Weather Witch ww-1

by Shannon Delany

  Marion set the paper on his lap and swallowed hard, his throat tight and scratchy around the lump lodged in it. Poison leaves? It made no sense.

  Certainly Chloe had reason to be angry with Marion’s father—he had used the girl ill when she probably knew no better and then lopped off her ear in a fit of his infamous rage. But Chloe loved his family—Marion knew that as much as he knew rain only fell up if you forced it to. There was something wrong about all this. His stomach pitched under his ribs and he ignored the most obvious wrongs marked by gravestones. He could do nothing for his family.

  But Chloe. If he might yet help her … He stood, bracing himself between the two tombstones. He looked at the place his hand rested on his brother’s headstone and, yanking himself up straight, realized that he knew about the leaves. He had watched his little brother gather something that day and tear it into tiny, unrecognizable bits to make the batter better.

  It was not Chloe’s fault. He was a witness to her innocence! He vaulted forward, dashing down the aisle of graves and out the gate. He rushed up the road, fighting gravity’s downward pull with every long and rhythmic stretch of his legs.

  He crested the Hill, huffing and puffing, determination pushing him onward past the burn in his side and the burn in his lungs and pressing him toward destiny.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Ill news travels fast.

  —ERASMUS

  The Road from Philadelphia

  Rowen and Jonathan set out early the next morning, heading still farther from the negligible town. Frederick had agreed with them—“Perhaps more time and distance and then, if young Lady Astraea is truly found innocent of all witchery and allowed to come home…” He had paused, the worry clear in his eyes. “Then might you return as the prodigal son and reclaim the lifestyle you came from. But until then,” he said sadly, “it is best to avoid most everyone. People talk. And if a reward is offered…”

  So they turned their backs and their horses’ buttocks to Philadelphia and continued on until they came to a tavern. Jonathan dismounted and tied Silver up while Rowen stared down at him in disbelief.

  “Follow me,” Jonathan requested.

  Rowen nodded, joining him. “Why not? As they said at Jordan’s party, I am no great leader of men.”

  Jonathan shrugged. “You led me on this particular adventure.”

  “Somehow that makes me feel no better.”

  Just inside the tavern’s door, Rowen froze, his eyes darting from side to side. He’d hoped such a brief stop so early in their race from the city meant they’d outrun any unwanted attentions, but that was before he noticed two posters hanging on the wall. The one to his left announced a manhunt for the murderer Rowen Albertus Burchette, while the one to his right included an artist’s illustrated rendering of a short-nosed, broad-foreheaded, thick-necked version of him from shoulders up and in stark black ink.

  He was not sure which to be more offended by, the one revealing his middle name to the world or the one that claimed a “faithful reproduction of a murderer’s image.”

  He motioned to Jonathan with his chin. The same chin now covered in an unappealing scruff. If he’d had access to a proper razor and strap he’d do the thing himself, bringing his face back to a proper cleanliness instead of allowing his sideburns to crawl toward his chin.

  Jonathan frowned, running his hand across his own stubble, pulling thumb and forefinger together at the end of his jaw in a thoughtful gesture before striding forward to the bar.

  Rowen blinked. Then, throwing his shoulders back, he followed, standing at Jonathan’s side.

  “A bit of your house ale for my friend and me,” Jonathan requested of the flat-faced man behind the bar. He pulled out a coin and tapped its edge on the wood.

  The man swept the coin into his meaty palm and filled two tankards, setting them down with a clank before the two younger men.

  Jonathan took a long sip of his ale. “Any news of import?”

  Rowen nearly spit his ale out when the bartender hooked a thumb in the direction of the posters.

  “Riders came through here this morning, putting those up and asking questions. Two fellows, one of decent breeding, are on the run. Seems the ugly one”—he pointed to the image of Rowen—”shot a man of higher rank.” The bartender leaned across the bar, saying, “Probably told he was ugly as the south end of a north-facing mule.” He nodded, lips pursed in a smug smile.

  Jonathan laughed. “He is one ugly bastard.”

  Rowen’s face colored at the comment.

  The bartender pulled away, laughing, and said, “And in my opinion a man should never be shot for speaking the truth.”

  “True, true,” Jonathan agreed.

  They drank the rest of their ales in silence, Rowen pouting and Jonathan occasionally chuckling to himself.

  “What precisely was your intention—going in there and asking for news once you’d seen we are it?” Rowen hissed as they left. “We are the news, Jonathan!”

  Jonathan snorted. “No. No we are not. Some other poor bastards are—and one of them is quite the ugly brute.” He reached up and tweaked the tip of Rowen’s nose. “Be thankful you’re a handsome beast, you ladykiller, you. No one would dare imagine you and that man on the flyer are one and the same.”

  With a laugh, he mounted his horse, nodded to Rowen, and nudged Silver into a trot.

  Holgate

  Even though her Making Tank placed her higher up in the tower with a small barred window overlooking the wall and the water of the lake beyond, none of it interested her today.

  “What does it look like?” The voice beyond the wall, introduced as Caleb, asked.

  Jordan jerked upright from where she slouched, dozing in the scant and slanting sunlight. Caleb’s voice echoed in her ears. “What does what look like?”

  “The outside—the sun, the sky, the valley … any bit of it.”

  “Do you not see it when you are taken for Making?”

  He laughed, the sound sharp and cutting. “No. The Maker knows how I miss it—the outside, so he keeps it from me. I have not seen the sky in…” There was a long pause as Caleb thought. “Nineteen months, three weeks, and … two days.”

  “So long…”

  “I refuse to be numbered among his success stories,” he hissed. “I will not let him break me.”

  “You are not a Witch either?” Jordan asked, turning around and scooting as close to the hole in the wall as she could get.

  Laughter roiled up again, but this time it was heartfelt. “If I have my way, the Maker will never know what I truly am. I will always control who truly knows the truth of me.”

  Jordan nodded and rolled up to a standing position, crossing the small space between wall and window in only a few short strides. With a new appreciation for the world outside her window, she described the scene with all the vividness and detail she could muster.

  * * *

  The Maker summoned Jordan to the laboratory early that day. The Wardens growled and shoved her inside, closing the door behind her. She pitched forward, catching herself inches from falling against a table’s edge. Straightening, she brushed her hands down the front of her dress to neaten it. It was more out of habit now, she realized, than need. Her dress was irrepressibly filthy and the last things to right the damage were her own grubby fingers. She looked at her fingernails and the dirt always edging beneath them. She hooked a nail beneath another and did her best to clean away the offensive grime, but shortly gave up. Some battles were no longer worth fighting. Besides, when they realized she was innocent surely they’d give her a proper bath and a new dress to return home in.

  If they realized she was innocent. Her fingers flew to the pin still nestled in the deep folds of fabric at her elbow and she traced the edges of its shape with one hesitant fingertip. The metal was cool to the touch and smooth as silk.

  Rowen’s heart.

  Her own heart beat a little faster at the thought.

  Or maybe it was the stran
geness of her surroundings.

  It seemed odd that the Wardens would leave her here, in the Maker’s main laboratory, unattended. In the dark.

  Waiting for the man who would only bring her more pain.

  She stood perfectly still, her eyes roving the poorly lit space, her finger and thumb stroking the heart pinned to her sleeve.

  Alone in the chamber, her eyes widened at the noise of something tapping softly near the room’s dim corner, like fingers on glass. She eased her way toward the noise, her eyes wide and round to better pull in the little bit of light that showed from the resting stormlights. The room’s walls were lined with long wooden countertops covered in jars, fat or fluted glass tubes, sturdy-looking beakers, and oddly shaped bottles and boxes. Some were stoppered with cork, others with rubber or metal, and disturbingly few bore labels she understood.

  In a small cask a thick fluid moved, bubbles rising so frequently they sizzled through the murky liquid. She paused there a moment, watching the viscous liquid until a bubble reached its top, pierced the skin, and snapped open, belching out a smell that reminded Jordan of the docks in summer. Wrinkling her nose against the briny scent, she moved on. Her fingers skimmed the counter’s edges, her chains rustling between her wrists, a reminder of her imprisonment even while she explored the dim space independently.

  She paused before a ghostly shape nested deep in a dusty cubbyhole and squinted, forcing her eyes to adjust and define the curve of the bulbous thing so white it nearly glowed from the cabinet’s recess. She gasped, recognizing it. Two black eye sockets peered blindly back at her, the skull leering out at her—its smile broad and amiable. Cheerful in a frighteningly alien way.

  Her fingers tightened on the counter’s edge.

  She had only seen a drawing of a skull in a book sitting open in one of the more questionable stores in the Below, and only once. Still … this was smaller than she expected. Her own head was a bit bigger, of that she was quite sure. She rolled her lower lip between her teeth and eased back and away.

  The cask’s bubbling intensified and Jordan raised an eyebrow, her gaze drifting back toward it. On the counter a bottle shivered and another trembled, walking forward on its round glass edge. Jordan backed up farther. All the jars and bottles with liquid in them—all the containers that had contents able to slosh—sloshed and quivered and danced below the little grinning skull—a child’s skull, Jordan realized—like anxious living things.

  Like anxious living things with a secret to tell.

  She reached out, wrapped a shaking hand around the skull, and, cradling it in hand, pulled it out of the dark pit it had been condemned to.

  The bottles and flasks all stopped their chattering at once. The silence that descended was somehow more disturbing than the clattering noise of a moment before.

  There was no sound in the chamber now except for Jordan’s breathing and the strange and ceaseless tapping that sounded from the chamber’s still unexplored corner.

  She held the skull so its eye sockets were level with her own wide eyes and she peered into them, wondering what color the eyes had once been. Had they been ringed with thick lashes—was this a boy or a girl who’d lost his or her head? Slowly she turned the skull, pausing again. Jordan drew down a deep breath.

  There was magick here—magick that was dark and dirty and disappointing. And had absolutely nothing to do with her.

  The goose bumps on her arms raising the fine hairs there seemed to insist this magick wanted to have more than a little to do with her—regardless of her own wishes.

  She tried to force her hands to stop their trembling but that only intensified the rattling that shook her straight to her bones. With all the care she could muster, she set the skull back in its cubby and stepped away once more.

  Dread uncurled in her stomach, but Jordan headed toward the noise, her feet pulling her body, unbidden, forward. The child’s skull was behind her, and the blackness nestling around it felt just as heavy as the darkness cloaking the corner before her.

  Light slipped like quicksilver across the domed surface of a large bell jar. The tapping sound grew louder, more frantic, and she saw a flicker of movement behind the glass’s surface. She drew nearer and the sound intensified, the tapping becoming a soft drumbeat as a dozen pairs of wings—of all shapes and patterns, colors and sizes—beat against the glass in protest of being confined.

  Butterflies flew in a controlled panic, wings stroking the glass.

  Jordan’s hand flew to the pendant at her neck.

  Light blared in the chamber and she stumbled back.

  “They’re beautiful, aren’t they?” The Maker’s voice scraped down her spine and Jordan swung around to face him, her chain swinging between her wrists.

  She was as free as the butterflies in the bell jar. She could move, but not far enough to mean anything.

  The Maker strolled across the floor and flicked a finger against the jar, sending the butterflies into a full-blown panic, their wings clattering en masse against the opposite wall. “Did you know their wings seem to have similarities to the stormcells?”

  Jordan shook her head, mute in his presence.

  “They build and hold power in their wings thanks to sunlight the way Witches pull storms into themselves. Some believe they bring sunlight—that’s why they’ve been nicknamed sunseekers—that they have a symbiotic relationship with the sun itself, calling to it the way your kind calls to darkness and storms.” He looked her up and down. “Nothing to say?” He frowned. “That is so very frustrating—talking at someone instead of to someone. You should speak freely, Jordan.”

  She looked down, focusing on the spot she knew her feet were hiding beneath the hem of her dress. “My kind calls to nothing. My kind is Grounded.”

  “You’re just like the rest of them,” he said, disappointment clear in his softening tone. “You resent me. You resent this gift I am giving you—this freedom from being Grounded. Do you know what I would give to no longer be Grounded?” His hand dropped forward and he snagged her chain, yanking her forward.

  “Let us begin then,” he said, placing her in the chair and pulling the buckles tight across her wrists. “I do not hold your words against you, Jordan. You should speak freely,” he insisted, his mouth so close to her ear as he cinched the final strap that all she heard was the rasp of his words. “Yes, Jordan, if thoughts or words well up in you, you should always speak freely. Or, better yet—scream.”

  On the Road from Philadelphia

  It was Rowen who suggested he stand guard at the river’s edge, letting the horses drink from the shallowest part of the water. “Perhaps we should head directly to Holgate. When Jordan is cleared of these charges, she will need someone to bring her home.”

  Jonathan kept his head down, settling Silver’s mane with the brush he’d wisely packed into the saddlebags. “That is a good point, young sir. And as good a direction to head as any.” He tugged at Silver’s ear and the horse flicked it and whinnied good-naturedly. “You could be Miss Jordan’s escort—if not her hero,” Jonathan teased.

  “I’m only hero material if your cousin Frederick includes me in his fiction,” Rowen mused darkly.

  “There is more hero to you than I think you’ve ever imagined,” Jonathan said, pausing in Silver’s grooming to look across the horse’s back to Rowen. “I tend to believe, if you will indulge me a moment, that a man can never be disproven of heroism unless he fails when pushed to perform. Untested, who knows? You, friend”—the word choice was not lost on Rowen—”have only now begun to be pushed. To be tested. Your potential is yet unglimpsed. There is the stuff of legends within you. Of that I am sure.”

  Rowen looked away. “So we head to Holgate.”

  “Yes. And you consider that you might yet be Miss Jordan’s hero. She is a damsel in distress. What is more worthy a hero’s task than to be a knight in shining armor for a damsel?”

  Rowen laughed. Rudely.

  Jonathan was not amused. “Consider that you m
ight be the happily ever after to her currently tragic tale.”

  Rowen mumbled something devoid of commitment and said, “You read too much fiction.” He cleared his throat. “Perhaps. If I am to be her hero—the happily ever after to her currently tragic tale—then I must say you are a good part of that story. This madness is all made more bearable by the assistance of a fine friend such as yourself. A fine friend is just as important as a fine woman in having a true happily ever after.”

  Jonathan snorted. “You might disagree with your current sentiment if you spend more time with Miss Jordan. Unchaperoned.”

  Rowen blinked and then burst out laughing. “Perhaps!”

  They didn’t hear, see, or smell it until it was on top of Jonathan, its broad flipper hands catching his head and twisting his neck with a crunch so loud Silver bolted as Jonathan crumpled to the ground, the Merrow sinking down with him.

  Rowen shouted and fired a shot, but the Merrow sprang away, using its slick tail as a coil and propelling itself after Silver as he streaked into the woods.

  Ransom’s nostrils flared, ears flattening against his skull as his lips pulled back from his bright white teeth. Rowen reloaded and watched the tree line as he stumbled over bits of river debris on his way to Jonathan. He didn’t dare go to his knees, didn’t dare turn his back to either the woods or the water as he crouched to check his friend for signs of life.