Stargazy Pie

by Victoria Goddard

  “Oh, indeed?” I turned to the ice box to fetch some cream for the coffee, and he laughed again. “Fine, I won’t tease you. We have too much to speak of.”

  “Go to, then.”

  He picked up a bun and frowned at it. “Is this onion? Not from Mr. Inglesides, is it?”

  “Mrs. Buchance made it.”

  “In that case …” and he swallowed half of it whole with evident pleasure. “I don’t see why the Ragnor Arms doesn’t have better breakfasts. Cartwright told me it was my own fault for sleeping through the service, but he’s sanctimonious that way. He’s been a brick about having to help me with my clothes and things, since my arm’s off, so I had to let him make his comments.”

  “Clearly whatever it is you want to say is a little difficult to articulate.”

  “You’re in fine form this morning!” He made a face and left off poking his stone arm. He was wearing clothes that rivalled even the Honourable Rag’s—or Violet Redshank’s—for elegance, black breeches and a plum waistcoat with a plum-and-silver knee-length coat above it. I almost asked him if only wore plum, but decided he was far more likely to run with the digression than with whatever he actually felt burdened to say.

  “Mr. Dart.”

  “Because you are always so to-the-point! Fine. Mr. Greenwing: I have been thinking.”

  “A most dangerous propensity.”

  He bowed in his chair, though the effect was spoiled by the crumbs caught in his beard. I debated whether I should mention them or not. “Thank you. Jemis, I’m a little worried about your friend Violet.”

  “I don’t think she’s addicted to wireweed,” I said, my thoughts still running on the book.

  “What?”

  “Sorry, that’s what I’ve been thinking about. What do you mean, then?”

  “Why—” He glanced down at the book on the table, which had fallen open on a page of complicated diagrams about substitutionary magic as practised in the Outer Reaches. “What is that?”

  “The book Mrs. Etaris gave me yesterday. I have no idea what that’s about, I’ve only read a couple pages. It’s very relevant to figuring out what might be going on with Miss Carlin, however.”

  “That’s just it,” he said eagerly. “How do we know what’s going on with Miss Carlin?”

  I sat back in my chair. “I beg your pardon?”

  He gestured wildly. “What do we know about this situation? What Miss Redshank has told us. We don’t even know if there is a Miss Carlin.”

  “There’s the pie,” I said.

  “And the only person we know for certain had access to it is—Miss Redshank. Look, Mr. Greenwing, I’ve been thinking hard about this since I woke up. There was no evidence of anyone else coming to the Little Church for a meeting—just us. And we did make our rendezvous where someone could hear it—do you remember you thought you heard someone?”

  I frowned, casting back to the day before last, as I’d seen him out of the store on his way to his aunt’s. “I … yes, I suppose so.”

  “A lot’s happened since then,” he admitted, a touch condescendingly.

  I raised my eyebrows at him. “But she would have recognized me from that conversation. Why attack me later?”

  “Unless she intended to attack you, all along. You have to admit her explanation for why she assaulted you was very peculiar. Then there’s the fact that she’s definitely lying about her name, refuses to say where she’s from, and chooses to stay at the Green Dragon.”

  “People who aren’t from the area wouldn’t know about the Green Dragon.”

  He gave me a withering glance. “Didn’t you get out of your university, ever? You just need to walk in the door of a place like the Green Dragon—hell, half the time you don’t even need to go in the door of a place like that—to know exactly what you’ll find. Places aren’t called the Green something-or-other if they’re not offering the special services to the Lady of Summer!”

  “Well—”

  “So this woman with a false name claims she had no idea you were here, except that she knows you’re broken-hearted after her best friend’s betrayal. She claims her cousin has been kidnapped on her way back from Kilromby to Ghilousette, and that this has something to do with magic trafficking out of Ghilousette into Ragnor Bella. She claims the pie was made by her cousin.”

  “But—”

  He overrode me. “We don’t have any proof for any of it! All we have is her word—and your trust, which is obviously a bit … I mean, there are reasons against her, aren’t there? What if she’s the one trying to catch this Miss Carlin? What if she’s trying to ruin you utterly—crying publicly that the Talgarths are party to stealing magic will mean social ruin for you if you’re wrong, no matter that you’re not disinherited from the Buchance fortune. Or that you came First at Morrowlea—and congratulations on that, by the way.”

  “Why don’t you think she’s lying about that, then?”

  “Don’t sound so offended!”

  “Pshaw!”

  He ignored this, and fished in the pocket of his waistcoat with his left hand until he could pull out a letter. “Because it occurred to me the other place Morrowlea might have sent something was your old house, so I stopped by this morning, and asked if there was a letter for you, and here it is.”

  I took it from him and unfolded it slowly. It was a very official-looking letter, dripping with wax seals and gilded lettering, and in the ancient ideographic script of chancellery and university documents it did, indeed, state that I, Jemis Greenwing of Ragnor Bella, Fiellan, had come First in the university, on account of my ‘courageous defence of the truth and good scholarship in the face of much outrage and intellectual, moral, and social peril’.

  I stroked the document flat. My heart eased a tiny amount. I had this, if nothing else. Too much had happened yesterday, but this, oh this … I had been so angry that my drugged—and, as I had learned this morning, ensorcelled—infatuation with Lark had caused me to ruin my university career … this was something they couldn’t take away from me, not if the university had given it to me for the reasons they had.

  My father would be proud of me for this, I thought, and on that thought smiled at Mr. Dart.

  “What about the rest of it? We saw the cult with our own eyes—and Mr. Shipston and his sister were definitely scared of the pie, and Dominus Gleason—”

  “I’d be scared of my shadow too if my sister had been turned into a mermaid by black magic! We found out things about the pie, and like fools said so. Miss Redshank merely had to claim it as a sign from her cousin. Why would her cousin make a stargazy pie? How could she, if she is being held by the Talgarths—even with Alisoun Artquist to bring it into the middle of town? If Miss Carlin is being held captive so her magic can be stolen, how on earth did she make a pie, anyway? In fact: how do we know Miss Carlin even exists?”

  I opened my mouth to rebut all this, and then thought of the pages I’d been reading over and over again, how Lark had very clearly been stealing my unknown gift at magic and using it to make herself as charismatic and attractive as possible. Everybody had fallen for Lark—just as everybody was falling for Violet. Except, evidently, Mr. Dart, but his distrust was a new development.

  A sudden spasm of sneezes reminded me that I’d been sneezing more or less constantly since I met her, though I’d put that down to logical causes—hell! I always put my sneezing down to logical causes, despite how obviously unnatural my predilection was—and Violet seemed to have lost her anger remarkably quickly—and all it had taken was a smile for me to make friends with her.

  “Fine, then. And your explanation for why the Honourable Rag called her Miss Indrilline? Which I admit I thought was strange, but I can’t remember where I’ve heard the name before. But she really has been at Morrowlea with me for the past three years, and we’re not like the schools that have long summer holidays, so she couldn’t have been doing anything very nefarious.”

  I bit my lip, Lark’s definitely nefarious behaviou
r coming again to mind, plus the serious hole in my logic that there’d been months since the spring convocation where she could have been doing anything—not to mention she’d claimed (hell! that word again) to have spent a year doing other things—what other things?—before starting at Morrowlea.

  “Mind you, I can’t think what the Honourable Rag was playing at by naming her. It seems rash even for him.”

  I stared at him meaningfully.

  “Cartwright remembered better than I,” Mr. Dart admitted. “He collects broadsides from half of Oriole. He reminded me that The King’s Gazette had done a special a couple of years ago on all those revenge killings in Tarvenol.”

  “Hell.”

  The Indrillines were the criminal kings of the Western Sea.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  When I asked at the Green Dragon for ‘Miss Redshank’, I was greeted with deafening guffaws and several offers of drinks while I waited.

  I soon found myself ensconced in the back corner, behind a handful of dangerous-looking louts. It being a holy-day, the drinking was moderate and the gambling kept mostly out of sight. I watched people going in and out of the back room, dressed in a range of clothing from the middle heights of fashion on down to the worst lack of it, and wondered where all these people came from. Up and down the highway, I supposed. It no longer went to Astandalas, but the main road (such as it was) from South Fiellan to the Farry March branched off the fine old road just on the other side of the Woods Noirell.

  I pulled out the book on Alinorel magic and read it with what concentration I could muster. The two lines about wireweed were next to useless, but the accounts of “The Magical Uses of Drugs” were cross-referenced to a brief discussion of the old religion’s use of a dried lilac concoction to promote ‘insight’.

  I’d not brought anything with which to make notes, but I sat with my drink and read the chapter over and over again, trying to fit together Dominus Gleason and Domina Ringley, the wizard attendant and Miss Shipston, Violet’s stories and the cult. And something odd was definitely afoot with the Honourable Rag.

  I was sure I was missing something important. I was also worried about Mr. Dart going to the Talgarths’ alone, but there didn’t seem to be any way for me to get there that wouldn’t cause more problems than it solved.

  Especially since we still weren’t entirely certain what the problems were, let alone how to solve them.

  The saloon grew increasingly noisy. I was in a corner away from the main entrance, fairly near the kitchen, where the door banged open and shut regularly. Perry was the tipple of choice, with a shot of pearjack to stiffen it up. Persiflage, they called it there. Light banter, with an edge.

  I sipped mine as best I could—I’m not a hardened drinker, and despite my morning indolence and slow progress out to the Green Dragon it was only the middle of the afternoon—but the stuff was so fierce and raw that I had to swallow quickly to get it down.

  Of course I should have known better.

  ***

  After about an hour, it occurred to me that Violet had still not come back from wherever she’d gone to. I was about to get up and go home—I was just sober enough to think that was a better idea than more pearjack—when someone slid into the seat across from me.

  I eyed him a bit warily. He was not from the respectable end of town. He wore an earring like a sailor or a Traveller, crinkled hair done up in a messy queue, rough clothes more than several steps down from mine. He grinned, showing a gold tooth. Definitely not from the respectable end of town.

  He laid a gaming tube on the table. “Up for Twelve?”

  Now, my father, in the brief period of time between his second and third tours of duty, had decided that I—at the age of nine—needed to learn something of a soldier’s life. We had, accordingly, spent a glorious long summer fencing, wrestling, swearing, and gambling. (He did mention a number of the finer points of drinking but left the practical experience for a later period of my life.)

  I wasn’t all that keen on gambling as a regular thing, but I was drunk and distressed by my thoughts, so I said, “Sure,” and proceeded to clean him out of five wheatears, a bee, four silvertuns, and a handful of copper pennies before he gave up and went back to the bar, muttering.

  Remembering some words of wisdom my father had also passed on to me that summer, I used one of the wheatears to buy everyone in the Green Dragon a round, which ameliorated things rather.

  I was feeling mellow and quite right with the world when another stranger sat down in the chair across from me, dislodging Red Bess and her friend. The two women had been sizing me up since I’d started winning. I was a bit regretful that I’d been so absorbed in the account of the waxing and waning power of magical drugs in synchrony with the moon that I hadn’t noticed Red Bess until she sat down, so I couldn’t decide if she or Mrs. Etaris were in fact the shorter.

  Unlike the first gambler, who’d looked like a raffish layabout farmhand, this stranger was well-dressed in Tarvenmoor fashion, doublet, tights, codpiece, and all. He was perhaps in his forties, pale-skinned, lean and with duelling scars on his cheeks. He was easily the most dangerous-looking person I had ever seen in my life. I smiled very cautiously as he slid another glass across the table to me.

  I sneezed a little, though there mustn’t have been much magic at the Green Dragon that night (or possibly the persiflage had something to do with it), for I’d not gone through two handkerchiefs yet.

  His hat was not quite so excellent as my own, being a beaver of unexceptionable quality and last year’s style of brim. He’d made it up to look more of the mode with a grosgrain ribbon in dark garnet red, which matched his doublet. My hat was much the same, though my waistcoat was watery blue, and I was wearing my summer-weight coat, more or less back to normal after its time in the river thanks to Mrs. Buchance’s skill.

  “Good even to you.”

  He probably had more weapons in his doublet than I had handled in my entire life.

  “And to you,” I replied with an attempt at carelessness, with a nod for the two glasses. Both contained a beautifully made classic persiflage, rich golden perry with the pearjack a deeper amber teardrop in the centre. I was quite seriously impressed that he’d made it over from the bar without stirring the contents, and drunk enough that I said so out loud.

  He smiled slowly. “You’ve quite the hand at Twelve. D’you know Poacher?”

  Aside from the accent, his voice was unmemorable, his features barely more so—if one excepted the scars slashed across his cheeks. In my effort not to be entirely unnerved by the scars, the red waistcoat and ribband kept distracting my glance. I tried not to stutter when I replied. “Learned to cast at my father’s knee.”

  He pulled out a deck of cards. His were old but of high quality, hand-painted instead of cheap prints. Poacher’s more involved than Twelve or Lotto or most of the other bawdy-house gambling games, involving strategy and general wit to ‘land’ the fish—the desired high card—without entangling in the other’s ‘lines’. Three suits, Trout, Salmon, and Happenstance. Quite a lot of moves.

  There are several rules, which I won’t go into at the moment (but anyone is welcome to come over for a game any time …). It’s an old tradition that both players drink down their first glass in unison before acquiring a second, more serious round, and that the bets are made after the first hand is drawn.

  We drank our persiflages—my second, more than enough for me—and Red Bess, with a kiss to my cheek that smelled of carnations, slid out of her seat to go the bar and order us the next round. While we awaited her return, together with a few other onlookers, the stranger said, “D’you read the New Salon much?”

  “Every week,” I replied inattentively, distracted by Red Bess, who was admittedly a respected master of the art of distraction. Her working outfit was a sight to behold. The fashion would have passed muster at Dame Talgarth’s dinner party, being a Second Imperial Decadent gown in sheer pink muslin bound with complicated red ribbons
to accent the shape of her bodice. It was both utterly modest and completely lewd at the same time, and even Mr. Dart’s brother would probably have cast an admiring eye over it.

  “Read the Letters to the Editor often?”

  I recalled my attention to my smiling opponent, taking the cards for my turn shuffling. Made myself shrug. “On occasion. You?”

  “I prefer the Etiquette Questions Answered column.”

  “It is generally entertaining, and occasionally educational.”

  He laughed, a short barking kind of laugh, while I divvied the cards into their two piles, Happenstance and Fish. “So it is. But I find the Crossword most instructive.”

  I sneezed briefly as someone crossed behind me, sending a gust of wet air and sharp citrus (citrus?) over me, and spent some time pushing the handkerchief into my dirty handkerchief pocket, and had to answer at random since I’d mostly forgotten what he’d said by that point, except that it was about the New Salon. “It is diverting on a dull day.”

  “Exactly,” he said with apparent satisfaction. Red Bess set down the glasses before draping herself over the stranger’s lap from the seat next to him. He did not appear to find this unsatisfactory. I thought the pink muslin and red ribbons looked very nice next to his red doublet with white slashes, even though the reds didn’t quite match. Red Bess seemed to find the scars rather alluring.

  I dealt the Fish, and he the Happenstance cards, and we fell briefly silent to consider our hands and the bets that would come next.

  From the Happenstance cards I drew Book, Dog, and Friend with Lunch, which was a reasonable set of affairs, a good place to begin from. Then I fanned the Fish cards in my hand and tried hard not to gasp. I had the three Rainbow Trout cards and the high Salmon, and with a perfect Net in my hand had to spend the rest of the game pretending I didn’t have it.

  How to bet, I wondered frantically for a moment. I wasn’t worried about the money—not with my winnings from earlier sitting in my pocket—but I had a certain familial pride to live up to. No one had mentioned that they recognized me, but then the Green Dragon was the sort of place where they might, or they might not, depending on circumstances.