The Changer's Key

by Kent Davis

  “But it’s too deep!”

  “This way! We have to go under!” Cram turned and pulled a hand from each of them onto his shoulders.

  Athena pulled her hand back. “Under? Cram, I cannot swim!”

  Henry pulled his hand back as well. “Nor can I!”

  Cram panned back and forth between the two of them, a mad look on his face. He pushed his oilskin bag over to Henry. “Wait here!” And with that he dropped below the surface.

  “Cram!” she called, and lunged forward, flailing at the water. She ducked under, trying to see him in the dark. She grabbed forward at nothing, muddy swirls in front of her. One foot slipped free of the mud, and then the other. She wanted to scream but knew that she couldn’t. Strong hands grabbed her just as she began to sink. She found her footing again, and her head came up into the air. She held on to her savior as if her life depended on it. It was Henry. “What do we do?”

  Henry Collins’s mouth hung open. He shook his head, wide-eyed.

  The fire had reached the shore, and groups of other animals had crept deeper into the lake. A curtain of blue flame raged at its edge, and even this far into the lake, the heat warmed Athena’s face like the summer sun. From below, the cold crept in, and shudders began running up her legs. She tried to quiet them but couldn’t. She could feel Henry’s shivering as well.

  It seemed like a year they stood there, trapped between the fire and the cold.

  Cram’s head popped up, splashing water everywhere. He sucked in great gouts of air. “I found it!”

  “What?” Athena had never been so happy to see anyone in her life.

  “No time! We have to get. . . . out . . . water!” His teeth were chattering. “Grab on, you have to trust me! Push with your feet. Keep your mouths closed.”

  Henry and Athena looked at each other. “He seems to know what he’s about,” he said.

  A laugh came out of her: a wild, terrible thing. She grabbed Cram’s shoulder.

  Henry grabbed the other shoulder. “Breathe deep!”

  She did, and lucky thing, because just then Cram pulled them under.

  CHAPTER 21

  Cold-bathings is a great advantage to health.

  —John Wesley, Primitive Physick

  The cold of the water ate into Henry’s bones. The roar of the fire barely penetrated under the surface in the silty brown. It was nothing compared with the sound of his heart. He kept his eyes open. If he lived through this and got withered and aged, with children and grandchildren and then great-grandchildren all sitting about his knees in a nice little house near the shore in Port Royal, he would have quite the story to tell. His fist ached, it was so tight on Cram’s shirt, and he did what he could with his other arm, moving it in a vaguely paddle-esque motion. It didn’t do much, however, and the water offered a delightful ease, a cool laziness leading to a long, well-earned sleep. So he stopped paddling.

  A hand on his chest shook him. Rude. He was ready for bed. He needed to clear the humors and let out the big sigh that he always sighed as he was curling up for sleep. But he was not supposed to sigh. Someone had told him that. The rude person shook him again and then pried his hands out of the blankets and placed it on something. Sharp, wood. It was the edge of a hole. But he could barely feel it. His hands seemed . . . separate somehow.

  Water.

  Henry was underwater and nearly out of air, and Cram was trying to get him through a hole in a jumbled wall of muddy, slick wood. It was a wide hole, a shadow tunnel taller than he was, made from branches. His pulse banged in his ears, and he could not really feel his legs, but he hauled himself up through the protruding spikes. Breath clawed at his throat, like an animal trying to get free. He kept on pulling, and the air slipped out, bubbles playing about his face. Then his head broke the surface. There was no light, but there was air. Earth, rot, and sweet, sweet air. And there was a shore, he felt it underneath him, an earthy, muddy slope, and he kept pulling, and pushing with his knees, and he dragged himself right out of the water onto the bank.

  So good to finally be back in bed. It was so cold in the house, and so warm here.

  “Wake up, sir! You have to stay awake!” It was the serving boy Cram. For some reason he was stripped down to his underthings, ribs sticking out like handles on a market day basket. Henry shrugged off the hand and put his head back on the pillow.

  Not pillow, mud. He opened his eyes, and all he saw was still water and then a faintly lit wall of sticks, mud, and moss. He turned his head, and behind him rose a sloped island of earth. This was in the lake. The fire.

  The journal!

  He wrenched it from the coat pocket, fearing the worst. However, the journal’s author was beyond clever: the cover had grown chemystrally on contact with the lake, sealing itself against the water. It would not open. His reagents, however, had not fared so well. The powders had blended into a mass of useless goo, and all that remained were the two sealed flasks Athena had given him.

  He found he was shaking all over again.

  “Cram?” he chattered.

  “Come on, sir, this way, we need to get you warm.”

  A merry fire burned at the top of the slope, leaking light, and Henry knew in his bones that he had to get to it. Athena was there as well, chewing on some jerky. Her back was to the fire, and she held her arms tight around her knees. She had very little clothing on, either, and her shoulders and arms were slim and very pale. A circular red scar lay on her lower back, a souvenir from a clockshot wound she received the day Henry and she met. She looked over her shoulder at him through a curtain of wet black hair. “Please do not look at me,” she said in a quiet way. Pained.

  He averted his eyes. “I’m sorry. I didn’t—”

  “Got to get them togs off, Professor, and quick,” Cram said, and he began pulling off Henry’s overshirt. “The cold of the water’s still in ’em.”

  His fingers began to move. This was no time for propriety. When was the last time propriety had been appropriate? He couldn’t rightly remember. His buckskins came off, and the warmth started to leach into his bones.

  Cram pushed on him. “Come on then. Miss Black said if you ain’t got blankets for warmth, all you got is each other. Can’t be thinking about what’s proper.”

  “That’s not what I—” Athena knitted her brows. “I don’t want you to see . . . this me.”

  The way she said it hit Henry. Not combative, not forceful. Careful.

  Cram looked down. “It’s the only way we last through the night, Lady.”

  “What about back to back then?” Henry turned his own back toward the fire as an offering. Athena did not respond; but she did move, and then two sets of shoulders were against his.

  And so they huddled together, and indeed, it was warmer. The smoke crept up into a dark hole in the ceiling, the only opening in a riotous crisscross of logs, sticks, sod, and who knew what else?

  “How did you start a fire?” Henry asked.

  Cram nodded at a small clay pot lying on the ground. “Flicker pot. Miss Winnie told me about ’em. ’Taint chemystry, just some hot coals from out there. Sealed with mud. Cadged the pot from you while you was fainted.”

  Clever. Henry shivered. “Where are we?”

  “Beaver lodge,” Cram muttered, attacking another piece of pemmican.

  The ceiling soared above them, at least twenty feet in the air.

  “What kind of beaver made this?” Henry asked.

  “Giant beaver, I surmise.”

  “Oh, good then,” Henry said, and his head hit Athena’s shoulder and he promptly fell asleep.

  A splashing spluttering exploded from the shadows below, and a few moments later Cram emerged into the firelight. He shook himself off like a dog, and lake water sprayed in a fine mist over Henry and Athena. He plopped down on the dirt, pushed his wet hair out of his eyes, and helped himself to a hunk of raw, gooey pemmican. Henry and Athena said nothing as he chewed through a number of bites, moaning and licking his lips. He looked up. />
  “Still burning,” Cram said.

  Henry leaned back against the makeshift chair of logs and sticks. “Two days. It has been burning for two days.”

  “Powerful chem there, Doctor.” Athena got up and began to go through her daily stretching routine. They had been traveling for weeks together, but since the lodge had become their whole world, new features had popped out. For example, neither Cram nor the Boyle girl could sit still. The serving boy had been back and forth through the underwater passage so many times Henry had lost count. And Boyle? She fought with shadows. Hour after hour, sheathed in sweat, tearing through sequence after sequence, slashing the air apart with her sword so Henry sometimes felt sorry for it. Henry supposed he was no different, only his obsession was made from paper. He paged through the diary in the dim light from the hole above. The watertight seal had released when the journal had dried, but open or closed, it was still a mystery to him. The cipher of the first section, the one with the description of the city of three rivers, had been difficult. It had taken up a good third of the pages, cramped, clear equations and proofs leading to nowhere in themselves, but this new portion . . . There was something different about it. The code was more dense, more complex, if that was at all possible, and hinting at even more glorious secrets. It scared him frankly, but he could not put it away and kept coming back to it like, well, a beaver to its lodge.

  Athena stopped fencing. She turned. “Why did you come back?”

  The question hit him in the stomach. “What do you mean?”

  “For us, to scare away the cats. Why did you return?”

  He had asked himself that question many times. Why save your nemesis? Why not leave her to die? Was it Cram who had brought him back? “I do not know.”

  “Well,” Athena said. She began fencing again.

  The silence grated.

  “How do we know the landlord of this flat will not return to collect our rent by chomping us with its protruding teeth?” Henry asked, of no one in particular.

  Cram stopped chewing for a moment. “We don’t,” he said through a mouthful of pemmican.

  “Do you not fear that this great beast will come splashing out of the dark, ferocious and angry that we have invaded its home?”

  Cram moved the pemmican around in his mouth. “No, sir, I do not.”

  Henry folded the diary in his lap. “And why not?”

  “Well, Professor, there are two reasons, as far as I can see.” He picked up a twig. “Reason the first, I refer you to the raging devil fire outside. I reckon that a little bunny rabbit could not forge a path through it, let alone a beast that might have made this.” He pointed at the roof, high above them.

  “Fair.” Henry could not help smiling.

  “Reason the second, Miss Winnie mentioned to me that beavers are as restless as a boiling egg. If they have not come back yet, mayhap they have moved on.”

  “They?” Boyle paused in her air stabbing. “There may be more than one?”

  Cram chewed for a moment on an errant piece of pemmican. “They mate for life. Have little ones. Mam always said you ain’t safe until you got someone to watch your back and someone else to watch the one watching your back, beggin’ your pardon.”

  Boyle stared for a moment and then went back to her stabbing, with some cutting and flourishing thrown in.

  Henry nodded. “So, you think we may be safe.”

  Cram nodded.

  “Then why go back and forth between here and the outside so many times?”

  “Well, Professor, I need to check the fire.”

  “Because . . .”

  “If it don’t go out soon, we are going to be late to meet the captain and Miss Winnie.”

  “Indeed.”

  “Also, if it goes out, the beavers might come back.”

  “Ah.”

  “Yes.”

  The little fire crackled.

  “You know, Cram . . .”

  “Yes, Professor?”

  “You are quite the capital serving man.”

  Cram smiled and looked away. “Thanks, Professor.”

  CHAPTER 22

  Protect and nurture your brothers and sisters. They are your only shield against the uncaring world.

  —Training manual, Reeve of England

  Walking around on wooden toes was stupid. Ruby had not been able to change them back immediately or even after a few hours.

  After four nights of focus, slow as molasses, painful as acid on a rope burn, there they were. Five infuriating and completely un-Ruby-colored toes stared back at her. She had changed them, but now they had scales like a dragon’s and glowed green as grass in the chem pot light.

  What good was changing if she could not change back? Or if it took a week to give yourself a different color of hair? Or forever? She had to be careful. If the Swede saw any of this, he would cut her toes off for research.

  How had Gwath done it? Noses, hair, skin, in less time than it took him to fry an egg. And always in secret. Thirteen years of training. Ever since she was a baby, Gwath had been her teacher. She could remember, clear as day, balancing as a toddler, trying to keep one foot on his beefy thigh as he waggled it back and forth until she fell. He caught her every time before she hit the deck. And yet he had never taught her this.

  Had he known she was a Changer? Fermat had said once that it passed through families but sometimes skipped generations or hopped around. Gwath was a Changer. Ruby was a Changer. It couldn’t just be coincidence. What did that make Gwath to her? Her father’s brother? Why would they have not told her? Her mother’s brother? Something . . . else? It pained her to think about it, but it floated just out of reach. A sweet, sad kind of pain that she could not locate in her toes, or in her mind, or even in her heart.

  It was a thought that in times before, she would have shut away in the iron box in her belly, where she kept everything locked up. But somehow she didn’t want to. The box was right full anyway. Locking things up there had always kept her moving forward. That heavy box, full of feelings and fondness and bonds and frustrations: Was it holding her down? Or keeping her stuck? After all, it certainly made her the opposite of empty.

  The nights were so quiet. The cadets on watch did not call to one another. The silence gave her time to think. She climbed up into the windowsill. The river below shone silver in the night.

  The biting chill of winter gave way to the promise of a Pennswood spring. But as the days warmed, so did Ruby’s frustration. She took to roaming the halls, searching for she knew not what. The Swede’s journal remained locked. Wisdom Rool had taken her lockpicks, and with them sitting in his saddlebags in Savannah or Acadia or on the moon, she had no hope of opening it. The Swede had an endless appetite for her blood, and Evram was so obsessed with Sleipnir that he barely talked of anything else.

  So Ruby kept working at changing.

  One night she couldn’t bear to stay in her room a moment longer. Night after night of working changes. She dreamed of doing something, anything else, but because they were where the changing had begun, she kept hammering at the toes. From scales to bunions, from doughy white to weathered clay, and then finally, after a brief holiday of red fur, she had finally gotten them back to almost matching her own skin. The pain burning up her leg every time she tried to change became a constant companion. Could she create a nose, though? Or a larger jaw? Nothing. What was she missing? Two times—into a barrel at Fermat’s tower and into a pumpkin during the Corson incident—she had completely transformed her shape. But she couldn’t when she was actually trying.

  She needed air.

  The roof was the only other place she could find to be alone. Ruby climbed up the ladder and then pushed the trapdoor open.

  Avid Wake stood there, a sprinkle of rain in her hair. The tall girl leaned against one of the railings. “Here for the view?”

  “Yes,” Ruby said, because “I’ve come up here to clear my mind so I can change into furniture” might not go over so well. She kept h
er distance and moved to the other side of the roof.

  They stared at the view. Ruby sneaked a few glances at Avid. The bruises on her face had healed. She seemed calm, less ferocious than down in the yard. A scar on her cheek gave her a constant . . . well, not a grin, but a smirk? She was waiting for something. An appeal? An apology? Ruby was skilled at both.

  But she would give neither.

  Time passed.

  Avid laughed.

  “What?” Ruby said.

  “They give you so much notice,” Wake said.

  “Who?”

  “Who else? Lord Captain Rool. Ward Corson. Cole and Burk. The Swede. You’re like their little chickadee. They have to hold you close inside their pockets to keep the cats from you.”

  There it was. “So you wish you were me, do you? Even though I’m a prisoner and all.”

  Avid laughed again, but it was the tiniest bit hollow. “You have your own room. You do as you please, Teach. We have to prove ourselves every day, on the bodies of our brothers and sisters. If I don’t measure up here, they send me back.” Something terrible passed across her face, but scorn quickly masked it. “And you say you’re a prisoner.”

  Across the river a spark lit up. Avid saw it, too. “Fires,” she said. “I think they’re burning farms.”

  “Who?”

  “Does it matter?”

  Ruby cocked her head. “Well, of course it matters.”

  Wake turned to her. “Not to me. If someone burns a farm, you stop them. No matter who they are.”

  Ruby shook her head. “That’s not what I—”

  “I saw what you did.”

  Ruby gripped her toes in her boots. “Avid—”

  “I saw you tip the board down at the spring. At the turn of the year.”

  The wind whipped across the roof. The glow of the distant fire grew.

  “I didn’t—”

  Avid rolled her eyes. “Just own it, Sweetling. You tipped me over because you couldn’t stand that I could do it and you couldn’t. It galled you, so you almost killed me.”