The Heartreader's Secret

by Kate McinTyre

  “Bastard got the noose. I stood in the crowd and watched. Ollie’s killer paid for what he’d done.”

  Olivia sighed.

  “But all Mother saw was that her daughter, who had never shed a tear for her son, had taken peace away from her. An accident is a tragedy. There’s sweetness to a tragedy, in a way. An aching, empty sweetness. But your little boy, raped and then murdered by a man you put in his path, dying violated and crying and in pain? Nothing sweet about that. That’s not a tragedy, that’s a bloody abomination, and the knowledge never goes away. When I’m honest with myself, I know she has the right of it. Justice was quite nice, but my real motivation was something considerably less noble. I saw something was off. The pieces didn’t fit. And I just… needed to know. I took away her peace because I was a soulless little monster who needed to know.”

  “Olivia—”

  “That’s why my mother hates me.”

  Chris struggled to speak around the lump in his throat. Ah, Gods. “She… I’m sure she doesn’t….”

  “Oh, don’t. I’ve known her for considerably longer than you have, and she most certainly does hate me. She’s quite clear about it. Monster, she calls me. Little monster. Always. Bloody… bloody always.”

  There was something about the way she said the words, the way she finally bobbed down and then back up the water, the way her lip curled and her eyes slipped off his….

  It hurt her. It still hurt her.

  She splashed water on her face and then met his gaze again with a grim smile. “Is it any wonder my mother hates outsiders? She’s never made a new hire since the day Ollie died. And police! Gods, the police are so bad they basically killed my brother themselves!” She curled her lip and looked away. “Just like I did.”

  Chris struggled to put it all into place. To imagine what it might have been like. “How did you stand it? Living here… all those years….?”

  She shrugged, still treading water. “Honestly, it really wasn’t so bad, until Da passed. Da loved me to the end. It’s just how she is, he’d always say to Mother, and whether she believed it or not, she’d shut her gob when he was there. She loved him, and he loved me, and I think some thread of love-by-proxy kept us all together. But after he was gone? Ah, well. No threads left, now. The straw that broke the back, for the record, is that I don’t want Miller. I never did. Ollie was born for this place, but even before I was categorized, I always just wanted to solve puzzles. Miller’s been in the family for six generations, and when Mother dies, I… well. I suppose she’s selling it to your Mister Spencer’s heinous little nephew. It’s not that I love that, Christopher, really. I’m not soulless. I’m—I’m not a monster. But I’m who I am, I’m selfish and I’m not ashamed, and I don’t want Miller. I love this place, and I hate it. I want my flat, my cats, and my murders.”

  This, now. This was something he could understand. He nodded. “I… never would have had any interest in my father’s legacy, either.” He laughed quietly. “For all my attempts to keep my head down, I suppose I’m rather quite the reformist, in the end. My father would be furious, but…” He shook his head. “I don’t know what I’d want to do, in all honesty. If I could have any proficiency I wanted, and work any job on the approved list for it, I suppose I’d just choose something prestigious and high-paying, because I’ve never really had a sense of what I want, besides taking care of Rosie. But… but I do know I wouldn’t want Lowry or ‘binding or the Buckley name. I do know that much.”

  Olivia smiled faintly. She ran a hand through her wet hair. Her lips were most definitely blue. “To being disappointments to our legacies, then.” She held up a hand as if giving a toast.

  Chris laughed quietly and returned the gesture. “I can drink to that,” he murmured. He swallowed and lowered his arm and bit his lip and then said, quietly, awkwardly: “I’m very sorry about Ollie. And about your mother.”

  She shrugged, shoulders breaking the water. “It is what it is,” she said. “And me being me, it’s usually quite easy to not feel much of anything about it at all.” And then, after a pause. “Thank you, though. I… you’re a sensitive soul, Christopher.”

  He smiled faintly. “So my father would have said.” He took a deep breath. “Is… is that all?”

  She started, and then, with a snap, the usual Olivia was back again. She grinned, canine teeth gleaming, and tossed her head. “Oh? You haven’t had your full of Miller-Faraday drama quite yet? Because I’m certain that I can find something in the cavernous wardrobe of our skeletal closet to make you squirm even more if you’d like!”

  He laughed faintly. “Ah, no. That’s… quite all right.”

  She cackled. But there was a warmth in her smile and in her eyes that he didn’t usually see, and something else, as well. He wished that Rachel was here, wished that he could plumb her for information about Olivia’s emotional state, but with his own, non-reading senses, he thought it might be… relief.

  “Thank you for the context,” he said softly.

  She ducked her head and actually coloured. Or maybe that was just her blood struggling mightily to heat her cheeks before she died of hypothermia. “Right,” she said, and then cleared her throat. “Well, I’m getting out. Turn around, Christopher, unless you want an eyeful.”

  Colouring, himself, he turned.

  A few minutes of water and fabric noises later, Olivia came up behind him, linked her arm with his, and led him out of the clearing and back to their horses.

  hris was wandering through corridors of thought, processing everything he had just learned when a horrifying visage appeared before him. He shot back on instinct, yelping.

  Hobby reacted.

  He reared and whinnied loudly, like a shrill scream in Chris’s ears. The saddle itself seemed to shift, and then Chris found himself falling backwards. He shouted, squeezed his legs, and buried his fingers in the horse’s mane, closing his eyes and holding on for dear life.

  “Whoa!” Olivia cried.

  “Ho, there, boy!” another voice added. It was hoarse and cracked.

  He felt Olivia and Alouette at his side and a hand on his leg, grabbing Hobby’s reins. While Chris’s heart drummed against his ribs like it was trying to win a swing competition, he was dimly aware of them talking to the horse, murmuring, pulling at him.

  It took him a long moment to realize that Olivia was talking to him.

  “Chris. Christopher, my word. Gods, you’re such a poor rider. What am I to do with you? If this was any horse but Hobby, you’d have a broken neck and then what would I have to tell your sister?”

  He peeled his eyes open, slowly, one lid at a time. Olivia was blinking wide eyes at him, wet hair falling lank around her shoulders, bowler hat looking especially silly perched atop it. She looked scared.

  He cracked a smile.

  “The countryside is going to kill me,” he said weakly.

  Her eyebrows pulled down into sharp annoyance. “Your own stupidity is going to kill you, you bloody tosser. Who jumps back like that on a horse? While screaming like a little girl? Do you not know anything about equine temperament?”

  “All’s well that ends well, Miss Olivia,” Chris’s other rescuer said.

  Chris turned to thank him.

  And swallowed down another scream.

  The man’s face was a horrifying mass of coiled and rumpled flesh. One eye hung almost an inch below the other, and a nose that barely seemed human peeked out from between folds of skin. He looked like ruined fabric, like when one thread came loose and gathered the rest up into puckered furrows. Human skin should not dip into valleys and creases and trenches. Everything about the horrible visage brought Chris’s gorge up and urged him to kick Hobby off, to flee.

  “Christopher.” Olivia’s voice was soothing and low in his ear, a slowly unspooling line of sanity that kept him from running or recoiling. “This is William Jones. He works here at Miller. Billy, this is my assistant, Christopher Buckley.”

  The monster touched the brim of
the hat sitting atop his bald head. Chris realized, swallowing bile, that he only had one ear. The other was just a twisted nub of flesh and a hole. “You help Miss Olivia track down her brutes in the city?” His voice matched his face.

  Chris fought down all the animal reactions tearing for control. He swallowed hard. Olivia acted as if the twisted horror before them was a friend. An employee. And so… “Ah. I that is, yes. That is, I don’t know if I help much. Notes, mostly.”

  “He’s quite modest,” Olivia said, with a little laugh. “He’s actually become rather indispensable.”

  The compliment, so unlike Olivia and uttered with such sincerity, tugged him back into the land of the sane. It was terribly impolite to stare at a physical deformity, and so Chris cleared his throat lightly and glanced away. There was nowhere else to really look. Well, nothing for it. He made eye contact, instead. “Good morning, Mister Jones,” he said, faintly.

  “Billy’s what they all call me,” the man said. One corner of his mouth twisted up into an approximation of a smile. The other corner didn’t move at all. Chris tried not to notice the way his face seemed to stretch down to his shoulders without the help of a neck, like some half-melted wax sculpture. “You’ve got all of our thanks for keeping Miss Olivia safe down there in the big city.”

  “Ah,” Chris said. “Well. You’re very welcome.”

  “What are you doing down here, Billy?” Olivia asked. “I’d have thought preparations for the Harvest Festival would keep everyone quite busy.”

  It was impossible to read the man’s facial expression, but had Chris seen a flash of guilt in his mismatched eyes? He cleared his throat. It sounded wet. “Checking on sommat down at the mill, that’s all,” he said. “Missus Elouise wants some fresh cider for tonight.”

  Olivia clucked her tongue. “Oh, goodness. Then you all have quite the day ahead of you. You’ll get no envy from me!” She made a shooing motion with one hand. “Get to it, then, or Mother will see you pay for your sins!”

  Billy Jones tipped his wide-brimmed hat again, and within a moment, disappeared into the lines of apple-heavy trees.

  “S—sorry,” Chris said, raising a hand to brush his hair back. “I didn’t—I was just so startled, he just looks—I—ah.”

  “Mn,” Olivia agreed. “Quite the sight, isn’t he?” She nudged Alouette, and Chris followed after her. He was relieved when Hobby seemed steady on his feet. He decided that he quite disliked being on the back of a living creature with no buffer between them.

  He turned around to see if he could still catch a glimpse of Jones, but there was no sign of him. He swallowed hard. “I… what happened to him?”

  Olivia shot him a glance over her shoulder. Her eyes were infinitely sad, and his heart skipped a beat, and somehow he knew what she would say before she could even start speaking. “Oh,” she said, quietly. “A common enough sort of story, I should think. After all, 815 people died in the Floating Castle, but how many more were injured?”

  “Ah,” Chris breathed. His hands shook a bit when he raised them to run through his hair. He swallowed hard. “I’ve never actually met anyone who….”

  “Well, now you have!” Olivia chirped, but it was a false sort of cheer, he could tell. She sighed. “In truth, I bear more than a little responsibility for poor old Billy’s fate. I… he was my companion, you see. Or valet. Or bodyguard, which is the real truth of it, because if my mother really was just worried about me all alone and living like a pauper in Darrington, she’d have sent a young lady and not a handsome footman with broad shoulders who might damage my reputation.”

  Handsome, she said. Chris tried not to imagine what it would be like, losing his looks. It was a vain, selfish sort of place for his mind to go. But he could hardly help it. Would Olivia still want him about, or would he unsettle suspects and allies alike too much? Would Rosemary be able to look him in the eyes? What work was there for a wordweaver whose face could turn a stomach?

  And what about Rachel and William? How much of what was between him and them was reliant on his good looks?

  He didn’t like the thought.

  “I didn’t like having him around. Hovering over me. I chased him off from my flat and my work but begged him not to come back here and tell my mother. I didn’t want her to send someone else. So he found a flat of his own, got a job as a cabbie, and checked up on me. Poor sod. You know, I ask myself every time I see him—was he fortunate that his lodgings were far enough from the fall zone that he didn’t die, or abominably unlucky that he was close enough to be caught in the flames and chaos of the aftermath? No one thought he’d live. The young lady he was cohabiting with certainly didn’t. But he pulled through.”

  Gods. Chris nodded slowly. Mother Deorwynn, there were as many sad stories from that night as there were stars in the sky. Was there anyone in all of Tarland who hadn’t been affected?

  “You said he was a footman,” he said.

  “He was,” Olivia said. “But he couldn’t bear showing his ruined face to every guest at Miller. He tried to leave. Live on the streets, most likely. Ironically, he’s a lifeknitter, but it’s barely a trickle. Not enough to find work. Mother knew that’s where he’d end up, and she wouldn’t hear of it. She’d have him trained to work in the orchards, and he’d never pay for room and board, or have to go into town to buy supplies. If he wanted to hide his face, he was welcome. And if he wanted to show it, that was welcome, too.”

  Chris nodded slowly. He thought about that as they picked their way through the orchards. Elouise Faraday would have known that Billy Jones had been derelict in his duty and left Olivia on her own in the city. And yet, she hadn’t held it against him. On the contrary, she’d opened herself up to him far beyond what would ever be expected of her. Was it just out of disgust for her daughter? Or….

  “That was very kind of her,” Chris murmured.

  Olivia gave him a small smile. “Ah,” she said. “That’s the real rub when it comes to my mother. She doesn’t hate me because she’s a bad person. She hates me because I am.”

  The stables were still empty when they rode their horses under the arch. Chris wrinkled his nose. He wasn’t sure he’d ever get used to the smell. It was certainly one element of the country he was not finding at all charming.

  Olivia jumped down from Alouette, peering about. She folded her arms. “Really, Mabelle should be here by now. We’re hardly at the crack of dawn anymore.” She shook her head and sighed. “I suppose we’ll have to brush the horses out ourselves.”

  Chris ran a hand down Hobby’s neck. There were needles from the pine trees embedded in his coat, and a cloud of dust came up when Chris patted him, but….

  “Ah,” he said, looking down at Olivia, who seemed positively miniature from his seat atop the placid gelding. “Olivia, I haven’t the first idea how to brush a horse….”

  She gazed up and shook her head pitiably.

  “I never learned—” he began, voice high with defensiveness, but she silenced him with a wave of her hand, indicating he should dismount.

  He obeyed, cheeks warming.

  “Hopeless boy,” Olivia said, but her voice was more or less warm as she placed two hands on his back and pushed him away from the horses. “I’ll deal with it, I suppose. Make yourself busy and stay out of my way.”

  Chris scurried off in the direction she pushed. Once again, he found himself uncomfortable under the gaze of so many animals, particularly the shaggier hippogryphs with dun fur and sparrowlike feathers, who had the implacable, twitching-head, dead-eyed stares of birds. He ducked his head and turned his attention to the debris-strewn alcove.

  It seemed to function as some sort of graveyard for old carriage parts. He felt strangely uncomfortable seeing the seat of a four-in-hand just laying there, propped up against a wall. It was rather like seeing a friend disemboweled. He made a face, stepping over the long handles of brooms and a wall hung with old, cracked leather tack awaiting repair.

  The hulking shape swathed und
er thick, off-white material caught his attention. He lifted the corner but found the covering remarkably heavy, made from heavy-duty canvas. He pulled harder, revealing an empty axle and the edge of a carriage chassis.

  “What are you doing? Get away from there!”

  He jumped back. The canvas fell.

  Mabelle Green hurried toward him, her braid bouncing as she placed her hands on her hips. “Nosy! What are you getting into that for?”

  Chris held up his hands and stepped back. “I, ah—you know, the process of investigating can be—”

  “Well, it’s got nothing to do with this old thing.” Mabelle rapped against the body of the canvas-covered carriage with her knuckles. It echoed back hollowly. “This whole area is full of all things sharp and half-constructed and dangerous. You’re going to hurt your fine self, poking around, and without a decent lifeknitter anywhere nearby. Then what will Rosie have to say to me?”

  Chris couldn’t help but study the girl in a more critical light the moment she invoked his sister’s name. This early, she was fresh-faced and glowing, her freckles standing out charmingly against her sun-darkened skin, her braid tightly woven with no fly-aways, and her shirt and trousers finely pressed. But they were still trousers. And it was beyond strange to see a teenage girl wearing suspenders. They framed a shape he absolutely did not intend to take notice of, considering her youth.

  No. Definitely not a suiting companion for Rosemary.

  But… thankfully, Miss Greene didn’t appear to be too disastrous an influence on her. The Rosemary he’d seen at dinner last night had been prim, clever, and ladylike. So he clamped down on comments about the young stablemaster’s relationship with his sister, and he held up his hands in surrender, instead.

  “I’m afraid Olivia has infected me with a certain curiosity about things,” he said, making the words an apology, and giving the girl one of his most charming smiles. “Dreadfully unattractive habit. I’m sorry.”

  “Mn.” Her brow furrowed and she looked him up and down, folding her arms. And then she sighed, and her jaw tightened slightly. “If you’re poking about in the workshop here,” she murmured, “I suppose you aren’t making a world of progress with Dad, yet?”