The Conjurer's Riddle

by Andrea Cremer

  His hero had been slain, his world tilted out of balance, and his innocence broken.

  Charlotte knelt beside Rufus’s body. Would his death be the toll demanded for this journey, or was this loss only the first of many to come?

  Though her limbs ached with weariness, Charlotte knew she would not soon sleep. It would be a long time, she thought, before her mind found enough peace to seek sleep again.

  THEY COULDN’T KEEP Rufus in the boxcar, but Charlotte didn’t want to discard his body without honoring the boy whose courage saved Scoff’s life and cost his own.

  At Charlotte’s urging, Birch and Pip scrounged through the packs for thin scrap metal, from which they crafted a small copper flower. Pip laid the flower on Rufus’s chest, and Charlotte bade their weary, sorrowful band to gather around his body as the boxcar rocked from side to side as it sped along the tracks. Grave shepherded the children into a semicircle around Rufus, and Charlotte took her place standing opposite them.

  When the eyes of all her companions fell upon her, Charlotte felt a hitch in her breath. She knew she must speak, but what was the best thing to say? Should she boast of Rufus’s bravery—say that his last act proved what an incredible warrior he would have become? Should she decry the Empire, pointing at their ruthlessness and stoking fury at their role in the boy’s death? Or perhaps offering words of comfort would prove the most helpful for a group already so frightened and worn at the beginning of their journey?

  “I only had a brief glimpse of Rufus’s life,” she said. “But even so, it couldn’t have been more clear that he had a boundless spirit and loyalty that did honor to all of us. Rufus risked his life, and lost it, for the sake of his friends. There is no greater act, no greater love. Let us honor him by never forgetting that.”

  Charlotte removed her cloak and covered Rufus’s body. The tightness in her throat was painful when she laid the fabric over his face. Scoff and Birch came forward; Scoff lifted Rufus from the shoulder, and Birch, the feet. They carried the body to the open door of the boxcar and cast him out, where he rolled into the tangled wilds that edged the rails.

  Charlotte watched him flop away from the train, ragdoll-like, until his corpse disappeared into the trees. It surprised her that she hadn’t cried since the attacks at the rail yard. No tears came when she first laid eyes upon Rufus’s torn and broken body. No tears came now. She didn’t feel grief, or fear. Only hollowness accompanied by a deep chill, the sort that comes from standing too long in a cold, hard rain.

  • • •

  Hours later, as the train rolled westward along the tracks, silence hung heavy in the boxcar. The children had gathered into something of a heap on one side of the car, clustered together for a sense of security while they slept. Birch, Scoff, and Pip were each stretched on the floor nearby, having also succumbed to exhaustion. Moses had found his own roost in the high corner of the car and was hanging upside down, wings folded about his tiny body.

  Only Grave and Charlotte remained awake. The pair sat at the far end of the car, away from the others, not sleeping, but letting time pass without conversation.

  Lulled by the quiet, Charlotte was caught off guard when Grave said, “I felt it die.”

  Shaking away the fog that had settled in her mind, Charlotte said, “I’m sorry—what?”

  “The catamount.” Grave didn’t look at her when he spoke, but stared ahead, his face troubled. “When its bones began to break. When it coughed blood. I could feel it fighting to stay alive . . . and then it stopped. Then it wasn’t an animal anymore; it was a sack of blood, meat, bone. It was nothing.”

  His tone made Charlotte’s blood curdle.

  “That happened to me . . . for a time I was nothing,” he continued.

  “Grave, I—” Charlotte struggled for some helpful thought, a few words of comfort. “I don’t think you were nothing. An illness took your life and then Hackett found a way to bring you back.”

  “No,” Grave said. “The Maker didn’t bring ‘me’ back. I’m not the boy who was Hackett Bromley’s son.”

  Charlotte didn’t protest; she couldn’t. If anything about Grave had become clear, it was that his resurrection wasn’t a simple returning of a lost child to a broken body. She saw no purpose in clinging to that idea, even if it offered a simpler, less frightening explanation of Grave’s existence.

  “I don’t know what I am.” Grave held his hands out in front of him, turning his palms up. “I don’t know where I was before this, but I wasn’t that sick boy.”

  “You’re human,” Charlotte told him. “You may not be that boy, but you’re one of us.”

  “I think I am those things,” Grave said, then sighed. “But I think I’m something else as well. And I don’t like what I can do. How easy it is.”

  “What do you mean?” Charlotte asked.

  Grave was still looking at his hands. He closed them into fists. “Killing. Making something become nothing.”

  “That’s not what you did.” Charlotte put both her hands over one of his fists. “You were defending us. If you hadn’t, the catamounts would have killed me and Scoff.”

  She didn’t bother adding “and you,” because she didn’t believe the catamounts could have killed Grave. Teeth and claws would never be a match for him.

  “Don’t forget that I killed two of the catamounts,” Charlotte told him. “Sometimes we’re forced to take a life to protect our own.”

  “And for that reason, the war?”

  There was no malice, no provocation in the question, but all the same it made Charlotte bristle. Having been born into the Resistance, she’d never been interrogated about its rationale. “It’s not that simple.” She wished she could have instantly offered a more substantive reply.

  Grave was silent.

  “I told you about the war,” Charlotte said, making another effort. “The Empire is greedy, cruel, and petty. It beats and bruises the very body upon which its gold-crowned head rests. Think about Jack and Coe—their father is an admiral, one of the highest-ranking officers in the Empire’s army, and yet his sons would fight to overthrow Imperial rule. Even those inside the Empire see its corruption.”

  “And you think the Empire’s corruption makes killing just?” Grave asked.

  “You don’t?”

  He frowned. “I don’t know yet, but—”

  Still defensive, Charlotte countered before he could go on. “I know there has been much confusion about your past and what’s to come, that’s it’s been a trying time for all of us, but especially you—to be thrown into a conflict in which you had no part and knew nothing of. Yet all you’ve seen since then . . . what the Empire is, what it does—”

  “I know what I’ve seen,” Grave cut in. “And all I’ve learned about the Empire proves the truth of your claims. But is this war the answer? Your Resistance has been fighting for decades. And the more you fight, the greater the violence, and the more terrible the weapons.”

  Grave paused, his voice dropping to a murmur. “And now Rufus is dead.”

  Charlotte had been lining up further justifications for the Resistance’s tactics, but her arguments vanished. Grief and trauma. Grave had killed for the first time, and he’d witnessed the death of a companion, an innocent child. His questions weren’t truly about the war; they were much more intimate. He was desperate to understand who he was and how he fit into this bloody puzzle of a conflict. They weren’t questions Charlotte could answer for him. No one could.

  “Grave,” Charlotte said softly. “You’ll find your place. These burdens upon your mind have already given you an answer you’ve been seeking.”

  “What is that?” Grave finally looked at her, his brow crinkled in concentration.

  “You’re human,” Charlotte answered. “And without a doubt, you have a good heart.”

  Sadness lingered in Grave’s eyes, but he smiled. “I hope s
o.”

  They fell back into silence, but Charlotte didn’t let go of Grave’s hand.

  CHARLOTTE LEANED AGAINST the boxcar wall, peering through the narrow gap between the door and the car, where a strip of morning light speared the dark interior. Steady pellets of rain beat on the metal roof and the sky was filled with bloated, low clouds of steel gray. While her companions slept, Charlotte’s mind chewed on the next stage of their journey.

  The Imperial train was bound for Moirai, a trio of settlements clustered at the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. Of the three sites, West Moirai alone was a proper town. One of the many free black towns that had been established along the western bank of the Mississippi, West Moirai was the type of place Madam Jedda had intended for her daughter to call home. Independent of the Empire, self-governing, and located on the greatest trade route of the continent—Charlotte could understand why Jedda would have preferred Meg relocate to West Moirai rather than live in the shadow of Britannia.

  North Moirai served as the administrative center of the river junction. Managed by representatives from West Moirai and delegates of the Delaware, Illini, Chicaksaw, and Shawnee tribes, North Moirai regulated trade routes, shipping corridors, and business establishments along both rivers. Just as vital as general maintenance of the tri-town's quotidian activities was North Moirai’s role as a buffer between British and French commercial interests. Both empires needed the revenue offered by these two great waterways, but neither could suffer direct dealings with the other. North Moirai kept coin and commodities flowing along the rivers while preventing bloodshed.

  But it was at a railyard just outside of East Moirai that the train Charlotte was on would load raw goods and then make the return trip for the factories of the Atlantic coast cities.

  One of the first settlements in the neutral trade zone along the Mississippi, East Moirai itself denied entry to any official Imperial vessels. Makeshift home for the transient, East Moirai was the fertile soil in which hopeful entrepreneurs could plant their hopes and then watch them thrive or wither. Ever changing and yet always the same, skirting the boundaries of two hostile empires, the transport and trading center of greater Moirai would serve up opportunity and danger in equal portions.

  Disembarking from the train was by no means easy, but still proved much less of an ordeal than stowing aboard it had been. Birch had calculated from days to hours down to within minutes of the train’s arrival at the boundary yards. Exiting the train at or too near the yards posed considerable danger, especially in light of the catamount attacks they’d faced in Albany, so when Birch deemed that they were within an hour of the train’s destination, it became a matter of watching for an opportunity to leap from the car without risk of serious injury.

  At a sharp bend in the tracks the train slowed enough to make jumps feasible, and they hurried to exit the car. Grave jumped first, carrying two of the smallest children with a third hanging on to his neck and shoulders. The elder children left next, then Scoff, Birch, and Pip, each assisting a child too fearful to jump on their own. Charlotte was the last. She landed on the soft bank, rolling a short distance before her body slowed and then stopped. The children bore some bruises and scrapes from rocks and branches, but they’d been spared any sprained ankles or wrists. Without delay, they distributed packs and set off on foot. The train tracks curved south, but their party turned to the west.

  After a half day’s walk through the forest, they encountered a narrow road of dirt and grass crushed by wagon wheels, and they turned west to follow it. This road wasn’t of the Empire, but a forest track used by trackers and traders, merchants or families making their way to East Moirai’s hubs of commerce, making it safe enough for their troupe to use. Charlotte welcomed the reprieve of walking in the open, on a proper path rather than skulking through the woods on game trails. Soon enough the road traced the course of the Ohio River, a waterway teeming with vessels en route to the Mississippi.

  The sounds of the trading center reached them before its buildings came into sight. The creaking of wood and the rushing of water that dropped through a mill, the bright ring of hammers striking iron, the shrill whinnies of horses and baying of livestock. Tucked up against a sloping bank of the Ohio, the outer edge of East Moirai bustled with life. Little rhyme or reason dictated the layout of the settlement’s fringes. Buildings had been thrown up as needed, aiming to serve those who sought the resources of East Moirai but preferred not to venture too far into the town proper. Some, like the farrier’s shop, showed solid construction and orderly design. Others, like the boarding house, were a slapdash assembly of mismatched wood planks and strange angles. There was even a small tinker’s workshop, a narrow rectangular building with wooden walls embellished by sheets of hammered metal, from which a bizarre cacophony of sounds emitted.

  Charlotte marveled to see the diversity of people mulling about camps that crowded the roadside leading into town. Voyageur canoes rested on the riverbanks and Frenchmen in colorful shirts and fur caps threw dice with American Indian traders whom Charlotte knew could hail from the Monongahela, Miami, Shawnee, and Illinois tribes, or the farther afield Lakota, Ojibwe, and Iroquois of the north. Trading posts like this one couldn’t be established without the permission and oversight of the local ruling American Indians. The British could have their forts for defense and rail systems to transport goods, but the treaty with Pontiac and his army of united tribes after their uprising in 1763 had placed control of the riverways from the Appalachian Mountains to the Mississippi with the Indians.

  In addition to the handful of buildings, traveling craftsmen and women had set up stalls wherever space was available between clusters of tents. They called out to passersby, proclaiming the quality of their weaving or carving or leather goods. More enticing still were the small fires over which cauldrons hung or spits turned. Charlotte’s stomach rumbled at the scent of rich stews abundant in savory seasoning, and succulent roasts dripping fat that sizzled on hot embers. Having subsisted on hard bread and salted meats of late, Charlotte nearly swooned at the thought of a hot cooked meal. But that temptation had to be put aside for the moment. Their destination was a structure on the northwestern edge of the post, near the riverside shrine to Athena.

  Unlike most of the other buildings in the trading post, the Ohio River Sanctuary was constructed of gray stone. The somber structure marked a break between the vagrant character of East Moirai’s outskirts and the beginning of the true settlement. The Sanctuary’s only ornamentation was a cluster of copper olive branches that adorned its door post. A symbol of the goddess, the branches signaled to travelers that within these walls they would find a safe refuge from the perils of the outside world. Scattered throughout the British wilderness between the coastal cities and the Mississippi River, Sanctuaries were built by priestesses of Athene to offer wisdom and protection of the goddess to those far from Imperial cities.

  But this day, what was of interest to Charlotte was another service the Sanctuary provided—that of the crèche. Not all Sanctuaries served as crèches; only a handful of the religious outposts provided shelter to the young and helpless. Crèches did not serve the Resistance alone. Years of war had made orphans of children throughout the interior of the country. The Empire’s practice of forcibly conscripting labor from settlers within the wilds often took parents and older children to the foundries of the East while abandoning the young. The lucky among these foundlings arrived on the doorsteps of a crèche. The rest did not.

  The religious orders that served Athene and Hephaestus maintained a position of neutrality from the start of the Revolutionary War and still held to that principle, but that hadn’t stopped them from providing care for soon-to-be-mothers and small children of the Resistance. The aid offered at the crèches was determined to be in harmony with their stated neutrality. Children, the high priestesses concluded, could not be held accountable for the wars waged by their elders.

  The Emp
ire knew that crèches existed, but deemed it unwise spend its resources investigating any Resistance connections to the sites. Even the most jaded of Imperial politicians and military officers were unwilling to risk the wrath of deities. For the Resistance in particular, these special Sanctuaries remained a haven for any child until the time they could relocate to the place they would remain until coming of age—a protected location like the Catacombs. Some children left the crèches as soon as they learned to walk, others were reared with the priestesses for a handful of years, but none stayed past the age of ten.

  As Charlotte and her companions approached the olive-branch-crowned door, she tried to summon moments from her own past, but she had no lucid memories of this place, nor of the journey from crèche to the Catacombs. The images she conjured from the past were little more than shadows and always fleeting.

  “You should probably keep Moses out of sight,” Charlotte told Birch.

  The little bat had taken refuge in Birch’s shirt pocket, but Charlotte feared that all the unfamiliar noise might startle the bat into flight.

  “He’s usually a sound sleeper until dark,” Birch said. “But I’ll keep an eye on him.”

  Scoff came up beside them and gave the building a cursory assessment. “Looks just like the one I stayed in. Though I remember it being bigger.”

  When Charlotte cast a sidelong glance at Scoff, he winked.

  “Come on.” Charlotte opened the door. “Let’s get everyone inside.”

  She held the door open as the children shuttled in. Grave was the last to reach the entrance, but he hesitated beside Charlotte.

  “Is something wrong?” she asked him.

  “I didn’t like the Temple of Athene in the Floating City,” he answered.