Whiskeyjack

by Victoria Goddard

  “Could it have been recently?”

  “Oh, no,” he said immediately. “These bones have been under the ground for years at least.”

  “Seven years?”

  “Could be,” he said reluctantly. “I’m sorry, Mr. Greenwing, I know this must be very distressing to you to find your father’s bones disturbed.”

  “They’re not his bones,” Mr. Dart said. “That seems to be the problem.”

  The world spun, the pattern shaking loose so it could start to form anew.

  In the Two Sticks and a Stone poets, it was the presence of an incongruous word or detail or allusion that indicated there was a meaning below the surface meaning. Find that odd poetical word for wool, ebraöni, and when you looked closer you might find that the wool had been pulled over your eyes.

  For the Gainsgooding conspirators, it was figuring out where were the gaps in the allusions and cross-references that had permitted Empress Dangora IV’s successor to identify who had been playing the game. They had never named their target: the Empress they assassinated was the absent darkness in the centre of all the present light.

  Sometimes what you needed to decipher the presence of meaning was to uncover the absence of something.

  My father’s living presence had seemed the incongruity, the detail that indicated something else was going on. But what if it was his absence that was significant?

  —If this was a fake, then we did not need Dominus Gleason to be connected to Sir Vorel in the matter at all. Sir Vorel could have been the one too weak to kill his brother but too fearful to let him live and take the consequences—

  Then what was Lady Flora doing tonight?

  I muttered something incoherent and rushed into the house. I doubt I would have been any more coherent in asking for her, but to my relief I discovered Ellen trimming the lamp wicks in the front hall.

  “Mr. Dart, Lord Jemis. Can I help you with anything?”

  She sounded hopeful. I smiled fleetingly at her. I’d always liked wick-trimming duty at Morrowlea, but then I’d only had to do it once a week. “Yes, as a matter fact, you can. I need to know who I should talk to over at Arguty Manor to find out what Lady Flora is up to tomorrow. My uncle is here and doesn’t know.”

  Mr. Dart gave me an astonished glance, but refrained from comment. Ellen wrinkled her nose. “My mum’s visiting Mrs. Brock again. Something about the cellars at home.”

  We went to the kitchen, where Mrs. Brock looked appalled and the sight of Mrs. Bellfrey immediately took me back to my childhood. No wonder Ellen had seemed familiar: she was the image of her mother from the dark curly hair to the cheerful smile.

  “Supper will be in an hour, Mr. Perry, so don’t go trying to look winsome at me.”

  I doubted winsome was a word anyone would ever think to apply to me, so I decided to try instead for candour. “It smells wonderful, Mrs. Brock. Mrs. Bellfrey, I’m Jemis Greenwing—”

  “As if I wouldn’t remember my dear Mr. Jack’s boy! Our Ellen’s been full of stories since you came home. She’s all fired up for the examinations, thank goodness, thinking of what you did, though what she can do without a tutor I don’t know.”

  “Oh, Mum!”

  “That teacher at the kingschool hasn’t any extra time for our Ellen or Jem’s Nedling, and they’re the brightest in the year, you know, and—”

  “Perhaps I can give them some advice on studying for the Entrance Examinations,” I said, mostly to interrupt the flow, and before she switched to the outpouring of gratitude that was sure to follow, made haste to ask my questions.

  “Lady Flora? Oh, she’s given me the night off. She’s dining at the Terrilees’ over in Yellem tonight, and staying over as she usually does.”

  Sir Mattrin Terrilee was the Chief Magistrate of Yellem. A good man for a fly, said my uncle; not so sound on wild allegations.

  The mechanics of the past week were becoming clearer. “Does she travel through the Forest alone?”

  Mrs. Bellfrey chuckled. “Good heavens, no, she takes Hagwood with her for safety.” She sniffed. “Though what good he’d do in a fight I don’t know. Coward to the bone, that man. Afraid of ghosts something fierce—he was gabbling about Mr. Jack’s rising. As if he would be so inconsiderate!—I do beg your pardon, Lord Jemis.”

  “Thank you,” I said, as that seemed easiest. “What’s the matter with the cellars, Mrs. Bellfrey?”

  She made an annoyed tsking noise. “Just after Lady Flora left, with barrels for the Terrilees as a gift—our cellar is better than theirs, you know, they haven’t a clue how to store their liquor properly. Or where the best place is to get it. Everyone knows that the wine merchant in Yellem hasn’t a collection worth the name. Why, I remember my father—do you remember, Mrs. Brock, how he would lay down the port for the old master, Sir Rinald the elder that was, as carefully as a mother with her babe. ‘There,’ he’d say, ‘that will keep us through a reign or two’.”

  Or through one poor wager at the Yrchester races, I thought, and smiled as winsomely as I could. I didn’t have Mr. Dart’s charm, alas. “Lady Flora had left, you say?”

  “Yes, and then who should show up but these lawyers from Kingsford, with a letter saying they were to search the house for contraband. I ask you! A Justice of the Peace’s house! High and low they were looking. Can you believe it?”

  I could, and, moreover, did. Even further, I was fairly certain that Mr. Morres and Mr. Tey were not only looking for contraband whiskey, and that very likely they would be most interested in the contents of my uncle’s secret desk drawer. One look at Mr. Dart suggested he was thinking much the same. We hastened therefore back to the library, where my father sat alone, next to the fire, with the table full of papers before him.

  He looked up as we entered. The curtains had not yet been drawn against the night, so I saw him with the fire reflected many times around him in the windows.

  I saw him as if for the first time: the unruly dark hair, the now-neatly trimmed dark beard, the eyepatch, the lopsided smile.

  A surge of joy began in my feet. It travelled up my body until it broke free in the form of a smile.

  “We’re so close,” I said or tried to, for even as I uttered the words he lurched up and knocked all the papers flying and engulfed me in an embrace.

  I had been thinking so much of everything else that I had forgotten that we had not been even close to private since the breaking of the curse.

  “Muffin?” offered Mr. Dart, turning overwhelming emotion into laughter. He set the plate on the table, I gathered up the loose papers, and we were about to sit down when Sir Hamish joined us.

  “I asked Vorel about the burial,” he said. “We’ve moved him to the parlour,” he added to us. “Easier to shut him in.”

  “Oh?” My father sounded remarkably blasé.

  “He said it was a closed coffin. No one looked inside after Hagwood and the magister put the body in.”

  “He didn’t witness it?”

  “He was prostrate with emotion. He did manage to praise his wife’s fortitude in preparing the body and sparing him that grief.”

  “No explanation for why my wife wasn’t involved?”

  Sir Hamish looked sympathetically at him. “Jack, I can imagine how hard this is. Harry Hagwood was a friend.”

  “Mama was ill,” I said into the following silence. “I fell ill then, too, so she was nursing me.”

  “The curse,” Mr. Dart supplied, nodding.

  “Leaving a coffin full of enchanted animal bones to stand in for me.”

  “Well, there’s a wrinkle in that theory,” I said, and let Mr. Dart explain while I tried to think.

  Tomorrow was the Fallowday of the Autumn, when the Dark Kings were most easily summoned.

  Tomorrow was the anniversary of my father’s apparent suicide, the mystery of which was only growing.

  Tomorrow Red Myrta had invited the Chancellor of Morrowlea to witness the Turning of the Waters, which sounded like it might be somethin
g to do with the (literal) Crimson Lake and the tippermongaramy and the Magarran Strid.

  Tomorrow was the last day of the spur weeks, the day before the Winterturn Assizes started, in Astandalan days the day on which the bounds of the barony were beaten and rituals designed to reinforce Schooled magic and the Lady’s church and diminish the Dark Kings’ cult were conducted.

  Sir Hamish said that the Chancellor was supposed to meet Red Myrta at the White Cross at dawn, so that they would have plenty of time to get wherever they were going before noon, when the ceremonies started.

  Noon, not to mention the Chancellor’s presence, suggested Red Myrta’s activities had to do with the Lady and Schooled magic and not the Dark Kings.

  Lady Flora and Mr. Hagwood had theoretically gone to Yellton to dine with the Terrilees and stay over. They had taken some number of barrels with them, ostensibly as a gift, just before the two Kingsford lawyers arrived to search the premises.

  I jumped when the dinner gong rang. Mr. Dart laughed. “It’s been a long day. Shall we collect everyone from the parlour?”

  But when we went into the room it was to a cry of surprise and pain, the crash of a breaking window, and a sudden howling wind.

  I snapped into the world of mortal danger. Dominus Lukel was staggering back, hand to bleeding brow. Hal was sprawled over a chair, grabbing his injured ankle. And my uncle was three-quarters of the way across the lawn.

  I was at the eaves of the forest before it occurred to me that this was not perhaps the brightest idea I had ever had.

  Chapter Thirty-One: Jack-in-the-Box

  I really must practice making quick turns and about-faces at high speed.

  I HIT AN ICY PATCH of leaves, careened wildly, and skidded to a halt in a thicket where, unfortunately, people were waiting for me.

  “Tavo!” someone cried even as I tried to recover my balance. “Tavo! Tavo! It’s not working! Why isn’t it working?”

  “Because it’s Taivo, you idiot,” said another voice. “Taivo!”

  Taivo meant ‘hold’, I thought semi-hysterically, and then it dawned on me that they were trying magically to bind me, and also that I felt no constraints on me whatsoever.

  And also that the voices belonged to Lady Flora and Mr. Hagwood, and neither of them was a wizard, and if this was magic borrowed from Dominus-not-really-Gleason, removing the curse might also have removed any other bindings he might have put on me—

  All this went through my mind to reach the conclusion that it was more strategic to pretend I was bound. I concluded this approximately three seconds before it occurred to them to check.

  Taivo—hold—hold still, presumably. I held still.

  Someone swung a poacher’s lantern around so that its half-circle of light illuminated my face. No werelight? Ben and Jack had had a werelight ... Roald had had a werelight ... But these were people playing with the Dark Kings, not the magic of the Empire of the Sun-on-Earth.

  The swinging light made me feel a bit dizzy. I closed my eyes. I couldn’t see much anyway, in the shadows and glare, but the glimpses were enough to determine who was there.

  My uncle, my aunt, Mr. Hagwood, and a large dim object I took, from the accompanying smells and sounds, to be a cart pulled by a remarkably placid horse. The horse alone, by its placidity in the face of suddenly-appearing people in the darkness, indicated that this was no new business.

  I wished I’d been slightly more strategic, oh, about ten minutes earlier.

  I wished I had not been quite so stupid as to run precipitously across the lawn after my uncle. One of the finest soldiers of the late Empire had been in the room: I might have waited to see what he thought we should do.

  “Well, we have him,” said my uncle. “Now what?”

  ‘NOW WHAT’ CONSISTED of getting me to climb into a large barrel on the back of the cart.

  As I continued to feel no magical constraint, I confess it taxed my capacity for subterfuge to the limit to make myself obey the command to climb in.

  Eventually, with some assistance from Mr. Hagwood, I folded myself to fit the space, knees up against my chest and chin resting on crossed arms. I then concentrated on not hyperventilating with quite ridiculous instinctive panic.

  “We’d better hurry,” Sir Vorel said nervously. “Someone might come after us.”

  And why hadn’t anybody? Getting me into the barrel must have taken five minutes at least, plenty of time for any of the people who had witnessed my flight across the lawn to decide on a plan of action and begin to execute it.

  Unless the plan of action was to see what happened. So far all we had was the letter from Eil and a great deal of suppositions. To do anything but demonstrate my father’s innocence we needed proof. This would surely give proof of smuggling, and almost certainly of illegal magic (for the ceremonies connected with the Dark Kings had always been against the law)—if I kept my head (the rest of the evening) and they went to gather witnesses.

  —Such as the Chancellor of Morrowlea, one of the most respected people in the world. Who had been invited by Red Myrta to see the Turning of the Waters, coincidentally on the Fallowday anniversary of my father’s apparent suicide.

  The barrel had been used to store whiskey. The fumes were incredible.

  My aunt was speaking. “There’s a diversion, husband, which you might have waited another three minutes for. Once we’re away no one will be able to follow us.”

  A cart wouldn’t leave sufficient trace? Back in Astandalan days the highway might have been kept clear and clean by quite extravagant use of magic, but no one in Ragnor barony bothered to sweep it. It was the tail end of autumn. All through the forest would be drifts of wet oak leaves such as the ones I had just skidded on.

  Someone pushed the back of my head. I jerked at the unexpected touch.

  “He’s not so calm as last time. He keeps moving.”

  Mr. Hagwood’s monotone held a bit of whine, whether of complaint or nerves I wasn’t quite sure.

  Lady Flora replied briskly. “Hammer the lid down, that’ll keep him out of trouble. Us too, if we meet anyone before we get on the grey road. Come, husband, leave off it. Your woebegone expression is inappropriate.”

  It was too late and I was too entwined about myself to try to jump out of the barrel like a jack-(or Jemis)-in-the-box. Mr. Hagwood had a mallet and pounded the lid firmly into place. Accordingly I missed what my uncle said, but I heard my aunt’s reply: “Nonsense. By this time tomorrow all our dreams will be fulfilled!”

  I WONDERED IF BEING conscious and unenchanted for this barrel-confinement would lessen my newfound dislike of small dark enclosed places.

  Somehow I doubted it.

  MY THREE CAPTORS DID not speak much. The cart rumbled along, from its sound on one of the forest roads. My barrel vibrated and jostled a little against the others on the cart, but was securely fastened in place and I did not bang except on the ruts that made everyone jump.

  I tried to listen, and, failing anything to listen to, to think, but by the time I realized I could no longer smell the whiskey it was far too late.

  I WOKE WITH A JOLT to the sound of jays screaming.

  I lifted my head without thinking, cracked it sharply on the inside of the barrel, and subsided again to acute agony from my limbs, a major throbbing from several parts of my head, and the disheartening sensation of an emerging hangover.

  It was particularly disheartening since I had done nothing to earn it.

  Well. Apart from acting like a total idiot, that was. It served me right that no one had rescued me yet.

  The jays screamed again, alarms not muffled nearly enough by the wood staves of the barrel. I could not tell whether they were real birds or the imitations of Myrta the Hand’s gang.

  I wondered why she was called Myrta the Hand. It had a nice ring to it. Very ballad-friendly; it was even easy to rhyme with.

  “Bloody birds,” muttered Mr. Hagwood. “Give me the creeps, they do.”

  “That’s enough,” Lady
Flora said. Her voice sounded at a distance, then suddenly boomed closer: “How long after dawn is it?”

  “Not yet an hour, ma’am.”

  “We have time for something to eat, then,” she decreed.

  I shuddered at the idea of food, then bit the sleeve of my jacket to help keep myself from vomiting at the thought. I was already going to stink of whiskey; being covered with my own sick would be the last straw of any hope for a reputation not as wildly eccentric as my grandmother’s.

  Mr. Hagwood muttered something I didn’t catch and went to make clattering noises a little distance away.

  I was desperately thirsty.

  I lay my cheek along my arms to give a slight change of position to my neck and tried to identify the various sounds I could hear.

  It was remarkably disconcerting to be unable to see. My senses of taste and scent were useless, thoroughly occupied as they were with the whiskey. (I was sure I would be able to identify this specific vintage until the day of my death, which would hopefully be far in the future.) I felt a pang of regret for the loss of yet another suit of clothing. That left, what, one waistcoat, one pair of breeches, and two shirts? And no coat fit to wear at all. I hoped the winter-weight outfit I’d ordered from the local tailor would be ready soon.

  A string of thumps, a heavy sigh, and a bit later, crackle and spit. Mr. Hagwood, dropping an armful of wood, kneeling to set the fire, the wood catching.

  The grey jays or their human imitators were easy.

  A creak and a tremor coming through the barrel wood, then more creaking, soft puffs, little half-vocalized sounds of protest or grunts: my uncle, climbing onto the cart.

  “Jemis?” he whispered. “Jemis, can you hear me?”

  Did he honestly think I’d answer that?

  “Jemis, I didn’t know, I’m sorry.”

  But what he didn’t know and was sorry for I was not destined to find out at that moment, for Lady Flora said, “Vorel,” in pre-emptory tones.

  I supposed it was good to learn my uncle did in fact know what my name was.

  I could feel his guilty start through the wood. “Oh, Flora, dear, yes, what can I do for you?”