Weather Witch

by Shannon Delany

  Sliding up to the shutters, he unlatched them and pressed forward to gain the advantage on his attacker. He threw them wide open with a shout. But no one was there. The air was still, the humble balcony empty except for the pineapple plant Maude had obtained for him that he’d forgotten to water.

  Blustering into existence again, the wind tore at him, twisting and biting its way around his body and blowing past his head with such force and such a chill that all his hair stood on end and bumps rose on his arms.

  Then it was over and there was no wind, no breeze.

  The cruel, chill air was gone and the night was once more still and warm, but with a touch more dampness—and darkness—than before.

  Bran tugged the shutters tight and, leaning the sword beside his bedside table, slid into bed and drew the covers up as tight as he used to when his father stormed around in a drunken rage to forget his son’s very existence—that Bran’s birth had ruined everything that was good in his father’s life. Somehow the cold, unwanted wind reminded Bran of the aspects of his father few knew, aspects he’d rather forget.

  En Route to Holgate

  Jordan woke to a pounding on her door. She tumbled out of bed in the dark, trying to tighten her dress’s back but getting caught up in a struggle. Had she been of lower rank she might have cursed, but saying such words only showed a lack of a more elegant vocabulary.

  And class, she remembered. It showed a definite lack of class. Although she was on her way to wherever they took Weather Witches and most of an evening’s travel from home, still she was a day closer to proving her innocence and helping put to rights an entire system that had somehow broken down.

  Lord Stevenson threw open her door and (obviously having no concern for decorum) stepped inside, holding a lantern before him. A bit of light streamed in from the hallway’s distant window and Jordan struggled to wrap her mind around the time. She barely had a chance to snatch up her shawl before he raised his voice to her.

  “Hurry, Witch,” he snapped. “We have places to be today so we may Gather more of your kind.”

  “More of my kind?”

  “More Witches. They are bringing in their newest Gatherings from all up and down the East Coast. And I will come along at least as far as Holgate. To make sure you arrive safely.” He grabbed her shoulder as she was slipping on her shoes and shoved her forward so that she hopped to maintain balance. Her shoes’ silk ribbons trailed in the dust and she stopped to lift her skirts and tie the laces, saying, “Transport us all? But the carriage—”

  He shoved her against the wall long enough to bend over her shoes and rip the ribbons free. Then he resumed prodding and pushing her down the hall and the stairs, across the main hall, and finally out into the sunlight.

  Her golden gown sparkling in the morning’s first light, she realized there would be no more carriage rides until she cleared her name.

  Behind the carriage and its horses stood a wagon with heavy-boned horses all its own. They were harnessed tightly to their wheeled burden, their hooves broad and black, legs and necks thick with cords of muscle.

  The wagon reminded her of one she had seen the day Rowen sneaked her into the Below for an incoming circus they would otherwise have not been allowed to attend. There had been wagons much like this one in the long line pulling into Philadelphia. Heavy-framed on wide wooden-spoked and steel-tired wheels, the wagon’s body was framed with long metal bars creating a cage.

  Her brain slowed at the thought, realizing how easily she’d moved from caged animals in her birthday’s menagerie to caged people. “You mean to put us in there? Like animals?”

  “You are Witches,” Stevenson reminded. “Oh. Oh, you really don’t know, do you? You are no longer afforded any special treatment. You no longer rank.” He looked at her and wiped at the tip of his nose. “Though I daresay you will smell rank at the journey’s end.”

  She stared at him, stunned.

  “It sometimes amazes me,” he admitted, “considering your education and money, how ignorant your rank can be.

  “Load the girl,” he ordered a Wraith, shoving her forward one more time.

  Hissing, the Wraith closed its hand on her, hauling her along toward the back of the wagon and the door with its bulky antiquated lock.

  She scrambled up three slanting steps and fell into the cage, landing on fresh straw spread across the wagon’s bottom. Straw. Like she was livestock! The door clanged shut, and the wagon rattled as the lock snapped closed and the wagon lurched forward, rocking from side to side nearly as much as it crawled ahead.

  Jordan tried standing, holding the bars for support, but the jerking and jostling of the wagon over uneven roads pitched her to her knees again and again. Finally she sat, adjusted her skirts so she was as ladylike as could be given such circumstances, and leaned her back on the bars to watch the countryside pass by.

  Through forests thick with wildlife that scurried, flew, and sang from the treetops and across cleared swaths of land where small clusters of houses gathered together and called themselves villages they went, the wagon groaning and Jordan becoming increasingly sore. The road narrowed as they climbed into strange foothills. At rare moments Jordan glimpsed water miles away and far below, sparkling like a bed of shifting sapphires.

  She scooted to the other side of the wagon, clutched the bars, and pressed her face against them to get a better view. The water was so wide! She had never been allowed to view such a large body of water. Her father said seeing such places (especially the sea) did strange things to a man or a woman—gave them what he called “the longing,” a desire for adventure aboard ship.

  Jordan snorted and sat back, her eyes searching for water between the stocky hills. She crossed her arms. Her father was odd about some things. She felt no longing. Yes, she might admit a fascination with such a large body of water but she had heard enough tales of the Merrow to have no desire to board any ship—not even the aptly named Cutter, its hull bristling with blades for slicing waterborne enemies to ribbons. No. She had no longing to be on any ship. Or in any wagon.

  She peered out from under the wagon’s roof. No. Not even an airship gliding through the sky and cutting through clouds or stealing thunder for its newly rumored thermo-acoustic engine could tempt her aboard. No. Certainly not. She was Grounded and would stay that way.

  On horseback now, the Councilman dropped back to ride beside the wagon. Jordan tipped her chin up and looked away in defiance. She would prove she was no Witch. She would forgive them the indignities they had served her and might even be so gracious as to not mention it again in public.

  Stevenson pressed his horse close to the wagon and smiled. “It won’t be long now,” he assured. “And you’ll be with your own kind. All will be right as rain,” he said, his tone mocking.

  But beneath his slick smile she remembered the threat. If she could not be Made she would be made to disappear. And there was only one way to do that.

  Murder.

  Chapter Nine

  I am he that walks with the tender and growing night …

  —WALT WHITMAN

  Philadelphia

  The young man no longer stuck to the shadows, no longer waited until nightfall to work his magick—or mischief, as those Grounded would claim. He was tall and broad of shoulder with dark hair and gray eyes and a coolness about him that made people think of first frosts and snowfalls. And with good reason.

  Because Marion Kruse was a coldhearted young man.

  Truth be told, he wanted nothing more than to return to a simpler time. A time he didn’t wander the roads and towns doing small things to amuse himself and set others to wondering. He wanted nothing more than to be back at his mother’s feet, reading books about pirates and scoundrels that made her laugh and tell him and his brother to never grow up to be wicked—that goodness was its own reward. He wanted nothing more than to grow fat on Chloe’s generously proportioned biscuits and call her “nanny” again. Nothing more than to go fox hunting with his father
and friends (even that frustrating pretty boy Rowen Burchette) and dance with an attractive girl.

  He wanted nothing more than to go back to before he’d been Made.

  But Marion had been taught that going back was nigh unto impossible.

  For a few years after his escape he had drifted through the forests and along strange roadways, meeting people and learning more about them than he’d ever known before. Too often knowing more meant respecting them less. But over the years he kept drifting closer and closer to his home city of Philadelphia. Not intentionally, but one night he looked up at the stars and realized they were nearly in the exact position as those he’d watched from his bedchamber on the Hill.

  He paused on the sidewalk by a window box filled with begonias. They were his mother’s favorite. So he moved on, glancing at the sky and the airships hanging there, big glass-bottomed airboats fat as fruit in fall. He lifted his face to better view the shadowy bellies of the ships overhead and wondered how many were infested with pirates—or respected captains with a pirate’s worldview. The airships were modern ones with wings, rudders, and a large balloon keeping them aloft even when their Weather Witch of a Conductor could not. They were the stuff of myths and legends.

  Like his kind had been once.

  Funny how magick and myth became reality so readily. He grunted, looking back at the begonias.

  He wouldn’t harm them.

  But roses …

  There were bushes of them in the next yard, bold blossoms so big they nodded on thorny canes. Nearly perfect, blooms wide to drink in summer’s sun. The gate and delicately crafted wrought-iron fence separating these roses from the ones inside looked familiar. He’d been here before.

  Funny how your feet led you back to the places your heart longed for most.

  This was her house. Her estate. These roses? The pride of her family—pictured proudly on the Vanmoer family crest. Her family?

  Ruined his.

  Her family was the reason, even after all this time, he dared not go home. Not that his family was where they used to be—but he dreamed someday to find them again. To track them down. To be their prodigal son.

  But knowing such a move might ruin whatever they had raised themselves back up to he had never asked after them. Never tried to find them. Never sent them word he was free. It was the same reason he had hesitated outside the city’s gate, reconsidering. The same reason he had halted at the base of the Hill.

  But sometimes you couldn’t help but be led back around. Sometimes destiny called so cruelly you dared not disobey. So he had climbed the Hill. Had found this house. And, as destiny seemed to dictate, he would make her family suffer.

  In small, quiet ways.

  At least at first.

  He bent to sniff the bouncing blossoms, touching the stem of just one. Because all it took was one when your heart was full of ice.

  Then he was on his way again, ambling merrily along, before anyone noticed anything was amiss. By the time they shouted, seeing how the rose petals blackened, dropping, and how the cane frosted, darkened, and twisted in on itself, deadening all the way to its knobby heart—by then he was gone.

  En Route to Holgate

  Wagons holding sweaty-looking occupants were already parked when Jordan’s transportation pulled alongside them, and came to a snorting stop. Their wagons were smaller, their occupants less well-dressed, and their horses more worn from what Jordan supposed had been longer journeys.

  The Councilman and Tester walked over to a small crowd of agitated and mean-looking men. Voices raised and Jordan pressed her face to the bars again, hoping to hear something of importance. The crowd grew more animated, arms flailing and pointing to the wagons before motioning down the hill toward something just beyond her sight.

  Then she saw the guns.

  Men stood beside the wagons, muskets and rifles at their sides. Some carried the weapons, switching them from one hand to another and always—always—looking down the hill to something beyond.

  The Tester and Councilman nodded, the Councilman growling out, “Hurry now! And you”—he pointed to one of the strangers—”you tell Johnson I’ll lynch him myself if this goes wrong. It stinks of treason, him arranging us all to meet so near to water and him being noticeably absent. He needs to remember where his loyalty lies now!” The wagons began to unload, guns on the would-be Witches as much as the mystery downhill. Jordan’s door opened and she bounded toward the exit but was met by others being escorted in. “But…”

  “You will travel together now,” Stevenson reported, sweat heavy on his brow.

  Watching his eyes she realized that although he spoke to her, he, too, watched what everyone else watched. Another wagon opened, and more Witches were loaded in with Jordan. No, she corrected herself. Not more Witches, more prisoners, Jordan thought. Maybe some of them were as she was.

  Mistaken.

  Two more wagons—these carrying a few sad-eyed prisoners—and the door clanged shut, the lock turned, and the Councilman took the key.

  “And your name,” a boy asked her, his gaze raking across her dress and now less than perfect hair, “what did they used to call you?”

  “The same thing they will call me when this misunderstanding is all cleared up. Lady.”

  She barely flinched when the wagon’s inhabitants fell into fits of laughter around her. Turning her back on them, she pressed her face to the bars, steeling herself to the idea that she would not bother knowing any of them as she would be plucked from their questionable ranks soon enough.

  Then she heard it—they all heard it—a noise that made the hairs on her arms raise and set her teeth on edge. A thin, trilling wail accompanied by soft, wet sounds like a child in oversized boots sloshing through puddles. The men with guns lined up, backs to the wagons. The drivers held the reins of their horses tight but still the beasts stomped and cried, tugging at their bits and bridles until their mouths foamed and bled.

  “Get into your wagons and carriages and away,” the Councilman commanded. “This is no place to make a stand—not with so much water…” He abandoned them all—handing his horse’s reins to another rider, and, leaping into the carriage, he knocked so hard on its ceiling to signal the driver that they all heard.

  “Johnson’s doomed us all!” someone shouted as the other men scrambled to follow suit, climbing onto the wagons or into the carriages.

  Horses bolted, carts jolting away as steeds panicked. Jordan and the other prisoners saw them then as their wagon bounced forward and away—a long line of wet and glimmering speckled shapes, hunched and slithering over the hill toward the retreating wagons.

  They moved like fish forced onto land, even their awkward motions made with inherent grace, an alien fluidity that Jordan had only seen basely mimicked by dancing prima ballerinas. They flopped forward, heads covered in spines and long, limp green-and-blue things that shimmered and looked like weeds that grew out of their domed skulls. They pulled themselves onward with broad hands and webbed fingers, thick bodies ending in a long, winding tail rather than a pair of legs and feet. But what caught Jordan’s attention most were their mouths …

  Huge hinged jaws removed any chance the beasts might be considered beautiful and were lined with rows of needle-sharp teeth—so many teeth, in fact, the creatures seemed incapable of closing their mouths. Thin, rubbery lips could never stretch far enough to obscure such razor-filled mouths.

  Jordan only realized as they raced away that her position in the packed and standing-room-only wagon had changed. Instead of pressing close to the bars to better witness the attacking Merrow, she pushed as far as she could into her fellow prisoners—decorum and all things proper forgotten in the face of horror.

  Their wagon was ahead of a few others, and, wide-eyed, they watched as the Merrow paused in their slick progress to coil onto their tails and then—

  They launched. Bodies sailed through the air like the school of exotic fish swam in the Mayor’s much-lusted-after aquarium. They were a
ll at once silver and blue and green, flashing like the ocean’s sapphire waves and landing on the closest horses.

  One horse reared up and struck out, squealing, forelegs flying. But the Merrow were everywhere—a swarm of flesh and teeth, burrowing wide mouths into horseflesh. Screaming, a horse bucked and broke free of harness and traces even as the carriage’s driver fired his gun and reloaded. Men on the same wagon fired a volley, their guns cracking out their reports’ noise as both bullet and ball left barrels and the sweet scent of black powder filled the air.

  The escaping horse went down on its knees and Jordan turned away when blood fountained up from it, but turned back (morbid curiosity winning against fear) in time to see more Merrow launch themselves.

  This time at the men.

  Those deaths were faster than the horses’. Not cleaner, not gentler, but faster. Bones cracked and heads came free of bodies and Jordan discovered another use for the bucket in the wagon’s corner when she emptied the sparse contents of her stomach into it. She rose again, watching as the bloodshed disappeared from sight, their wagon’s rioting horses calming as they gained greater distance from the threat. Soon the horses slowed to a jog, their sweat a lather so thick it dropped to the road in clumps like freshly whipped meringue.

  The awkward caravan paused a few miles farther down the road, pulling to a stop at a broad crossroads. The Councilman and Tester exited their coach and the group reconvened. There were no more worried looks although the men were clearly shaken and filled their sentences with curses. A few fierce words were exchanged and everyone remounted, the wagons going their separate ways. Jordan settled as best she could among the crowd of bodies, wondering how soon—if ever—they’d feel safe again.