Steelhands

by Danielle Bennett

  Still, I had no right to feel ungrateful. I’d lost my hands, but I’d kept my life, and that was more than so many of my fellows could say. Without any further delay, I tugged my gloves on—extra thick to keep the chill from getting into the metal, which in turn made my wrists ache—did up the buttons of my coat, and left.

  After the end of the war, once the Esar’s plans for me had become apparent, I’d thought it prudent to rent my own quarters in the city rather than returning to my parents’ estates. It made for a much shorter commute between home and the bastion every day, and I had a very lovely view of the Basquiat from my window. In fact, I lived close enough that I could take the Whitstone Road to cut across the Rue and be in upper Charlotte—and therefore, the Crescents—before the sun set.

  The days were growing so short in winter and the early dark played havoc with my moods.

  It would have been more convenient for me if the magician tending to my follow-up appointments had been operating out of the Basquiat instead of her own home, but the Esar had his own way of doing things, keeping magicians and politicians separate. If the rumors I’d heard were true—as much as I hated listening to idle gossip, more often than not there was truth to be found in it—then he didn’t trust the magicians at the Basquiat as much as he once had.

  That was a tense area that could’ve used a little diplomatic intervention, I thought, and it made me wonder why we were bothering so with the Arlemagne when there were matters within Volstov that needed tending to, but I was no ruler. It wasn’t my place to suggest these things. The problem would be resolved in its own time, and certainly without any help from someone like me.

  There had always been a struggle between members of the bastion, the Esar’s handpicked favorites, and the Basquiat, whom magic herself had picked. And the Esar, I suspected, did not like being reminded of forces more powerful than he. Since he was no magician, it was all something of a sore spot.

  The air was bitter and still as I made my way down the road, thankful for the absence of the sharp winds that had attempted to flay the skin from my bones earlier. If I kept to this path I would eventually come to the ’Versity Stretch—as I already had, more than once—where Adamo had long since finished giving his lectures for the day. I had no idea at all where he was currently staying—whether he had a place in the city, too, or if he was taking advantage of the professors’ quarters, now that he was one. It didn’t seem like information I should want to know, and yet I’d spent a good portion of my life knowing every small detail about men I now seemed to go out of my way to avoid. Even though we hadn’t liked each other, we had lived with each other. I knew when each of them liked to take their showers, when they slept—when they did not sleep—and what kind of woman each one preferred. At the time, I’d been desperate to escape and live on my own, exactly as I was now.

  Yet my private quarters were too private. If the upstairs neighbors weren’t at home, all was too quiet, save for the wind howling outside the window on the colder nights, or the sound of the dog above shuffling around his favorite bone.

  It didn’t make sense. Perhaps if Thom had been there, he might’ve explained it to me, but he wasn’t, and he had troubles enough of his own. I wasn’t about to write to him with mine.

  I always knew when I was getting close to the Crescents, because abruptly the city planning and even the buildings themselves ceased to make any kind of logical sense. They rose up around me like abstract paintings—a chimney here, a steeple there, and now and then a large round room supported by a twisted scaffolding structure that didn’t look as though it could possibly bear the weight. It was difficult not to feel like you were about to become part of an architectural accident in the Crescents, the way the houses all leaned toward the streets like they couldn’t wait to be the first one to topple over and crush you.

  The houses never did fall of course, but I couldn’t help being glad the wind had died down, all the same.

  The sun was just beginning to set, bruising the sky a lovely gray-purple, when I made my way to Crescent Number 27—a tall, crooked affair made of polished white stone, with a set of silver chimes hanging in the entranceway to ward off evil spirits. There was a light on in the tower but none at ground level, which wasn’t so unusual. The tower was her workspace, and she’d probably gone up there to prepare her instruments beforehand, or something of that nature.

  For someone so intimately involved in the proceedings, I had very little understanding of how they worked. I tended to look away when the gears were out. I supposed they disturbed me more than I was ready to admit to myself.

  I knocked—rather loudly, just to be sure she’d hear it from upstairs—the sound rattling the gears in my knuckles. It was an uncomfortable sensation, like grinding your teeth in the night. I rocked between my heels and the balls of my feet, glancing up and down the street out of idle curiosity. It wasn’t as crowded as it had been up near the Basquiat, but then I had come around dinnertime. Most people were either inside with hot meals on the stove or still hard at work, I imagined, with little crossover between the two. I hesitated, then knocked at the door again.

  The problem with magicians—aside from getting around their quirks, which often translated to sheer rudeness—was that if they were working on something, it was nearly impossible to get their attention. I’d let myself in once before—after knocking and waiting in the streets in the heat of summer for nearly half an hour—only for her to demand why I’d come so late.

  I wasn’t about to make that mistake again, and the light was on in her workroom. Yet even though I’d taken up with ruffians, breaking and entering wasn’t something I wished to add to my list of “unexpected things I’d done because of the strange crowd I spent my time with.” Sighing, I tried the door before I could talk myself out of the idea and found it unlocked.

  Perhaps we’d both learned something from that little incident, then.

  There was a gray cat in the entranceway, as well as several pairs of women’s shoes on the floor and matching coats hung up along the wall, but the house was otherwise silent. The cat wound around blue satin boots, rubbing its face against the toe, then yowled enigmatically at me.

  Almost on instinct, I reached down to let it sniff my fingers. It did so just as one of my metal knuckles let out a hiss and a creak, and the cat’s ears folded backward, the fur over his spine prickling up in mistrust.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered, glad no one was around to see me offend, then attempt to rationalize with, a simple house cat. “It startles me, too, you know.”

  The cat sniffed and turned its back on me, bolting deeper into the house.

  I should have expected something like that, I thought, and shut the door behind me so as not to let in too much cold air.

  “Hello?” I called, just so I wouldn’t seem too much like a burglar in the night. Or a madman who spoke only to cats. “It’s Balfour, you remember … I don’t think I’m late this time, unless I got the date wrong, in which case I’m terribly sorry.”

  There was no reply. Whatever she was working on must have been incredibly engrossing, and it wasn’t something I wanted to interrupt, either. I knew that from experience, even if the rest of what I knew about her was very perfunctory indeed, though we’d been acquainted for many months.

  Her name was Ginette, and I’d heard her refer to the cat once or twice as Kerchief, though I wasn’t sure if that was his full name or just a pet name she had for him. She kept her house neater than I’d been led to believe most Margraves did—they were usually too busy with their spells or their books for cleaning. Or maybe she kept a maid.

  I peered past one door—the kitchen, it seemed from the shadowy shapes of pots and pans hanging from the wall—but no lamp was lit. It would be strange indeed for anyone, even magicians, to conduct experiments in the kitchen in the dark, rather than in their studies or their workrooms, and so I passed the silent kitchen by.

  The hallway twisted away from the foyer and circled past the kitc
hen in a clockwise direction. I almost tripped on a few small steps before I found myself passing her private rooms. I cleared my throat outside each doorway, and even knocked on one, but there was still no answer.

  I felt more and more like an intruder with each step, but I made it to her workroom without the Provost and his men suddenly appearing to arrest me.

  This was eerie, to be sure, but I’d been an airman of the famed Dragon Corps. Presumably, I didn’t spook easily—although I was beginning to wish I’d gone to see Luvander’s hat shop instead and ignored my appointment. There were so many times being that kind of man served you better than doing things right ever did, or so I’d learned from living with my fellow airmen: those good old days when I was punished routinely for bringing up what we ought to have done, and they had a jolly time ignoring just that for a night of rowdy fun.

  The door to Ginette’s workroom was half-open, and a light was on in the room, though I knew instinctively there was no one inside. No sounds at all came from within, not the usual tinkering clatter of metal on metal or the creak of the floorboards as she moved from spot to spot at her long wooden tables. I hesitated, wondering if I should be the one to call the Provost and his men, then gently nudged the door open.

  The light in the window, I saw now, was coming from a lamp on one of her worktables, which had all but completely burned through its oil. It was giving off its last dramatic, guttering sparks now; if I’d come a little later, I would have assumed she wasn’t home at all.

  By the dying light, I could see the signs of unfinished work on one of her tables—a small black bowl full of little cogs next to a glass jar filled with some clear liquid, containing an assortment of long, lean metal tools. One large cog and an empty vial were placed between those items; all her other tools were in their proper places, or at least what I could assume were their proper places from my cursory assessment. I’d spent a great deal of time staring at her tool wall—a collection of hammers and tweezers, pincers and wrenches, ranging from very large to so small they looked like toys for a doll—while she operated on me. I knew what went where practically by heart.

  It looked to me as though she’d been suddenly called away in the middle of an experiment. Judging by how much oil a lamp such as the one she’d been using usually held and how much had burned down, it must have been some time before the hour of my appointment. It was possible she’d thought she’d be back in time.

  I did hope everything was all right. She’d never mentioned family, but then, neither had I. Our conversations were limited to discussing how my hands felt that day, and why there were bread crumbs caught in the gears—that sort of thing. But I had to assume she had someone, and I wondered if said someone had suddenly fallen ill. It wasn’t like her to miss an appointment. That much I did know about her.

  The cat—Kerchief—appeared at my feet again, winding around my ankles. I didn’t reach down to pet him, and managed not to trip over him, though he followed me all the way from the empty workroom and down the winding halls, yowling at me when I let myself out.

  THREE

  LAURE

  “We are going out tonight,” Toverre said, “and I need you with me. I can’t do this alone, Laure. That’s final.”

  If he’d just said Please, Laurence, that would have done it for me. An I need you got me every time, but That’s final always sounded too much like orders for my liking. I wanted to help him, I really did, but I knew the moment I agreed to it he was going to tell me I couldn’t go in what I was wearing, and whether he knew it or not, that was always something of a slight. I knew how to dress myself the same as anyone else, but we couldn’t all have an eye for what color went with what fabric like some people. Truth be told, it didn’t seem like all that useful a skill to me anyway. More like it made a person crazy, trying to match things all the time.

  Just look at what it had done to Toverre.

  Not to mention, it was bitter damn cold—another reason why I was opting for warmth over coordination—and we had reading to do. Knowing Toverre, though, he’d probably done all his reading three weeks in advance, underlined the good parts, and reread them twice already. He did stuff like that.

  I wasn’t so lucky. I liked to savor what I was reading, except for the boring books, which I didn’t like to read at all. The assignments we had for the strategy of war class weren’t bad, and I didn’t mind doing them first, but some of the history books could put a girl to sleep as soon as she cracked open the cover.

  That was why I’d been putting those off as long as possible, standing in front of the mirror instead to try to see whether arranging my skirts just so would hide the fact that I was wearing trousers beneath them and woolen socks beneath that. It wasn’t that I believed Toverre about making the women and possibly some of the men faint in the streets at the sight of me—the Thremedon women kept their legs covered, too, I wagered, though probably with something fancier than a pair of heavy riding pants—but I thought maybe if Toverre didn’t have to look at it, he wouldn’t have that much cause for complaint.

  It was a long shot, but my da had always said that a fool’s hope was better than no hope at all.

  Yet no matter what I did, the skirts weren’t quite long enough to hide the rumple of fabric where I’d tucked my trouser legs into the tops of my boots. A small detail, maybe, but one I could be sure Toverre would notice right away. And he wouldn’t stop complaining until I did something about it.

  A knock at the door and me rushing to answer it messed up all my arranging anyway. Being left out in the hall too long gave Toverre the urge to clean it—something I knew from the last time I’d opened the door only to find him staring fanatically at dust on the wall sconce.

  Only it wasn’t Toverre at my door, but a large package, wrapped in brown paper and tied around the middle with a length of twine. I stared at it for a moment, not understanding what was going on, until Toverre gave a huff from behind it and shifted his weight impatiently.

  “Aren’t you going to let me in? There’s a stain on this rug that wasn’t here the night before, and that means it’s fresh. I do sometimes wonder whether we’re living with humans or animals. Father’s prize pigs were cleaner than this.”

  “Do come in,” I told him, stepping back so that he could make it past me with his heavy burden. “What’s that?”

  I knew he wouldn’t tell me—one of the few things Toverre enjoyed more than cleanliness was a good surprise—but that never stopped me from hoping he might slip up one of these days.

  “It’s for you,” Toverre said, which wasn’t an answer at all. He deposited the package on my bed with a lot of fuss and crinkling of the paper, then crossed his arms over his chest. “Well, go on. Only do close the door, so whatever that stain smells of doesn’t waft in.”

  I couldn’t smell anything from where I was standing, but I kept that to myself, shutting the door and giving it a firm nudge on top of that, since the wood of the frame was a little warped. I could’ve shaved it down with my da’s plane in no time, but I hadn’t brought that with me.

  Then I turned my attention to … well, I supposed I’d have to think of it as a present even though it wasn’t my birthday and it certainly wasn’t Toverre’s. If this was some city holiday he’d learned about and hadn’t given me fair warning of in advance, I was going to clout him a good one.

  “Hurry up,” Toverre said crossly, which was his way of being shy and nervous. “It’s not going to snap at your fingers, and it’s getting late.”

  I supposed I was being silly. Da never savored the moment just before opening a present, and neither did Connor, who worked with the horses.

  Without any further ado, I plucked the all-purpose knife from my boot and cut through the knot in the twine. I saw Toverre wince out of the corner of my eye at the idea of a lady carrying a knife in her footwear like a common highwayman, but what else was I supposed to do? He was the one who wanted to roam the city late at night to take in the pretty lights and enjoy the ambiance,
and after what’d nearly happened to us on our first day, I wasn’t going to let myself be caught off guard again. I had my virtue to protect, not to mention Toverre’s.

  I tore through the stiff paper without bothering to try to save it—though I would be able use it to get the fire started in my room again later, after we got back and we were both freezing cold. Sitting in the center of the package, neatly arranged, of course, was a pair of black boots with shiny silver buttons all up the sides. They looked sturdy as well as fashionable, and when I picked them up I felt something soft folded beneath them.

  “The boots are from my mother,” Toverre explained, spitting the words out quickly. “Well, from me, but I sent home to get them from Mother. After what happened to your last pair, I remembered you were the same size. And also, these will go much better with your clothes than those old brown ones. It’s a pity the buttons aren’t gold, since they’d match your hair better, but mother has different coloring and I didn’t want to seem too demanding. I’m sure there’s a button shop somewhere. We’ll find it, and, no worries, I’ll put them on.”

  “And what’s this?” I asked, indicating the fabric swaddled up beneath. There were three different colors in all—black, white, and green—and they looked suspiciously like women’s undergarments.

  After all this time, was Toverre finally taking an interest in what was underneath my clothing?