The Midnight Bargain

by C. L. Polk

  And sitting beside her was a leather-bound book, its embossed cover monogrammed with CJE.

  Beatrice averted her gaze from the volume and gasped. “Your gloves and hat! So clever.”

  Her ivory gloves and hat bore fantastical embroidery of vines and blossoms. “It’s the fashion in Llanandras,” Ysbeta said. “Shoes, too. See?”

  She lifted one foot to display an ivory leather court shoe embroidered in the same motif. Beatrice took the other half of the seat, leaving Ianthe to take the backward-facing seat for himself.

  “Ysbeta made us stop at a bookstore,” Ianthe said. “She was most insistent. All for a tome on—what is it again, Ysy?”

  “A Scientific Garden, by Conrad Jacob Edwards,” Ysbeta said. “It’s about planning your planting so you reap greater benefits by pairing some crops together, instead of row planting.”

  “I’m simply baffled,” Ianthe said. “I could understand if it had been the latest Romance of the League of the Rose, as I am most impatient for the latest volume—”

  “Scientific gardening sounds interesting,” Beatrice said. “May I see?”

  Ysbeta handed the book over. “I was curious to see what you made of it.”

  She opened the book to the first page, and breathed in the smell of it, as she always did.

  Ysbeta gently kicked Ianthe’s ankle. “What are you smiling at?”

  “A prime day for sailing,” Ianthe said. The sun shone on the curls standing out all over his head in an exuberant globe. “If only I could have convinced Ysy to change our plans. The two of us could take a single-mast rig just about anywhere.”

  Beatrice caught the first typographical error on the second paragraph and found another on the next line. She couldn’t decode the book in front of Ianthe, but when she looked, Ysbeta was watching her reaction. Beatrice nodded, and Ysbeta smiled wider as she snapped open her fan and wafted cooler air at her face.

  “I could sail a single-mast by myself.” She lurched into Beatrice’s side as if jogged by the swaying progress of the landau’s movement. “What color will you wear to the party on the Shining Hand? Something pale, I expect.”

  “Mauve,” Beatrice said. “But Father didn’t actually tell me if he accepted.”

  “He did,” Ianthe said. “Father told me.”

  “I am delighted he thought of our presence.”

  “I asked him to extend the invitation,” Ianthe said, “after Mother thought you might not want to come.”

  “Will she—will she be surprised by our arrival?” Beatrice imagined standing on the ship’s deck, head high, back proud, unfailingly polite as she looked Mrs. Lavan straight in the eye.

  “You’ll be our guests that evening. I don’t know if you are prone to seasickness. You don’t really feel it on the main vessel, but it’s getting there that’s the trick.”

  Seasickness! She never considered it. “In truth, I don’t know if I get seasick,” Beatrice said.

  “We have our own physicians,” Ysbeta said. “It will come out all right. Come on. I want to see if that woman painter is still here. Do you remember her?”

  “The firebrand,” Ianthe said. “Very well. We will see if Miss Storkley is still in residence.”

  He called the driver to halt, and Ysbeta sprang out of the carriage unassisted. Ianthe offered his hand to Beatrice as she climbed out of the landau, settling her skirts into place once she was on firm ground.

  The ateliers of Pigment Street perched above the street-level shops and cafés that sold the artists’ works and fed their bellies. Ysbeta strode ahead, sure of her destination, while Beatrice walked by Ianthe’s side and tried to untie the knot in her tongue. Their landau clopped along behind, guided by the Lavans’ driver, splendid in his eye-catching blue-green livery.

  “Why do you call her the firebrand?” Beatrice asked.

  “Miss Storkley? Because she’s political.” His profile revealed the elegant slope of his nose and the strength of his chin, and Beatrice glanced away before she could forget herself and stare. “We discovered her while she was in residence in Masillia and packing up to move here. She’s a magnificent portraitist. Her work commands sums counted in the thousands of crowns. But she takes that money and uses it to make paintings that shine an unforgiving light on what she views as the ills of society.”

  “But she is still popular?”

  “Immensely,” Ianthe said. “You will have to see her work to understand. Not many women take up the palette and easel, but if this world is just, she will go down in history.”

  Pedestrians stood aside to let them pass. They touched their foreheads in respect, bidding them good wishes. It was Ianthe they were awed by—he was a figure of fashion, walking the streets in rich embroidery and hand-hooked lace. His expensive perfume cried wealth and power. And Beatrice, in her silvery green walking suit of good quality but little ostentation had passers-by noting the difference in their stations. Everyone who saw them knew exactly what they were.

  “You sound as if you admire her.”

  “It’s very brave,” Ianthe said. “So few women painters rise to such prominence. It would be a sad thing if she hadn’t the opportunity to use her Skyborn-given talents in a way that honors them.”

  “But if she hadn’t,” Beatrice pointed out, “you wouldn’t know if the world were diminished or not.”

  “You point out that we do not know how dark the world truly is,” Ianthe said.

  “Precisely,” Beatrice said. “For every Miss Storkley who rises above the restrictions of her sex, there could be a hundred more, their talents and genius smothered by those who refuse to let women lift their gaze past society’s expectations.”

  Ianthe turned his head to examine her. “You are a firebrand too, Miss Clayborn.”

  “I suppose I too am political,” Beatrice said. “I forgot myself.”

  But Ianthe gazed at her, welling with admiration. “I hope that you will forget yourself again.”

  Oh, he couldn’t do that. He couldn’t look at her like that, as if the people swerving past them no longer existed and she was the only sight he wanted to gaze upon. How dare he be so openly besotted? It made warmth spread across her breast. It made her knees tremble. She couldn’t look anywhere but at him. But her throat tightened, and she fought the urge to reach for a collar that wasn’t there, for he was everything that stood in the way of her path—a man, a magician who sought to become a husband and father.

  “You look so sad,” Ianthe said. “What can I do?”

  “I’m fine,” Beatrice said. “Really. Thank you for asking. Ysbeta is probably a mile ahead of us; we should—”

  “Ysbeta is just upstairs,” Ianthe said. He nodded at a black-iron gate standing open to lead to a matching set of stairs running up the side of the building. “Shall we go up?”

  The stairs rang under their feet, announcing their arrival into a room that glowed with daylight. Tall windows filled the wall, angling to form part of the roof. The room smelled of linseed and freshly cut wood, and Ysbeta sat perched on a tall wooden stool, raptly watching the artist she had come to see stretch canvas over a large wooden frame.

  Miss Storkley was a wide-shouldered woman with the golden-brown skin of a child born to parents of different cultures. Her hair was bound in a tall headwrap as expertly fastened as a Makilan craftswoman’s, and she might have been part Makilan, from the narrow precision of her features. She glanced toward Beatrice and Ianthe but focused her attention back on her work with a brusque grunt.

  Beatrice’s chin came up at the rude greeting, but Ianthe paid it no mind. Ysbeta barely glanced over her shoulder before turning back to watch Miss Storkley clamp the canvas at the corners.

  “Are you sure I can’t help?” Ysbeta asked.

  “You sit right there where you can’t get paint on your dress,” the artist said, and Beatrice startled at the tone the woman took with a wealthy potential patron. She glanced at Ianthe, who shared her look with a smile.

  Ysbeta twisted o
n her perch. “Miss Storkley has finished her latest. It’s right there. She wouldn’t let me go near it and made me sit on this stool until you came—”

  “It’s very wet.” Miss Storkley said. She gave up her task to come closer, her linen coat buttoned closed and splattered with paint. Her heavy black buckle shoes—a man’s shoes, with a gentleman’s hose—were a riot of splattered pigment. “Properly, no one should get near it for another week.”

  “Oh, please, Miss Storkley,” Ysbeta said, leaning toward the woman. “I swear, I’ll be careful. Who bought it?”

  “No one,” Miss Storkley said. “It’s true art resting on that easel. No man’s coin commissioned it.”

  Ysbeta bounced in her seat. “Oh, cruel! I want to see!”

  Miss Storkley scowled, but it melted into a wink. “One hand on the wall. Don’t get any closer.”

  “Thank you!” Ysbeta cried. She leapt off the stool. “Come, you two! One hand on the wall, as Miss Storkley said!”

  Ianthe chuckled silently and moved to the wall. He planted his palm on the panels and followed Ysbeta, who was staring at the painting with—

  Distress. Her eyes fixed on the sight of that canvas as if she beheld horror. Beatrice touched the wall and came up behind Ianthe, who could see the painting now, but his expression was thoughtful, his mouth a straight line. Beatrice lined up beside Ianthe and gasped, her dismay the loudest noise in the room.

  The painting was of a couple emerging from the darkness of a temple, clad in wedding clothes. The woman’s green gown glistened like silk; the man’s coat, in the same shade, was embroidered in gold— Beatrice could make out the cleverly disguised phallic symbols in the thread, meant to bless him with virility. His attention was on the people congratulating him as a newly married man; his smiles were for his admirers and friends.

  Beside him, his bride raised one hand to touch a richly engraved silver collar fastened around her throat as she stumbled into the sunshine. Her expression was a mirror of Ysbeta’s, her eyes focused not on the witnesses but at the terrible sight of her own future. A tear glistened on her cheek, but no one in the painting paid attention to it.

  Beatrice tried to take a decent breath, but the hollow in her middle, the tight band around her chest—oh, this painting was horrible, horrible! She couldn’t bear to look at it, painted in colors too rich for a warded woman to see. It dragged her back into her mother’s room, to that terrible five seconds when she learned exactly what a collar took from her.

  Beside her, Ianthe stirred, released from his study of the scene. “How awful.”

  Beatrice turned her attention on him. “You think so?”

  “Absolutely. It’s utterly tragic,” Ianthe said. “She had to marry for advantage, not love. Look how unhappy she is. Look at the groom, who cares nothing for her distress—I’m furious just looking at it.”

  Ysbeta choked down a sob. She spun away from the painting. She fled from it, right out of the studio and out the door, weeping.

  “Ysbeta!” Beatrice cried. “I’ll get her.”

  She ran along the wall, getting clear of the painting, grabbing a handful of her skirts as she ran down the stairs. Ysbeta stood just inside the iron gate, bent over as she cast up her last meal on the paving stones.

  Beatrice reached inside her pocket for her vial of candied fennel seeds. Ysbeta stood up and gagged.

  “Here,” Beatrice said. “They’ll settle your stomach, too.”

  “That is not happening to me,” Ysbeta said, bile staining her breath. “By the Skyborn, it will not.”

  “It will not,” Beatrice said. “We must push on with your lessons. The sooner you learn higher conjuration, the better.”

  Ysbeta groped for Beatrice’s arm, her eyes round. “Yes. Teach me everything. Before it’s too late.”

  “I will,” Beatrice promised. “I swear on the Skyborn. Everything you need to know.”

  CHAPTER XIII

  Ysbeta thrust the book into her hands the moment they boarded the landau. “Lavan House, Cornelius,” she ordered. “Ianthe is seeking his own means later.”

  “But Miss—”

  “Go.”

  The driver shrugged and guided the horses into the street, maneuvering through traffic to turn on Silk Row, aiming for the Meryton Highway.

  Beatrice looked behind her one more time, but the landau was long past Pigment Street. “You left him.”

  “He can hire a cab.” Ysbeta lounged in her seat in an unladylike slouch. “If I had to listen to him ask me what was wrong for the entire journey, I would have thrown him out of the carriage anyway. At speed.” Her hand came up to trace a line across her neck. “What’s the book about?”

  Beatrice glanced at the driver, who kept to the business of driving the horses in a trot through the streets of Bendleton. She made the sign and cast the spell, blinking at the title:

  Hazel and Chestnut: The Hidden Path of Women

  “What is this?” Beatrice murmured, and kept reading.

  “What is it?” Ysbeta asked.

  “One moment,” Beatrice said, and read on with rising excitement. “I was right. Of course, I was right. But here isproof.”

  “What were you right about?”

  “There is a hidden network of women practitioners. They’re probably the ones who make the grimoires,” Beatrice said. “They signal each other with hazel and chestnut—wisdom and warning—”

  “I know,” Ysbeta said. “But they’re the sign of women who practice in secret?”

  “Exactly,” Beatrice said. “We can find other sorceresses. Maybe even a sorceress who knows the great bargain. Someone who can help us.”

  “And not a moment too soon,” Ysbeta said. “How do we find them?”

  “They mark themselves with the sign. Embroidered on a handkerchief, or the border of a fichu—we just have to keep our eyes open.”

  Beatrice glanced behind her again, and Ysbeta huffed. “You’re looking for Ianthe. We’re long gone.”

  “I know, but—” Beatrice sighed. “Will a cab go as far as Lavan House?”

  “He’ll be fine,” Ysbeta said. “I will not.”

  “Has something happened?” Beatrice asked.

  “Bard Sheldon called on my father this morning,” Ysbeta said. “He stayed for twenty-five minutes. Mother was all smiles. The jaws of this trap are closing.” Ysbeta swallowed. “I’ve made a terrible mistake not collecting other suitors sooner, Beatrice. You have to help me.”

  “I understand you don’t want to marry Bard—”

  “Or anyone,” Ysbeta said. “I never want to marry, never.”

  “I don’t blame you. But what if you meet someone who stirs your heart?”

  “It won’t happen,” Ysbeta declared. “No man or woman has ever turned my head. I know beauty when I see it, but my heart has never ached for anyone.”

  “No one?”

  “It’s magic that stirs my senses,” Ysbeta said. “Writing my books, sailing to port after port, learning even the simplest charms brings me joy. That is what I must do to live a useful life. I must pursue knowledge of magic, preserve it, pass it on to the ones who thirst for it. My life will end the moment a warding collar wraps around my neck.”

  Beatrice shuddered. “You must never know what it’s like.”

  “How do you know?”

  “My mother took me aside and put mine around my neck this very morning.”

  Ysbeta lifted one hand to cover a soft gasp. “That’s supposed to be bad luck for you Chaslanders, isn’t it?”

  “Bad luck,” Beatrice grumbled. “I wonder how many brides made a run for it before that particular superstition took hold.”

  “Why did she do that?”

  “Because she wanted me to know exactly what sorceresses sacrifice. She didn’t know until it was too late.”

  “Does she not want you to marry?” Ysbeta asked. “Does she dislike Ianthe?”

  “That’s not why she did it.” Beatrice turned her head and watched cattle gr
aze. “She didn’t want me to make a choice I will regret.”

  “Will you regret marrying my brother?”

  Beatrice pressed her lips shut and breathed slowly. She smelled the dusty road and the green meadow and a ribbon of the southern sea. She studied the glowing aura of sorcery around Ysbeta’s head. The same choice loomed before her, and she shook her head.

  “I will regret something, regardless of what I choose. But if any man is worth warding for, it’s your brother.”

  “But you don’t know what to choose,” Ysbeta said. “I do know, Beatrice. I choose magic. Show me how to save myself.”

  The journey to Lavan House took an age. Beatrice followed Ysbeta inside, and she dashed through the marble hall as if she couldn’t see the beauty of it anymore. Beatrice hurried along behind Ysbeta, who deposited her in a soft green room with glass-paned doors leading to the garden.

  “I’ll be right back,” she promised. “Wait here.”

  The room was filled with beautiful things. Beatrice circled the room at the slow pace of a museum visitor and gazed on the shapes and fabrics of the furniture, the intricate vines, leaves, and fruit on the enormous hand-knotted carpet, and the perfect, formal symmetry of the gardens outside. She drifted past a rosewood pianochord and stopped before a serpentine statue carved in the fluid, realistic style of Sanchi.

  It depicted a Sanchan woman, tall and slim, dressed in elegantly draping robes and jewels. Pendant earrings hung from her lobes and her veil of hair was anchored by a jeweled diadem across her brow. A ring pierced the inner septum of her nose. But Beatrice stared at her corded, elegant, and completely bare throat.

  Beatrice studied the woman’s features. The youthful plumpness was gone from this woman’s face; her cheekbones were high, her full lips curved in a half smile. Her body was a woman’s territory—full-breasted, round-hipped, and robust. Her hands were half-raised, curled to signal protection and invitation.