Weather Witch

by Shannon Delany

  He puffed out a deep breath and stepped forward to check that she was cinched tight. “But we are both the products of our environment and our parentage—whatever yours might be,” he added. “And so we must do some unpleasant things from time to time to get by. Sometimes we have no choice.”

  Then he did a new variation of her treatment. Still she remained Grounded and unMade. When the Wardens finally came to take her away, she was crying.

  Bran stumbled to a bucket in the laboratory’s corner and, crouching before it, watched everything he’d eaten earlier in the day rush back out the same way it had been put in.

  * * *

  Jordan was an aching lump in her Tank. Today the sunlight was not enough to lighten her mood and being surrounded by the same grim walls was far from inspirational. Her right hand flopped out, limp, on her lap, wrapped in a hasty bandage that had soaked through with a stinking salve. “To heal the burn,” the Maker had promised.

  The burn he had given her with the brand.

  Even blind with pain she hadn’t produced a mist or a drizzle.

  The Maker had said she must have a tremendous will to continue to hold out so fiercely.

  Pain was her constant companion now. Long gone was her naïve belief that Weather Witches were just a segment of society that worked hard for their living, a segment of society that had some small control over their destinies. Maybe no one had choices.

  Further gone was her halfhearted hope Weather Witches held some modicum of respect from society.

  Hope was no longer a word she recognized.

  There was a flutter of sound at her windowsill and a shadow fell across Jordan, marring the crisply split beams of light that divided her curled form in slices cut by the bars that kept her from the outside. She stirred, raising her head off her knees. Something had changed. She looked toward the morning’s light and the thing that now blocked part of it.

  A hawk paced the stone sill, its tail feathers and wing tips brushing the bars in a soft and rhythmic way that reminded Jordan of the lightest touch of Rowen’s fingers across the strings of the guitar he’d shown her once. It was beautiful, this hawk—large and covered with feathers full of various shades of brown, cream, and red. It turned and cocked its head, looking at her. A beak the color of old butter and tipped with ebony hooked cruelly between two golden eyes that glinted as brightly as her mother’s favorite earrings right after a good polishing. Its pupils were broad and dark, black pits marring its shining eyes, and Jordan shivered but unwrapped her arms from around her legs and slowly pulled her feet beneath her so that she could crouch there.

  Hearing something, the hawk hopped, turning its back to her.

  What was it like, Jordan wondered, to have such freedom and power you could soar through the sky, wind ruffling your feathers? Did it tickle your skin—the pull of air on your feathers? Did it make your eyes tear as the wind whipped past? What did eyes like that see from high in the heavens?

  Carefully she stood.

  The bird cocked its head.

  Something interesting in the courtyard so many stories below or had it spotted something in one of the trees lining the lake that fascinated it?

  She took a step forward.

  And another step forward, quietly closing the distance between the bird and herself.

  It gave another little hop, excited by whatever it had spied. Then it froze and only the faint breeze that always twisted around the tower and through her Tank gave it the appearance of life, teasing the edges of its feathers.

  What were those feathers like when stroked against the skin—could you feel freedom in their touch? Did they carry the sensation of rising winds as easily as the winds carried their owner? Her hand stretched out, fingers open and trembling at the question and the desire that now tingled at their tips.

  Straw crackled beneath her foot and the hawk’s head spun, its eyes widening and glinting, seeing her so close. With a shriek it leaped off the sill, plummeting. Jordan’s heart dropped into her stomach and she lurched forward the last few feet, hands wrapping around the bars as she pressed her face between them and watched the bird throw its wings open—the movement audible—and slowly, lazily loop over the crowd below before beating its wings and climbing, rising above the shop rooftops and up above the wall that hemmed in Holgate and kept it from the bridge, the lake, and the outside world.

  From freedom.

  The hawk soared over the wall and shrieked again as it headed out over the water and teased the treetops with its wing tips.

  She sighed.

  To have that freedom … She’d never had that. Society did not allow for a young lady to just … go anywhere or do anything on her own. Even her time with Rowen had been chaperoned.

  Mostly.

  She smiled and remembered.

  * * *

  Rowen had stolen her away one morning. It all seemed so innocent.

  One moment they were seated in the parlor sipping tea and munching on delicately crafted watercress sandwiches and then Rowen (who delighted in balancing his cup and saucer on his knee) had broken them both, sending their chaperone scurrying for a mop. He stood then, grinned in that devilish way that was only Rowen’s, set her cup and saucer aside, and, grabbing her by the wrist, tugged her out the back door and into the glassed-in rooms where the thick-scented exotic plants thrived.

  “Quickly now,” he urged, his smile so deep it dimpled. He took the lead, his hand slipping down her wrist to grasp her hand. “And quietly,” he added, giving her fingers a gentle squeeze.

  What could she do but follow, her heart racing and the most insane smile stretching her lips?

  Out the back of the glass and steel building they’d gone, Rowen tugging her along and only glancing back twice to make sure he wasn’t going too fast for a companion in heels and a tightly cinched corset.

  But each time he looked back he’d snared her with those changeable eyes of his and she’d quickened her pace. Because wherever he was leading she wanted to go. In Jordan’s book, Rowen was synonymous with adventure.

  They’d raced through the gardens dotting the Astraea estate’s back lawn and into the hedge-maze, Rowen guiding her through with such accuracy it seemed he’d often made the trip blindfolded. Or in the dead of night, like Jordan had several times when she had needed to clear her head.

  Out the back of the hedge-maze they went, only pausing at the very edge of her family’s property—the edge with the walled lip that overlooked the Below so dramatically it made her clutch his arm and close her eyes a moment to quell her sense of vertigo.

  The Astraea holdings had been built as high into the granite face of the Hill as anyone could get and was nicknamed “the Aerie” for more than one reason.

  Rowen had grinned down at her, his eyes lingering on the way she held his arm so tightly before he slid his fingers under hers, pried them free, and wrapped them into his hand. He gave her hand a little squeeze and said something.

  At the time she hadn’t heard what he said and for weeks after, when she remembered that moment, she tried to convince herself that the loss of his words meant nothing since she could read so much in his face. But now, her hand aching and her head pounding, she wanted nothing more than to know what words his lips had formed at that instance a heartbeat before he led her through a narrow break in the hedges at the wall’s edge and onto a set of stone steps she had never even known existed.

  They stood on a winding slate stairway, above what suddenly seemed to be the rest of the world as all of the Below spread out in a rambling and colorful variety of houses and shops of different shapes and sizes. They were so far up it seemed the Below was nothing but a set of odd miniatures designed for a wealthy child’s dollhouse.

  There was no banister to hold, no place to stop and rest during the long descent, and she hesitated there, looking back over her shoulder toward the safety and manicured simplicity of life on her family’s estate.

  But his hand touched her face, turning her back to lo
ok at him. “Don’t look back,” he whispered. “Forward. Onward.” He seemed such the bold adventurer then, standing like a mountain king with the backdrop of an entire wild kingdom behind him.

  She could do nothing but follow.

  Down the stairs they went, her knees wobbling by the time they reached the bottom.

  “Next time you must give me fair warning,” she had scolded, “so that I might wear more sensible shoes.”

  “Next time?” he asked, one eyebrow arching rakishly. “You are already imagining a next time?”

  She blushed so hard her face stung with heat. “I do own sensible shoes,” she said in answer.

  “I’m sure you do,” he replied. “Here.” He tugged on her hand and drew her into the back of an alley.

  She tripped after him and fell against him, her hands grabbing at him so that she kept her balance.

  His arm wrapped around her instinctually, holding her close until she regained her balance.

  But she never truly had regained it after being held so tightly against him.

  There in the shade of the buildings stacked around them as awkwardly as toy blocks, Jordan first heard Rowen’s heart beat and felt the strength of him just beneath the comfort of his slightly soft frame. He became synonymous with adventure and safety all at once.

  “My head is spinning,” she had whispered.

  “We took the stairs too fast,” he apologized. “I did not want us to be spotted before you’d had a bit of an adventure…”

  She drew back from him then and maintained a more respectable distance between them.

  He smiled and said, “Come now. There are a few spots I would take you before we must make our ascent.”

  “You have done this before?” It was a stupid question. Of course he had, how else would he know about the slate stairs?

  But instead of saying anything sharp or hurtful, Rowen winked at her. “Here.” He grabbed her hand and wrapped it around his arm. “It will be safer if they believe we are officially together. There will be fewer questions asked. The Below is not the finest place for a woman unescorted.”

  “Oh. Of course,” she agreed. She rested her other hand on the top of his forearm as she had seen her mother do with her father.

  “Try to keep your eyes in your head,” he suggested. “Best to appear we are well versed in the neighborhood although we obviously do not belong to it.”

  She nodded and made a conscious effort.

  It was tremendously difficult not to gawk, though, especially when they stepped out of the alley and onto the main street. It was crowded with colorful shops, and windows were stuffed with displays of wares from different lands and painted with gilt and silver paint using words like New, Improved, Startling, From the Orient, Unique!

  Tiny automatons puttered in circles in one shop window and wriggling puppies filled another. Hanging in the next were a variety of meats—smoked hams squeezed tight in netting, sausages in long skins, whole roasted ducks, chickens, and rabbits, dark, gutted, and strung up for display with a shelf of cheeses below them, waxed or wrapped in paper, with flesh white as the moon, yellow as the sun, and dark as tanned leather.

  They paused at a flower shop, a young girl with a basket full of wildflowers standing before it to shout to passersby. Rowen pulled out a coin and gave it to the child, who did a dainty curtsy and passed a bundle of flowers to Jordan with a grin that surprised Jordan with the child’s lack of front teeth. The child giggled and began to bellow about her wares again.

  Jordan sniffed at her gift and gave Rowen a smile before returning her hand to its place on his arm, now with the bouquet pressed and perfuming the air between them.

  They wandered down the main street, pausing before windows and tables stacked with assorted wares, commenting quietly about the large carved wooden signs that stuck out from second stories on heavy metal supports and wasted no time on words but spoke to a less literate crowd. The cobbler’s shop was represented by a sign in the shape of a shoe, the baker’s sign was in the shape of a steaming loaf of bread, and the tavern on the corner had a spotted dog with an assortment of empty pewter mugs chained upside down beneath it so they clanged together and drew attention in any breeze.

  But the doorway Rowen dragged her through had no sign that she could see and it took a moment for Jordan’s eyes to adjust to the dim lighting inside.

  Behind a workbench an older man was bent over something small that shimmered and threw back the light he had tilted to focus on it. He wore a strange assortment of glass lenses over his eyes and reached up to tug one aside and then cranked an adjustment on the contraption’s other side, making one of his eyes appear amazingly large in comparison to his other.

  A chime sounded behind them and the man looked up, blinked, and then readjusted the lenses, sliding most of them up and to the side so that it seemed he had as many eyes as an insect. “Well hello, milady,” he said, rising to his feet only to bow. Then he noticed Rowen and laughed, dodging around his workbench to shake his hand. “How long has it been?” he asked, looking Rowen up and down.

  “Almost since you broke with the family.”

  The man rolled his eyes. “You have an awkward way of expressing yourself for a nephew of mine,” he muttered.

  Jordan blinked. “Nephew?”

  The man looked at her, his eyes crinkling when he smiled. “Our dear Rowen is a bit of a man of mystery, is he?”

  Rowen simply smiled and puffed out his chest. “Jordan, this is my uncle, Nicholas Burchette. He and Father had a bit of a falling out some years ago over the family holdings and rather than battle it out in Council Court as most of our rank do, he decided to cut all ties with the family and move to the Below to set himself up as a craftsman.”

  “To be fair, it was not your father who instigated the issues, it was your mother.”

  “It always is,” Rowen agreed darkly.

  “And I already had the skills of a craftsman and had already served my required military time, so rather than lodge a proper complaint and drag my own family before Council, I did the truly noble thing and removed myself from nobility.” He shrugged. “I have never looked back.”

  Rowen looked at Jordan and nodded. “As it should be.”

  “And now you—” Jordan took in the shop’s interior for the first time. The place was lined with tiny shelves and hundreds of clocks and timepieces chattered and ticked along, some in eggs decorated with cut and colored glass, some giving life to pocketwatches that were chained to their shelves, and some mechanisms in wooden boxes that looked like miniature cottages. And some … She stepped forward to investigate the thing under the workbench’s bright light. “Is that a ring?”

  “Yes. My newest project.” He slipped between the counters and her, excusing himself, and lifted the thing up, holding it between his index finger and thumb, so it was more readily viewed. Rowen stepped forward and all three of them pressed their faces close to the thing that was only the size of the stone in Lady Vanmoer’s anniversary ring. It was a metal ball perched on a narrow band with a tiny bump on its top.

  Jordan squinted at it. “Would it not be heavy on one’s hand?”

  Nicholas smiled at her and pressed the tiny bump on its top. There was a click and the ball split into three equal petals, opening to reveal a tiny timepiece no larger than a pearl.

  Jordan’s head snapped up and she looked at Nicholas. “That is truly remarkable. However did you…?”

  He smiled and shook the ring once, and the petals closed. “I use very small tools and remarkable magnification.” He set the ring down on a tiny pillow and stepped back. “Many years ago I had the great fortune of meeting a man (much my senior) who worked on a device much relied upon in your own household. A Russian.”

  Jordan tilted her head, considering. “The elevator?”

  “The same,” Nicholas responded. “Ivan Kulabin. He had a gift for mechanics and showed me a few things. And shared some amazing things far more tangible than his knowledge.”
<
br />   She took a moment to admire the tiny tools spread casually around his workbench’s surface. They sparkled, gleaming there, tips and edges like tiny fingers or blades—

  * * *

  The pleasant memory was ripped away and Jordan whimpered at the thought of the glimmering tools. They could make so much beauty and wonder or wreak such cruel havoc …

  Where was Rowen? Her good hand reached into her sleeve and she was briefly reassured by Rowen’s heart hidden there. She lowered her head and bit her lower lip. How much longer until the Maker gave up and realized she was no Witch? How long could she continue without breaking?

  It was more than the torture, she realized, touching the fresh wound tenderly. It was the exhaustion that wore at her the most. The worry and fear. The Maker seemed never to follow a schedule. There was truly no time one might feel safe—no time she might simply let down her guard.

  She glanced toward the door and the small window in it, assuring herself that no one was watching before she tugged on the heart-shaped pin, pulling it free.

  The pin’s back sported a blade akin in shape to a long slender nail.

  She slid its tip beneath her manacle and turned it experimentally to see if its point might cut the leather. She winced realizing it would, but not before it cut her, too. She dragged it back out from between her wrist and the restraining cuff and set it on her lap. Then she looked at the lock on her cuff and grabbed the pin again, prodding its tip into the locking mechanism and wiggling it. But, long as it seemed, it still was too short for the lock.

  Her head snapped up and she looked at the lock on her Tank’s door. The keyhole was much different than that of her cuff’s. Quietly she slid over to the door, and on her knees in her ruined party dress she carefully slid the pin’s tip into the lock’s hole. She heard it make contact with something inside and her breath caught. She fell onto her rump in surprise. It might be possible.

  If she could somehow slip off the cuff …

  … then out the door and to the gate …

  And what then, she wondered, standing to go to her window. She wouldn’t get far dressed as she was and on foot. She knew that much now. She would need transportation to take her away from Holgate. A horse, a carriage, hidden in a wagon or … Her eyes lifted to the other broad tower marking the horizon of Holgate and making it a truly unique silhouette standing stark against the horizon.