Wench

by Maxine Kaplan

  “Tanya . . . ?” asked Riley, bracing himself against the wall.

  Tanya looked at the ceiling and held out a hand. “Wait,” she said softly. Out of the corner of her eye, she spied Jana holding out her arms and balancing on the balls of her feet, swaying to the deep, rocky hum as if it were music.

  A cracking sound echoed through the chamber and Tanya refocused on the ceiling as deep grooves in the surface formed, widened, and, finally, exploded.

  A white, sandy slurry that defied gravity poured out of the ceiling in controlled but unstoppably heavy streams, wriggling like snakes, winding their way out of the ceiling, into the walls, and pooling briefly around their feet, soaking their boots before being absorbed into the floor with the sucking sound of a whirlpool.

  The mine shaft stopped shaking.

  Tanya stood.

  Haphazard bars of clay and tubes of red dust, somehow still suspended in the air, partially blocked her view into the wine cellar. But she could see it. She had done it. They could climb up.

  She laughed in amazement and, after a moment, Riley joined her, bending over at the waist as he exhaled what must have been a very long-held breath. Jana cupped her hands around her mouth and whooped.

  Tanya looked down. The marble had settled into the bottom of the shaft as if it had always been there, inlaid in an attractive swirling pattern. She lifted her boots, now inundated with damp, pale grit, and grimaced at the heaviness before breaking out in another smile.

  She had dissolved marble.

  Looking up again at the dust she had suspended in thin air, she was filled with awe. She lifted a finger and touched a strand of pulverized red brick.

  It collapsed at her touch.

  “Huh,” she said, frowning at her reddened fingertip. “That’s a worrying—”

  Before she could finish that sentence, the remainder of the ceiling rained down on her head, coating her head to toe in soot and brown powder.

  Tanya barely had time to spit the grime out of her mouth when the mine shaft began rumbling again.

  “What did you do?” yelled Riley, bracing himself again.

  “Nothing,” she yelled back, equal parts panicked and furious at how clean he still was. She hesitated. “Or maybe—hang on.” She dipped to the floor and snatched her most recent map. “Oh no.”

  “Oh no? What is ‘oh no’?”

  She looked up. “We should climb up into the castle now. The mine shaft’s going to cave in.”

  Chapter

  11

  Jana didn’t hesitate. She vaulted into the air and, with a grunt, she caught the jagged edge of what used to be the cellar floor.

  The whole shaft shuddered again, like a giant about to be sick, and Jana’s left arm slipped from the edge. Tanya cried out and Riley stumbled to her side.

  But Jana appeared unconcerned. She hung by one flexed wrist and angled her head backward, calmly surveying the wine cellar, its gold-leaf-edged shelves supporting an endless variety of bottles.

  Jana said, “Got it,” and hurled the dangling left side of her body upward, catching one of the shelves. The muscles in her arms visibly rippling, she pulled the rest of her body up so that it was level.

  She repeated this pattern three more times, until—before Tanya could begin to figure out how she was making her limbs move the way they were—she had clambered across the shelves to the door, which she casually opened and hopped through.

  Jana looked down at them from the hallway. “You better hurry,” she warned, pointing behind them.

  Tanya and Riley turned. A brown, humid tidal wave of liquefied rock and mulched earth was heading straight for them.

  Riley stood under the cellar and raised his arms. “Boost me,” he ordered Tanya. “I’ll pull you up after.”

  Tanya crammed the quill and map into her belt. She bent beneath Riley’s waist and hoisted him up, her arms falling squarely between his knees and his behind. She thought a prayer to the Lady of Cups, patron goddess of tavern maids, and lifted.

  He was bonier than she had expected and lighter, too; underfed, thought Tanya. He shot up through her arms and grabbed at the second-lowest shelf. He swung his legs up to land on the shelf underneath that.

  The mine shaft shook and muck started to pool around Tanya’s feet. She could hear him knocking over bottles and muttering something under his breath. Taking a deep breath and biting his lip, he let go with one hand.

  He arched backward, swaying in the shuddering, dusty air. He gulped and stretched his hand out to Tanya.

  The groundswell was already up to her knees, sticking to her clothes and sucking her in. She jumped.

  She caught his hand and swung like a pendulum in a grandfather clock, heavy and horizontal.

  “Careful,” gasped Riley as she finally managed to jam her feet into the shelves.

  Together, they scrambled across the shelves until they found the door and tumbled through, rejoining Jana. The mulch was still rising, sealing off their exit.

  Riley sighed. “That’s a shame,” he said, and Jana shut the door.

  They made their way down the corridor, following Riley as he hugged the wall. “Behind this door is a small staircase leading to the serving gallery behind the banquet hall,” he told them in a low, urgent voice. “From there, our route to the duchess’s bedroom is”—he began ticking it off on his fingers—“from the gallery, to the dumbwaiter, which leads to the dressing room directly off the bedchamber. The tiara is under her vanity in a safe. I crack the safe—”

  “Or I smash it,” broke in Jana.

  “No, you don’t.” Riley threw her a freezing glance. “We don’t want her to know the tiara’s missing until it, we, and the whole camp are long gone. I’ll crack it. Don’t you worry about that. You’re just here for insurance.” Riley opened the door.

  The sight of the serving gallery hit Tanya with a wave of homesickness so strong that in that moment she would have given both her companions food poisoning and snapped the quill in half in order to be back at the Snake.

  Tanya forced her eyes away from the tidy sideboard of bitters and liquors to focus on the dumbwaiter. Jana hopped in first, followed quickly by Riley.

  Tanya moved to squeeze in after them, but frowned when she couldn’t maneuver even one thigh into the box. “Can one of you scooch back?” she asked, giving Riley’s knobby shoulder a shove. “I can’t fit in there if you’re going to sprawl around like that.”

  Riley shoved right back. “That’s fine,” he said, starting to pull down the door. “You’re staying in the pantry.”

  Tanya gaped at him. “What if someone catches me?”

  “Look, someone’s got to pull us up. And you’re the tavern wench, aren’t you? You’re going to look much more at home with all the cutlery and whatever than we are.”

  “Not in pants and covered in brick dust!”

  “You can’t track that filth into the duchess’s bedroom. They’d be onto us in a second. Make yourself useful and find us another way out of here.”

  “And if an armed, drunken, likely violent corpsman finds me first?”

  Riley shrugged and gestured at her chest. She scowled and Jana giggled.

  “Not that,” he said, smothering a grin. “The quill—bring the ceiling down on ’em.” He pulled the dumbwaiter shut and then opened it a crack. “Or I guess you could try taking off your shirt. What do I know about corpsmen?” He slammed it down again, muffling, but not hiding, Jana’s bubbling laughter.

  Tanya kicked the door after him before using the rope at the side to pull them upward.

  She knew they were right. Any muck she had tracked in from the mine shaft would be much better explained in the serving gallery than in any of the upper floors. She couldn’t fight and she couldn’t pick locks. She wasn’t good for anything that needed to go on up there. In the end, she’d be a liability, not an asset.

  She hadn’t wanted to be a burglar, but having entered into the field, it galled her to be incompetent at any part of it.<
br />
  Tanya sighed and unfolded the map. She settled onto the floor, her back against the dumbwaiter, and licked the quill. If this was her job, she would do it, unglamorous though it might be compared to slinking around a duchess’s bedchamber with a knife at her hip.

  But before she had a chance to begin her work, the door banged open and a disheveled corpsman staggered in.

  The corpsman didn’t notice her, scrunched as she was against the dumbwaiter. He lurched toward the sideboard opposite her and threw open the liquor cabinet, peering inside with such slow, dense intensity that she lost all concern that he would discover her or be a threat if he did.

  He was narrow-hipped and ropy. His hair needed a good pulling through with a wet comb, but his uniform was in fine repair: quite clean and impeccably tailored to his form. She could spot a place by the knee where a seam had split, but whoever had patched it up knew what she was about.

  The corpsman reached for a bottle of gin infused with violets, but missed and sent it crashing to the floor in a wet catastrophe of glass and flowers.

  The gin flowed onto Tanya’s already mostly destroyed boots, sending her to her tidiness-loving feet on pure instinct.

  “Useless corps,” she spat out. “Don’t you ever do anything but drink and steal other people’s provisions?”

  The corpsman straightened up—not without some effort, but he made it. “That can’t be you,” he said, in an incredulous voice.

  Tanya recognized that voice.

  Steps approached the serving gallery, slower and more sure-footed.

  “Is everything all right, Greer?” Another corpsman, this one shaped like a barrel and stone-cold sober, stuck his head in the room. “I heard a crash.”

  Greer started laughing.

  The second corpsman sighed and walked in, saying, “Pass me that broom. I’ll clean this up.”

  Greer collapsed further into giggles, leaning against the sidebar with the effort.

  “Come on, man,” implored the second corpsman wearily, stepping forward and retrieving the broom leaning up against the cupboard himself. Turning around, he said, “At least pretend to be a . . .”

  The second corpsman stopped talking when he caught sight of Tanya.

  She cleared her throat. “I guess you didn’t make it to the Glasslands, huh, Darrow?”

  Greer finally turned around and Tanya was rather gratified to see that he looked awful: greasy and sunburnt, with deep circles under his eyes.

  “We haven’t made it anywhere, have we?” he slurred. “We got stuck in the shithole that is the Queen’s Corps.”

  Darrow paid his companion no attention. He was studying Tanya with confused, knitted brows, looking as if he were trying to solve a math problem that was too hard for him.

  “You stole a horse,” he said slowly. “That’s what they said.”

  “I . . . actually did,” Tanya admitted. “I did steal a horse.”

  “People . . . these scholars.” He was struggling. “The scholars said you were going to be imprisoned by the Queen.”

  Tanya tossed her muddy hair back. “They haven’t caught me yet,” she told him, folding her arms.

  Darrow blinked once. He blinked again. Then he dropped the broom and pulled his sword from its sheath.

  “Tanya of Griffin’s Port,” he said solemnly. “In the name of the Queen and Council, I place you under arrest.”

  “Wait, really?” asked Greer, sobering up. “You’re going to arrest her? We thought she could be dead. You . . . you said a prayer to whatever the hell wind god the Glassies pray to! She turns up, out of nowhere, at this weirdo duchess’s palace, and you’re going to hold her up at sword-point?”

  “Yeah, really Darrow,” Tanya said crossly. “I hate to agree with Greer, but you can’t be serious.”

  “I have to, Tanya,” he said, his face grave. “It’s not only the lawful thing to do, which is my sworn duty, it’s also the only way to keep you safe.”

  “I don’t need you to keep me safe.”

  “You’re unarmed. This is a dangerous part of the country once you get out of the duchess’s compound.”

  “I’m aware of that, thanks,” she told him, her voice rising, the quill starting to heat up in her hand. “You have no idea what I’ve had to do since your Commander Rees dissolved his corps like so much butter in a hot pan. Lady of Cups, why can’t either of you find a normal commander to enlist with? Do you have any idea what’s going on in this castle tonight?”

  They weren’t listening to her anymore. They were staring at her fist, because her fist, wrapped tightly around the quill, was glowing red.

  “Tavern maid,” asked Greer, still looking at the quill. “I’ve actually been wondering just that. What is happening in this castle tonight?”

  Tanya stared back at him, furious. It did not escape her calculations that the sudden appearance of members of the Queen’s Corps who could vouch for her character was exactly what she needed. She need only give up the Tomcat, give up Riley, give up Jana, and produce the quill. She would be instantly escorted directly to the Queen and Council to make her request. She could come out of this looking like a brave and loyal subject, one who had suffered for Lode and safeguarded what was likely to be the most valuable magical artifact in the country.

  But that would mean trusting whoever this corrupt commander turned out to be—and she knew that he had at least been bribed to seduce a duchess by a notorious crime lord.

  It might mean surrendering the quill to a personage less than the Queen herself.

  In short, it would mean trusting her person and the power of the quill to someone not Tanya herself.

  And that, well . . .

  That was unacceptable.

  A sharp knocking echoed down the wall at her back. Ignoring the corpsmen’s probing eyes, Tanya turned her back on them and opened the dumbwaiter door. She yanked the rope, pulling the chamber down.

  Riley and Jana slid into view and tumbled out into the serving gallery. Riley was slightly flushed and Jana was wearing an amethyst around her neck, but they were otherwise unruffled.

  Riley shifted the bulging sack strapped over both shoulders so it sat more in the center of his back. “There was a lantern signal across the White while we were in the duchess’s dressing room,” he said hurriedly. “She and the Tomcat’s dupe are on their way back early. Did you find us a way out?”

  “Um . . .”

  Riley followed her gaze to the corpsmen, his eyes widening when they met Darrow’s.

  Darrow was gaping, too. “You’re . . . you’re the blacksmith,” he said slowly. “The one I met at Ironhearth.” Riley’s face hardened and he pulled a knife out from his belt.

  Jana stretched out her back as she stood. “You two!” she said brightly, pointing at them “You were in Tanya’s corps! I remember you. You came to Ironhearth with the idiot”—she pointed to Darrow—“and you”—pointing to Greer—“you gave me whiskey and wasted no time at all in barging into Tanya’s tent yourself when I asked where she slept so I could borrow a nightdress! How’ve you been?”

  The two boys were too slack-jawed to answer, so after a moment of pleasant, smiling silence, Jana pulled out her sword and, with one swift, horizontal movement, smacked them both across the temple with the hilt.

  With a crashing of glass and spilled wine, they collapsed onto each other in a heap. Greer’s arm knocked the storage closet at the bottom of the sideboard open, revealing neatly folded linen with a simply embroidered hem.

  Tanya stepped over Greer, pushing him to the side. She pulled out the fabric. “I think I’ve got a way out,” she said.

  Five minutes later, Greer and Darrow were stripped to their underwear and tied up together like two husks of corn. Jana and Riley were pulling on the collars of their uniforms, both far too big for them. Tanya was wearing a clean white kitchen smock and had her hair tied up in a maid’s kerchief.

  She frowned down at Darrow and Greer. “They’ll be OK, right?”

  Jan
a came to stand next to Tanya and nudged Darrow with her boot. “Yeah, see, he’s groaning a little. Listen.”

  Jana kicked Greer, too, and a thin, creaking sound escaped out of his mouth.

  Jana shrugged. “They might be a little . . . what’s the word? Concussed? But as long as they don’t go swimming or get drunk or something in the next couple days, they’ll be fine.” She paused. “There will be some bruising.”

  Riley stepped over the corpsmen, looking like a twelve-year-old shrugging around in Darrow’s gray coat. Jana, tucking her hair under Greer’s cap, looked more convincing.

  Tanya saw Riley sneak an appraising look at Darrow’s body. She thought she could imagine his feelings: It’s never fun to feel like your body doesn’t fit. Tanya had gotten over that feeling years ago, rejecting it full stop, but then, she was likely more self-possessed than Riley.

  “How are we getting out of here?” Riley asked Tanya. “I’d like to stop wearing this outfit as soon as possible.”

  Tanya pulled out the crumpled map. “Our horses”—she pointed—“are all the way over here, on the other side of the castle, across the White. We could walk it, but we can’t do it now. There’s nowhere to hide on that walk and that’s the direction Tomcat’s dupe and the duchess will be coming from. I’d say let’s steal a horse and just make a break for it”—Who I am? wondered Tanya wearily—“but everyone else has horses, too, and I think they’d probably come after us.”

  Riley frowned. “So . . . what then? Why am I dressed like an idiot?”

  “Because we’re going to wait it out. We’re going to wait until the majority of the corps is passed out from the free food and booze—trust me, it will happen—and then we’re going to walk right out of here like it’s the most natural thing in Lode. In the meantime, to answer your question, you’re dressed like that because . . .” She took a deep breath and grabbed a surviving jug of ale. She put on her best waitress smile. “Because we’re going to join the party.”

  A door from the serving gallery led out into the kitchen garden. Tanya left first, balancing the jug and four pewter mugs on a silver tray.

  It was pleasant in the garden. Wind ripped across the empty expanse of the White, but the tall stone of the castle blocked its progress, leaving the climate merely on the autumnal side of balmy. Roses of all colors—purple, blue, red, yellow, white, and pink—grew in a twisty, winding thicket all along the south side of the castle.