“Guard?” she turned, calling down the hall. “Guard? Viens ici.”
Into the room walked Rin. Iris’s blood drained from her face, her fingers curling in her lap. Rin’s black jacket was properly buttoned to the top, her yellow skirt swaying as she walked. And her face, Iris noticed, was now covered by a new red veil as dark as Bellerose’s hair, so dark Iris wondered if Rin could even see. She hoped not. If Rin could, would another battle between them ensue?
Relax, Iris thought. Fighting’s not allowed in Club Uriel. Those are the rules.
But of course, rules could be broken.
“Adam, do tell this one to stand to the side.” Madame Bellerose brushed strands of hair with a black-gloved hand. “I’m tired from the carriage ride and I’d like to sit.”
“Iris is my guest. And my guests sit.” Adam gestured to the empty seat at his right. “You’re welcome to do the same.”
The woman’s expression stiffened, her red lips thin as the blade of a knife. “How uncouth,” she said, but sat down nonetheless.
Somehow seeing Rin standing in the same spot even after her Patron had sat stirred a sense of camaraderie that went beyond whatever residual fear was left over from their battle. Without a word, Iris shifted to the side and patted the seat next to her.
It caught Rin by surprise. But slowly, as Adam grinned secretly and Bellerose scowled, disgusted, Rin took her seat next to Iris.
“And so here we all are,” said Adam. “Iris, let me formally introduce you. This is Madame Bellerose. Her family has vineyards across Europe and has long manufactured luxury goods in Paris, but they’re also known as being quite the philanthropists. Madame herself has donated a fair amount to women’s groups across France, Britain, and America.”
“We’re at the dawn of a new era, after all. Old money can have new values, no?” Bellerose’s long gloves were spotless, the seams intricate as if especially sewn for her.
Adam turned to Bellerose. “Madame, let me introduce to you, Miss Iri—”
“Oh yes, I recognize that one from the auction,” Bellerose said with a bored sigh.
New values, huh? The irony. Iris could hardly hide her amusement.
Adam rubbed his chin. “In that case, what party are you referring to?”
“I stumbled upon an old friend I haven’t seen for some time,” said Madame. “And so I’m throwing him a welcome back party at my residence—next Tuesday evening.”
Adam sipped his wine. “I think I’ll be busy that night,” he said shortly. “So, if that’s all.”
Bellerose adjusted her shoulders. “You seem in a hurry to get rid of me. Can’t we just gossip like the rest of them? About the dead and dismembered bodies left behind from the tournament? Poor Douglas. He never did stand a chance against Belgium’s boars.”
Douglas. That was the dead man’s name. The Exploding Man, according to Adam’s list. Even after everything he’d done to her, Iris shivered violently at the thought. But as her stomach heaved, she gritted her teeth to calm herself, noticing Bellerose’s and Adam’s eyes on her.
“Those two grave robbers I employed were useless, of course. Dead already.”
And so Bellerose had one champion left.
Adam looked at Rin. “I’m terribly sorry for this,” he offered.
“Oh, dear boy, please.” Bellerose dismissed him with a wave. “The little beast doesn’t understand what we’re saying. She’s useful for little more than her savagery in battle.”
“And what are you useful for, Madame Bellerose?” Iris glared at the woman, her skin burning hot. But Bellerose’s shock slowly turned to a viciousness that simmered underneath her smile.
“My, my, Lord Temple, do you have no disciplinary skills?” Bellerose snapped her fingers at a waiter carrying a tray of champagne. “Careful now, or you may end up in the same predicament as Portugal.”
Portugal? She must have meant the man named Cordiero.
Adam placed his glass down. “You mean that incident here the other day.”
“The man who made a fuss and had to be put down like a dog. Such an unnecessary loss for the tournament.” Bellerose’s smile turned wicked. “But punishment is to be expected for those who speak out of turn to their superiors.”
“Such barbarity,” Iris whispered, shaking her head, her fists clenched so tight she could feel her blood pumping through her veins.
Bellerose’s eyes slid toward her—a cordial glance. “Did you say something, dear?”
“He’s here, no?” Adam said quickly, successfully stealing back Madame’s attention.
“Perhaps. I don’t see him.” Bellerose pinched the thin neck of her wineglass. “But there are other things I’d like to discuss with you, my love. Alone.” She looked at Iris. “If that’s okay with this one, of course.”
“More than okay.” Iris stood. “I don’t want to spend another second around you.”
Bellerose’s laughter sounded like shattering glass. Iris grabbed Rin’s arm.
“Come with me,” she said to a surprised Rin. She had things she wanted to talk about too.
Rin, the fierce warrior, now stumbled behind her awkwardly as Iris pulled her away.
* * *
Rin wasn’t comfortable standing outside. Different from the seasoned fighter Iris knew, Rin folded her arms, impatient, turning her back on Club Uriel as tipsy men streamed in and out, laughing garishly and smoking cigars. But the second Iris grabbed her elbow, Rin’s well-trained muscles moved in a flash, pulling out of her grip and facing her menacingly.
Iris put up her hands. “I’m not here to fight,” she said. “Just needed the air. And thought you did too.” Especially Rin, who had to be around that disgusting woman so often.
Rin understood her body language, but lifted her head in defiance nonetheless. “If you want to speak with me, use our tongue,” she challenged. “You still understand it, clearly, so you can speak it if you try.”
Iris cleared her throat. “All right,” she mumbled in English. “But if I do that, will you show me your face? You want to speak with someone. I want to look you in the eye when I do.”
She pointed at Rin’s veil. Rin must have understood, because she turned away from her, keenly aware of the two men who’d just lumbered out of the club.
“Don’t worry about them.” Iris guessed her embarrassment. “I’ve already seen your face. Even on their best day, those wankers can’t match your loveliness.”
She tried her best to say it in Fon and must have flubbed it entirely, for Rin burst out laughing. It sounded beautiful.
“Beauty means nothing to me,” Rin said. “It’s Bellerose who makes me wear this veil when I accompany her. She says my face is too horrid for her to look upon.”
“Her entire existence is horrid. I wouldn’t put much stock in what she has to say.” Iris had spoken in English, but just so Rin understood her meaning, she said Bellerose’s name and made a comically disgusted face that had Rin giggling.
Rin continued. “I decided to wear the veil myself because secrecy is always helpful in battle. But I suppose here it only makes me stand out. Besides—”
She unpinned the red veil from the braids that kept it in place.
“As you said, you’ve already seen my face.”
Delicate, youthful features—a small, round nose and thick, straight eyebrows—contended with the scars of battle on her face. Her large, focused brown eyes shone fiercely bright—that is, the one that was still unmarred. Iris’s gaze traced the dark violet scar down the center of her right eye. Without meaning to, she reached out to touch it, only realizing when Rin twitched that she had no right to from the start.
“You could have killed me after our last battle, but you showed me mercy,” said Rin. “You should have taken my head. That’s what you and I were trained to do.” Outwardly, Rin spoke proudly of the act, but her little shiver didn’t escape Iris’s notice. “Why didn’t you?”
Iris only shrugged, smiling. It caught Rin off guard. After a mo
ment passed between them when it was clear Rin may not speak again, Iris decided to interject.
“What happened to you? Your face?” Iris tried to ask in Rin’s language.
Perhaps Rin understood. Perhaps she didn’t. Either way she didn’t answer.
That was when Iris remembered the story Rin had told. That she was kidnapped in a raid and taken to the Dahomey. This girl was not at the South Kensington Exhibition that made the rest of the Fanciful Freaks. That’s when Iris began to wonder: when it came to the birth of the Fanciful Freaks, perhaps it wasn’t the place that mattered so much as the method.
She tried to ask her. “Your powers,” she managed in Fon. It took a few tries to get the pronunciation correct enough for Rin to understand.
“You once had a necklace of white stone,” Rin said, and Iris remembered her mentioning it among the trees. “You left it inside your household when you disappeared. It was the same household I came to live in when I was first brought to the Dahomey. They believed the stone to be the secret behind your power. That’s why I swallowed it.”
“Swallowed it?”
“To keep me safe after my household decided to send me to the ahosi for training. Because of my nervousness, it went into my windpipe instead, but I didn’t choke. It simply stayed there in my chest. That’s how I knew the crystal was wondrous.” Rin placed her hand upon her chest. “It was while working for the king that I learned of his experiments in the Forge.”
The Forge… Iris covered her mouth with her drumming fingers but said nothing.
“Behind the palace complex, deep within the mountains, was a secret workhouse made of stone. Inside was a hearth they called the Forge. There the kingdom’s top military warriors conducted experiments with it—the white crystal, just like what your necklace was made from.”
Iris frowned. “Experiments?” She almost held her breath as she heard the answer.
“Because of the rumor that your white crystal necklace had caused your wondrous powers, the king had sent spies to find more of it. They correctly guessed it would be where they’d originally found you and took just enough so as not to raise suspicion. In the Forge, they conducted many experiments to see if they could meld it into different weapons, if it would react to other kinds of ore, to steam pressure, to vodun. I don’t know all the details. At the time, we trainees were ordered to keep watch for thieves at night. But because of the experiments, the Forge was often volatile. And an accident happened the night I went inside the workhouse alone. A strange explosion. That’s all I can remember from that night. And when I awoke…”
“You had your sword,” Iris said.
Just like at the fair. Iris was right—the method mattered more than the place.
“I was the only one there at the time, so no one else could have been affected,” Rin continued. “When the Forge exploded, I felt the force of it resonating inside my chest. It was as if the little crystal inside me were buzzing…”
So the key to everything was this mysterious white crystal? And Rin was an important piece of this puzzle too. Together, they could make sense of it all. But she was also a dangerous warrior with a mission of her own.
Iris thought carefully about what to do before finally offering her hand.
“I want to know the secret of the white crystal. If you get any more information, please, please let me know,” she said. “And call me Iris,” she added. “You and I are sort of like sisters, aren’t we?” As strange as their relationship was, Iris truly felt a kinship with her that she couldn’t express with words. She only needed the one to translate for Rin to understand her meaning.
“Sisters?” Rin stared at Iris’s hand, a little annoyed, a little embarrassed. She folded her arms and turned away. “After I manifested my sword, I was told many times that I was like you. The reincarnation of the great Isoke. I trained with my life on the line all while chasing a ghost.”
She looked down at her own calloused palms. “And then I was told to bring you back alive. You, a ghost who should have been long dead. The king’s true reason, I don’t know. When I came to these lands, I didn’t know what to expect. But now…” Rin’s shoulders drooped a little. “If I take you back with me, I wonder… what will happen to the two of us?”
Iris smiled even wider, her hand still out for Rin to shake.
Rin placed her hands in her pockets with a defiant huff. “Your language skills are terrible, Isoke,” she scolded. “But don’t stop trying… When I was first taken to Dahomey, I too found it difficult to learn.”
“Rin—” Iris started, before a bloodcurdling shriek from inside the building cut her off.
Stunned, Iris and Rin ran inside only to find an old man tumbling down the staircase. The blood pouring from the man’s mouth stained his white beard, his cloudy blue pupils dilated as he continued to flop down each step until his body rested at the bottom. A trail of blood followed behind him, one of his leather shoes abandoned in the middle of the stairs.
“Cordiero! He was poisoned!” someone screamed from the railing of the second floor.
Everyone ran to see the man’s undignified end, gasping and whimpering. Among them were Adam and Bellerose, both staring with an intensity that frightened her.
“My husband!” A woman barreled down the steps: Mrs. Cordiero. Once she’d reached the dead man, she threw herself upon him and began wailing.
Cordiero. A member of the Enlightenment Committee. And now he was dead. Poisoned.
Mrs. Cordiero’s wail echoed off the high ceiling, but neither Adam nor Bellerose seemed to notice Iris glaring up at them as they turned and left the scene.
So which one of you did it? Iris thought to herself. The Enlightenment Committee was a frightening group indeed.
29
IRIS HAD TO GET OUT of Club Uriel. And so she told Max to look after Jinn as she spent the rest of the day on the grass by the River Thames with the book Mr. Mortius had delivered to her: A Family’s Travels through West Africa, by John Temple. Courtesy of Adam. It was good to know that murdering Cordiero hadn’t made him forget the little things.
Or maybe the culprit was Bellerose. The woman looked ruthless enough to do it. Adam at least had helped Iris enough to earn the benefit of the doubt.
Well, there was no proof either of them had committed the crime. Besides, the death of a Committee member had nothing to do with her. So she focused on what did.
Like many explorers, John Temple’s father, Sir Isaac, was interested in the Nile, which took him to Eastern Africa, specifically Zanzibar and Nairobi. John had once gone on an expedition with his father, funded by the British government. He spent a number of pages detailing from experience Lake Victoria, one of the great lakes of the continent. More curious was an offhand line that seemed to flow by quickly and yet stick out of the page all the same.
Later, while my father was recovering from sickness in Yorkshire, the Crown sent another expedition, one that cared more for the treasures within the lake. And treasures they found, indeed. That they’d made such an important discovery without him bothered Sir Isaac until the end of his life.
Maybe it was her imagination, but Iris felt the sting of mockery in those last few words. The Temple men seemed to have a long history of hating their fathers. But what was this about “treasures” within the lake? Maybe they were just categorizing fauna and flora. Still… it made her uneasy.
John detailed his experiences in West Africa, including his travels to the Oil Rivers Protectorate in the lower Niger region, where the local authorities had sanctioned a special mining project. But according to a newspaper Iris had just bought on the street, that project was now under British control. It was why some envoys were here in England right this very moment.
John Temple also spoke of the Dahomey Kingdom:
The ahosi. Or the mino. That is what they call themselves, though we Europeans call them Amazons because of their resemblance to the Amazons of Greek mythology. They are women military warriors who serve their king. An e
lite force known for their prowess in battle.
And Iris was once one. It was still difficult to believe. John Temple spoke to the king of Dahomey about his travels. It was his work that had brought him there in the first place.
It wasn’t until an explorer visited our lands that my king began to believe you were still alive. That explorer seemed obsessed with your mystery, Rin had told her as they’d fought under the stars. John Temple. He was researching her. Why? Did the stories of She Who Does Not Fall reach as far as Europe?
“A global eclipse,” Iris whispered, trying to remember all that Rin had said. She scanned the chapter. Indeed, it was one of the topics that John Temple spoke about with the king. The king’s predecessor, King Ghezo, had once believed that the eclipse was a sign that the gods favored the Dahomey. The existence of Isoke was proof enough for him. It was something King Glele believed even now. About that eclipse, John wrote:
Different cultures believe a solar eclipse to be an act of aggression, like the Vikings, who once believed that sky wolves were chasing the sun. But in the Americas, the Navajo believe eclipses to be a part of nature’s order. What if it is both? A display of the Earth’s predilection toward order and balance and also a sign of the divine?
The natural and the supernatural working together. Maybe even one and the same. Iris put the book down and stared into the black waters of the River Thames. White birds and butterflies of gold, orange, and blue flew above her. Free of fears. Free of secrets. Free of worries. Free.
She and Rin gained their powers in different places and times than the other Fanciful Freaks of London. What if there were more like Iris around the world? Maybe there had been Fanciful Freaks throughout history—only her powers had allowed her to survive a little longer than the rest, that’s all. There could be an entire society of them that she didn’t know about. If John Temple knew the truth, he didn’t reveal it in this book. If Adam wasn’t going to tell her outright, maybe she would have to find his father.
The Bones of Ruin Page 29