Bell Weather

by Dennis Mahoney

  When it pivoted, the roadway opened to the right. The space was slender but they might slip through if they were lucky—if the winterbear was sluggish and the mare didn’t falter. She would feint left and buy herself one or two seconds. She had ridden all her life and knew that she could do it, but the mare sensed her nervousness and started backing up. The bear stepped again, widening the gap.

  Turn around, Molly thought. Gallop back to Root. Throw yourself on Abigail’s mercy. Go to Pitt.

  Cross the river, ride to Nicholas in Liberty.

  Submit.

  Molly tugged the reins and made a motion to the left. The bear moved to meet her, rippling with a snarl. Molly turned right and spurred the mare forward. They were tight against the trees, racing hard toward the gap, when the winterbear straightened with a roar and swung its paw.

  The mare reared in terror and the claws caught her neck, partly severing the horse’s head and knocking Molly off the saddle.

  She landed on her side near the bear’s hind legs. Blood splashed hot, covering her cloak and slickening the leaves when the horse toppled over. Molly slipped and just avoided being crushed underneath. The horse’s eyes were open—how they glared at her and rolled! The winterbear fell upon the carcass with a grunt. It forgot that Molly was there, or simply didn’t care, and slashed the mare’s stomach so its entrails spilled.

  Molly crawled, trying desperately to stand and get away, and then she stumbled into a run and didn’t stop, didn’t turn. She sprinted up the road until the bear, the horse, and any chance of fleeing home to Root were far behind her, out of sight, and even then she hurried on. Her lungs were so inflamed from gasping in the cold, she opened her cloak to see if she’d been clawed without feeling it. The mare’s heavy blood weighed her down. She could smell it. Soon the blood froze solid in the wrinkles of her gown. The odor sickened her, the sound of the intestines wouldn’t leave her, and she staggered on for miles, jogging when she could, haunted less by the bear than by the horse’s glaring eyes.

  At great bitter length, with her joints beyond stiffness and her muscles turned to wood knots, she finally saw a window light glowing through the trees. The sight warmed her spirit as a fire would have thawed her, but the promise of relief exhausted her completely.

  She came to the house and read the weathered sign above the door:

  SHEPHERD’S INN

  Travlers Welcom

  The inn was two stories high but smaller than the Orange, standing in a half-acre clearing by a creek. Its walls were so dark and packed with ancient moss, it appeared to have grown with its own set of roots, like a house-shaped tree from a strange, magic fable. A barn stood behind it, and a miniature garden, and a sty packed with pigs that appeared to have horns. The lighted window she had seen was one of the upper rooms, and though the downstairs windows had been shuttered for the night, the house felt awake.

  It was one or two o’clock. In a few more hours, Root would notice she was gone. She had to get away—there was no time to lose—but she couldn’t press on in such cold without a horse. She was just about to knock, wondering if anyone would answer so late, when the bolts unlocked and the door opened wide.

  Heat rushed out, heavenly and soft. She was greeted by a musket leveled at her chest, wielded by a man who looked astonished to behold her. He was sixty and decrepit with a piebald beard and a long, blue nightcap trailed behind his back.

  He gaped at her and said, “World’s evil, what has happened?”

  Molly’s jaw was so tight, she almost couldn’t speak. “I need to warm myself.”

  “Of course, of course. Come in!” he said and pulled her by the arm, checking the road a final time before he closed up behind them, dropped a crossbar, and guided her into a parlor.

  Molly went to the hearth, disregarding her surroundings. She was much too cold to stand directly at the fire, which was painful to her cheeks from several steps away.

  “You’re hurt,” he said.

  “My horse was killed. A winterbear—”

  “A winterbear! You’re lucky to have lived. Have you walked very far?”

  “Miles,” Molly said.

  He took her cloak off and hung it up to dry beside the fire.

  “But you must have a drink. Forgive me, aye a drink. My name is William Shepherd,” he said, pouring her a cider in a tall pewter tankard. He mulled it at the hearth and placed it in her hands.

  The first warm sip was medicine and magic, midsummer sweet and flowing softly to her stomach. Her toes didn’t thaw but her fingers started prickling, and she finally felt relaxed enough to look around the room. It was dank, as if the inn had not been aired in many weeks. The floor was swept but grimy and the walls were drably papered. There were chairs around a table, several of them crooked, and the touches of décor—minor antlers, wilted herbs—were so devoid of charm they left no impression.

  “Come from Root?” Shepherd asked.

  “Yes,” she said, regretting it at once. “I live in Grayport. My name is Mary Wright.”

  “Wright, you say?” He looked at her with doubt, leaning forward at her side and craning his neck to see her, like a footman well trained to stay in place behind his master. “Mary. I had thought … But what am I saying? Never you mind. Here you are, safe and sound. Don’t you worry any longer.”

  “Have you a horse that I can buy? I have money.”

  “Not tonight! Such a ride and you alone. Mary, did you say? But you must stay the night. I cannot let you go, not in proper conscience. I will send you off warm and well fed, aye and horsed, but you must stay the night.”

  He took her by the arm and Molly shook him off.

  He cowered as if she’d hit him. She hadn’t meant to frighten him but liked that he was scared. She’d had enough of curiosity, enough of conversation. Still and all, he was right—she had to wait for morning. It was difficult to keep herself from crumpling to the floor.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “You’re only being kind. I’ll stay and buy a horse and leave at first light. May I please see the room?”

  He nodded and led the way, still cringing in submissiveness. She wondered how the poor man survived here, defenseless, with the Maimers and the bears and the countless traveling strangers.

  “Have you ever been robbed?” she asked him in the awkward, rickety staircase.

  “What? Count my stars, never once,” Shepherd said. “I offer bed and board and folks appreciate that. I have little worth stealing.” This was proven when he took her through an upstairs door. “Here is my very best room. You may have it free of charge.”

  The room contained a stool, a bed, and a tiny iron stove that was close enough to set the mattress on fire. A four-pane window overlooked the road. Molly almost had to duck so as not to bump the rafters.

  “Is anyone else staying here tonight?” she asked.

  “Not a soul,” Shepherd said, setting a candle on the stool. “Travel slows with deadfall.”

  “Why is the stove lit?”

  “The stove,” he said, pondering its flame, as if the thing had a tendency to light itself in secret. “My rooms are always warm and welcome when they’re needed.”

  Any other night, she’d have questioned such an answer, but she didn’t have the will and felt grateful for the warmth. “Thank you,” she said.

  “Would you like a bite to eat? Another drink to help you sleep?”

  “No.”

  Shepherd sighed, disappointed or relieved. His nightcap had slipped down sideways on his head and the candlelight shifting on his face made him older. Sad, Molly thought, with his poor scraggly beard. Lonely in the wilderness. A man without a family. Molly clasped his hand and felt him shiver at the touch. He patted her knuckles with his palm and then he left and closed her in.

  She sat on the lumpy mattress, cozy with the stove, and fell asleep before she could fret, or cry, or wonder what would happen when she rode away tomorrow.

  She woke before light. The room was still warm. She hadn’t slept d
eeply and her mind felt clear, but the angle of her shadow on the wall looked wrong, as if the candle had been lowered and was glowing from the floor. Her limbs lay heavy and her tear ducts leaked, but she felt the need to turn without knowing why.

  She gasped and tried to stand, tipping sideways and reaching out to counteract the fall. Her palm touched the stove. She was almost too alarmed to recognize the burn, and made a fist and raised it up to hit the figure on the stool.

  “Stop,” Nicholas said, “for the sake of Tom Orange.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Molly sat on the bed. The sinking mattress made her tilt and when she righted herself to face him, they were touching at the knees. His clothes were plain as ever—black coat and breeches, white shirt and stockings—and the lack of ornamentation made him fashionably grave. He was much as she remembered, though he did look older. Several years might have passed, to judge by the finely wrought lines around his eyes and the new kind of weight—a density or depth—that gave his wiry frame both elegance and strength. He was smoak instead of ordinary wood. He had hardened.

  Molly leapt and hit him, covering his face and ears with hot, furious slaps. She kicked the candle out. He ducked but didn’t attempt to catch her hands; she pounded with her fists on his shoulders and his crown. His hair was smacked askew. She was hurting him, she knew it, and she would have kept going, maybe till he tumbled off the stool and she could kick him, but a quick sharp pain above her knee backed her up.

  He had cut her with a knife. She landed on the bed again, huffing through the hair that had fallen around her mouth. She hiked her skirt, bared her knee, and touched the wound through her stocking. It was short and horizontal, just deep enough to bleed.

  Nicholas hadn’t stood and Molly hadn’t heard a flint, but he had managed in the pause to reignite the candle—yet another of his mysteries and likely meant to vex her. Perhaps he’d hidden a living ember in a tin. She refused to look amazed, at least about the flame.

  Nicholas fixed his hair and straightened out his coat. Red welts marked his face and he was swelling at the ear, and yet he didn’t touch the places she had struck or seem surprised. He looked at her with love and held the knife where she could see it.

  “My happiness at finding you alive is unrequited.” Nicholas smiled weakly, like a child feigning courage. Molly stared to let him know that she could batter him again, even if it meant jumping toward the blade.

  “You have questions,” he began.

  “How are you alive? What have you done to Tom?”

  “I’ll tell you. Please be patient.”

  “No!” she said and tensed as if to stand again, defiant.

  Nicholas flicked the knife above his knee to catch her eye. He cut his own leg, mirroring her wound. He didn’t wince. He didn’t explain. The gesture’s chilling strangeness made her watch very hard.

  “I could tell you nothing at all,” he said, “and still your reappearance in the city would destroy me. But once you know the facts, you won’t tell a soul and you will choose, of your own free will, to leave forever.”

  He handkerchiefed his cut with calm, delicate fingers and the candle flame stilled, growing steady in its light.

  “I knew that you would come as soon as you read the letter,” he said.

  “You said to ride for Liberty.”

  “I banked on your rebellion. I prepared either way—unpredictability was ever in your nature—but your flight toward Grayport was vastly more likely.”

  “You said my reappearance—”

  “Listen, Molly. Listen. I have answers by the bushel. I watched you leave Root. You were a little less than graceful, jumping from the window, but you left in good time. I’m sorry about your horse. At least you saw a winterbear in all its fearsome glory.”

  She pressed the wound above her knee. Blood slithered through her fingers, mingling with the blood from the mare’s severed neck, and then the memory and the smell made her cut sting worse.

  “I paid William Shepherd to keep you here until I finished my work in Root,” Nicholas said.

  Feeble old Shepherd. Oh, she’d been a fool!

  “He is an honorable man,” Nicholas assured her. “I told the truth, as it happens: that my sister was running from trouble, and that for her sake, as well as for my own, it was imperative to keep her safe until I arrived. He was eager to assist. If not for my persuasion, he would not have taken payment.”

  Words and words—what was he saying? Truth, William Shepherd, payment and persuasion. What did it matter? He was here and he was talking like her brother, like her too familiar, undead, infuriating brother, and the one thing she needed him to clarify was how.

  “I killed you,” Molly said.

  He raised the blade like a finger to his lips and said, “Shush. I will tell you how we came from Grayport to this. Whatever your emotions, I encourage you to rein them. Tom Orange has a much sharper blade to his throat.”

  “Tell me what you’ve done.”

  Nicholas laughed and wiped his face, amused by her contrariness but grimacing—in anger?—when his hand touched a spot above his eye where she had struck him. The knife was on his thigh now, close enough to snatch.

  “In Grayport,” he said, “we were desperate. We were poor. Would you believe that I was terrified? I did my best to hide it, from the onset of the sickness I endured aboard the Cleaver to the first cold night we hid inside the church. We were victims in a city full of predators and strangers. You remember the pickpocket.”

  Molly watched him closely. Did he know the man was dead?

  “I found him easily,” Nicholas said, “the night he stole your locket. He was a coward, easily pinched, and I was struck to think the two of us had seemed an easy target. Never in our lives had we been so common, marked by common criminals and bent to common work. We belonged in higher spheres, and I resolved to make it happen. I knew of Kofi Baa from the Customs House. I knew his business and his wealth—they were no great secret—and I knew that he could lift us if his will were so inclined. I paid to have him attacked and played the selfless hero. My injuries were bought: a sensible investment.”

  “How could you?” Molly said, recalling Kofi’s smile and his deep, melodious laugh. “After what he did for us!”

  “Before what he did for us. I chose not to tell you—did you really not suspect?—because I knew you wouldn’t approve, however great the gain.”

  “It’s terrible,” she said.

  “How?” Nicholas asked. “I never did the man a single stroke of harm. He rewarded me with trust and benefited vastly. Then his colleagues and friends were benefiting, too. I dealt with business woes to start, mostly trade laws and customs, but soon their needs diversified. With every problem solved, my reputation grew. People asked for arbitration. For avoidance of scandal. For extrication from legal, marital, and ethical dilemmas. I helped them as I could and they were satisfied to pay. But everything was built upon my ironclad success. There were problems, now and then, that even I could not resolve, and one can never let the rabble question the magician. So what does the magician do? He makes his own illusions.”

  The candle guttered out, sending up a fine, smoky ribbon in the moonlight. Molly’s thoughts weren’t in rhythm with the words he was speaking. She would start to comprehend but then her memory would stutter—back to Grayport, to sitting in the office while he worked, then to waking up tonight and finding him beside her.

  “How do you control a blackmailer?” Nicholas continued. “Create one. How do you safeguard a secret? Know it. Whatever is required may be summoned or invented. Put simply, I devised my own worth among my clients. The truest self-reliance generates itself. My work was not so different from the tactics and deceptions we devised for Mrs. Wickware.”

  “It’s criminal,” she blurted, feeling stupid as she said it.

  “Criminal.” He laughed, sounding casual and warm. “I built the cages, in they went, and I provided them the key. All they lost was money. Each of them coul
d spare it. I hope you aren’t aghast that I meddled with the law. These are men’s laws, malleable and thin: made to bend. They are not the laws of nature. Not the laws of life.”

  There was just enough moonlight to see him on the stool. She focused on his leg, first the blood and then the knife.

  “We didn’t sail three thousand miles to shiver, and starve, and be the browbeaten victims of the bright new world. We came to be strong. We came to be more. And what other option did we have?” Nicholas asked, leaning forward so his eye, only one, caught the moon. “Think of the bread riot in Umber. Did you not support the wretches who demanded something more? You and I stole apples on the morning we arrived. Then we needed something better, so I took that, too.”

  “But then we had enough,” she said. “A home and means to live.”

  “Had you known what I was doing—and I wonder how much voluntary blindness dimmed your sight—what would you have done? Confessed to Kofi Baa? Consigned us to a destitute existence or to jail?”

  Molly leaned forward, closer to his knee. The moonlight fell upon her own cheek now—cold, white light reminding her of winter, of the Grayport snow she’d eventually adored, of the chocolate she used to sip after shopping in the market. She remembered being happy that she made Kofi happy, and she couldn’t bear the thought of causing him to glower.

  Nicholas paused to think, comfortable but stern. He let his question dissipate. She played the timid listener.

  “I had such a wealth of work,” he said, “I had to hire help: desperate men and women who were squandering their gifts. You could say I had a staff of hand-picked talent. I gave them work by proxy—very few knew my name—and any caught or compromised were freed, again by proxy, or compelled to hold their tongues. One of my earliest and most reliable employees was the pickpocket. His name was Mr. Crutch: a middling thief who lacked direction when I found him and persuaded him to broaden his ambition. Marry threats of danger to the promise of reward, and any man alive will listen very closely. It was he who attacked Kofi Baa and wounded me, with great care, according to my instructions. I used him often that year.”