But he nodded, and it’s true that I was relieved. At least I would see Caro again, and maybe Fin as well. I hoped the Fey weren’t treating him too badly.
Jules slowed to a trot and then a walk, and then he stopped completely. I looked around us for an entrance to the barracks, or even that terrible squeezing rock, but I could see only jungle.
“Get down,” Jules rumbled.
I silently obeyed and walked around to stand in front of him. I placed my hands as gently and delicately as I could on either side of the wide, hot planes of his cheeks.
“It happened to you, too,” I said.
He nodded. I saw something new in the glass eyes I’d crafted for him, some of the sad depth that shone in the dark eyes of flesh-and-blood horses. “Oh, Jules,” I whispered, “I’m so sorry.”
He tucked his long steel chin against my back, embracing me in his way. I felt him give one heavy shudder, and then he was still.
We stood like that for a long time; I was unwilling to let him go in spite of his heat against my burns. Gradually his overheated systems cooled, and I could see the glow in his furnace growing dimmer by slow degrees.
“We ought to get you back,” I said, “or you’ll run out of fuel.”
I felt Jules nod. I slipped around and remounted him, and he walked us quietly back through the jungle.
AGAIN and again as we walked, I thought I saw . . . a glimmering shadow, just geometric enough to suggest walls, a short turret . . . but I would never have seen the Fey barracks if I’d gone past them on my own. Even with Jules leading me, it was difficult to make out anything beyond the huge trees tangled into a single mass with centuries of creeping vines and hanging moss.
Jules marched me right up to an arched door that I didn’t notice until two Fey soldiers opened it and walked out. Even they were hard to see—not invisible, but somehow my eyes didn’t want to look at them and didn’t want to focus in the few moments when I did.
They seemed to recognize me, though, or at least they did not try to accost me the way the Fey soldiers had that morning. Instead, they simply circled around behind us.
Jules walked decorously through the barely visible archway. As soon as we were inside the courtyard, I could see it clearly. I saw the guards clearly as well when they walked up to flank us again. One of them even held out a hand to help me dismount, and I thanked fer before refusing and slipping down on my own.
I opened the hatch to Jules’s furnace; he was nearly empty.
“We can fetch more coal if need be,” one Fey guard said, frosty, but civil enough. I supposed news had spread that my story was true. I wondered if looking like my automaton mother helped my case or hindered it.
“Please do,” I said, then felt Jules nose my shoulder.
“Sleep,” he rumbled.
I wanted to cry again, but I controlled myself. “Is there a place nearby where my horse can safely rest?”
The guard nodded curtly. “We’ve prepared one.” Fe spoke grudgingly, as if they had only done so on orders.
I followed fer into a stable, where there were several other horses, all living, none of my mother’s creations. No Ashes.
Again I felt the urge to be sick, and again I forced it down.
The guard brought Jules and me to a stall near the back and, after a suspicious glare, left us alone.
Jules’s pace had slowed almost to a limp as we’d walked toward the stables. He settled himself down, folding his legs under his body and resting his head on the green, salty-smelling sawdust on the floor.
“Thank you for showing me, Jules,” I said, kneeling by his side. “I needed to know.” I wanted to say, I’m so sorry that happened to you, but the words didn’t seem strong enough.
Jules didn’t even nod, so little fuel had he left; he just looked up at me with his quiet glass eyes.
I stroked the three spirals between his shoulders that would let him sleep. He wound down to stillness.
I stayed kneeling there for a minute, and then for another, not willing to take my hand away.
Eventually I heard a tactful cough and looked up to see the guard at the stable’s half door.
“Sergeant Candery requests your presence,” fe said, as if fe wished it weren’t true.
I got up, then gave a long look back at my sleeping horse.
“We keep someone posted at both entrances,” the soldier said with a little more sympathy in fer voice. “Your horse will be quite safe.”
The image of the injured mare flashed in my mind, and it took me horrid long moments to force the memory away. When I came back to the present, I nodded at the guard and followed fer out of the stable, securing Jules’s door behind me.
It was strange to hear someone refer to my gentle old housekeeper as “Sergeant” with such deference, and it crystallized for me all the ways in which Mr. Candery had changed. But then I supposed that of the two of us, I had changed the more. I had been a little girl when he left, frightened and lost in a fog of mourning too overwhelming to begin to understand.
Now I was a young woman with my own business and with people I loved around me. Mr. Candery had grown so fierce, so strong, but I had grown fiercer and stronger yet.
I wanted to believe that we would still be friends, our new versions of ourselves.
✷
Mr. Candery leaned over a table covered with maps and letters. Beside him was a blue glass pot of tea: clary-bush. I inhaled the scent hungrily.
He looked up at me with a soft smile and poured the tea into delicate cups. “Two sugars still?” he asked.
“Just one.” I stayed by the door, not quite willing to step forward. I wasn’t sure why Mr. Candery remembering how I took my tea should make me angry, but it did.
He used tiny tongs to lift a single rough sugar cube from a china bowl painted with flowery vines that writhed away from his movements. He dropped the sugar into the clear tea and stirred it with a silver spoon, all with such practiced elegance that neither the spoon, nor the cup, nor the sugar made the slightest splash or clink.
I used to love watching Mr. Candery prepare tea.
He picked up the cup and held it out to me. When I didn’t move, he walked around the desk. He lifted one of my hands and wrapped it around the cup, ever so gently. I didn’t resist, and when he let my hand go I took a sip.
The clary-bush tasted wonderful, floral and sharp, and true to its name, it started clearing my mind immediately. I breathed in the steam, trying as I often did to give myself the gift of one moment of calm just before I plunged into a task I knew I didn’t want to do. The tea cleared my head enough that I could see why I was angry now, each reason as distinct as a china vase I was ready to smash.
For each vase, I had to ask Mr. Candery a question.
I let out my breath and began.
“Why did you leave me?” Smash.
I saw the sudden pain in his eyes. “I had to leave, Nicolette. All the part-Fey had to leave, at least the . . . the ones like me. Look at my face.” He brushed a blue-freckled hand across his even more heavily blue-freckled cheekbones. “I couldn’t have stayed.”
“You had ombrossus. Or you could have painted your face.” I hadn’t thought of either option until just before I voiced them, but they seemed so simple and obvious to me now that my anger only grew.
Crack. Smash.
“Ah.” Mr. Candery began to look a little angry too. “As I imagine you’ve learned by now, Nicolette, if you’ve a sharp mind you can break the ombrossus spell once you know how to look for it. No one familiar with the oil—none of the royal brigade sent out to round up the part-Fey—would be fooled for long.”
I remembered how I’d recognized that spicy scent when I confronted the automaton Fin, how once I did, the illusion of his wholeness had unraveled. How my mother had . . .
I nodded.
“And cosmetics . . .” He frowned. “Hardly reliable, and even if they were, I didn’t want to hide my face. I didn’t want to hide at all.”
He glanced from his teacup into my eyes, his gaze steady. “I saw what was coming for people like me, and I knew I had to do what I could to keep it from happening. The rebellion, it’s necessary. You can understand that, can’t you?”
I nodded, looking down at the floor. Not wanting to hide was something I understood all too well, and I was starting to feel ashamed of my questions, of my demands. I felt selfish and childish. But that shame made me angrier, too, made me want to line up more fragile things to break.
“And your mother was in Faerie, you know,” he said. “It was so hard to smuggle her out, sick as she was, and harder still not to stay by her side. I wanted—oh, I know I should only have wanted to come here to fight for our freedom, but . . . I have always loved your mother, Nicolette. Surely you know that by now.”
I was close to crying, or to screaming. I remembered it all, those whispered conversations late at night, the sad longing in Mr. Candery’s voice when he murmured news to my mother that my Faerie-hating father refused to hear.
I hadn’t understood that longing when I heard it as a child. I understood it now.
“Mr. Candery . . .” My chin trembled, and I raised my cup and took another swallow of tea to hide it. The hot drink gave me strength. “Mr. Candery, are you my father?”
Crash, crash, crash.
With a quick uncontrolled motion, he set his cup down on the table and flew to me, gathered me in his long slender arms, and buried his face in my hair.
I stood stiff as a poker in his embrace, waiting.
“I wish I were, Nicolette,” he said. “You don’t know how many times I’ve wished I were.”
My arms went around him then too, and in spite of all the anger smashing its way through fragile places inside of me, I hugged him back, for the sake of every single time I had wished the same thing.
He led me to a small couch by the wall, and we sat together. He held both my hands in his as he spoke.
“The one thing I want you to understand, more than any other, is that your mother thought you were safe when she left you,” he said. “I was there, and your father was too. She didn’t love your father anymore, and she didn’t respect his beliefs . . . but she thought that he could provide for you, and I could do enough to help you keep learning her trade. We’d both left more in that house for you than you knew, than you probably know even now.” Mr. Candery squeezed my hands. “She left you safe, which is more than I can say myself. I didn’t know your stepmother would treat you quite so badly as—as the stories I’ve heard suggested she did.” Tears began to well up in his eyes. “But I knew she was not kindhearted.” He shook his head. “Still, Nicolette, I thought you would be safer in your mother’s house, with your mother’s machines and my spells to protect and help you, than you would . . . anywhere else. I had to leave Esting, had to come to Faerie, and there was only hardship waiting here for me.”
My imagination flooded with scenes from a whole other life I might have had if Mr. Candery had decided to bring me to my mother in Faerie when I was twelve years old. Announcing that he was taking an Estinger child to quarantined Faerie wouldn’t have been an option, of course—he would have had to smuggle both of us out, booked us illegal passage on one of the few Nordsk trade ships that still ran to Faerie back then.
I would have grown up here, with the Fey and Mr. Candery and my mother, my automaton mother. I would have learned so much from her; I would have been a far greater inventor by now, and I would have had two people to love me and look after me all through the adolescent years that had in my reality been so cold and lonely.
True, I would not have made my own way as an inventor, would not have proved to myself that I could. I wouldn’t have met Fin or Caro either; my heart couldn’t comprehend that loss.
And Jules . . . Jules would have slept away in his little box in Mother’s workshop forever, and all the buzzers too. I would never have known him, his help and kindness and steadfast love.
Jules, Fin, Caro, the self I had fought to become.
I didn’t want to break things anymore.
I moved my hands so that they were on top of Mr. Candery’s. “I know you couldn’t take me to Faerie,” I said, “and I . . . I have a good life in Esting now. A life of my own, and friends that I love.”
“And a kingdom to rule, Heiress,” he said, a little wryness showing through his gentility. “I must admit I’m glad you don’t list that first among your blessings, though.”
I shook my head. “I’m not going to be Queen. Fin and I are—well, we’re not getting married. We’re just telling people that story, while we can use it for good. The way we used it to come here, to you. To Faerie.”
He didn’t even raise his eyebrows. “The way I used it to bring you both here,” he said.
“You knew?” I whispered.
He nodded slowly. “Never think we didn’t try to watch over you,” he said. “We left you little helpmeets, too, as best we could. I know we failed in so many ways, Nicolette, but we did try. I beg—” he cut himself off.
I knew my mother had had her ways of watching me, these past eight years. I was sure Mr. Candery had helped her with them. But sitting there now, knowing that they both had seen the pain and loneliness I’d gone through . . .
I closed my eyes for a moment, forcing myself to think of other things. To think of why I was here, and what I really wanted to say right now. Trustworthy. I beg your forgiveness.
“You did leave a lot in Lampton that helped me,” I said. “You and . . . Mother too.”
It was harder to forgive her. When I remembered the Estinger soldier’s screams at the geyser, the terrified mare, I thought it might be impossible. Everything I felt about my mother threatened to rise up and drown me again . . . but I held Mr. Candery’s hands and kept myself there, in that little room, in that little time, only with him. I could understand Mr. Candery right then, and that was enough.
“I can’t thank you, exactly,” I said, “but I think I understand. Some of it, at least.”
We shared one more soft embrace, and then we finished our tea.
In place of my anger at Mr. Candery, there bloomed a curiosity more than tinged with frustration. “I wish you could have told me more in your letter,” I said. “If I’d known my mother was here . . .”
“I could write nothing that might be used against any of us,” Mr. Candery replied. “Your mother has been a great help to our forces in understanding and fighting back against the technology that Esting has used to dominate us. Without her . . .” He shook his head. “The war might have ended long ago, and none of us would be left even to tell stories about it.”
I froze.
How long had we been in Faerie—a day? Two days? How long had we slept, that first eerie night in the jungle? The stories I’d heard about time passing differently here than it did in Esting had always seemed like xenophobic drivel, and yet . . . So many things were different here. Could Fitz have finished building his army?
“Mr. Candery,” I said, “there is something terrible that I have to tell you. Something about Esting. They’re—”
I stopped myself. I wished I could trust him again as completely as I had when I was a child, but we had both changed so much . . . Oh, I had said I understood, but understanding was not the same as trust.
“Fin knows the most about it,” I said. “The Heir. We need to have a conference with you and with the Fey leader; we need to have the diplomatic meeting you wrote of. Then he and I both can tell you.”
Mr. Candery shook his head. “I can get you back to your other friend, that Miss Caroline,” he said, “but I’m afraid it’s impossible to take Fin out of seclusion just now. Your arrival was so . . . complicated . . . that my superiors require time to make sure that the Heir is honest in his intentions with us.”
I pulled back, sitting up straight on the couch. I tried to make my eyes flash in the righteous way a real Heiress’s might. “I can promise you that Fin is honest,” I said. “If you can’t t
rust me, Mr. Candery, after all this—after what . . . well, then I don’t even know why I came here.” My voice stayed steady and imperious, at least.
“Of course I trust you, Nicolette, of course I do,” he said. “And for your sake I trust your friends as well. But we are an army, and I am a sergeant, not such a very high rank at all. I was permitted to invite you and your fiancé here because of our previous connection, but I am certainly not permitted to try to convince my superiors of anything. Least of all could I convince them to trust such a potentially dangerous person as the Heir of Esting.”
I stood up. “I used to think you were so wonderful,” I said. “I used to think you could do anything, and Mother even more so. Now I—” I couldn’t tell Mr. Candery that I knew how the Ashes were made, I realized, not then. “You can’t even help me see my friend.”
“Nicolette, you’re a grown woman. You must see how—” Mr. Candery stood too. “Nicolette, neither your mother nor I are so wonderful as you once believed! I am not by any means all-powerful, and she . . .” He stopped. Even now he couldn’t say anything against her.
I felt as if I were pounding helplessly against an unbreakable wall with Fin in danger on the other side. But as I always did, I reminded myself of all the other times I had felt helpless and how things had never been as dire as I’d thought they were. When Mother died and Mr. Candery left, when the Steps destroyed my workshop, when I thought that Fin and Caro were in love with each other and the only way I’d known to make a family was lost to me . . .
Every time, I had triumphed. I had found something in myself that let me get over that wall.
When I spoke again, my voice was as steely and strong as anything I’d ever built. “If you cannot convince your superiors to trust Fin, perhaps I can,” I said. “If they wanted a conference with the Heir, they must accept one with the Heiress. Take me to them now.”
I STARTED to wonder if I had done absolutely everything wrong. At least back home in Esting I had some concept of worst-case scenarios; here I had none. I couldn’t even imagine the worst that could happen to me in Faerie.
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