Greystar

by C. L. Polk

  “It’s dark as a tomb in here. Should I ring for anything?” He pulled the curtains all the way back, moving around old Hiram. “Coffee, perhaps?”

  I stood where I was. Letting Ray play host would give him the advantage. “No time. I have to talk to the Emergency Relief Program manager and find out if we can help everyone standing in line outside. What do you want, Ray?”

  Ray flopped into a deep blue horseshoe-back chair, his head resting against the tufted velvet. “We really should screen those people more thoroughly.”

  “How many people do you think are jobless right now because of the power outage?” My power outage. I had denied these people the work they did to put food on the table. I had taken away their wages, disrupted the transport of goods they needed to survive. Would they understand? Would they agree that we had done the right thing, taking their miracle away?

  Raymond cocked a finger at me. “That’s exactly my point. Those are the people who deserve our help.”

  “I’m not going to argue the philosophy of charity with you. This is a national emergency, and the people who were desperate before this crisis are a sign of how we failed them—”

  Raymond scoffed, propping one ankle up on his knee. “If they’d just make an effort—”

  “Just tell me what that show of support to the others is going to cost me.”

  “Nothing.” Raymond spread his hands and shrugged. “You’re the best person to be the Voice. I’d be a fool to try and stand in your place. I’m good, but I’m not that good.”

  Oh, this was trouble, and I was in it up to my knees. “And so I’m supposed to believe you’re stepping aside for the sake of us all?”

  “Yes. Because that’s exactly what I’m doing.”

  And horses could fly. I didn’t even bother trying to hide my skepticism.

  Ray didn’t quite squirm in the silence. “We need to rebuild government. We need a new Cabinet.”

  There it was. “You want your father’s job. Finance Minister.”

  “And we don’t have time for the usual process. It would have to be done by writ.”

  Meaning I had to convince the Queen to incite a riot in Government House by skipping the usual scrutiny the elected men and women in the Lower House would normally demand of a prospective Cabinet member.

  “Do you think the Elected would stand still while an entire Cabinet was appointed without their approval?”

  Raymond’s gaze flickered away from me, and then he looked me square in the eye. “We don’t have time to let the Elected bicker over Cabinet positions. It has to be done by writ. This is an emergency.”

  He was correct, but my scalp prickled. Something wasn’t right. What?

  I turned my head and looked out the window. Street maintenance was out rolling down a fresh layer of snow, crushing the track marks of bicycles, skis, and sleigh runners into a uniform surface. Cyclists went around the heavy tampers on winter wheels, continuing on their business, gray and black smudges topped with a dash of color—often yellow ribbon around left sleeves, a sign of their frustration. And stretching taller than my window was the Edenhill Hotel, Raymond’s triumph of architecture.

  The Edenhill had cost millions to build. It hadn’t been open even a year. It stood silent and dark, nonoperational due to the loss of aether power. There wasn’t a bank in Aeland that would wait for their loan payments. The Elected would want to see Ray’s finances. If the Blakes were in money trouble, he’d never stand against the scrutiny of the Lower House. And everyone would know why within a day.

  Raymond’s face was sheet-white when I turned back to him. He unflexed his fists and shrugged. “I know you can handle everything on your own. But I can ease the way with the others.”

  He’d scooped up the Second Ring in the handful of days between the First Ring’s arrest and my arrival. His support meant joining his supporters to my cause, exactly as it would have been for our marriage. I’d needed the Blakes’ popularity against Percy Stanley back then. Now Ray needed my pull with the Queen to hide the truth about his family’s overleveraged wealth.

  The real work was convincing Queen Constantina to enrage the Lower House. But what choice did I have?

  “I’ll get you your writ,” I said.

  * * *

  Ray was going to be a thorn in my side if I didn’t do something about him. The Storm-Singers left free were young enough and foolish enough to throw their vote behind a personality rather than the facts, and Ray had been making friends with his peers all through his school days.

  William handed me into the sleigh, and the foot-warmer blazed with new coals nestled inside it. I lost count of the number of people in line at the Benevolent Society, now attended by workers in green caps. But my thoughts strayed back to Ray. He and his voting bloc could push me into doing what he wanted rather than the right thing to do for Aeland.

  I didn’t have a voting bloc. I hadn’t attended college, so I was never a member of the Sticky Pudding Club or any of the associations they’d formed while carousing across the campus of Queen’s University. Instead of scavenger hunts and secret parties, I had been learning how to guide a nation by my father’s side. I’d remained in the company of my elders during winter balls and parties, discussing trade and policy, while the others drank too much and danced all night.

  I hadn’t regretted it. I even congratulated myself for keeping my focus on important matters while the others got into all kinds of mischief and forged their friendships. I didn’t have any friends my own age, and that was now biting me around the ankles. This was ridiculous! I was twenty-eight years old, and I didn’t have any friends?

  The sled veered around the corner onto Main Street. People dashed in and out of the building that housed The Star of Kingston. I looked for a glimpse of bottle-black hair, but it was silly of me to hope for the sight of Avia. She was dangerous. She was looking for the truth. And once she found it, the nation would know what their leaders had done.

  I gazed out at the world from the back of my family’s luxurious sled, pulled by fine horses and attended by the most solicitous men, and felt the walls of my upbringing closing around me. I needed a friend. Someone who understood what it was like.

  I let William and George drop me at Government House, but I walked through the warren of hallways and doors that housed the clerks and bureaucrats who kept the wheels of government turning, across the threshold that marked the border between Government House and Mountrose Palace. I paused at the doorway guarded by Queensguards and Amaranthines and was granted entry into the wing where the Amaranthines guested in the hospitality of Queen Constantina.

  The cut flowers had been replaced by fragrant boughs of evergreen whose scent mingled with the smell of burning sweetwood. Each table held a censer that leaked fragrant smoke, filling the hall with the gentle, calming aroma. I moved to the door of Miles and Tristan’s suite and waited to be allowed in.

  Miles had company taking tea with him in the sitting room next to a blazing fire. The ghosts of two Samindan women stood by the door as if they were guards. Miles looked up at me, lowering a bone-clay mug from his lips. “Grace. There’s someone I want you to meet. This is Robin Thorpe.”

  I turned my attention to his companion on the settee—a short Samindan woman dressed in a smart wool walking suit. My attention went to pure envy at the sight of the spirit-knitted weskit she wore under her gray tweed jacket. The cables of knitting bent and wove over each other, the pattern said to be a protective magic that confused the deadly spirits of the waters and kept their sailors safe. I would have loved to own one, but I wasn’t Samindan, and it wouldn’t have been appropriate. Dangling from her left sleeve was a yellow ribbon, the long ends hanging to her wrist.

  That gave me pause. Miles’s friend was one of those who wore their grievance on their sleeve, silently counting themselves among the rebels who wanted to overturn all order and normalcy. I inclined my head, the politest greeting appropriate for a commoner.

  “How do you do?”
I asked.

  “How do you do,” she replied, but she didn’t answer my smile with one of her own. She bore a face that could have been twenty or fifty or even older, with strong cheekbones and a softly curving mouth, her eyes dark enough to hold starlight in them. But it was her aura that made me stand up straight.

  It was normal. But too normal, too uniform, with none of the iridescent flicker that made even a mundane aura appear to breathe and flex around the person. I never would have noticed with a passing glance, but hers was wrong, all wrong, and she tilted her head at my long, silent inspection of her person. Heat rushed to my cheeks.

  “I am so sorry,” I said. “I adore spirit-knitting. I’m quite entranced by yours. Perhaps I’m actually a water spirit.”

  “It’s a clan pattern,” she said in reply. “In case you were wondering.”

  “I was,” I said. “I’m Miles’s sister, Grace Hensley.”

  “Oh, I know who you are, Madam Chancellor. Congratulations on your appointment.”

  She made me feel as if I stood on the pitching deck of a ship, fighting to stay balanced. “Thank you.”

  “Robin used to work with me at Beauregard Veterans’,” Miles said. “Then she left me for medical school.”

  Robin shrugged, her smile bemused. “Alas, classes are canceled due to the blackout.”

  Miles picked up his mug. The scent wafting from it was pungent, medicinal. I recognized it as a fortifying brew meant to strengthen the blood. He sipped and grimaced at the taste. Father never liked it either. “Not even lectures?”

  She scoffed. “The entire first year, crammed into an auditorium that was only meant to hold two hundred people? You couldn’t hear yourself think. But you didn’t come here to hear about the woes of an ex–medical student, Dame Grace.”

  Miles set down the cup, coughing. Robin reached for the silver water jug. He shook his head. “No, it’s all right. She might be able to help.”

  I didn’t have time for chitchat with a stranger. “Miles, there are things happening at the Benevolent Society I wanted to tell you—”

  He ignored me. “Robin, tell her about the movement.”

  Robin grimaced. “Thank you, Miles. I came to get your help precisely so you could reveal my secrets.”

  “Robin’s instrumental in the efforts to end the persecution of witches in Aeland,” Miles said. “But she could use some support from the establishment.”

  Robin’s face went as smooth as polished sculpture, her expression carefully blank.

  “Is that what the ribbon means?” I asked. “It’s a sign that you support freedom for witches, isn’t it?”

  “It means we all stand under the same sun,” Robin said. “The ordinary people of Aeland should have the same rights as our rulers. The vote. Legal protection from exploitation, incarceration, and persecution. Fair taxation. Representation in Parliament that serves us, not just the landowners and bosses who work us to the bone and drain our pockets after. And it means putting an end to the malicious, systematic persecution of witches.”

  Ah. The talk of university students, arguing for Uzadalian utopia.

  It had the ability to capture the imagination of the young—stories of distant nations and their idealist principles, their practice of letting all citizens over the age of sixteen vote for free. They exchanged drinking tales of workers who only worked seven hours a day and were paid a share of the company’s profit atop high wages. They wrote of the freedom to travel to any nation in the league. And sometimes, even though our government had done their best to suppress the information, they whispered that witches were free citizens.

  Fine talk to excite a first-year student away from family for the first time. Stories of Uzadal were sincere and earnest, but the lore lacked the understanding of the rippling consequences of change, and how even the most carefully planned reform had unexpected losses.

  “Especially that,” Miles said. “You know it’s wrong, Grace. She was there at Clarity House,” he explained to Robin. “No one could ever support the asylums after witnessing that.”

  Father had. He’d built them in the first place. I wasn’t like him. I wouldn’t ever be like him. But Miles was promising too much, talking of freeing the witches. They would tell people what had become of them, what they had been forced to do … and how could we withstand the fury of the people after they learned that?

  Robin sighed at Miles. “You’re sure she’s all right.”

  “Positive.”

  Miles was friends with an agitator guided by ideas and dreams, but with very little concept of reality. I attempted a friendly expression. “You have a difficult battle ahead of you. Do you want my advice?”

  “No. I want freedom. You can’t give me that even if you wanted to.”

  Makers, how I wish it were that simple. But I could help her. Miles was right. “There are things I can probably do, but it will go better if you call off the protests. They alienate the people, and you need them on your side if you want them to—”

  Robin cut me off, her tone and expression cool. “I didn’t say I wanted you to save me, Dame Grace. I said you can’t give me freedom. We will take it for ourselves.”

  Oh, Solace. “Change is slow,” I said, as gently as I could. “When you set a goal, you can’t just grab for the end results. It’s a journey of small victories.”

  She gave me a patient look. “Gradual change from within. I have heard that before, Dame Grace.”

  “The work you do today will help your children, your grandchildren.”

  “It will. Because the work I do today will help my friends, my neighbors, and the hundreds of witches unjustly stolen to languish in asylums, because I’m going to free us now. That you would take people from our families to rot—”

  “It’s worse than that,” Miles said. “They were locked away so we could—”

  I gripped the arms of my chair. “Don’t you tell her that! Miles!”

  Miles glanced at Robin, but he spoke to me. “She needs to know, Grace. They all do.”

  “They can’t know,” I whispered. “If they knew what our parents and grandparents did, they’d never forgive us.”

  “Do we deserve forgiveness?”

  “We didn’t do this! But it’s on us to put it right.”

  Robin watched us argue, the furrows on her brow deepening. “What did you do?”

  “We broke the aether network,” Miles said. “Me. Grace. Tristan. We destroyed it. That’s why the ghosts are wandering.”

  “You mean the spirits were— Oh Makers.” Robin’s face went ashy. She covered her mouth with one hand, but she held my gaze, staring into me. “How could you do this?”

  “You see? We had to break it,” I said. “If we had walked away from that, we would never sleep again.”

  She shook her head slowly, her gaze never leaving me. “How can you sleep now?”

  “Pure exhaustion,” I snapped. “Oh, I’m sorry. That was uncalled-for. Miss Thorpe, I don’t know how we can help you, but—”

  She cut me off with a shake of her head. “I think your people have helped enough.”

  “Then why did you come to Miles?” I demanded. “He’s one of us too.”

  “He turned his back on your wealth and power. He had to hide from the courts, run scared just like us, trying to help people without getting caught—he’s more of a witch than one of you, Chancellor.”

  She said that last with such scorn I jerked upright. “How dare you.”

  “Grace,” my brother said. “Be polite.”

  It was cold water dashed in my face. “I won’t be insulted by some renegade witch—”

  “We took her grandmother. We ripped out entire branches of her family and forced them into a nightmare. She has the right to be angry. I thought you’d understand that.”

  How could he take her side? My brother, scolding me after everything she’d said? And I wasn’t the one who’d done those things, Father and Grandpa Miles had—

  And in a different fu
ture, where I was ignorant of the truth when Father died, when I became the Voice, when I locked myself in his office dressed in a white veil and wore butterflies on my shoulders, I would have read his journals. I would have learned the secret. And what would I have done then?

  I cringed away from the answer.

  “I apologize for my rudeness,” I said.

  “Thank you.” But she didn’t smile. I wasn’t forgiven, even though I’d apologized. What more was I supposed to do?

  I rose, smoothing my trousers. “I should come back later. Too much strain can’t be good for you.”

  “I’m fine,” Miles said. “Come by when you’re ready to start our inquiry.”

  Miles couldn’t help me anyway. He could offer sympathy, but I needed solutions. I had no one to confide in, no one to look over my shoulder and help me plan my next move.

  And I needed more power. More knowledge. More skill and experience. I needed the First Ring, and they were locked up in the Tower of Sighs. But so was the man who had the power to shove them into helping me.

  That was the only advantage I had against Ray. I needed to use it.

  I passed tall windows flanked by heavy blue curtains. Against the snow-covered grounds, a college of red-winged jays took flight in search of better shelter. A dead woman in servant’s livery passed me in the hall as I stopped a page to ask for directions. At his word I turned my steps south, toward the Tower of Sighs.

  FIVE

  Articles of Incorporation

  Building a tower to hold Aeland’s more distinguished prisoners was a notion couched more in romance than practicality. My thighs burned as I climbed past the cells holding shivering Laneeri nobles unused to the chill of an Aeland winter.

  I steeled my heart against their discomfort. These men and women had come to seize power in the aftermath of the terrible vengeance they had planned for Aeland. I stepped around ghosts gathered by the cells, more Laneeri with the unbleached hair of commoners, all of them dressed in their army’s uniform, all of them glaring fit to kill. Ghosts could only affect the physical world with monstrous effort, but my show of nonchalance as I strode past covered a churning stomach and palms gone clammy.