“I can’t bring her back, then,” I said. “I can’t put her into another body to feel that pain again, I can’t! I wouldn’t do it to anyone!”
The pity I’d felt for poor drowned Fitz on the beach evaporated away. He must have spoken with the automaton soldiers; he had to have known the pain he was forcing them into. He was an even greater monster than I had imagined.
Mr. Candery picked up the box from my lap and closed his hands gently over it in protection.
“She feels it even now,” he said quietly.
I recoiled in my seat.
“At least if you bring her back, she can . . . feel other things too. See. Move. Work, she would say.” He opened his hands like a shell, offering me the box. “It’s what she wants, Nick. To live. To work. Please, bring her back.”
I was unable to move. I felt the ghosts of imagined fire all over my body, just looking at the thing in Mr. Candery’s hands.
I stood.
I forced myself to move quickly, even more quickly than I’d walked toward Caro and Fin in the healers’ hall. My muscles screamed, but it was nothing to the pain the Ashes felt.
“I’ll bring you to her storeroom right now,” said Mr. Candery, following me out the door. “No one will blame you if you want to rest first, though, Nicolette.”
I looked back at him, not trusting myself to speak.
But he must have understood.
His eyes softened, and he nodded and tucked Mother’s box into his own jacket pocket, carefully, as if he could spare her some of the pain that way.
Every second. Every second, burning alive.
I took off running toward the stables.
JULES leaned his head out, looking down the stable hall, listening to one of the Fey horses nicker quietly at him. His ears were pricked forward; he looked like any happy horse.
I thought it couldn’t be true. If Jules had always been in pain, I would have known. I couldn’t have just sailed blithely through the past two years, seeing him every day, and not noticed.
I sprinted to his stall and threw my arms around him. I heard the surprised chirrup of the other horse, and the deeper, calmer noises in Jules’s throat, comforting noises.
“Mechanica,” he rumbled. The name had always been a badge of honor coming from him. It reminded me of what I had done, what I could do.
He was always trying to comfort me, to help me. And what had I done to help him?
I’d brought him back to life once, given him the large quarry-horse body he had now, when he’d had only a clockwork-trinket body before that could fit in my hand.
But I knew he felt the same pain no matter what kind of body he had.
“Jules, I’m so sorry, I’m sorry,” I whispered into the warm, hard expanse of his neck. I clutched at him as if I could remove the pain.
He pulled back, taking one or two steps into the stable. He gave another rumble, half voice and half engine, full of sorrow.
“Is it true?” I asked.
He looked away.
I closed the door behind me. I wanted to reach out to him, but suddenly felt as if I couldn’t. I’d taken so much from him already, these two years, without knowing. To take anything else, even the solace of a touch . . .
But he came to me. He nosed my palm, pulling my hand up so that it lay on his broad cheek the way it had done so many times.
“You’re always in pain.”
He hesitated for a long moment, and then he nodded.
“Every second,” I said.
He just watched me.
I could feel the anger coming up in my belly like bile, rage at my mother for condoning such a thing, for using her money to help make it possible. And she’d left Jules trapped in the chest in her workshop for years, for what might have been forever if her plan hadn’t worked, if I had never found the secret key.
Jules and the dozens of other animals, too, trapped as Ashes in her many drawers or in sleeping clockwork bodies. Suspended in endless pain.
I felt sick, heartsick. Bone-deep sick and angry. And none of that pain was a fraction of what Jules had been feeling all along, for longer than I’d known him. Perhaps longer than I’d been alive.
Jules pressed his face against my hand. He looked down at me from the height I’d given him, his glass eyes full of compassion I didn’t deserve.
“Worthwhile,” he rumbled. “Worthwhile to know and . . . help you.”
“You did help me, Jules,” I said. “You saved me as much as I ever saved myself. You—” I wouldn’t make him watch me cry. “I loved you when I had no one else to love. And you loved me. I always . . .” My voice faltered and failed me.
Jules shook his head.
I took a steadying breath that did nothing to help. I had to go shakily into the next question. I was sick with dread that I already knew his answer.
“Do you want . . .” I shut my eyes, then forced them open again. I had to show him I would be all right. “Do you want not to be in pain anymore?”
Jules stood stock-still.
Then, slowly, a quiet sigh began to sound from his body, not just from his voice but from his oiled joints, the clockwork in his head, the furnace in his belly. Every part of the machine and the horse inside breathing out together, one great exhale.
“Yes,” he said.
And then again, although speaking hurt him: “Yes.”
I ran my hand over his cheek.
“I’ll go with you,” I said.
✷
I rode to the shoreline on Jules’s back. I didn’t want to ride. I hated the idea of him carrying me, of being any more of a burden than I’d already been. But he had stamped his steel hooves and huffed smoke when I’d started to walk, and I could deny him nothing now.
He ambled slowly through the jungle, across lingering rivulets of seawater from the great wave. I had thought he might fly, but I was glad he didn’t. We shared the silence between us as he walked on.
I rode with my head held high. All I wanted was to fling myself down on Jules’s neck and weep, but I wouldn’t let myself. I would do nothing that might make him think I still needed him.
We reached the shore too soon.
It was almost dawn. The sand was dark around us, nearly the same color as the water. The sky was dusky gray-blue at the edges, still nighttime above. The jungle behind us was a dark mass.
I dismounted, and Jules stood looking at the water for a long time. I thought of all the buzzers already gone, all the Ashes of the thousands of soldiers that were released inside of yesterday’s wave.
I couldn’t feel sad for them, because I knew they had found peace, whatever peace comes after great suffering. I tried to feel the same for Jules. To rejoice in the death of his pain.
In the end he walked to the water alone, leaving me on the shore. I had made a small hole in the box of his Ashes back in the stable, at his request, so that it would happen quickly.
I tried to empty my head of anything but this last sight of my horse, my friend, calm and steady and wonderful as he always was, walking into the sea.
When the waterline reached the bottom of his belly, he reared up, throwing out his wings to their full span. Jules gleamed in the moonlight and the silver traces of dawn, casting spray around him like pearls.
He plunged forward, all courage and fluid grace.
I watched the reddish glow in his furnace douse under the surface.
I stood on the shore, taking one breath at a time. I saw nothing after he went under, no ghost rising from the water. Nothing.
I knelt down on the beach and watched the sun come up.
✷
The air grew bright and clear, and one by one birds began to sing in the jungle at my back. I don’t know how much time passed before Caro and Fin came and sat down beside me. Fin settled himself slowly, with great care, and he placed a long witchwood cane on the sand in front of him.
“Mr. Candery told us,” Caro said. “Oh, Nick.”
Neither of them touched me. Th
ey only sat with me, sharing my silence. The burden and the gift of it, the sadness and heartbreak and relief. There on the quiet beach, I was finding the space I needed to feel everything I’d feared would drown me if I let it in at once. It all washed over me then, all the conflict and confusion, the misery and rage and grief, and I took it in as if it were only more water. With my friends at my side, it was nothing more than that.
I turned to Caro at last, remembering the faraway look that had been in her eyes in the hall, and I was relieved to see that it had left her. There was some shadow on her still, a remnant of something she’d seen or done, but the real Caro was coming out from under it again. I knew that whatever horrors those of us in the battle had seen, Caro had fought equal horrors in the healers’ halls.
Fin looked a little haunted too—which I could well understand—but there was a bigger change in him. He was staring out at the ocean, and I could see it in his profile, although I couldn’t name it. He seemed older, for one thing, with a few lines at the sides of his mouth that I thought were new, and far healthier than I could have hoped he would be so soon after his grievous injury. But there was something more . . .
He broke the spell by glancing at me and smiling his Prince Charming smile, although even that had something new about it. “What is it, Nick?” he asked.
“I don’t know . . .” I cocked my head a little to the side, taking him in from a different angle. “It’s as if . . .” I shook my head and smiled back, my first since Jules—only a few hours, but it felt like years. “I think you look like a king now, Fin.”
Fin took a deep breath. “Well, I should hope so,” he said.
Caro touched his shoulder softly. Neither of us told him we were sorry for his loss. It wouldn’t suffice, and it wasn’t needed.
Fin turned to me. “Let’s talk about Jules, Nick, if you want to talk,” he said. “Politics can wait.”
I felt my chin tremble. I looked out at the water. “He loved me,” I said. “He loved me, and he saved me, and he was wonderful.”
Fin nodded.
“That he was,” Caro agreed.
They sat with me for the rest of the day. No one came to fetch us, not even Mr. Candery, and I was grateful. I knew he was longing for me to bring back my mother.
✷
Reanimating Margot took almost no time at all. It was obvious from the moment I walked into that last storeroom that she’d been rebuilding herself constantly, working toward some newer and more perfect model of her own anatomy.
There were a dozen arms to choose from, as many legs, several torsos. I worried over which parts to choose at first, hearing her criticisms of my choices in my head even as I tried to make them, but then I remembered that she’d be able to trade them for others or even build yet more new body parts as soon as she was back.
So I did what I think no other daughter before me has ever been able to do: I remade my mother in my own image.
I chose for her the same attributes I would have chosen for myself. A right hand with tiny drill bits built into the fingernails for doing delicate clockwork; a left hand with a rubber grip and a wrist that rotated 360 degrees. Eyes with adjustable lenses, one microscopic, the other telescopic. Legs with inner springs I thought would let her walk lightly. I chose the torso with the roomiest furnace so she wouldn’t have to worry about refueling herself too often; she could simply focus on her work, the reason she was willing to stay alive through so much pain in the first place. Another brown silk wig, less elaborate than her last. And a porcelain face that looked the most like the mother from my childhood, the prettiest mama in the world.
It was Mr. Candery, in the end, who wished her back. He waited in my mother’s parlor the whole time I rebuilt her body, pacing back and forth; I could hear his footsteps from the workshop below. I told him I’d thought he’d like to do it, and he was grateful, but in truth I wasn’t sure if I could wish hard enough myself. I was still so angry with her, and I knew in my heart that I could never forgive her for Jules, for the buzzers, for all the many kinds of pain she’d caused.
Mr. Candery went into the storeroom and closed the door. In only a few short minutes he opened the door again and beckoned me into the room.
And there, already rummaging around in the other versions of her body, was my mother. The face she turned to me was the face I’d always loved.
“You made a good choice with the eyes,” she said, tapping her porcelain temple with a drill-tipped finger. “I might have picked a stronger right arm, though.” If she could have pursed the lips of her porcelain mask, I knew she would have.
I also knew that it was foolish to feel embarrassed, to let myself be vulnerable to any of her criticisms. “At least you’re moving again,” I said.
Her multi-lensed eyes rolled upward and she tsked at me, a sound that brought back a whole flood of squabbling, domestic memories I thought I’d lost.
Then she shuddered and sighed.
“Nicolette,” she said, “thank you.” She reached out the drill-bit hand.
I clenched my jaw and couldn’t quite reply. The next thing I’d have said would have been an excoriating judgment about the buzzers and Jules, and what good would it do either of us for me to dole out yet more of that pain?
I turned and left her instead.
✷
Mr. Candery found me later, while I was eating dinner with Caro at one of the communal tables that had been set up in a long hall, the biggest room I’d ever seen in Faerie.
Both Fin and Talis were absent, although the rest of us—healers, soldiers well enough to leave their beds, officers like Mr. Candery, Caro and I—were eating together. There were quiet murmurs of conversation, but the pervading atmosphere in the room was one of stunned relief. Esting’s automaton army was vanquished, and some of us, at least, had survived.
Mr. Candery touched my arm so gently that I didn’t jump even though he had surprised me. “Hello, Nicolette,” he said. “My dear, I just wanted to tell you . . .” He paused, sighed. “Your mother is very grateful to you. And very proud.”
I tried my best to keep my face neutral; my anger wasn’t at him, not truly. And was I grateful to my mother, was I proud?
Part of me was.
And part of me hated her.
“All right,” I muttered to Mr. Candery. I didn’t know what else to say.
“I was . . . we were talking just now. She says . . . she’s too stubborn to say it herself, if you’ll pardon my saying so, but she wishes she could . . . she knows you’ll be heading back to Esting soon enough, you see. She wishes she could write you a letter when you’re there, in the hopes that you may write back.”
I blinked. I supposed I would be returning to Esting soon. The idea seemed as strange and foreign as flying to a star. It was only an ocean that separated me from my home country, but it felt like a whole other world.
I looked at Mr. Candery’s worried, loving face, and I wished more for his sake than for my own that I could agree to read my mother’s letters. But the knowledge of Jules’s pain and of my mother’s part in it still sat so heavy in my heart.
Caro regarded us both with compassion, saying nothing.
A brief burst of music, the deep harp-and-drum that announced the Fey ruler, kept me from having to answer. Like everyone else at the long table, I rose from my seat for Talis’s entrance.
Fe walked into the room as calmly as ever, gesturing at once for us all to sit. Fe spoke in Fey first and then in perfect Estinger in the quiet, gentle tone fe always took.
“I’m sorry for interrupting your dinner. We have something very important, very serious, to tell you.” Fe looked around the room, and I felt that shiver again when our eyes met, that moment of wondering how deep fer perceptive powers really went. Talis looked at every soul in the room that way before fe spoke again, confirming trust, offering honesty and transparency. Fe loved each and every person in the room. It wasn’t a general kind of love, either; it was specific and complicated,
frustrated and fierce. It was like the love all grown-up children feel for their parents.
Fin entered to stand at Talis’s side. He was wearing his black dress-uniform coat, patched so well now that it looked nearly new, and over it a sash of the Fey lapis blue. The weight of sadness and that other, more welcome burden were still in his face and in the way he squared his shoulders even as he walked with the help of the witchwood cane.
I wished I could stand at his side and support him, although I realized this was something he had to do, had to let the Fey see, on his own. The sole integrity he had to show as the new ruler—the new king.
“King Corsin of Esting has died,” Talis said.
All through the room a startled murmur rose. Much of the noise was joyful.
“It was no doing of ours,” Talis said, holding up fer hands in reassurance, looking at us again with that perfect clarity and honesty.
“My father has been ill for years,” Fin said. “The death of my mother and my brother broke Corsin’s heart, depleted his health, and forced him into his extremism. Recent events proved too much for his heart to withstand.” A translator standing beside Talis repeated Fin’s words in Fey.
Caro squeezed my hand. We both knew the “recent event” Fin spoke of was the news of Fin’s own supposed death; more of Fitz’s work.
“Any death should be mourned,” Talis said, and I knew as well as everyone else in the room that fe was sincere. I thought fe locked eyes with me for another moment then, and I had the unsettling feeling that fe knew and even understood about Jules, but it was over too quickly for me to be sure that I hadn’t imagined it. “But this death has brought us new life.
“King Christopher Dougray Fadhiri Anton Abdul-Rafi’ Finnian,” Talis said, a lilting formality coming into fer voice, “as his first official act as monarch, has cosigned a proclamation of Faerie’s independence. My friends, we have our freedom.”
Shocked silence in the hall—shock from everyone but Caro and me. We looked at each other with jubilation and gratitude and everything but surprise.
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