by Ari Marmell
Getting off Delacroix lands hadn't ultimately proved that difficult. Cyrille might have lacked either Widdershins's skill or her god-given advantages, but he still had her to guide him, to watch and listen for any sign of the household guards. Furthermore, she'd gone briefly ahead to see if the two unconscious Crows had been discovered yet; when she realized they were gone, clearly having recovered and limped away, she left their lantern where they had lain, burning merrily away. That should attract attention, swiftly enough and in sufficient quantities, to make escape in an alternate direction that much easier.
Once off the House grounds, it was, perhaps ironically, the young Delacroix who took over as guide. This was, primarily, because he knew Aubier's streets and Shins didn't—but also because, even though they went nowhere near the gang's territory, the thief was nearly paranoid about watching for the appearance of the Thousand Crows.
Several hours before dawn, they had made their way to the Carnot property, scrambled atop a nearby house—or rather, Widdershins scrambled and Cyrille struggled—and firmly planted themselves.
And then they waited.
And waited.
“It's a natural phenomenon,” she explained the fifth or sixth time her companion expressed his boredom. “The hours between midnight and dawn pass three times slower for me than anyone else. You're just near enough to be caught in it, I'm afraid.”
More waiting.
“Let me get this straight.” Cyrille glanced at the palm of his glove, wet from the melted frost coating the roof, then idly wiped it dry on his cloak. “We're here to spy on the Carnot household. To see if anyone suspicious, or anyone I recognize as a foreigner to Aubier, enters or leaves.”
“Unless we changed the plan when I wasn't listening,” she confirmed.
“And we're doing this here, even though we both agree they're not going to be open or obvious about such things, and you aren't even certain the local Carnots are involved, because you don't know where the Thousand Crows are holed up, so we can't spy on them.”
“We've been through this already, yes? I'm positive we have. I think I remember actually being there for it.”
“You know there are multiple inns and hostels in Aubier that cater to outsiders, right? If you're correct about the Carnots coming here from Lourveaux, we know about when they'd have arrived. It'd take a bit of digging, but at least you'd be watching people you know are part of what's going on.” Cyrille sounded smug as a king's cat, presumably at having come up with a course of action Widdershins had missed.
“Mm-hmm. Cyrille?”
“Um, yes?”
“I'm an outsider to Aubier.”
“Yes.”
“The Thousand Crows, and possibly your mother's people, are looking for me.”
“Yes…”
“Where do you imagine, first and foremost, they'll be looking?”
Had his face fallen any harder, it might have cracked not only the frost, but a shingle or two beneath it. “Oh.”
Widdershins reached over, gently patting his hand. “If the Carnot house proves a dead end, that'll have to be our next step, yes. But first I'd rather exhaust the options that don't involve putting us in undue proximity to people who want to stick pointy things into me, all right?”
Cyrille cast the strangest look her way, but nodded.
And so, more waiting.
The dawn began to break, casting the shadow of Castle Pauvril over Aubier like a giant (and mildly arthritic) sundial. The streets began to bustle with first a trickle, then a flow of humanity. And the pair of youths on the rooftop watched as that trickle and flow continued to have absolutely nothing to do with the Carnot household.
“Hey, Cyrille?”
The boy glanced up from where he'd been tracing idle patterns in the frost. “Hmm?”
“You're an aristocrat,” Shins observed.
“Um, yes?”
“Formal education? Tutors and classes and books you didn't want to read to learn facts you couldn't have cared about less?”
“Yeah…”
“How come nobody uses alchemy anymore?”
Cyrille blinked, shifted around to sit with his legs crossed, wincing only slightly—at the cold of the roof on his rear, Shins assumed.
“I mean,” she continued, “if it actually works…”
Her companion nodded slowly, squinting a bit as he worked at dredging up the memories of old history lessons that—as she'd theorized—he hadn't really given a damn about.
“Alchemists worked for generations before they started getting results,” he began slowly. “Once they did, the formulas and recipes and all that proved maddeningly complicated. Something like one person out of ten could make them work with any regularity, and that's just drawing from the people who got through their years of apprenticeship.
“It also proved ludicrously expensive. The different reagents—uh, alchemical ingredients—needed to make the more interesting procedures work…Yes, a few alchemists even managed to turn lead into gold, but it was so costly, the profit margin was surprisingly low. And when it came to more basic stuff—poisons, medicines, solvents—there were just far easier sciences. Ultimately, alchemy became a curiosity, a hobby practiced by the occasional rich or half-crazy eccentric, nothing more.”
Widdershins, of course, had honed in at least partly on the gold. “Low margins,” she said, “but still profitable, yes? So why would it vanish so completely?”
Cyrille's gaze grew unfocused. “I'm not entirely sure I'm recalling this right,” he admitted. “I only half understood it back then. Near as I can explain, though, objects and elements resist transformation through the alchemical sciences. Which means, it's difficult and expensive to create a solution that'll turn lead into gold, or nickel into iron. It's much easier, and much cheaper, to create a substance that'll undo the process.”
“Ah. So even if you pulled it off, odds were the law or your enemies or whoever would catch you in it.”
“Precisely. There was a brief period where the reagents to reverse the changes had a wider market than the ones to cause them. In the end, it just wasn't really worth it to anyone.”
“Except lunatics like Fingerbone,” she muttered.
“Uh…”
“Seriously, who goes by ‘Fingerbone’? Who masters something like alchemy and then devotes its use to a gang of thieves? And who the happy hopping horses is that?”
“Uh,” Cyrille reiterated. Then, following Widdershins's insistent scowl and pointing finger, “Oh!”
The “Oh” in question was a balding, broad-shouldered fellow in brocades and fabrics at the absolute lowest end of what could be called “fine.” He moved casually, just another man on the street, going about his early-morning business, worthy of Widdershins's attentions only…
Because he'd stepped onto said street from within the Carnot property.
“Name's…” Again Cyrille's face screwed into odd shapes as he struggled to remember. “Josce Something. I've seen him around at a few shops and events. Highly trusted Carnot manservant. I think he might even be head of the household staff, which is curious.”
Shins, who'd just been starting to relax, tensed up. “Why curious?”
“Well, he's only been in their employ about half a year. That's remarkably swift advancement, so we just figured he'd come to them from a different branch of the…Oh, come on! Don't give me that look! That was well before the Lourveaux Carnot bloodline left!”
“Which doesn't mean they couldn't have sent someone ahead to get their little scheme rolling,” she snarled. “Come on. Let's get moving before we lose him.”
“He could just be running an errand!” Cyrille protested.
“Fine. Feel free to stay here. There's important frost to be melted.”
Grumbling, the aristocrat followed.
As it turned out, “get moving before we lose him” had been unduly optimistic. They very nearly lost him multiple times after they were moving.
Widdershins rec
ognized the techniques the moment Josce began employing them. Innocent stops to examine this shop or chat with that person, very slight twists of the head to study the street reflected in a window. This “servant” was ever alert, ever watching for anyone tailing him.
And he was subtle. He was good. Certainly not what one would expect in a model majordomo.
Shins found herself with the same problems she'd had earlier, and then some. Wide streets, routes and twists she didn't remotely know, long swathes where rooftop pursuit was out of the question—plus a very perceptive mark and a companion who was about as unobtrusive as a collection plate.
It took every trick she knew, splitting up multiple times, and every bit of extra help Olgun could provide. Thanks to the tiny god, she spotted a faint twitch just before Josce turned, giving her the opportunity to duck aside; or someone in the crowd stumbled slightly, passing between Cyrille and the Carnot servant, briefly blocking the latter's view.
Still, they fell constantly farther behind, and by the time they'd reached the southeast edge of town—not one of the several directions through which Shins had yet either entered or exited—even Olgun had to admit they'd lost the man completely.
“Well,” Cyrille offered, “there's nothing out here but a few farms and the like. Can't be that hard to find him again, can it?”
Widdershins couldn't tell which of his struggles was the more obvious, the one to sound chipper or the one to hide his fatigued gasping from the long, brisk walk. She decided to glare at him with equal vehemence for both.
“Yes, I know,” she hiss-snapped at Olgun. “We don't have any better options! Stop ruining a perfectly good glare!”
By then, however, she'd lost the moment. With ill-concealed poor grace and a childish urge to kick something in the roadway, she turned to seek likely prospects among the farms and barns.
In less than an hour—or so Olgun informed her; with the overcast rapidly building between her and the sun, Shins couldn't have been sure—they proved Cyrille right. As they'd seen no trace of Josce on the road ahead, nor moving across the largely barren fields, only a handful of buildings stood near enough to have hidden him. They found him at the third: an old grain mill, wind-driven, at the very edge of a property.
“Not sure which House owns this field,” the aristocrat admitted in a whisper. “Mother would lecture.”
“Let her.” Shins crept nearer, feet silent over the dry and pebbly soil. Cyrille was rather less quiet, but thankfully, it shouldn't matter. Even before they got close, Widdershins could hear the grumble of rolling, grinding stone from within. She looked up at the tattered blades, idly rotating in the wind, and nodded.
“They've engaged the millstone.”
Cyrille snorted. “You think Josce sneaked out here to make grain out of season?”
“I think a man constantly watching to see if he's being followed is probably going to worry about eavesdroppers, too, yes? You turkey. Come on, let's see if we can find somewhere we can hear them over that racket.”
The mill itself was old, worn, surrounded by flakes of stone and shreds of sailcloth. Footing was uneven, the air redolent of powders both grain and rock. What slight noise could be heard over the grinding from within was lost in the creaking and squeaking of the sails above. Widdershins still moved softly, silently, if only out of habit, and Cyrille did his best to mimic her efforts.
The front door was a no-go, not even to be considered. Unfortunately, that didn't leave a great many options, since the designers—for some reason—hadn't felt the need to include a wide variety of windows in the structure.
Given that even Widdershins, city girl to her soul, had heard of the dangers of stirring up too much dust in a mill, she couldn't say she blamed them. Still, it was grossly inconvenient, bordering on rude.
It was Cyrille (and when had he gotten ahead of her, in their gradual circumnavigation?) who spotted the one exception. A small, horizontal rectangle with thick, wooden shutters that currently hung wide open, it faced onto an expanse of empty field. Perhaps it was intended to air out the place if the powders and dusts did accumulate to a choking or explosive degree? Shins could only guess and could barely bring herself to care. At the moment, she was more concerned over the fact that the boy was standing right in front of it as he waved her over!
“I'm just wondering, Olgun. Is there a reason the gods put more souls than brains in the world? Is it supposed to be funny? Or was there just a shortage?”
Cyrille continued to beam at her as she approached, right up to the point she grabbed him by the collar and yanked him away from the window so fast she was surprised the wind didn't whistle between his teeth.
“Are you crazy?” she hissed at him. “Or just dumb? I suppose ‘both’ is an option. You are a blue blood.”
“I…Widdershins, I looked! There's nobody in the room, and they weren't going to hear me over—”
“It has a door, this room?”
“Well, yes, of course it—”
“Then someone could have walked into it while you were standing there waving like a monkey in an anthill, yes?”
Cyrille looked as though someone had just eaten his kitten. “I'm sorry, Shins. I didn't think.”
He looked so miserable, she couldn't even bring herself to scold any further. (The fact that she'd done more than her share of equally foolish things in her time, and Olgun was currently parading images of every single one of them past her in a cavalcade of humiliation, might also have had something to do with it.) “Look, just…learn from it. Don't do it again, all right?”
“I will. I mean, I won't. I mean—”
“Good.” Widdershins took a single running step and dove through the open window, rolling to a stop beside the door that the room did indeed have. A quick peep underneath revealed nothing at all, and pressing her ear to the wood merely gave her a clearer perspective on the grinding.
A quick glance around told her nothing about the chamber, save that it wasn't used much. A few old tools and a chair lying in one corner, coated in dust, made up the entirety of its contents. Idly she waved Cyrille to follow her, but her attentions remained focused on that door.
“Olgun?”
Doubt, but a willingness to give it a shot. She felt the whole side of her face begin to tingle, focused on her ear, which she again pressed to the door.
For a moment, the millstone was painful, almost deafening, but it swiftly faded back to normal levels. It reverberated in her head, however, a peculiar blurring effect, as though the echoes of the grinding were now louder than the sound that birthed them.
Still Olgun's power flowed, the god almost seeming to juggle sounds, drawing some nearer and hurling some away, until finally, finally what might just have been a voice leaked through.
Unfortunately, that proved to be the limit of the god's ability. She could tell that there were voices, but could understand only the occasional word.
Something about a schedule? Not a voice she knew, or at least not one she could identify under the circumstances, but definitely worried.
A second voice, also a stranger, too low for her to pick up anything at all.
When the third man spoke, however, she recognized the phrase “damn girl” readily enough, had no doubt to whom the speaker referred. Perhaps more importantly, she recognized the voice itself.
Ivon Maline's wasn't a voice one would soon forget. She'd felt the need to take an extra bath to scrub it off of her the last time.
And that meant…
“We found it!” The soft hiss was intended for Olgun alone. In her excitement, however, Widdershins had been loud enough that Cyrille, currently hauling himself awkwardly through the tiny window, might have heard if not for the constant rumble.
Ivon and Josce, collaborating. Solid evidence, finally, of House Carnot's involvement with the Thousand Crows. She even had a witness with her that Calanthe Delacroix and the Aubier authorities couldn't readily dismiss.
Except, as Olgun pointed out, they still
hadn't witnessed anything. They only assumed one of the two unknown voices had been Josce's; only assumed he'd come here when he'd disappeared from their sight.
Widdershins grumbled something about horses and figs, then grumbled a second time at the clumsy fwump of Cyrille sliding from the window to the floor behind her. She stood, examined the hinges of the door—old and slightly corroded metal, as she'd anticipated—and then reached for the ubiquitous tools she kept in various pouches and pockets on her belt. A few dabs of oil, a pause to let the stuff soak in, a few dabs more, and that should do it.
She checked to make certain Olgun was ready, decided there was very little point in making certain Cyrille was ready, and then laid a hand on the latch. Slowly, carefully, every nerve prickling, she eased the door open a couple of inches.
What she saw, after allowing her vision to adjust to the dimness beyond, was—the inside of a mill. An open chamber, shelves for storage, a screen to sift the grain and a basin to catch it. She couldn't see the millwheel itself, though its presence resounded everywhere, nor could she see any sign of the three speakers.
Open it farther for a better look? If Ivon and the others were anywhere within sight of the door, any wider could well draw their attention, no matter how silent, but if she couldn't see the bulk of the room…
Ah.
Shins stepped to one side, pressing her face against the narrow crack between the door and the wall to which it was hinged. Not much of a vantage, but it proved enough.
There they were, closer to the doorway than the young woman was entirely comfortable with. Ivon she couldn't see at all, but that was fine. She didn't have to. Her clearest view was of a man she didn't recognize, a pinched-faced, mouse-haired fellow who wore the clothes of a merchant but the sycophantic simper of a lifelong errand boy.
The third had his back to her, stood so she could only glimpse him through the aperture, but that was sufficient. She'd seen the balding head and brocaded tunic recently enough to identify them now.
“Cyrille!” Then, just a bit louder, “Cyrille! C’mere!”
He crept up behind her, idly rubbing an elbow; probably banged it on the way in. “What?” he whispered.