by Kate Milford
Petra looked coldly down on Masseter from her place on the sofa like a queen looking down from her throne. “I have had fifteen years to prepare for this moment.”
“Learned a few things, have you?” the peddler grunted as he shoved himself to his feet. The iron fingers lengthened as he stood, twisting to entwine about his calves.
“I made some friends.” She nodded to Madame Grisaille, sitting like a monarch herself in her seat in the corner. The old lady raised one hand off the arm of her chair and curled her fingers into her palm, and the iron that bound the peddler’s legs tightened, grinding the bones in his feet against each other.
“The lady declares that you will stand where you are,” Reever said from the chair to Masseter’s right. “She prefers that her city not be drowned for the sake of your device.” In the chair to Masseter’s left, Negret said nothing, but he twirled the long, needle-sharp awl he’d been holding in his fingers, and suddenly it was no longer a bindery tool, but a weapon.
The peddler ignored the brothers and stared at the woman in the rocking chair. “So the iron does walk abroad.”
“When she must,” Madame said in her thrumming voice. The peddler shuddered, as if he could hear her words resonating through his own skeleton.
“Now.” Petra held out a hand. “Give me my bone. Then I am going to do what I can to stop this flood.”
“Why?” the peddler snarled. “You’re going to try out your supposed orphan magic now, after all these years? It won’t work.”
“Maybe not,” Petra said. “But I’ll have tried.”
Masseter looked at the box in her palm. “Give me the winder, and I’ll give you the spring.”
Petra’s eyes were hard. “No. Not until I’ve done what I have to do. Then you can have it.”
Masseter’s mismatched eyes bulged in confusion and anger. “When you’ve done what? Gone to the source of the river? Drowned on the way? Died on whatever fool errand awaits you if you arrive? Am I to follow you to the middle country and take my spring and my winder from your corpse?”
“Neither one of them is yours,” Petra spat. “And yes, you could do that. Or you could follow me to the middle country, help me do what needs doing, and have the spring and the winder when you’ve made amends for what you did to my town.”
“What does the winder matter to you, anyhow?” the peddler argued. “You’ll be at the bottom of a river, either way.”
“It matters because you don’t get to lie and kill a whole community and still keep the thing you came for,” she snarled.
“Vengeance?” the peddler said in disbelief. “You’ll keep the thing just so I can’t have it?”
“Yes!” She calmed her voice. “If you like. You have your choice. Make amends and have the spring and the winder with my gratitude, or lose both.”
Masseter put his hands in his pockets. “Or I could kill you and take them.”
To his right, Reever Colophon barked out a laugh. “No,” he said, leaning back comfortably in his chair and watching in amusement as the iron twisted its tendrils more tightly around Masseter’s legs. “You could not.” To Masseter’s left, Negret tapped the stiletto-shaped awl silently against one knee.
“And if you try,” Madame added, “I will carry you from this place, and when the waters fall, the people will discover a new statue somewhere in the city, a statue of a nameless man with mismatched eyes. And as the years pass, the statue will grow legends. They’ll say it cries out in desperation, and they’ll say on the right kind of night, you can almost hear the words. As if—impossible, of course—but as if there were a man imprisoned within it, begging for his freedom from an unknown but vengeful queen who put him there for his sins.”
“Suppose I say yes,” Masseter said quietly, his eyes on Petra, “and when we have gone up the river together, when we have gone beyond the reach of the unknown queen, suppose I kill you then?”
Sullivan spoke from Petra’s side. “You’ll have to go through me.”
“Well, now it’s a party,” Masseter retorted, rolling his eyes. “Happily, friend.”
Petra ignored him. She gave Sullivan an apologetic smile and shook her head.
The seiche smiled back, his eyebrows arched. “If you don’t want my company, that’s fair. But you aren’t the only one who has restitution to make, so don’t be a martyr, Petra.” His voice changed. “Let me come with you.”
The quality of Petra’s smile shifted a fraction. “I can’t ask that of you.”
“You don’t have to ask.” The eye with the scar below it flashed a wink.
Masseter sniffed. “I could kill you both for that scene alone.”
“I’m sure you could.” Petra stood and walked to him and actually patted his cheek. Masseter bore the condescension without flinching, but fury radiated off him in waves. “But if the stories are true,” Petra said, “you haven’t killed yet in the course of building your new device. You’ve let plenty die, but you haven’t taken a life with your own hands. I think there’s a reason for that. Possibly that reason has a name.”
“Jacinda,” Maisie said quietly from the hearth. She picked the queen of secateurs up from the floor, stood, and put the card into the peddler’s palm, the one marked with the little spray of scattered scars. He crumpled the card in his fist with a snarl and raised his hand as if to strike the girl, then just as quickly dropped his hand again and thrust it into his pocket, the queen still clenched in it.
Meanwhile, Petra unscrewed the winder from the music box and put it into her watch pocket. She handed the box to Mrs. Haypotten and smiled thinly at the merchant. “Make your choice.”
For a long moment, they looked at each other. With his scarred hand, now empty again, Masseter reached into his own unfinished device, the one contained in the filigreed box. Carefully he plucked out the spring. Petra held out a palm, and the peddler put the spring carefully into it.
Maisie stretched herself up on her knees, craning her neck for a look at the curl of bone. Words and figures had been carved into its flat surfaces, but they were minute, and she would have needed a glass to read them.
“The calculation is inseparable from the consequence,” Masseter said, watching Petra closely as she, too, inspected the spiral. “Not magic, perhaps, but something one should never walk through time without remembering. Something you should perhaps remember, as well,”
“Thank you.” Petra put the spring away with the winder. She glanced to the iron queen, and immediately the nails unwound themselves from Masseter’s legs and feet and eased themselves back to their original places in the floor. “Shall we go, Mr. Masseter?”
He closed the box and returned it to his pocket, then bent and rubbed his shins. “I am at your service.”
“Remember it,” the iron queen said grimly. In his chair, Negret gave the awl one more tap on his knee, then turned its point with fierce and deadly precision on the stack of papers.
Petra, meanwhile, opened the French doors between the riverward windows and stepped outside. The rain whipped in, and the surface of the water was now mere feet below the porch’s tiled floor.
Masseter followed her with curious eyes. “Shouldn’t we go and get . . .” He gestured vaguely back inside.
Petra glanced over her shoulder. “What? Our tooth powder?”
“Anything?”
The young woman took a deep breath. Then she laughed. “I imagine we can find what we need along the way. I don’t know what that’s likely to be.”
She walked to the gap in the railing that showed where the stairs led down to the river, then stepped down onto the blue stair and from there onto the surface of the water. It bore her feet up as surely as if she were standing on rock. She laughed again, the rain slicking her bobbed curls into a sleek, chestnutcolored cap.
The seiche strode past the merchant and through the open door. “I suppose you can walk on water, too,” Masseter muttered.
Sullivan said nothing, just stepped down onto the floodwater besid
e Petra. The two of them looked back at Masseter. Petra reached up a hand. The one-eyed merchant squared his shoulders, crossed the porch, and allowed her to help him down onto the surface. Whether because Petra still possessed some lingering orphan magic or because the river understood what was being asked of it, his feet did not sink.
As the three of them turned away from the inn, Maisie shook herself and ran to the French doors. “Petra!” she wailed. Out on the water, Petra turned and waved but didn’t stop walking.
Jessamy Butcher and Madame Grisaille followed Maisie onto the porch, each with a hand at the ready to restrain the girl if she tried to follow. “Where is she going?” Maisie choked on her words and on the rain, her chrysanthemum shawl whipping in the wind.
“Into the wilds of the middle country,” Madame Grisaille said, drawing her gently back into the shelter of the parlor. She took Maisie’s shawl from her and passed it to Jessamy, then unwound a wrap from her own shoulders and swathed the shivering girl in it. “But look, my dear, she isn’t going alone.”
“But she’s going without us,” Maisie protested. “Why would she go with them? They’re not her friends.”
“I think Mr. Sullivan would take issue with that,” Jessamy observed drily, hanging the girl’s shawl from a corner of the mantelpiece. “But Maisie, she isn’t going without us.” She returned to the door and crouched at Maisie’s side as they watched the trio walking on the water toward a bend in the river, nearly out of sight. “Just imagine. Imagine our friend. Days from now, when she and her companions reach the source of the Skidwrack. And imagine it isn’t a spring, but a crossroads.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m telling this story,” Jessamy said softly. “And because my stories are all stories of crossroads.”
Maisie sighed and nodded.
“So let me tell it properly. Listen.” She glanced over her shoulder into the parlor. “Listen. That’s the way to begin, isn’t it, Mr. Amalgam?”
Phineas Amalgam inclined his head as he left the corner table and settled once more into the vacant chair by the fire. “Tell it however you see fit, my dear. May we stay?”
“If you like.” Jessamy turned back to the river, and to the girl who watched it, searching for moving silhouettes in the darkness.
EIGHTEEN
The Crossroads
The Headcutter’s Tale
Listen. Deep in the middle country, there is a crossroads. Perhaps it is a literal one, a place where two roads intersect; perhaps it is one like the boy Foulk saw reflected in a puddle. Either way, they will come to a crossroads, these three. And at that crossroads, who will our Petra find there but that same man in his long coat and gray fedora, the one she met so many years ago on the night she sent a cat’s bone upriver.”
Jessamy could have described that crossroads from memory, and the fingerpost that stood there, one arm pointing off in the direction of the river that would twist and turn its way to Nagspeake and the others pointing, perhaps, to even stranger places. It would have looked very much like the scene painted on the music box that, without its winder, could no longer perform the one song the Devil himself could not play. (And in fact, months from that day, Mrs. Haypotten would remember that the box with the crossroads was missing its winder. When she fitted it with a new one, the innkeeper’s wife wound the box and lifted the lid, only to frown as the first notes of “Riverward” began to tinkle out. “I could’ve sworn it was the kite-shaped box as played that one,” she murmured. “This one played . . .” But for the life of her, she couldn’t remember what tune she had expected to hear. The song danced out of reach, refusing to be remembered even as it refused to be forgotten.)
But now: “She’ll meet that man again,” Jessamy said to Maisie. “And she’ll walk up to him, her feet sure and confident from miles of walking on water, and she’ll say, ‘Take the waters from my river.’ And the man in the fedora will smile at her—the smile of someone who doesn’t quite understand what’s about to happen, but thinks he knows, and thinks he has his world safely in his own hands.”
Maisie, who had seen that very expression on the face of Antony Masseter in the moments before Petra had shown him the music box, nodded. But her wide eyes did not leave the Skidwrack.
Jessamy leaned closer to Maisie’s ear. “And the man will say, ‘I will make you a bet.’ He will whisper it, because only fools who are bluffing shout their wagers.” She glanced over her shoulder, back into the parlor. “Isn’t that true, Mr. Tesserian?”
Cross-legged by the hearth, Al Tesserian nodded. “That’s the way of it, in my experience.”
“And Petra’s two companions, standing at her back, will share a look between them then. The seiche who never believed he could love anyone, who did not think he deserved to love or be loved after the things he’s done but who loves Petra, and would gladly make bets with the Devil for her sake; and the one-eyed merchant who cannot afford to see her fail. The look that passes between them, however, is not one of worry, because they have walked with her on the river for days now, and they have shared enough adventures to know better than the Devil what he is about to tangle with.”
Maisie gave a tiny, conspiratorial smirk.
“ ‘Not a bet,’ Petra will say. ‘A contest.’ The man in the fedora will grin again and show his teeth, because now that the challenge has been made, all he has to do is accept. ‘What shall the contest be?’ he will ask, still thinking he can afford to give away such advantages as choosing the conditions. And what do you think Petra will say?” Jessamy glanced at the old, gaunt lady standing at Maisie’s other side. “Madame?”
Madame lifted a hand, as if the answer could not be more obvious. “Surely Petra will say, ‘We shall dance.’”
Maisie’s smirk widened.
“Petra will say, ‘We shall dance,’” Jessamy repeated, taking one of Maisie’s hands in hers and turning the girl in a circle and drawing her away from the open doors. Far away on the river, three tiny figures disappeared around a bend and into legend; back in the parlor, a young girl laughed as a woman wearing gloves and stigmata spun her again, faster.
“Can the Devil dance?” Maisie asked, reeling.
“Mr. Amalgam, you know the lore,” Jessamy said. “Is the Devil any good at dancing?”
From his chair, Amalgam replied, “The Devil’s good at whatever he needs to be good at.”
“So the Devil can dance,” Jessamy continued, “but he bears the burden of too many secrets—every secret kept out of malice, every secret kept out of fear, every secret kept out of ignorance the Devil carries with him, in case they might be useful to him someday. And as you know,” she said, touching Maisie’s shoulder with one gloved finger, “a person cannot dance with all their soul while holding tight to secrets, even if they’re someone else’s. Still, he won’t think he needs to dance with all his soul, not to beat an ordinary woman, so the Devil won’t worry overmuch about that.
“Then, ‘Give us light,’ the Devil will cry, and a ring of flame will surround them all.” Jessamy turned, her eyes seeking Sorcha and finding her standing by the hearth, hands clasped at her back. “What sort of fire will that be, Sorcha?”
“Not true hellfire, surely,” the firekeeper said, smiling. She reached up and took down one of the fancy paper matches she and Maisie had made earlier that day. “Flamedry, perhaps, or some other sort of border fire.” She reached the spill into the flames. When it caught, she touched the burning end to the palm of her empty hand, then drew her hands apart again. Strung between the spill in one hand and her opposite palm like the strands of a cat’s cradle was a gleaming thread of fire hung with individual flames that burned downward, fluttering like dangling flags.
Maisie stared in shock. Sorcha laughed again; then, as the paper match burned rapidly down to nothing, she flung her arms sharply wide, and the flaring flags flew to pieces like fireworks.
“So they will have their fire,” Jessamy continued as sparks rained down in the parlor. She tugged M
aisie’s hand to reclaim her attention. “ ‘Give us a jury,’ the Devil will call, and the air around them will seem to thicken as spirits emerge out of nowhere, illuminated by the flames just as the ghostly sailors were revealed by the light of a storm bottle in the captain’s tale.” She turned to nod at Captain Frost in his chair by the display cabinet. “All come to determine the winner. And, ‘Give me a song,’ he’ll shout, and all the musicians who ever lost a headcutting with the Devil will find themselves there at the crossroads, their hands bound to do his bidding when he calls until their days are done and they surrender their souls at last.” Jessamy’s hands in her borrowed embroidered gloves twitched as she spoke, but her voice stayed clear and strong as wide-eyed Maisie turned to her to hear the rest of the story.
“And then the headcutters will play,” Jessamy continued, “and the Devil will dance. And a lesser person would despair, because even dancing without his entire soul, the Devil is a whirlwind. But—” She paused. “This will not be a lesser person who stands before him, waiting her turn. And so, although the seiche boy who loves her might reach for her hand, and although she might squeeze his hand back, Petra won’t despair. Because she will have two things the Devil doesn’t know about. So when his dance comes to an end in a whirl of dust and nightmare, the Devil will bow and offer his musicians to Petra. ‘Give the girl a song,’ he will order.”
She held up a finger. “But Petra will refuse. ‘None of your songs for me,’ she’ll say. Because the first thing Petra will have is a song already in her mind. The only song that beats the Devil.” And Jessamy glanced over her shoulder at the twin who sang under his breath when he thought no one could hear and who was at present stitching the binding on a book covered with swirling blue and gold and green paper. “Isn’t that right, Mr. Negret? I know you know it. Whistle a bit for us now.”