The Tinker King

by Tiffany Trent

  She realized now, a bit ruefully, that much of her acceptance had come because of Bayne, and the chance it had offered her to be near him under his tutelage.

  And then all of that had fallen apart when she’d discovered he was a Duke’s son masquerading as a Pedant. He was a spy for the Architects, a secret society of warlocks trying to restore magic to the world. And he was also running away from the marriage his parents were arranging for him.

  She’d had an unfortunate hand in that, too. As she pulled on her warmest wool dress, it still made her squirm a bit to think of how Lucy Virulen had manipulated her into charming Bayne and how, despite her own desires, Vespa hadn’t been able to release him.

  She supposed she’d expected that when the dust settled from the Rousing of the Dragon, that things would pick up where they’d left off after that long-ago kiss in the storage room of the Museum. She couldn’t see how it could go otherwise. But in the last year, though they’d shared quarters and he’d mostly been kind, there was still a shadow of something—regret, anger, revulsion?—when he looked at her.

  She checked herself in the floor-length mirror they’d managed to salvage. It was cracked at one corner, so sometimes her reflection wavered. But, as she swiftly pinned up her hair, which was darker now that the sun was weaker with the onset of winter, she couldn’t really see what he objected to. Certainly she was no Lucy Virulen, but neither was she a warty troll woman.

  Whatever it was, that shadow had gotten in the way of everything. And she didn’t know how to make it vanish. The more she confronted it directly, either by asking him what was wrong or how she could help him, the worse things became between them. She had learned to say nothing for the most part, except when she couldn’t help herself.

  The shadow was in his eyes this morning when she finally went downstairs to put on her boots. Truffler, who had appointed himself official housekeeper, objected to shoes being worn about the house. They tracked in mud and dirt.

  “Are you sure you want to go? This could be dangerous,” Bayne asked as he packed a satchel with glowglobes and paralytic grenades.

  “And miss out on the adventure?” she asked as she laced her worn boots. She really hoped a cobbler would set up shop in town again soon. “I hardly think so. You can use my power, yes?”

  He glanced at her. “I suppose.”

  Guarded. Always the answer was guarded behind some wall she couldn’t quite understand, though this sounded very like he was anticipating disappointment.

  She pursed her lips and decided not to air her frustrations now. Later perhaps, if all was well. She didn’t want to think about what would happen if all wasn’t well.

  Syrus came in from his workshop, his hair tousled from sleep. “You’re sure your power’s up to it?”

  He was much more direct.

  Vespa didn’t truly know the answer, but she wasn’t about to say no. “It seems to work best when I just feed it to Bayne and he controls it. You were planning on doing that anyway, so it should be fine.”

  “I was planning on that, yes, but you need to learn to control it on your own.”

  She could almost hear the words he didn’t say. Because someday I may not be here.

  “I’m working on it,” was all she would say.

  “I still think it is a bad idea, you know,” Syrus said. “Going in there.” He yawned. Piskel, who had just poked his head up out of Syrus’s collar, yawned after him.

  Coffee and tea were scarce these days, but Truffler had pilfered their small store of coffee and made some for the occasion.

  The hob handed Vespa a cup. “Thank you, Truffler. You really didn’t have to, you know.”

  He shrugged and carried his tray over to Syrus and Bayne while she sipped. The coffee was sweet and rich. Perfect.

  Piskel turned his nose up at the coffee. He hated the smell. He drifted into the parlor, and Vespa supposed he would curl up in his little basket by the fire and fall asleep. Piskel was not a morning sylph.

  “You don’t have to go, if you’d rather not,” Bayne said to Syrus.

  Syrus stared down into his cup. He sighed. “I’ll go,” he said.

  “We’ll leave at the first sign of trouble,” Vespa reassured him. “We’re just doing reconnaissance, I promise.”

  Syrus looked at her in confusion. He often accused her of being a walking dictionary.

  “Spying,” Bayne said. “We’re just spying. The gear I’m taking is defensive only.”

  “Where have I heard that before?” Syrus muttered into his cup.

  They were soon ready.

  “All right, then,” Bayne said. “Take hold of my sleeves.”

  Vespa and Syrus did so.

  “Be ready for anything,” he said.

  “I think that really goes without saying,” Vespa said.

  He looked down at her with a raised brow. “Are you stalling?”

  Vespa coughed slightly. “Possibly.” Because who in their right mind would be eager to transport themselves straight into a spider’s web? If that was indeed what they were headed into. Syrus was sure, but Vespa needed more proof.

  Bayne was still looking at her.

  Vespa sighed. “Just go.”

  The next moment, they were dissolving into air.

  Bayne took power from her easily. The stretch and pull of her body from one place to the other was familiar and almost pleasant. Slowly she began to feel that it was taking much longer than it should for them to materialize.

  It had always been habit for her to close her eyes before the magic took hold; she supposed for the time they were suspended in space, she truly had no eyes, which was a strange and disturbing thought.

  There was a terrible pressure and a rushing sound. Vespa opened her eyes involuntarily. Dark, sticky webs reached out, threatening to entangle her. Something vast and spiderlike moved beyond it, but she honestly couldn’t see much.

  Vaguely under the roar she could hear Bayne shouting. And then the next thing she knew, someone had dropped her from on high into an icy bath.

  Or at least that’s what it felt like. At first she was so shocked as she spluttered and reached for air that she wasn’t sure what had happened.

  Then she understood. She was in the River, and speeding quickly toward the pilings and ruins of the old Emporium bridge.

  Vespa had never been the strongest swimmer. She had only been a few times in Chimera Lake near the University, which had been rather like swimming in a large, warm bathtub. This raging cataract was far from that.

  She thought she heard Bayne shouting for her when she could manage to keep her head above water. It sounded like he was yelling at her to get rid of something.

  “. . . petticoats!” he screamed. He was swimming toward her but not fast enough. She tried swimming upstream, but there was no way that she could fight the current. In one glimpse before she was pulled under again, she saw Syrus crawling from the River on the new City side.

  As heaviness encircled her waist and legs like a coiled snake, dragging her down, Vespa understood that Bayne wanted her to remove her petticoats.

  She just wasn’t sure how. She tried pulling up her skirts and finding the strings, but her hands were numb and freezing, and the waterlogged wool confounded her efforts. When she bobbed up again, she saw that she was about to pass into the ravine that the old bridge had spanned. The bridge pilings and broken remains of the Night Emporium were looming quickly.

  Vespa tried magic, thinking perhaps she could transport herself out of the River, just to the bank. Nothing. There was absolutely nothing there.

  Through a haze of water droplets she saw Syrus running along the jagged shore. He gestured that she should swim toward him, rather than trying to swim upstream toward Bayne.

  She tried it, striking out as best she could at an angle to the heavy current. She was making strides but not fast enough.

  Bayne swept into her then with such force that she rolled back underwater. He grabbed the back of her dress and managed t
o haul her toward him.

  “Magic . . . won’t . . . work,” she said through stiff, almost frozen, lips.

  “Rivers are null spaces. Can’t use magic in them,” he said above the roar.

  Of course.

  “I’m sorry,” he said next. Before she could wonder why, he grabbed hold of her collar and ripped the wool dress from her body.

  “Hold fast to me!” he shouted.

  Vespa put her arms around his neck. She realized then that he had no coat. She was not going to wonder about the state of his trousers.

  He fumbled with her petticoats, and then they also slipped off her.

  “This is a most distressing situation to be thrust into, Pedant,” she said, looking up at him as they were swept toward the rocks. His dark hair was plastered against his head and neck; droplets of water glittered on his eyelashes and lips. But there was that light in his eyes that she had missed, the joy he often took in defying danger.

  “That all depends on your point of view,” he said, half smiling. “Hold fast!” he said suddenly.

  She braced herself against him, trying not to get in the way of his arms or legs. He reached and seized something with all his strength. The water roared around them and she was nearly torn from him, but she clutched at his waist with her numb arms until she felt her feet touching rock near his. He held her around the waist with the other arm. He had seized an iron spike as they were about to pass it, and brought them into an eddy around the old bridge piling.

  “Can you climb up on your own?” he asked. “I’ll help push.”

  Vespa nodded, unwinding her arms from his waist and finding handholds in the rock under the water. He boosted her with his arm, and she managed to haul herself up onto the old piling.

  He came up after her.

  Shivering in her soaked underthings, she collapsed on the nearest rock and took several gasping breaths.

  “Sorry about your . . . erm . . . gown,” Bayne said as he wrung the water from his hair. His once-white shirt was stuck to his skin. Vespa forced herself to look away so that she wouldn’t see the definition of muscles, the dark hair of his chest. Her hair was straggling out of the careful pins, so she finished it off, uncoiling it and wringing it out between her hands.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “I’m sorry I didn’t understand right away. I tried to get the petticoats off myself, but couldn’t do that and swim, too.”

  “Wool can take on a lot of water. You’d likely have sunk if I hadn’t . . .”

  “No, really,” she said, “no need to explain.”

  Vespa looked up at him again and wished she hadn’t. He was beautiful with the morning sun touching his face and that look in his eyes that she could never quite understand. But she felt decidedly naked under his gaze and wished for all the world that she had enough magic to provide herself with a cloak. The magic simply wasn’t there, though. Whatever had happened that had forced them into the river had drained her completely.

  She heard Syrus shouting distantly over the cataract and realized he might not be able to see them. Bayne climbed to the other side of the piling and waved, shouting, “We’re all right!”

  Vespa rose and went to stand beside him, waving at Syrus. He’d gone as far as he could before the sheer walls rose up and the rocky shore disappeared into them. There were quite a few more pilings and turbulent river channels to cross before they could even get to where Syrus was.

  Syrus’s face went white then, and he pointed behind them. They both turned and looked over their shoulders.

  “Bayne,” she whispered, though she knew he couldn’t hear her.

  On the opposite bank, where the rocks rose into dark cliffs, a scarlet-robed figure stood. It had a human shape, but Vespa couldn’t tell what it might be. As it turned away, she caught a glint of gold deep in its hood, but that was all.

  “They will come back!” Syrus shouted across the water. “Hurry!”

  Without a word, Bayne pulled Vespa close.

  “I thought . . . ,” she began.

  “We’re not in water now, are we?”

  Before Vespa could even shake her head, Bayne pulled them from the piling to the bank next to Syrus.

  “Take hold, Syrus,” he said. “I think I can get us home. Just barely, but I think I still can.”

  Syrus nodded, and then they were dissolving again; this time, Vespa hoped, with a different result.

  CHAPTER 5

  I’m gasping for breath as if I’m still in the water as we come to form in the parlor. Truffler enters, muttering and clucking as he sees what a state we’re in. Piskel climbs from his basket, scolding us for waking him until he realizes that something is amiss. He floats over to me and puts his fingers over his nose. I guess I stink of the River too much for his liking.

  “Hot water at stove,” Truffler says, indicating we can bathe if we’d like.

  We each go to our rooms to find fresh clothes. Gentlemen that we are in manners if not in title, we let Vespa bathe first.

  “What happened?” I ask as we sit shivering by the parlor fire, waiting our turns at the bath.

  Bayne is practically green with exhaustion. “If it is Ximu, as you say, then she’s got a field surrounding the old City now. I can’t transport us in there without getting stuck in her energy web. I’m wondering if that’s how the kinnon got bitten—he may have flown into it accidentally and gotten stuck.”

  “And then somehow he managed to get free, only to die of his wounds. Poor chap.”

  Bayne nods.

  “It’s Ximu, all right,” I say.

  “What’s confirmed it for you, since we couldn’t manage to actually see her?”

  I think about the scarlet-robed man and shiver. “The xiren. The man who was watching us—he is one of her Captains who can take human form. They wear robes like that, woven of their scarlet silk. And I saw the gold markings . . .”

  Nainai always warned us to beware those who walked in scarlet. “Shoot first, ask later, where they’re concerned,” she said. I had always thought her advice so funny. What if the xiren changed colors on occasion? And why should I worry if they were extinct anyway?

  I didn’t worry until today.

  Bayne nods.

  Vespa opens the kitchen door then, patting her hair with a towel. She’s dressed again in what I think is probably one of three gowns she owns, now that one of them is at the bottom of the River along with her petticoats.

  “I . . . hmmm . . . have no other petticoats, so I suppose this will have to do for now,” she says. “Else I shall have to resort to wearing trousers.”

  Bayne looks up at her, and something passes between them—that age-old something that I wish they would just resolve. She blushes and looks away from him. I often feel like I’m in the way, that so much is unspoken because of me, but then and again, I also know that it’s much more than that.

  “Your turn, gentlemen,” she says.

  I defer to Bayne. He looks far more uncomfortable than I am. “Your lordship,” I say, gesturing toward the kitchen. He glowers at me, gathers up his fresh clothes, and enters the kitchen.

  Truffler is toasting bread on the hearth in the parlor, and Vespa goes in to sit with him. I don’t move, not wanting to soil anything with my wet clothes or offend Piskel with my stench.

  Bayne is quick, and soon it’s my turn. Good man that he is, he’s refreshed the water, so I don’t have to wait too long before I can pour it into the beaten-brass tub. It’s not the most comfortable way to bathe—certainly not like the bathing rooms I glimpsed in the Grimgorn estate or Virulen Manor—but it’ll do.

  I don’t want to think about anything as I scrub the River from my body, but one persistent thought worms its way in. If Ximu is in the old City, and I’ve no doubt of that now, then she apparently has something to hide. Something big.

  When I’m clean and dressed, I return to the parlor just in time to see Bayne tucking an old quilt around Vespa, who’s fallen asleep on the settee. He reaches out a tre
mbling hand toward the curls that fall around her shoulders, but then he withdraws as if he’s touched fire.

  Those two. I clear my throat softly.

  He turns. “I was just . . . making sure she sleeps. She needs rest after all that.”

  “Mm-hmm.” Piskel is laughing behind him and making crazy, lovesick faces.

  Bayne jerks his head toward the library. “Let’s go in there. We’ll catch her up when she wakes.”

  We go to the scarred table with toast and tea. Bayne clears away maps and books, except for an old map of New London, which he unfurls before us.

  We both stare at it a long time. I’m looking at the curve of the River, wondering if and how we can defend our side if anyone tries to cross it. The ravine gives us some advantage.

  He’s thinking the same thing, because he finally points to a place upstream near the old Tower.

  “There,” he says. “I think if it came to it, they would cross there. It’s shallow there and not as wide, yes?”

  I nod, thinking of the time when I swam the River against Truffler’s urging and freed the Harpy. Bayne had been there. I never imagined when I hid under the Harpy’s cage with him that we would one day be living in the same house, plotting how to defend the Empress against Ximu.

  “You think there’s an army, too?” I ask.

  “I’m almost certain of it,” he says. “What else would she be hiding there?”

  “My thoughts exactly.”

  “We must tell the Empress,” Bayne says.

  I remember their exchange yesterday. “Won’t she be angry that we disobeyed?”

  “Perhaps,” he says. “But I hope the information will finally open her eyes. We must have better defenses.”

  I ask the question I’m sure neither of us wants to contemplate. “Is it already too late?”

  Bayne stands and begins to pace. He always paces when he’s thinking or nervous. “It may very well be.”

  “Then . . . what can really be done? Can you and Vespa make a field like hers to protect the City?”

  Bayne shrugs. “We could try. I’m not sure how successful it would be unless we could convince some Elementals to help us keep it going. And we obviously can’t live this way forever, can we?”