Wench

by Maxine Kaplan

  She frowned and moved the Pitfire, blocking his exit.

  She watched as the little circle labeled Lord Magus Rollo of Vermillon’s Pass stumbled backward. “Not yet, magician,” she said. And then, grimacing, she stuck the quill back into her arm. She drew it back out, dripping black sludge.

  Tanya put the quill against the Gate. “Now listen to me for once, my lord.”

  She wrote:

  I was wrong. You were right. About to do something unpredictable. Be ready to fix my junkoff. You’ll know when.

  Tanya sat back on her heels. The words soaked into the shift. Rollo didn’t move. She waited and still he didn’t move.

  He was with her.

  Tanya picked up the quill and began to weep.

  She thought of the Queen and the Lode they could have made, an imaginary, beautiful, unfree utopia; she thought of the Queen herself, whom she had believed in, who was beyond restraint, and whom she was betraying.

  She thought of Riley and Darrow holding hands. She thought of Jana’s hands on her hips, of Greer’s lips on hers. She might never see any of them again. She might never see anyone again.

  She was putting her trust in Rollo.

  She put the shift back on. She sniffled and wiped her eyes. She kissed the quill—it quivered and she hesitated. But she thought of Griffin’s Port, imagined it covered in black sludge, and did what needed to be done to save them all.

  Tanya snapped the quill in half.

  Chapter

  35

  Tanya floated in a dim fog shot through with pockets of silvery light. She spun, suspended, watching particles of light shimmer in the moonlight.

  She floated downward and the fog cleared enough for her to see weathered wooden planks, iron poles, large white boulders washed smooth by the tide. She fell closer and saw the Geode Sea at sunset, misty, green-gray, and raucous.

  The docks at Griffin’s Port.

  There was a woman walking down the beach, away from the docks. She was tall and broad shouldered, her dusty auburn hair streaming loose and long, behind her. She was barefoot, her ankles wrapped in bangles.

  Tanya still floated above the rocks.

  “I’m still here!” she shouted silently, the words leaving her mouth in silent bubbles. “Mom, stop! I’m not behind you! Stoooopppppppppp!”

  Tanya plummeted and hit the rocks below with a sickening crunch.

  Crunch. Crunch. Pop. Bang. Bang. BANG.

  Tanya’s eyes flew open, but they met nothing but darkness. She tried to move, but struggled, pinned down by heavy, calcified chunks of what used to be the body of a demon.

  She coughed and choked on ash. Coughed again.

  The banging paused. “Tanya?? Tanya, tell us where you are!”

  Tanya reached out an arm and banged on the steel plate, which was now partially crushed and bent around her body. “I’m here,” she called out, her voice rough and garbled. “Behind the steel!”

  Frantic footsteps approached and something dented the steel from the outside.

  “Move out of my way,” said an impatient voice. Rollo. He muttered a few unintelligible words and the steel disappeared, wiped out of existence as if it had never been, revealing Rollo, Jana, Greer, Darrow, and Riley, staring down at her as if she were risen from the dead.

  Which she supposed, in a way, she was.

  Jana leapt forward and rolled the biggest rock off of her hips. Darrow crouched next to her and swept away the smaller ones as she worked, clearing the way for Tanya to sit up.

  He offered her his hand, and Tanya went to grab for it, before Rollo yanked him back. “Don’t touch her,” he told him. “Not with your bare hands.”

  “What? Why?” asked Tanya, before finally looking down on herself. She gasped.

  The wounds on her skin had closed, but they had not vanished. Instead of open, liquid pools, the map of Lode was written out across her skin in brand-new, thick veins of dark black. If she looked closely, she could see her faint, ordinary, pale blue veins behind them, but only if she looked closely.

  Tanya touched her wrist with an experimental fingertip, following a new vein. She looked up at Rollo. “What happened?”

  He swept off his cloak and threw it to her. While she wrapped it around herself, he pulled out kidskin gloves.

  “When you broke the quill, the sludge exploded off the ground, shooting through the sky,” he said, pulling her up with both hands. “Shooting back to this volcano.”

  “Where are the witches?” she asked.

  “We don’t know,” answered Riley. “Not exactly.”

  Tanya was finally standing. She looked around the altar room; it was wrecked, still, and silent. No whispers. The thrones had dissolved into piles of shapeless bone and obsidian, almost as if they had melted.

  Where the altar table had been was a crater. She stepped forward and peered down. There was no bottom that she could see, but there, impossibly far away, she thought she could see a glimmer of red fire.

  “You think they somehow escaped down there?”

  Riley shrugged and wiped his sweaty, soot-stained forehead. Now that she looked, Tanya could see that they were all disheveled, filthy, worn out—as if they had been through battle.

  “The Tomcat always said there were secret passageways to hidden realms,” he told her. “That’s why he wanted an alliance with the Others to begin with. Maybe that’s one of the passageways. Either way, they’re not here. Neither is that black stuff.”

  Tanya held out her arm. “Are you sure about that?” she asked. No one answered.

  Tanya dropped her arm. “I need to touch somebody,” she said.

  “That,” began Rollo, “is an incredibly reckless idea—” But before he could finish, Jana grabbed her hand.

  Nothing happened.

  Greer started laughing. “You were worried about nothing, Rollo,” he said, smacking the smaller boy across the shoulders. He turned back to Tanya and Jana. “He was going on and on about how breaking a blood-magic bond always has consequences for the magician. I tried to tell him you were a tavern wench, not a magician, but he can’t take a joke. . . .” His smile faded as he looked at them.

  “What?” Tanya turned to Jana and gasped, dropping her hand like it was on fire.

  Jana was pale, wide eyed, and quietly weeping. As soon as Tanya let go of her hand, she fell to her knees. She breathed, her face down.

  They waited. When she looked up again, she was calm, but her eyes were filled with anguish.

  “It whispered to me,” she told Tanya. “When I touched you, it went inside me and it said . . . it said horrible things.”

  “What did?” asked Greer, his voice hollow. Tanya looked at him and saw his eyes were wide.

  Jana looked at Greer, too, and swallowed. “Tanya’s blood,” she answered. “There’s a demon in there now.”

  “Well, get it out!” cried Riley, cutting through the shocked silence. He turned to Rollo. “You’re a wizard. I’ve seen what you can do. Tanya, you have no idea. When you broke the quill, Bloodstone started coming apart. Literally, splitting into pieces, fire everywhere—he filled in the gaps, knitted the place back together. He can fix you!” He turned back to Rollo. “Right?”

  “No.” They all looked at Tanya. She shook her head. “He can’t. The Queen told me herself. Blood magic has unpredictable side effects. Breaking a blood-magic bond has even worse ones. And they’re irreversible.”

  Darrow swallowed. “You can . . . never touch anyone again? Ever?”

  Tanya shook her head. But Rollo cleared his throat.

  “There’s quite a lot we don’t understand about blood magic,” he told them imperiously. “It’s not a respectable area of study and thus most respectable magicians have studied it very little. But—”

  “But?” interrupted Jana from her knees. “You can get that thing out?”

  “No.” Rollo sighed and crossed his arms. “Unless I’m very much mistaken, that demon is inside Tanya permanently. But that doesn’t follo
w that it always has to be in charge. There may be ways of . . . controlling it, that she could learn. With time.”

  They absorbed his words until, finally, Tanya smiled. “All it takes is a little discipline,” she said, almost to herself. “A little common sense and organization.”

  “What, Tanya?” asked Greer, offering her his—sleeved—arm, as Jana got to her feet. “What did you say?”

  Tanya looked at him, still smiling. “Don’t worry about it,” she said. “Get me out of this hole.”

  As soon as the volcano—Tanya didn’t feel the need to capitalize it in her head anymore—imploded, Madame Moreagan had seized control. The older tavern keeper’s preparation and quick thinking was the only thing that had kept Bloodstone, rocked by earthquakes and buried under hardening lava and debris, from being looted, burnt down, and abandoned in the chaos.

  Instead, three weeks after the collapse, Bloodstone was as bustling as ever. And, of course, there were still knife fights in the streets, smugglers under bridges, and muggings in alleyways. It wouldn’t have been Bloodstone without them. But there were also organized crews rebuilding the Pitfire canal system, with only the occasional black eye or shouting match. A disgraced shipwright’s assistant that Madame Moreagan had found somewhere was teaching them how to build fan propellers for the boats, now that infernal energy from the volcano wouldn’t keep them going on their own.

  And the Gate still stood. If the Queen knew that anyone could come through now, she hadn’t shown her hand. If the Queen’s prison of ice had melted away with the Others, she hadn’t used her freedom to come charging after Tanya.

  Not yet, anyway.

  “Are you sure you won’t come with me?”

  Tanya was in the stables of the Witch, watching as Jana tied a saddlebag to a new horse, a pretty, spirited gray mare Riley had stolen.

  Jana was facing away from her. Tanya was aware that Jana had been avoiding her eyes for days. She understood. Jana didn’t want Tanya to see the fear in them. Tanya was grateful.

  “I’m sure,” said Tanya, with a genuine pang of regret. “I’m no rogue. I’d just slow you down.”

  Jana put her head against the horse for a moment. Tanya heard her exhale.

  When Jana had asked Tanya to go with her, she had wanted to. She wanted to see Jana move, laugh, even fight, every day if she could. But Jana was Jana, and Tanya was Tanya. If Tanya left with her, she’d be living Jana’s life, not her own. If Jana stayed—well, Tanya hadn’t even asked.

  She didn’t want to hurt her.

  In a flash, Jana had closed the distance between them and had Tanya’s face in her hands.

  “Jana!” Tanya tried to move away, but her grip was too strong. “It’s not safe.”

  Jana laughed. “It’s never safe,” she said, urgently pressing her forehead against Tanya’s. “It was never safe, for anyone, ever.” She shut her eyes, gulped, and carefully, slowly, put her lips on Tanya’s.

  Tanya kept her eyes open and her hands to herself, but kissed her back.

  Jana let go and Tanya felt tears build in the corners of her eyes. No matter whom she loved from now on, they would always have to let go too soon.

  “I’m coming back for you someday, tavern wench,” Jana promised. She jumped on the horse. “I’ll kidnap you if I have to.”

  Tanya looked up at her and smiled. “I know,” she told her. “I look forward to you trying.” Jana grinned back, reined up her horse, and was gone.

  Tanya walked out of the stable to find Rollo on Gillian, impatiently looking at his pocket watch.

  “That took you a full fifteen minutes,” he announced. “I don’t see what you could possibly be doing that would necessitate prolonging our stay in this literal sinkhole.”

  Tanya patted the nose of her new horse, a young chocolate-colored colt with skinny legs, and climbed on. “You didn’t have to wait, Lord Rollo.”

  He sniffed. “I did it out of respect to Gillian’s misplaced affection for you. Don’t be flattered.”

  “Never.” Tanya took one last look around at the city of her nightmares and nodded at Rollo. “Now, let’s get out of here.”

  Their destination was six miles away, a small hamlet on the eastern edge of the Marsh Woods adjacent to the vast, calm Mirrorglass Bay. It was a freshwater bay. The name of the town was Freshwater. There was fly-fishing, mussel beds fat with pearls, mushroom bogs—a million things the ocean-bred Tanya knew nothing about.

  Or there had been all that before the Queen had burnt most of it down.

  Most people had left, but some had stayed. Most buildings had been razed, but some were still standing.

  One that was still standing was what had been the Freshwater tavern before its owner, a crotchety old woman, fled to her niece’s farm the second the sludge had shown up.

  Tanya liked that its previous owner had been smart enough to cut and run. And she really liked the local scuttlebutt that the woman had decided to make it a permanent retirement, and that abandonment of over four weeks meant that, by law, it was hers to claim.

  Tanya and Rollo rode through Freshwater’s gate. It was shaped like a bullfrog; you entered through its mouth. The tavern wasn’t so well situated as the Snake had been, so they had to ride a little, slowing down to accommodate the children running down the road, and the young men who had been conscripted as temporary bricklayers.

  Tanya had no doubt that the Queen would come for her one day. But it wouldn’t be today and it wouldn’t be tomorrow. It would be when the Queen was good and ready; when she had a foolproof plan that would make her punishment more useful than simple revenge.

  The Queen could be patient. And that gave Tanya time.

  They finally arrived at their destination.

  The tavern was still standing, but really only technically. It wasn’t livable yet. But its poor location meant that, except for in a few places, the base structure, made of golden-brown brick, was still fundamentally intact.

  The roof, formerly and still occasionally tiled with brass-bound terra-cotta, was a different story.

  But Darrow was working on that.

  Tanya hopped off her horse. “Do you need anything, Darrow?” she called up. “Want to take a break, let me fix you some lunch?”

  Darrow smiled and waved. “What?” he called. “I can’t hear you!”

  It was rather loud just there—some little girls were splashing in the pond nearby, trying to catch a turtle.

  Tanya put her hands around her mouth. “I said,” she began, “do you want me to fix—”

  “He’s fine,” said Greer, strolling up next to her. He had his throwing knives collected in one hand. “One of the girls from the dairy brought him something. She’s going to be disappointed, but he’s fine.”

  Tanya shaded her eyes against the sun reflecting brightly off the water. “You’re still going to do this, huh?” she asked.

  Greer nodded at Rollo. “He says there are things at the college the Queen shouldn’t get,” he said. “He needs help to make sure she doesn’t. I saw him knit a city back together with a stick. I believe him.”

  Tanya turned. Rollo was still on Gillian, stiff and formal—though Gillian was trying to buck him off, as gently as one could buck.

  “He’s certainly very determined,” Tanya said dryly. “It’s a pity the great masters of the Royal College turned out to be nothing but well-educated mercenaries. But you got through once before, right? Even if the Queen has upped their security—which I’m sure she has; if she’s paying their bills, she wants their work safe—I think you’ll get through. He’s an irritating little twit, but the boy can do some impressive things.”

  Greer smothered a smile. “Hey, why isn’t Riley coming with us?” he asked suddenly. “Isn’t he supposed to be some great thief?”

  “The best, I think.”

  “So, what then? Trying to impress his upstanding new boyfriend with legality?”

  Tanya shrugged. “Maybe he wants to try something new.” She smiled at Greer
. “I’d have thought you, of all people, would understand that.”

  Greer smiled back. “You know I’m only going because I owe Rollo, don’t you?”

  “What could you possibly owe Rollo?”

  Greer bit his lip. “You,” he said simply. “If he’d left, we’d never have known where you went. We’d have never been able to get you out of that volcano without him. We’d have drowned in sludge first.”

  Tanya concentrated hard as Greer’s hand reached for hers. She was working on listening to the demon in her veins, tracking it, maybe one day controlling it.

  Greer winced as they touched, but didn’t let go. “As soon as I’m done, I’m coming right back to you,” he said. “To this.” He looked around the jolly, busy, laughing village, and then back at Tanya. “I’m coming right home.”

  Tanya lifted his hand, kissed it lightly, and released him. She smothered the pang at seeing the pain creases in his forehead smooth out as soon as she let him go, at his instinctive step back.

  He’s coming back, she soothed herself. He’s going to stay.

  For now, it was enough that someone was going to stay.

  “You’d better,” she told him. “I have plans for this village and I can’t run the place alone.

  “Speaking of,” she said, suddenly remembering all the myriad things on her ever-growing to-do list. “Do you know where Riley is? He was supposed to be working on something for me.”

  Greer pointed past the frame. “He’s set up a little shed behind the main house,” he said. “Try there.”

  It was almost too cute to be called a shed. It was more like a somewhat manlier gingerbread cottage from her book of fairy stories. Tanya thought back to Riley’s deft understanding of architectural diagrams and shook her head—it was amazing the talents some people wasted when they didn’t have the space to develop them.

  Riley himself was nowhere to be found. There was a note scrawled on the door—misspelled and clumsily written. But he would get better at that.

  Went to help blacksmith rejoin bellows. Be back soon. No one touch ANYTHING.