Black Iron

by Franklin Veaux

  Exactly what he wanted.

  He had succeeded in the Guard by being clever enough not to show anyone how clever he was, and by honing a highly advanced deference to his betters. He was also tall, and had the strength that came from lifting heavy baskets. That helped, but it was mostly those other things that had facilitated his progression through the ranks.

  The job did come with certain duties beyond standing still and deferring to his betters, and one of those duties was reporting infractions of the law. Roderick was not aware of any area of the law that specifically covered ladies of high birth assisting unknown gentlemen in leaving the Queen’s airship by means of the loading door while the ship was in flight, but there were rules that covered “suspicious activity,” and jumping out of the back of an airship, he reasoned, might be at least a bit suspicious. He figured he really ought to do something. Problem was, from the looks of it, doing something meant detaining a young lady who was not only of noble birth, but the daughter of King Philip XVIII of France, and on top of that was due to marry the Queen’s half brother. No part of that looked good for Roderick’s career prospects.

  On the whole, he would have preferred to live his life hawking the finest imported silks. Imported silks, he thought with perhaps understandable naivety, seldom tried to kill you.

  The wind drove a hard slap of rain into his face, threatening to knock his helmet off. He righted it absently, frowning.

  The Lady Alÿs drew herself to her full height. Most people became more imposing when they did that, but in her case, it still left her a bit short of five feet tall. Her curly black hair, which usually tended toward frizzy even when sternly disciplined by comb and tie, managed to pull itself together long enough to stream imperiously in the damp breeze. “Do you have any idea who I am?” she demanded.

  “Oh yes, I do, my lady,” Roderick said, bowing very slightly. “I do indeed.” His voice sounded a bit rueful. “Meaning no offence, my lady, but I would be remiss in my duties if I didn’t report this…” He glanced out the gaping cargo door into the gray rain outside. “This…um, this whatever-it-is to Her Majesty. I think it might be best for both our sakes if you come along with me. We’ll let her sort this out.” His cape billowed behind him dramatically.

  From Alÿs’s perspective, the day was going inexplicably sideways. And it had started out so well. The Queen’s flying parties were famous, and this party promised to be posh even by the normal standards of the Court. Queen Margaret was entertaining a special guest, namely the ambassador from the Ottomans, and had gone to considerable lengths to impress. There was to be a grand buffet, part meal and part (the better part, truth be told) an opulent display of wealth, with long tables of polished oak groaning under the weight of food so fancy that it was, in some cases, not even entirely clear which bit went into your mouth.

  The Queen herself was dressed to impress as well, in a long but form-hugging brocaded dress with a lot of complicated and fussy bits on the front that somehow managed to conceal all the things a dress was supposed to conceal while still exposing enough to have set tongues wagging even five years ago.

  But fashion is a mercurial thing, and one of the nice things about being a monarch was that you got to set the fashion. Many of the same women of the Court who would a few years back have found Margaret’s dress entirely outré were, this evening, just as outrageously dressed themselves, as it ever has been with those who cleave close to the bosom of power.

  After the meal, there would be an all-evening dance attended by the various barons, dukes, earls, and viscounts who made up that part of the royal Court that mattered. There would be subtle flirting and endless gossip to catch up on. Alÿs’s betrothed, His Excellency Sir Leo the Duke of Byron-on-shire, would be there, but no matter: His Excellency the Duke had scarcely passed his eleventh birthday and would be tucked somewhere out of sight the moment the first dance finished.

  The decision that Alÿs would marry the Duke had been met with some small degree of shock and more than a few whispers behind exquisitely gloved hands. Alÿs was three years older than His Excellency, and some felt that an older woman with a younger man was distressingly modern, even scandalous. But the union of the French and English royal houses carried with it no small advantages, and Alÿs, being the youngest of four siblings, was the most available to be sent off to a distant land for political purpose, so there it was. What could you do?

  Such evenings were not without their charms. Alÿs had been looking forward to gossiping with the Lady Eleanor de Revier, the Queen’s favored lady-in-waiting. Alÿs had heard a rumor that Viscount Thomas Holland of Huntingdon was feuding with Baron William Marlboro, he of the bulbous red nose, over something involving the upcoming marriage of the good baron’s daughter. As a result, Holland was making noises about withdrawing his support for Marlboro’s son Bernard to attend the Academy of Military Arts, which would in all probability mean that the appointment would go to Richard, the son of the Duke of Barnstaple, instead. The Duke’s family was in good graces with the Baron of Harringworth, whose brother had just been killed in that dreadful war in Afghanistan that never seemed to end, so he would be bound to have a spirited opinion on the subject. Lady Eleanor would surely know every detail.

  The zeppelin tilted up away from its mooring, making for the early evening sky. The city slipped away beneath them. Eleanor sidled up to Alÿs at the buffet to whisper hints of something even bigger than the developing feud between the Huntingdons and Marlboros. Something, she said, she had just learned about Charles Rathman, Earl of Shrewsbury, uncle to Her Most Royal Majesty and overseer of the evening’s festivities. “Find me later,” she giggled, and scurried away. Alÿs nodded, momentarily distracted by a minor kerfuffle at the far end of the buffet line, where an odd little man had set off a wave of tittering by picking up the wrong fork.

  This was exactly the sort of gaffe that would, in more ordinary times, have attracted the sustained attention of Alÿs and the entire rest of the Court for days. For those born to the aristocratic class, silverware was a serious matter, rivaling in complexity the Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica that Alÿs had struggled through with her frustrated tutors. It existed almost entirely as one of the many little rituals the upper crust of society created to separate themselves from the more beastly sorts of people, and only incidentally to assist in the pragmatic matter of conveying comestibles from plate to mouth.

  But these were not usual times. The matter of the fork could not hope to compete with the matter of the Turks.

  Margaret had personally invited Tahkir, the Ottoman ambassador, aboard her airship, setting many brows furrowing and many tongues wagging. He sat at the end of the table like some great exotic masthead carved in the prow of a ship, wearing an extraordinary outfit of yellow and blue, woven through with gold thread and decorated exquisitely with gemstones.

  The ambassador smiled easily and often as he moved through the people, chatting with nobles and servants alike. He was surrounded by half a dozen members of his own personal guard, all dark eyes and sleek black hair, who smiled far less often than the ambassador did. They too were dressed in robes of yellow and blue that set them apart from the Queen’s aristocratic guests in their opulent dresses and fashionable suits.

  Alÿs looked forward to dancing with the ambassador later that evening. She had met him twice before at Margaret’s parties. She found him an excellent dancer and a charming conversationalist, always eager to listen to whatever she had to say, however trivial or gossipy. He seemed to take genuine delight in hearing her stories about her family back in France, about the goings-on in Margaret’s Court, and about anything else she wanted to talk about.

  There was talk, though it was more whispered than spoken aloud, that Margaret planned to make an Ottoman a member of her Guard, an unprecedented departure from tradition that caused the narrowing of many eyes. Compared to that, the strange little man with his clumsy inability to naviga
te the tricky shoals of proper dinner etiquette was more footnote than main story.

  The feast ended. The band assembled on the edge of the dance floor. Her Royal Highness and her guests moved to the airship’s Great Hall, where the members of the Court arrayed themselves under the curious eyes of the Ottomans.

  Alÿs and her betrothed shared the first dance, as was the custom. The young Duke was a quick-witted lad with dark eyes and dark hair, only slightly taller than Alÿs herself. The Duke was a fine dancer, despite his age. Alÿs glowed with pleasure as they whirled together on the dance floor, soaking up the attention from the assemblage of aristocrats.

  Alÿs noticed the man after her dance. The shoes were the first things that caught her eye. They were fetchingly designed, made of several different kinds of leather cunningly arrayed in a carefully crafted artifice of randomness. They were tipped with metal points, slightly upturned, in a style currently the rage back home in Paris.

  The shoes were attached to the feet of the strange man who had very nearly used a dessert fork in place of a fruit fork, to his unending shame at this and every future Court function at which he might appear until the end of time.

  She looked him up and down. He seemed to have been purpose-built as the exemplar of the word “nondescript.” Dark hair, dark eyes, not unlike the Ottomans standing to one side of the dance floor. Slight of build, with one of those faces that you forget the moment you look away.

  She didn’t recall ever having seen him before this evening. That piqued her interest. She was intimately acquainted with all the members of the Queen’s Court and could tell you, were you of a mind to listen, their titles, crests, histories, and endless minutiae of who favored whom and who was most likely at a moment’s notice to challenge whom to a duel, the outcome of which would be talked about for weeks. She was acquainted with the ever-changing swirl of consorts, attendants, squires, lackeys, and various hangers-on that buzzed around the noble families like a cloud of hopeful, gaily dressed flies. She knew the comings and goings of the ambassadors, lesser diplomats, and other functionaries who made their living operating the vast machinery of the state, and could even recognize in passing the couriers and servants whose jobs were likely to bring them in contact with civilization’s more refined elements.

  And this man was a complete, utter mystery.

  If there was one thing that intrigued the Lady Alÿs, it was a mystery. Preferably the sort of mystery that could be turned into a juicy bit of gossip of the sort that was the standard medium of exchange among her peers.

  “Who are you?” she asked, curiosity making her bold.

  He bowed, looking flustered. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I have—”

  “It’s ‘I’m sorry, my lady,’” Alÿs said. “And I insist.” She had a way of insisting that hinted darkly of unfortunate events to those who failed to obey her. It was a strategy that cut straight through her combined disadvantages of stature and youth. “I am Lady Alÿs de Valois, and I would very much like to make your acquaintance.”

  She offered her gloved hand. He took it gingerly, as though he expected it to crawl off her arm and do something hideous.

  The man reached out and shook her hand in the manner of a carpenter or a fruit purveyor or some other member of the coarser classes. Alÿs was most thoroughly and astonishedly shocked.

  “I saw you at dinner earlier,” she said when she had reclaimed her appendage. “You seemed to be having difficulty managing your tableware. Who are you?”

  “I am, that is…” He hesitated. “I am the second cousin once removed of the Earl of Glaucaster, visiting London from Canterbury.” He had the look of one reading from a script at an audition.

  “Oh? Charles has a cousin? I had no idea!” Alÿs said mischievously. “So you know his sister, Gertrude, then?”

  “Of course!” the strange little man said. “Gertrude. Yes, of course, I know Gertrude well. Lovely woman.”

  “His sister’s name is Francine,” Alÿs said. “She’s quite a nasty woman. Who are you really?”

  “I told you! I’m—”

  “I know what you told me,” Alÿs said. “I asked who you were.”

  The little man bowed awkwardly several times. “I would love to stay and chat, but I must be off. Thank you, Your Eminen—Your Gr—that, is, um, m’lady,” he said.

  “Oh, no you don’t,” Alÿs said. “Who are you really?” She looked him up and down. “Where do you really come from?”

  “I really have to go, um, m’lady,” the strange man said. His brown eyes carried the desperate look of a rabbit in a snare.

  “Before we get to know each other? I think not. I want you to stay so I can learn all about you.” Alÿs moved to take his hand.

  But then the Earl of Tuscón slipped smoothly between them, bowing deeply enough to be obsequious. “The pleasure of a dance, my lady?” he said. Before Alÿs could protest, the strange man in the fetching shoes melted away like a ghost.

  As they whirled around the dance floor, Alÿs kept scanning the crowd for the odd little man. The earl was a consummate dancer, and if he noticed Alÿs’s distraction, he was far too much of a gentleman to remark upon it. Not that he was really much of a gentleman; Alÿs had heard from Eleanor that she had it on good authority from none other than the Lady Jane Holland, the second daughter of the Viscount Thomas Holland, that the earl was running about in scandalous fashion with a lady of the evening from Highpole Street, and with his wife expecting their second child in just a few months—the inhumanity of it!

  The dance ended. Alÿs disentangled herself from the Earl of Tuscón’s damp grasp and headed off in the general direction the strange man had gone. He was nowhere to be seen. Odd, that. The Queen’s zeppelin was the largest airship ever constructed, but it was not so large it offered many places to hide.

  She made excuses, waving her hand vaguely in the direction of the zeppelin’s privies with an expression that suggested she would be unavailable for a time, and set out on a serious search. Now that she had both hands wrapped firmly around a genuine mystery, she was reluctant to let go.

  She found him, finally, in the last place it would occur to her to look, a part of the vessel ordinarily only visited by members of the servant class. He was unfolding a large, complicated-looking structure made of bamboo and black silk, a great delta-winged kite so large its wingtips almost brushed the storeroom’s walls. The large doors, used for provisioning the zeppelin with food for the banquets and normally secured for flight, hung wide. Cold wind howled outside.

  “Who are you?” she demanded, gripping the doorway.

  He looked wildly around the room. “Me? Um…I’m, that is…”

  “What are you doing with that contraption?”

  “What? This? Oh. I was just going to…” He sighed. “It’s a long story.” He fumbled in his pockets. “How do people wear these pants?”

  “You don’t belong here,” Alÿs said conversationally. She felt like this was one of those situations where she ought to be afraid, but she had never quite got the hang of fear.

  “You have no idea how right you are,” the man said ruefully. He fiddled with something on the contraption he was holding. “Here, can you hold this for a second?”

  He passed her a smooth bamboo strut. She took it, bemused. “Okay, so, this cloth bit wraps around here, like this, see,” he said. “And then this part comes down here like this, see? And then I just fasten this harness around my chest and I just hold on to this bit, and…thank you. I can take that back now.” He took the strut from Alÿs and fitted it into the frame of the kite.

  “Hey there! Stop right there! What do you think you’re up to, then?”

  Alÿs turned. The guard loomed in the doorway, watching the two of them with suspicion.

  “I think that’s my cue,” the stranger said. “Sorry, lovely talking to you, can’t stay. Goodbye!” He turned and leapt
through the door into the yawning chasm below. Alÿs heard the flutter of silk, then nothing but the wind.

  Alÿs and Roderick watched in open-mouthed astonishment.

  Roderick recovered his wits first. “Right. My lady, I think you best come with me,” he said.

  ✦

  Her Royal Highness was mightily displeased, and more than a little disbelieving. “He did what, Alice?” she said, deliberately mispronouncing the name just to show her displeasure. Alÿs felt her face grow hot. There was a cluster of people, mostly lords and ladies from the dance but also a handful of the Royal Guard, gathered around them. Someone sniggered. Alÿs felt an urge to stomp her foot.

  “Jumped, Your Grace.” She stared resolutely at a point just behind Margaret’s left ear.

  “What did this…man look like?”

  “Well, he was—he had—” Alÿs stammered. She closed her eyes, but could produce nothing more than a vague recollection of the kind of bland, unextraordinary face that seldom leaves anything but vague recollections. “He had exquisite shoes. Your Grace.”

  “Just so there is no mistake, you are saying that a strange man with—” she frowned “—with exquisite shoes snuck aboard our zeppelin, to attend our party, a party whose invitation list was carefully overseen by none other than the Cardinal himself, a man known to your father, as we recall—and then jumped out a window?”

  “It was the loading door, Your Grace.”

  Roderick nodded enthusiastically. “’S true!” he said. “I saw it with me own eyes. She helped that man put together some sort of apparatus. Like a big kite or something. I saw her! Then he went right out the doo—out the window, Your Grace. Boom! Just like that. The two of them were in cahut—cehoot—working together, Your Grace.”

  The Queen’s face grew cold. “Is that so?”

  This time Alÿs did stomp her foot. “Absolutely not! I have no idea who he was. I was trying to find out what he was up to before this big oaf scared him off. I am not in cahoots with anyone. Your Grace.”