Of Steel and Steam

by Pauline Creeden et al.

I pulled the ribbon free from the parcel, then lazily tore at the paper.

  The watch-globe buzzed above my head, eager to catch a glimpse of my next clue, but I didn’t share its interest.

  Already, I was exhausted and all I could get excited about was the idea of locking myself away in my workshop and warm baths in the attic of my family’s cottage.

  But then, I squinted down at the box and joy speared through me.

  In the parcel, my glasses winked up at me from a pile of pale blue tissue paper, gleaming like new.

  I was so quick to snatch them that the parcel wobbled on my lap and slid onto the bench.

  I shoved the glasses onto my face, a dreamy smile fast taking root on my lips. All those times I’d wished for my sight back, now I had it.

  I slumped on the bench and shut my eyes for a peaceful moment. Relishing a small victory.

  I pulled the parcel back onto my lap and peeled away a layer of crisp paper.

  I found myself staring at … myself.

  My reflection stared back at me. The glossy sheen of my black-rimmed glasses, the overcast grey of my weary eyes, and the chapped wrinkle of my lips, all encased in a mop of curls.

  Tucked in the box was a shard of mirror, the size of my callused middle finger. I gingerly moved it to the side, careful not to cut myself on my reflection, and slid out the final piece of the parcel.

  A roll of parchment.

  Chapter 13

  I ran my thumb over the crunchy paper. Over one word in particular.

  Fans.

  It took a few moments for it to sink in.

  One or two people in Spades showing interest in me was something I could have accepted. But ‘fans across Spades’ suggested that more than a few.

  That I couldn’t understand.

  I looked up with a frown.

  My shadow, the watch-globe hovered above me, revealing the gifts to all of the audience.

  I let myself imagine the audience, playing alongside me, calling out their ideas of where the clue could lead to, what it could mean. Something swelled in my chest and twisted at the same time.

  With them watching, pressure thickened inside of me. It clogged my windpipe, dizzied my head. Among all the ordinary players, a chunk of the audience had chosen me.

  I turned my frown down at the parcel, if only to hide my confusion from the watch-globe.

  But I couldn’t spend the rest of the sun’s light on that bench pondering the sanity of my ... fans. Soon, I had to meet Night at the court who would hopefully help me figure out the mirror-shard’s meaning, and I wasn’t quite finished with the circus yet.

  The row of stalls opposite me wasn’t as alluring as the hat-shaped kiosks, but I took that as what it would mean in Hearts. Those stalls were cheaper.

  The sparkling kiosks lured players in and did what Night had said about the carriages. Flushed them of their buttons. But the grim, wooden stalls down the windy dirt path stunk of cheap karvka and secrets.

  I wasn’t one to splurge, and I was in dire need of new stockings and maybe some trousers.

  Leaving the box on the bench, I stuffed the mirror shard and letter into my skirt pocket. I took the narrow path of dingier stalls and seedier merchants.

  Keeping a safe distance, I grazed over the merchandise.

  One man in a shiny skin-tight unitard made popcorn by tossing kernels in the air and clapping his hands at the right moment. Next to his stall stood a sparkling red boutique where a cyclops-woman trimmed her own nose hair. Her sign read, ‘HAIR CUTS, ANYWHERE.’

  Halfway down the path, I found a cheap fabric stall that sold satin instead of silk and coarse straw-like jackets in place of cotton.

  For three small buttons, I bought a sky-blue tunic with wide sleeves, a pair of opaque tights and a small sling bag to hold my clues.

  As I stuffed my small collection of clues and new clothes into the black bag, a shadow stretched over me and stole all the sunlight. My eyes strained to adjust to the sudden darkness, and I glanced over at my shoulder.

  Paris, the masked thief, stood behind me, one hand in his pocket, the other rolling a cherry over the tips of his slender fingers.

  “You again,” I muttered and turned back to the small bag. I barely managed to zip it shut. “Don’t you have animals to turn into, or some hats to steal?”

  The round-bellied vendor gasped and rounded on his assortment of hand-knitted hats, shielding them from Paris.

  “Was I not clear about my bet?” Paris moved around me, then leaned on the edge of the kiosk, his quartz eyes sucking me in. “How do you expect to win if you spend all your buttons on clothes?”

  “I need them,” I said huffily. “And you’re not my mother, so don’t tell me how to spend my buttons.”

  “Oh, that’s not fair. It would be a kindness if I told you not to buy anything from that side of the stall.”

  He gestured to a rack of strange blue jackets and trousers, made from a material I couldn’t place.

  “Denim,” he added. “Ghastly stuff from another world.”

  I scrutinised him from the corner of my narrowed eyes.

  Paris bit down on the glossy cherry, baring his sharp white teeth, his lips quirked into a grin.

  As much as I tried, I couldn’t tear my gaze from his mouth, not even as he ran his tongue over his reddened lips to lick away the cherry blood.

  I cleared my throat and busied myself with the bag.

  “What other world?” I asked to distract from my pink cheeks.

  “One of many.” His tone was flippant. “Most of the tunnels leading there have collapsed. The last time we had a visitor from that world, it didn’t turn out so well.”

  Paris reached out for my hair.

  I flinched, but not before he drew his hand back with a piece of straw pinched between his fingers.

  Mortified, I ran my fingers through the tangled knots. I let the straw drift to the packed dirt at my feet, and slung the bag over my shoulder.

  I asked, “What happened?”

  “It was long before the Hatterthon,” he said. “Did you know your hair sometimes looks peach?”

  “I—what?” I touched my fingers to my hair. “Oh, it only happens when it’s really sunny out.”

  “Hm.” Paris flicked the cherry pip across the path. “If you’re ever short on career options, weather teller would do nicely. Simply walk by people’s houses and brandish your hair for the latest forecast.”

  “Peach, wear a hat.” I stepped back from him and his charming smile. “Pale, cloudy out.”

  Paris leaned closer, closing the small distance I’d put between us. He ran his knuckle over the brittle ends of my hair, and my lungs tightened.

  “Frizzed,” he said roughly, “a storm is coming.”

  My fingers clenched around the bag resting at my hip.

  Something about the way he said it, the delicate and dangerous roll of storm over Paris’ sharp tongue, made me think there was more to what he said. A hint that he couldn’t give with the audience buzzing right above us.

  I bit down on the inside of my cheeks and nodded. “Nice chat,” I said. “But the game and all…”

  I didn’t hang around to see his reaction.

  The cringe that came after my fumbled exit was too strong, and in a blink, the shame spread over my prickled skin and down my tense legs. I had more embarrassment than hope, so I bustled away until I reached the end of the stalls.

  When I looked back, Paris was gone.

  I choked on a heavy breath of relief and swung up my gaze to the lonely looking kiosk.

  A tabby cat lounged on top of a plain grey stall.

  Its floppy woollen hat was so tiny that I first thought it was a third ear. With my glasses planted firmly on my face, I could make out the letters on the stall’s sign: ‘TWO BUTTONS FOR TUNE.’

  I could almost hear Night’s commanding voice, ‘Don’t waste buttons.’

  But how often did one get to see a cat play a tune?

  I hesitated
a beat before I dropped two buttons on the stall. The cat shrieked at the clatter and scrambled back, as though the buttons had stung him.

  “Oh, are you all right?” I crouched down to study the shuddering cat. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

  Its golden glare shone with indignation as it settled back down on the stool. Huffing, the tabby cat crossed its fluffy arms overs its big, bloated belly.

  “What use does a cat have for buttons?” he demanded. “How can I use something as absurd as buttons!”

  I pointed to the sign below. “It’s the price you set. ‘Two buttons for tune’.”

  “Is it?”

  Tabby lifted his bottom in the air and leaned over the edge of the stall. He eyed the sign upside-down.

  “It would help if I could read.” He drew back to the stool, crossed his legs, then rested his paws on his knees. “Fine. Do you have any buttons that taste like cream? Milk will do, too, though I have a craving for pasteurised milk.” He gestured to his bloated belly. “Unpasteurised is tasty enough, but I don’t think it worth all the litter-box bother.”

  I dug through the buttons I had left. “Sorry, I only have this.” I pulled a white button from the small bag and handed it to Tabby. “It’s the colour of milk. Best I can do.”

  Tabby plucked the button from my pinched fingers. He gnawed on it a while, then dunked it into his cup of whipped cream.

  “Payment accepted.” Tabby stirred the cup of cream with his claw. “Would you like fortune by chance, warnings by colour, or truth by blood?”

  After I returned the unwanted buttons to the pouch, I gave the sign another once over.

  Ohhh.

  Fortune, the sign was meant to read. Not ‘for tune’.

  “Um,” I hesitated, rinsing my gaze over the gadgets on the table.

  A black box sat to the far right, swathed in a dark velvet throw with a hole cut into it. I imagined I would have to stick my hand into the hole and pull something out.

  A coloured board loomed behind Tabby, jagged like an unfinished jigsaw puzzle. But the instrument to my left intrigued me most.

  A golden funnel stuck out from the middle of five dishes, each dish etched with names. Most of them I didn’t recognise. Roman, Aleksandra, Edaline, and etched into the small coal dish was the name Draco.

  “It means ‘dragon of shadows’ in the old tongue,” Tabby piped in, tapping his claw on the edge of the glittering black dish.

  My lips thinned as I gave a disinterested nod.

  Draco’s dish wasn’t the one to capture my attention. It was the final and largest one—the one whose engraved name glared up at me with a wretched reminder of my home.

  The Queen of Hearts.

  Running my fingers down the golden tubes above the dishes, I said, “This one.”

  Tabby dragged himself onto the stall and withdrew a pointed needle-sword from the golden tube.

  I tensed. “What’s that for?”

  “To prick your tongue, of course.” Tabby looked at me as though I were a fool. “What better place to find the truth than behind the lies we tell?”

  I drew a deep breath, then hesitantly stuck out my tongue. My eyelashes fluttered and I braced as the needle jabbed into my tongue. But there was no pain.

  And when Tabby tapped the needle on the tube, it wasn’t blood that rolled from it. It was black beads of shadows and whispers.

  I shuddered.

  Tabby’s bright yellow eyes and seedy smile didn’t ease me either.

  Perhaps it was just the set of his mouth but it almost looked as though he was sneering. Not a nice, sweet smile like the ones Marybelle gave me whenever I cut myself sparring, or like the tight smiles Lock would force after I beat him in a fight. It was a cryptic smile of things to come—of secrets Tabby knew and waited for me to learn.

  “What is your name?” he asked.

  Cloudy black droplets trickled through the tube, too slowly for my wearing patience. I drummed my fingers on the stall table.

  “Shoshanna White,” I droned. More than anything else in the game, I was asked my name. Was there a stall, I wondered, that would paint my name over my forehead for me? “I prefer Rose,” I added.

  “White rose so bare,” said Tabby.

  “Fair,” I said. “The poem is ‘Take my heart if you dare, My white rose so fair’.”

  Tabby cocked his head to the side and blinked at me. “There’s a poem?”

  The drop of black cloud hit a dish, Draco’s dish, and I felt it.

  The moment it slapped to the coal, a jolt struck through my bones, so hard that I jerked forward and smacked onto the table. Nausea washed down my throat, the kind that came from surges of torment.

  I’d felt that nausea once before, when I’d learned of Holly’s death.

  I slumped on the table, willing the burn of my throat to be banished. “What was that?”

  “The price for peeking through the Sister’s curtains,” said Tabby.

  He studied Draco’s dish for a while before he grumbled to himself. When his yellow eyes touched back to my pained ones, I caught sight of pity behind the sharp yellow.

  “You lost the one most precious to you,” he said. “What took her will take you too.”

  Nausea slipped away, pushed out by the sudden iciness that filled me, from the frost in my gaze to the icicles in my thrumming heart.

  “Are you sure that’s what it says?” I looked at the coal dish. To me, it looked like three murky black dots, hard against the glittering of the dish. “You could be misreading it.”

  “Fate is ambivalent and fluid,” said Tabby. “When I consider fate, my mind travels to streams and rivers. They are there, they have carved their place into the world, they will eternally exist. But they move. They are never still, never set.” Tabby placed his paw on my hand. “I hope that brings you comfort, Bare Rose.”

  It didn’t.

  I slipped on a calm, unfazed expression for the watch-globe above, but every muscle in my fatigued body wanted to run.

  “Thank you, Tabby.”

  Before I could leave, Tabby hooked his claw into the sleeve of my blouse. “If you make it far enough to see my cousin, you might want to find another currency. Cheshire certainly won’t like buttons, no matter how white.”

  “Cream, then?”

  Tabby drew back to his seat. “Lactose intolerant, not that he’ll admit it. He makes himself sick with over-indulgence. Might I suggest a nice scratch behind the ear, or a biscuit even?”

  I gave a brisk nod.

  “And remember your fortune,” said Tabby. “Fate, while written, is never set. It can be avoided, should you make the right choices. But still, down the river you will go—just watch out for the rocks.”

  Chapter 14

  I looked back at the circus with a longing gaze before I braved the road on foot. The pouch of buttons was too light after my little splurge, so I kept my fingers curled around the hilt of my dagger and marched past the carriages.

  On foot, I felt it. The isolation of the game.

  Though players bustled all around me, most of them were in pairs or more. I was alone.

  Vulnerable.

  Everyone that hurried by, excited players rushing to follow their leads before nightfall, or a Hatterthon performers collecting rubbish from the shrubs, had my spine as stiff as a stone statue.

  A man in a wide-rimmed black hat kept his head bowed low and shuffled through the vines with a suspicious glance back at me.

  A woman with spiral, yellow hair piled above her head and sheathed in a gown that cut into her waist and spilled out at her hips, barged into my shoulder as she raced uphill. Out of fright, I stumbled back so fast that I tripped over a bush-sized toadstool and landed in a puddle.

  It was all I could do not to race back to the court. But my legs already began to weaken and I wondered if the magic of Spades would turn them into goo. I doubted they could take much more before they collapsed beneath me.

  Skirt sopping wet, and all the heavie
r for it, I forced my legs to carry me further until I could see the night’s looming darkness settle over the court ahead. From this far down the road, the towering court seemed to touch the dusky sky, as if grazing it with mock kisses.

  I was about to begin the trek uphill when I caught sight of a fiery whip cutting through the shadows of the trees. Crimson hair swept to the ground.

  It was Maple, the poorly girl from the tavern. She was hit to the road with a crunch that rippled through the bricks at my feet.

  A wrinkled, wiry-haired man straddled her with surprising agility, and wrapped his hands around her neck.

  Before I could blink, I was belting up the road, dagger in hand. A scream tore through my throat as I tackled the old man off Maple’s squirming body.

  Tangled, we slammed onto the road.

  He was quick to right himself, and scrambled for a rock, but I was quicker.

  I rolled out of the way just as the rock came crashing down. I swung out my legs. They wrapped around his neck, throwing off his balance.

  I leveraged my weight to pounce on him.

  The man snarled up at me, sparse rotten teeth pebbled in his black mouth, and swung out the rock. I reeled back and doubled my grip on the dagger.

  I didn’t hesitate.

  I brought down the dagger, the tip aimed at his chest. But the blade glinted once with the reflection of the watch-globe, and I stilled.

  Breathing hard, I stared down at his twisted face, every bone in my body aching to finish what I started.

  Swine are for slaughter. That’s what Marybelle always told me.

  But the watch-globe changed things. I couldn’t be one of those players the audience saw, the ruthless bloodthirsty contestants who killed their way through the game.

  It wasn’t so different from the tournament in Hearts. One of the reasons I never signed up—I feared what I would become, the ugliness inside of me bared for all of Hearts.

  I spurred back from the rotten toothed man and slashed the blade across his leg. Blood gurgled like his cries, and spilled out from the side of his calf.

  Maiming a dangerous swine would have to do.

  Spidery fingers gripped onto my arm with surprising strength. “Come on,” urged Maple. “Shoshanna, hurry!”