Engraved: Book Five of The St. Croix Chronicles

by Karina Cooper

  I’d watched him seize metal bars and heard them groan, but only in this moment could I grasp that it was him that had caused it.

  Osoba knew. Whatever it was Hawke struggled with, the lion prince knew what humors gripped the ringmaster he respected.

  And still, none would outright tell me.

  No more shouts came from behind me. I dared not look to see if they had left me to this creature wearing the face of their erstwhile ringmaster.

  Only a boisterous storm overhead could have made the moment any more dramatic. London’s dreary spring did not humor me.

  “Cage,” I said slowly, testing out the boundaries of his awareness with a cautious name.

  The distance created between my memory and my emotion came from the opium I had consumed at the time, but the weight of Hawke’s hungry stare now felt like a firm hand against my skin. I could not help but conflate it with the memories of the night spent in his arms. Of the kiss bestowed between iron bars.

  Though I knew for certain that this creature only looked like Hawke, it was too difficult to separate them.

  He did not stir at his name, but stared at me as though demanding I submit—as was right and proper, he no doubt thought. Beast or no, he had always behaved that way.

  I took a step forward. “What have they done to you?”

  A snarl trickled from between clenched teeth, and muscles rippled from neck to waist in a fascinating flow that spoke of mingled strength and vanishing control.

  There was something far more wild about this man than I had ever before seen. Something that did not suit the tailcoat and top hat he’d once so easily sported, either in the guise of ringmaster or the sadistic showman he’d become.

  The air before him steamed on a shuddering breath.

  It was all the warning I received.

  When he launched himself at me, he did so with such agility that for one moment, he truly was a tiger—all feral strength and masculinity bound into flesh that did not flatter the monster within. In the space of a blink, he was in the air.

  And I was not so proud that I would not embrace the dirt at his feet to avoid him. I had already knelt once by choice. What was a second when it was my hide on the line?

  I dropped, rolled beneath him. His feet hit the ground, a single hand braced against it for balance. I fumbled under my skirts, found the sheath there by pure luck. As he spun, already prepared to come at me again, I wrenched the blade free.

  I had little choice, and no room with which to weigh the consequences. I caught the naked blade with my other hand, hefted it by my ear and let fly. That I prayed to whatever gods of divinity or reason might be watching over us was a new habit.

  His gaze snapped up to the incoming knife. In a split second, one hand swiped through the air, and the blade halted.

  I froze.

  Time, it seemed, froze.

  Hawke had not used magic, not that I’d seen. No color filled the air, no lights, no Chinese words or whatever sorcerous gibberish he was meant to say.

  I did not feel that prickle of energy—that tremble in the air that happened when Ashmore first helped me to reveal the aether that filled the world.

  He simply caught the knife, bare hand wrapped around the blade. It gave me no relief to know that my intent—to hit him in the forehead with the hilt, not the naked point—had been on the mark.

  Blood oozed from his white-knuckled fingers. Had I preferred to strike at him with the blade, as his instinct no doubt assumed, he would have caught the handle. I had never known that he could be so quick.

  My insides, misguided anatomy that I possessed, twisted. “Cage.” A raw whisper.

  Hawke shuddered. The planes of his face tautened to near impossible implacability, echoed in the rigidity of his posture. His eyes fixed upon me.

  Hunger, the likes I had never known in any mortal creature, all but seared me to ash where I stood.

  When he presented me with his back, I remembered to breathe. He threw his head back and roared. It rang through the Menagerie, tore like claws through fabric and fog.

  It was all the distraction needed by them I had not seen as they flanked me.

  Two men came from either side, a conjoined effort that netted them a graceless tangle of limbs. Caught as I was by Hawke’s uncanny behavior, I managed nothing more than a furious shout as I went down—a shout echoed by another roar, one of indefinable rage.

  An elbow found my forearm. My fingers spasmed, sparks of numbness flaring through my hand, while a knee pressed into my sternum. I could not tell what limb belonged to whom, but the reddened arm planted by my head provided too good an opportunity to miss.

  I bit it.

  One of the men struggling to contain me yelped. I bit harder, and half the weight on me jerked.

  And then lifted away entirely.

  It was but for the need to breathe that he did not leave a hunk of his flesh with me forever. I could suddenly see more than shoulders and torsos, and what I saw defied all reason.

  The man I had so discourteously bitten was nowhere to be seen, though not far from where we tangled, the hedges bent. Hawke uncurled from the bent boughs, turning with a suddenness that had the man struggling to pin my arms beneath his knees freezing in place.

  I took the opportunity to defy all modesty and bring a boot up in sharp rebuke. The cold air biting into flesh covered by bloomers was the lesser of my enemies. My muddy boot slammed into his head moments before Hawke launched himself at us.

  I squeezed my eyes shut, braced for the worst, but the weight upon me vanished—complete with a flailing knee that caught me in the face. I rolled over, clambered to my feet, but my vision went double as the blood and my own senses jostled around inside my ringing head. My cheekbone throbbed, a harsher echo of the smaller pain Hawke had nipped into my lip.

  I couldn’t see what happened next, or how it came to pass, but I didn’t look around me to verify anything. I simply hobbled for the gates—staggering for them, much to my dismay. I was a far cry from fully healed, and I despised myself for this.

  While it might be acceptable to say that I would never have succumbed to opium’s grip had I known how difficult it would be to recover, I felt instead a dark truth: that had I known the difficulties, I would never have quit the stuff in the first place.

  I reached the gate without hassle, found the lever by which it swung open and closed again on the other side.

  When I pulled it, pleased at the ease with which it moved, the mechanism carved into the whole engaged, and the gilded iron sealed.

  Just in time.

  A body, flung with surprising ease, collided with the iron facing, and a footman with hair nearly the same color as the gates he slumped against groaned in barely lucid disagreement.

  I gripped the ornate bars.

  Somehow, in the fray that now seemed to pit Menagerie footmen against its erstwhile ringmaster, I had been forgotten. Golden skin flashed beneath a mob of men who threw themselves upon him, and whilst confusion reigned, Osoba finally made his appearance. He had not changed from his everyday togs, save the addition of a whip coiled in hand.

  A whip for the whips; all too much a physical tool for a metaphorical title.

  It uncurled, and he barked a command. “Make way!” As expected, his voice carried effortless authority.

  Those too slow to obey were plucked from the ground by Hawke himself, shaken like useless dolls and tossed away. He tore them from his shoulders, a veritable beast in human skin.

  Osoba’s reputation had been made on the backs of beasts.

  I sobbed for breath, screamed a warning to the thing that was not Hawke—but too late.

  The whip snaked out, an effortless length of black, and the crack of it echoed across the Menagerie. I flinched as a welt appeared on Hawke’s arm, painfully pale. Another lash lanced across his clothed back, and Hawke’s spine bent, face turned to the sky.

  Something had been done to him in the months I had not been here to watch. Something te
rrible, worse than what I had imagined. Osoba had brought me to Hawke’s prison with the intent to strip the blinders I’d unwittingly worn.

  So be it.

  I could not be sure of the lion prince’s expression from where he stood, but I did not need to see it to know that it was no smile. Another crack of oiled leather, and Hawke dropped to the ground, hands and knees braced as though he would try to stand again. A fourth and final lash across his shoulder drew blood, tearing the muslin and spotting it with fresh crimson.

  The slack end of Osoba’s whip dropped into the mud. Hawke did not rise again. “Damn you, Cage,” he said. He panted for breath, shoulders heaving with the effort. “Damn you forever a fool.”

  Such inexplicable sorrow filled me at the rage barely contained in the lion prince’s accusation. Rage, I sensed, that did not stem from a place without his own sense of terrible sadness.

  Hawke slumped, gasping into the mud he clung to.

  I let go of the gate as the footmen, clustered in various stages of hurt, stirred.

  I would return. This I swore, though I did not know what I would bring when I did. Something to absolve this mess.

  Anything would do.

  Quickly, before I lost any opportunity gained by the bestial fury of my unwitting savior, I fled into the private gardens.

  I did not hear the creak of the gates opening. Nor was there sign of pursuit.

  Confused, angry, hurting just enough to feel as though it weren’t enough at all, I threaded my way through the maze and could not stop shivering.

  I had seen too many faces of Hawke; the temptation befitting a ringmaster to the masked gentleman who knew how to waltz, from the working man with rough hands and scarred back to the lover. I had seen him with those blue eyes deploy a malicious charm to seduce and entertain, and now this.

  Which was the real Hawke?

  I feared that I would never know.

  The distress this caused me did not bear examination.

  Chapter Seven

  There was a body guarding the door, but it was not one armed with pistol or blade. The figure leaning at his post was slight of form, so short that his head barely came to my shoulder. Brown hair tousled beneath a cap askew, and wide brown eyes filled a gamine face often turned to a mischievous quiet.

  Flip, one of the ringside regulars, and a boy small enough to be taken for younger than his ten or so years of age.

  His lips widened into a smile, an attention perked to wary welcome as I stumbled from the hedge rows I forged through. “This way, marm,” he called, a practiced hush and flick of an agile hand to move me along.

  Months past, before I’d married my late earl, I had been caught unawares and flanked by the Black Fish Ferrymen in the fog below. I’d worn my everyday attire, not that of my collector’s guise, and the footpads who’d thought me a bit of a treat were not the sort to be dissuaded by the promise of repercussion.

  It had been Flip who’d come to my rescue, a slip of a boy with the eyes of an old soul.

  He had also once fetched Hawke when I’d run afoul of fools attempting to hurt the sweets more than they’d paid for. I hadn’t needed saving then, but Hawke had at least softened the beating I’d likely have endured in a bid to rescue girls who were something like friends.

  Now, Flip watched me with the same easy warmth he’d usually displayed, beckoning me through the open door. That he called me marm, as a child might a school mistress, barely flickered in the meandering list of things that currently bothered me.

  There were far greater concerns at hand.

  “Flip—”

  He raised a small hand, filthy with blackened nails. “Best not t’ask,” he said, somehow guessing my intent. “What them do in the big house, I don’t know. There’s blood every day.”

  I winced as I followed him to the exit. Escape through Limehouse’s twisted lanes waited beyond, but I paused long enough to ask, “Can you get somewhere safer?”

  “Don’t worry nowt fer me,” he assured me, small hands tucking at my lower back to push me through the ivy-laden arch. “Got plenty places fer hidin’ where them can’t reach.”

  “What of the circus dangers?”

  Flip’s smile widened. “Never took a tumble in me life,” he said proudly. “Codger leaves me be cos I look like all’er rest.” That he called Marceaux a codger was worth a bit of a smile. He meant to say that he blended well with the other children; a priceless skill to possess in the good monsieur’s employ.

  I was all but drained of my ability to feel, blasted too long by the surging adrenaline unleashed by plight after plight in a single day. I barely noted the flicker of relief Flip’s confidence caused me, though I could not set aside the concern I clung to.

  I stopped outside the wall and snagged the nimble little bantling by the collar. He was thinner than I could recall him being; or perhaps I was overly concerned.

  He looked up at me, wide eyes framed by black lashes nearly as long as a girl’s, and his filthy cheeks dimpled. I hadn’t the heart to lecture him, but couldn’t stomach the thought of leaving him behind. “Can you come with?”

  “Nah.”

  “Flip—”

  He patted my hands. “There, marm, s’not all bad. Few of us, we’re ringers by trade and know th’ places they don’t. Eyes in, eh?”

  There’d be no convincing him. He was a beggar by birthing, but he was right to call himself a ringer by trade. He was practically weaned under the canvas. Such lifetime performers were a proud people, rightfully conceited about skills learned without loss of life or limb.

  I let him go, and took the opportunity to smooth his worn shirt in lieu of any other affectionate gesture I did not feel quite comfortable making. Had I my shawl, I would have wrapped it about his thin shoulders for warmth. Or at least would have made the offer.

  He’d never accept.

  I sighed. “You’ll pain me greatly if you tumble,” I told him.

  The blighter winked at me. “Aye, marm. Won’t.”

  “See that you stay out of Marceaux’s reach,” I added sternly. “And all others’ too.”

  “Aye, marm.”

  “And for the love of all things, eat something,” I ordered, and the cheeky kinchin tucked a finger below his right eye, tugging the skin down low, and grinned.

  He spared me answer by way of another marm, vanishing once more inside the gate, and I had no other recourse but to let him go.

  I had seen all that I could of the grounds. There were fewer familiar faces, less workers peppering the landscape by day. The air was quiet, weighty—as though all within held a collective breath in fear of what might come.

  I had never wished so hard for access to the alchemical mysteries I had not yet mastered as I did then. In theory, by calling upon the Trump called Eon, I would be able to see the flow of aether as it affected the things before me. Ashmore had done it once for me, marking my entry into the exoteric truths of alchemy—those things that could be seen and understood outside of one’s self.

  Unfortunately, Eon was five steps in, three higher than I’d mastered. Without my ghostly mother’s influence, I had no access to the rest. Any attempt I made to call upon the Trumps would cost me in resources I had not yet built up. Apis and Bacatus-Typhon were the weakest, with a portfolio rather smaller than the following Trumps. The first two promoted easy mastery. The rest would take time and a slow build.

  Unlike my mother, I was no superior alchemical creature destined for greatness.

  I’d suspected the truth of this situation, but now I knew it for certain: I was woefully unprepared for this war, and less so if I took into account Hawke’s own interest in waging it.

  I shivered, the mud drying upon my bare legs reason enough to force me to move before I froze where I stood.

  Wrapping my arms about myself, I turned from the main street winding away from the gated Menagerie and traversed the narrow lane bracketing the private garden’s wall. The air had not softened its sting, and the cold combin
ed with the coal-blackened fog plucked my nose and throat until I felt as though I cleared it too often.

  My only comfort was that given my current state of bedraggled apparel, I was most likely to be mistaken for an ill doxy than the toff I’d otherwise be. Without my fog preventatives and the respirator I’d worn to move freely in the acrid stench, I would never be recognized for the collector I supposedly was.

  Although I was more accustomed to the general cacophony of nighttime London below the drift, the daylight did not lessen the noise so much as alter it. Where once I would have been assailed with catcalls from the East End dolly mops and the shouts of the gaming hells, Limehouse kept up a busy chatter of shops and market stalls. The creak and clip, clop of the tired old nags hauling hackneys and carts did not echo so much as strain through the peasouper.

  Few enough took the narrowest of lanes, but them what did tended to be beggars looking for a rest, footpads gathering for a mark, and bantlings without factory work nor schooling to get to.

  Yet as I made my way around rotting crates and piles of refuse, I did not see even these.

  Limehouse, known primarily for its rampant Chinese population and opium dens catering to any with the coin, had changed. It seemed quieter somehow, watchful. As though the whole of the district held its breath, waiting for something.

  Water splashed over my ankles as I trod through standing puddles gathered in narrow ruts, and the end of the lane opened wide into West India Dock Road at the juncture where Commercial Street ended. If I stayed on this course, I’d reach the West India Docks, and the sky ferries that carried passengers from below the drift to the docks above.

  While goods still came on ships made to follow the River Thames, it was by way of sky ships that extravagances were delivered. Trade bloomed between ports, and there was a high interest in goods received from across the world. A laborer able to invest coin in his appearance could work his way up to those docks above the drift for a good day’s wage, but most could not afford such a luxury and remained below, shedding blood and sweat for a mere three pence.