by C. L. Polk
Avia Jessup let the camera hang around her neck. “Sorry! Are you dazzled?”
“Quite,” I replied. She wore the same gently threadbare coat, but her hair swung free, dark as a magpie’s wing and flashing the same deep blue that glinted off their feathers. I breathed through the flutter in my stomach. “How did you know to wait for me?”
She shook her hair back into place. I blinked, trying to clear the spots that fouled my view of her charming, red-lipped smile. “Pure luck. I was here for the press statement from Member Clarke. I noticed you weren’t present.”
I sorted through the flurry of motions, memos, appointment requests, invitations, and came up with nothing. “I was in my office, trying to catch up on everything during my absence.”
“And imprisonment,” Avia noted. “But you’re free now. And if you’re playing catch-up, do I congratulate you on your formal position as Chancellor?”
She was fast. “There was to be a formal announcement tomorrow.”
“Oh, I love a scoop,” Avia said, and it sparkled in her eyes. “Congratulations, Chancellor.”
“Thank you. But you were explaining how you knew to…” I trailed off as I recalled the presence of a bright orange lacquered sleigh, pulled by a team of four, with William and George waiting for me. “Oh.”
“It is distinctive, isn’t it? Add the boars on the horse blankets, and I knew you were free.”
“And you were here for a press statement.”
Avia nodded. “Not a lot of interest, by the turnout. A number of the shadow coalition have formed a subcommittee to investigate claims by abolitionists about the validity of the Witchcraft Protection Act.”
I hoped the quickening of my heart didn’t show on my face. I thought of still, tranquil waters, relaxing my expression. “I didn’t know of this subcommittee. Maybe it’s in the next pile of memos.”
“I have the press statement and a photo, but I think it’ll barely make the back pages,” Avia said. “Though now I’m bound back to the Star. Your appointment shall be in our morning edition.”
She was every bit as vivacious as I’d thought she would be. She was a figure of action, staying still only long enough to wait for my dismissal so she could charge back to the paper and drop another headline winner. I wanted to be near her energy and ambition, to bask in the freedom she had carved out for herself. Like my brother, she had given up everything to chase a dream, however risky, whatever the sacrifice. “I’m passing right by it. Hook your bike onto the back and ride with me.”
Avia leapt for a black lacquered bicycle that had rust spotting the frame and fenders and lifted it on the bike hooks herself. My footman William helped us into the back seat, and I spread a wool-filled sled blanket across our laps. “We’ll have to share the foot-warmer.”
“I don’t mind,” Avia said. We squeezed closer, sheltering against the chill. We pressed together from hip to knee, ankles bumping as we perched our toes on the warming box. Up close she smelled like spiced apple tipsy blended with the floral bouquet of her perfume. “That tunic looks warm. How was your stay in Kingsgrave?”
“Mercifully brief,” I replied. “Don’t eat the millet. Listen, do you have a smoke? I’m dying.”
“I do.” Avia regarded me with an impish smile. “I’m mercenary enough to trade it for a few questions on the record.”
“Then let’s bargain. One smoke, one question.”
She laughed, throaty and rich. “Five.”
It caught me up, that laughter, making me smile. “Three, like in the stories.”
“Done.” She slipped a battered tin cigarette case from her pocket and had a pair of ready-mades between her lips in an eyeblink. I reached for the wind and stilled it as she swept a matchstick along the rough side of a matching tin box. She watched the unwavering flame for one surprised moment, then set both cigarettes alight, handing one to me. “So. You’re back in business.”
I closed my lips over the red-stained end she had held in her mouth. The smoke rushed through my blood, and something in my head unknotted with a grateful sigh. “The Queen appointed me her Chancellor. That wasn’t a question.”
Smoke trailed from Avia’s mouth as we turned left onto the King’s Way and passed a temple whose steps were crowded with seekers, their heads covered in short white veils. “It wasn’t. But here’s one. How did you come to return to Kingston with a procession of Amaranthines?”
I had rehearsed for this one. “Pure coincidence,” I said. “I was in the area with a physician who studies battle fatigue in veterans; he needed my influence to visit Clarity House in Bywell, which is where the Guardians first appeared. Their arrival was astonishing. I shall remember it for the rest of my life. My compliments on your photo, by the way. I had no idea cameras would ignore the veiling on their true appearances.”
“Thank you,” Avia said. “That gave me quite a shock in the darkroom. I have no idea why it happened, but it made the most arresting photographs I’ve ever shot.”
“You’ll be famous forever,” I said. “That one photograph alone, the rights must be worth thousands of marks.”
Avia’s smile faltered. “I shouldn’t doubt it. Next question. The Amaranthines’ arrival coincided with the country-wide blackout, and it begs me to ask: Are the loss of aether and the arrival of the Blessed Ones connected?”
She had good intuition. I had a drag and a long exhale to gather my thoughts. “This is a difficult question to answer. I don’t want to imply that the Amaranthines are responsible for the loss of aether. But they are intensely interested in the power that lit Aeland’s homes and businesses. More than that, I cannot say.”
The horses made it up to trotting speed, matching pace with a peloton of cyclists on their way home from a day’s work. Yellow ribbons bannered from their left arms, and some of them gave me and my sled a dark look. Avia leaned toward the small urn meant to catch ashes. I turned my gaze away from glowering cyclists to focus on her.
My response to her next question was poised on the tip of my tongue as she wrote with a sleek silver-trimmed ebonite pen. She raised her head and looked into my eyes, catching me staring. Hers were night-dark, lined with long black lashes shadowing her keen expression as she spoke:
“After the institution of the Witchcraft Protection Act, the first people arrested under the new law were Deathsingers, witches who could communicate with and compel the dead. Around the time the lights went out forty-two years later, thousands of ghosts appeared throughout Aeland.”
She pointed. A transparent woman in a white gown and no shoes walked through a clump of pedestrians waiting for the traffic light to turn blue. They shied away from her as she stepped into the street. Cyclists shouted in alarm and horror as they rode right through her.
Avia went on. “You were in an asylum that housed Deathsingers at the extraordinary moment when aether stopped working and the Guardians of the Dead set foot in the mortal realm for the first time since the Age of Miracles. What is the connection between these three events?”
My breath stopped. My mind screamed at me to lie, lie. “I have no comment.”
She caged me with her stare. “So there is a connection?”
Every rattle and bounce of the sled’s runners jarred my bones. “I cannot confirm or deny a connection between the events you have mentioned.”
“It’s so easy to say ‘No, there is no connection’ when that’s the truth.” Avia crushed the coal burning at the end of her cigarette in the urn mounted in front of us. “But you didn’t.”
“The newspaper is no place for sensationalist speculation,” I said.
The corners of Avia’s mouth turned down. “I’m not in the habit of publishing wild guesses, Chancellor Hensley. I will find corroboration—maybe not from you, maybe not today. But I will keep looking.”
“What makes you think there is a connection?” I asked. I could have bitten my tongue. Fool!
“I don’t really believe in coincidence,” Avia said. “This is where I get
off.”
The sled had come to a halt on Main and the King’s Way, parked in front of a sandstone-fronted building that rose a little taller than its neighbors. At the end of the block, the Edenhill Hotel soared into the sky, its windows dark and empty of guests. As one of the first buildings fully powered by aether, it stood abandoned and useless in the wake of the blackout.
Avia lifted her bicycle off the back of the sled. “Thank you for the ride, Chancellor Hensley. When I have more questions, I’ll look you up.”
She shot me a wink and wheeled her bicycle to a rack, where she was still chaining it while George drove the horses around the corner and out of sight.
I tucked the sled rug around me and planted both feet on the warmer, but I felt as if I would be cold forever. Avia Jessup had made the connection. She’d keep poking around until she found the answer—an answer that could leave Aeland devastated if the people learned the truth.
My stomach gnawed at me as I shivered in the back seat, weariness banished by a single question: What was I going to do?
FOUR
An Election
The question gnawed at me through the evening and the rest of the night. The next morning, I bade George stop at the intersection of Halston and 17th and give two cents to a newsboy whose stacks of the latest edition of the Star rose to his waist. William brought it to me, and my face peered out at the reader under the headline “Hensley Scion Appointed.”
I scanned the story. Avia hadn’t written a word connecting the asylums, the loss of aether, the appearance of Aeland’s dead, or the arrival of the Amaranthines. I could breathe for today, at least.
I set the paper down on the bench when we pulled up to the headquarters of the Kingston Benevolent Society, the city’s most exclusive charity club. A cruel northern wind chilled the citizens waiting to apply for relief programs, who shivered in a great huddle.
I searched the crowd for the green caps of Society workers. “Hasn’t anyone come out to take your names?”
They shook their heads. Someone should be out here, talking to these people.
“I’ll get someone.”
I handed my coat to a woman and put in a request for workers to see to the people waiting outside. The lift was out, so I took the stairs past appointment rooms and clerks’ offices, climbing above the larger boardrooms and suite clubs officers used when forced to meet with the public. The private floors smelled of breakfast. I ached with hunger.
I’d cause an uproar when they saw the royal writ declaring me the Voice of the Invisibles. It would be as much work as quelling a thunderstorm alone, but the others weren’t unreasonable or stupid. They’d see I was the only clear choice. I wove my way past dark-stained pedestal tables flanked by horseshoe-back chairs. Gaslight chandeliers brightened the room enough to read the fine print on the day’s paper, but the scent of newspaper ink wafted as people lowered their pages to stare.
It wouldn’t do to rush inside and trot from table to table, wheedling the others into coming upstairs. The scent of coffee carried me across the room to the buffet. I filled a plate with every kind of cheese on offer, tempered by sliced fruit and goose sausage. I smiled at a young man who dropped his gaze to the jacquard squares covering the arm of his chair when I looked at him.
His name bubbled up in my memory. Sir Richard Poole, barely twenty years old, a Second Ring Link from somewhere up north. I knew all the faces in this room. I hadn’t talked to them much, as they were mostly Links and Third Ring Callers, mostly young and untried—
Wait.
There wasn’t a single Second Ring caller taking breakfast. If they weren’t here, if not a one of them was here, then they had to be upstairs. And if they were upstairs, I had to be upstairs. Now.
I set my tray full of breakfast down on an empty table and walked out of the breakfast lounge. When the door clicked behind me, I took the stairs two at a time, grasping the doorknobs to the sky room to fling the doors open.
The faceted glass dome set in the ceiling was covered in snow, dimming the room enough to need the gaslights. The callers of the Second Ring filed up to a row of three black glass bottles with black and white voting balls in hand. I strode into the room, hand inside my jacket.
“An election is a good idea, friends, but wholly unnecessary.” I produced the thick vellum reserved for declarations of law and royal writ. “Queen Constantina has made her decision already. She has chosen me.”
Voices babbled one over another—I clearly heard “She can’t do that!” among the exclamations and annoyance. I couldn’t stop myself—I rolled my eyes.
“Of course she can do that,” I said. “She’s the Queen of Aeland.”
“But she doesn’t.” Brandon Wellesley ducked his head. “I mean, she never does that. We elect a Voice. Then we inform her.”
“We elect the candidate for Voice and humbly offer the choice for her consideration,” I corrected. “She’s already chosen me for Chancellor—”
Elsine Pelfrey scoffed, shaking her long-chinned head. “The practice of one person holding both the post of Chancellor and the Voice is by no means ancient tradition. It only began when your own great-grandmother manipulated her way into holding all that power. There’s no reason why we can’t have one person for the Voice and another for Chancellor.”
“The Voice is chosen by ancient tradition,” I said. “We choose the most experienced, the most capable, and the most talented to be the Voice, do we not?”
Elsine’s face creased in a most unattractive way when she didn’t like what she was hearing. “And that’s you?”
As far as arguments went, it was pathetic. “I’m not going to be humble, as there is too much at stake. That person is plainly me. And with the storm on our doorstep and the First Ring in prison, we don’t have time to test out an untried Caller.”
Elsine folded her arms and slung her chin forward. “We won’t follow you.”
That was really quite enough. Elsine had been eager to shackle my brother to her side for a chance at more influence in the Circle. “Are you going to go home then, Elsine? Are you going to squint at your needlepoint while this storm makes landfall right on Kingston? Fine. Go.” I pointed at the exit. “And any of the rest of you who won’t lift a finger against what’s coming, you may as well go too. I’ll let the Queen know you’re staying home that day.”
And the others spoke out. “Why should we let you come in here and take over?”
“How do we know that writ of yours is even real?”
“I don’t care if it is real. You were ousted! You can’t walk in here and expect us to—”
“Grace is right.”
The voices stilled. All eyes turned to Raymond Blake. He stood up, buttoning the top button of his jacket. Ray was defending me? Ray, who had given me back Grandpa Miles’s engagement ring the night I’d been kicked out of the Circle?
I’d gotten over Raymond’s abandonment already, honestly. We knew why we were marrying, and love wasn’t even on the list. But what would he get from supporting me now?
He spoke into the silence he had commanded. “This is no time for petty bickering. Grace led us for months before Sir Percy played politics. And then look what happened when the job was his. Frostnight was one blunder after another, and you all know it. You were there. And when the little storm blew in on the eighth—”
“It wasn’t that little,” Elsine objected.
“I don’t know how you can say that when snow cyclone Mabel is pounding on our heads,” Ray said. “If Grace had been here, we probably could have saved the last harvest.”
I eyed Raymond. “You named it Mabel?”
Ray shrugged. “We needed a code.”
“But she wasn’t here,” Elsine said. “Where were you, Grace?”
“I was in the company of the Amaranthines in Bywell,” I said. “Since Sir Percy had ousted me, not just from the First Ring but from the entire Circle, I had no reason to sit around Kingston while he mucked it up. And when the Blessed Ones
arrived here, they were not happy. It’s a lucky thing I decided to go out of town.”
“Lucky, indeed,” Ray said, supporting my tattered story. “So now that you’re back, we need you to lead us.”
“We could hold another vote,” Elsine said. “That would be fair.”
“The election’s over,” Raymond said. “I recognize Dame Grace as the Voice of the Invisibles. You should too.”
Chaos take him, he was rescuing me.
Elsine’s mouth was a thin line. “There’s obviously a place in the Circle for Dame Grace, but to deny us the chance to elect our free choice—”
Raymond scoffed, his lips curling into his usual humor. “Oh, chin up and take it, Elly. I know you were hoping to be elected.”
“Against you? Not likely,” Elsine said. “If we count those votes, Ray, you’ll be the clear winner.”
Ah. The fog cleared, and I could see exactly what I’d stepped in.
“And I recognize Dame Grace as the Voice,” Raymond said. “So support her. We’ve some work to do, reckoning when to meet the storm with the Circle. Let’s stop fighting and do it.”
I kept my smile on and spoke up. “We have to be ready the moment the storm gets close enough. I did the calculating last night. We begin the working at eleven tonight.”
A few people twisted to retrieve satchels, but others sat still, looking uncertain.
Raymond nodded. “Tonight. Let’s prepare.”
Now everyone moved, capping pens and getting on their feet. Raymond touched my shoulder. “May we speak privately?”
“Of course.”
I followed Raymond into a small office. It wasn’t like I had a choice.
He shut the door and pinned down a thin pane of magic where wind would roar in the ears of any would-be listener. This smaller meeting room had a view of the street and a cold hearth. Raymond swept out one arm, inviting me to sit. The ghost of Hiram Carrigan lounged on the settee, unaware of us both. He’d collapsed in the card room five years ago.