The Court of Miracles

by Kester Grant

  A hundred hands pull me off him.

  Corday takes my dagger.

  Orso is holding me. His hands bind my arms painfully behind my back. I don’t kick. I don’t fight. I do nothing. But my eyes never leave the Tiger.

  “You are no Lord.” My voice is jagged. It makes him wince more than the wound. “You are not fit to be in this Court.”

  Orso tries to put a scaly hand to my mouth, but I bite him and he lets go.

  “You bring only dishonor,” I say, and the Tiger rises like a terrible vengeance before me. He ignores his bleeding arm and brings his face right before my own.

  “You have no Law,” I say.

  He strikes me then, and the world spins. There is blood in my mouth, blood streaming down my face. I look at him and I laugh.

  He calls for his Master, Lenoir, and says, “Fetch my whip.”

  They tie me to a chair and huddle behind me, their muffled voices pitched in confusion.

  “She insults a Lord.”

  “Yet did she say anything that was untrue?”

  “She attacked a Lord before the whole Court.”

  “We cannot allow it. An example must be made.”

  The Tiger is not with them; he stands in front of me so I can see him. He studies me, fascinated, as if he’s never seen me before. He ignores the blood still dripping from his shoulder. He knows I could have stabbed him in the heart, that I could have killed him. He knows I wanted to do something much worse: Humiliate him. Speak the truth in front of the entire Court. No matter what happens to me now, they’ll whisper about it forever. My words will chase him day and night, and he’ll never escape from them. The Cat who looked the Tiger in the eye and called him Lawless before his brethren, something the other Lords have never dared to do.

  Montparnasse murmurs something to Corday. She speaks to Orso, and fury crosses Orso’s face. He steps toward the Tiger.

  “Where is she?” he asks.

  The Tiger looks away from me, meeting Orso’s face with confusion.

  “Where is the child Ettie?”

  The Tiger looks from Orso back to me. “I’ve no idea. I don’t have her.” Then he shakes his head and asks, “Where’s Thénardier?”

  Femi is at Tomasis’s side; he whispers in Tomasis’s ear. Tomasis shakes his head; Thénardier isn’t here.

  The Tiger throws back his head and laughs. The sound of it echoes around the Court and bounces off the walls.

  “Left early, did he?” he spits. “And so he got his price in the end.”

  “Kaplan…,” Orso says. His voice rumbles a low threat.

  “I didn’t take her,” the Tiger answers.

  “Liar!” I cry.

  He turns back to me.

  “I’m many things, little kitten, but a liar is not one of them.”

  The room is silent, because everyone knows he speaks the truth. The Tiger has never lied. He’s never had cause to. He says whatever he wants because he’s not afraid of anything or anyone.

  “If Thénardier has anything to do with this,” Tomasis says, swallowing his rage as he speaks, “then it was done without the knowledge of the Guild of Thieves.”

  Orso, tense and watchful, looks from Tomasis to the Tiger.

  “The Thieves would not touch one of your children, Orso,” Tomasis insists. He’s worried about what might happen if his Master conspired with the Tiger to take my sister.

  Orso fixes him with a hard stare and then finally nods.

  The Tiger comes back to me, crouches, and smiles so wide the scars on his face are stretched taut.

  “If Thénardier did this, then the jackal has played us both,” he says to me.

  I growl in response.

  He stands, raises his good arm, and in a loud voice says, “Look well, O Wretched. Let all the Court be witness to my oath. If I had taken the girl, I’d have told you, Black Cat of the Thieves Guild. Because I would have wanted to see your face, knowing she was mine.” He pauses and looks at me. “Nonetheless, you’ve broken the Law that you so fondly speak of. You’ve insulted and attacked a Guild Lord here, in the Miracle Court.” His eyes flicker toward Orso and Tomasis. “It is forbidden,” he says in tones of glee. “An example must be made.”

  The Lords say nothing. Their silence condemns me.

  Lenoir, the half-blind Master of the Flesh Guild, arrives, huffing and puffing. He drops to one knee and presents the Tiger with his whip. A cruel leather cat-o’-nine-tails ending in metal hooks. It is rumored to be the whip that was used on him as a child, when his father sold him to slavers. They say he found the man who whipped him, cut out his heart, and took his weapon.

  I’m not afraid.

  The Fleshers untie me from the chair. They haul me up and turn me around so that I’m facing the Court and the Lords. Lenoir wants me to see them watching. Tomasis won’t meet my eye. Orso looks only at the Tiger. Corday watches me as if I’m a fly caught in a web. Yet I won’t look away from them. I’m fearless. Proud.

  “How many times did she speak?” Corday asks.

  “Five,” Lord Yelles answers.

  “The strike. She drew blood,” Lenoir adds.

  “But he struck her once,” says Corday.

  “Five lashes, then,” Orso says. “No more.”

  They push me to my knees.

  They say the Tiger can rend flesh from bone. They say he had years of practice when he was a slaver.

  I tense every muscle, waiting for the blow.

  Even so, I’m not prepared when the first lash hits me. It’s like nothing I’ve ever felt. Like fire running through my body. My mouth inadvertently opens and a cry escapes me. Every part of me is aflame. Montparnasse is behind the Lords, his eyes fixed on mine. I see Loup, unsteady on his feet. Tears leave dark streaks along the ashen gray of his face; he weeps as he holds back Gavroche, covering the boy’s eyes with his hand.

  The second stroke tears through me, and I can’t help but scream. Only two things exist: the pain that fills my body, and the thought that burns through my heart.

  She’s gone.

  The world is darkness threatening to engulf me. Blood and sweat pour down my back. Every limb shakes. Femi is there beside Tomasis. His chin held high; his hands are balled into fists.

  When the third stroke comes, everything starts to dim. The sounds around me thicken and fade. The world grows cold. The darkness grows bright, and stars dance about me. The ground beneath me trembles, and I hear it: the voice of the City whispering my name.

  When the fourth blow lands, I see my whole life laid out before me drawn in threads of crimson, gray, and black. I see how it started, with a sister weeping in her bed; a child so terrified she gave herself to a Thief; a girl who was so lovely, the world would go to war to possess her. And through it all, he is present. He is the hunting song calling through the night.

  The broken boy beneath the lash.

  It ends where it begins.

  It ends with him.

  He is the nightmare, the monster. The thing that stalks in the dark. He is the fear ensnaring each one of us, gripping us in his claws.

  And despite my weakness, as he tears the strength from my bones, I see my path. I hear the City whisper to me with silken words. I know what I will do.

  With the last blow, my thoughts uncoil into endless shapes before me. I see Azelma sleeping. I see Ettie reaching out for me. My pulse hammers, drowning my ears with its beat.

  My sisters.

  I couldn’t save the one who protected me. I couldn’t save the one I was supposed to protect. I can’t save the hundreds who sleep in the grasp of his claws. No one escapes him. And so there is only one thing left.

  I make this oath in iron; I make it in bone.

  I will destroy him, and then they will all be free.

  HOW THE TIGER GOT HIS ST
RIPES

  FROM STORIES OF THE MIRACLE COURT, BY THE DEAD LORD

  Il était une fois…there was a man among the Wretched of the Miracle Court who lived in a time of famine. He saw Death the Endless take half the city. Then hunger took his wife and daughters, leaving him with only one young son.

  The man asked himself: Shall I sit here and wait for death to take us both?

  For as all men, he was afraid and did not want to die. Thus, fear made him do that which the Wretched are bound by Law never to do.

  He sold his son to the slavers of the sea. The Guild Lords heard of it, and on the day that the slavers sailed up the Great Serpent, they went to stop it. For it is forbidden to sell a brother into slavery. But when they saw a hundred slave ships on the banks of the Seine, they too were afraid. For how could a weakened, starving Court do battle with such an army? And for the life of one boy?

  They watched his father take twelve gold coins in exchange for the life of his son. They watched him trade the coins for slaver’s bread so that he might live. They saw the boy dragged away; they heard his cries as the slavers striped his back and face with their cat-o’-nine-tails, and they did nothing. They comforted themselves by saying he would probably not survive a day at sea, and they agreed to forget.

  But things that are forgotten don’t always themselves forget. One day, many years later, a slaver came from the sea: the boy, now a terrible man with stripes on his back and his face like a tiger. He wielded the cat-o’-nine-tails now.

  He cleaved flesh from bone from the back and face of his father and sold him to his brethren, but that was not enough to satisfy him. He went to the table of the Lords of the Miracle Court and demanded a place.

  Lady Kamelia Yelles of the Guild of Sisters spoke for all the Lords. She said that there was no place at the high table for one who trades in flesh, and there never would be.

  Humiliated, the man left with vengeance burning in his heart, and set out to break Lady Kamelia. He purchased opiates from the Guild of Dreamers and bribed members of her own Guild to feed them to her. He made her unable to think or move without the poppy, until she was ready to say or do anything he asked. Then the Tiger took her Guild from her and fed the poppy to every Sister until he had made them slaves in a city that had not known slavery for a hundred years.

  The Lords did not see what he had done until it was too late. And once they did, they looked upon him and were afraid. For he had turned the Guild of Sisters into a Guild of Flesh. And he had allies on a hundred ships at sea, allies who would come if he called them.

  He took his place at the high table, and the Lords came to know that they should never have abandoned that boy so long ago. They had been fools. For is it not written that the Law is like the giant creeper? It drops across everyone’s back. And none can escape it.

  I crouch on the rooftop, darkness wrapped about me like a cloak. The sounds of the night float toward me: the sloshing of the river, the Great Serpent on its banks, proactive costermongers shouting their evening wares—oysters and coffee for those with an appetite.

  A shape sits motionless beside me, like a giant bird of prey with golden eyes that see everything. The frayed edges of his cloak stir in the wind.

  “Will you summon them?” I ask.

  Femi looks at me, and he does not answer.

  “You know that I will do this even if you will not help me,” I say.

  “I promised to protect you” is all he says.

  My gut twists with guilt.

  It is an impossible thing he has promised, especially given what I am planning to do. But he swore a bone oath to my sister, and he will never forget it.

  “I will summon them,” he says finally, and the silence that follows tells me he has already gone.

  I stretch out my limbs, pins and needles prickling my muscles, and I stand, staring out over the city. Somewhere in those crowded streets Azelma sleeps; somewhere out there Ettie is afraid. The night wind buffets me, whispering around my ears, caressing the long scars that have healed into ropes across my back.

  I hear the hunting song, and I know whose name it sings.

  * * *

  I climb in through the kitchen window of the house on the rue Musain with a basket in my hand and land on my feet like the cat that I am.

  The house is many-storied, alive with thick cigar smoke and the loud chatter of excitable young men.

  Thénardier’s inn ceased to be my home the night he tried to strike a bargain for Ettie with the Tiger. I lived for a time with the Ghosts, then under the Pont Marie, with Femi Vano and a handful of other Cats of the Thieves Guild. Then Orso arranged for me to take a room at the top of a house occupied by students. Ever since thousands of the city’s children died due to sickness in the water, we’ve been working together—the Wretched and the students. The nobility is our common enemy, after all.

  So in exchange for my board, I’m a messenger between the house and the Miracle Court—and sometimes a gunrunner for the Smugglers Guild, who happily accept the students’ generous overpayments for guns, ammunition, and anything else they need.

  The students, devotees of Orso, are from the city’s best universities. They’re wide-eyed with the idealism that comes from having grown up with a silver spoon wedged firmly between their teeth. They gather in the school’s courtyards to hear the Dead Lord’s stories. But then, I should have known they were not just stories. Orso does nothing without reason and design. The old bear’s mind is always turning.

  Grantaire, who has the nose of a hunting dog, appears in the kitchen as if summoned. He could ferret out the scent of fresh-baked pain au chocolat from a mile away. I have an entire basketful, still warm, stolen from the racks of a nearby bakery. The smell reminds me of the pastries Ettie devoured at the Tuileries, and the dull ache of her absence twists inside me.

  “You goddess, Nina.” Grantaire kisses me on the cheek as he abducts a pain au chocolat, melted chocolate oozing from the ends of the crisp pastry. He grins in delight and wolfs it down. I swat him away as he tries to grab another.

  “Nina, be kind,” he pleads. “The big day is nearly upon us. We’ll need all the sustenance we can get.”

  “ ‘Big day’?” I dance away from him with my basket.

  “Lamarque’s funeral.” Grantaire smiles, flaky crumbs around his lips.

  Three days ago, General Lamarque was overcome with sickness.

  “We’ve had word from the courier. They think Lamarque might not last much longer.”

  “The funeral will be a state event,” Grantaire continues, licking chocolate from his fingers. “Lamarque may be a noble, but the people love him. The city will be in an uproar. It’s the perfect time to stage our protest.”

  A protest with guns and barricades and a careful plan to take the streets, so the students can take the city, with Lamarque’s funeral as the chosen signal. I can’t help but shiver as I think of what happened the last time the city’s people protested.

  They killed one-third of the mice for reason and one-third for sport. Then the cats hanged the six little mice before all of their brethren to teach the mice fear. A strange coldness grips me; soon I’ll get what I want.

  I shake myself and march into the salon with my basket, where nineteen young men sit in overstuffed chairs, talking, smoking, and drinking by candlelight. Another handful surrounds a large table, on which are laid a map and piles of toppling papers.

  These men are the members of the Société des Droits de l’Homme, the Society of the Rights of Man, a political club.

  I’ve learned a lot from being around them. The walls are paper-thin, and their voices are loud. The palace dictates that no association can have more than twenty members. The nobles made this law to prevent uprisings like the one that almost killed the king and the queen forty years ago. The Société is therefore made up of smaller groups, li
ke this one. Grantaire is its vice president, and St. Juste, who turns from the table to glower at me, is its leader.

  St. Juste was carved out of marble and determination. There are rumors he requires food and rest like other mere mortals, but they have never been substantiated. He seems to subsist entirely on passion and black coffee. His tailcoat is always red, because he cares nothing for fashion, and his cravat refuses to stay tied because he worries it when talking. He refuses any vice, taking neither wine nor smoke; he doesn’t gamble, joke, or even flirt with ladies.

  So when he glares at me, I face the full heat of his disapproval.

  The boys’ eyes fix on my basket of pain au chocolat, and they lose all interest in St. Juste’s latest lecture. There’s a stampede around me, leaving St. Juste to curse me and cast aspersions on baked goods, as if they somehow undermine the boys’ commitment to the cause. He can be melodramatic like that.

  I ignore him and give up the basket to one of the boys, then bend to study the map on the table. It’s a detailed plan of the city, with twenty red marks placed at strategic locations. These are the positions the Société’s cells will take. They will arm themselves and call out to the neighborhood to join them, will build a barricade and slowly push outward till the streets of Paris are theirs. Or so St. Juste has stated at least a hundred times.

  “The rue Villmert group has moved,” I comment, pointing to one of the red marks.

  “The courier said that their position was too vulnerable from the east.” St. Juste points at another street. “They’ve moved to the avenue Ficelle.”

  I frown. “But there’s no easy escape from Ficelle, no alleys or empty houses.”

  “They won’t need an escape!” St. Juste raises his voice. “The people will join them!”

  I roll my eyes. St. Juste expects success in every part of the Great Plan. He can’t fathom the thought that any aspect of their glorious revolution might fail, even though the city has a history of swallowing revolutions whole.

  “Will you come to order?” he roars at the boys who are whooping as they try to steal the remaining pastries from one another.