“Sophie.”
I whirled. Niko beckoned from the slim alley between my building and the next set of row houses over. The eaves overhung the dirt path, casting thick shadows, and I could have walked by him a dozen times without seeing him.
“What are you—”
“Over here,” he ordered. I bristled at his tone, commanding me like an officer barks at a private, but I slipped my key back into my pocket and followed him into the alley. His shoes and the hems of his trousers were spattered with mud, and I thought I saw streaks of blood on his dark brown linen coat.
“How many hurt? Dead?” I managed to ask. My most pressing fear—how bad had it been?
“They didn’t even get to use their bayonets,” he said, as though this would placate me.
“So they only shot my neighbors, they didn’t gore them to death.” I gripped his arm in mine. His sleeve had blood on it. “How many, Niko?”
“I don’t know yet. Maybe twenty, thirty hit, maybe more. Look, the soldiers entered Fountain Square from the Stone Castle, fired in ranks a few times, and the rioters scattered. It was a damn good thing for the soldiers that the rioters hadn’t had time to properly assemble with weapons, that’s all. It would have been a brawl.” He pursed his lips, as though calculating their odds.
“Would that have been preferable?” I almost shouted. Niko shot me a sharp look, and I lowered my voice. “A brawl? Hand-to-hand fighting in the square?”
“No, of course not, I’m just saying—this wasn’t exactly planned.”
“Then explain how it happened.”
“Explain what? A crowd-size temper tantrum I didn’t orchestrate or condone? Sweet hell, Sophie. You’d blame me for the mosquitoes if you could.”
“Then what,” I forced through tense lips, “happened today?”
“They’re impatient,” Niko said. “Yesterday’s debates didn’t go so well. Folks gathered to talk in the taverns, they got heated, they started moving from tavern to tavern and eventually into the streets; the crowd gained momentum.” He shrugged. “It just—snowballed. These things do that, you know.”
“Why?” I held up my hand to his exasperated retort. “I mean, why now? The vote is coming. Reform is coming.”
“Yeah, well, their patience is getting thin. And there was an amendment to the bill recently, remember?”
“Yes, they removed the anti-conscription provision—mercies, Niko, they didn’t riot over that?”
“They sure as hell did. I tried to stop it but this got out of hand, quickly. They don’t trust a governing body that keeps taking things away from them!”
“It was…” My breath shook. “The anti-conscription provision was a bargaining chip. We knew that piece would probably fail, but having something less vital to be able to remove—Niko, it’s invaluable to the process.”
“You set that part up to fail? You meant to remove it?” I thought, for a brief moment, Niko might actually hit me. “You’re a worse snake than I thought.”
“It’s politics, Niko! It’s negotiation. There has to be something you’re willing to give up—”
“What is the nobility willing to give up?”
I fell silent for a long, uncomfortable moment and made him wait for me to speak. “Plenty of them aren’t willing to give anything up and we have to be able to vote them down.”
“Do you trust them?”
“What?”
“The nobles. Once this vote is done, say it passes—you trust that they aren’t going to go back on this?”
The fight I’d had with Theodor echoed in memory, recalling words so similar to Niko’s but spoken by me. I took a shaking breath. “Yes. We have to. There’s no other way forward.”
“You were born down here with the rest of us rats,” Niko retorted. “You can play pampered palace pet all you want, but you know better. You know that their game is rigged. They hold all the power. They can give it or withhold it and all we can do is—what?” He snorted. “Riot until there’s none of us left. And we will. You know that.”
I ached, from the soles of my feet to my throbbing head, but deeper than that, in my soul. For Galitha, for the common people, for a nation ready to tear itself apart. “Legal reform will work. It has to. You know that, or you wouldn’t have asked me to help you.”
He sighed, the lines around his eyes showing plainer than before the Midwinter Revolt. “Yeah, sure. I did. Call me a hopeless optimist.”
“That,” I assured him, “is something I have never called you, nor will I.”
15
THE RIOT CAST A LONG SHADOW OVER THE CITY. I SPENT A QUIET afternoon at Viola’s salon a few days later, ostensibly to discuss a new book of poetry but in reality to digest the impact of the riot on the Reform Bill’s chance of success. The nobles were quieter with their objections to reform, frightened like chastised children, just as they had been after the Midwinter Revolt. All my warnings seemed to percolate into their conversation. I spoke little but felt a sense of relief despite my grief at the bloodshed—the nobility now understood the depth of the common people’s dedication. They weren’t giving up. We weren’t giving up.
The date was set, swiftly and unceremoniously, for the vote on the Reform Bill. With the final moments of the work of months hanging in the balance, I didn’t expect Theodor to be able to help me with the charms as we had planned, but he insisted that he needed to get away from the scrabbling and clawing of the nobles the day before the pivotal council session. He arrived inconspicuously at my shop in the late afternoon. “All right,” he said, unpacking his violin. “I’m at your service.”
“Did anyone see you come in?” I asked, glancing at the quiet streets through the window. The hours between midday and the end of work tended to be quiet in my shop’s quarter, as morning errands were finished but the bustle of trades-people locking up and going home or out to the taverns hadn’t yet begun. The dozy quiet of a hot summer afternoon even seemed to seep inside between the panes of glass.
“I don’t believe so, but does it matter? A prince does as he likes,” he said with false gallantry.
I rolled my eyes as though it were a joke, but I didn’t like that cavalier attitude. “Alice and Emmi are washing the windows in the back. The dust is so bad this summer that we can hardly see to work sometimes. They’ll be done shortly.”
“Of course, you wouldn’t want them to know about—”
“No,” I replied hastily as Emmi trotted into the front of the shop, dust smudging her cheeks and painted in a thick stripe down her pinner apron. “How goes it?” I asked her.
She glanced at me, and then blanched at seeing Theodor. “Almost done,” she squeaked.
“You needn’t be afraid, I won’t bite,” Theodor said.
“Don’t tease her,” I said, more irritated than I intended. What of it, if Emmi was a bit struck by the presence of the heir to the throne in our shop? The reality of my situation was so strange that I often felt separated into discrete pieces, one that lived in my shop, and one that lived with Theodor. Perhaps my employees felt that division, as well.
Alice and Emmi shook out their cleaning rags in the alley and tidied up as best they could, though the reddish street dust had nearly dyed Alice’s fair hair pink. “Pink and blue hair powders were the fashion ten years ago,” I joked. “If anyone asks, tell them you’re reviving the style.”
“I wouldn’t have worn them then, either,” Alice grumbled, arranging her black silk-covered hat to hide the worst of the dirt streaking her white linen cap.
“I’m going to have to spend half the night washing this off—it’s gotten places I hadn’t dreamed of.” Emmi laughed, then remembered that Theodor was standing a few feet from her, and her bronze cheeks reddened. They both clattered out into the street before Emmi could embarrass herself any further.
“To begin, then,” I said, leading Theodor into the back of the shop, into our workroom.
“First,” Theodor said. “Between that letter from Niko and the riot,
I’m worried about you living alone.” He raised a waiting eyebrow.
“It’s all just talk, I’m sure, Niko’s letter!”
“I’m not so sure. Obviously it wouldn’t be said in my presence, so I asked Ballantine and Ambrose—”
“Theodor!”
“What? There shouldn’t be any secrets kept from them. They admitted that they’d heard plenty of… unflattering… things, but it’s hard to tell if anyone is serious about them.” He sighed. “Still, I can’t help but worry—perhaps you should stay with me. Until we go to the summit, until—well, we’re going to be living together soon enough, anyway.”
A hundred weak reasons ran through my head: that I hadn’t packed, that I still owed three months on my current lease, that I hadn’t washed the windows and couldn’t move out of a rented space and leave it dirty. In truth, the thought of accelerating our eventual domestic arrangement was overwhelming. In my little townhouse I had peace and quiet and could do things the way I always had. “I’ll consider it,” I said, more curtly than I intended.
Theodor’s mouth was a thin line. “Consider it, then. And perhaps consider making yourself one of those protection charms you charge your clients for.”
“How can you suggest that?” I nearly shouted, remembering my open windows in time to keep my voice down. “You know I don’t use my own charms—I never have, and I never will,” I declared.
“I know you never have, but I didn’t think you were so stubborn as to set yourself a rule that you never would.”
“Stubborn?”
“Inflexible, yes. Refusing to consider new situations previously unimagined.”
“The entire point of a rule,” I said, my voice tight, “is that it applies regardless of the situation.”
“Why?” he challenged.
“Because,” I snapped. “Because that’s the rule, the rule we all follow, passed down from mothers and grandmothers and aunts.”
“And no one has ever broken that rule? It’s a superstition, Sophie, not a law.”
“It’s real to me. My mother taught me, and she didn’t break it, even when she got sick with a fever—and she died, Theodor.”
“I don’t want you to die just to prove a point,” he said, voice softening a bit. “I don’t understand why a rule your mother taught you as a child, a child who was never going to do anything but sell charms to her neighbors, has to hold up now, for a woman who’s so much more than that. A woman who’s influencing the fate of nations.”
“Because with power comes responsibility, and rules govern that responsibility,” I said, echoing words my mother had said once, long ago. “I think that applies all the more to who I am now.”
Theodor shook his head. “I can’t convince you.”
“No,” I said. “But I will tell you—if you ever figure out how to make a physical good-luck charm, I’ll take it. First—practicing your casting. We can start with this,” I said, producing a jacket whose bright rose silk shimmered beautifully but was bereft of the charm that had been commissioned for it.
“You have a deal,” he said, “and I have motivation to learn more about casting. Now—do I just play? And let you do whatever it is you do to draw the charm?”
I hadn’t considered one finer point of the process—I imbued my pieces with particular types of charms. Luck, love, money; Theodor didn’t have the control for that yet. Fortunately, this piece was for simple good luck. “I suppose,” I thought out loud, “that the kind of music you play might have an effect on the precise nature of the charm. This is for general good fortune, so try to play something… lucky. Cheerful.”
He played, drawing the charm quickly from the ether. The song was a vibrant, plucky country air, and the accompanying charm as close to pure luck as I could have hoped for. I deftly drew it into my control and wove it into the fibers. “It’s working,” I confirmed as I set a line of light around the hem and then embedded it down the center front. “And that’s enough.”
He finished the piece with a flourish; simply stopping in the middle would not, apparently, do. “Already?”
“Yes,” I said. It had taken perhaps a quarter hour, far less than my usual method of stitching the charm in. I could only hope it was as strong and indelible, but nothing I had seen from the experiment with the curtain led me to believe anything else. With various melodies and adjustments to them, we tailored the charms to the pieces on my schedule. It took merely the better part of two hours to move through the remainder of my backlogged projects, finishing with the sky-blue riding habit I had struggled with. When we were done, the protection charm clung tightly to the fibers of the riding habit, glowing in the wool as though it had been woven there.
“Keep going for another minute,” I said, curiosity eliciting inspiration. “I want to try something.” I pulled a thick thread of light, twining like yarn, toward the shelving on the far wall of the atelier. Fabric was my medium, what I knew innately. I understood the weave and hand of a piece of cloth before I even touched it, and allied myself with it when I draped and sewed. Wood, metal, stone—the materials of a building weren’t my usual canvas.
I pressed my intentions on the golden thread. I manipulated its movement, trying to drive it deep into the wood, to hold it there. To my surprise, it slivered itself into the wood grain and held, but at an odd angle, like a bent nail, with the tail of the thread dangling behind it. I looped the thread and tacked it into the wood, creating an uneven pattern on the surface.
Thinking of some of the finer furniture I’d seen at Theodor’s house, I tried something else, cutting the thread off and picking a new shelf. I flattened the threads into something more like thin sheets of metal, and imagined them pressed into the wood like an inlay. It worked; the charm settled into the wood like mother-of-pearl into barely perceptible grooves in an inlaid box or tabletop.
Theodor stopped playing as I inlaid another set of shelves with the charm he had cast. “Do you think it will hold?” he asked.
“I have no idea,” I said. “It might fall out as soon as we walk away.”
“More experiments,” Theodor said with a laugh. “Keep it up and we’ll have to get you a university post,” he joked, then his face fell. “I’m sorry—I didn’t mean to compare you to him.”
“Not at all,” I replied, though the thought shook me. Was what I was doing comparable to Pyord’s studies? I thought of something he’d said, that we’d only scratched at what charm casting could do. I shook off the thought, though the idea of being able to imbue anything with charm—or curse—was unsettling. Would charmed rifles never miss? Would cursed fortresses crumble?
“But Pyord thought of this,” I said. “If not this, exactly, he knew there could be more to charm casting. He studied this, in ancient texts.”
“Not to sound insensitive, but if the Pellians had this figured out… well, either it’s not very powerful at all or they weren’t terribly good at it.”
“I know, they’re not exactly world dominating today—Pyord seemed to think it was just a rash of bad luck that kept them from developing casting further.”
“That’s irony for you.”
“It is,” I said, disconcerted. What exactly had the Pellians discovered? How far had they stretched magical influence? “There’s really no way to know without another Pyord digging up ancient texts.”
“Few enough people know how to read those defunct languages. Of course…” Theodor flashed his best imitation of a conniving smile. “The university in West Serafe is considered the best in the world, with scholars in every discipline and a library that makes our Public Archive look like a second-hand bookbinder’s.”
The prospect was intriguing. Away from Galitha City, where very few people could read the ancient language that shrouded any studies of my skill, could I hire someone to research and translate for me? I was reluctant—after all, Pyord had been a scholar of Pellian antiquity and he’d been far from trustworthy, but Nia had been willing to help me. Any concerns I had about someone
recognizing me and growing suspicious of my work would be allayed in a foreign country. Theoreticals aside, perhaps I could discover what was wrong with my casting ability—and recover my skills.
“Beyond that,” Theodor said, his voice intensifying as he laid his violin in its case. “It does make one wonder. There have always been rumors that the Serafan court magicians were, well, actually magicians.”
“Not just better-than-average tricksters and showmen?” I scoffed.
“Rumors are rumors,” Theodor conceded, “but quite often, where there is smoke, there’s fire. Is there any possibility, do you think?”
I wanted to dismiss the prospect completely, but short months ago I wouldn’t have believed one could control musical casting at all, let alone manipulate it into physical objects. “I suppose it’s not impossible,” I said, hesitant.
“Perhaps you could do a bit of investigation while we’re in West Serafe,” Theodor said. “The secrets are certainly buried well if they’re there at all, but then again—I don’t know that any foreign delegation has ever included a charm caster.”
“One thing at a time,” I told him. “There’s a vote tomorrow, remember?”
“Indeed. I ought to go home and make the final edits to my grand, unifying speech.” He paused. “I’d usually love your insight, but it might be best if…”
“No offense taken, I need to get these orders out for delivery, anyway.” I shooed him out of the store, then wrapped packages in brown paper as the late summer evening fell.
16
I WOKE TO A GOLDEN HAZE OF HOT SUMMER SEEPING THROUGH my open windows and the immediacy of remembering—today was the vote. Our hopes hinged on the votes cast in the Council of Nobles today. Not only my hopes, I knew, but the hopes of a quiet populace, waiting, their patience nearly threadbare.
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