The Chase

by Virginia Boecker

  It was necessary.

  With him gone, I was free to talk to who I wanted, see who I wanted. It didn’t occur to me that the rules Warin gave me were custodial, saving me from the truth I came to learn on my own: I repulsed people. For being dead, for being reborn from dark magic, for being dangerous, for being a thief, for being. The moment anyone discovered what I was, they turned me away. Rejection became part of the tapestry, an expectation and an inevitability.

  Until I found her.

  She was called Helysoune, a name just as old-fashioned and impossible to pronounce seventy years ago as it is today. But everyone in her family called her Hels, so I did, too. She was a witch, all of fifteen when she spotted me resting in the loft inside her family’s barn, tucked away in north Anglia in the tiny coastal town of Grimsby, as far away as I could get from humanity as I thought possible.

  It was ten years after Warin died and for all that time, I was alone, though not by choice. She took pity on me, bringing me food and water, not knowing what I was or that I didn’t need it. She caught on quickly enough, though, and when she disappeared I thought she’d gone to find someone to send me away. Instead, she came back with a blanket. I told her I didn’t need that, either, but she interrupted me and said, “You may not need it but that doesn’t mean you won’t like it.” She draped it over my shoulders, warm and soft and smelling of sage and hearth and home, and she was right. I did like it.

  Hels was the youngest and the only girl, with five brothers, all wizards, none of who were afraid of me or repulsed by me, and when she suggested I stay on with them, they all said, “What’s one more boy to the bunch?”

  I say I found her, but I guess you could say she was the one who found me.

  I stayed with her until the end, until her parents were gone and then her brothers were gone and then it was just her and me and then she was gone, too. By then I didn’t feel like a revenant anymore; she brought the color back into my eyes and into my life and I felt almost human again, with all the grief and fear and realization that no matter who I found or who found me they would leave me, eventually, and that it would always be this way, forever.

  Which brings me to Fifer.

  I don’t know what I am to her: a dare, a rebellion, something to impress her friends, look how fearless I am. No matter what the reason, it has to end. Her friends, that healer, her guardian—the most powerful wizard in the whole of Anglia, for Christ’s sake—once they find out what she’s doing, they’ll end it anyway. They’ll say it’s dangerous and they’re right, but not just for Fifer and not for the reasons they think. When this started I wanted to make her like me for the sport of it, for the fun. Only now I feel the same pull to her as I did to Hels and if I don’t cut it off I will be in too deep, too involved in her life and then eventually, inevitably, her death. I can’t go through it all again, not again.

  I stand up then, dust the hay and the dirt off my trousers. It’s around midnight, time to make my exit. That guard didn’t really think I’d hang around to be interrogated by the Inquisitor, did he? I step over the body of my now-stiff cellmate, flex my fingers, readying them to pry apart the bars in the door. I’ll take out whatever guards are on post and be on my way.

  That’s when a messenger boy in dark livery appears, silent as a hare in the hay. Even I didn’t hear him coming. He pulls a tiny, rolled-up scrap of parchment from his sleeves and presses it toward me. Before I can unroll it he’s gone, scurrying back into the shadows. I guess whatever message he brought me doesn’t require a response.

  I smooth out the slip of paper; it’s difficult to read in the dim light of the single torch set in a bracket somewhere down the hall, but I manage. What I see gives me gooseflesh, as if it were brought in on a winter breeze.

  I have a proposition for you.

  I pause then, peering through the bars and wondering for a moment if this note was perhaps delivered to the wrong hands, or to the wrong cell. But there’s no one around but me.

  I keep reading.

  It involves a pardon, which I imagine you don’t care much about, and money, which I imagine you do. I am in need of your talents. And I’ll make it worth your while. If you agree, simply wait for the guards to retrieve you.

  It isn’t signed, but it doesn’t need to be. No one else has the authority or the audacity to propose to a prisoner. No one else would have the foresight to send a child to do his bidding in the middle of the night, or to leave such a damning note unsigned.

  Blackwell.

  I quickly scan the note again. Blackwell doesn’t tell me what to do if I disagree but, because I have a lamentable sense of self-preservation, I don’t.

  * * *

  Just before sunrise they come, a full complement of guards alongside a pack of Blackwell’s prized wolves: his witch hunters.

  To the untrained eye, they’re nothing more than servants, dressed in drab, coarse woolen tunics and pants, battered boots, and nondescript coats, stripped of their uniforms after the Reformist rebellions against the king began last year. It was Blackwell’s attempt to keep them from being attacked, or, more precisely, to keep them from being recognized. I know who they are anyway: The malice and violence that lurks in their expression is something no manner of disguise can hide.

  “I’m flattered,” I say to them. “By the retinue. But it’s not necessary. I’m not… here to make… trouble.” My words are punctuated by a battery of weapons, pikes and broadswords and polearms and halberds, shoved into my shoulder and chest and gut. I’m forced backward, into the wall, to keep them from impaling me, but even so, it’s enough to draw blood. I can feel it trickling beneath my shirt and down my chest, slow and dark and cold as molasses. “No need to make a mess.”

  One of the witch hunters steps forward, over the blue body of my cellmate, to stand before me. He’s my height, blue-eyed and blond, attractive by Anglian standards. Eighteen, maybe nineteen, and by the swagger in his gait and the smirk on his face I can see he’s wholly in love with his job, wholly in love with himself. He’s handed off his sword to the hunter beside him and approaches me unarmed, as if to show me how unafraid he is of me, how unintimidated.

  Fool. I could end him without even trying.

  “Here’s how this is going to go.” He looks me over, slow. “You’re going to come with us. You’re going to do it willingly, and you’re not to cause even an ounce of trouble. Understand?”

  “Never said I wouldn’t,” I reply. “You children are so awfully eager, aren’t you?” He scowls at that. Then, unable to resist, I pick the foremost thought off the tip of his brain, hanging there like overripe fruit, and toss it at him. “Speaking of eager, next time you might want to kiss your bird a little more gently, eh? A girl likes a soft touch, not when you paw them like a dog. And a viscount’s daughter, no less. Try not to take your overreaching”—I grope the air, the way he groped her dress—“so literally.”

  He punches me, just as I knew he would. I smile as I wipe the blood from beneath my nose.

  “Take him to the Inquisitor,” he says, pointing to the door. The guards and the remainder of the wolves converge, clapping me in irons and hauling me from my cell.

  Whatever confidence I felt in the cell at Fleet disintegrates once I reach Greenwich Tower. A bankside fortress a mile from Fleet Prison, wrapped in a forbidding stone wall and anchored by domed towers topped with tiny flags. We approach the water gate in a tiny skiff and after the portcullis admits us and slides noisily back into place, trapping me inside, I think—too late—that this was all a tremendously bad idea.

  They haul me up one flight of stairs and then another, across a cobblestone path and beneath an archway, over an aggressively green patch of grass and through a set of bolted doors and up yet another flight of stairs. Finally, one last creaking door and a shackled thrust into a solitary chair and I’m here: the very heart of the den. Lord Thomas Blackwell, Inquisitor of Anglia, uncle to the king, sits staring at me from his place behind the table opposite me. We are a
lone. He does not deign to rise.

  My heart no longer beats, but the sensation in my chest is the same: tight and hot and pulsing.

  “You received my message, I assume,” Blackwell says. “Which you found intriguing enough that you risked being here, instead of halfway to Gaul.”

  “Something like that.”

  Blackwell doesn’t respond. He just sits and continues to stare at me. His eyes bore into mine, yet I get nothing off him. Perhaps he’s got a barrier, too, like the one Fifer has: ash, presumably; salt; and perhaps mercury. An image of her squirms through me then, ferocious and red and too damned young for me. I wonder if I’ll ever get my coat back.

  “Your proposal,” I say as I shake off the thought of her—she doesn’t belong here—and continue. “What is it?”

  Blackwell rises then, finally, and makes his way to me, still chained in my chair. He pulls out the sword from the scabbard fastened to his hip and holds it before me.

  “Do you see this?”

  “Hard not to; you’ve got it pointed in my face.”

  “Steel. Man-made. Ordinary.”

  “Lethal.”

  “Not to you,” he replies. “Not to those who defy my law. The king’s law. Were a sword like this of any use, I could have excised all of you by now. Amputated you the way a barber surgeon does a gangrenous limb. Clean. Swift. Neat.”

  I grit my teeth a little. While I have no allegiance to anything, anyone, it doesn’t mean I want the whole of Anglia’s witches and wizards extinguished on the whim of one man.

  “As it stands, the rotting limb remains, and now it’s become a disease,” Blackwell continues. “If left untreated, it will infect the host, and the host will die.”

  “I’m not sure what this has to do with me,” I say.

  “You’re a thief, are you not?”

  “Is this your way of extracting a confession?”

  “I need you to acquire something for me.”

  I nod, somewhat relieved. I had half expected him to ask me to kill someone for him.

  “What is it?”

  “A sword. One of purported power and of refuted existence. It can cut through anything: stone, steel, bone. Whoever possesses it can never be defeated, not by weapons, not by magic, not by anything. The man who wields it will bring to heel all who defy him. It is what I need to cleanse this realm.”

  There is only one sword I know of with a reputation like that, one I want no part of.

  “The Azoth,” I say.

  “You’ve heard of it.”

  “I’ve been around a while. It’s not the first I’ve heard of it, nor are you the first man I’ve come across who wanted it. Wanted it, but didn’t get it.”

  Blackwell waves it off. “Where they failed, I will succeed.”

  “It’s meant to be cursed,” I go on. “I assume you’re aware of that? It gives power, only to take it back. You’d be dependent on it for your survival.”

  “Your concern for my welfare is touching.”

  Then, when he says nothing else, I say, “Where might I go looking for this sword?”

  “I’ve no idea.”

  “You’ve no idea,” I repeat.

  He slides his blade back into his scabbard. “My sources say it’s in Anglia.”

  “Well, that narrows it down.”

  That produces something akin to a smile, if a serpent could smile.

  “What did the man in your cell tell you?”

  “The man in my cell was dead,” I respond.

  “But that didn’t prevent you from turning out his pockets, did it?” It’s a guess on his part, but a good one and by the gleam in his eye he knows he’s hit the mark. “What did you find?”

  “I don’t know,” I say, and this time I don’t lie. “It was a poem of some sort. I have no idea what it’s about.”

  “Yet you took it anyway,” Blackwell points out. “You didn’t know what it was, and you still took it. Why?”

  The parchment was clutched in his death grip. It was the last thing on his mind. It was important to him, which meant it might be valuable to me.

  Blackwell nods, as if he knows what I’m thinking. “The man in your cell was the last man I hired to find the Azoth. On that paper is all he knew of its whereabouts. It was not enough to find it, or to save him. I suggest, for your sake, you do better.”

  “You don’t seem the type to believe in fairy tales,” I say. “For a sword to have that kind of power seems far-fetched, to say the least.” I shake my head. “Seems like a waste of time to me.”

  “I do hate a defeatist. Let me put my proposal to you another way.” His voice is smooth with fervor as he swings his sword in front of me, back and forth, slow as a pendulum. “Bring it to me or I’ll drag you to the gallows in chains. Hang you till you’re near gone, then slit you from breath to belly, pull out your innards and set them alight while you watch. Sever one limb at a time, slowly, tendon by tendon and bone by bone, before burying them in unhallowed ground, cursing you to eternal damnation.”

  I blink. It’s not that I think he couldn’t do those things to me; he very well could. But if he thinks he could manage that without losing a limb or two of his own, he’s very much mistaken. “And if I refuse?”

  Blackwell laughs. The sound and the sight of it is more frightening than all his threats strung together and that’s when I feel it: a warning, something primal and urgent and older than even me that whispers no.

  “You can’t really think you have a choice.”

  Chapter 5

  Fifer

  I don’t want to ask for his help. Not because he can’t help me—he’s the only one who can—but because there’s no way to ask for it without prefacing it with words I don’t want to say but then I do anyway:

  “There’s someone missing.”

  John whips his head around. We’re standing in his physic garden, and his hands are full of herbs: licorice and nettle and thistle and feverfew. He doesn’t drop them, but they do begin to tremble. Because missing, when said in Harrow and in conjunction with anyone magical, usually means one thing and only has one outcome. It’s what happened to his mother and sister after they disappeared from Harrow ten months ago, thrown in Fleet Prison, then burned at the stake.

  “Who?” He straightens up, his face carefully neutral. “Who’s missing?”

  “It’s… well, it’s no one you know,” I say. “Not really. I mean, you’ve met him, but I wouldn’t say you’re acquainted with him—”

  “Not him.” John pulls a face then, something between exasperation and disgust. “Didn’t we talk about this? Revenants are dangerous. Not to be trusted. I don’t see why you have to be so difficult about everything.”

  “I’m not difficult.”

  John drops the herbs in the basket at his feet. Gives me a look.

  “What?” I say. “I enjoy his company. He’s… interesting.”

  “So is dysentery.”

  “That’s disgusting.”

  “And I don’t think ‘wandering off’ counts the same as ‘missing,’ do you?”

  I decide to let this slide. While I didn’t tell John about Schuyler missing our last meeting, I was in a strop about it for a week and he didn’t have trouble figuring out why.

  “He left his coat behind.” I hesitate, not wanting to tell John it was because Schuyler left angry and forgot it: I’d sooner die than explain that we fought over a kiss. “He never does that. His things were still in his pockets.” John raises an eyebrow, but I go on. “Then I did a location spell to try and find him. He didn’t just wander off. He was taken, John. To Upminster. To—”

  Even before I say the word Fleet, John spins away from me. He stands stock-still, staring out over the meadow that runs behind his house.

  “I don’t know what kind of help you think you can give him, or that I can give you,” he finally manages. “If he’s in… there, then there’s nothing either of us can do.”

  “But that’s just it,” I say. “You know what h
e is. There’s nothing that should be keeping him in Fleet. Nothing that could. If he’s there, it’s by choice.”

  John says nothing to this.

  “I need to keep an eye on him. Make sure he doesn’t do anything foolish. More foolish,” I amend quickly. “And, I don’t know, maybe we can try and talk to him. Tell him that whatever it is he thinks he’s doing is deranged and he should get out of there and come back to Harrow immediately.” I sound like a scolding grandmother, I know, but I don’t care.

  John turns around then, and he’s frowning. “And how do you plan to do that?”

  “That’s where you come in,” I say. “I thought about taking off my barrier and calling to him. He’d hear me, I know he would. Only I worry that… well, I worry he would hear a lot more than what I tell him.”

  John’s frown deepens. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  After I met Schuyler—and after I already knew I’d see him again—I read as much as I could find about revenants. It wasn’t their strength or speed—or even the fact that they were technically dead—that unnerved me, it was their ability to hear other people’s thoughts. I didn’t like this inequity of power: that he could know everything about me without me choosing to tell him and I would know nothing about him.

  But there’s something that unnerves me even more.

  “Revenants can hear everyone the same way,” I explain. “Schuyler can listen to your thoughts just as easily as he could Nicholas’s, or Lark’s, or any stranger on the street. He can also hear your memories, if he cared enough to bother. He has the ability to know a lot more, too. Feelings. Intentions. Desires.” I cringe at the word; it feels like an admission. “But the only way he can know that is if he… well, if he—”

  “If he what?”