My mother. My mother, dead these eight years. My mother, the engineer and the architect of my entire life.
My mother, who’d left. She’d left me to my father, and thus to the Steps and all the misery and abuse I’d known under their so-called care. My mother, who had left a whole world of grief when she died. A world of grief I’d moved through ever since and never thought I would leave.
My mother, who was right in front of my eyes now. Who had never died at all.
I hated her more in that moment than when I’d railed against her for getting sick and dying when I was so young, when I’d thought I couldn’t survive without her—when I’d nearly been right.
At the same time I was so relieved, so grateful, as if my world had suddenly been put back on its axis again after spinning out of control through the void for all this time, for all those grief-filled years.
“Hello, darling,” she said.
I took a step back. Her voice hurt more than anything.
Caro stepped back too. “Maybe I shouldn’t be here,” she said. “Maybe Mr. Candery was right. Nick?”
“I . . .” I wanted Caro to stay, and I wanted her to go. Both of those wants were so dwarfed by my shock that I could barely understand either of them.
Caro must have known this was my mother; the shadowed face by the fire was thinner and more sharply angled than mine, with darker eyes, but still nearly a mirror image. And Caro was so intuitive; she’d felt my reaction perhaps even before I did.
“I’ll stay,” she said quietly, and I knew when she said it that it was what I wanted.
But that was the last feeling I was sure of, because too many of them were filling me up at once. I was no longer in shock, and I wasn’t numb; I felt all the rage and betrayal and happiness and hope and fear and longing tearing from my heart through every single vessel, throbbing into my feathery burns.
I nearly wished I could be numb instead.
I searched for something to say, a question to ask, an admonishment, a curse word strong enough. I had nothing.
“I am so proud of you, my darling girl,” my mother said.
I’d heard that voice from the womb; it was stitched into my bones.
I shuddered and began to weep, and then I lunged forward into my mother’s arms.
I felt the buzzers crawling over us, clicking and whirring contentedly, as if all they wanted was to see us together. My mother embraced me and rocked slowly back and forth, soothing me the same way she’d done when I was small. Her arms were hard and warm. “My darling girl. My little genius, my Nicolette. I’m here, I’m here. It’s all right now.”
I resented the words even as I drank them in. My rage and relief were both so strong that neither could win over the other.
But my tears eventually dried. I felt their sting in the burns on my face, a healing kind of pain. And there was a question rising on my lips that had to be asked.
“Why did you leave me?”
I felt her flinch, and my anger relished it.
“I needed to leave,” she said.
I shook my head. I couldn’t bear to look into her face and kept my own buried against her rigid shoulder. “I’m your daughter,” I said. “I’m your daughter. You needed to stay with me.”
“You were half-grown,” she said quickly, and I was sure she’d been telling herself that for years. Her voice was sterner now, Nicolette’s-been-naughty stern. “You could look after yourself, and you did. You’ve done so well, the most famous inventor in Esting, and known to be a woman! I only dreamed of such a thing. Although . . .” She shifted in her seat.
I waited out her hesitation as long as I could. When I finally opened my lips to ask her what she wanted to say, though, my voice had run away from me.
“Although?” I heard Caro speak for me. I looked back; she’d settled into one of the other chairs, but she was leaning forward, her face tense.
“Leave,” my mother snapped, as imperious as any queen. “This is a matter for family.”
A wheel turned inside me, love and longing submerged under righteous anger. I pulled back and would have leaped away, but her strong, hard arms held me fast.
“Caro stays,” I said, hating the remnants of tears in my voice. “She’s more family to me than—” I couldn’t finish my sentence.
My mother straightened in her chair. Her eyes flashed cold as steel. “You have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said.
I fought to recoil from her then, really fought, but she was far too strong. “I didn’t—didn’t—how could you have . . .”
I felt a rush of blood through my head as my heart sped up. There was something else I was starting to understand.
The strength of my mother’s embrace, the cold in her eyes. The overwhelming scent of ombrossus.
My mother, the great inventor, the maker of Jules, of the buzzers, of any mechanical body she pleased. She had died, had been dying . . . her own body had begun to fail her.
She needed to leave, she said.
I understood before I drew my next breath. How she’d built herself this new body to save her own life even as she ruined mine, how she must have smuggled herself to Faerie, and Mr. Candery had covered her tracks, had stayed behind to tie up the loose threads in my upbringing before he in turn was forced to leave. How there would be a little box of Ashes set into the back of my mother’s clockwork head, Ashes like the ones I’d used to animate Jules and all the buzzers. Ashes that no one had ever been willing to explain to me, or even to speak of, so taboo was their origin. So cursed.
I wanted to ask her how, why; wanted to scream at her and at all the world around me. But in my panic I had finally struggled free of her arms, and then a stronger instinct than all the others took over: the instinct to run.
I ran past Caro and out into the hallway, and the Fey guard grabbed for me but I heard my mother call, “Let her go.”
Let me go, as she had done. Let me go.
But Mr. Candery followed, and in my weakened state it wasn’t long before he caught up. I sobbed and struggled against him. “Where’s Jules?” I said. “I know you have him. Take me to my horse.”
He nodded.
Mr. Candery brought me back to that sunny courtyard, and there was my Jules, living and moving, his furnace running hot on fresh fuel again.
Once I saw him, the world came right, and nothing else mattered. There was some mad, shaking strength in my exhausted limbs, and I shoved aside the Fey soldier who was reloading Jules’s furnace and kicked its hatch closed as I jumped onto my horse’s back.
“Run,” I said harshly in a ragged ghost of a voice, and he was off. We leaped over the tall courtyard wall and rode hard through the jungle, over rough terrain and through slapping, tearing branches and thorns that rasped against my burns but still felt like nothing at all after the sickening plunge from the sky that we’d made only a day before.
I lay forward against Jules’s neck as we ran together, as if we had only one body between us, and let myself lean fully against him.
“She’s Ashes, Jules,” I whispered, tears stinging my cheeks again. “My mother’s Ashes.”
I felt Jules wince and stumble, but just as quickly he regained his footing. He changed his course slightly, and then we were fighting our way through a jungle thicker than ever. If I had not been flat against his back, the long branches that whacked against us would have knocked me off in a moment.
I watched the dark green blur speed past me as Jules galloped, faster and faster . . . breathtakingly fast, unsettlingly fast, faster than I’d designed his legs to run. I heard steam hissing underneath me, pistons clattering as they pumped too hard, gears starting to crackle and grind as they whirred on and on, so brutally, inexorably fast.
“Jules,” I said. “Jules, slow down.”
But for the first time in all his life, he didn’t listen.
“Jules, stop!” I cried. And then, as if I were speaking to any horse at all: “Whoa!”
He ran f
aster. He rampaged on through the jungle, and I didn’t dare to lift myself from his neck to see where we were going. I felt the heat of his body rising the way it had done when we were fleeing the storm. I instinctively recoiled to protect my burned skin, but then I forced myself to hold on.
“Jules, please, please stop,” I whispered. I clutched him with all the strength I had left and fought the temptation to squinch my eyes shut.
We rode on and on. I started to wonder how long the Fey soldiers’ fuel would last.
I wondered how long their coal lasted in my mother. I wondered how she’d chosen her own design.
Heartsickness grew inside me like a cancer, and I abandoned all thought except my determination to keep hold of my runaway horse.
Eventually the green streaks around us grew paler, sparser, and I no longer felt branches whipping at me. Jules slowed and stopped. I carefully raised my head an inch or two and looked around.
We stood at the edge of a small clearing, a hollowed-out bowl of open space with jungle rising all around. The grass was pale green and looked as smooth as water, and a stream ran down one side of the meadow to collect in a pool at its center.
It should have been a lovely spot, but the air smelled acrid and wrong. There was a frightening silence around us, as if an invisible glass bell had settled over the place, sealing it away like a specimen. The sky directly overhead was wrong too, dark like the pupil of an eye. Faraway blue sky at the horizon ringed a stagnant, unmoving storm cloud. It was the too-flat shadow of the storm cloud that gave the lovely little clearing its feeling of ominous gloom.
Jules was heaving and panting like a flesh horse now, smoke and steam pouring from his mouth and nostrils and even his ears.
“You’ve hurt yourself, Jules,” I whispered. Any anger I might have felt at his running away disappeared as soon as I started to worry that he was injured. I dismounted, ignoring the fierce trembling in my legs, and slowly examined his hooves, his hocks, his belly and head. He had strained every mechanism nearly to the breaking point, but there didn’t seem to be any new damage beyond what he had sustained during our fall from the Imperator.
Besides, I knew now that I could repair him. If my mother kept herself in working order in Faerie, she would certainly have more than enough equipment for me to do the same for Jules.
It was strange, a kind of strange that felt like a sickness, to realize I’d accepted the idea of my mother as an automaton so quickly. Actually, I hadn’t accepted it—but I understood it. I didn’t rebel against the idea as I thought I should—how could I? Hadn’t I been building my own living automatons for almost two years? Hadn’t I joyfully accepted every automaton she’d left me?
I could understand, even, why she had done it. If I’d known I was dying and seen a way to save myself through my own invention . . .
I could imagine making the choice she had made, just barely.
But I couldn’t imagine, couldn’t understand, why she had let me believe she was dead. Why she had left me to endure all I had endured.
Jules had halted just before the edge of the clearing, so we still stood in the natural shadows of Fey trees and bushes rather than the distinctly unnatural, stagnant, greasy shadow of the storm cloud. He nosed my shoulders and neck, checking me for injuries as I examined him.
Then his head snapped up and he became perfectly still, a steel and copper statue.
“See,” he hissed through a closed mouth, one syllable that sounded even more pained than his voice usually did.
I was crouched under his shoulder, checking a front hoof. I looked up and froze as completely as my horse had done.
There was a man walking into the clearing.
Not a Fey but an Estinger man in rough military dress, field gear. He stalked into the center of the meadow, looking methodically from side to side, his steps practiced and utterly silent. Finally he gave a short, punctuated whistle, and several more Estinger soldiers walked into the clearing behind him. Two of them carried an unmoving man on a white cotton stretcher stained with blood.
They followed the first man toward the opposite side of the clearing from where Jules and I were hidden, just beyond the clear little pool that reflected only the greasy darkness of the storm cloud.
The soldiers who weren’t holding the stretcher positioned themselves in a circle and bent to lift something that I couldn’t quite see. It was flat, dark, and obviously heavy. Though they were too far away for me to be certain, I thought they looked frightened; they moved quickly, even frantically back from the dark, heavy disk they held.
A bright light shot out from where they pulled the disk away, a flame spurting into the sky like the water geysers in Nordsk that I’d read about as a child.
From the shadows of the jungle came one more soldier, this one leading a limping mare with a long gash in her flank. I looked with pity on the horse, pity that was easier to feel for the animal than for the dead man on the stretcher, whom I could hardly bear to look at. I shivered with hatred for the war and the soldiers and even for myself, that I couldn’t feel what I thought I should.
I leaned closer to Jules, keeping my hand on his front foot, a contact point.
The men dragged the disk farther away, and I watched the geyser flicker and settle down from its first surge into the sky. Now it looked more like a fountain, an even, flowing fire, shooting up from the ground and fluttering in lovely patterns. It was beautiful, but within moments the acrid smell in the air increased tenfold, growing so strong that I almost gagged on it.
Wet-looking smoke rose lazily, too slowly, from the top of the plume, slithering up to join the storm cloud in the sky above us.
I covered my mouth with my arm to try to keep out the smell, but it had already soaked into the loose fabric. After a moment I took my arm away again.
The soldiers had set down that heavy disk, which seemed to be made of some kind of stone and had steel handles at its edges. The man who’d whistled the all-clear earlier now nodded, and then the soldiers with the stretcher stepped forward.
I’d thought the man they carried was dead, but as the soldiers advanced toward the flame, he began to groan, and then to weep.
“Ah, Lord,” he moaned in a distinct Esting City accent. “Ah, Lord.”
They brought the stretcher to the geyser, and then they placed it in the center of the flame. The fire widened, consuming the man’s body in one big, hungry bite.
He screamed, a sound that echoed around the shallow bowl of the clearing. I think I will always hear that sound echoing somewhere in the darkest and most frightened parts of my mind.
He didn’t scream for long.
The smoke darkened until it looked almost slimy. The acrid air changed slightly, mixing with the smell of burning meat.
My stomach shuddered and lurched, and I brought my arm back to my mouth, resisting the urge to vomit. I knew that any sudden movement would reveal our presence to the soldiers.
Eventually the smoke lightened, both in color and weight, flickering upward like moth’s wings. I couldn’t see the outline of the man’s twisted body in the fire anymore; it had narrowed to one slim geyser again.
I had been so consumed by staring at the fire that I hadn’t noticed what the soldiers were doing. One of them had put on a bulky dark suit, leather of some kind, covered all over with chain mail. He held two long-handled iron instruments in his hands: a pan and a brush.
He gathered a small pile of ashes—Ashes!—from the center of the flame into the pan, then tipped it into a waiting box on the ground, slowly and with infinite care, so that even from a distance I could tell that he didn’t spill a single tiny grain.
Just before he covered the box, a transparent, ghostly shape seemed to reach out of it, straining into the air.
He snapped the lid shut over the grasping hand.
From the side of the clearing, another soldier began to lead the horse forward.
I couldn’t bear to look anymore. I rose and pulled myself onto J
ules’s back. The injured mare balked, but they led her closer, closer to the fire . . .
Jules stood his ground, staring into the clearing. Tears covered my face as I clutched the handles on his shoulders. I wanted more than anything to ask him to leave, run, not make us witness any more.
But I knew why he had taken me there. I knew he had more right to decide what we saw, and when we left, than I did.
I knew it had already happened to him.
Jules called to the horse in the clearing, one low, sweet neigh; the language of horses, his own tones that I knew so well. Sympathy, solidarity. Mourning and love.
The injured horse’s head flung upward. She called back, a high whinny that seemed to hold both despair and gratitude. Jules had told her that she wouldn’t burn alone, or unmourned.
The men in the clearing snapped their heads toward Jules’s call, but he had already turned, was already running, taking us away again.
The soldiers had been prepared for defense, not pursuit; they’d been looking for invaders. None of them rode horses, and the doomed mare was far too injured to give chase.
Still, my heart did not stop drumming with fear for a good ten minutes.
Jules did not falter once as he ran through the thick jungle. The landscape wasn’t quite as dense on our return route as it had been on our rampage toward the meadow, and I was able to keep my head up. A good thing, too, because he was so overheated I could hardly bear to hold on to him.
The thought made me relax my grip; he was still running fast, but he wasn’t careening with wild, dangerous speed, and I knew he wouldn’t make any sudden, unpredictable jerks or jumps that might unseat me. I forced myself to breathe deeply and slow down my heart.
Jules slowed slightly too, into a smooth canter.
“Are we going back to the barracks, Jules?” I asked, truly unsure of the answer but willing to go wherever he wanted to take me. I thought I’d known heartbreak before, but the way I hurt now, understanding that Jules had endured so much pain . . . I would do anything he wanted me to do, forever. My heart broke over his pain like water over a stone, changing nothing.
Venturess Page 15