“That’s impossible,” Rachel murmured. “Only a powerful gearsetter can work on machinery this precise.”
Rosemary puffed up, her shoulders going back, her chin up. “Em can work on any machinery,” she said firmly. “It takes her longer, it’s harder, and she has to put her whole soul into it, but she says that we can do anything without categorization that we can do with it.”
Rachel looked over the carriage and its great white wings. “We can’t fly,” she said softly.
“Maybe not yet,” Rosemary said. “But we have to learn to walk, first.”
They all rolled the great winged carriage out through the aisle between the stables. It was heavy, and the wings were terribly unwieldy. Horses stamped and wuffed as they went by. Chris couldn’t help but smile at Hobby as he went past. The sweet-tempered gelding nickered at him.
Out in the yard, Rachel moved off to one side, wearing a pained expression. Chris went to check on her. She brushed him off. “I’m fine,” she said, closing her eyes tightly. “Just… get me to Garrett.”
He shook her head. “Are you sure about this? It’s safer if you stay here, Rachel. Let us try this another way. I can’t have you in danger, too. Not you and him.”
She glanced up, searching his face. “Does that mean you’ve forgiven me?”
Chris turned away. He watched Olivia, Rosemary, and Miss Greene circle the carriage. “I don’t know,” he said feebly. “I just—I would feel so much better if you stayed back here with Rosemary….”
His sister heard him. She turned to him and placed her hands on her hips. “Don’t be a blockhead,” she said, in that voice she’d used on him since she was a little girl and didn’t think she should have to listen to her brother telling her to go to bed on time. “You think I’m staying behind? Please! Rachel said it herself: Em isn’t a gearsetter! And I don’t know how it’s supposed to work. It’s patented, you know! In order to keep it aloft, I’ll need to be on board! Singing.”
Gods! There was absolutely no way that—“For hours?” he choked out.
“If that’s how long it takes us to get to the city!” she shot back.
“Absolutely not!” he cried. “No, not by any means! Rosemary—you’re here for a reason. Darrington is dangerous. We’re headed into the den of a man who would love to get his hands on you!”
“Oh, and Summergrove has turned out to be so safe?” Rosie retorted, flipping her mass of black curls. “I think we can all agree that my hiding place is compromised. I can’t stay here. What happens next… well, we’ll need to talk about that. But for now, Darrington is as good a place as any!”
He shook his head, advancing on her, with some wild idea about how if he could just—just get his hands on her, just wrap her up in his arms, just make her understand, then… “How can you possibly think that Darrington is—”
“Chris!” she shouted. He stopped. Everyone was staring, he realized. Miss Greene. Olivia. Rachel.
He swallowed. “Rosie,” he whispered.
Her face softened. Her hands dropped from her hips. “Chris,” she repeated, her voice was quiet. She took a step forward to meet him, pulling one of his hands into both of her small ones. He looked down, comparing them. Hah. Not so small, after all. Like him, she had strong fingers and thick wrists. Her nails were uneven and ragged where his were finely manicured. It was hard not to think of how he’d stared down into her crib while his father’s fiaran icicle chimes played overhead. Her little fingernails had been so small he’d hardly been able to bear it.
But the hands that held his didn’t belong to a child.
Not anymore.
He looked back up at her eyes. “It’s only been half a year since I sent you up here,” he said. “Do you remember how vulnerable you were?”
“Yes,” she told him. “But half a year can be a lifetime, Chris. I didn’t understand anything back then. I wanted what I wanted. I didn’t care what it might mean. What it might cost. I just believed in the world that Father told me was there. But it’s different now. I don’t want to bind for anyone else. I don’t want to be a stupid chess piece on their awful board. Everyone just wants to break the world, but Emilia and I… we want to fix it.”
Chris swallowed hard. “She convinced you to see things her way,” he said. “What if someone else convinces you. Aren’t… aren’t you just falling in with someone else who can control you?”
“Christopher, really,” Olivia murmured.
He coloured. “I don’t mean that she’s—” he hurried to say, but Rosie shook her head hard.
“I know what you mean,” she said. “And that’s not how it is. Before, I just believed something. Now I believe in something.”
“How do I know they won’t hurt you?” Chris pleaded.
“You don’t,” Rosie said. “You just have to know that I won’t let them, and then trust me.” She grinned, then, in a way that also reminded him of when she was his baby sister. She squeezed his hands and tilted her head to one side. “After all,” she said, her voice sweet and sing-song. “Do you think anybody can make me do anything I don’t want to do?”
Nervous overwhelmed laughter erupted from Chris’s lips. “Gods,” he gasped. “Gods, not in any hell, Rosie.” He tugged her forward, pulling her into his arms, and she buried her face in his shoulder.
He couldn’t believe she came all the way up to his shoulder.
“You’ve taken care of me for so long, Chris,” she murmured. “You’ve given up so much. I know I’m still only fourteen. I know I’m not all grown up. I know you won’t be satisfied until I turn eighteen, and maybe not even then. But you can let yourself go just a little.”
He closed his eyes and held her tight.
Olivia cleared her throat. “Right. I understand this is a moment for the both of you, but the most dangerous man in Tarland is about to get his hands on a technology that could apparently destroy us all. And he’s likely holding someone most of us consider a friend hostage while he waits. If we could possibly move this inside of the flying carriage, that would really be ideal.”
Rosemary stepped back. She turned her face away from him, but he saw her swiping at tears. He hated that it made him happy to see her cry for him.
“I love you, Rosie,” he said. “And I trust you.”
She nodded. Looked up. Smiled.
“That’s it, then?” Olivia asked briskly. “Wonderful. Let’s move.”
One by one, they loaded themselves into the carriage. Rachel sat in the far seat. Olivia settled in beside Chris.
Rosemary came to stand on the step and peered into the carriage.
Rachel struggled to move over. “Sit with me, Rosie?” she asked, curiously sincere for such an innocuous offer.
But Rosemary shook her head. “No, I can’t. I have to ride in back, on the footman’s stoop,” she said. “I’ll need to sing up three sylphs at once and control them all, to get us lift under the wings. I don’t think I can keep a hold on them for so long if I’m inside and can’t see them clearly.”
Chris bit back a strangled protest. “What if you fall?” he asked, very reasonably.
She smiled. “I won’t,” she said and shut the door in his face.
The carriage settled and bounced as Rosemary climbed up back. She rapped a fist on the back, right by Chris’s ear. He tried not to flinch. Tried not to imagine rogue sylphs twirling around the body of a Falling Castle. Tried not to think of his sister in peril.
Tried to trust her.
“Hold on!” Rosemary called, and her clear, beautiful voice flowed around them.
Within moments, a wild wind rose around them. It blew at the curtains of the carriage, sending all their hair spinning and whipping around the interior. The blood-soaked hems of Olivia and Rachel’s skirts stirred and fluttered. Chris had to hold his coat down.
“Please live, Maris,” Olivia murmured, turning to look out the window.
And then they were rising into the open air. The great white wings of the carriage sp
read wide, and Chris imagined, as he never had before, all the tiny moving mechanisms inside those beautiful wings. Things of wonder and magic, he thought, were made from things of simplicity and hard work. Which were, he supposed, the only wonder or magic that mattered.
The manor shrunk. Chris saw all the rows of trees laid out beneath them. The mill. The cidery. The guest house. He thought that, perhaps, he could even see a gleam of sun on the water that might be the pool where Olivia had stripped off her clothes and dived in, and where there was a tree that had her name carved into the trunk beside that of her brother.
An insectoid sylph with many-faceted eyes swirled past his window and giggled, and Chris jerked away, gulping.
Then the carriage’s great wings cupped the air, and they launched forward. South. Toward Darrington.
he countryside passed in a blur. Where the flight of a normal winged carriage was smooth and graceful, their journey was loud, undignified, windswept, and wild. They blew past towns Chris recognized only from the conductor’s last calls on the train north. Occasionally, the carriage would list to one side, or bump, or even drop precipitously. Chris would cry out in alarm. Rachel would wrap her arms around her middle and shudder. Olivia would burst into laughter, which could be hysteria, or perhaps a sign that she truly was mad, after all.
Rosemary continued to sing.
Chris watched for train tracks. He watched for the great cloudling-powered behemoth eating up countryside as it shot south, carrying Sister Margaret and Miss Banks’s precious notes. But the train curled through the country like a garden snake, and Rosemary flew them in a straight shot. Occasionally, he’d catch sight of tracks cutting through the trees and fields like a ribbon of steel riverbed, but then it would be gone once again. Perhaps they passed the train. Or perhaps they were too late, and it was disembarking even now.
Either way, time passed in a stomach-clenching, heart-pounding blur, and he soon saw the small parishes and boroughs that clustered around the edges of Darrington City.
“Where are we meant to land this gods-forsaken contraption, do you think?” Olivia called, the first time any of them had spoken in some unit of time Christopher had no grasp over.
Rachel shook her head. “We’ll need to trust Rosemary can find somewhere,” she said. It was hard to hear her voice, she spoke so quietly, but there were spots of red high on her cheeks. Whether from exhilaration, fear, fever, or just cold, it was blood beneath her skin rather than back on the stones.
“She’ll find some wealthy fool’s rooftop platform, no doubt! And then the lot of us shall ramble down four flights of stairs, disturbing their day!” Olivia threw back her head and cackled. “Ah, this is madness, you all know, don’t you. Madness!”
They sailed past the outskirts, deeper into the city. Chris moved closer to the window. He could see buildings clustered close together, districts rising and falling. The city zipped by at a dizzying pace. Below him, closer to the ground, he saw other winged carriages. They fluttered along beautifully. He wondered if any of them thought to look up to see their drunk, mad cousin wheeling above their heads.
Then he wondered if this was what Darrington had looked like from Mother’s eyes, on the night she died. A spirit sang and giggled and darted past his ear, trailing motes and ephemeral leaves behind her. Chris’s memory flashed up the taste of vomit in the back of his throat, the sound of singing sylphs and shrieking steel, the sight of a beautiful celery whirlwind stretching up to the heavens and of a castle smashing into the ground. He swallowed hard, clamping down on his gorge, and pulled his head back inside. The heights that had seemed so dizzyingly magical in the countryside suddenly took on the stomach-crunching, heart-stopping dread he knew all too well. He closed his eyes tight and willed that he be here, now, and not then or there.
Rosemary’s song was barely audible over the sound of the wind and the humming sylphs, but Chris noticed when it changed. The carriage bumped and wavered.
“Are you all right?” Rachel’s voice penetrated his fog.
“I will be if we get to the ground safely,” Chris replied, voice and body both shuddering.
“It would seem that’s on the docket,” Olivia mused.
Chris forced himself to crack his eyes open. Their furious pace slowed to a holding pattern. The sylphs ducked and dove, and the carriage’s wings straightened, flapping to keep them aloft rather than to drive them forward. Below them spread out the expanse of Beckley Park, with all of its charming wooded areas, manicured lawns, picturesque ponds, and cobbled gathering areas.
The latter was where they descended to.
Promenading socialites the size of ants grew to the size of birds. One by one they looked up, elbowed their neighbours, and then took off in a spreading stampede off to the green. Chris wondered who could possibly take out horses and curricles and fine new clothes with Darrington in the state it was, and he felt strangely vindicated to send them scurrying for cover. William might very well be (dead) fearing for his life at this exact moment, and yet society swarmed on?
It occurred to Chris that he didn’t much care for most of society he had seen up close.
After how wild the ride had been, Chris rather expected a bump when they landed. It felt as if they all ought to be jostled together, falling out of their benches to the floor of the carriage. And yet the landing was so gentle and graceful that he barely felt a change when they alighted upon the ground like a butterfly onto a flower.
Olivia had the door open and was out of the carriage in instants. A scream went up from the gathered, staring crowd at the sight of a tiny, harried woman who looked as if she’d just come back from a slaughterhouse. Chris tried to hide the blood on his shirt beneath his coat, but it was all over his hands, his face… much of the crowd broke out into a panicked stampede when he jumped down and landed beside Olivia. Rosemary’s three sylphs darted around them in spinning figure eights, agitated.
Rosie’s song reached a shattering note, and the sylphs exploded into showers of motes and flower petals, which rained down around Chris’s shoulders and tingled where they touched his shoulders.
“What is this?” A man with a round belly, a prodigious beard, and a posh accent emerged from what remained of the crowd who held their ground. “I’ll have you know, my son is off calling the coppers as we speak.”
Olivia looked at Rosemary as she walked over to join them, and then patted down her skirts as if they were covered in dust and not blood. “Yes,” she said smartly. “Please, I insist that you do so. Have a message given to one Officer Hannah Burke. Tell her that Olivia Faraday is in the city and that she’s needed at a certain house on Greensborough Row.”
“No police!” Rachel gasped, her fingers digging into Chris’s forearm. “If—have I not impressed the severity of my brother’s temper upon you? If officers arrive on scene—”
Olivia waved at Rachel dismissively. “Do tell her that it’s all rather hush,” she said. “Delicate bits involved, and such.”
The big man’s mouth worked like he was a fish. “Now, see here—” he said eventually.
“Are we very far from Greensborough Row right now, sir?” she asked, the very soul of politeness.
“We’re close!” Rosie replied for him. “I don’t know the exact lay of things around here, but I’m sure it’s close. I chose to land here for a reason.”
“Ah, good then. We can hail a cab. Please”—Olivia fluttered eyelashes at the big fellow—“Don’t forget. That’s Hannah Burke. Greensborough Row. We really will need her assistance, I think. Tell her—tell her there’s a fox headed into a henhouse, hm?”
“I—”
“Fox. Henhouse. Yes?”
Faced with three bloodstained, possibly dangerous, and unfailingly polite women, one of whom had just been controlling three elementals at once, the big man quailed. He raised a shaking hand to straighten the tails of his moustache and then nodded. He got out of their way.
Feeling rather stupid, and acting almost entirely on instinc
t, Chris tried to tip a hat he wasn’t wearing as he passed.
The first cabbie that answered their hail got one look at them before his eyes went wild and he kicked his team of horses up into a hard trot away from them, calling for help.
“Gods,” Olivia snapped. “We ought to have changed clothes, the way things are going.” She raised her bloodied hands to look at them, turning them over. She folded her lips. “But it wouldn’t feel quite right to just wash Maris’s blood away while she might be dying, now would it?” She closed her eyes. “Please don’t be dying.”
“I’m sure she’s…” Chris said but didn’t know how to continue. He wasn’t sure. Maris’s blood haunted him, the way it had exploded forth from her slashed neck like a fountain. Emilia Banks breaking her deepest belief in order to pour her life into her lover’s veins.
Will might die like that.
He shuddered.
Another cab passed them by. Yet another veered hard to the other side. Pedestrians were yelling in alarm and turning to sprint in the other direction. Once again they had attracted something of a crowd.
Olivia stepped out into the road.
She did it so casually and without any prompting that Chris didn’t have time to grab for her.
“Olivia!” he cried out, releasing Rachel and throwing himself after her. Rosemary darted forward to help Rachel stand, and Chris stepped out into traffic, and there was a cab bearing down on them, hooves flashing in the sun. He threw himself before Olivia, turning her back to the flying hooves and closing his eyes tight as he wrapped his arms around her and pulled her close.
He didn’t die.
“Christopher,” Olivia said, her voice muffled against him. “Please. This is unseemly. I knew he would stop.”
Flushing, stammering, Chris stepped away, back to the curb. The cabbie stared down at them, eyes so wide the whites seemed grotesque, like a terrified horse. He began trying to back up almost immediately. “Police!” he cried. “Police!”
“Stop it!” Olivia snapped. “We aren’t killers. We’re trying to stop killers! Let us up into your darned hack, you coward, or you’re impeding law enforcement!”
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