Monstrous Heart

by Claire McKenna

  ‘What if she were no longer your responsibility? It’s been years, Jonah. She is an adult.’

  ‘And do what? Be with you instead?’ he said, and it felt so blunt and emotionless that a frightful thought made her blood run cold as the salt upon her skin.

  ‘Maybe … you could. I would not say no,’ she stammered. ‘I’d like to try.’

  ‘Try. Like an experiment?’

  ‘Not …’

  He shook his head. ‘No further now. Arden, you are beautiful and so wonderful but I could be no more than an amusement to you, something indulgent to pass the time before you go back to Clay Portside and leave me with as much thought as you would discard scrap and spoil.’

  ‘I didn’t kiss you for my own amusement, Jonah.’ Arden’s tears prickled her eyes and she hated that he made her feel this way, run headlong into her fears of mistakes and abandonment. The Order saw her desires as dangerous and unwanted. But it hurt so much more when a lone man should come to the same conclusion.

  ‘We are lonely, you and I, and I thought …’ Her cheeks were so hot they would burn if she touched them. Humiliation crisped her breath to ash. Where was the lightning to strike her? Where was the ground beneath her feet to open and swallow her into a peaceful oblivion?

  He ran his hands through his hair, leaving runnels in the dyed pomade of the night before. An absent, impatient gesture.

  ‘I am not some brief occupation for your spare time. I am not an object for you to use when it suits, or a rag for wounded hearts.’

  ‘Jonah, I didn’t mean it that way. I’m completely adrift. Just now it seemed that you were the only real thing that I could be certain of. Jonah Riven. Not even my blood belongs to me!’

  And now she was reduced to begging, as if she could not descend any lower. A look of infinite tenderness softened his eyes, as brief as a whisper. He made to move towards her, as if about to hug, and comfort.

  The sympathy ended almost as soon as it began, and he caught himself, his expression twisted with anguish.

  ‘I made a promise.’

  The spell was broken. She was bested by Bellis. Mr Riven’s first and only love. He lived only to provide her protection. She was once again malorum, a lightless failure. She could not bear the shame any longer. Ran from him as he stood in the darkened warehouse with his dying beast, fled into the grey, cold day. The seabirds cried above her. The waves fretted against the shorelines. The ache of desire that had come so suddenly to her now twisted into a miserable thud.

  As she crested the hill she rolled her ankle upon a loose rock while running in the unfamiliar shoes, and coupled with her exhaustion, she slowed down to a limping walk along the trail.

  ‘Stupid, stupid,’ she said to herself, while her smarting ankle brought tears to her eyes.

  Her ankle, and the other things. Self-pity was an easy cloak to wrap herself up in.

  How awful she was. How greedy.

  I will cease to think of him. Let him do what he wishes. I shall tell the Lions he is angry with me, and by the end of the month I shall be far from here. I will not have my Guild Degree, or employment. I shall wear a commonblood coat.

  But no sooner had she come about the corner bluff than she saw Chalice standing outside the lighthouse with a stack of pigeon crates, each one bearing the seal of the Lyonne Investigatory Order.

  20

  Arden had expected that she would break

  Arden had expected that she would break to Chalice the news of her recruitment into the Order with some delicacy, perhaps over the last of their fig-brandy, because Chalice in her cups was infinitely more agreeable than Chalice in her normal day-to-day. Instead, the admission came with a box of messenger pigeons dumped outside her door.

  Each bird was banded about the leg with a metal ring. Engraved on each, a tangle of thorns entangling an open rose.

  Now Chalice knew Arden’s shameful secret.

  ‘Not every day one is gifted Clay Tipplers owned by Lions,’ Chalice said peevishly as Arden approached. She stuck her finger in through the wire, and a yellow beak pecked her. ‘Bad-tempered as the bloody delivery driver who dropped them off.’ She withdrew her finger. ‘I must wonder when I was to be included in this little complication of yours. Lions. Here’s me thinking you were just another Seamaster’s Guild ingenue.’

  ‘Please understand, I didn’t want you to worry, Chalice. You’d have been in a state if I told you what was really going on.’

  ‘What was going on?’ She turned to Arden, eyes narrowed, judging every mud-splattered, salt-encrusted, kiss-abraded inch of her. ‘What the devil have you been up to, Lightmistress? Don’t think I didn’t see you coming in on Mr Riven’s black boat either.’

  Without the gentle preamble she would have preferred, Arden was forced to tell Chalice about her father’s suspicions, the work instruction she should never have had, and the constant fear that one day her true function would be revealed.

  The admission of Mr Lindsay’s appearance as a Lyonne Order agent and her subsequent instruction to befriend Mr Riven raised only an eyebrow. Chalice was truly unflappable, and for that Arden loved her.

  The kiss, however, Arden left out.

  Chalice, she suspected, already deduced that such a thing had happened between her and Mr Riven. Maybe more. The stormbride went to place a teapot on the fire pit, dropped in handfuls of pennyroyal and raspberry leaf along with the tea leaves.

  ‘So, you rescued our intimidating neighbour on the words of your Order handler,’ Chalice said, stirring the concoction. ‘Had a deep and meaningful talk on the duties of a husband. Well then. The puppet master gathers his strings.’

  ‘The Lion made me think I had a choice. A mendacious choice. Either I left Mr Riven to his fate, in which case he might have died, or I went and rescued him and established some sort of connection.’

  ‘And did you establish a connection?’ Chalice asked, stirring her witches’ brew so hard it sloshed into the fire.’

  ‘Of course I did,’ Arden sighed. ‘They knew my weaknesses, that I wouldn’t let Mr Riven come to harm. They’d have lost their only tenuous link with Bellis Harr … Riven, I mean. Their runaway sanguinem, taunting them from across the waves.’

  Chalice gave her a sideways eye, as if to say: come on now. You dropped her marriage name on purpose.

  ‘That’s not the kind of connection I’m talking about. Arden, talk to me. How close did you come to that man?’

  Arden looked at Chalice’s angry face and down at the minty brew so astringent it made her throat sting. ‘Chalice why are you making a pennyroyal tea?’

  ‘Did you and him …?’

  ‘No, goodness gracious. No! He’s married, and he loves his wife. I am merely his neighbour.’

  Chalice stopped stirring the tea and gave a relieved exhale at the abortifacient mixture. ‘Indeed. At least it hasn’t been a night of entirely bad choices. One wouldn’t want the daughter of Alasdair Harrow getting upset at you. If she’s anything like him, she would be a terror.’

  A mutiny stirred in Arden, a resentment towards that loved and perfect woman. ‘If Bellis cared about Jonah, she’d not have sailed away without him,’ Arden sniped. ‘She’s given up her vows, as far as I’m concerned.’

  The stormbride jutted out her chin in preparation for some harsh truths. The words that came were more measured than Chalice probably wanted them to be. ‘Darling, when I said you should think of getting yourself companionship, I in no way considered him. If you’ve ever listened to me in our brief time together, keep your wits about you and your emotions cool.’

  ‘Are you telling me to stay away, Headmistress Quarry?’

  ‘I’m saying, be convivial and neighbourly all you like, but if Lions are involved, you leave Mr Riven deal with his wife alone, do you hear?’

  ‘Goodness. If it’s such an importance that I should promise you, then all right. I shan’t involve myself in his personal matters. He’s really not interested in me … that way.’

 
; Mollified somewhat, Chalice left the tea to brew. Arden later drank some, for the menstrual cramps were due in a few days, and the concoction helped women’s pains.

  In the yellowing light, Chalice prepared the lighthouse’s winding mechanism for Arden’s shift, but did not, as part of her afternoon ritual, go immediately to bed. Instead Chalice began loading her dry-sack with a change of clothes and her travelling coat.

  ‘I forgot to tell you, in all this morning’s strangeness. I have business in town. Mr Sage is harvesting one of his night-flowering herbs for me, and if I’m not around to watch him, he’ll do it all wrong.’

  ‘You’re leaving?’

  ‘Only a night. I’ll take your Fine Breeze across to Vigil and return in the morning, if you can cover the first three hours of my shift.’ She nodded to the empty earthenware cup in Arden’s hands. ‘You are not the only one who gets the noonday demons around here. Perhaps some nightflower will be just the cure.’

  Arden didn’t know why she pained at hearing Chalice would not be around. Chalice always spent the nightshift asleep – it wasn’t as if she would miss the stormbride’s company. The instruments foretold calm weather, no need for the woman to stay.

  And yet, Arden did not want to spend the night-time staring between the Riven compound and the horizon where the Sainted Isles lay. She feared him leaving, and what that meant. Like he’d said, he had not thought much of Bellis until seeing Arden. Now with the memory of a kiss burning his lips, would the night bring urges and pining for the love he’d never consummated? The what might-have-been would crowd his memories. He would board his boat, sail towards the horizon to his woman beyond the waves.

  We cannot force Mr Riven to join his wife, but perhaps you can remind him of what he misses.

  Jealousy was a sin, a terrible sin. Tonight of all nights she needed company and a friendly ear. Even if it was Chalice.

  Fleetingly, Arden debated on telling Chalice to stay, then decided it a mean-spirited request. Was obviously not for the plant-harvesting Arden’s stormbride was spending a night in Vigil. She gave Chalice as benevolent a smile as she could. ‘Enjoy your night hunting mandrakes and night-blooming things.’

  For all her ill timing, Chalice was not ignorant of her Lightmistress’ sorrows. ‘Now are you sure you will be all right? Last night was a trial for you.’

  ‘I will manage well enough. Oh, and I saw Gregor Tallwater doing Harrow muscle work, behind the Black Rosette. Doing it, but not enjoying it. If you cross his path tell him I don’t feel badly towards him for this morning’s unfortunate altercation. It can’t be the best life, working for Mr Harrow.’

  ‘Not much money in grunt enslavement, if it is a Harrow doing the paying,’ Chalice said impishly. ‘At least we can put aside our previous concerns of our shipwrecked foundlings making an illegal run to the Sainted Isles. They’d need more than pittance wages to pay for a boat out past the permanent storm.’

  ‘His children have a better chance of surviving here than they would over there.’

  Chalice darted forward and kissed Arden on the cheek. She smelled of pennyroyal mints and a herbal liquorice: comfort and authority at once. ‘There will be yet a few weeks before the first of the Deepwater festivals, and winter. The ashes and leaves augur well for a fair season, then you can go home to Lyonne. I know this place has been a trial.’

  ‘Made better with you.’

  Arden hugged her stormbride back and let her go.

  Approaching dusk made her maudlin sometimes, and tonight more than most. As she had told Mr Riven, Arden’s mother had been an airship pilot before her death at the sword-hands of Summerland pirates. Arden’s understanding of the climes might not have been a blood talent, but her inherited instincts were strong all the same.

  There was a storm coming. Arden grumbled to herself and tapped the recalcitrant barometric tubes, which had spuriously committed themselves to fine weather right until the entire sky became overcast. Once they begrudgingly gave correct measurements, she went up upon the lamp-room gantry and checked the glass.

  For the first time in years Arden recalled the woman she remembered only in fleeting, sightless moments. A smell of jasmine, a visceral memory of being embraced. Pale blonde hair as soft and billowy as a dandelion flower against her cheek, hair so different from her own. The blurred mother murmured promise of her return, soon, soon.

  And the thick scent that came with her mother’s departure. It’s only a little rain, my darling, only a few little days. Will you be good and wait for me to come back from Vinland? I’ll bring a rubber dolly and diamond ring for my favourite girl.

  It had fallen to Jorgen Beacon to tell Arden, when Lucian was too bound in grief to speak. Her father’s visiting younger brother, with his thin, smudged face, moustache so spiky and severe.

  Your mother has gone, girl. She will never come home.

  The high sea licked over the wooden pier as Arden watched Fine Breeze sail away into the aged day. Her instincts for trouble were not Beacon-born. They flitted in and out of her awareness, never quite real, but never completely absent. The cold wind chased her skirts, pressed against her bones like a great friendly animal.

  ‘Calm yourself, Arden Beacon,’ Arden said to herself. ‘It is only the weather, and the changing seasons.’

  She retired inside the lighthouse and prepared her first watch of the evening. Her spyglass showed no flags upon the Vigil message pole, or messages telegraphed in light from the Harbourmistress. There were no flotillas of prospectors, just the lone grey silhouette of a lich-ship, that automatic coffin-vessel forever winding back and forth from the rockblood wells of the Sainted Isles to the refineries of Dead Man’s Bay.

  By sundown a gale came up, and properly so. The fishing boats did not return to harbour, for they would sail north to miss the worst of the storm cell.

  There was, however, Fine Breeze, bobbing gamely through the sleety bluster.

  ‘Chalice,’ she scolded under her breath. ‘It’s nearly dark. What are you coming back for in this wind?’

  Her stormbride would be cold and wet when she got in. Arden went to load up the fire, and put a kettle to boil for tea, muttering her practice rant. How could Chalice be so foolish? If she’d had an argument with Mr Sage on the correct way to pull up a weed by lamplight, then she should have stayed in one of the guest rooms at the tavern. No need for Chalice to make her way back here.

  ‘By the graces of all the devils,’ she called down the tower as the door opened to let the wet occupant in. ‘Chalice, I thought you were more sensible than this.’

  She ran down the stairs with a blanket in one hand, a coldfire lantern in the other. Nearly got to the bottom before a great loom of trouble came over her. She stopped, one foot hovering above the final shadowy landing, watching the light and dark flicker below.

  Deep senses, lantern keeper’s senses, the ones that told of the shift in a current, or the shape in the fog, now told her that it wasn’t Chalice downstairs. Too many people. The lantern-light skipped and swam over the concave walls.

  She turned to run, but too late, for the intruders who had come into the lighthouse had secured a head start. In the snuffling twilight where the lit lamps and the dark warred between each other, she did not see them until one seized her about her legs and pulled her down onto a landing. She fell, mere inches from splitting her head open on the iron stair-rise behind her.

  She thought, I will leap up to my feet, I will kick him, but the caustic smell of ether and the awful nothingness that rose up to greet her were stronger than her will and Arden fell into a whirling, punch-drunken night.

  21

  I just wish you didn’t have to kill them

  ‘… I just wish you didn’t have to kill them. The boy and the woman.’

  ‘Shut up, Sean. Hold the tube steady.’

  ‘Still. Bad luck taints such a sin, even if the Magistrate himself permitted it …’

  ‘Helena, stop that cripple’s tattling, or so help me—’


  Hushed murmurs, imploring. ‘Sean, little brother, it’s fine. We’ll be long gone, oh my babies will forget us and our evil …’

  ‘It’s a sin …’

  A scuffle followed, the sound of a landed punch and a cry in pain.

  Then snuffled sobs, a woman’s careful soothing.

  Arden groaned, and the breath required to make such a sound hurt her. A pain throughout her body, her mouth cottoned, her head whirling still. She tested her arms, and they would not give. The tower was cold, the fire had gone out.

  The woman’s voice again. ‘Leyland … She’s waking up.’

  ‘Hold her arm, it’s hard enough getting the vein.’

  A pain jagged sharp and centred now, in the crook of her arm, which hung over the armrest of Jorgen’s rocking chair. And a face in the centre of her rapidly tunnelling vision, cragged and pale. Leyland Tallwater. He smelled bad, the vinegar sweat of a man in high crisis. She recognized the tight bun and Hillsider features of Helena. The linen bandages that must have been taken from Arden’s kit now bound her tight to the chair. Her heart beat fast in her chest. Blood loss, she thought with an odd clarity. I’m losing too much blood.

  Through the veil of her lashes she saw the needle in her arm, almost black with clots, the metal lying hot and heavy upon her skin as the snake in the Garden of Eden might do, after feasting on the blood of …

  … no, wait, wrong story, why can I not think straight, she thought. Speak to him, Arden. Make him stop.

  ‘Leyland,’ the woman pleaded, ‘this isn’t right. Magistrate Harrow was too insistent. It’s a bad idea. I don’t trust him.’

  He ignored her, and strange again, Arden did not much care, for a lassitude had filled her, a warmth rising and rising, her eyesight almost vignetted in black clouds, a beautiful way to die.

  Lucian Beacon appeared from the gloom of her past, comforting his young daughter when she first saw a horse put to sleep on the Cotton Wharf after a crane had snapped and broken the poor creature’s legs. Her father had let Arden press her face into his chest, smell of clove-spice and lantern oil while she heard the pitiful whinnying turn to snuffles and silence.