“Stop sneezing, will you?”
I grimaced into the dirt. “If only I could.”
He started forward, pushing carefully through the undergrowth. The wet leaves slapped at my face, but I kept close beside him, determined not to lose him in the darkness. We were going slightly uphill, but I knew enough about dark woods to know that one’s sense of direction could be totally off in the dark—especially when one’s head was ringing dizzily from lack of air and over-exertion.
My breathing settled down into the fast-paced nasal hiccoughs again, as if I was hyperventilating under hysteria. This annoyed me considerably, as the only reason to panic was the fact I was making enough noise to alert anybody to our presence. I kept holding my breath and then having to release it with a soft explosion when I could no longer manage.
After an interminable time, during which the cracks got less frequent and somewhat more distant, Mr. Dart said, “Didn’t your father teach you anything worth know—elp!”
The exclamation came a moment too late for me to avoid tipping over the sudden short cliff he’d just rolled off. We tumbled to a halt at the bottom in a tangle of limbs and bracken, breath heaving and bones rattled, but I didn’t think I’d done more than jar myself.
“Right ho, Mr. Dart?” I murmured when I could form words.
“Right ho, Mr. Greenwing.”
Neither of us made a move to disentangle ourselves. We listened, instead, me to my breathing, my gradually slowing heart rate, and the noises of the woods around us. The wizard appeared satisfied, or at any rate didn’t pursue us down the cliff. Other sounds were less comprehensible but could have been pheasants or boars or the like. Theoretically, at least.
It was increasingly cold and the rain, of course, chose that moment to begin falling again.
“He taught me how to gamble,” I said after another few minutes. “Which I thought would be of more use tonight, to be honest.”
“I am sorry, Mr. Greenwing, that the evening’s entertainment did not go as planned.”
I moved my head out of the way of a particularly obnoxious rock. “It’s certainly given me a new appreciation for the hazards involved in picking mushrooms.”
He chuckled a little too loudly, for we heard an exclamation and the unwelcome sound of purposeful movement through the woods—and not the woods above the cliff.
That’s below us, I thought, moving slowly and carefully to a sitting position and helping Mr. Dart get out of the pile of bracken he’d landed on. The bracken was wet enough to not be supremely noisy, but I didn’t get far before I froze at the sight of a purple light floating disembodied through the air.
Mr. Dart clamped his hand over my face.
Indignation warred with horror; horror won. The light moved this way and that, leisurely, too high for ordinary human height. The Silver Priest had been abnormally tall, I thought, and unconsciously tried to catch my breath.
Tried—choked—Mr. Dart had perforce to remove his hand—I screwed up my face and pinched my noise and clenched my gut—just as the light seemed to be leaving I could hold it in no longer.
“Oh, Jemis,” Mr. Dart said sadly—there’s really no noise so unmistakable as a sneeze—and a voice out of the dark cried: “Well, well, well, if it isn’t my old runabouts. Mr. Greenwing and Mr. Dart.”
Chapter Fourteen
Miraculously—although I hesitate to use that word—I wasn’t late for work. The market bell was still ringing as I dragged myself into the store with as fair a pretence at nonchalance as I could manage.
Mrs. Etaris turned from the counter, where she had been opening a crate of New Salons. “The young men used to call it ‘catching the night worms’ when I was young. Though that was in Fiella-by-the-Sea; possibly they’ve always said ‘picking mushrooms’ here in Ragnor Bella.”
“Uh,” I said, and blew my nose.
The Honourable Rag had, so he claimed, been out collecting worms, the marshy forest below the Ladybeck being the best location for it, as surely we well remembered from our boyhood forays into fishing. As he bore a wriggling bag of nightcrawlers and a small trowel for good measure, neither Mr. Dart nor I could well argue with this statement, utterly incredible as it seemed.
Not having provided ourselves with such accoutrements, we pretended to have been poaching salmon and that I had fallen into the Ladybeck and dragged Mr. Dart in after me. With equal bonhomie the Honourable Rag agreed that it was a very bad turn of luck, goddess wot, and I should be careful not to catch my death of cold. He didn’t seem to feel Mr. Dart was in any danger.
The whole situation made me think of a particularly bad hand in the card game of Poacher I’d once used to win against Violet’s Salmon of Wisdom by sheer ability to tell a plausible tall tale. Sadly in this case I did not think we had come even to a draw, cheerfully blasé as Mr. Dart was. It was only the fact that we’d seen the Honourable Rag’s purple werelight, I was certain, that provided him with an equivalent concern for us keeping our stories and our thoughts to ourselves.
There was no sign of any companions, nor, more fortunately, of wizards, cultists, or other strangers. The Honourable Rag seemed to bear a field of sheer bland normalcy with him, almost as disconcerting in its way as the silliness of the secret society members turning into a serious cult.
We squelched slowly up the hill towards the road, past the turn-off to the Garden Hut and past the crossroads, where even the Green Dragon had blown out its lanterns. The Honourable Rag managed all the while to keep up a continuous stream of inconsequential gossip about people I neither knew nor cared about. I focussed on keeping one foot in front of the other and not sneezing too horribly, while Mr. Dart asked bright questions about the gossip and the Honourable Rag kept laughing.
We got to the Ragglebridge just after sunrise. At the sight of the two fishermen at their posts (the larger one grinned into his beard, no doubt at how dishevelled the growing light revealed us as), I roused myself to say my adieus. Mr. Dart started to say something, but the Honourable Rag clapped me on the back hard enough to stagger.
“Off to work you go, good lad! We’re off for a hunter’s breakfast at the Arms.”
So off they went, with Mr. Dart casting me one final would-be-
eloquent look I couldn’t decipher. I turned down the back way to Mrs. Buchance’s for a hasty wash, shave, and very welcome change of clothes before running to Elderflower Books before the market bell had quite finished ringing.
Catching the night worms, indeed.
Before either of us said anything further, Mrs. Landry came in. She greeted her sister amiably, nodded at me, and asked for a copy of this week’s New Salon. I hastily went to the counter—the market-day delivery of the New Salon was my sole assigned task so far—and undid the string tying the bundle. While she waited for me, Mrs. Landry smiled archly at her sister. “Have you found out anything more about that herring pie of yours?”
“Of Mr. Greenwing’s, rather,” Mrs. Etaris replied.
Mrs. Landry looked at me. I didn’t feel up to a polite smile, so just nodded my head awkwardly. “I see,” she said, with an air of the greatest significance. “And what do you make of it, Mr. Greenwing?”
“Nothing,” I replied immediately and truthfully.
“Nothing?” she replied even more archly, as deliberately oblivious to subtle verbal cues as the Honourable Rag.
My thoughts flashed to the ring, which—I realized, heart sinking—I’d entirely forgotten to tell Mr. Dart about. At least I hadn’t lost it in all the night’s excitements; I’d found it still in my waistcoat pocket this morning.
“Oh,” I faltered, when she kept staring at me, as much at a loss as when attempting to prevaricate in front of Mr. Fogerty the fishmonger—and then I decided on the other strategy from Poacher, which was the truth. “To be honest, I haven’t thought about it much this morning.”
Mrs. Landry looked disappointed.
Mrs. Etaris chuckled. “Now, my dear—be sure if we find anything out I shall
keep out the juiciest gossip for you.”
I would have taken that an insult, but Mrs. Landry responded with another arch smile. “Do be careful not to step on your husband’s toes—he’s the investigator in Ragnor Bella!”
Mrs. Etaris frowned at her. “I should be disappointed indeed were private curiosity become a crime. It would be a sign of great woe for Alinor.”
“You’ve been reading too many old romances again, dear. I suppose you know your business best. Mind, the town’s abuzz that there might be highwaymen in the Arguty Forest.”
Mrs. Etaris neatened the stack of books on the shelf beside her. “There are always rumours of highwaymen in the Arguty Forest. Have you finished with that, Mr. Greenwing?”
“Your paper, Mrs. Landry,” I replied, and exchanged it for a handful of coin. She nodded, the feathers on her hat bobbing as she went out the door.
In the hopes that there would be something to calm my throbbing head, I went to the back room for a glass, and found jugs of both water and coffee. After swallowing a hasty glass of water, I poured a cup of coffee for each of us and took them out to the front room, where Mrs. Etaris was now arranging a stack of brightly-coloured historical romances on the front table. I wondered which ones Mrs. Landry thought she’d been reading too much of. The Passion of Madame Anastasiya? The Underwriters of Li Shan Do? Black Tulip? Fitzroy Angursell’s utterly illegal (and certainly not—well, almost certainly—surely Mrs. Etaris wouldn’t dare keep it in stock) comic epic Aurora?
Mrs. Etaris smiled. “Thank you, Mr. Greenwing. And thank you for arranging the cookery books yesterday.”
I glanced at the shelf, and had to blow my nose again. “You’re welcome, Mrs. Etaris.”
The market-bell rang, and I straightened up as a rush of people came in for their New Salons and a handful of other things, books of poetry and practical gardening and the grammars of obscure languages, and obvious intent to gawk at me.
I was too busy for a while to do more than handle the cash and try not to sniff too unpleasantly, with a bare few mouthfuls of coffee here and there. Mrs. Etaris welcomed most of her customers by name, smiled at them all, and helped them find what they sought—and in several cases, what they didn’t know they wanted.
She had a gentle encouraging manner that was hard to resist, and to my extreme if inarticulate gratitude turned away the pointed questions about why I’d missed my stepfather’s funeral and how long I was planning to be in town and why I was working there and how generally peaky I looked.
After the glut thinned, I went into the back to clear my nose as best I could in privacy. When I came back, Mrs. Etaris had found a book for me to look at: Exchanges and Excellencies: Magical Systems of Northwest Alinor, by one Magister Aube of Kingsford. “Thank you,” I said, “but why give me this? I don’t think I’ve mentioned that I studied History of Magic, have I?—Or at least, that I began with that?”
“Did you indeed?” she said, with a heartening smile. “No, I don’t believe you have. I thought you might find Chapter Three of interest—oh, Mrs. Buchance, how lovely you look this morning.”
I pushed the book aside and tried to smile at Mrs. Buchance, who was wearing a a pale grey walking dress and did indeed look particularly fetching despite her mourning. She was holding my tricorner hat in her hand and a folded garment over her arm. “You were in such a hurry this morning,” she said. “I thought you might like your hat and coat for later, Mr. Greenwing.”
“Oh … thank you, Mrs. Buchance.”
It was my summer-weight coat, not the one I’d—hell. Not the one I’d abandoned somewhere in the woods last night. Please, I thought, say the suspicion I’d left it beside the Talgarths’ moat was wrong.
“Mrs. Inglesides is taking the girls with her boys for a picnic down by the Point, so I thought I’d spend the afternoon going through Mr. Buchance’s paperwork in his offices here in town. His business partner has written to ask me for some records, and I
haven’t had much opportunity to find them.”
“Must the Charese portion of his business wait for the Winterturn Assizes, too?” I asked.
Mrs. Buchance hesitated. I flushed at how impertinent that had sounded. “I didn’t mean—It’s none of my business—”
But she was smiling sadly. “No, they have a different system. It is nearly through their period of probation … once I can get the Chief Justice to sign off on the documents, as witness to my status as his widow, I will be able to access them. But he’s not back yet from the summer course he was teaching in Ormington.”
I remembered what Dame Talgarth had said in the bakery. “He’s expected soon, I heard.”
She nodded patiently, and I thought, of course she’d know much more about such news than I. “So my brother said.” She passed me my hat, which I put next to the book, and then when I sneezed seemed struck with something, and added, “Have you found out anything about that ring we found in the pie?”
Mrs. Etaris said, “You found a ring? Did you eat the pie?”
“No!” I said, a bit too strongly, and moreover sneezed emphatically; both women laughed. “One of my sisters knocked it off the counter, and it broke on the floor. While we were cleaning it up, Mrs. Buchance found a ring had been cooked into it.”
“How curious. Do you have the ring with you?”
It had, quite miraculously, not been lost—despite the scuffles, secret societies, and at least seven different tumbles. Unlike several of my handkerchiefs, which had not fared so well: I’d started out with six, but by the time I came to transfer my pockets to my second waistcoat this morning, I only had three. Well, at least they weren’t embroidered with anything more incriminating than the Old Shaian ideograph for Racer, Violet’s idea of a good pun on my horse-derived name and my affinity for running.
Before I could do more than place the ring on the counter, someone came in for a book of riddles. Mrs. Buchance took her farewells and left politely while Mrs. Etaris saw to the transaction. I poked at the ring and sighed at how clumsy I was.
Mrs. Etaris examined it carefully when she was finished, but seemed to find no answers in the flower pattern of red garnets or the heavy gold, either.
“It makes me think of a sigil of the Lady of Alinor,” I said hesitantly, looking around at the shelves for a book on emblems, and not knowing where to start.
“Heraldry is in the third room,” Mrs. Etaris said. I blinked at her, and she smiled. “It’s closed due to a slight mishap we had there after the last Embroidery Circle meeting. I daresay you’ll have time next week to start clearing it out.”
She sipped her coffee, frowning at the ring. “You may be right about the Lady, though I wonder if I haven’t seen something like it more recently … We shall have to consider.”
I nodded and tried to look intelligent, though I felt even peakier than earlier, and probably looked it, too, as Roald Garsom had indicated when he’d come in for a picture book (“the one where the knight ends up like you!”). I might look pretty bad, I thought, after last night; but it still seemed somehow unfair that the town fool felt emboldened to say so.
Mrs. Etaris pushed the book of Alinorel magic at me. “Now, as for this book, Mr. Greenwing—Lady bless you!” She waited until I’d gotten myself under control, and then said, “You seem to be sneezing worse than yesterday, Mr. Greenwing. Did you catch a cold while you were out, ah, picking mushrooms?”
“Oh, probably, given everything else that happened.”
“They say that Morrowlea breeds idealists. You seem to be of the cynical variety.”
I grinned reluctantly. “I do my best, Mrs. Etaris.”
“I’m sure you do, Mr. Greenwing.”
A few more customers came in, seeking a guide book to the Farry March, a collection of harp music from the Inner Reaches, and a three-volume work on Trees of the Western Forests, which put paid to our conversation until they’d all cleared out. The search for the guide book had disarrayed several shelves, so while Mrs. Etaris remedied that
, I flipped through the book she’d given me. Chapter Three was titled, “Identifying Proclivities to Magic and the Seven Magical Senses.”
Mrs. Etaris poured us both some more coffee, though the jug was nearly tepid, alas. When I looked up at her in befuddlement she said, “It has been exercising my imagination how you can be so very sensitive to scents that—to be frank—no one else notices. I had wondered if it had something to do with magic, but of course it is not an easy thing to find anyone able or willing to test—nor is it something I imagine you wish much spoken of in town, when you already have your little train of rumours.”
“But … magic doesn’t run in my family.”
She raised her eyebrows at me. “Not in the Greenwings, perhaps, but the Noirells were well known for their skills in the days before the Fall.”
“I see,” I said, and not for the first time wished the Noirells had not disowned my mother. But before I could go further, the door opened, and Violet walked in.
She was dressed in the most elegant height of fashion for a young man of the coastal city-states, in a knee-length ivory and crimson coat over black pantaloons and waistcoat. She wore a gilt-handled rapier at her belt. She did not appear to be hiding her sex; her hat was a dashing deep-brimmed tricorner with ostrich feathers tumbling down, and exquisitely feminine. The autumn style, I supposed.
Mrs. Etaris turned to greet her affably, and paused for the briefest possible moment of astonishment before catching herself. Violet looked at me with a quirk of her lips, the old familiar smile from when we’d been friends. I swallowed against my immediate, foolish, probably disastrous desire to smile back. Mrs. Etaris returned the grin. “Is there anything we can help you with?”
“I have come to make my apologies,” Violet declared, turning to me and drawing her sword.
Only the most tenuous remnants of self control prevented me from saying “I say!” like Mr. Dart.
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