Soulstar

by C. L. Polk

“Instead, we have selected a new leader.”

  I held up my hands, and the force of their questions pressed against my palms. “I humbly accept leadership of the Solidarity Collective. I am also taking Jacob’s place as the candidate for South Kingston–Riverside Central in King Severin’s election. My platform retains the same values and promises as Jacob’s had, and I have a lot of work to do, so I’ll only be taking questions for five minutes.”

  “You wouldn’t answer the question regarding the legal status of your marriage to Zelind Bay,” that same reporter spoke up. “If your marriage is not genuine by Aelander standards, how can we trust that your decisions will have the moral weight that Aelanders demand of their leaders?”

  “Aelanders understand that the work of government is to manage the smooth and orderly operation of its resources to serve its people, including the distressed and endangered. Aeland did the right thing in freeing witches from the horrors of their labors in the asylums. They rejected the atrocity legislated by those Aelanders in government who destroyed the very souls of their loved ones. Aeland understands moral action better than you think, sir.”

  Reporters spoke up to try to have their questions heard, shouting over each other for their chance. I pointed at a woman in a pinch-fronted hat and a press card from the Kingston Daily Herald. “Yes.”

  “You were a labor organizer in your days working for Beauregard Veterans’,” she said. “Is it true that the weight of the demands from your united nurses are the root cause of Kingston’s only veterans’ hospital’s financial woes?”

  “I don’t think that’s true, no,” I said. “If you research the actions of the last Cabinet of Queen Constantina the First, who now await their sentences for treason in palace prison, I believe you will find a series of deep funding cuts to secondary service hospitals, including Beauregard Veterans’.”

  More uproar. I disregarded them, finding a friendly face in the crowd. “I see you, John Runson of the Star of Kingston. What is your question?”

  John raised his voice to drown out anyone rude enough to keep talking. “Did anyone else announce their intention to run for the seat?”

  “Not before Jacob’s death,” I said.

  “Today is the last day to sign up for candidacy.” John tossed his hair, and shell beads clicked against each other as his locks shivered back into place. “You could be running unopposed.”

  “The day’s not over yet,” I said, and some of the reporters laughed. “Someone might come and make this a race.”

  “And indeed, someone has.”

  The voice came from behind the crowd of reporters and pulled them around to stare at Jarom Bay, graying locks hanging neatly around the hand-eased shoulders of his gleaming, midnight blue coat. Beside him stood a smugly smiling Albert Jessup.

  “I’m Jarom Bay,” the man said. “You all know Albert, of course. We’ve come to announce my intention to become Riverside’s Elected Member of Parliament. The loss of Jacob Clarke saddens me, and I mean to carry on his legacy, with sound and sober decisions to help guide and protect the people who employ and house thousands of citizens.”

  None of those reporters were looking at me anymore. But Albert was, and I wanted to punch him right in his supercilious face. This was Jessup’s doing. He had hated Jacob, the leader of a small but effective coalition bent on bringing fairness to government. They had squashed Albert’s efforts to line his own pockets more than once.

  Jarom was cut from the same cloth. When aether-powered vessels had outrun even the fastest sailing ships, the Bays had turned to real estate, buying and tearing down the homes of poor people and rebuilding neighborhoods for a profit. Together they’d empty the pockets of ordinary Aelanders and put them in the street.

  Reporters asked them questions. Jarom answered with keywords like “tradition,” and “stability,” and “preservation”—nothing like the ideals that had moved hundreds of voters to chip in for a permit to elect Jacob. Would they do the same for me? Did I have what it took to beat the barrels of money Jarom could spend on voters who could see how a Bay in Government House would fatten their bottom line?

  I had to. I had to get every clan and shopkeeper I could, because Jarom Bay in Government House was a disaster.

  I stepped off the platform and pushed through the reporters, headed straight for Jarom. He watched me approach, the stern lines between his eyes furrowed and deep.

  “I come to wish you good luck, Mr. Bay,” I said, and stuck out my hand. “It will be a pleasure to have such an influential competitor.”

  He stared at my offered hand, stripped of its glove, and then gazed at me. “I’m sure I won’t need it.”

  I cocked my head. Reporters shot photographs of Jarom refusing to shake my hand, at the cold sneer on his face as he denied me courtesy.

  “I wish luck on you regardless,” I said. “Good morning.”

  “Mrs. Thorpe!” a reporter cried. “Is this rivalry personal?”

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” I said. “That would be awfully petty, don’t you think?”

  I smiled at Jarom and Albert, waggled my bare fingers at them, and strode off.

  I had expected a fight. But this was going to be a nasty battle, one that I would have to fight with all my strength if I was going to stop Jarom from buying his way into Parliament.

  THIRTEEN

  At the King’s Pleasure

  The next week, I knocked on doors all over Riverside, traveling from the comfortable clan houses of Water Street to the tenements of Five Corners. Today Zelind had taken the time to accompany me. Our last visit before our lunch break saw us perched on fifty-year-old chairs adorned with frothy crochet doilies as we drank Mr. Alfred West’s best tea—properly strong, if a bit stale from hoarding.

  “You want to know what the government can do for me?” Mr. West asked in a soft and reedy voice, his bent figure pitched forward with his years. A white Aelander living in a building across the street from Clarence Jones Memorial Park with creaky floors and decades of water stains on the walls, the halls filled with the scent of simmering shellfish stock. Mr. West was small of build, with a dapper air and a chin that had never needed a razor. He slurped his tea loudly, and the cup rattled as he set it back on the saucer. “I want them to turn the lights back on. How can your government do that?”

  Zelind glanced at me before setting kher teacup back in its saucer. “We want to bring light into your home that costs less than your old bills for aether.”

  “Don’t see how you can promise that,” Mr. West said. “How are you going to get the lights back, with all those witches on the loose? They were making the machines work.”

  We had run into a surprising number of people who didn’t believe the story Grace had published in the Star, each with their own explanation for the power outage—that the Amaranthines had done it, usually. And that they had brought thousands of ghosts with them to haunt us into doing what they wanted, which was anything from letting them take over the government to turning them into walking gods.

  Some of them took one look at Zelind and kher short halo of unlocked hair and shut the door in our faces, convinced that witches had come to hurt them. Some of them stared uncomfortably at Joy until I regretfully left her behind on canvassing days. But Mr. West hadn’t so much as batted an eye. Then he invited us in for tea so he could tell us all about how the witches needed to be enslaved again.

  “There’s another way to make aether,” Zelind said.

  “Not without witches. You need witchcraft to make it, don’t you? It’s the only way this makes sense. And good luck trying to round them up now that they’re scattered all over the country, doing Solace knows what. We need the Royal Knights to save us from the weather, so they can’t do it. It’s got to be the witches. You’ve got to bring aether back.”

  “Believe me,” Zelind said. “We’re working on bringing aether back, and we won’t need witches to do it.”

  “Hmph. You’d say so, wouldn’t you? Tell me this, tho
ugh—” Mr. West sat up a little straighter, a probing glint in his eyes. “How is going out to vote in your mock election going to change anything?”

  “There are six million people in Aeland,” I said. “Two million of them live right here in Kingston. A fraction of that population actually has the power to vote individually. The Free Democracy Party wants to demonstrate the will of the millions by taking all of those ballots and bringing them to the justices of the highest court and asking them to make our election legitimate.”

  Mr. West planted a dainty hand on his knee and led with his chin. “And you think they will agree.”

  “I think that we’re not going to stop until we make free democracy a reality,” I said.

  “You should organize more voting collectives,” Alfred said. “Even if a thousand people chipped in to make one vote—”

  “Work within the system,” Zelind said. “We could do that. And if we did, the elite would just find a way to shut us out of their system. We can’t rely on that.”

  “That’s how we elected Jacob Clarke,” Mr. West said. “That’s how we’re going to elect you, Auntie. We’ll pay for the permit, and we’ll vote you in, and show the country how it’s done.”

  “I’m grateful to you for that,” I said. “And I want to ask you to come out and cast your own vote as well. Our polling station will be in the dancing hall at the far end of the park—”

  “Where Jacob died,” Mr. West said. “I don’t get out much. I watched from the windows. You can hear the music in the summertime, you know, and I could hear him. And then the shot—oh, it made me jump!”

  I leaned forward. “You heard the shot?”

  “Like a firework going off just over my head,” Mr. West said.

  Zelind and I looked at each other.

  “When the police came,” Zelind said, “did you tell them that?”

  “The police never came here,” Mr. West said. “I watched everything from my window. It takes too much out of me to take all those stairs unless I need to, and no one came to my door.”

  No one had come to see Mr. West. There were others in the building, though, and perhaps the police had only talked to the building custodian. “Mr. West, I’m so happy I came to see you today. I need to meet your neighbors. Who would you say could give me some good ideas about what Aeland’s government needs to do for them?”

  “You should see Marjorie Potts,” Mr. West said. “Beware, though—she’ll keep you all day.”

  “I’ll save her for last, then,” I said. “Thank you so much.”

  Zelind and I shook hands, and when we left, we hurried to the stairs. Zelind went up, not down. “The police never came here. We have to look. Has it snowed since—”

  “No,” I said. “Do you think it was here?”

  But we climbed the stairs. We pushed open the door, and we stepped wide of footprints molded into pristine snow.

  Five snowmen stood sentry on the rooftop, their heads peaked with fresh fall, the impressions of small boots nothing more than dents.

  “Look,” Zelind said, pointing past the snowmen.

  The edge of the roof was a waist-high wall crowned with snow, except in the place where it had been cleared off. Footprints paced around the spot, dusted with snow. Zelind went to hands and knees before one, and alternated blowing on the powder filling it, and dusting snow away with kher gloves.

  Zelind’s efforts revealed an impression of a Service boot’s heavy-lugged soles, but the size was smaller than most men’s boots, the heel impression a little narrower.

  “Small feet,” Zelind said. “They were up here.”

  “How’d they get up here with a sniper rifle? Did they carry it in a loom bag? A broom case, for skiprock?”

  “A guitar case,” Zelind said. “It could have been anything.”

  We skirted around the footprints and peered over the mound of snow on the walls. There was the stage, visible in the winter with no leaves on the trees. The assassin had been here. Had watched and waited through the music. Had waited here with a long-barreled rifle and infinite patience, waiting for a clear shot, for Jacob to stand in one place, for the wind to still.

  Had the assassin stared down their scope at me? Had they waited with all the patience of an egret as I fought to save Jacob’s life, and then stood in his place to save his dream? Cold trickled down my back.

  “This is it,” I said. “But the police never came.”

  “You can’t go to them,” Zelind said. “They’ll think you’re interfering with their investigation.”

  “They stared right at this building,” I said. “They couldn’t have missed it. But—”

  But they had already taken me away. Why bother with evidence when a good story would do? I scanned the park again. You really could see everything on the outdoor stage. This had to be the place.

  But how were we going to convince anyone to look into it?

  “Look at this,” Zelind said. “They dug around in the snow for something. Cigarette butts?”

  “Shell casing,” I said. “They pocketed it before they left.”

  “Taking the evidence,” Zelind said. “That’s clever.”

  “That’s thoughtful,” I said. “If we can assume this shoe print can determine gender, we’re looking for a woman sharpshooter.”

  “I think it’s fair to assume the shooter is an adult,” Zelind said. “The boot size is small, suggesting the shooter is also small.”

  “Right. I don’t even know how one goes about finding the kind of expert gunsmithing you need for a rifle to fire accurately at this distance—”

  “The army,” Zelind said. “She or khe probably joined the army.”

  “The army would have her in the records as a woman, most likely.”

  Zelind made a rueful face. “True.”

  “And was so adept at shooting they put her in combat. I like that story. But can we prove it?”

  “We can request a dive into the records,” Zelind said. “How many women sharpshooters can there be?”

  “Let’s look into it,” I said. “Thank you for thinking of it.”

  I started for the door and had swung it open before I realized Zelind still stood next to the assassin’s perch. Kher brow was knit with worry, and khe crouched next to the shoe mark one more time.

  “Zel. Are you coming?”

  “Robin.” Zelind licked kher lips, looking at the shoe marks in the snow. “You can’t look into it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She saw your face through a scope,” Zelind said. “We have to assume that she watched you try to save Jacob’s life, and that she decided not to take it. If you suddenly show up asking questions about her, do you think she’ll show you mercy again?”

  “You have a point,” I said. “First spies in the steering committee, and now this.”

  “What?”

  Weariness stole over me. “When we were at Jacob’s funeral, Tristan showed me a mark on a mailbox he believes is a signal between a spy and their handler. He believes that someone informed on Jacob’s plans, and that’s the reason why he was murdered.”

  “To stop the shadow election?”

  “Or to shatter the collective,” I said. “But yes. Jacob made enemies while he was in Parliament. He was frighteningly effective. There are people who wanted him gone.”

  “Who?”

  “Albert Jessup is on the top of that list,” I said. “He hated Jacob. It wasn’t just opposing his goals in Parliament. It was personal. Jacob used to delight in thwarting him. Any of the Royal Knights would have the money to pay an assassin, but many of the men and women who hated him most are imprisoned in the Tower for treason.”

  “So Albert Jessup.”

  “Yes,” I said. “And—and Jarom Bay.”

  “Why him?”

  “Kingston has a housing crisis,” I said. “Jacob used his leverage against the city council to stop the Bays from buying up cheap land, squeezing out the tenants with intimidation tactics, and
rebuilding commercially profitable properties—apartments, mostly.”

  “How much money could that mean these days?”

  “Hundreds of thousands of marks,” I said. “Jacob used to push the council into forcing rent controls and maintenance orders onto Bayside Properties, sucking money out of Jarom’s and Birdie’s pockets.”

  “And Jarom thinks that I would come home, join the business, and kick the poor out of their homes?” Zelind asked, disgusted. “But now the two of them are working to take your seat.”

  “Correct. Because I will continue Jacob’s work. I will tweak their noses at every turn.”

  “You’re not safe,” Zelind said. “You realize that, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you’re doing it anyway.”

  “Yes.”

  “But you can’t chase down this assassin. You have to assume she’ll kill you if you try.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “But I’m not going to just let her hunt me, either. Let’s figure out what to do over lunch. I’m starving.”

  * * *

  It wasn’t as simple as that, however. I spotted Grace’s sled the moment we turned the corner onto Water Street.

  “Now what is that about?” I wondered.

  Zelind sped kher pace. “We’ll know when we get there, I suppose.”

  Grace was sitting at the table next to Eldest, who grinned and shoved another filet of pan-fried salmon at her. Next to her perched Tristan and Miles, who cut globe sprouts into quarters before eating them. Orlena had a tiny portion on her plate and was picking away at her salmon.

  Zelind and I sat on the bench across from them. “What are you doing here?”

  “We’re here just to get out of the palace,” Miles said. “Grace said she had news for Zelind.”

  “For me?” Zelind asked. “I’m sorry, Chancellor Hensley, but I don’t see how we could—”

  “It’s your invention,” Grace said. “You applied to protect the rights to your technological innovation, specifically an animated generator of aether.”

  “I did,” Zelind said. “But how did you know that?”