by Kate Milford
It’s not easy to let go of things you have always known to be true. But imagine finding that the patterns and facts you’ve held contain the evidence of a whole new reality you never suspected was there. And imagine that, to even begin to understand it, you have to question some things you’ve always believed. Bit by bit, you cast away little truths. A times B equals B times A. Or, I am not the sort of person who would willingly allow another person to die. Little by little, you give up everything you think you understand about the world. Oh, those certainties are still there, even still accurate in their way . . . but if you let yourself see them—if, in your confusion in the new and strange world you are exploring, you turn back even for a moment toward the old one—everything collapses.
This was Foulk, working for Morvengarde, trying to figure out how to break his orbit and waiting for the right moment to strike amid all the strange loops of his life. But late at night he tortured himself with questions. How many rotations, then, would it take? How many revolutions, how many spheres and rivers washing over him, how many perfect shuffles of spacetime, to return to where he started and who he had been?
And then, several things happened at more or less the same time.
Things one and two: Foulk failed an assignment, and he got Seleucia Deacon killed. That is a tale in itself, but the most amazing thing about it might’ve been that it did not get Foulk killed in response.
When he got over his shock, Foulk realized he’d likely been spared only because the one other person on Morvengarde’s staff who could reckon with time as well as he could had been Deacon herself. After that, he decided it was time to stop putting off going back for Jacinda. After all, he’d unexpectedly been given a second chance after a terrible mistake. There wouldn’t be another of those, and if he died before he hadn’t at least tried to fix that first horrible error he’d made, everything else he’d done, all those other dreadful choices, would be for naught.
He decided to begin the reckoning he’d been planning for years.
The next thing to happen was that Seleucia Deacon’s sister, Aniline, inherited her stock and became Morvengarde’s new junior partner. It was Aniline who appeared before Foulk one day in the wilds of Georgia to present his next assignment. And at the same time, she gave him a gift.
“I am Grandmaster Secondaria now,” she said without preamble. “And although I would gladly see your head on a pike, you are still of some value to this company. Therefore, I bring you a present of goodwill.” And Aniline Deacon opened a box and showed him a very beautiful enameled flower in the shape of a yellow-and-red firework. “I heard from my sister that you like dahlias,” the new Deacon whispered as she lifted the brooch from its wrappings.
Foulk had never so much as looked at another dahlia since leaving Jacinda in her garden the night she had vanished, so this could only be a reference to that incident, and meant for wounding. Sure enough, Aniline Deacon smiled and stabbed him over the heart as she pinned it on his vest. Then she gave him his next assignment, and then she vanished.
This is the last one, Foulk decided as he unbuttoned his shirt and pressed a handkerchief to the wound. This mission, and no more, and then I will do what I must. But he also knew he could not fail in this one. Aniline wanted him killed. If he didn’t deliver on the job Morvengarde had set, nothing would save him, and if he died, his childhood sweetheart would stay dead too.
The assignment took him to Missouri, in another era that was not his own. And there, very much to his shock, he met a girl who was so like Jacinda that Foulk stumbled in his resolve. But in the end, he knew she was just one more sacrifice to be made so that he could undo it all.
And then, the unthinkable happened. Foulk failed a second time. Worse still, the device—the device that made everything possible—was broken.
There were no others in existence, as far as Deacon and Morvengarde knew. Seleucia had been the keeper of the only other similar mechanism in the company’s possession, and it had been destroyed when she had been killed.
But once again, the merchants did not kill Foulk, because Aniline didn’t have her sister’s head for reckonings. They couldn’t kill him. He was the only time-reckoner they had, and he was the only one with a true understanding of the device that had been lost. So instead of taking his life, they tasked him with rebuilding the mechanism, no matter how long it took, no matter how difficult the task.
And so he began.
Again the years spiraled.
And then, one day, the rain began to fall.
INTERLUDE
“This inn . . .” He rubbed the space between his eyes, hard. “It’s like the old days. The days before I could shut out the patterns. Because the one I can’t unsee—the one that drowns all the rest—that’s the one that’s everywhere here. It’s everywhere,” he said savagely, glaring around the room as if they were all to blame. “Even without the loupe, the weyward lumination in this room is so bright, I can barely stand it. You . . . you blaze. Each of you. Each of you is a reliquary, and I can’t take the glare.” He took a halting pair of steps toward the fireplace. Amalgam lurched out of the chair between Reever and Negret, and Masseter dropped into it. With a shaking hand, he raised his glass to throw back the last of his drink.
Each of them? Maisie tore her eyes from the peddler and looked at the others, trying to see what he saw. Then she remembered the secrets she’d glimpsed herself, and it didn’t seem so shocking a thing to say. Then she realized what he’d actually said, and she looked down at her hands. The cards Tesserian had passed her during Masseter’s tale, the king of allsorts and the knave of gnomons as well as the queens of paquets, penny-farthings, and secateurs, all drifted, forgotten, to the floor.
“Oh, yes,” Masseter said softly, looking down at the girl sitting not far from his feet. “You especially, my dancing friend. And I think the others have seen it, even if you haven’t. Certainly Tesserian there has, with his structures that won’t fall until he grants them leave to do it. But he didn’t build that castle. You did, my dear Knave of Building Castles of Cards. He’s only been feeding you the pieces. And I think you would be just as dangerous a gambler as Tesserian if you chose to be. I suspect you read people as well as he does, if only you can convince them to dance. More, you can hear music the rest of us can’t. You and the bookbinder, there,” he said, nodding to Negret, who paused in the act of driving holes through his block of pages, one of Forel’s awls twisting in his fingers. “The world sings to you, even in its silence. Someday it will tell you secrets, if it hasn’t already. But I suspect it has. I suspect you have been a Queen of Finding Things yourself for some time now. Buttons, dragonflies, books . . .”
He hesitated, considering the shocked girl closely. “You have a worden and some sort of ferly on you too. Other knacks, other kinds of savvy you might not discover for years. Possibly the magic of that-which-remains.” A flicker of regret crossed his expression, mingled with surprise; Masseter was not accustomed to feeling anything remotely like sorrow. “I would need the loupe to be certain.” It was in his pocket, but he did not reach for it.
Maisie began to protest that she didn’t understand, then realized that she did. Not everything, not by a long shot . . . but as she looked from the peddler to the castle, she thought perhaps she had an idea.
“I’m sorry,” Masseter said, but the coldness had returned to his face and voice, and the girl turned instead to Tesserian, who managed a hesitant pat on her shoulder that didn’t much help. Jessamy, still sitting at Maisie’s side on the floor, shot a look of fury up at the chapman and tugged the girl into her arms. But there was nothing to say, because she could see the truth as clearly as Masseter: this was a child bound for the roads. Strange things would find her, even if she didn’t go seeking them. She would stumble into them, just as she’d stumbled into this inn.
Meanwhile, Masseter turned to look thoughtfully at the Haypottens. “When you open your home and your place of business to roamers, other roamers will find it, each on
e tracking more of the dust of the old roads across your threshold. That sort of thing isn’t so easily swept back out the door. It lingers. It clings to you, much like the residue of the uncanny fires built by the conflagrationeer who tends your hearth.” He glanced grimly at Amalgam, who had backed up close to the corner table where Sangwin still sat. “The extraordinary calls to the extraordinary, doesn’t it? So I suppose it isn’t so strange that this house would see its share of creatures like us passing through.” He threw out his arms to encompass the entire room. “But this many? This varied? And everyone pretending studiously to be human, even the ones who so obviously aren’t. Why?” He nodded at Maisie again. “For her sake? Surely not. This isn’t coincidence, all this weyward light in one place, and it isn’t accident.”
He pivoted slowly, meeting each of the fourteen pairs of staring eyes until his gaze fell on Petra, who, at some point during his tale, had perched against the riverward window where Sangwin had been smoking the night before.
“Me?” Petra grinned. She straightened and returned to her original seat on the sofa beside Sullivan. “Surely you’re not suggesting I can control the rains and waters, Mr. Masseter.”
“Maybe not,” he said softly. “But you have controlled the telling, these last two days. Why?”
Petra shook her head as she sat, so that the dragonfly at her temple sent tiny flickers of reflected firelight around the room. “I believe these stories were Mr. Amalgam’s idea.”
“Maybe, or maybe we’ll find that the two of you had a conversation earlier, perhaps at a meal, when the old traditions of storytelling came up. Perhaps you expressed that delightful, infectious curiosity of yours. Perhaps that’s how he came to suggest it. But certainly since then, you’ve stepped in now and again to call forth certain tales. Not every time, not with every storyteller. But more than once. And,” he added with a humorless chuckle, “I can’t help but notice that, when you have, the tales that come forward out of your conjuring are tales of peddlers and men with one eye. Again: not an accident. Not a coincidence.” The expression in his own eye chilled further, even as the rest of his face curved in a smile. “I know who you are. I know your name, and I know what story you’re going to tell. If you tell the truth. You might as well just come out with it, beginning, if you please, with: How?”
The room held its breath. Some waited to hear the explanation for what they themselves had also sensed; others waited to see how this final act they’d been anticipating would play out at last. Three prepared grimly for battle; one prayed her hands would remain her own as she wrapped her arms tighter around the girl she held. One brushed fingers across the back of Petra’s neck: I am here, beside you, for whatever good it’s worth.
Petra herself leaned forward on the sofa, propping her elbows on her knees and looking thoughtfully over her interlaced hands at Masseter. “You know how. You said it yourself. There sometimes come moments when the patterns of time and chance and the endless moving pieces—people, stories, floodwaters—come into a particular configuration in which otherwise unbreakable loops can change. You didn’t call the phenomenon by its name, but it has one.”
“Kairos,” Masseter said, his voice trailing into a hiss.
“Yes.” Petra smiled thinly. “Kairos. The right moment for undertaking a particular action. And, as you have told us, the moment of kairos can be calculated, with the right sort of reckoning.”
“That sort of reckoning is—” He shook his head, disbelieving. “Nearly impossible.”
“Nearly,” she agreed. “But not.”
They stared at each other.
“How?” he asked again.
“Work,” she spat. “Years of it. Years, training myself to see the patterns. Years, learning the mathematics, the probabilities and all the potential interactions and fluctuations of time and space, all the millions of variables that affect it all.” She sat back, folding her arms across her chest. “And that’s why we’re here. This is the kairos moment, Mr. Masseter. For me. For you.”
“For what?” he asked softly, dangerously.
“My turn to tell a tale, is it? Fine, then.” Petra matched his tone to the precise murderous pitch. “Listen.”
SEVENTEEN
The Summons of the Bone
The Orphan’s Tale
L isten.
The last time the waters began to rise, the first to die was Nell’s father. The rain that had been falling for weeks made the bank slick, and Nell saw him go. She saw him lose his footing, saw him grasp for something, anything to hold to keep from plunging into the river Skidwrack. By the time she reached the embankment, he was gone, carried away by waters that just kept rising.
The waters took her sisters, too: the eldest in a sudden flood that caught her as she was chasing the family dog across a field, the youngest when lightning struck the tree the girl was sheltering beneath. Their mother was last and hardest, because when the waters of the river came lapping at the house and Nell knew they had to flee or be drowned, there was still time, plenty of time to leave. But Nell’s mother refused, because she couldn’t bear to leave the place where her eldest and youngest daughters were buried, even if it meant losing her middle child, too. She would not abandon the house, not even when the waters came rushing across the floor and drove them to the roof; not even when the waters filled the house like a bucket and the only thing left to do was grasp a piece of driftwood and hope safety still existed to be found somewhere.
When that happened, even then, Nell’s mother would not go from the house. And when Nell finally dragged herself onto dry ground, she was alone. And still the waters kept rising.
She was fifteen, and she had nothing but her older sister’s blue coat, which she had found caught on the branch of a drowned tree, for protection from the rain. As she hunted for the safety of higher ground, she encountered others like herself, set adrift by the waters, alone and afraid. Each time, they wondered what it would take to stop the floods. The rains kept coming; the waters kept rising. Soon, it seemed, the entire town—whatever was left of it—must drown.
One night, alone in a cave, Nell thought about an old bit of folklore she’d once heard. She was hungry and thirsty and had been awake for days, so perhaps it was delirium that made her decide to try it.
It took her a few days more to find a black cat, another few after that to find enough dry wood to boil water. When all that was left of the cat were its bones, she made her way to the river’s swollen edge and set the bones on the surface. The frothing Skidwrack took all but one. The remaining bone spun gently, as if it were caught in the mildest of eddies. Then it slid against the plunging flow, upriver and out of sight.
A moment later, the figure of a tall man appeared at the bend in the river around which the single bone had disappeared. He strode upon the surface of the water as if it were a road, with a long, dark overcoat wrapped around him and a gray fedora keeping the rain from his head.
Nell watched with her heart in her throat, wiping drops from her eyes over and over as the strange figure approached. At last he stood before her with his coat whipping about his ankles and rain dripping from his hat. “I received your message,” he said in a voice like thunder rolling far, far away. In the shadows under the hat’s brim, a pair of searching eyes considered her curiously. “Put forth your question.”
She folded her shaking hands and cleared her throat, and she saw the dark man smile very slightly, as if there was something endearing about her fear. “I want you to stop the water rising.”
The man put his hands into the pockets of his coat. “That isn’t a question.”
“Please stop the water rising?”
“That is still not a question. It’s a request with a question mark at the end of it.”
“Well—can you stop the water rising?”
He smiled more. “You called me all this way to ask me a question I can answer with a single word?”
The girl realized her mistake and raised her hands quickly. “Wait. No. Le
t me think.” And as she thought about her question, she realized she had a problem. She had expected to be allowed to make a request, but what the dark man had offered was something different. She could perhaps ask, Will you stop the water rising?—but even if he answered yes, that didn’t mean he would stop it now, or at any time before her town would be wiped off the coast. She could not think of any way to ask him to solve the problem of the rising water.
At last she asked the only question she’d come up with. It didn’t accomplish what she’d wanted to accomplish from this meeting, but it was the best she could think of. “How can I stop the water rising?”
“Ah. Now, that is a good question. Before I can answer it properly, you must tell me why it falls to you to ask this thing.”
He listened as she told him about how the water had taken her family, one by one. She told him how, as she had sought a way to stop the flood, she had seen other parts of the town deluged, other families rent apart by the swamping of either their lands or their people. He listened to the pain in her voice, and he listened to the rain as it fell ever harder, as if it wished to drown her words until it could drown the girl herself.
Then he pointed with a long hand to the river water rushing past the small spit of muddy ground upon which they stood. “Your message to me was in the form of a single bone.”
“The one that floated upriver,” she whispered.
“Do you know why this is so, that a single bone exists in the whole of a cat that can do this, and why that bone alone may be used to summon me?”
She shook her head.
“There is a sort of magic called orphan magic,” he said. “It is the magic of that-which-remains, of that-which-is-alone. It is, in many ways, the magic of desperation, but it is never the magic of chance. When one remains, it is the one that was meant to remain. It is the one that is special; it is precious because it is unique; it is powerful because that is how it survived.” The man took something from his pocket, and she recognized it as the white bone she had set adrift on the river an hour before. “There is one bone in a cat that may call me, but it must be separated from the others to do its work. It has potential when it is connected to the rest, but when it is sundered away, its potential becomes power.”