Nessa fell silent for a moment, watching her work.
“Did I teach you that?”
“You did,” Hedy said. “You were not wrong.”
Nessa pulled over a chair. Hedy set her quill down. She picked up the tuning fork.
“Between my own research and what you’ve brought me, I’m coming closer to a functional model of a dimensional gate. Marie got me thinking. She told me that, at least according to what you heard, this Carlo person infused a portal ‘bookmark’ with his own blood. Sounds like he had a host of theories about the blood of characters from the first story, first and foremost, that you’ve got some truly potent stuff in your veins. Anyway, I’ve been jabbing her all afternoon, taking samples. She’s been a good sport about it.”
“She always is,” Nessa said.
“Watch this.”
Hedy picked up a tiny vial of smoked glass. She tipped it over the topmost wineglass of the pyramid. A single drop of blood hit the water and billowed like scarlet ink.
The flame of the black candle, normally steady as a rock, danced and flickered. Ripples spontaneously broke out in the tower of glasses, like a handful of pebbles thrown onto the surface of a placid lake. The crystal glasses shivered and chimed, letting out an angelic peal of bells before falling silent once more.
The last ripple faded.
“Marie is here now,” Hedy said, “but she’s spent her entire life on your world. Her thoughts, her hopes and fears, they all form a…tether of sorts, pulling her home. Now, the candle is a constant. I suspected it before, but now I’m certain it occupies space in more than one dimension at the same time. If I can harness that stability, while using Marie’s blood as a catalyst—”
“You can open a doorway to bring us all home.”
“Theoretically.” Hedy set down the tuning fork. She picked up her quill. “Theoretically. One-way, and for a very brief window of time. And it’s going to require a massive surge of power. Probably no challenge at all, where you come from, but we don’t have…what was it? Marie tried to explain it to me. Fountains, where you turn a tap and electricity pours out of the wall?”
“She was being metaphorical, but not far off the bat.” Nessa tapped her fingertip against her lips. “Lightning. We need lightning.”
Hedy turned in her chair. She met Nessa’s gaze.
“Supposed to storm tomorrow night,” she said.
“Can we be ready by then?”
“The almanac calls for clear weather all next week,” Hedy replied. “And I’m not sure we have another week.”
“That answers that, then.”
“That answers that.”
Hedy turned back to her work.
“You don’t have to hover over me like that,” Hedy said.
“Does it bother you?”
“No.”
Hedy rapped her tuning fork against a glass on the bottom tier. She watched the ripples. She jotted down a few notes.
“Just wrestling with how ridiculous it is that I’m at least a decade older than you,” Hedy said, “and I still see you as my mother.”
“I don’t imagine I was an especially caring and doting mom last time around.”
Hedy chuckled. “You might be surprised. Not in a way that would make sense to outsiders, maybe, but…you had your moments. You were capable of great cruelties—”
“You showed me a few of those, in your memories.”
“And I hope you enjoyed them.”
“I did,” Nessa said.
“But never toward me. Never toward your family. You might be teasing at times, playfully malicious perhaps, but for me, for the rest of the coven, you were always there for us. And you might have denied to your grave that you cared…I mean, technically, you did deny it to your grave…but I knew the truth. You always made sure that I knew you were there for me. And you might let me stumble, but you’d catch me before I fell.”
Nessa fell silent. Hedy put down her quill. She picked up the tuning fork.
As another chime rippled through the candlelit cave, as another line of numbers joined the waterfall of ink, it jarred the ghost of a memory. Words Nessa had never spoken in this lifetime, but they came to her like the lines of a play written just for her. She leaned forward, and her arms coiled around Hedy’s shoulders as she embraced her from behind.
“Well,” Nessa said, “don’t say ‘I love you.’ Because I won’t say it back, and then you’ll feel most foolish indeed.”
Hedy smiled. She leaned back against Nessa and closed her eyes.
Forty-Four
Gazelle cupped a hand over her brow and pointed to the horizon. The sun had risen, casting a clear and strong light upon the cobblestones.
“Look at that,” she said. “The sun himself wants to join our coven.”
Marie squinted up at the sky. They walked side by side with long-legged strides, taking in the crisp, cool morning air as they headed for a blacksmith’s shop at the end of Falconer Lane. Black smoke belched from a chimney in the squat brick hut, the bellows already hard at work.
“How do you figure that?” Marie asked.
“He’s being chased, too.”
Gazelle’s finger drew a line across the far horizon. Another line met it, razor-thin, cold and gray and dark. A storm front, distant now but headed straight for the city.
“I see,” Marie replied. “Do we let him in?”
“Don’t think so. Men are welcome in the Pallid Masque if they prove themselves capable of doing a woman’s work, but we have to draw a line somewhere.” Gazelle smiled at her, sidelong. “We do our best work by moonlight. The sun isn’t much for subtlety.”
“Have you seen the plans Nessa and Hedy drew up? I don’t think ‘subtle’ is on the menu tonight.”
A wave of sweltering heat roiled out to greet them at the blacksmith’s door. The peg-studded walls inside the shop were a dangling showroom of the trade, from horseshoes to pick heads to farmers’ hoes and shovels. A hammer clanged out, iron against hot white gold, and the bellows whooshed under an apprentice’s blistered hands.
“Steady on the heat!” shouted Puffin, a broad-shouldered woman draped in a thick leather apron and elbow-length gloves. Her hammer rang down, battering bright metal into a spear-tipped rod. “We’re on a deadline, my boys. Most important one of your lives, for a customer more discerning than any governor or lettered lord. No mistakes today.”
Hedy stood at the front counter, putting the finishing touches on a letter. She signed it with a flourish and folded the parchment with a sharp crease. The letter nestled in a narrow box, along with three thumb-sized ingots of gold from the stolen pay wagon.
“Gazelle, just in time. I need you to run this box to Lamon and Rossini’s, that cartographer’s shop just off Orchid Road. It’s for the woman. Put it in her hands and leave. Don’t answer any questions, and don’t wait for her to open it.”
Gazelle clicked her heels together, snatched up the box, and darted off. She didn’t ask any questions. She never did when Hedy spoke. Hedy glanced over at Marie.
“I’ve been watching over someone from a distance,” she explained. “Daughter of an old friend. After tonight, whether we succeed or fail, she’s on her own. I’m not worried, she’s industrious—but even an industrious girl can use a little extra gold in her purse. Goodness knows I could have at her age.”
“How are the preparations going?” Marie asked.
Nessa leaned against the wall, arms crossed, watching the work unfold with a look of barely restrained glee in her eyes.
“Full steam ahead. Puffin’s apprentices just found out they’ve been working for a witch all this time. They seem to think we’re going to eat them if they don’t work fast enough. Can’t imagine who put that notion in their heads.”
A shirtless teenager, his muscles glistening with sweat, shot her a nervous glance as he leaned into the bellows with all his weight.
“Focus.” Puffin’s hammer punctuated the word with a crash. “It’s not about spee
d; it’s about attention to detail and consistent work, just like I always taught you. You boys do your part, you’re going home with fist-loads of sweet metal to weigh those pockets down. Enough to see your families through the winter, that I promise you.”
“But if not…” Nessa said, leaving the implication dangling.
Marie walked over and slipped her arm around Nessa’s waist, pulling her close. Nessa nuzzled her forehead against Marie’s shoulder.
“How do you feel?” Marie asked, her voice soft.
“Apparently I was quite the chemist in my last life. After I take the tonic? Amazing. Like I can battle the entire world. About a half hour after that…less amazing. But I’m sustaining. No fainting spells, barely nauseous. I can almost pretend I’m not sick.”
“We’re going to beat this thing,” Marie told her. “After coming this far, all the mountains we’ve had to climb…I’m not letting it end this way.”
Nessa’s arm tightened around her. They watched as Hedy conferred with the blacksmith, going over elaborately drawn plans and their supply of precious metal. Hedy never stopped moving, her eyes sharp and gears turning, as if she was locked in a game of mental chess with the universe itself.
“We have a daughter,” Nessa said.
“How do you feel about that? I mean, after your…the thing that happened—”
“The miscarriage. You can say it, Marie. And yes, when the doctors told me I couldn’t have a baby, part of me was relieved. Apparently it’s taboo to speak that truth aloud, like I’m derelict in my duties as a woman, but it is the truth. And Richard had been badgering me into giving him a child—a son, to be specific—from day one, but I never mistook his desires for my own. I am not naturally possessed of any great maternal instinct.”
“I can’t picture you changing diapers,” Marie said.
“Or any of it. I’ll tell you what would have happened. I would hand my child off to a nanny for most of its young life. I would be present, if cold, for holidays and birthdays. They would grow up resenting me, a resentment that would evolve from repressed reproach to outright hatred as they matured. They would bloom into an educated, cultured, emotionally frozen and perfect monster.”
“It sounds like you’ve given this a lot of thought.”
“Quite a bit,” Nessa replied. “My final verdict is that I am not so cruel as to inflict myself upon an innocent child.”
“But Hedy,” Marie said, catching the unspoken words that trailed off the end of Nessa’s voice.
The forge-fire shone, reflected in the circles of Nessa’s glasses. Her eyes were beds of glowing coal.
“She’s amazing, isn’t she? She’s brilliant. Some of the things in her workshop would stun our world’s scientists, and she did it all without electricity, or functional plumbing for that matter. And I helped to raise her. To shape this beautiful creature. I have this…ferocious pride, like a fist in my chest, squeezing out the air to make room. Is this what motherhood feels like?”
“I think there are good parts and rough parts,” Marie said. “To be fair, you got to skip all the hard work. Brilliant or not, I’m sure Hedy went through her terrible twos like every other toddler.”
“I have no regrets,” Nessa said. She watched Hedy for a while, nestling in Marie’s arms. “She’s ours.”
“Yours. I don’t have an official claim to stake here, much as I’m enjoying you enjoying this.”
“Maybe we should make it official, then,” Nessa mused.
Marie blinked at her. “Nessa?”
Nessa turned to face her, staying close, her long fingers trailing along Marie’s arms. She looked up to gaze into Marie’s eyes.
“We’re taking terrible risks tonight. Good chance, to be perfectly honest, we won’t get off this planet alive. And if we do make our way home, finding a cure for the poison in my veins is just one of the fights waiting for us.”
Marie counted them off. “We need Carolyn Saunders. Ezra is slick, but he slipped up one too many times. He’s holding her hostage. I don’t know why, or what his real game is, but we’re going to have to square off with him and everybody he can muster for a fight. Then there’s the bounty on our heads. I hurt Nyx; I didn’t kill her, and you know she’s going to be back. On top of that, we know Savannah Cross is still alive and out there, somewhere.”
“And after all that,” Nessa said, “the good Senator Roth is long overdue for a reckoning. Not to mention whoever gave me that damned spell book and set me up to fail. Our battlefield will be long and wide and deep, Marie. I think we could use something to look forward to. A bit of extra motivation, to see us to the dawn.”
Marie didn’t ask what she meant. She already knew. The words sat, frozen upon her lips, until Nessa spoke them for her.
“Marie Reinhart,” Nessa said, “will you marry me?”
Marie pulled her into a crushing embrace, swallowing her in her arms, her lips pressed to the curve of Nessa’s neck until she could find her voice again.
“Yes,” she whispered. “Yes.”
“Then hold that thought,” Nessa told her. “Hold it and clutch it like a talisman. When our work is over, and the last of the killing is done, that’s when we’ll be wed.”
* * *
The old governor’s manse was once the tallest building upon the highest hill in Mirenze. Technically, it still held the honor, despite being a burned-out shell, its salmon shingles shattered and its wooden eaves turned charcoal black. Fat birds clucked and took flight through the cavernous great hall, nesting along the exposed timbers, and their white droppings spattered the singed remains of once-opulent rugs.
It was late afternoon, and the storm was rolling in.
Humid pressure hung in the air, squeezing Marie’s sinuses with the promise of a downpour to come. Clouds painted the sky funeral gray. Every now and then a distant peal of thunder echoed from the east, a little closer each time. The coven hauled in their gear in wheelbarrows and burlap sacks, spreading out under Hedy’s stern direction as she pointed them this way and that.
“We have one shot at this,” she called out, her voice sending pigeons fluttering overhead. “This is the last storm we’re expecting for a week, and we may not have another week to wait. So follow the plan, to the letter, and if you’re not sure about anything, ask me right away. No room for mistakes tonight.”
Lamberto huffed and puffed behind his mole mask as he shoved a wheelbarrow laden with copper spikes along the rotted floorboards.
“Due respect, Dire Mother, but we can’t make the lightning strike.”
“No,” Hedy said, “but we can give it the juiciest target in all Mirenze. And when it comes down, we can stand ready to greet it.”
“Still feels like we’re taking a lot on faith.”
“So have faith,” Nessa called out.
Her voice rang off the charred timbers, the panes of half-shattered glass in the tall arched windows. The mansion was a fallen palace, and she strode into its heart like an owl-feathered queen, eyes blazing behind her mask of bone. She moved with absolute purpose, absolute dominion over everything that lived and breathed within its walls.
“Have faith in me,” Nessa told him. “That should be all you require to triumph.”
“Are you ready?” Hedy asked her.
“I’ve been studying my part of the ritual, memorizing it. I should be quite capable of handling the work now that you’ve taught me the warding charms that were conveniently left out of my spell book. It’s a perfectly manageable task.”
“Only you,” Hedy said, “would describe an untested, experimental ritual to open an unstable gateway between dimensions as ‘perfectly manageable.’”
“And you have one simple job tonight: prove me correct.”
The circular stairway, winding along the outer wall of the entry hall, groaned under their footsteps.
“Careful,” Hedy said. “No one’s been up here in a while. The flooring should still be more or less sound, at least where it hasn’t already cave
d in, but take it slow.”
“What happened here?” Marie asked.
“The previous governor of the city. He committed suicide in his study. Doused himself in oil and set the whole place aflame. His successor didn’t bother trying to rebuild; he just moved the official governor’s residence to a villa closer to the waterfront. This place has stood vacant ever since, which makes it perfect for our needs tonight.”
“Still,” Marie said, “kind of a tragedy.”
“A very small one.”
From the second-floor landing, Hedy led the way through a nest of burned-out rooms. Scraps of charred oil paintings clung to sagging and broken frames. A second narrower staircase ran up to an old attic, half the floor caved in and looking down on the great hall far below. One entire wall was gone, a jagged hole that offered a view of the city’s rooftops.
“Plenty of room,” Hedy said. “Let’s get started.”
They unspooled coils of wire forged from melted gold ingots, laying a pattern upon the blackened wood. A circle, then another to entrap the first, and a five-pointed star with barbed, wicked bends. Boot heels thumped on the roof above their heads as the more agile members of the coven shimmied up the beams, hammering spikes of copper into the groaning eaves and the ridge of the roof. Others looped more wires around the bases of the spikes, running them down like loose electrical cables, and hooked them to the outer edges of the design upon the attic floor.
Night came fast, came early, as the storm blotted out the setting sun. The rain began to fall, gentle at first, fat droplets pattering down onto the broken rooftop. Then came a ripple of jagged light behind the roiling clouds and the first strong peal of thunder over the city streets. Hedy brandished the black candle in her left hand and raised it high, its eternal flame defying the rain.
“Nessa and I will begin the chant and project the sphere of power,” Hedy said. “Marie, I need you and Gazelle to hold the perimeter. If the lightning strikes—”
“When it strikes,” Nessa corrected her.
“When it strikes, we’ll have five, maybe ten seconds at most to herd everyone inside the circle. And then…well, I guess then we’ll find out if I’m any good at this.”
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