The Raconteur's Commonplace Book

by Kate Milford

  Foulk stared down at the priceless loupe. “And I can really keep this?”

  “Certainly. It’s a gift.” Morvengarde reached into his pocket again and took out a card. “I would be glad to hear from you sometime, Foulk. Write and tell me what the glass shows you. I will explain what I can. And perhaps you may return the favor in your own way.”

  “How?”

  “I am a merchant by trade, in the Roaming World,” Morvengarde said, presenting the card he’d taken from his vest.

  MORVENGARDE

  GRANDMASTER IN TOTO

  DEACON AND MORVENGARDE,

  INCORPORATED

  GOODS, SERVICES, AND EXPRESSAGE

  TRUSTED SINCE TIME IMMEMORIAL

  49 TRYSTERO WHARF, THE LIMEN DOCKS

  “Should you come across relics in your wanderings, I will buy them from you. Or, in the case of a reliquary, I—or one of my chapmen—will offer to pay them very well now in exchange for their mortal remains being left to me when they die.”

  It began that simply. A boy who could see patterns, desperately looking for the one he couldn’t quite see but that had to be there, and a lens that began to bring it into focus.

  It wasn’t precisely all around him, but the traces were more common than he’d expected. He took the loupe everywhere, glanced surreptitiously through it at everything, and began to learn to interpret what it revealed.

  Ferly showed up through the lens as a sort of nimbus—a glowing mist around a particular subject that could vary in color, density, and concentration, not unlike all those fogs in the catalog listing Mr. Haypotten described. The uncanny comes in so many flavors, after all. A person marked with ferly could possess any number of varieties of it, and if you wanted to know what you were looking at, you had to look more than once, and carefully. Ferly doesn’t only follow people. It follows objects. It can attach itself to places. It can arise from stories, dances, songs. It spreads sometimes, touching and transforming everything in its path. It is deeply complicated on many levels.

  Worden seemed at first to be simpler. Through the loupe, it looked like a halo, just as Morvengarde had said. It was hard-edged, confined; it was usually immediately obvious to what or whom the worden belonged, which was not the case with the more nebulous ferly. And it was generally a binary thing: you had it or you didn’t, and that was almost all the information the lens would show. Over time, however, Foulk would begin to be able to spot subtle differences in the halos he saw. You could have a secondary or tertiary or quaternary worden, a destiny linked to the worden of someone or something else. Worden could be modified almost endlessly by the shifting fogs of ferly. Or not. Most destinies, in fact, are not supernatural.

  The lens of the loupe opened up an entirely new world of patterns and systems, and the boy was utterly ensorcelled. He was uniquely gifted to work out all the permutations of ferly, the subtle differences in primary and dependent worden, and to interpret the results when they layered over each other. And little by little, the Roaming World became his world, though it was some time before he wrote to Morvengarde, or encountered another roamer in person.

  One day a few weeks after his meeting on that lonely road, he happened to be passing by Jacinda’s garden in the field at the edge of town. She was pulling up weeds from around the flowers that grew among the meteorites. Foulk lingered, as he always did when passing there. And as he watched her weeding and humming to herself, some imp of the perverse made him take the loupe Morvengarde had given him from his pocket.

  He fitted it to his eye, and gasped as the quality of the world changed before him. Jacinda’s garden was roiling, absolutely flooded with ferly. He had never seen so much in one place.

  He took the lens from his eye, wiped it clean on the edge of his shirt, and looked again. No, there was no mistake: the garden was positively alive with weyward lumination.

  Of course, gardens often hide secrets; we have Madame Grisaille’s tale from last night as an example. But Foulk didn’t think there was much of a secret to the ferly he was seeing. This was, after all, a garden full of things that had fallen from the sky. One of them—perhaps more than one—was, in some way, miraculous.

  He went home and wrote immediately to Morvengarde to tell him, and to ask him to come and give a valuation. Jacinda’s family wasn’t what you’d call poor, and he knew Jacinda would never willingly part with her meteorites, but he thought surely they’d all like to know if they possessed something as valuable as it seemed at least one of these sky rocks was likely to be. There might be an emergency one day, some reason they might need the money.

  A week later, a blond woman turned up at Foulk’s door with a tall, muscled man in smoked spectacles standing respectfully behind her.

  “I have come from Morvengarde,” she announced, presenting her own card. It was identical to the card the Roaming World merchant had given Foulk, except where the first had had simply the name MORVENGARDE in large copperplate followed by the title GRANDMASTER IN TOTO, this one read SELEUCIA DEACON, GRANDMASTER SECONDARIA. “I believe you have found something needing a valuation.” The tall man in the smoked spectacles said nothing.

  Something about the pair gave the boy the feeling of someone walking over his grave. But his fascination with the Roaming World had only grown since he’d met Morvengarde, and here were two more denizens, right at his door.

  “It’s a garden,” he said. “A garden of meteorites. It belongs to my friend. It’s—I think it’s got a lot of ferly to it.”

  “Show me,” the woman ordered, and together the three of them walked to the road that passed the field with Jacinda’s garden. Jacinda was there, of course, her back to them as she cut long-stemmed flowers with heads the size of saucers and laid them in a basket.

  Foulk reached into his pocket for his loupe, but Deacon had already taken a glass of her own from inside her coat. “Oh, my,” she said, even before she had the glass fitted all the way into her eye socket. She looked for a moment, then passed the glass to the man who’d come with her. He tucked the loupe between his right eye and the smoked lens covering it, made a noise of surprise, then passed it back. “Very well, Foulk,” Deacon said, pocketing the loupe. “You are absolutely right. Well done. Would you introduce us, please?”

  Heart pounding, Foulk led them to a break in the garden wall, and they walked to where Jacinda was working. She looked up from her basket of flowers as they approached. Dahlias, they were, shaped like exploding fireworks. Red ones, yellow ones, dark purple ones like the late-evening sky he had seen in the reflection of his crossroads in the rain puddle weeks before.

  Foulk could barely speak from nervousness, but somehow he managed the introduction. “Jacinda, this is Miss Deacon. I brought her here because she and her partner are merchants who specialize in . . . very valuable objects. She’s interested in your meteorites and asked me to introduce her to you.”

  In the midst of this speech, both Seleucia Deacon and the man who’d come with her looked sharply at the boy. He fumbled but carried on, thinking they were reacting to his reference to her partner; he’d meant Morvengarde, of course, but perhaps they thought he’d been referring to the silent man, who seemed to be more of a bodyguard.

  When he finished speaking, Jacinda looked to the newcomers. Her smile was friendly but wary, and Foulk realized he’d been a fool to think that Jacinda would be excited about the idea of selling her precious meteorites at any price. “It’s very nice to meet you. I don’t know if Mama and Papa will sell any of the meteorites, but they’re home, so you’re welcome to talk to them. This way.” She tucked the basket of red, yellow, and purple dahlias over one forearm and motioned toward the house.

  Before she could take a step, Seleucia Deacon put a hand on her shoulder. “Don’t bother, my dear. These are too big for us to move. But thank you. Your flowers are beautiful. And thank you, Foulk. I hope you both have a lovely evening.” And without another word, she and the bodyguard left the garden and disappeared down the road, leaving Foulk and
Jacinda staring after them, and then staring at each other.

  “That was strange,” Jacinda said.

  “Yes, it was,” Foulk replied, but he knew his friend couldn’t possibly understand just how strange it was. After all, if there was as much ferly in this garden as it had seemed, surely the size of the meteorites, troublesome though it might have been, wouldn’t have stopped Morvengarde from acquiring them.

  Then, “How have you been?” Jacinda asked. And Foulk forgot all about Deacon and Morvengarde and ferly and worden and all of it. They talked straight through until sunset, and when he left for home, Jacinda kissed his cheek, and the world rewrote itself, with new patterns bursting into existence everywhere he looked.

  At some point between the time that Foulk left and the time her mother came out to call her in for supper, Jacinda disappeared.

  Late that night, her parents came knocking on Foulk’s door. They had seen the two of them talking in the garden and had hoped the boy might know where she’d gone. And even as he shook his head no, an idea started to take shape in Foulk’s mind, and he began to feel sick to his stomach. Because there was a pattern here, impossible not to see, and he couldn’t believe he’d missed it before.

  When Deacon had looked at the garden, she’d agreed that there was a powerful source of ferly there. You are absolutely right, she’d said. Well done. But Deacon had not seemed particularly interested in the meteorites.

  Morvengarde, when he’d given Foulk the loupe, had told him to watch out for both relics and reliquaries—people who were living vessels of weyward lumination. And Foulk understood that it could be very, very difficult to tell what the swirling fog that was ferly was actually attached to. When he had looked into the garden and seen it, he’d assumed it had been emanating from one or more of the meteorites. But Jacinda had been in there too, both times, working among the rocks.

  What if she had been the source? What if she was a living reliquary?

  Morvengarde, when he’d given Foulk his assignment, had said he offered reliquaries a good price to deed their mortal remains to him after they died. But clearly no one had had any sort of conversation with Jacinda’s parents about their sixteen-year-old daughter’s funerary arrangements. Foulk shuddered. The very thought of that conversation was horrifying to him—surely it would’ve been horrifying to her parents as well.

  Was it possible Seleucia Deacon and the man in the smoked spectacles had just . . . had just taken her?

  The next day, when Jacinda didn’t turn up, Foulk went looking for Deacon and her bodyguard. No one in town had seen them. It was as if he had imagined them both.

  He wrote to Morvengarde. The following week, he received a reply: Deacon returned to HQ. Your assessment mistaken. Meteorites purely quotidian. We look forward to next find. M.

  Quotidian meant normal. Mundane. But something in that garden had not been quotidian. He wrote back again, and this time he asked the question he needed answered, point-blank: Did she take Jacinda?

  The reply was brutally short and equally evasive: Don’t be ridiculous.

  Jacinda never turned up again.

  A year later, Foulk left home. No one said it, but he couldn’t miss the clues: the whole town thought he’d had something to do with Jacinda’s disappearance. After all, he’d brought the strangers to her garden, and everyone knew there had been strangers, because he’d gone around the next day looking for them. He’d been the last person to speak to her before she’d vanished. His heart hurt, and he couldn’t take the suspicion. He packed a bag and Morvengarde’s loupe, and he took to the roads.

  He hadn’t contacted the merchant again, but it wasn’t long before Deacon and Morvengarde tracked him down. Of course, they waited until the worst possible time, when Foulk had run out of money, gotten himself into five kinds of trouble, and could see that he was about to come to a sticky end. Seleucia Deacon swooped in with her big, silent bodyguard and rescued him. She didn’t ask him to commit to working for the company, but she left the door open. And though he managed to resist it for years, inevitably, just before the American War Between the States broke out, Foulk wound up walking through that door. He tucked Morvengarde’s loupe firmly into his eye socket and went in search of ferly and worden, wandering all the trails of the Roaming World.

  Over time, Foulk became one of Deacon and Morvengarde’s most profitable chapmen. And eventually, Morvengarde en­trust­ed him with a unique and very special charge. You see, he turned out to have a certain touch of ferly himself: whether he’d been born with it or whether it was a matter of his constant daily interactions with it, the boy—now a young man—never knew. But along with his gift for recognizing systems, he turned out to also have a gift for spotting patterns and systems in time.

  Time, of course, is as complicated as ferly. More, even. It can move in what seems like a line, can seem to be measurable by the predictable cascade of sand through glass, but that’s mere illusion. The ability to see beyond the illusion to the truth of it is vanishingly rare, but Foulk could do it. It was a glorious challenge, like the hunt for the obscure hidden pattern that he now understood was the existence of the Roaming World. He had solved that problem, and so he turned himself to the question of time. And his employers bestowed upon him a device that helped him simplify the workings—the reckonings—it took to really see and anticipate the vagaries and interactions of time and space.

  Because, just as he’d sensed with his glimpses of the Roaming World so long ago, Foulk began to see that there were brief points in time when the patterns and systems shifted. Loops could be broken. Whole new possibilities opened up. In those moments, great and even impossible things could be done—if you didn’t miss the moment. For the most part, those junctures were impossible to anticipate; they were the confluence of so many factors that even Foulk’s brain couldn’t hold and calculate them all, and some came and went in less time than it took a heart to shudder. But Foulk could see how to do it. And with the aid of Morvengarde’s device, he learned to calculate, anticipate, and use those moments.

  As for Jacinda . . . it seems strange to say it, perhaps especially when talking of a man who was rapidly becoming something like an artificier of time and space, but . . . Foulk never looked back. At first it was that he couldn’t bear to learn what he knew he would find, because it was impossible not to understand what happened when Morvengarde made a deal. Foulk learned that the Great Merchant never risked losing a relic. Yes, the terms of the deals he made were always that he would collect the relics after death. But no reliquary who made a deal with Morvengarde ever lived long after that.

  Jacinda had surely been dead for a long time.

  As the years went by, Foulk found another reason not to look back, or reminisce, or ask any untoward questions. He didn’t want anyone to think he cared. And while he feigned carelessness, Foulk began to plan. Someday, he decided, someday he would go back for Jacinda. He would take his still-broadening skills and Morvengarde’s mechanism, and he would reset her life, and save her from himself.

  But he couldn’t hurry. This was the kind of thing he’d have only one shot at, and there was every chance that, even if he succeeded, it would be the death of him. He had no idea what Deacon and Morvengarde had done with Jacinda’s relics, but if he managed to save her, whatever parts of her they’d deemed valuable would vanish, and the merchants would be furious at the loss. He couldn’t fail, and his likelihood of success went to zero if Deacon and Morvengarde doubted his loyalty for even a second. He planned, and he told himself he was waiting for the moment: that one juncture that was the singular true conjunction of time and opportunity for the saving of the girl he had loved when he was a boy.

  And in the meantime, he did terrible things.

  He did whatever they asked. He told himself this was to avoid any doubt they might’ve otherwise had, and he told himself when he went back to rescue Jacinda, it would all be undone. He told himself it would be as if all the dreadful things he had done had never happened at
all—even though by then he knew that wasn’t necessarily true. Time isn’t like a strand you can tease out of a muffler or a knot and, simply by pulling on it, undo the whole. Foulk knew that. But he was also becoming incredibly good at time reckoning, and he told himself he’d find a way to undo Jacinda’s death in a manner that would also undo all the rest of his crimes.

  He told himself many, many lies.

  All the while, the years spiraled around him. The War Between the States began. Foulk worked as a sutler, following armies and selling to soldiers, still seeking worden and ferly amid the hellscape of the Civil War in his own era, and in times and places beyond that. Battle had its particular set of systems, and so did time, but he saw all the patterns, quotidian and uncanny. He carried on.

  It is . . . difficult to break from any orbit. He tried not to think of Jacinda, but when he did, Foulk thought of her garden and the meteorites that had broken free of all sorts of forces—more than he understood at the time—to land improbably in what would become her dahlia beds. He himself was feeling more and more like a satellite, flung in loops that changed in subtle ways even while bringing him back over and over again to basically the same place. He put off returning to Jacinda in her garden. There was always a reason, though never a good one.

  There are some systems, some patterns, you can access only if you’re willing to give something up. To really understand the deeper realities they reveal, some systems force you to make sacrifices. There is a property of multiplication, for instance, that states that three times four gives you the same result as four times three. But there is a kind of mathematics that’s done with four-dimensional numbers called quaternions. It is the mathematics of rotation in three-dimensional space: the mathematics of orbits, in fact. If you want to do these kinds of calculations, you must first accept that A times B no longer equals B times A. And then there are eight-dimensional numbers called octonions, which require you to give up other fundamental mathematical properties. There are . . . well, truths that have to be tossed aside to understand these strange mathematics, which are also true.