by Kate Milford
She nodded, trying not to think of what she had had to do to the cat to release that one tiny bone’s orphan magic.
He lifted his head just a fraction, just enough for her to catch the glint of his eyes through the drops cascading from his hat brim. “You have been sundered from your people by violence. You are the last to stand, an orphan. You are the bone that will float upriver.”
“I don’t understand.” But that wasn’t quite true. She understood just enough to be afraid.
His expression became sympathetic. “I know. And I cannot explain it to you in a way that will make you understand, not fully. But you are the orphan bone. Just as one bone was sufficient to call me, you will be sufficient to stop the water.” He stepped to her side, put one arm around her shoulder, and pointed upriver with that long hand. “There are great forces in the middle country, and at the source of the river is the reason its waters keep on rising. If you wish to stop them, you will have to confront the source of the waters. And you will likely not survive,” he added. “However, it is equally likely you will be able to stop the rising and keep the town from being drowned completely.”
“How?” she asked with a shaking voice. “How will I find the source in time? How will I know what to do?” She tried not to think about what he had said about her not surviving.
“Finding it is the easy part. Because of the orphan magic, the Skidwrack will take you upriver if you ask it to, just as it carried the cat’s bone. Knowing what to do . . . You will simply have to hope you are clever as well as an orphan. The magic may well help you accomplish what you set out to do, because what else is magic good for? But magic won’t make you clever. Magic won’t tell you what to do, or how.”
“Can’t you tell me?” she asked desperately. “That’s what I asked, after all!”
“You asked how you could stop the waters rising, and I tell you: you can stop it by letting the river carry you to its source to confront what waits there. I tell you orphan magic will carry you upriver, and orphan magic will help you accomplish your task. But one magic bone isn’t worth all the answers in the world, even if I had them.” He pushed his hat back and leaned down so they were eye to eye. He was handsome beyond imagination, and his eyes were worse than any nightmare. But there was nothing but honesty in them as he added, “And I don’t have all the answers in the world, Nell.”
He spoke her name as if he’d said the word goodbye instead, and she knew there was nothing more to learn from the man who had answered the summons of the bone. So she nodded and looked down at the river at their feet.
His arm was still around her shoulder. “Would you like me to help you into the water?” His voice was gentle, muted by the rain, and it was as if he had asked for a dance. She nodded, and he swept her into his arms, and, without appearing to have a care for his expensive-looking suit, he stepped down the muddy bank and into the Skidwrack with Nell held tight against his chest.
His dark coat fanned out across the surface. “Don’t fear the river,” he whispered. “You are that-which-remains. It will carry you, if you let it.”
She held her breath and closed her eyes as the strong arms released her into the current. At the very last moment, she felt him tuck something small and thin into the fingers she clenched over her stomach: the bone that had called him in the first place.
The dark man stood in the surging river and watched her disappear upriver with the slender bit of bone in her hand. Then, with a very small frown of regret between his eyes, he took hold of a tree root and climbed the muddy bank.
For Nell, being carried by the river was strangely peaceful. Fear seemed beside the point, and she was too tired for it anyway. She was exhausted. She ached with sadness. The sensation was like being swung in a hammock, which was good, because her mind was in chaos. She could not begin to imagine what waited for her, or what would be expected of her, or how she would accomplish what needed doing. She did not know if she was clever, or merely desperate.
There’s no need to worry before it’s time, the river said as it rocked her. Sleep. You will need your rest. I cannot give you much, but I can give you that.
I am hallucinating, she thought. My river doesn’t speak.
The Skidwrack merely burbled and laughed. The day was fading, and there were stars overhead. She watched them pass slowly as the river chuckled and murmured.
And then, without warning, two hands grabbed her shoulders and jerked her roughly out of the water and up onto dry land.
It was a sharp, harsh action, and it made the water splash and froth. Her head dropped beneath the surface for a moment, and for the first time since the stranger had lowered her into it, Nell tasted the river. She choked and sputtered and rocks scraped her back through her drowned sister’s coat as the unseen person hauled her up onto the bank. She fought free from the hands, rolled to her side, and coughed up more water than she had realized she’d swallowed. At last, Nell wiped her eyes clear and looked at the person who’d interrupted her journey.
The look of concern on his face was at odds with his gaze. At first she thought this was just a trick of the water she was still blinking away, or a function of the fact that one of his eyes was a delicate orb made of tin, with an iris enameled the same cold blue as his right.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“I was until you grabbed me,” she snapped.
“Was I supposed to leave you in the water?” he asked, surprised. “I was passing on the road, and I saw a body in the river. You didn’t look dead. What should I have done?”
Something about his tone was wrong, just as something about his eyes was wrong. Here is a lie, Nell thought, though she couldn’t work out where in those words the lie crouched.
“Yes,” she said, “you should have. We have business, the river and I.”
The mask of concern fell away, and for a moment, the face that considered her was nothing but pure, cold calculation.
“Did he tell you that you had to do it?” the stranger asked. “The man who answered the summons?”
Nell, who had been about to stand and wade back into the river, faltered. “How could you know?”
“I know.” Like the man in the black coat, this fellow had terrible eyes. In his blue-and-tin gaze, however, there was no emotion to be read. “I also know he lied to you if he told you that sacrificing yourself was the only way to stop the water’s rising.”
“He didn’t say it was the only way,” Nell said cautiously. “I asked how I could stop it, and this was his answer.”
“Ah.” The stranger nodded. “That was your mistake. So much depends on phrasing, doesn’t it?”
The river lapped at Nell’s foot, and she scooted a little ways farther up the bank. Already the water had risen another couple of inches. Why had she bothered to move? She and the river had work to do. She’d only be returning to it. Unless, a tiny voice protested. What if this man really does know another way?
He nodded as if he knew her thoughts. “I do, you know. Have another way.” He crouched beside her and rested his elbows on his knees. “I, too, have been sundered. In a sense, I, too, am all that is left. And I have something you don’t: I know why the waters are rising. I know what crouches at the river’s source. The other way is: I go and you stay.”
Nell’s heart leaped. “You would do that?”
He smiled, and if only something of the smile had reached his eyes, it would have been like sun breaking through the clouds. “I will. I only need the bone.” And together they looked down at the slender pale thing Nell still held clenched in one hand.
“Orphan magic?” Nell said, opening her hand between them.
“Orphan magic,” the man confirmed. His fingers twitched as he held them over the bone. “May I?”
Nell hesitated. “You’ll really do it? You can? You will?”
“I can,” he said. “And I will,” he added. Something about it felt like an afterthought.
“And you’ll hurry?” Already the waters of th
e river were toying with her feet again.
“The only thing I’m waiting for is the bone.” His voice was kind, encouraging, patient. But his face was stiffening into irritation.
Nell took a breath. She lifted her palm in offering, and the stranger plucked the precious thing from it. “Thank you, Nell.” He tucked it in a pocket in his waistcoat and stood. “And now I go.” He strode into the water without another look at her.
Nell held her breath as he lay back in the Skidwrack, his coat spreading over the surface like a slick of oil. If he’s lying, I’ll know, she thought. The river won’t take him. If he’s lying, it’ll sweep him away in the other direction.
The stranger rotated once in the water in an eddy that spun him gently a full 360 degrees. Then, slowly but surely, he began to drift, just as she had, upriver against the current. Nell stood. She watched him disappear with his hand cupped protectively over the pocket with the bone in it. Then, with a very small frown of regret between her eyes, she took hold of a tree root and climbed the muddy bank.
When she reached the top, she discovered there was no road. The road was on the other side of the river; here there was nothing but forest. It was only the first lie she would catch him in. The much bigger lie was still to be uncovered. For what Nell didn’t know was that half a mile upriver, the blue-eyed stranger would climb from the water, wring the wet from his clothes, and strike out on foot. Away from the rising waters. Away from what was left of Nell’s town, which a few days later would be washed totally from the world, left to live in Nell’s tortured memory and the occasional scrap that washed up on the freshly drawn coast or at the edges of the floodplain when the flooding finally ran its course and the river calmed. Away from the promise he’d made. And all for the sake of the bone in his pocket, and the strange magic it contained.
INTERLUDE
As Petra stopped speaking, her eyes came to land, confidently, heavily, on Antony Masseter.
Masseter met Petra’s gaze with his single bright green eye.
For a moment, the only sounds were the crackling of Sorcha’s fire and the drumming of the rain on the roof. Then Mr. Haypotten made a brusque noise. “I say, now, it’s getting quite late. Who’ll finish the toasted cheese, before we all go our separate ways for the night?”
No one answered. Everyone’s eyes were on either the young woman on the sofa or the peddler facing her from his chair opposite the hearth.
Then Masseter reached up to his firelit face. With one hand, he stretched the flesh away from his eye. The rest of his face twisted as with the other hand he reached in, took hold of his bulging right eyeball, and delicately pulled it out of the socket.
Or at least, that’s how it looked, and if Petra had been a different sort of person, she might have gasped in horror. But she wasn’t a different sort of person, and she merely watched with an expression of something like disdain as Masseter tossed a clear, curved bit of glass, colorless except in one circular space where it was tinted with golden green, onto the floor between them. Jessamy snarled in protest as it shattered not far from Maisie, though the girl herself didn’t so much as flinch.
Then the peddler flipped the patch up onto his forehead to reveal a gleaming silver hammered-metal orb with a laquered iris of the same cornflower blue as the eye that had worn the false lens. The blue-enameled metal contracted around the pupil as if to adjust to the light in the room.
Petra looked down at a shard that had slid across the floor to rest at her feet. Without standing, she reached out her left heel and ground the yellow-green colored glass to powder.
Masseter chuckled, and it might’ve sounded genuine enough to anyone who wasn’t also able to see the brittle coldness in the blue eye that had been hidden under the green.
“Petra,” he said. “Short for Petronella, I think. But I would never have recognized you, Nell, not if you hadn’t tipped your hand with all your little machinations. You changed your hair.”
“I’m also fifteen years older,” she said. “Sometimes time just passes normally, a pattern you seem to have forgotten. You, of course, look exactly the same.”
The peddler crossed one ankle over his knee. “What do you want?”
Petra’s disdain sharpened into anger. “You didn’t keep your word. You lied.”
“I lie when I need to.” His face hardened. “And when I feel like it.”
“You lied,” Petra repeated, “and you let my town die. There’s nothing left there but rooftops.”
“Saved you, didn’t I?” he asked, baring his teeth. “That’s something.”
“No. I was willing. I had made up my mind to be a sacrifice if that’s what was needed to save the town. You stopped me,” she snarled. “You didn’t save me, you stopped me. You promised me you could save my home. And then you didn’t. Did you lie about knowing how to stop the flood, too?”
“Of course I did,” Masseter retorted. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
“So condescending.” Petra shook her head. “Just because you’ve popped in and out of a dozen lifetimes doesn’t mean you’ve lived a dozen of them.”
He grinned. “Perhaps not, but I am something of an expert on time and how it passes. And I’ve endured about as much as I plan to endure of whatever this is, so I’ll ask again. What is it you want from me?”
“Give me back the bone.”
The peddler shook his head. “No.”
“You took it from me under false pretenses. You took it in a lie.”
“But I took it, and I’ll keep it. Your anger is . . . understandable. And impressive. But it matters far, far less to me than the consequences if I don’t manage to finish what I’ve started. Your bone is part of that, and it has properties I need.”
He reached into a pocket and took something out: a hunk of metal about the size of a palm. The filigreed box, bought for an eye in the hollow-way and fitted with a paper keyway taken from a homicidal room in a house that could not be mapped, containing rods and dials and gears and valves designed by a fire-reckoner and assembled by a maker of reliquaries.
The peddler undid a catch on the side and opened the box. “It’s there, you see?” he said softly, holding it up for her. “Along with the adit-gate from Fellwool House and John Ustion’s fierekenia mechanism, all nestled into the hollow-ware man’s coffret, which cost me dearly, but I had precious few options by that point.”
“You stole my great-grandfather’s device?” Sorcha demanded. Then, more shocked still, “And you finished it?”
“I had to, when it became clear he wouldn’t,” Masseter snapped. “A dozen artificiers I set to work on the problem. None of them would sell to me after Lung sent me on my way, but I knew none would be able to resist the challenge. A dozen artificiers, a dozen secret tries, eleven total failures. Only Ustion’s came close, and then he walked away from it. So I took it, yes. He never knew, so don’t bother staring at me like that, and it sounds like your mother was just as happy to find it gone.”
“But how did you finish it?” Sorcha persisted. “You’re not fire-savvy.”
“No, but I know someone who is. Someone across the Tailrace. I took him the pieces, and he gave me instructions. He told me what to look for, so that I could then take it all to the reliquarist, who assures me that now only one piece remains.” He sucked in a mouthful of air. “That’s all. Just one piece, and I’m finished. It will all be finished.”
There was nothing inside that looked like a bone. Nothing, that is, until Petra remembered Negret Colophon’s story of the peddlers and the whalebone spring. Then she saw it: the tiny, delicate whorl of pale yellow.
“How did you even manage that?” she asked. “A cat’s bone isn’t pliable. It’s nothing like whalebone.”
“Yours was magic, if you recall,” Masseter said. “And the thing is so nearly complete. I regret to disappoint—”
“Yes, yes, your grand task is nearly finished,” Petra interrupted. “And I know what you came here for.”
He fell silent and l
ooked at her without a word, as if he longed to be able to wish her dead.
“It’s how I knew you would come,” she continued. “Especially once the waters started to rise. You couldn’t risk this place being drowned like my home was. You might never have found it again.”
Still he said nothing. The young woman reached under a throw pillow beside her on the sofa. Then she withdrew her hand and showed him the gold-and-ceramic music box, the one from Madame Grisaille’s room, which lay at the crossroads of the lines in her palm.
“Your machine will want winding,” she murmured, looking down at the scene painted on its lid. “And for that, you will need a very special winder-key that can coil more than metal.” Then she looked up at him. “I think I am right in guessing that a winder that can coil time is rarer even than cat-bone springs.”
The peddler’s face had drained to the color of dry china clay. “Give that to me.”
“No.”
He made a move as if to dart forward out of his chair. Once again, just like the night before, there was a well-intentioned but belated impulse on the part of a number of the guests to try and intercede as things suddenly lurched toward physical violence. But even as Sangwin, Amalgam, Captain Frost, and Mr. Haypotten got moving, Masseter himself stopped cold in his tracks. He fell forward onto his knees before the card castle with a grunt of pain as the very nails in the floor pulled themselves loose and lengthened into grabbing fingers that held his feet immobile.
Maisie allowed herself to be pulled farther out of the way, then wriggled loose from Jessamy’s grip and watched, fascinated, as the grasping iron flexed and tightened its grip on the peddler’s shoes.