Spark

by Anna Holmes

  My stomach sinks a bit as I wipe a plate dry, looking past the lacy curtains at the dusklit harbor. I was raised knowing well that diplomats approach negotiations like mountain climbers competing for footholds in a blizzard. Each has the survival of their own interests in mind. In general, I expect no true courtesy past the perfunctory displays of etiquette. But usually the desperation, the willingness to take advantage of the other climber's every stumble—those are hidden.

  The Legion is sending me Alain’s mother in Alain's hometown. The woman who willingly submitted her own children to experimentation. These aren't just waiting for me to stumble. They’re actively cutting my ropes.

  “I think that plate’s dry now,” Elle comments at my side.

  I drop the towel in surprise and try to still my breathing. At length, I stack the plate in the cupboard. “You’re quiet.”

  “You were oblivious,” she says with a shrug.

  I laugh a little. “That is true.”

  She tilts her head. “You’re…not angry with me for saying so?”

  “I’m not. Not everyone would be happy to hear it, I suppose, so it might be good to limit that sort of thing to people you know won’t mind.”

  “Oh. So you don’t mind?”

  “I don’t mind.”

  She nods, looking me up and down in silence for a while. Sizing me up. She did this the last few times we were in a room together, but again, I don’t mind. At last, her eyes, always uncannily focused, settle on my shoulder. She reaches out and touches my braid with her fingertips. “Pretty,” she says.

  I crane my neck so I can see it myself. Usually there’s at least a strand or two breaking free by now, but today my hair seems relatively well behaved. “Oh, thanks. Mostly just to get it all out of the way.”

  Elle toys with a strand of her own hair, long and mostly straight. Like her brother’s, though his strands are thatchy, with a tendency to stand up on each other. “Out of the way…so it doesn't get in things?”

  “In things, tangled around things, tangled around each other, in my face….” I laugh. “Would you like me to do yours?”

  “Yes, please,” she says, reaching into the jar on the counter. She pulls out two cookies, hands me one, and starts nibbling hers a bit at a time.

  I nod my thanks and set my cookie aside so I can pull a chair over and pat the back. “Sit.”

  Elle plops dutifully into the seat. “Is it hard?”

  “A little tricky to get the hang of at first, but after a while you don't have to even think about it.” I start sectioning her hair, taking my time to avoid snagging any unexpected intersections. “Nobody’s ever braided your hair before?”

  “Papa and Alain have short hair,” she says by way of an answer.

  Before our first visit, Alain warned me that Elle speaks directly. She makes a connection and jumps straight to it, he explained. No need to waste time on the thoughts that come between. Admittedly as someone raised to try to speak so that any listener can follow, it was jarring at first, but between us we've made it work. She slows down for me; I hurry to catch up. And frankly, the speeds at which she makes these jumps are less frustrating and more wondrous the less I worry about the steps I’m expecting her to take to get there. I don’t for a second doubt that she could have caught things that would slip through a trained alchemist's fingers. “How’s it going up there?” I ask quietly.

  “Slowly. Mother burned the summary, so they have to work the whole experiment over again.” She fidgets. “The doctor isn’t stupid, and the beardy one knows generally what he’s on about, but this isn’t like putting together fuel for magical objects—even putting fuel in experimental magical objects. What if—what if we get it wrong? More wrong?”

  A question twisting my own insides in knots. “The way I see it,” I say slowly, “is that something is wrong now. It’s going to stay wrong unless we try to make it better. If we do, there’s a chance that we could help him. If we don’t—we’re really not helping him at all.” I pause and wrinkle my nose as I fold the strands of her hair against one another. “Does that make sense?”

  Elle nods stiffly, cautious not to pull her hair from my hands. “You’re smart,” she says. “In a different way than he is. That’s probably why he likes you so much.”

  I laugh a little. “Well, thanks. Different how, do you figure?”

  “His is all books. Mine, too. You’re…wise, I think.”

  “Wise.” I chuckle again. “I’m not sure I’ve ever been called that before.”

  “I think you have to be, if you’re queen,” Elle muses. “All those people who want different things asking you to settle their arguments. You have to keep them all happy enough not to set things on fire again.”

  I bump her shoulder gently with mine. “You’re telling me, kid.”

  “I think you do a good job,” she says with a shrug. “But I don’t know much of anything about governing.”

  “Well, I don’t know anything at all about alchemy. I wouldn’t be alive if it weren’t for the people with the kind of smart you are.”

  “And Mother wouldn’t be nearly as powerful,” she says with a snort. “Bet she hates that.”

  I never did understand the Legion obsession with ranking talents. “It takes all sorts of people to let us live the way we do,” I tell her.

  “Well, we is subjective,” she says with a little giggle. “You live very differently than the rest of us.”

  “That…is true.”

  “Why?” she inquires. “You could just live in a house. It would cost substantially less.”

  “While that is also true, there’s…a couple of things about the job that means the castle comes with it.”

  “Like what?”

  “There’s a certain—level of security that has to be maintained.”

  “People like to try to kill you.”

  “People really like to try to kill me. But the castle is well equipped to deal with most of the things people would try to kill me with, so that’s good.”

  “Is it really important to have a huge fancy house when important people come visit?”

  “That’s also kind of part of it, yeah.”

  “Why?”

  I sit forward on my own chair to ease the ache in my tailbone and to buy me a couple of seconds while I think about the answer. My mother's were all wordy and my father preferred to leave it at “first impressions are important”. “Why did you tell your father to buy teacups instead of using his old mugs?”

  “So the buyers wouldn’t think he’s a cheapskate or broke— oh.”

  “Some of what I do is business, really. On a very large scale.”

  “With some threats of violence thrown in.”

  “More or less,” I try to say cheerfully. “There.” I tie the end of her braid off, and she sits forward and fiddles with the plait for a moment, the corners of her mouth pulling upward.

  Elle lifts her eyes to the window to catch a glimpse of her reflection. She smiles briefly, and then shrieks. I jump up from my chair in time to see the porcelain mask disappear from right up against the glass into the gathering darkness outside. My skin goes cold with dread. “Lock the door behind me and go find Alain,” I tell her. I throw open the back door and rush into the night.

  Immediately, my limbs tense in the cold. In just my simple red linen shirt—meant to be worn under armor, which is conveniently sitting upstairs next to my sword—I am freezing. The best I can hope for is to get one of her swords away from her. It’s not much and it’s not likely, but I will be damned if I let her get away again.

  She takes a sharp turn through the small boatyard at the edge of Alain’s family’s property. A rowboat bobs on the high tide, lashed to a post at the end of the dock. I’m catching up. She’s either tired today or I’m making much better time than the last few encounters, but either way, I may just have a chance. I stoop down, grab an oar, and swing it with all of my strength.

  It slams neatly into the small of her back
and knocks her forward. This gives me the precious seconds I need to catch up. She struggles upward. I reach out for her crooked elbow, and she snags my ankle with her feet, and for a moment, we stay there, waiting for the other to make a move to start pulling. “Give it up,” I say. “You’re caught.”

  The doll tilts her masked face up toward me. Even the eye holes are covered in dark mesh. Her other hand fidgets on her belt. I pull her arm back before she pulls something. Predictably, she wrenches with her legs, and down I go, too.

  I don’t even feel the impact. I use it to roll forward, scramble for her other arm. She uses the newly freed one to reach for the sword at her hip. As reflexively as I suck in a frantic breath, my elbow flies into her porcelain face.

  A crack, and the doll reels back, letting me tip forward. I catch myself on a forearm and whip my head back up in time to catch part of the mask falling away as she scrambles away from me.

  The first thing I see is light. My breath catches in my throat. No, no, this can’t be. And yet, as I struggle to find her neck in the recesses of her hood, I already know what I’m going to see. Jagged lines of blue, like the ones on my shoulder, snaking their way up past her ear, into her hairline. She may as well have hit me in the gut with the oar.

  She clutches the unbroken half of the mask to her face and tries to cover her exposed skin with her other hand. “Mama,” I manage to call out. “Stop. Why are you doing this?”

  She pauses for one second, two, then, for the second time in a year, vanishes from right in front of me.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Riley

  With Kai and the big one gone, it’s only August and me left to keep an eye on Crow. I fought in a war. I’m no stranger to foul language and epithets. Somehow, she manages to exceed my tolerance for them in a multitude of languages. I shut the door on the inn room we’ve stashed her in at last and face the boy. “She’s all yours. My suggestion—don’t listen to a word out of her. I’ll be back when I’ve managed to forget the last few hours.”

  He looks a little floury, but nods and enters the room. I walk down the hall to my own room and sigh. Something in me hates leaving a boy, still in training, with a snake like her. Again I consider marching her to the local guards’ hall to put her in a proper cell, but that's more people who know we’re here, more people she can talk to, more opportunities to make a break for it. I’m going to have to trust August’s mettle. Someone trusted mine at his age, which may or may not have been a mistake, but now it’s my turn to make it.

  I knock on the door, wait a beat, then open it. Tressa’s woozily picking her head up from where her brother and I propped it up on the modestly arrayed bed with an assortment of pillows. The innkeeper looked a little baffled when we’d asked for so many extra, but we managed to make her a decently comfortable spot. “Hey,” I say, doing my best to pull a smile out of myself. “How’re you feeling?”

  She rubs at her eyes. “Tired. Tired of sleeping.”

  I squat next to her, looking her over. Her front legs are awkwardly crooked in front of her instead of tucked under like the back ones. There’s not much to see past the bandages wound around her knees. “How are your legs?”

  “Tired of being fussed over,” she says with an eye roll and a little smile. “The pair of you.”

  “Well, I’m afraid you’ve earned yourself a little fuss.” I gesture to the bandages. “May I?”

  “If you must.”

  “I am fairly sure your brother would have my head otherwise.”

  “Well, we wouldn’t want that.” She tilts her head back against the pillows. “Go ahead.”

  I start for the bandages, hesitate. It’s not often the differences between us give me any pause. But this—I patched up my share of wounds during the war, but they were on people with whom I shared anatomy. I knew what to expect. What if I hurt her more? She lifts her head. “Riley. Just do it.”

  “Right,” I say, willing my hands as steady, as if my will has much to do with that. I peel away the bandages a bit at a time. “Just…hit me if you want me to stop.”

  Tressa rolls her head back again to look at the ceiling and laughs. “I am not going to hit you.”

  The bandages start pulling away red, and I'm wincing. “Well, if you change your mind, let me know.”

  She starts collecting bits of the bedsheet between her fingers, her eyes squeezing shut as I work. “Do you do this for all your subordinates?”

  “You’d be surprised,” I tell her, setting aside the bandages. “Yours aren’t the first legs I’ve looked at.” Tressa bursts out laughing, and my face heats up. “Right. That does sound vaguely obscene.”

  Her laughter trails off. “Oh— it’s all right. Look, I can’t even see you anymore. I know you didn’t mean it that way.”

  “No, I didn’t. Caelin always likes to say that my words take off running and leave my brain scrambling to catch up.”

  I stand to retrieve the vials Kai left for me from the wash table, giving me an excuse to keep my embarrassment to myself for a second. Hopefully by the time I return, the shadows have chased off a bit. I wouldn’t know. As I sit back down to work, she nudges me with an elbow. “And even if you did mean it that way, somehow I doubt that legs that look like mine would be the sort you meant.”

  “I don’t know about that,” I answer, face still treasonously warm as I set about mixing the flasks. “Why shouldn’t they be?”

  “What was that about your brain again?” she teases. “How many other centaurs have you been looking after and where have you been stashing them? I have a lot of questions.”

  I laugh nervously. “Oh…right. Yes.”

  I stop mixing and set to piping the salve into the gashes. They’re still so raw. To make matters that much more worrisome, they’re giving off enough heat that I don’t even need to be touching the surrounding flesh to feel it. I brace her leg carefully with my hand to the back of the knee so I can steady us both while I ensure I get at every small cut. The hide on the back of it is much less coarse, sparser than I was expecting. She stays quiet for a while. When Tressa breaks it, her tone is distant. “Riley….”

  “Yeah?”

  “Do you remember the promise you made me? When I signed on?”

  I stop piping for a moment and look up at her. She’s looking straight back, her jaw set, but I can feel the hammering of her pulse in the back of her leg. “I do,” I answer, frowning. “You’re not….”

  “It might be time.”

  “N-no,” I retort. “Not for that. Not for this.”

  “You’d do it for Rust.”

  “Rust is a horse.”

  The stoic facade cracks and the far-off tone falls away with it as Tressa gives me a weary smile. “Tell me you’ve noticed.”

  Now I have to put her leg down, for fear I might jostle it with the fine bit of trembling I’m doing. “Oh, devils take that. You’re a person, all right, and piss on anyone who says otherwise.”

  “Riley. You gave me your word.”

  “That word I would have given to any old subordinate in a hopeless situation. But you’re not any old subordinate. I know you. Are you honestly ready to give up here?”

  Tressa pauses, pursing her lips. At length, she answers, “No. Not yet. But if it comes to that….”

  “It won’t.”

  “We have to be realistic here.”

  “I agree. You have an alchemist for a brother, who learned from your mother, and a bizarre mage who somehow healed an impossible wound before. Be realistic about your chances. Please.”

  She blinks in surprise. “I— you’re right. It’s only the second day. I’m getting ahead of myself.”

  “Good.” I start unwrapping the other leg and working on that one in silence, trying not to let my rattled breathing sound aloud. After my chest loosens a bit, I say, “I don’t want you to suffer. I hope I didn’t imply….”

  “No, I understand,” she replies slowly. “At least, I think.”

  “There are preci
ous few people in this world who can do the things you can. Not one of them is like you.”

  She laughs quietly. “I know, I know. Last of my kind.”

  “I didn’t mean that. This time or the other.”

  Tressa doesn’t move, doesn’t even seem to breathe. I feel like I might keel over, and oh gods, did I just confess something? Why does Caelin have to be right so frequently? And where the hells have I left my brain? I unstick my throat enough to try to speak, but she puts a hand on my shoulder to stop me. “Someone’s coming,” she says in an urgent whisper.

  I set the flask down and let go of her leg, slipping the crossbow from my back. As I stand, I set my finger to the trigger, and the channels in the wood turn red as the crossbow recognizes my touch and readies itself to fire. I’m in the middle of positioning myself at the door when there’s a whistling loon call from the other side. I set the crossbow down and pull the door open to let Caelin in. “For gods’ sake,” I sputter when the door shuts. “I wasn’t expecting you back tonight. What the hells were you doing sneaking around like a burglar?”

  “Hello to you too,” she says, pulling a face. The face and the sass are nothing noteworthy, but her light…it’s basically out, and it’s not just that my embarrassment is overpowering it. When we were kids, we used to have contests to that effect, and every time, her light won out. “What is it?”

  She holds up an object, and though the dimness of the room doesn't bother me, it takes me a moment to comprehend what it is. Half of a mask— the mask the sorceress wore. “My mother,” she says grimly.

  I didn’t know the Queen Mother outside what Caelin told me, but even still, my heart sinks. From everything I understood, she was a very ill woman after the poisoning. That was why when she disappeared again after the fake wedding, Caelin anguished. Whether she’d admit to it or not. "You caught her, then?”