by Beth Cato
The hand stroking the wool of her sleeve gripped it tight instead. Others leaned in, reaching toward her, toward her satchel.
Octavia stood. The motion of the train almost bowled her over. Her calves rocked against the bench to keep her upright.
“I’m terribly sorry, I’m just—” Octavia began.
“I need a healing. My chest . . . it hurts, I can’t breathe—” Lung cancer, bronchioles clogged like autumn leaves in a gutter.
“My foot! It—” was broken in childhood and set poorly. The bones grind together as if to spark a fire.
“I need a medician! I’m sick.” The babe is quickening. The woman—the girl—is too small, too young. She starves, the babe starves. Together they breathe in the coke from the furnaces. Black nodules already stain and harden her lungs.
Octavia’s awareness—the horror of it—almost drove her to the floor. These women called to her, and it was as though their bodies, their woes, opened to her like a book. Octavia knew.
“I can’t. I’m sorry!” Too many in need, too few herbs. Only one of her.
The women gathered around her, hunched against benches for balance, a shabby pack of wolves with snarling lips and desperate eyes. They lunged.
Octavia shoved several back. As she spun around, the stick of her parasol thwacked several more. A nose broke, and klaxons of blood began to wail. Oh Lady. Every train car will be the same. If I jump off—I can’t. I would never find Alonzo again. She kicked someone’s bag aside. An empty space gaped at the back of the room. She kicked away more suitcases as she stumbled that way. Her hand dove into the center of her satchel, to the medician blanket.
Two seconds later, she had the blanket fluffed out. The action surprised the mob. They retreated a few steps and cried out. A honeyflower-woven circle—oval, really—lay flat in the center of the blanket. Octavia threw herself into it, her fingers grazing the golden threads around her.
“Lady!” she cried out.
With an electric snap, the circle flared into existence. The heat of the Lady’s scrutiny flashed against her skin, a stark reminder of the chill in the air. The women dove at her and crashed against the invisible barricade of the circle.
“By Allendia’s ghost!”
“Magic!”
Howls of frustration filled the train car.
The circle of a medician blanket enabled the Lady’s eye to focus on those most in need of healing. For most medicians, that borderline created a sensation akin to walking through a wall of spiderwebs. It helped contain the patient within the circle if they thrashed or convulsed. Octavia, with her unparalleled power, formed something similar to a brick wall. She could cross her circle as she reached for supplies or whatnot, but the patient could not leave until Octavia broke the enchantment.
Octavia cradled her satchel on her lap. Her arms, her body, shivered. Her parasol’s staff gouged into her, but she didn’t move. She stared at the women feet away, listened to their curses, their profanity.
Miss Percival always warned me and the other girls that if we went out in public in our gear, people would riot.
The thought of Miss Percival stung. Her mentor may have sold out Octavia and Mrs. Stout to the Waste, but the woman was still wise. She’d been like a second mother to Octavia for the past ten years. All those nights when the nightmares of her parents’ deaths had plagued her, Miss Percival had been there, her presence a balm. Even in recent years in their medical wards at the front, Miss Percival had always avoided giving burn cases to Octavia except as a last resort.
Now, these women—her own countrywomen—would burn Octavia alive, if they could. They’d shred her apart with their bare fingers.
Frothy spittle spattered against the invisible wall and rolled down as if on glass. Several women pulled out eating knives and stabbed the barricade. Octavia flinched. Metal met nothingness with a sound like a wrench clanging on dense wood.
She had never known anyone to take shelter within a circle like this. Another peculiarity for the list. I can float a body within a circle, and guide it beyond. My blood has grown pampria, a temporary version of the Lady’s Tree, and vines. I can hear the songs of zymes, those microscopic enigmas that make people ill. And now I know the details of a person’s health in greater detail than ever before. She was suddenly so tired. So very tired, and alone.
Lady, watch over Alonzo. Help him to blend in, unlike me. Help us find each other again. Please.
“The circle only starts at the thread, not the edge of the blanket. Look here,” said one of the women. Her hands trembled. At the Look here, Octavia gained insight into her body. The sound was dimmed by the circle, but even so, the stranger’s blood burbled with too much sugar, as if she were a Frengian maple tree ready to be tapped. The nerves in her hands and feet had atrophied, unable to carry tactile sensations back to the brain.
Octavia clenched her eyes shut, as if she could force away the insight.
Knives tugged and sawed at the white edge of the blanket. She felt the motions, but she also knew that they wouldn’t impact the integrity of the circle. Blankets were damaged and frayed in the course of their use, though she had never known anyone to willingly savage one.
It’s spite. Pure spite. Rage wavered through her, hot and cold.
A woman cried out in triumph. “I’ll patch my coat with it! The one bit that will never get dirty.” Others laughed and cheered.
Octavia’s rage dwindled to pity and numbness. They wanted something of her? Fine. At least it could be of use. “The cloth absorbs blood and other matter.” At her voice, the women grew silent. “Use it to clean up injuries. Use it for your monthly. Don’t keep it on open flesh as a bandage, though, or it will absorb too much.”
They murmured at that. “It’s a trick!” cried one. “She’s trying to poison us.”
“No. I’ve heard the same about this enchantment they do. It’s why the cloth glimmers.”
The knives went to work again. Their anger was gone. Now they worked in eager cooperation, like rag weavers gathered to rend cloth. Octavia bowed forward in the oval into a relaxed Al Cala pose. The satchel slid from her lap and rested like a thick log against her belly.
Unbidden, the image of the Tree flared in her mind’s eye. The green branches that extended beyond the clouds as if to support the sky itself. The bark, gnarled, much of it patched in rough lichen. Leaves bobbed and swayed as if to wave in greeting.
The vision of the Tree had been a tremendous comfort since it had first come to her as a teenager. Most medicians experienced it, from her understanding, though it was regarded as a private thing not often discussed. Octavia knew now that this was no mere vision. She saw the Lady as she was, day or night, whatever the weather. Nothing was distinct about the nearby mountains—though they did not have the sharpness of the Pinnacles—or the normal forest that existed like moss at the Lady’s feet. By some magic, this Tree had been hidden in the Waste for centuries, yet somehow the Wasters had found it. When they held Octavia captive, they had tried to bargain for her cooperation by saying they would take her to the Tree. It had to be done by land, she knew, and the trek was hard. Beyond that, the location was a mystery.
Can you show us the way, Lady? It seems everyone is trying to kill us. Can we find refuge beneath your branches?
And if not there, where?
CHAPTER 2
Octavia woke to the rollicking grind of the train’s brakes. The Lady’s warmth lay as a cozy weight over her, like dirt upon roots. She wiped a trail of drool from her mouth as she pushed herself onto her haunches. The circle around her held. She had seen circles stay open for hours during complex operations that relied on doctoring as well as herbs, but certainly not with the healer bound inside. The other women, long since retreated to their benches, began to murmur and stir. They eyed Octavia as they reached for their hats and bags. Their look reminded
her of the vultures that clustered on the edge of a battlefield, waiting for their turn.
Octavia did not anticipate a pleasant disembarkation.
The train screeched to a halt. She dug her elbow against her satchel, readying herself. The rest of the women stood. The door to the train car flung open with a clang. Grabbing hold of the medician blanket, Octavia lunged forward, jumping over the stairs entirely. A surprised conductor fell backward. Incontinence. She landed, ready to run.
Pandemonium drowned her.
Songs, bodies, thousands of them. As many as an army encampment, but all in tight proximity. A stew of humanity, with her senses more attuned than ever before.
She screamed, but even that sound was lost in the cacophony.
She ran, faces blurring around her. Dark suits, dark skins, people, people everywhere. Train whistles blasted like a whisper against the needs of bodies. Starvation gout disease pox infection syphilis double amputation typhoid pregnancy migraine. She ran, she shoved, she found a wall of glimmering white tile. A door. She opened it. She threw herself inside. A hallway, the lights electric. She staggered another twenty feet until she collapsed, heaving for breath, heaving from terror. The songs still burbled close by, like ocean waves hidden behind a dune.
“Lady, what is happening to me?”
She pulled the blanket from beneath her arm and pressed it to her face. The cloth absorbed her sobs as she rocked for a minute. Enough of this. I need to find out where I am. Find Alonzo.
Up the hall she found a map painted on the white wall: TAMARAN TERMINAL. Colored lines depicted a massive facility of multiple floors and several dozen tracks. The place could easily hold tens of thousands of people—no wonder she had been overwhelmed. Even at her normal sensitivity, this place would have left her dazed and desirous of a quick retreat.
How am I to find Alonzo amidst these crowds? And how am I to cope with the noise of all these diagnoses?
The map showed several access hallways, like the one she was in, but she could not avoid the city itself. The terminal was located at city center, at the plaza. Even as a newcomer to Tamarania, she knew of the plaza.
The southern nations were a cluster of twelve city-states. Tamarania possessed the largest area by far, though its principal city occupied only the tip at the continent’s end. The other city-states overflowed islands interconnected by bridges, naval vessels, and airships. The plaza was the hub of Tamarania, and of all the southern nations. Millions of people were said to live in the immediate environs.
Millions. My brain will explode.
Octavia had heard millions of living beings before—microscopic zymes—when the Lady’s magic had enhanced her hearing so she could diagnose the Wasters’ water contamination. People were so much bigger and more complex, there was no comparison.
If the Lady can enhance my hearing, maybe she can decrease it. Actually—she did. In the train car, I barely heard the women’s songs once I was in the circle. The magic filtered it.
Frowning, she fluffed out the medician blanket. It looked ghastly with an entire long edge hacked away. She had not properly disengaged the circle before she fled and she still felt the inherent heat of the Lady’s presence. “I’m sorry,” she murmured. While she’d been in training, forgetting to disengage a circle was a grave offense—the sort that earned a hundred lines and a week of doubled manure-shoveling duty. “But I do still require your attention.”
She delved into her satchel to find her headband. The white cloth bore a hand-stitched emblem of the Lady’s Tree on the front. It sparkled with the same enchantment as the rest of her uniform. Warding the cloth had taken many days of meditation; she hoped that the existing enchantment might make the cloth more receptive. As if I’m one to judge the Lady’s capabilities.
Octavia sat in the circle, headband across her lap. “Lady,” she whispered. At the word, heat stroked her as if she were a cat. “You have opened my eyes and ears in new ways, and now I ask something more of you. I’m too attuned to people. I must be able to walk the city. Please, rest your touch on my headband so that I may cover my ears and dim the songs around me.” She lifted up the band. It grew hot in her grip. She remained that way for several long minutes, breathing through her Al Cala, and didn’t let her hands drop until the cloth began to cool.
She disengaged the circle with murmured gratitude. She secured the headband to cover her ears, the embroidered side upside down and hidden at the nape of her neck. Immediately the background burble of songs vanished. She could have wept with relief as she murmured more thanks, but she didn’t dare linger.
The longer I am hidden away, the harder it will be to find Alonzo.
She wended her way through more passages in an attempt to avoid the public terminal. Rounding a corner, she stopped. A body was sprawled on the floor. Even as Octavia approached, she knew this person was dead. There was no song. Maybe the southern nations are not so different from Caskentia after all.
She stepped closer. The body’s music returned, so thready that it barely penetrated her new headband.
Octavia gasped and dropped to her knees, hands delving into her satchel. What just happened?
“Octavia.” The woman’s head lolled as the name gargled past her lips.
Shock froze her in place. “I—do I know you?”
The cut and shabbiness of the woman’s clothes denoted Caskentian origins, her skin honey in hue. Blank eyes met Octavia’s gaze. “North.” Her jaw bobbed as if she struggled for more words. Frustration flashed across her haggard face.
With that, the music puffed out. She was dead. Again.
“Lady?” Octavia whispered, though she already surmised what had just happened. The Lady had spoken before through people on the brink of life and death—through a boy in Leffen, and through Alonzo when Octavia had saved him with a leaf. She had a sense that a leaf wouldn’t work on this woman now—after all, she was too far gone for even the Lady to utilize as a messenger.
North. Caskentia. What had the Lady tried to say? Octavia stood, shaken.
The entrance of the terminal roared with humanity, but this time she could discern true sounds as well: overlapping voices, footsteps, the clatter of wheels, the rumbles of trains. The songs were like breeze-blown tree branches outside a window, much easier to ignore than the banshee screams they’d been before.
She studied the crowd. It was peculiar to see so many darker skin tones, ranging from deep tan to coal. Tamarans were rare in Caskentia, which was one reason why Alonzo had stood out so much to her. And why he was doomed as a Clockwork Dagger—too unusual, too memorable. Now he would blend in too much for her to find him.
She followed the flow outside to the plaza and froze as elbows and bodies jostled against her.
Night draped over a metropolis set aglow. Before her was an illuminated hexagon easily a half mile in diameter. In the middle was a massive roundabout packed with more cabriolets, automated cycles, and bicycles than she had ever seen in her life. Each side of the hexagon featured a massive building that was blocks long and dozens of floors tall. Tramway tracks stacked around them. Every ten or so floors, another track made a circuit. Bridges spanned the high gaps, the trestles like fine spiderwebs. Beyond the plaza, tower upon tower stretched into the sky.
On the far side of the hexagon sat the ornate palace known as the Warriors’ Arena. It was shorter than all of the surrounding buildings at a mere dozen floors, but no less magnificent. A bright stained-glass dome crowned the gray edifice. Mooring towers lined the long roof; airships bobbed from several. Long, rippling banners advertised the next Arena bout several days away.
Peculiar, how the city-states prided themselves on centuries without war even as they relished the blood sport of Warriors played out in the Arena.
Spotlights waved to and fro like gigantic dogs’ tails made of rays. They beamed over airsh
ips on high, their gasbags adorned with advertisements far too distant for her to fully read from ground level.
Somehow, amidst these thousands of people, Octavia needed to find Alonzo.
As obvious as the Garret household would be to Daggers and Wasters, it also presented the only specific location for her to meet him. Now it was a matter of finding it. With her coat pulled close and satchel snug at her hip, Octavia set off across the plaza.
How can I inquire with any subtlety? She approached a doorman as he stalked a yellow-lit entry between a haberdashery and a cheese shop. The directory sign behind him listed a dozen residence floors, but no occupants by name. There were simply too many.
“Pardon me,” Octavia said, smiling. “I’m to deliver a message to the Garret flat but I’ve lost the address.”
“Shoo, girl. You look like you were dragged behind a lorry.” He motioned her away with both hands.
She bit her lip to contain a retort, but she knew the man was right. Her coat had multiple rips after the train ride, and it barely managed to cover her uniform if she remained standing. If she lingered anywhere for long, she would be jailed as a vagrant.
She looked around, scanning for any clue, any idea. Another airship drifted overhead. From here she could see the ad, the familiar calligraphy and crown logo featuring two fashionable young ladies holding up slender tins.
ROYAL-TEA. A TASTY BALM FOR ANY ILL!
She snarled. A few nearby pedestrians lurched away from her, wide-eyed. That blasted Royal-Tea was everywhere. The Wasters made the concoction by brewing the dried bark of the Lady’s Tree—and they were kidnapping teenage girls from Mercia to fetch the bark. A dangerous task, with the woods full of threems—beasts part equine and part dragon—to act in the Lady’s defense. Ads for Royal-Tea had plastered Caskentia, and each purchase unknowingly funded the war effort of their greatest enemy.
