The Raconteur's Commonplace Book

by Kate Milford

  “I didn’t leave any dots!” Maisie argued. “If there was a pattern, I’d know! It was my story!”

  “Ah, well.” Amalgam cleared his throat delicately. “Storytellers often don’t know what the hell they’re talking about, Maisie, my dear. A troublesome truth it’s taken me a lifetime to come to terms with.”

  “By contrast . . .” Masseter took another drink—less a sip this time than a slug. He reached into his watch pocket and produced something small and gleaming from it: a silvery brooch in the shape of a flower, enameled in red and green and indigo, which he tucked into the palm with the firework scars without appearing to notice he was doing it. “By contrast,” he said as he clenched and unclenched his fist against the sharp edges of the metal flower, “I am cursed to spot patterns and understand systems. I cannot not see them. And that, young lady, is how I caught the things you had left out, and knew how they would change your tale.”

  “Useful skill, that,” Amalgam observed. “I wouldn’t mind having a bit of that curse.”

  “You might think so,” Masseter agreed, but his voice was grim. “Until you can see things in complete systems, you have no way of knowing how the smallest change in flow or sink will alter one, to say nothing of all the other intangibles that act upon things. So take this room, on this night. There’s the rain and the tide working against the soil and rock and riverbed outside, yes. But.” He nodded gallantly at Sorcha. “Also at work there is the particular geometry of the logs in a fire. There is the movement through the room of bodies around a house of cards.” He glanced at Petra and raised an eyebrow. “There is the telling of a particular tale at a particular time.”

  “And what is this system you’re describing?” Petra said with a grin.

  “Well, that’s so often the difficulty with them,” Masseter replied with a bow of his head. “It’s hard to know where one ends and another begins. Small systems feed into bigger ones like tributaries.” His green eye flashed closed and open again, a strange, hard-edged wink. “They’re rather like stories that way, in fact.”

  Petra stood and went over to refill her own glass. “I wonder. You know, it might be your turn, Mr. Masseter. Have you got a story to tell yourself?”

  Masseter stood by as Petra reached past him for a bottle. “It’s rather come to that, hasn’t it?” he said quietly. “It’s down to you and me.” She smiled up at him in perfect innocence; there was a glitter in her eye that he thought was not from the fire. “Fine.” He darted a glare across the parlor at Maisie. “The knave is not a villain.”

  “Hear, hear,” Captain Frost pronounced from across the room, folding his arms across his chest.

  “He’s right,” Tesserian whispered as he reached over to hand Maisie the queen of puppets.

  She took the card in one hand, then remembered she still held the little handmade book in the other. “Wait.” She offered it back to Negret.

  But the bookbinding twin shook his head. “No, keep it,” he said, taking Forel’s roll of tools from his pocket and nodding at the stack of paper and the awl that already sat on the table beside his chair. “I can make another.” Mrs. Haypotten pursed her lips hard, eyeing the sharp implements in the roll as Negret began straightening the papers into a stack, but she said nothing.

  “Thank you.” Maisie tucked the book in the pocket of her frock, then looked critically at the castle to find exactly the right place for the queen in her hand.

  Masseter, meanwhile, waited at the sideboard until Petra had returned to her seat on the sofa. Then he took another long sip and two steps toward the center of the room. “Here goes, then.”

  SIXTEEN

  The Gardener of Meteorites

  The Chapman’s Tale

  In another place, in another time, there was a boy who could see the patterns.

  All of them. And he nearly went mad with it.

  Humans, like many creatures, are built to recognize patterns. It’s a protection—a way to find what we need to survive, and also to see the dangers lurking in the shadows. It is how we recognize the things we sense, and how we understand the ways in which they fit into the world around us.

  And patterns are everywhere. In the clouds. In the tides. In the red fruit, so like an apple, that hangs from the tree, just within reach, when you find yourself famished by the side of the road at high noon; in the creature whose face reminds you of a wolf’s, the one you will now edge slowly away from. In the seedpods of pinecones and the nesting of spirals. In music, in speech.

  In all these damned stories. Sequences. Series. Systems. Loops. Echoes.

  This boy . . . let’s call him—no, not Pantin; though I imagine you haven’t heard the last of his tales, Maisie. Anyhow, this boy wasn’t from Nagspeake at all. Let’s call him Foulk.

  Foulk couldn’t turn the patterns off. He couldn’t stop seeing them, sensing them, anticipating them. The natural ones, the intentional ones, the accidental ones and coincidental ones; the meaningful ones and the ones that were there, unmissable, but simply didn’t mean anything. The almost-patterns—oh, those were often worse: the ones that never quite manifested, or came close enough to meaningfulness to make him want to scream with frustration. Panes of window glass that didn’t quite match. A sound repeated, its rhythm just out of phase with the order his brain expected. Torture on top of torture. And it was all constant. An assault, like voices screaming in his ears and pounding in his head all the time. Torchlight, directed straight into the eyes.

  He dreamed of emptiness, and silence. A cloudless, birdless, colorless sky; a dark sea with no scent, no temperature, and no motion.

  And then, one day when he was not quite fifteen, he had an idea. He decided the way to force all those patterns to fade into the background was to try to make himself look for one particular system among all the rest. Just one thread, one web in the forest of information. Because as he grew, as he became more and more accustomed to the constant barrage as one becomes accustomed to the needle-pain of freezing water or the sandpaper ache of smoggy air in the lungs . . . he had begun to become aware of something.

  Not aware of the actual pattern, per se—not in the sense of being able to see it or smell it or touch it. But he thought he could perceive it. Perceive that it must exist, even if he couldn’t spot it yet or pick it out of everything else. But he could feel it like pressure in his brain. All those years of inundation had made him unable to miss the hints of it, the moments he thought must be part of something bigger. They could not all be coincidence, nor all accidental. They could not all be meaningless.

  Roads that lie strangely on the landscape. Springs that wind their devices in ways that physics cannot explain. Preternatural lights, unaccountable fogs, ice that freezes where it shouldn’t, its crystals forming according to aberrant geometries with their own inexplicably deviative patterns. The uncanniness of some numbers, some fires, and the occasional lone blue stair.

  Yes.

  He began to search for more iterations of the data he thought might be part of the invisible pattern. And he began to find them, amid the noise of everything else. But these were like pieces of a puzzle that seemed they ought to fit, and simply . . . didn’t. Or at least, if there was a means to make them fit, he couldn’t find the right way to turn them.

  There was one other pattern he looked for, and it centered around a girl. Her name was Jacinda, and in the rare moments when Foulk could stop the rushing of stimulus long enough to notice anything as more than a term in a sequence, he noticed her. He loved how she, almost alone among everything else in the world, could exist outside a pattern in his mind. Yes, she was part of a family, and also human, and also fit into any number of other taxonomies he could’ve named. But she seemed to shake them off as she walked. They trailed behind her, no more substantial than a shadow, or a cobweb. Outside the obscure, indiscernible pattern he sought, she was the only thing he actively tried to place. He loved her, and he ached to know where she fit into the set that also included himself.

 
Jacinda kept a garden in a field at the edge of town, a garden that was a miracle in its own way. It had not one but four meteorites in it that, according to local legend, had fallen from the sky on four separate occasions at some time in the unspecified past. One was smallish, pocked with golden and glittering crystals, and looked as if a pair of strong arms could lift it. The other three meteorites were iron, full of shallow pits and indentations that made them look as if hundreds of gigantic fingers had pressed into them all over, and varied from about the size of a large curled-up cat to that of a large curled-up sheep. And all around these, in the shallow remains of the craters they still sat in, Jacinda had planted tangles of flowers and vines and brambles.

  But she was not a gentle, quiet horticulturist, this little gardener of meteorites. She was fierce, and she was brilliant. She knew the science behind those huge chunks of crystal and iron, and half the reason she planted things there was to attack with her fingers, her spade, and her gleaming curved garden shears the weeds that tried to choke them.

  So Foulk looked for the obscure pattern he could sense but not see, and he yearned for Jacinda, and those two things held back the madness of the rest of the things he could not ignore, and time passed. The pattern still eluded him, but the search for it accomplished what Foulk had hoped: it drove the others into the scenery. Little by little, he forgot what it was like to see them all, hear them all, sense them all. They became a blur, a rushing in the background, like the landscape seen from a carriage or a train when your eye is focused somewhere other than on the window and what flashes by outside it. But it was still all there, ready to pop back into focus at any time.

  One afternoon when he was almost sixteen, Foulk took a walk, looking for his pattern. He walked straight out of town on one of those old, old roads that crisscrossed the country. He ignored the infinitely repeating spirals and ratios in every flower head and he forced himself not to try to predict the movements of the flocking starlings or get lost in the wave action of wind across the wheat in the fields. Instead he looked for examples of the elusive system, and he let the road carry him deep into the countryside.

  It had rained earlier that afternoon, but the sky had cleared, and now as the sun began to set with red and gold clarity, it reflected off the puddles that still lay in depressions in the rutted old roadway. He tried to ignore these, too; seeing the perfect mirroring of the world above in the road below at those uneven intervals was like sitting under a leaky roof that dropped single drips onto his forehead without predictable frequency. It was both system and nonsystem, and it hurt.

  But then, because of course he couldn’t totally ignore the puddles if he wanted to keep his feet dry, he saw something that made him stop: a puddle that reflected something it shouldn’t have.

  Reflections are predictable, mostly. They can be calculated. But mirrors, even the most ordinary of them, are uncanny. They all have a glaze of what Foulk would soon come to call the quality of ferly. Any surface that can become a mirror has the potential for bewitchment.

  This puddle showed him a fingerpost, with two hand-shaped signs offset from each other by ninety degrees.

  Foulk looked up and around himself, but of course, if he’d been walking toward a huge road sign, he’d have known it. There wasn’t a sign. There wasn’t even a crossroads. There was just this one very old, very rutted road, which he’d been following now for a good four miles without a single turning, and there were no intersections visible ahead, either.

  But when he looked back down at his feet, Foulk found the crossroads still there in the puddle, plain as day. Or not, actually, because the sky over the reflected fingerpost was not the bright clear sunset of Foulk’s own sky, but a deeply twilit one instead: dark enough that even when he crouched for a closer look, Foulk couldn’t read the words on either of the finger-shaped signs. But he could see himself. There was a Foulk in the reflection, perfectly mirroring the boy’s surprise as he looked out of the puddle.

  “You can see it,” said a voice, and another face appeared in the puddle.

  It was . . . well, it was Morvengarde, and it’s impossible to describe the man until he’s standing before you. But there he was. He was there in the reflection, and he was there still when Foulk turned away from the water on the ground and looked back at the real sky, looming over the boy and blocking out what was left of the sun.

  It may surprise you, since Morvengarde and the company he founded are so much a part of Nagspeake history, to know that he has a place in the world beyond this city. But his shadow is long and his reach is broad—even so far as to lonely country roads in the middle of nowhere.

  And when he appeared to Foulk on that lonely road, he was so instantly, obviously a part of the obscure system Foulk sought, and Foulk was so desperately relieved to have not one but two terms in the pattern—the reflection that did not reflect the world around it, and the stranger himself—that the boy almost completely failed to notice how terrifying the man was. At first, anyway.

  “Yes,” Foulk said, getting to his feet. “I see it. But where is it?”

  “That particular crossing?” the man nodded down at the fingerpost. “Everywhere. Everywhere you are, anyhow. It’s the crossroads you carry with you.”

  “I carry a crossroads even when I’m not at one?” Foulk asked, looking back down at the reflection.

  “Oh, you’re at one,” the man said with a smile. Then he held out a hand. “My name is Morvengarde.”

  Foulk introduced himself, but he couldn’t tear his eyes away from the puddle. “Why can I see it? Can everyone see their crossroads?”

  “Certainly not,” Morvengarde said, chuckling. “Most people would go mad if they had to be reminded constantly that their choices have consequences. You can see it because—and correct me if I err—you often see things others cannot. And what you cannot see,” he added meaningfully, “you sense.”

  “The obscure system,” Foulk said eagerly. “It’s real, isn’t it? This is part of it. You’re part of it. Tell me what it is! Please. I’ve been looking for so long.”

  “It doesn’t have a single name,” Morvengarde said. “Different people have different names for it. The one I hear most is the Roaming World.”

  “The Roaming World,” Foulk breathed. The relief was staggering. It reminded him of when he’d been much, much younger and had discovered that he was not, in fact, crazy, but that the number sequence and accompanying ratio he’d begun seeing everywhere were known phenomena and even had names: the Fibonacci sequence and the golden mean.

  “It will come clearer over time,” Morvengarde said. “The more you see, the more you look, the more you will find it. It hides in plain sight, but like many patterns, the overall structure becomes increasingly evident the more data you have.”

  “Is it really a whole world? And is it a whole separate world?” Foulk asked, looking down at the puddle. “Is there . . . is that some sort of portal? Or is this Roaming World just a system within this world?”

  “Young man, philosophers have given entire lifetimes to that question. Perhaps someday you will be the one to answer it.” Morvengarde reached into an inside pocket of his long coat. “It’s a rare thing to encounter a roamer at the start of his wanderings. Allow me to give you a gift of welcome.” And he took out a small magnifing glass like a jeweler’s loupe. “This, I believe, will help you see.”

  Foulk took the glass. “What is it?”

  “Look through it.”

  Foulk obeyed and peered up at the stranger. Morvengarde was suddenly outlined in vapor and astonishing color against the fields. It was as if he both wore a halo and was also generating glowing smoke that billowed away from his tall figure.

  The boy yelped and pulled the glass away. The world returned to normal. He put it back, and once again Morvengarde was a thing of strange light and shadow.

  “Is this how you see the world?” Foulk breathed in wonder.

  “No, indeed,” the stranger said. “Even among roamers, very few ha
ve the ability to see as you do, even when aided by a glass like that one. You have very special vision.”

  “What is it about you that the glass is showing me?” Foulk asked, too caught up in all this new information for tact or caution.

  “Well, I couldn’t say,” Morvengarde replied, tucking his hands into his pockets. “Describe it.”

  Foulk tried, fumbling over words like halo and nimbus and fog, then radiance and visible light and refraction and even foam before Morvengarde, laughing, threw up his hands. “Enough. I think I can tell you what you’re seeing.”

  We have heard from Mr. Haypotten about the makers of reliquaries here in Nagspeake, and the spectacular vessels they craft for containing the wondrous. But there is another kind of reliquary.

  When do the remains of a miraculous person become miraculous themselves? A saint must—generally speaking—perform some number of miracles in life, but must also—again, generally—be dead before he or she can be given the title. But surely that’s just formality. Some people contain the wondrous within themselves throughout their lives. How would they perform marvels in the first place, if there wasn’t a core of the miraculous, some strange power already within them?

  Mr. Morvengarde had a name for this quality. Worden: the quality of having a fate, a destiny, and he was always in search of those who possessed it. He also looked for those touched by a quality he called ferly—the strange and uncanny. Worden and ferly were revealed by a phenomenon Morvengarde called weyward lumination: weird light.

  Objects that gave off weyward lumination he called relics, and people with worden or ferly—or best of all, both—he referred to as reliquaries: living, breathing, walking vessels for the miraculous. Foulk would very quickly discover, however, that not everyone is a saint who happens to be a reliquary.

  “When you look at me,” Morvengarde finished, “you are seeing both kinds of weyward light. Worden is the halo, and ferly is the mist.”