in search of work. But what if they hadn't? What if they had been stolen too?"

Lumi stared blankly at him, bewildered. She had never known that children had gone missing from the school, but how could she? The children had gone missing just as she and Tai had arrived.

"We know that Tai had men in Lombardia, men who were loyal to him," Tom said. "What if he was stealing children and taking them somewhere?"

"But where would he take them? To Singtsu? He isn't hiding children there. And he didn't leave the palace in the days I was there. He's not secretly slipping off to the dungeons to check on all the kids he's stolen," Lumi asked, but her voice was growing louder as she spoke, because she was suddenly unsure.

What wasn't Tai capable of? He'd planned three huge explosions in New Hamilton, killing so many people, to start a war. Why wouldn't he be capable of kidnapping children?

"Tom," Lumi murmured. "We need to find Doctor Hart and we need to tell her about this. If this is... this is worse than we thought."

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elle xx