Thieftaker tc-1

by D. B. Jackson

  “I’ve been worried sick,” she said.

  “I’m fine,” he told her, breathing in the scent of her hair. “They took me to see Hutchinson.”

  “Hutchinson?” Diver said, sounding impressed. “What did he want with you?”

  “He wanted to make sure I knew that the same people who wrecked his house would have been capable of killing Jennifer Berson.”

  “Surely you haven’t been with him all this time,” Kannice said.

  “No. After I left the Town House, I had another encounter with Sephira’s men.”

  Diver walked toward them, looking from Ethan to Kannice. “And what did they want?”

  “Sephira would like me to finish my inquiry and leave matters as they are,” Ethan said. “Aside from that though, it was mostly the usual bluster.” He should have told Diver about Folter, but he didn’t want to speak of the matter in the middle of the tavern. “I would have come back here after speaking to Hutchinson, but her men chased me into the North End. And then Holin found me.”

  “Holin?” Kannice asked, her tone hardening a bit. “Marielle’s boy?”

  “I saw him home, and then kept an appointment with an illusion.” He held her gaze, until finally he coaxed a reluctant smile. “If you feed me, I’ll tell you all about it.”

  “I’m sure you will.” But she was still smiling.

  She went into the kitchen and reemerged a moment later with a bowl of dark stew that smelled of venison and red wine. She had bread for him as well.

  He took the bowl from her, and after Kannice filled a tankard of ale for him, the three of them walked back to Diver’s table. Ethan began to eat, and in between mouthfuls he told them about Anna and the brooch. He also told them of the other killing he had learned about from Pell. And finally, he told them about Daniel.

  “Daniel was no conjurer,” Diver said grimly, when Ethan had finally finished his tale. “He wasn’t the smartest of men, and I wouldn’t have lent him tuppence, but he wasn’t a murderer, either.”

  Ethan sipped from his second ale. “I know. I won’t allow him to be blamed for Jennifer’s murder.”

  Diver stared back at him, his face a mess, his dark eyes demanding more.

  “You have my word, Diver. I won’t allow it.”

  His friend nodded at last, stood, and drained his ale. “I’ll be going then,” he said. “I’m glad you’re all right, Ethan. I was worried about you.” He chanced a look at Kannice. “Both of us were.” And with that, he left.

  Kannice and Ethan said nothing. Eventually Kannice took one of Ethan’s hands in hers, but she just watched him, her eyes shining with the light of a dozen candles.

  “I didn’t intend to go to Marielle’s home,” Ethan finally said. “But with children being murdered in the streets, I wasn’t about to let Holin walk home alone.”

  Kannice dropped her gaze to their hands, a sad smile on her face.

  “You don’t believe me.”

  “I believe you didn’t intend to go there. But I also think that you’ll find any excuse to see her.”

  She looked up at him once more, still smiling, as if she wished to soften what she had said.

  “I don’t love her,” Ethan said. “I did once, but I don’t anymore.”

  “Do you love me?”

  The question hung between them. Ethan started to answer, then stopped himself. He wanted to tell her that he did. He knew that he cared about her more than he did anyone else in the world, and he wanted to tell her that. But it wasn’t what she had asked.

  The truth was Ethan didn’t know if he could love anyone anymore. He had loved once and that love had been ripped from him, along with his freedom and his pride and his ambition. His heart had been lashed day after day, month after month, for more years than he cared to count. The scars remained; they had grown hard, like calluses on a worker’s palm. He didn’t think they would ever soften.

  “What I feel for Marielle is similar to what I feel for my father,” Ethan said.

  Kannice raised an eyebrow.

  “That sounded stranger coming out of my mouth than it did in my head,” he told her, grinning briefly. “I have something to prove to her. I want her to see that I’m more than the young fool who got himself transported to the Indies. Just as I would want my father to see that if he was still alive.”

  Kannice shrugged. After a moment she nodded. “I can understand that. But I find it hard to believe that’s all you feel when you’re with her.”

  “You’re right. I feel regret, and loss. Maybe I see the life that I might have led had things been different. But I don’t care for her the way I care for you. I don’t want to be with her.”

  “Well, that’s the stew talking. And maybe the ale as well.”

  Ethan shook his head. “No,” he said earnestly. “It’s me.”

  She squeezed his hand gently, but said nothing.

  Seeing the sadness that lingered in her eyes, Ethan cursed himself for not being able to say what she wanted to hear, for his inability to stay away from Elli and the children, even for his refusal to lie to Kannice by telling her that he did love her. At that moment he would have done just about anything to drive that pained look from her lovely face. But he knew her well enough to understand that the best thing he could do was tell her the truth and let her decide what she wanted.

  “It’s getting late,” he said. “I should probably go.”

  “Probably.” She still held his hand, and now she met his gaze. “You have too many people angry with you, Ethan. Sephira, this conjurer. Hutchinson will be angry if you don’t do what he expects of you. Don’t do anything stupid.”

  “You mean like take on a job for Abner Berson?”

  Kannice didn’t smile. “Just watch yourself. And don’t be shy about showing your face here and letting me see that you’re still alive.”

  He lifted her hand to his lips. “All right.”

  A short time later, Ethan left the tavern. The moon had vanished behind a bank of clouds and the wind off the harbor had freshened. Dressed only in his breeches, shirt, and waistcoat, he hunched his shoulders against the chill. He kept his hands thrust in the pockets of his breeches, one fist wrapped around Jennifer Berson’s brooch.

  With the moon hidden, the streets had grown dark and forbidding. Ethan couldn’t keep himself from flinching at every vague shadow, every creak of a wooden door, every sudden gust of wind. He expected at any moment to see Yellow-hair or Greenleaf, or some conjured horror, emerging from the murky darkness. He strode through the streets as swiftly as his leg would allow, and only began to breathe easily again when he was back behind Henry’s shop, stepping over the dogs who lay together at the base of his stairway. As soon as he was in his room he locked the door and lit several candles.

  He undressed quickly, fell into bed without bothering to darken the room, and bundled himself in a woolen blanket. Exhausted as he was, he slept fitfully, and was awakened in the middle of the night by strange dreams of Sephira Pryce that left him both shaken and aroused. Eventually he fell asleep once more and didn’t awake again until morning. But he felt no more rested than he had when he went to bed.

  He climbed out of bed, still sore; relieved himself, ate a small breakfast-bread, cheese, some water-and dressed. A light rain was falling as he left his room, so he threw on his coat and made his way out onto Water Street. There were still an unusual number of laborers and wharf men in the lanes, and Ethan wondered if Diver had again been turned away from work.

  He didn’t ponder this for long, though. He had come to a decision overnight. He needed help. He had no intention of ending his inquiry, but for now Sephira and the conjurer who had summoned Anna out of air and light didn’t know that for certain. He could evade them for a time, but eventually-probably within a day or two-they would figure out what he was doing and track him down. He had to find Jennifer Berson’s murderer. To do that he needed to know more about the spell that had been used to kill her and, if Mister Pell was right, to kill tha
t child who died on Pope’s Day.

  There were perhaps thirty other active conjurers in Boston. No doubt there were far more than that who had conjurers’ blood in their veins, but many of his kind did all they could to avoid notice. People were still burned and hanged as witches throughout New England; fear of discovery ran deep among conjurers, and those who didn’t have access to power tended to shun those who did. Because of his profession and because of the Ruby Blade mutiny, Ethan might well have been the second-best-known conjurer in Boston. The most famous of the city’s spellers was an old woman named Tarijanna Windcatcher, who made her living as a tavernkeeper and a self-described marriage smith.

  She ran a bar that catered to the few sorcerers who openly roamed the streets of Boston, and she found matches for men and women who despaired of ever finding love on their own. Janna made no secret of the fact that she was a conjurer, and those who paid for her services assumed that she used her powers to find matches for them. Ethan had once asked her if this was in fact true. Janna refused to answer.

  She came from one of the islands of the Caribbean-Ethan didn’t know which one. She was orphaned at sea as a small girl and rescued by a ship that had sailed from Newport. Janna was African, and Ethan didn’t know how she managed to avoid being taken as a slave. He had heard rumors of a romance, years before, between Janna and a wealthy Newport shipbuilder who couldn’t marry her because of her race, but did provide for her so as to secure her freedom for the rest of her life. He didn’t know how much of this was true, but she had managed to remain free and eventually, after finding her way to Boston, to buy herself the tavern, such as it was. At some point, having no memory of her family name, she took the name Windcatcher. She claimed there was no significance to it; she just liked the way it sounded.

  She sold the usual drinks in her tavern, as well as stews, meat, and bread-nothing compared with Kannice’s fare, but passable. But she also sold herbs and oils, rare stones and talismans, ancient texts about spellmaking and blades, incense, and spirits used in rituals. In short, anything that sorcerers might find useful for conjuring. Ethan usually fueled his spells with blood or leaves found here in the city. But on those few occasions when he needed something different, he always went to Janna.

  Ethan followed Orange Street out past the pastures and fields, and overgrown paddocks that seemed to have been neglected for years. None of the houses out this way looked particularly sturdy, though few looked as fragile as Janna’s. Gulls sat atop the town gate in the distance, ghostly forms in the silvery mist, their cries echoing off stone and wood.

  Janna’s tavern, the Fat Spider, stood at the corner of Orange and Castle Streets, within sight of Amory’s Stillhouse, and not far from where Anna had taken him the night before. The building always appeared to Ethan to be one strong gust of wind away from toppling over. It leaned heavily to one side and its roof sagged dangerously in the middle. The placard on her door read, “T. Windcatcher, Marriage Smith. Love is Magick.” Ethan laughed every time he saw it. Janna might as well have climbed on to the roof of her tavern and screamed “I’m a conjurer!” as loud as she could.

  The Spider was warm within, and it smelled of woodsmoke and roasted fowl, clove and cinnamon. The stub of a single candle burned on the bar, but the place was empty. Ethan walked to the middle of the room and called Janna’s name. After a moment, he heard the scrape of a chair on the floor overhead, and slow footsteps leading to the top of the stairway.

  “Who that?” a woman’s voice called.

  “It’s Ethan Kaille, Janna.”

  The woman muttered something that he couldn’t hear, though he could tell from her voice that she wasn’t happy he had come. Still, she descended the stairs, which creaked loudly with each step she took.

  She wore a simple linen dress of ivory and a brown woolen shawl wrapped around her bony shoulders. Her skin was the color of dark rum; her hair, which she wore so short that it barely concealed her scalp, was as white as the moon on a winter night. She had a thin, wrinkled face, and dark eyes that were as alert and fierce as a hawk’s. As always, she carried a cup of Madeira wine; Ethan had never seen her without one.

  “Kaille,” she said, scowling at the sight of him. “Thought you was a customer.”

  “Sorry, Janna.”

  Her expression didn’t change but she waved him toward the bar. “Well, you here, so you might as well sit an’ drink with me.”

  She poured him a cup of Madeira, and then he followed her to the hearth, where a fire burned. They sat at a small table and Ethan sipped his wine, which Janna had watered quite a bit. He shouldn’t have been surprised. Given how much she drank, undiluted Madeira would have left her broke and soused.

  “You come for a healin’ tonic?” she asked, sitting forward in her chair and eyeing his battered face.

  Ethan chuckled, though once more he wished that he could have healed himself without raising the suspicions of Henry, Derne, and others. “No.”

  “Who did that t’ you?”

  “Who do you think?”

  Her expression turned stony. “Sephira Pryce.”

  Janna didn’t really like anybody. She tolerated Ethan because he was a conjurer, and she could be charming at times when her work demanded it. But she treated strangers with contempt, and wasn’t much nicer to people she knew. Aside from a scrawny black dog that occasionally came by her place, she had no friends that Ethan knew of. Still, there was no one in the world she hated more than Sephira Pryce. That she and Ethan shared this probably explained why she helped him with his work, despite knowing there was little profit in it for her.

  Ethan wasn’t sure why she hated the Empress of the South End so much. He had no reason to think that the two had ever met, much less had dealings. A year or two before, Janna mentioned that Sephira had once cost her a substantial amount of money. Ethan never learned exactly what happened, but he knew that if he managed to convince Janna that she could hurt Pryce by helping him, she would tell him whatever he wanted to know, regardless of whether he paid her.

  “She’s a wicked woman,” Janna said, shaking her head and sounding so bitter one might have thought that Sephira had beaten her.

  “You’ll get no argument from me.”

  Janna shook her head a second time and leaned back in her chair. “So, no healin’ tonic. You finally gonna let me fix you a love tonic for that woman o’ yours?”

  Ethan shook his head, knowing that she meant Elli. “No, thank you.”

  “Wouldn’ take much. Where there’s a past, th’ love is easier t’ coax back.”

  “What I need is information, Janna.”

  She dismissed him with a wave of her thin hand. “You always need information. There’s no coin in that for me.”

  Usually this was where Ethan pulled out a few shillings and put them on Janna’s table. Already she was casting furtive looks his way. Ethan took another sip of wine and returned her stare.

  “You’re right,” he said. “This time there’s no money. Maybe there will be if you’re able to help me, but I haven’t got any right now. Sephira took every coin I had.”

  “Why she so mad at you all o’ sudden?”

  “A rich man hired me, and she wanted the job for herself.”

  Janna laughed delightedly, exposing sharp yellow teeth. “Good for you, Kaille!” She laughed some more, shaking her head slowly.

  “I need your help, Janna. There’s a conjurer in the lanes who’s killed twice now: a young woman a few nights ago, and a little boy last fall.”

  Her expression grew serious. “I heard talk o’ this.”

  “What did you hear?”

  “Not much. I heard o’ th’ killin’s. That’s all.”

  “His latest victim was Jennifer Berson.”

  “Her father’s th’ rich man?”

  Ethan nodded, reached into his coat pocket, and pulled out the small bundle containing Jennifer’s brooch. “This is what was taken from her.”

  Janna took the bundle and unwrap
ped it, whistling at the gem. “Nice,” she said. “Cut yourself, an’ put some blood on it.”

  Ethan hesitated.

  “I’m too old t’ be cuttin’ myself for your jobs.”

  He did as she instructed.

  Janna muttered something under her breath and an instant later, there was a small flash of blue light round the brooch. But that was all. The glow vanished as quickly as it had come. Ethan thought he glimpsed a pale blue figure standing off to the side, but by the time he turned to look, it had vanished. Janna stared at the gem for a moment, and then frowned.

  “Nothin’,” she said, handing the brooch back to him. “You have somethin’ else?”

  “No. But I saw her body. There wasn’t a mark on her. I knew that a conjuring had killed her, and so I tried a revealing spell.”

  “And?”

  He frowned. “And I didn’t learn anything. I thought the glow would pool at the spot where the spell struck her, and I thought it would reveal the color of the conjurer’s power, but…” He shook his head. “I suppose my spell didn’t work, or whoever killed her managed to conceal his conjuring.”

  Janna sat forward once more. “Why? What did you see?”

  “Her entire body glowed. The effect of the conjuring didn’t seem to be concentrated anywhere.”

  Her dark eyes narrowed. “And what color did you see?”

  “Silver, like starlight. There was really no color at all.”

  “Damn,” Janna muttered. She sat back again, scratching her forehead.

  “What is it, Janna?”

  “This speller might o’ concealed th’ color o’ his power, but tha’s all. You saw just what you were supposed t’ see.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “That ’cause you’re not thinkin’, Kaille. You’re assumin’ that she was killed by a spell.” Janna shook her head. “She wasn’t. She was killed for a spell.”

  It made so much sense that Ethan’s first reaction was to be furious with himself for not realizing this on his own. His second was to be horrified.

  Conjurers generally spoke of three kinds of casting. Elemental spells, the simplest, were fueled by one of the elements-fire, water, earth, even air. Living spells, which were more difficult and more potent, demanded blood or hair, leaves or bark-anything that came from a living creature or plant. All the conjurers Ethan knew relied exclusively on elemental and living spells.