Soulstar

by C. L. Polk

I reached out and took the windflower from kher, and it spun with a fluttering rattle as I pedaled to the eastern end of Riverside, then climbed the stairs to the top floor of the building where Gabrielle Meadows kept her light-filled painter’s studio. I opened the door carefully, avoiding disturbing noise.

  They were already gathered, and Preston Grimes, our group’s pessimist, spoke as I shut the door. “We can’t do it.”

  What, already?

  Preston leaned against the back of his wooden chair, his arms crossed over his chest and his knees splayed apart, his bony ankles showing below the hem of his trousers. “There’s not even a month to Election Day. It’s impossible.”

  Jacob rolled his eyes and set down his teacup. “Honestly, Preston. Can’t you wait until I’m finished presenting the idea before you pour cold water on it?”

  Preston planted his feet on a paint-splattered drop cloth and gave Jacob a reproachful look. “And while you were floating around on the high of a beautiful idea, did you even think about the resources this action would need?”

  Slowly, discreetly, I took a deep, grounding breath, and the scents of linseed oil and gassy-smelling paint thinner slid up my nose, rising to press against my forehead. I studied a still life painting drying on an easel—student work, and not the graceful, talented hand of Gabrielle Meadows, whose atelier we used for our meeting.

  Jacob lifted his chin. “It’s going to take everything we have. This is the biggest, most significant action we’ve ever considered. This even outdoes the work we did on fighting the Witchcraft Protection Act. That makes it worth every drop of sweat and tears it will take to make this happen.”

  “Jacob’s right,” I said. “The scope is wider than anything we’ve done.”

  “And you’re doing the organizing, of course,” Preston said.

  My shoulders came up. “Actually, I’m pursuing work with the Chancellor—”

  “You are?” Preston looked even more dubious. “Jacob, how do you expect this to work?”

  “This action will reach millions of people,” Jacob said. “They’ll join us.”

  “If we have the coin,” Preston said. “And if we spend every dime on this action, which at worst is a shallow publicity stunt.”

  Around his section of the circle, his companions nodded, eyes trained on the landscape gardener who used his magic to make Riverside’s public spaces lush and healthy.

  I had expected caution from Preston. He always wanted to know the scope. He always questioned enthusiasm, testing a wild idea until the inspired either came up with a plan to address the weaknesses Preston poked at or abandoned it as foolishness.

  Jacob had the vision, but Preston’s hand was on the tiller, and he wouldn’t set course in a new direction until he knew the way was clear. If we convinced Preston, his coterie and Jacob’s would unite and get to work moving whatever mountain the two of them pointed at.

  If he didn’t agree, Jacob’s idea would founder. Would that be my fault, if it did?

  “It’s more than that.” I set my hands on my knees and caught the eye of everyone in the circle. “Once we have all those ballots counted, once we have physical proof of what the people of Aeland want—that’s more than just a symbol. That’s evidence in a legal appeal to the Chamber of Justice.”

  “That’s thousands of marks in advocate fees.” Preston planted the point of one finger into his palm.

  “We have advocates in the movement who could—”

  Preston sent his gaze to the ceiling. “It’s thousands of marks in legal fees that will get us—what? What do you imagine? That the justices will dissolve the power of the Crown because we asked nicely?”

  I swallowed down the words that would make me look like a foolish girl and not the steady-tempered, rational woman I was. “I imagine that the people will see how hard we’re fighting for their freedom and power.”

  “We’ll talk about money in a moment,” Jacob said. “I want you all to appreciate this idea and what it could do for us.”

  Someone in the neighborhood had started a hearth-fire. The faint smell of smoke filtered through the scents of linseed oil and solvent. A draft swirled around my ankles, and I sipped weak tea while I listened to them debate.

  Preston inclined his head. “I agree that it’s a beautiful symbol, Jacob. It’s an inspired idea, and it will capture the imagination of millions. But I have to consider the practicalities.”

  He lifted the cup resting on the small table next to his seat, then grimaced at it. “I need more tea. Tell me how you mean to get the message across the country in time.”

  He stood and moved to a potbellied silver urn full of tea made from second steepings and took it black, leaving the scant supply of sugar lumps and dribbles of milk to someone else. There were still molasses cookies, and he took one to dunk in his cup. He made a sour mouth at the first sip of tea, and then turned his attention to Jacob.

  But I spoke up. “King Severin has cleared the railways to announce the official election, but they didn’t clear the secondary stations. They will need people to dig those stations out. We’ll just ride on his back.”

  Preston mulled this over. “Send our volunteers with the Service workers.”

  “It’s the fastest way to contact movement members across Aeland. It’s not fast. But it’s the quickest means we have.”

  “That’s clever,” Preston said. “They’ll be paid, fed, given a bed—”

  “And then they can bring the news to the networks in-country. We can tell them to name a candidate for each riding, spread the news about the shadow election, and every riding organizes their vote.”

  “It’s tidy,” Preston admitted. “But after that, we’re long on ideas and short on money. This is going to take funds … and I can tell you, it’s going to be more than we have.”

  “We’ll have to raise money,” Jacob said. “But—”

  “Our people are stretching dimes to keep fed and warm,” Preston objected. “And the kind of money we need, we can’t collect it in coin jars. We need a patron. We need an investor.”

  Our people didn’t have that kind of money. There weren’t many people who profited off Aeland’s system who wanted to see it fall—but that didn’t mean there was no one.

  But you couldn’t make a plan if you didn’t know the goals. I cleared my throat. “How much do you need?”

  Preston shifted in his seat. “I have no idea.”

  “Guess.”

  He shrugged his shoulders and dunked his cookie in the tea, buying a minute by chewing. “At least thirty thousand marks. If you can find thirty thousand marks, we can raise the rest.”

  Thirty thousand marks. I factored it. Two investors at fifteen thousand. Three at ten. Five at six thousand. But that may as well be a million—I didn’t know many people with that kind of coin, and all of them would want something in return for that money. Power, or favors, and how do you reckon the value of a favor against the cash that bought it?

  Who could we afford to climb into bed with? Who could we recruit who wouldn’t cost us that much?

  “We’ll get the money,” Jacob said.

  I stared at him. “We will?”

  “We will,” Jacob said. “I have ten thousand I can liquidate quickly. That’s a third done already.”

  Then Preston spoke up. “I’m good for five. That’s half. Find the rest.”

  “We should still take personal donations,” I said. “We could make up the rest that way. People will want to help. But I can lay my hands on a thousand?”

  “From your savings?” Jacob said. “We can’t accept.”

  “You’ll have to,” I said. “And I know someone else I can ask—”

  “Anyone I know?” Jacob asked.

  “Miles.”

  He shook his head. “Your Royal Knight friend? He might, but—”

  “Miles believes in the cause.”

  “But his sister can’t find out about this until it’s in motion.”

  “Then I shouldn’
t be here at all.”

  Jacob grimaced. “You’d keep our confidence.”

  “I’ll be our woman on the inside, but I won’t spy for you or mislead her while she pays for my counsel. If you don’t want her to know about the shadow election, I shouldn’t be here.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t,” Preston said, and moved toward a window. “But you won’t tell her what we’re planning; I know you.”

  Preston raised the sash. The smell of smoke filled the room, hustled in by the chilly air from the window.

  “Fire!” Preston hollered. He pulled the paint-splattered draperies wide, and through its panes leaping orange flames danced on the roof of a building in the distance, its pointed spires burning, black smoke unfurling across the sky.

  “Solace,” Jacob said. “That building’s done for.”

  “Isn’t that … it is,” I said. “That’s Kingston Asylum.”

  “Good riddance to it,” Preston grumbled.

  “They kept patients who weren’t witches too,” I said. “They were overflow for Beauregard Veterans’. There are innocents in that building. We have to go.”

  * * *

  It was over before we even got there. Fire had Kingston Asylum in its grasp, and only a handful of people—all young men, shivering in pajamas and wet woolen blankets—had survived the fingers of flame that belched out the window to lick the stone walls.

  Preston stopped on the street and shook his head. “Lost cause.”

  “Some patients got out,” I said, hefting the metal case holding a pathetic measure of first aid supplies I’d taken from Gabrielle’s building. “Ahoy. I’m Robin Thorpe. I’m a nurse. Does it hurt to breathe right now?”

  The soot-streaked young man nodded. “Had to run through smoke to get out.”

  It was too dark to see down his throat, but he turned away coughing and spit a black gob onto the snow. I gave him a gentle smile and held up a stethoscope.

  “Let’s have a listen,” I said, and he went obediently still. I placed the cold disk on the left side, and the right. I took his hand and pressed on a fingernail, watching the pale spot take its time to fill up.

  He’d be dead by morning. “Come this way,” I said, and gave him a cup of water. “Is that better?”

  “No,” he admitted.

  “Stay quiet. Don’t exert yourself. Tell this man your name; he’s going to write it down.” I nodded at Tupper Bell, who clutched a writing board and pale pink paper, the only kind Gaby would write on. “I’ll be back to check on you.”

  “Sure thing, Doc.”

  I left him to tend to the next one.

  “I wet a handkerchief in the sink and tied it over my face.”

  “Good thinking,” I praised. “Come over here. Stay with this man.” I pointed to the man whose airway would close up, who’d struggle to breathe and suffocate anyway. “The fire wagons will be here soon.”

  And on to the next, a man in a black-streaked white porter’s uniform. He coughed. He wheezed. He grabbed my wrist.

  “I unlocked all the doors I could,” he said. “Second I smelled smoke. The fourth floor was gone. Nobody could have made it up there—”

  He coughed again, and tears streaked his face. “I should have tried.”

  “You did,” I said. “You saved your patients. You got them out.”

  But I sent him to sit with the first two men and moved on to the next.

  “It must have been a chimney,” a patient said. “It’s cold as a murderer’s heart in there. We stripped the extra beds for blankets and sit near fireplaces all day—”

  Talking to fill the air. Breathing just fine. This one would make it. I moved on.

  There were so many ghosts milling around the grounds, all of them wearing the means of their death—blackened by soot, or horrible burns. I left them alone until I had sorted all the survivors, moved them to their groups—Urgent and Fatal, but I didn’t call them that—and kept examining, kept listening for clear breath sounds, or the fluttering hiss of a lung overcome by smoke.

  The fire wagons came too late to save the building, but they fought the blaze regardless. When the medical rescue people came, they came to ask me questions and sorted patients out. “There’s nowhere to put them,” one of the medics said to me, wiping soot off her cheeks. “We’ll take them, but they’ll be on cots.”

  “Cots will be fine,” I promised.

  She stared at the translucent, burnt, and smoke-blacked ghosts. “What a way to die. Horrible. How did it start?”

  “Not aether, obviously,” I said. “One of the patients thought it could have been a chimney.”

  “Awful,” the medic said, and she turned away to help a patient into a sleigh.

  I didn’t know how to determine what started a fire. The ghosts drifted to me, attracted to someone who could hear them, and they told me what had happened to them.

  “The door was locked. I couldn’t get out. I couldn’t breathe anymore. And then I was here.”

  “Hurts,” said a ghost, blackened by burning. “The floor collapsed. I fell. There were flames everywhere. It was so loud.”

  “What’s your name?” I kept asking. “Who are your people?”

  They told me. I wrote their names. “How did it start?”

  None of them knew. Grease fire in the kitchen? Chimney fire on one of the floors? I talked to the dead and learned what they had all been doing. Sleeping. Reading penny novels. Singing to themselves, just to hear a voice.

  I made my way through all of them, but one ghost made me drop my pen in the snow. He wore the white uniform of a porter with a wool coat over it, as if he had to go outdoors, or worked somewhere particularly drafty. But he wasn’t covered in soot. He wasn’t charred with burns.

  His coat collar was soaked in blood, all of it having trickled from a bullet hole in the back of his head.

  I swallowed down nausea. Not a chimney fire.

  Arson.

  * * *

  I insisted on staying with my patients until the medics came, and then I marched across the trampled sooty snow to speak to the senior constable. I told him what I knew from talking to the living victims and the dead.

  I had thought it would go better than this.

  “I know you can’t talk to them,” I told Constable Weaver for the fourth time. “I’m telling you what they told me, so you can use the information to—”

  Weaver sighed and capped his pen. “Look, we don’t have time to chase after your fancies. We have no proof that the fire was deliberately set that isn’t coming from your imagination.”

  Rolling my eyes didn’t endear me to the constable, but they rolled anyway. “Fine. Do whatever you like. I tried to tell you—”

  “Weaver!” The shout came from the burnt-out asylum’s open front door. “This one was shot.”

  “There!” I pointed at the ghost of Caleb Grimes, still staring up at the asylum with his coat collar soaked in blood. “Just as I said—”

  “Even I can see that ghost’s been shot.” Constable Weaver closed his notebook. “Excuse me.”

  I stared after the brown-coated policeman’s back, and if I’d had iron to chew I would have spit nails. It was arson! What else could it be? That stubborn, shortsighted, unimaginative—

  “Robin,” Jacob said, and I turned to his gentle expression. “You tried. But it’s going to be a while before people accept magic, let alone what Deathsingers can do.”

  “What do you think he’ll do when he finds out I’m correct?”

  “I’ll tell you what he won’t do.” Jacob offered his arm, and I took it. “He won’t come to you with an apology. Did you leave anything at Gaby’s?”

  “My scarf.”

  “Let’s see if she’s still up,” Jacob said, and we skirted the fire wagons and the medical sleds and the ice-spiked tires of the police’s winter tricycles, headed up the street to the six-story building that had been snapped up by artists years before when the business operating inside it went under to the competition o
f the Bays’ sailing empire.

  Tokens of the Solidarity movement hung out the windows and the fire escape grates; strips of yellow ribbon even decorated the mailbox. Gaby was outside, sweeping a soft drift of snow off the stairs, hiding the comings and goings of our secret committee meeting.

  “Good evening, Gabs.”

  Gaby startled so hard she jumped in the air. “I didn’t hear you coming.”

  “I’m terribly sorry. Robin left her scarf upstairs—”

  “Stay here. You don’t want to trudge up six flights just for that.” Gaby unwound a fluffy yellow scarf from her neck. “Borrow mine, and we’ll trade at the next meeting.”

  “Six flights isn’t so bad. Beauregard didn’t have a lift, so I’m used to it.” I craned my neck to look up at the windows and caught a blur of movement.

  I smiled at Gaby’s nervous expression. Honestly, she was going to have to tell us who her mysterious paramour was eventually, but I couldn’t fault anyone for keeping their romances private.

  “Come to think of it, your scarf will do nicely. Thank you,” I said. “Sleep well when you get there.”

  EIGHT

  Louder than Thunder

  I woke up glad I had washed the smell of smoke out of my hair. I had laid out my outfit for the celebration the night before—a full, swirling skirt, proper underlayers, my soft gray clan sweater. I’d loaned the dark gray one to Jean-Marie, as Zelind hadn’t finished knitting one for her yet. My boots were freshly polished, even though they would be trampled and dull by the time the party was over.

  Zelind hadn’t followed my lead, and morning saw kher dressed only in a singlet and woolen hose while khe fussed about tidying the tiny rooms we shared. Khe stripped the linens off my bed and remade it. Khe sorted books back onto the shelves. Khe had been arranging brightly dyed balls of yarn by color in the basket when I put my foot down and declared, “We’re going to be late.”

  “You can’t be late to a festival,” Zelind said. “How long do we have to stay? Twenty minutes?”

  “We have to be there for the acknowledgments,” I said.

  “You have to be there. How about I just slip off and—”