Talis stopped me with a raised hand. “These things will unfold in their own time,” fe said. “That’s the right way. Can’t you see?”
Even Fin, next to me, nodded in agreement.
I wrapped the cloak up tight around me. “No, you don’t see,” I said. “You might as well be blind too, like the beggar in your story! It would be wonderful to think that—that we could give things their own time, that we could tell each other stories and weave some kind of . . . some kind of natural peace, but we can’t. You can’t. Talis, there is an automaton army coming to Faerie.”
There—the words were out. Everything in the room seemed to turn toward me, as if I were the hub of some great wheel, the rim of which I couldn’t even see. Sergeant, prince, and ruler, all waiting and listening.
“I’ve seen the automatons. I believe they are nearly ready to sail, and I don’t know how much time we have left. Whatever peace we can make together, or whatever war we can fight, we must start now.”
✷
The negotiations with Talis went on for hours, and in that time I came to respect and admire Fin in ways I’d never had the chance to before. He was so self-possessed in the face of such authority, and with breathtakingly lethal stakes at hand. He argued his case with eloquence and yet listened so humbly and open-mindedly to what Talis and fer advisors said that I began to hope we might make our peace with Faerie after all.
I came to admire Talis, too. The Fey leader was a ready match for both Fin’s intellect and his rhetoric, and fer casual, forthright way of speaking made me utterly convinced of fer honesty. Talis showed me the same respect fe had for my mother, something it became more and more evident most of the Fey did not share. Now that I knew about the origins of the Ashes, I could hardly blame them. In fact, the huge scope of Talis’s empathy astonished me. Even fer wish to spare the lives of Estinger soldiers was clearly sincere.
“But that’s just it,” Fin said. “Esting’s soldiers are machines now. There are enough of them to wipe out not just your army, but all of your people, and without a single Estinger life being lost.”
“How do they move? Are they only clockwork?” asked one of Talis’s advisors, a slight, elderly soldier with several heavy medals pinned to fer uniform.
“Ashes,” I said.
The advisors collectively hissed in their breath. “Ghost soldiers,” Talis whispered.
Fin glanced at me sharply. “You didn’t tell me Fitz used Ashes,” he said.
I thought of the fire in the clearing, of the screaming soldier. I knew if I told him about that day it would break him.
“I . . . I wasn’t sure when I saw them,” I said, which was the truth.
“But you’re sure now?” Talis pressed fer hands against the desk, watching me carefully.
I looked right into fer eyes. “I’m sure.”
Fe sighed and looked down, then scanned the roomful of waiting advisors. “We abhor them,” fe said to me. “We forbade their use long ago, and your mother . . .” Fe caught my pleading expression and Fin’s confused frown, and fe paused. “I think you and I might be able to make our peace, Prince Christopher,” fe said. “But if such an army is coming, we must prepare our own as well.”
“More Ashes?” the small advisor asked, the one who’d spoken before. “None of us would stand for it, Talis, as you know well.”
Fe shook fer head. “We will not make more.” Fe was watching me again, and then every pair of eyes in the room turned to look at me too. I had the distinct feeling that Talis knew about all the Ashes I’d brought with me. Did fer vast empathy allow fer to sense them too?
Fe knew about the buzzers that had flocked to my mother’s room; Mr. Candery must have told fer, or even my mother herself. And of course fe would know about Jules. I felt dizzy and weak as I started to understand, to realize just what Talis was asking of me, of us. I pictured Jules’s powerful metal frame multiplied a thousandfold, and a Fey soldier riding each steel horse.
This was the price of the peace Talis would broker with Fin: my mother and I would build another mechanical army so that Faerie could fight back if the peace should fail.
FOR the next month, I barely saw Fin or Caro at all; at least not during the day. The Fey had put the three of us in one room, deep in the barracks, without question. We even shared one of the yards-wide beds designed for their large families, but we were each so busy that we didn’t always share sleeping time, and when we did, we usually collapsed exhausted into bed without even speaking. Caro had fallen in love with the healers’ halls, and she spent all her waking hours there, learning their trade. Fin was in meetings with Talis almost all that time, working to keep the leader’s trust and broker the smaller details of the peace they both worked toward so tirelessly.
Estinger forces had already been pushed out of the capital, one of the reasons that Corsin had agreed to these negotiations in the first place. The remaining Estinger territories were isolated pockets, but they still held some crucial ground; I remembered the clearing, the fire and Ashes. Fin insisted that we couldn’t tell the Estingers we were still alive, that we were here, until negotiations were complete; it might negate the element of surprise Faerie would need if a battle proved inevitable.
“They’d call us traitors, anyway, if they knew what we were really doing here,” I said to Fin one day early in the talks, in a rare moment of quiet. We were sitting by a high window in a house on the outskirts of the Fey capital; we didn’t dare risk openly walking its streets, especially not Fin. But we both looked hungrily out at the winding, narrow paths and the many round turrets of gold-veined blue stone, all interconnected, vines climbing around their edges. It really was like a honeycomb, as the first explorers had described: repeating patterns of tiny structures, each one small and neat and inconspicuous by itself, building on one another into a whole that almost seemed to have a life of its own.
“But that’s exactly it, Nick,” Fin murmured. He placed his cup on the windowsill and ran his hands through his hair, thinking. “They say Faerie is part of Esting, that the Fey are my family’s subjects . . . and then helping them, trying to keep them from dying, is treason? No. I’d be a traitor if I treated them the way my—the way so many of my family have done.”
“But you don’t think the Fey are your subjects,” I said quietly. I understood what he was saying, and I was working toward the same goal. But ever since the first day we’d come to Faerie, my understanding of treason, of righteousness, of what was right and wrong in the first place, had grown harder and harder to parse. I didn’t think I knew what was right anymore; I didn’t think I knew what I felt.
“I don’t think they should be,” Fin amended. “But my family, my country—our country—subjugated them long ago. Until we can right that wrong, and I think we can, Nick, I really think Talis and I are getting somewhere . . . until then, they’re as much citizens of Esting as you are, and they’re equally entitled to my help. Nick, working with the Fey is the opposite of treason.” His voice was starting to shake a little, in anger or conviction or fear.
“I know, Fin,” I said, pressing my hand gently to his chest. “I know.” His good intention, at least, was one thing I could be sure of. And for a while, I could think of it and feel a little surer of my own.
They hoped to have a full proposal for a cease-fire ready by the time the Estinger army appeared, an offer that King Corsin and his advisors could agree to. We would fly out to meet the attacking airships long before they reached the shore; the battle might be over before it began.
But I still spent my days with my mother preparing for that battle. I both hated and loved it, but I had to help her; we were the only ones who knew how to engineer the automatons that would give Faerie any chance of surviving the Esting attack if Fin and Talis should fail to prevent it.
Her workshop was breathtaking. She lived and worked in the house where Mr. Candery had taken Caro and me to, in twelve little honeycomb rooms of the kind that seemed so common here. Most
of the rooms were underground, and walking through them was like opening those Nordsk nesting dolls, each one so intricate and meticulous that you think surely this was the end, there couldn’t possibly be anything after it. And then there was.
She’d continued her studies of animal anatomy, and she seemed to have grown fixated on dragonflies and bats. My buzzers climbed inquisitively over larger, more streamlined versions of their own bodies, running their delicate legs over the improvements with what seemed to me like jealousy.
“No horses,” I murmured the first time I saw her workshop, holding out my hand so the copper butterfly could perch on my finger.
Behind me my mother made a strange hissing sound, and when I turned I saw a small cloud of steam around her head.
“No more horses,” she said. The furnace in her belly glowed. Her face was just a porcelain mask, and its expression was the same as ever, but her bright glass eyes looked angry.
I pushed past her and ran upstairs, back to where Jules waited for me, wound down and asleep in the courtyard. I threw my arms around him and longed for him to wake up, but I couldn’t make myself draw the spiral pattern between his shoulders that would bring him to life. Jules took me back and forth between the barracks and Mother’s workshop every day, and he had started to seem tired lately, in a way he never had even when we worked our hardest together back in Esting. I wondered if something about Faerie was making him sad, something he still didn’t want to tell me.
The Fey had forbidden my mother to gather new Ashes even before the Estinger forces had taken over the site of their creation. We would have to make our whole army from whatever I had in my case.
When I returned, she was bent over the worktable in her first room, fiddling with a minute piece of clockwork. I could barely see the glow of her furnace now, and the steam around her head had dissipated; she seemed to have calmed down.
I set the case on the edge of the table and began to remove the thin vials of Ashes. I found myself holding my breath.
My mother glanced over at them. Her glass eyes gleamed.
“Smart girl,” she whispered. “You brought those all the way here for me.”
My jaw clenched. “Jules made me bring them,” I muttered.
She opened the case and rifled through the glass vials with flickering, quick movements. “There isn’t much, but it’ll do,” she said, adding bitterly: “All my other stores were destroyed long ago.”
“Destroyed? How?” I was sure there was something about the Ashes that I still didn’t know. What I’d already learned made me heartsick, and yet . . . I thought of Fin’s talk of responsibility, of doing right by whomever was in your care, no matter how they came to be that way. If I was really sending Jules and the buzzers to war, I had to know how their Ashes could be destroyed so that I could keep them as safe as possible.
“The Fey call their destruction releasing the Ashes,” my mother said scornfully, extending her neck just a little longer than would have been possible in her old body in order to examine a delicate gear. “They’re just killing them, of course. You’d think they’d take my word for it. Yes, the burning is—painful, but . . .”
The hinges of her painted mouth closed, and her lidless eyes glanced toward me.
Then she shook herself with a jingle and kept talking, her remarkable hands working with inhuman deftness and speed as she spoke.
“But if I myself found it worthwhile, surely they could see that it isn’t so terrible . . . I was going to die anyway, and so was every animal that burned! It’s a blessing, the best magic Faerie has! And yet the Fey choose to die, of old age, of disease, in childbirth, or from injury, every one of them . . . I can’t understand it.”
“You don’t know that,” I said coldly, bending over my own work. Mr. Candery had found an old stool for me to sit on; my mother never needed one herself, and it didn’t seem to occur to her that I would. I was trying my best not to envy her strength, her speed and dexterity, with mixed results.
I thought of Talis’s story, of Shim stepping calmly over the side of the merchant’s ship. Of the serpent who had given Shim fer life back, even if it was a new kind of life entirely.
“I do know it,” she said. “Even the Fey smuggler who, ah, who helped me transform said no person in all their national memory had ever done it. It repulses them on some instinctive level. The only instinct I knew was the one to keep on living and working. I told fer that, and even then it took all the money I’d ever made to persuade fer to bring me to the fire . . .”
I forced myself to ignore the growing revulsion that I felt at my mother’s story. “Not that,” I said. “I meant that you don’t know the Ashes came from creatures about to die.”
Her head snapped around on her snaking neck. “No one would burn a healthy animal for no reason,” she said. “Surely you don’t think even I could be so cruel as that.”
“The prices Ashes fetch at the Night Market—the prices you paid for them—would be reason enough!”
Her neck began to retract. “I didn’t hear you weeping when you found Jules and my buzzers back in Esting.”
I threw down the wrench I’d been holding and stood. “You didn’t hear anything! You weren’t there. You left me!”
She straightened up. Her new body was taller than the original had been, and our eyes were exactly level. “Didn’t hear anything?” she asked, her voice oil-smooth, a perfect replica of the one that used to teach me and tell me stories. “I wouldn’t be so sure of that, Nicolette.” She raised one metal hand to her ceramic cheek, drummed her fingers on it lightly with a sound like four tiny hammers. “‘Oh, Jules, I wonder what Fin is doing right now. Do you think he’s thinking of me too?’” She pitched her voice slightly higher to mimic me, childish and silly.
I felt as if she’d struck me. Hard, in some vulnerable low-down place. I struggled to breathe, and all I could do for many long moments was glare at her, too outraged to speak. I thought I could really hit her, my own mother, for saying that, if only I knew where it would hurt her.
How many more horrible things would I learn in Faerie? Perhaps it was good that I might have to go to war. I was going to hurt someone, and soon, so it might as well be in the service of . . . something.
“I couldn’t always hear you, of course,” she went on in her own voice, as if it were obvious. “The spell didn’t work for me as well as Mr. Candery hoped it would. After those horrid interlopers”—I realized she meant the Steps—“smashed up my workshop, it failed completely. But it was enough for me to see which way the wind was blowing, and comfort myself with the knowledge that I’d left you the tools to make a living, and a match with the Heir into the bargain.” She turned away, clacking. “You used the other tools so well, I can’t understand why you didn’t use the best one of all when he fell right into your lap.”
I snatched up my wrench again. “Neither of us understands the other, Margot,” I said, enjoying her shock and hurt at my use of her given name. “I think mother and daughter should both let go of that fantasy now if we’re to have any hope of working together.”
Her glass eyes flicked toward me again. “Ah,” she said, “it seems you have some sense after all.”
✷
They were the longest days I’d ever worked in my life. Not even when I’d been building the bigger Jules and his carriage, nor in the heady, rough first days of starting my own business after the Exposition, had I stretched myself so thin. But it would not be long before the automaton army came ashore. Mr. Candery had assured me that no more or less time had passed here than in Esting, and indeed the notion started to seem absurd to me. Based on the state of the automatons I’d seen in Fitz’s storeroom, I believed we still had a month or two, but I couldn’t be certain. Talis had sent twelve soldiers to assist us in our work; it would have taken a year to build our army without them, and I knew at least that that was too much time.
I was afraid my mother would ask or force me to divide Jules up into multipl
e bodies, but it never came to that. Unlike the loyal buzzers, Jules didn’t want to see my mother; he didn’t say anything to me, just gave her a wide berth on the rare occasions that she happened to be in the courtyard when we came riding in. Perhaps she sensed my protectiveness—at any rate, she never asked me about him. They never got close enough for me to see exactly what he thought of her.
So the mechanical force we built was no cavalry . . . not in the traditional sense, anyway. There were no horses. Instead we built insects, spiders, birds, and bats, all big enough to ride. Even the buzzers volunteered themselves, and like their beloved Jules they soon had much bigger and fiercer bodies.
“I’m certain I saw only foot soldiers in Fitz’s warehouse,” I said a few days into our work, “no horses. They were—” I’d almost mentioned the mare I’d seen at the burning site. I couldn’t tell Mother; I didn’t want to talk to her about the Ashes at all. “I don’t think it would be reasonable to count out horses, though,” I said instead. “Especially not now that Jules has become as famous in Esting as I have.” For some reason, the merman Fin had freed flickered across my mind. “They could have . . . some kind of marine force too, couldn’t they? Ashes of fish, or whales, or . . . sea serpents?” I pictured the serpent from Talis’s story, imagined the monsters from the Imperator’s map made huge and metallic, and I shivered.
“Of course not, Nicolette,” she said, sliding out from under the chassis of a carriage-size beetle she’d been working on. “It’s completely impossible.”
I bristled. “How so?”
She actually paused before responding, something that was incredibly rare for her. “You can’t burn coal underwater, of course,” she finally said.
Well, that was fairly obvious, and I did feel a bit foolish for not thinking of it. Still, as my mother slid back under the beetle’s chassis a little too quickly, even for her, I wondered if she was keeping the real reason to herself.
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