Free The Ever Breath by Julianna Baggott

cows at all!” Truman said.
    “Herrrd of domesticated fire-breathersss,” Praddle explained, as if this were the most ordinary thing of all.
    The houses grew closer together. Shops sprang up, and soon Truman and Praddle found themselves in the thick of the city. Truman held the snow globe in one arm and Praddle in the other, and they jostled through an open-air market. Stalls were set up on either side of the narrow road. An eight-footgiant hawked barrels of mead. A spindly man with only one eye—in the center of his forehead—was announcing a new line of pickled cabbage. A beast that looked like a living gargoyle—monkeyish, with fangs, and dragonlike too, with scaly skin—was offering remedies for toothache and gout. A diminutive centaur blacksmith had a line of hoofed creatures, snorting impatiently, awaiting new horseshoes.
    Truman and Praddle bustled by the opening of a large tent. Loud shouting, singing, wheezy accordions playing offbeat polkas, and the noisy din of bongos billowed out from its flaps. “Ruckusss tentsss,” Praddle hissed.
    “What’s inside of them?” Truman asked, trying to get a peek.
    “Ruckusesss!”
    There was an electrified air to the city. Truman loved the oddness of it all—the noises, the strange smells, the creatures. He felt as if he were being pushed along by a strong current. Everyone seemed to be heading into the city, and no one was moving against the tide—except for a company of large hairy spiders. Truman spotted them hustling along the gutter in a long, tidy row.
    He stopped and pointed them out to Praddle. “What are they doing?”
    “Don’t point!” one of the spiders scolded. “Didn’t your mother tell you it ain’t polite?”
    “Sorry,” Truman said. “Where are you all headed?”
    “Tired of being treated like dirt,” the spider said. “There’s jobs for us. Good jobs, too, from what we hear. Up in the highlands. The lightning wing-beaters is already working, and the fire-breather flies.”
    “Good luck,” Truman said, marveling over having conducted his first actual conversation with a spider.
    The spider gave him a nasty look. “And good riddance!”
    Truman wasn’t sure what to make of that. He backed away from the angry spider and joined the crowd again. It wasn’t long before he noticed a cage and, locked inside it, a horned man wearing a tweed suit and a blue necktie. The cage sat in front of a spice shop. It was the same kind of cage he’d seen the vultures carrying through the snowy sky the night before. Truman stopped in his tracks.
    Attached to the cage by wire was a sign: HORNED BEAST . THREAT TO OUR GOODNESS. SPY. BETRAYER. JARKMAN .
    The man was staring off, unaware of Truman.
    “Did he do something really wrong?” Truman asked Praddle.
    Praddle shook her head. “He disssagreed …,” she hissed.
    “With …?”
    Praddle swiveled her head, checking all directions, and then she whispered, “Official Affairsss.”
    Truman looked around and saw other cages—between the hawkers’ carts and tents, sitting on the ground, swaying heavily from lampposts. All were marked “Property of the Office of Official Affairs.” He read a few of the signs: BANSHEE. MIXED BREED OF MONKEY-BIRD. URF. KNURL. Most of them also ended with JARKMAN .
    Now Truman also saw that there were posters tacked to the sides of buildings and tents. Above the slogan US VERSUS THEM! THE DIFFERENCE IS SIMPLE! they all showed a picture of a man with a hawk’s beak who had plumage sticking out around the collar of his shirt and the sleeves of his suit jacket. The feathered man stuck out his little dimpled chin and looked squinty-eyed. Two protruding ears completed the un-settling image.

    Truman was sick to his stomach. “What does it all mean? I don’t understand.”
    Praddle shook her head and put a hand over her mouth. She couldn’t talk about it, not here.
    All of a sudden, Truman felt disoriented. “Maybe we should try to go back, up the mountain. Maybe I