by J M Sanford
“Oh no you don't!” shouted Meg, flinging out one arm to block Harold by magical force before he could climb onto the wyvern's back. They couldn't trust the half-wild wyvern to do as it was told.
“Why not?” Harold demanded, putting his broad square shoulder against the witch’s power as if trying to make headway against a gale. “Somebody's got to go up there and get Amelia.”
“And we’ll all go, soon enough. But not yet,” said Meg. “Perce, keep this boy from playing the foolish hero until we’re ready.”
Despite the gathering clouds and the chill in the air, with the sunset glow skimming the boards like it was, Meg couldn’t help but recall the night she’d left Springhaven, all those years ago. She’d been… what, twenty-four? Twenty-five? Younger than Amelia now. She’d lost track of time as it had slipped past, and she couldn’t be sure of the day or the year, but she remembered with painful clarity the quiet parlour steeped in the slow amber glow of a glorious summer’s evening – how beautiful and idyllic the scene that she’d been fleeing. She remembered Jonathan sitting silent with an open book unread in his lap, and the golden halo of light in his fluffy hair. How like a wounded angel her husband had looked, while Meg had rushed about, determined to leave before nightfall.
Ever since she’d made the decision to leave, she’d kept busy. She’d made much of making sure she had the right walking boots for the journey; of binding a broom for flight so she could move quickly when she had to; of calculating how much she could carry by herself. She’d cut her hair short for practicality’s sake, but though the bouncing curls barely touched her shoulders, she’d had to tie them back with a scarf to keep them out of her eyes.
The practical details had kept her from thinking too much about what she was doing on the larger scale: abandoning her well-meaning husband and her baby. She wiped her eyes irritably, and was just trying to squash another spare pair of bloomers into the already full bag when the sound of water splashing on the kitchen tiles gave her a welcome distraction. She dropped the bag, striding to the kitchen. It hadn’t rained in weeks and nothing should be…
…dripping. A tall slim girl stood in the kitchen, droplets of water rolling off her dark bedraggled hair and the hem of her grey dress, splishing on the tiles. She looked somewhat bewildered: she must have tried to fly from shore to tower, found the magic out here thinner than she was used to, and got a ducking. But her grey uniform was unmistakeably that of the Antwin Academy and she probably wore conjuring rings under her black gloves. At sight of Meg, the girl curtseyed gracefully, clasping her hands in front of her – a polite gesture that might well have been used to transfer a poison dagger from her belt to her palm.
Meg had on no conjuring rings of her own – she’d fought with Jonathan over whether she could keep the ones he’d given her on their wedding day – and instead she snatched up the breadknife from the kitchen table, levelling it at the stranger. Where was the baby? In the parlour, with Jonathan. And perhaps this girl hadn’t heard about the baby… Meg gripped the handle of the knife tight, trying her best not to shake, but the amber light flashed off the blade in shivers. “So, are you the Black Queen?” she demanded. “Have you come to do me in?”
“Oh, no,” the girl shook her head. “Sincerity Willows, of the Willowgrove Willowses,” she introduced herself, with another perfect curtsey. “Mistress Kingsbridge sent me. She said you needed a governess, and that I’ll never graduate, so I might as well take this opportunity for what it is and be grateful.” And she smiled the smile of one who is eager to please but has no idea how to go about it.
Lowering her breadknife but not discarding it, Meg stepped closer, plucking the pin from the girl’s stiff collar and glancing suspiciously at the glinting sapphire. Sincerity: yes, that was the name Mistress Kingsbridge had given her. A fifth year who didn’t have the stomach for killing or politics, or the brains for espionage… but she’d tended to all her sisters’ children, so she knew how to look after a baby, and she was an accomplished cook, so she could look after a man. More importantly, she knew enough magic to defend the tower.
“Mistress Kingsbridge tells me you didn’t last very long at the Academy either,” said Sincerity, with a nervous laugh. “But we don’t leave an old girl out in the cold, even if she didn’t make it as far as graduation. Lucky for both of us, I suppose! Is it true what they say – that you eloped with that young scholar?”
“Wait: Sincerity Willows, did you say?” Meg had been stupid with fear for days, and the familiarity of the name had only just sunk in.
The girl nodded. “Youngest of the Willows girls, seventh daughter of a seventh daughter. Frightfully unlucky, if you believe the old superstitions.”
“Austerity’s little sister?” Yes, there it was: whenever the forced smile began to relax, the face of an old friend began to emerge, as if a mask was melting away. Meg put away the breadknife. Still distracted with packing and unpacking and repacking her bag, she briefly showed Sincerity the tower, and Jonathan sulking in the parlour with the baby.
At sight of baby Amelia in her basket, Sincerity gave a gasp of delight. “Oh, what a beautiful baby!” she cooed. “What a beautiful baby you are! Aren’t you just the most perfect little princess?”
“She’s not a princess,” Meg snapped, ramming her spell book into her bag. “Don’t go putting silly ideas in her head while I’m gone.”
“Ah. No,” said Sincerity, chastised. “Of course not.”
Jonathan had refused to come across to shore with Meg when she was ready to leave, and instead Sincerity had accompanied her so that there would be somebody to return the boat. As Meg set off on foot, she’d been able to hear the clumsy slap and splash of the oars as Sincerity rowed to the tower, steering her way slowly past the craggy rocks, but she never looked back.
She’d trusted Mistress Kingsbridge’s judgement wholeheartedly; trusted an Antwin girl with everything she cared about in the world, and she knew she could have come to regret it bitterly. Now Amelia’s fate rested at least partly with another unproven young Antwin girl… Meg closed her eyes. At least it would only be a few short hours until it was dark enough for Sharvesh to ascend and rescue both Bessie and Amelia.
25: A GIFT FROM A GRIFFIN
“Who does that girl Rose think she is? Talks of our stealing the crown, when she's got no right to it herself!” Bessie, with Amelia in tow, was still walking at that surprisingly swift pace, apparently fuelled more by indignant anger than by fear. They still had more than an hour to escape before the node burned out and Ilgrevnia fell, but Bessie refused to waste even a moment. She opened a door onto a narrow alleyway, casting about for any signs of golems before stepping outside. The setting sun had sunk below the level of Ilgrevnia's Walls and the air was cool, but Amelia hadn't realised until stepping out of the palace how much she'd missed the breeze on her face.
“I'll bet the records show she's no cousin of mine or yours!” Bessie continued, once the brisk pace she set had taken them out of earshot of any palace windows. “Empty-headed merchant's brat fancies herself a grand lady in the making, and doesn't care that our necks'll be on the chopping block because of her… If I'd won the contest, I would've –” She stopped abruptly, looking around. On either side the grey stone façades of abandoned houses loomed over them three or four storeys tall, leaving only a narrow strip of cloud-darkened sky above, the threat of chill rain in the air. Footsteps echoed on the cobblestones: four feet in perfect rhythm. Bessie vanished into the dark arch of a boarded-up doorway, her drab grey dress blending perfectly into the shadows, while Amelia turned invisible, and the twin gentlemen passed by.
“Where should we go from here?” Amelia whispered, once she was certain the golems were out of earshot.
Bessie examined the empty street, and Amelia could only guess what the trainee assassin's sharp eyes saw that her own eyes might miss. “I'm tempted to say the docks are the only place big enough to land a full-sized skyship in this ridiculous little City,” said Bessie. �
�So of course, that's where they'll be expecting us to go…” Still hiding in the shadows, she consulted the map Scarlet had given them, her dark eyes cast down in an expression of furious concentration.
Amelia edged into the doorway beside her. “Oh, look: Scarlet's marked the positions of the flamethrowers for us,” she said, still wanting to believe that her first intuition had been right and the round-faced cheerful cook had only their very best interests at heart. “That was nice of her.”
“Ah, but are those all the flamethrowers?” Bessie muttered.
“Out of interest, how are you planning to get back to the ground?”
“There's really only one way that I can think of,” said Bessie, grudgingly. “I have two catsfoot charms left.”
“What’s that?”
Bessie pulled two crumpled strips of pale blue paper from her pocket and showed them to Amelia. “Catsfoot: to let you land safely on your feet, no matter how far you fall.”
“I see.” Amelia thought she'd seen Bessie use such a charm before. “Two? Do you mean you'd let me have one of them?”
“We've worked together this far, haven't we? I won't leave you behind, I swear.”
“Thank you.” Amelia wasn't sure what a young assassin's word was worth, especially after that business with the Orb, but she held her tongue. She had no other plans for how to escape Ilgrevnia by herself.
“It's not all that far to the Walls,” said Bessie, as much to herself as to Amelia. “Just a matter of keeping out of the way of the prince's men.”
Nervously, Amelia stepped out into the street. In the fading light and the rapidly thickening haze of drizzle, she could just about see the top of the Keystone above the rooftops, though not the enormous granite barricade of the Wall. The City of Ilgrevnia might be big enough to get lost in, or small enough for Commander Breaker and the white griffin to find them easily. That was, if the Dragon Prince didn't come after them himself… Amelia's attention was still on the Keystone, the centre of the City, when she heard the tinkling of silver bells and the click of claws on stone. She whirled around, coming face to face with the mad blue eye of the black griffin, the point of his beak much too close to her face. He turned his head to examine Amelia with the other eye, watching her silently and unblinkingly.
Bessie muttered something extremely unladylike under her breath, and folded up her map.
“Hello, Sable,” said Amelia, stiffly.
“Hello, Amily,” said the griffin. He still had bits of rope, scraps of leather and a sprinkling of silver bells hanging from him, and now he wore a brown leather satchel slung awkwardly around his neck.
“'Amelia',” Amelia corrected the griffin, gently as she could considering the trouble he'd dropped them all in. She'd begun to suspect there was something not quite right with the black griffin – perhaps he couldn't help being the way he was. “Where's your sister?”
Sable blinked, and cocked his head to one side. “Can't say,” he said at last.
“Come on, Amelia,” said Bessie sharply, striking off down the street, away from the City centre. Amelia hurried after, and the black griffin fell into step beside her.
“Did Scarlet send you to be our bodyguard, Sable?” Amelia suggested, hopefully. Maybe the black griffin wasn't very bright, but he could certainly be fierce. “I'm sure there'd be some nice kippers in it for you, if you helped us get safely to the Walls.”
“Oh, don't encourage him!” Bessie snapped. “I'm sick to death of griffins – aren't you? Where is our friend Ginger, anyway?” she demanded, not looking at the griffin, keeping her eyes on the way ahead.
“Scarlet wants you to have something,” Sable said to Amelia, pointedly ignoring Bessie.
“Oh?”
Sable stopped, sat down and shrugged his satchel off over his head. “Take it, take it. Scarlet says you might need it.”
Amelia took the satchel hesitantly. Although she wasn’t sure she even wanted to know what was inside, she couldn't resist temptation. She regretted her curiosity at once when she got a noseful of the smell of damp leather and fish paste inside the satchel. The contents of the satchel looked innocuous enough at first sight: a couple of books, a parcel of what appeared to be sandwiches (that would be the source of the fish paste, or so Amelia hoped), a compass… Gingerly, she pulled out something that until today she would've called a snow globe, but which now looked suspiciously like a smaller version of the Orb. Inside the glass, a palace with delicate spires stood in a snowy landscape. Just like the real Orb… “How very… nice. Thank you. What is it?”
“Can't say.”
“Oh good,” said Bessie. “How can we need it if we don't even know what it is?”
The black griffin seemed to be glaring at Bessie, although with crows it was difficult to tell. “Can't say!” he squawked irritably, and without so much as a farewell he leapt skyward, the wind from his great black wings buffeting Amelia, whipping her hair around her face, stinging in the cold. She watched the griffin until he disappeared from view in the haze.
“Throw it away,” Bessie hissed in Amelia's ear, making her jump. “Get rid of that thing, and quick.”
“No!” Amelia clutched the miniature Orb tightly. “I don't even know what it is!”
“All the more reason to get rid of it. I don't trust those griffins,” Bessie grumbled. “The way we keep running into them at every turn, when we've evaded the golems easily enough.”
Amelia didn't remind Bessie that they'd already been foolish enough to trust the black griffin with the dangerous Device, although she wanted to. She hurried after Bessie, who was walking away with their only map. “We don't have to go over the Wall,” she said, grabbing hold of a corner of the map. “Look:” and she pointed out a section of City at the edge, several blocks deep, that somebody had crossed out in a hurry. The huge hole that she'd seen before must be the most direct route down to the ground.
“No,” said Bessie. “It's half a mile or less from here to the Walls.”
Half a mile… As the crow flies, perhaps. “And fifty feet straight up to the top of the Wall,” said Amelia.
“There'll be a bit of climbing, but trust me, I could make it from here to the Walltop in ten minutes if I was on my own.”
Amelia suspected that the prince's men would be patrolling every easy exit from the City, including the stairs to the walkway along the top of the Walls, where a small vessel might alight long enough to pick up a passenger or two. But Bessie was a City girl, and she seemed to know where she was going. Of course, neither of them had a clue how many of the wretched golem things the prince had at his disposal… Too many. Bessie might have thought at first that the journey to the Walltop would be short, but she and Amelia kept having to dive for shelter at the sound of footsteps or men's voices.
As the two fugitives left behind the mostly well-ordered rows of narrow three-storey shops and houses, the streets closed in, the architecture around them slumping or being squeezed out of shape, all the houses jumbled one on top of the other. The slums of Ilgrevnia sloped up to meet the sheer surface of the Wall, as if the contents of the City had been climbing up to overspill its bounds, and died there. Did Bessie really mean for them to climb that? The centuries had taken their toll on the remains: as Amelia stood and stared up at the Wall, she could see that a number of the ramshackle huts built by the Ilgrevnian poor had fallen away from the man-made cliff years ago, their component parts rotting away, exposing a surface pitted with cavities: shabby rooms carved out of the Wall itself.
Bessie forged ahead, a small figure in the mist and the fading light, and Amelia hurried to keep up with her, afraid to be left alone. Bessie led her through the alleyways, under the scratching branches of winter trees and shrubs, up tiny narrow staircases and treacherous ladders, through single-roomed dwellings. Vegetation had taken hold of the abandoned parts of Ilgrevnia, much of it brown and dead at this time of year. It was both a blessing and a curse – it offered cover from the prince's men seeking them, but at the sam
e time it obscured the way forward, and the branches snagged at Amelia's long braids. A slippery covering of wet dead leaves obscured broken timbers and crumbling steps. Amelia could only try to take comfort in the idea that the higher they climbed, the less they ran the risk of meeting golems (Amelia would happily bet that a man of stone weighed far more than she did) but then the same derelict structures forced them to double back, again and again, as the clock ticked away their time. Remnants of life still showed here and there in the rooms they passed through: shards of broken pots; the rusting skeletal frame of a sewing machine that must once have been the pride and joy of some long-gone seamstress.
“What do you think happened to the people who lived here?” said Bessie. “When he took the City?”
Amelia protested that she'd rather not think about it, and was embarrassed when her voice came out breathless and Bessie turned to look at her with surprise and pity.
“Sorry,” said Bessie, who found it easy enough to climb and talk at the same time. “I didn't think.”
Amelia tried to measure her breath more carefully. They still had a way to climb, and for pity's sake, people had lived here once, no matter the steepness of the makeshift streets. Now, of course, some of the ladders were broken or missing altogether, leaving the girls to climb as best they could using the holes left behind as hand-and toe-holds, but Amelia still wished she could climb as swiftly and easily as Bessie.
They came up from a dark, dank room onto a flat roof, into twilight and rain. They'd reached the inner surface of the Wall. Amelia had expected to find it sheltered in the shadow of the enormous barrier, but instead the wind snapped restlessly at her, catching her skirts and pulling her back. She steadied herself against it. The top of the Wall stood another twenty feet or so above the rooftops, which meant that Bessie and Amelia stood thirty feet or so above street level proper. Here the Ilgrevnians had made the most of their rooftops with kitchen gardens, raised to catch the sun for at least a few hours of the day. Now the gardens stood weed-choked, dark, forgotten. Pathways scarcely big enough for two people to pass threaded through the raised beds, tunnels carved between towers of brambles. Bessie hesitated, getting her bearings before they entered the maze of tunnels, which stretched far along the inner Wall. Amelia looked out over Ilgrevnia: curved streets and odd angles carving the City into irregular sections, with houses and workshops piled in wherever they'd fit; houses three or four storeys tall; and above the streets, a landscape of terraces and roof gardens, observatories and solariums. Lit windows showed Amelia the extent of the occupied section of the City, and she could see pairs of golems, searching for her in the streets below. She hadn't seen much of the City from the back of the wyvern – she'd had her eyes closed for a lot of that flight – now she stood and stared. Soon it would all be destroyed… She hadn't much time left to escape, and when she looked around, Bessie had disappeared.