The Changer's Key

by Kent Davis

  “How is your breakfast, milady?” Avid asked.

  “Somewhere between the refuse pit and sweaty rat cakes.” That got a chuckle from the room. Ruby Maxim Two: “Always Mock the Vittles.”

  Wake smiled as well, nodding at the white-haired girl, Ruby’s climbing partner. “Keep a watch out for Never. She has brains to burn and will never show you her full hand.”

  Ruby tipped an invisible cap to the girl, who stared back, expressionless. And creepy. “I’ll remember.”

  Never jumped up on her bench. “See that you do!” The cadets about her stomped their feet in appreciation, none more energetic than the white-haired boy sitting next to her, the one who had raced Avid on the ropes. Her brother?

  Avid looked her over. “So where did you come from? They haven’t told us anything about you, but that was some entrance yesterday. Tinker’s carriage with the lord captain?”

  “That’s not how everyone arrives?” That got another laugh from the hall, but not from Avid.

  “Hardly.”

  Too much bravado. This was the queen, and she wouldn’t be upstaged in her own castle. Ruby toned it down. Humble. That’s what this girl wants, for me to scrape and for her to be the one who shines. Ruby dropped her eyes to the table, then brought them up, stark. “What’s past is past. They brought me here to train. That’s all I want to do.” She couldn’t exactly say, “I want to discover the secret forged into my blood by my grandmaster alchemyst mother, who then abandoned me, and oh, by the way, stumble on how to activate some kind of hidden ability to change my very shape,” now could she?

  Avid nodded. “I saw you out there today.”

  “And?”

  Avid smiled. “I’ve seen worse days.”

  Ruby ventured a small smile back.

  “What happened to your parents?”

  Was this about her father? Her stomach tightened.

  Or her mother? Marise Fermat had left Ruby far behind when she was a baby, but not before branding her with something that so many people wanted: Wisdom Rool, the Tinkers, the Royal Navy, and for all she knew the high mandarin of Cathay. Was this girl having at her? Ruby cast a quick eye about the room, and saw nothing but interest. They wanted to know her. She took in their faces: plain lines, hard living. A regular girl, then, that’s who she needed to be. “My parents are fine, as far as I know. Father a second mate, mother a milliner.” Milliner sounded good. “Said good-bye a few weeks ago. They miss me, I hope. What about you?”

  Avid Wake’s face closed like a jailhouse door.

  She grabbed Ruby by the collar, two cadets swooping in to help her, and before Ruby could even protest, they were back in the yard.

  The fist tore into Ruby’s cheek. A light flashed somewhere, and she hit the ground. She blinked the cobwebs away, and a circle of plain gray boots came into focus. Just past her nose, red blood spattered the white of the yard. Hers.

  Ruby’s pulse pounded in her head, and the mix of snow and mud stung her face. What had she said? What had she done? The mud had no answer for her.

  “Get up,” said Avid. “Get up, girl.” She kicked Ruby right in the small of the back. Pain lit her body.

  Gwath would forgive her for playing possum. So would her father. Cram would urge her to stay down. Athena might actually jump into the fray, running to her defense.

  None of them were here.

  Ruby Maxim Three: “They Feed on Weakness.” Somehow she made her way to standing. Surrounded by watching cadets, the tall girl was circling her fists.

  Ruby spit out more red. “You’ll need more than that to lay me out.”

  Turns out Avid had more.

  At some point it stopped.

  Unknown hands pulled Avid away, but no one reached out to Ruby. She fought her way to her knees in the chill calf-deep mud of the courtyard. The circle of cadets hung back, as if she were carrying some manner of plague.

  Ward Cole half carried her back to her room. A boy about her age sat on her bunk, restless olive eyes skittering about. A clean linen bandage lay unrolled before him.

  “Hale here will fix you up,” Cole said. He squatted on the balls of his feet, back against the wall. The boy ran a cloth over a cut above her eye.

  Ruby stifled a curse.

  “I am sorry,” the boy said. “It must be cleaned.”

  “What are you using on that cloth, acid?”

  “Don’t worry, Teach,” said Cole. “Everyone fights when they first get here. It will hash itself out. You fought well today.”

  “Really?”

  “No, not really.” He laughed. “But a fight you walk away from is a fight well fought. Or crawl away from. You didn’t quit. That is something.”

  It hurt her pride to ask, “Why did no one stop it?” Why did no one pull her off me?

  Cole’s smile turned rueful. “The wards try to stay apart from cadet matters. We find it more useful to let these things work themselves out.”

  “Is it useful to allow someone to be murdered by a curly-headed giraffe?”

  His face went still. “Are you deceased, Cadet?”

  The swiftness of the change caught her flat-footed. “No. No, Ward.”

  “Then ‘murder’ doesn’t really fit, now does it?”

  “No. But I still don’t understand why she came after me. We were talking about our parents—”

  Cole started. “Your parents?”

  “Yes. She asked about them, and when I told her who they were and what they were doing now, she snapped.”

  Cole let out a breath. “Ruby Teach, we are orphans.”

  “What, the Reeve?”

  “Every last one of us.”

  They sat in silence as the boy, Hale, rubbed something cool that smelled like pine on her swollen knuckles. He cleared his throat as he moved to her back. “I need to pull up your shirt, please.” He was up close, but his voice stayed far away, as if it were watching everything happening from out in the hall. As he pulled up the shirt about her waist, he gasped. Light fingers probed the place where she had been kicked, and Ruby choked off a moan, twisting. The twist set off a whole cannonade of other pains in her back and legs, until she could do nothing but stay as still as possible.

  “Ward.” Hale backed into Ruby’s view, face concerned.

  Ruby did not hear Cole rise, but his hand was suddenly on her shoulder. “Teach, I’m going to help you. It may cause you some pain.”

  “And that is different from now how?” she gritted through her teeth.

  Hale hustled over to the far corner of the cell, as if to avoid a snake. Caution warred with keen interest across his features.

  “Hold on, Ruby,” Cole said from behind her.

  What was he going to do? Whatever it might be, Ruby gripped the bedframe in her fist for dear life. Just in time.

  At first, she thought it was hands on her back. Cole’s hands. But no, it was mud. Cool, liquid, gummy mud. On her back. In her back. It did hurt, but the hurt came with something else. Ease.

  The pain wasn’t gone, but it had changed. She was sore, sure, but she could move. She used her newfound flexibility to turn on the bed to face him. He was squatting again, hands held palm up.

  Ruby frowned. “What did you do to me?”

  Cole was sweating as if he had run from Charles Town. “We call them Works. They are the core of being a reeve.”

  Before she knew it, her head was on the pillow. She tried to form a question, but her mouth just said, “Wuuuuuu?”

  Cole tucked the blanket around her shoulders. “No more questions tonight. The healing is taking your strength, too. You’ve had quite a day. Tomorrow, be certain that you will discover more, and that more will be asked of you.”

  She had a smart reply primed, but she was asleep before she could say it.

  CHAPTER 7

  FARNSWORTH: I’ll be deviled! Without your mask you are the spitting image of Lady Catherine!

  CATHERINE: I am Catherine, you daft ninny. I have taken a disguise so that I may steal t
he heart of Gerald Bumblebuffle. Now, boost me up this wall.

  FARNSWORTH: As you say, my lady. If I may offer my opinion of that young “gentleman”?

  CATHERINE: You may not.

  FARNSWORTH: As you say. Boosting.

  —Marion Coatesworth-Hay, A Game of Vials and Vapors, Act I, sc. iii

  The captain and Henry waited for them at the bottom of the hill. Cram, breath steaming, slogged up the path behind Lady Athena. He rounded a switchback to find her standing in front of a little wooden sign, painted red with writing.

  Cram was not much for letters. “What’s it say?”

  Athena read, “All who cross this line shall beware. You leave your safety behind.”

  “Ah, well then.” Cram turned around and headed back down the trail.

  “Cram, stop,” Athena said.

  “You heard the sign there,” Cram said. “Beware the line and we leave our safety. Just ’cause the captain claims this woman as an old mate don’t mean nothing up here in the heights. Mam always says, ‘If you jump down the chimney, don’t be moaning if your nethers get burned.’”

  “Fine. Let us stay out of the fire. Let’s go back to the inn, shall we, and sit about the hearth telling stories of Ruby Teach and how we wish we had had the courage to walk up a Providence-forsaken path.” She turned and trudged on up the trail.

  Down below, the captain had wheeled the handcart about so the professor, his busted leg sticking out at an angle, could see. The tall boy stared up the hill at Cram, eyes full of woe. No doubt in Cram’s noggin that even on his crutches the professor would never have been able to make it even halfway up. The captain had stayed with him for protection.

  The little crossroads outside the town of Harris’s Ferry sat empty save those two, no farmers or trappers to be seen. It was a chilly gray morning, and the fallen leaves smelled of rot. The town itself was abandoned, two buildings smoldering in the morning, both with signs in front of them. Lady Athena had read them aloud. BACK TO FRANCE WITH YOU, OR UP IN SMOKE WITH YOU.

  “Burning out foreigners,” Teach had said. “Bad business.” The captain had talked them past a small barricade across the road, and once they had even pulled the professor’s handcart into a pond to hide in a stand of cattails as a roaming band of bravos had marched past, muskets and masks and hard looks. The countryside was rising. But why? And for whom? Among them his companions had a passel of sense, and none of them had been able to answer. Cram shook his head. They had other fat to fry.

  He sighed and turned himself back around, struggling to catch up with Athena, who was making good time up a devil of a steep trail. The trees loomed in like tight shelves in a larder.

  Was the trail yet more steep? “Lady A.?”

  She turned, impatient as ever. “Yes, Cram?”

  Cram stopped next to her in a little clearing and put his hands on his knees. “A moment for my bellows, if you might? This trail is tolerable sheer.”

  Athena Boyle wiped the sweat from her face with a silk handkerchief. Her waistcoat and topcoat were free of the stains and tears that marked the rest of their duds after months on the hunt. Cram was proud of that. It had taken every ounce of ingenuity and gumption he had to make it so. Not to mention professor-level experimentation with cleaning substitutes. Who knew that goat’s milk could make leather just that shade of ivory? And it were best not to speak of the various cleansing uses of crushed slug. No matter. Athena looked every inch the wealthy young gentleman, and that was just how Cram preferred it.

  “I’ve caught glimpses of a dwelling farther up the hill, I think. Just a bit farther, and we should be able to get a better look.”

  “And this woman will guide us to the place in the professor’s journal?”

  “Supposedly.”

  Cram sat. And he thought. Something still nagged at him. “But ain’t we going away from the Ferret?”

  Athena pressed her lips together. “Must I go over this again?”

  “Yes, please.”

  She gave him a Look and ticked off on her fingers. “None of our contacts in Philadelphi can find Ruby. We don’t even know if she is in the colonies anymore. Collins’s mentor is imprisoned in his own underground tower”—she nodded back down the trail—“and our good captain knows of only one other person who may be able to help us pick up Ruby’s trail. His wife.”

  “His wife who left him and his daughter when Ruby was a baby?”

  Athena nodded. “Yes.”

  “Who is one of the more powerful alchemysts on this continent?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who no one has seen in thirteen years?”

  “Yes.”

  “How we going to find her?”

  “The journal and the guide.”

  “The journal and the guide will take us to her?”

  “If Henry Collins can decipher the rest of it, he believes so.”

  “And then what?”

  Lady Athena shook her head, disbelieving. “And then we all pray she is in a mood to help us find Ruby.” She cinched her hat back onto her head. “Better now, Cram?”

  He smiled. It was nice to be back to the two of them, even if it took scaling a mountain. The lady and the professor still only talked if they had to, and when they did, it was all pins and stickers. And the captain, when he thought no one was watching, had the look of a sinking ship. This whole journey felt to Cram like a rickety old tinker’s carriage: holes in the floor, crank wheel smoking, and all four wheels fixing to fall clear off. All he could do was keep tightening, keep cinching, and keep smiling and hope that they got somewhere soon.

  He jumped up. “I am indeed better, milady. Right as rain. Let us mosey.”

  “Well, come on then.” Lady Athena started back up the hill, grabbing a tree trunk to pull herself over a shelf of mossy rock.

  She swung around the tree, out of sight, and then there was a strange sound, like something in the brush rushing at her. She yelped, “Cram!”

  Cram scrambled over a rock to get a better view.

  Athena’s hat had come off. She hung upside down in front of him, swinging back and forth by her ankles, rope rising into the trees. Cram split to the side of the path to see if he could help her down.

  “Wait, Cram!”

  Something struck Cram’s feet, yanking them out from under him. Lady A. whirled in front of him and then back and forth like a pendulum. He now was hanging upside down as well, and twirling to boot. Hunting snares, he reckoned.

  On the path to a guide’s house.

  Should have seen that coming.

  The ropes disappeared up into the trees. The furious face of Lady Athena rotated into view and then disappeared again. Then reappeared.

  Athena cursed. “Do you have a knife?”

  She disappeared.

  He shook his head, then realized she couldn’t see him. “No,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “The captain needed it for his cheese this morning.”

  “So you left your knife with him?”

  “Well, I didn’t surmise I was going to need it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, with your sword and the professor’s flippity-flips at hand, I haven’t drawn that thing in anger in a month.”

  “Well, is it at all possible that it might be useful at this moment?” Athena said.

  “It might indeed,” Cram admitted. “What about your sword?”

  She pointed to where it lay just out of reach, glittering in the wintry sun.

  “Hard cheese that it fell out over there. Just inches from your grasp. Worst of luck really.”

  “Yes.” Athena turned back into view, and from the face she was wearing, he was right pleased when she spun back out of sight.

  This was not good. “What now? If we keep swinging like this, I might lose my breakfast, and I’m a mite hungry already, so that would make things doubly—”

  “Cram . . .”

  “Yes, milord.” It was important that Cram call her mi
lord, in public, and that was right fine with him, because deciding between sir and lady had taken up far too much of his very valuable time.

  The birds started tweeting, and their swinging slowed until it was more hanging. That’s when the little voice snuck into his ear.

  “Are you meat?” it asked.

  He craned his head about. The little voice, like a piccolo, belonged to a boy, all in buckskin. He wore a beaver head hood, so it looked as if the beaver were chomping his noggin from behind.

  “No, young sir, we are certainly not meat,” said Cram.

  The boy stared for a moment and then turned and ran back up the hill as if he had been shot from a musket.

  “Well done,” Athena said.

  “I had to say something.”

  “‘Not meat’ is most decidedly a solid stance.”

  “But what if you are meat?” another voice asked.

  Cram was pleased that his yelp was not very loud. The boy was back, and standing next to him, leaning on a spear, was a woman. She was dressed the same as the boy, leather breeches and knee-length hunting shirt, with a wide leather belt around her waist. She had a similar hood to the boy’s, but this one was a white wolf’s head, and it was propped back over the top of her dun-brown hair. Her skin was that outdoor-seasoned leather that marked her somewhat between five and thirty years older than Cram. The hand on the spear was layered with scars, animal ones, not the kind you get from cooking. She looked positively iron.

  “I’m a mite gamey,” Cram offered, “and my companion”—he shrugged his shoulder at Athena—“is positively stringy.”

  The woman barked a laugh. “I like you,” she said. “We might eat you last.” The little boy licked his lips.

  “Madam,” Athena began.

  “Madam!” The woman hooted. “Madam. Do you see a ‘madam’ anywhere around here, Cubbins?”

  The boy shook his head solemnly and then poked Athena in the shoulder with his stick. She began to sway slightly.

  “Very well then,” Athena said. “My name is Lord Athen Boyle. A pleasure to meet you. This is my servant, Cram. We have been sent to secure an audience with you for our captain, Wayland Teach. Would you be so kind as to eat us, or let us down, as you choose, but by all means let us get on with this kerfuffle.”