by Beth Cato
“No. I need to speak to him myself.”
The man stared at her, intending to intimidate. She wasn’t cowed. She glared back, listening beneath the pain. The melody was familiar. She would have known Mrs. Garret after being near Tatiana and Alonzo; there was no way this man would fool her after she had spent so much time with Mrs. Stout, Mathilda, and the babe—and in the clarity of a circle, no less. Rivka’s song revealed her clear connection as well.
“You’re Devin Stout.”
The songs shifted around her. The man’s in anger. The girl’s in anxiety, fear.
“You realize I’ll have to kill you,” he said lightly.
Whatever she had expected of Mrs. Stout’s son, it wasn’t this. “That would make your mother quite cross.”
“That doesn’t take very much. Give her a copper novel and a gin and tonic, and she’ll be better soon enough.”
“She left you notes last week.”
“Ah yes. That she was moving to the southern nations and hauling my sister along. That I should do the same. Never explained why.” The tautness of his skin strained the words.
“I have a message to give you directly from her. It’s in my—” As she shifted to reach into her satchel, he moved as well, fast and sinuous as a snake. Behind her, the girl whimpered.
“I don’t trust easily. Pull it out slowly.” He motioned with a copper-toned Vera .45. Octavia pulled out the cipher and extended it to him between two fingers. He plucked it away and nodded.
“This is from Mother, all right. Girl, put that stove back together. You’re supposed to be running a bakery, not dismantling more damned contraptions.”
“I needed to open it up. There was a clog, and then I found—”
“Clean it up,” he snapped. He held the note to the dim light and squinted, and then he began to laugh. Deep, wheezing laughs. His lungs, seared, scarred.
“So, it all comes out now.” He lowered the note. “You’re Octavia Leander, a medician. That explains the satchel. Packed with goodies, I’m sure.” Octavia hugged it a little tighter. “I’m supposed to help you break into the palace.”
“Yes.”
“Because I’m King Kethan’s grandson.”
“Yes.”
“This is supposed to be a surprise.”
She hesitated. “Yes?”
Mr. Stout shook his head. “Oh, my mother. She’s so bright with her ciphers and mysteries, her desperate need for intrigue, that she misses the most obvious details. All my life, people stopping me in the street. ‘Oh, you look like the old king. Best not let Evandia see you.’ In the army all the crusty old swaddies say, ‘You look far too young to be another of Kethan’s bastards.’ My nose, my cheekbones, my hair. By all accounts, I was something of a throwback. I wonder if the infernal who did this”—he motioned to his face—“thought the same. Maybe he did me a favor.”
Metal chimed and dinged as the girl resumed her work.
“Are you going to help me?” asked Octavia. The vault. The vault. I must get inside the vault. The urgency itched in her mind, along the lengths of her arms.
“Ah, you’re that sort of woman. Full of sass. War did that to a lot of you, unfortunately. Rivka’s like that sometimes, aren’t you, girl?”
Rivka recoiled. Bits of metal dropped from her hand. She snatched up a washer as it spun like a Mendalian dervish.
Octavia felt a wave of nausea and disgust as she looked between Mr. Stout and the girl. Dogs are usually treated better. Even dogs that are about to be eaten. No daughter should be treated this way.
His daughter . . . Mrs. Stout doesn’t know she already has a grandchild. Devin Stout has kept this child a secret since he was scarcely more than a child himself.
He fanned himself with the note. “The surprise here is the vault.” She could tell he grinned beneath the mask. “I like the idea of taking the most valuable treasures of the realm from Evandia. I like it immensely.”
“Hold on. Take? I want inside for very specific—”
“Then lay your claim. You’ve obviously helped my mother. I can give you first dibs.”
Lady, what am I getting myself into? “Books and anything related to the Lady. Mrs. Stout said there are . . . pieces of the Tree in there.” He doesn’t need to know that King Kethan believed they were the most powerful things in the vault.
“Pieces of the Tree. What are those worth, with everyone marching off to see the full thing? Well, that’s your choice. I’ll get whatever else I want, then. Maybe it’ll finally be enough to leave this damned kingdom.”
“Where do you want to go? The southern nations?”
He shook his head. His pale blond hair, cut crude and short as if by handfuls and a razor, bobbed at the movement. “Ah, the southern nations. Everyone talks up the city-states like they are so grand. No. I want to cross the sea, and without indenturing myself. I want to leave this wretched place and never look back.”
“Your mother would worry for you.”
“My mother. My dear mother. The true heir to the throne.” He snorted. “All her stories of growing up as an orphan with the prudish Percivals and how the grit of the field never washed from beneath her nails, and here she was, the missing princess. I figured she was one of King Kethan’s bastards, really. It seems more appropriate that she’s legitimate. Suits her.”
He looked to a crooked calendar on the wall, squinting, and flipped through several months to find the current page. “What day of the week is it? Ah. Well. Tonight’s the night, then. I know the boys on duty.” He walked to the counter and tipped a burlap bag of flour onto a slab of wood.
“You want to do this tonight?” Octavia’s heart pounded at the thought, but at the same time she was relieved. Get in, get out. Succeed, fail. Let it all be done before Alonzo arrived.
“What my dear mother doesn’t know—among many, many things—is that I am intimately familiar with the palace. I had to guard the old doss house when I was first conscripted. I know every crack and cubbyhole. I can get us in.”
“What, were you a Clockwork Dagger at the palace?” Octavia asked. She rubbed her foot against her calf.
“Ha! The first rule among Clockwork Daggers is you never say you’re a Clockwork Dagger. You say nothing, make people wonder.”
“People will assume the answer is yes.”
He smoothed the flour with a swipe of his hand. “People are idiots. A man can’t be defined by what he was, but by what he is. I’m the humble owner of a bakery and engage in various other entrepreneurial pursuits, when the mood suits me. Now look here.” With his fingertip, he drew a square in the brown powder. “The vault is on the far side of the grounds. Guards always mutter that the old side is haunted, cursed. Not like the newer side of the palace is any better. It all burned in the attack.” He shrugged, box coat loose on his shoulders.
“Cursed? Like how the Wasters claim their land is cursed?”
“The whole bloody continent is cursed. You look around Mercia? People say there are no trees here because of the factories, but you take a gander at a daguerreotype from forty years ago, the skies are clear and there are still some plants to be found. The Waste is better for growing things these days. At least battles turn over the soil, and blood and flesh make good fertilizer—girl, don’t dent anything!”
“Sorry, sorry,” Rivka said. She picked up the part she had dropped.
Mr. Stout gestured over his shoulder. “She might grow up to be a decent mechanic, so long as some buck doesn’t get her in the pudding club these next few years. Harder to assemble an engine with a babe strapped to your teat. Now see, this is where the gate is.”
He rambled on, sketching out the map in flour, discussing the locations of guards and going off on a dozen other tangents.
Octavia listened and pressed her arms against her body. She scratched her boot
against her calf, shifting from foot to foot, but it did nothing to ease the irritation buried beneath cloth and leather.
Irritation just like the skin of her arms.
The bark was spreading.
CHAPTER 12
Octavia stared out the small window at the front of the bakery and couldn’t see a single star through the quilt of smog. Buildings pressed in, neighbors with no comprehension of personal space. Faint glowstone lights lined the street below. Electric wires crisscrossed in thick tangles though few windows revealed bright glows. Everything felt darker, gloomier, especially after the modern brightness of Tamarania.
“Caskentia is known for two straightforward approaches to life,” said Devin Stout. He sharpened a knife against a whetstone. “If negotiation is possible, use bribery. If negotiations aren’t an option, murder is. Unfortunately, murder is the messier of the two, and we have to wear Evandia’s white livery to get in.”
I won’t think of that possibility. We can get in and out without any deaths. “A shame I can’t just wear my uniform as it is,” said Octavia. Instead, she had layered a palace housekeeper’s plain frock over her Percival gear. Considering the chill of the night, she was grateful for the extra warmth.
“It’s daft that you insist on wearing that Percival swag at all. You look like a stuffed sausage, though really, a lot of the servant girls at the palace do, so you’ll actually blend in.” The man was like a cruder version of his mother—his mouth constant, his tact thin.
Mr. Stout and Rivka had left the bakery for part of the afternoon and returned with livery for each of them to wear. “I like to pop into the palace every so often, see if there’s anything new,” he had said. As if the royal palace were a community garden that might offer new flowers in bloom.
The fact that the palace was so porous, so susceptible to bribery, wasn’t a surprise. Octavia wasn’t a moppet in a nappy; she knew how Caskentia operated. The shock came in Mr. Stout’s attitude. He didn’t know fear. His heart rate didn’t spike. To him, this request to break into the vault didn’t seem like a big fuss.
Rivka felt differently. Mr. Stout had insisted she come along. Octavia had argued against placing the child in danger, but he stated that they were a package deal. Rivka hadn’t argued one way or another, but the terror was there, melded too readily with her song. She’s accustomed to constant fear in his presence.
There had been no chance to talk to the girl alone. Mr. Stout kept her in his shadow. Octavia wondered where her mother was, why he had kept the girl’s existence hidden from Mrs. Stout. Was it shame over Rivka’s harelip? Her obvious Frengian heritage? Octavia couldn’t see Mrs. Stout being bothered by those things.
“Let’s go, then.” Mr. Stout swaggered out. His coat dangled past his buttocks, the trousers showing the chickenlike scrawniness of his legs. Rivka wore a smaller version of Octavia’s attire and carried a basket burdened with more white laundry. Her eyes were round and solemn against her darker skin, her chin often tucked as if she could hide her upper lip.
Octavia had folded some of the laundry and half stuffed it into the top of her satchel, as if the entire bag carried more of the same.
Auto and foot traffic had dwindled as the hour neared curfew. Octavia was thankful for fewer bodies about, though the idea of wandering after hours worried her. Criminals would still be about—the police worst of all.
“Kethan’s bastards! Move yer wagon!” roared a lorry driver, laying on the horn. Some young bucks strolled along, hats at jaunty angles, while young women scurried in tight packs like prey animals. The air stank of a peculiar mix of rotting fish and ammonia. They crossed to walk along the outside of the palace walls. Gray bricks extended some ten feet high, the top crested with spikes.
Mr. Stout motioned to a gate as they walked on by. Iron bars reinforced battered wooden planks. Paint layered the wood in myriad colors. It reeked of urine. “Everyone calls this the protest gate, or the bloody gate. Evandia’s tower overlooks it, you see. It’s a good place to come for a piss, if you’re willing to risk a potshot from the guards up top.”
“Everyone hates Evandia,” Octavia murmured. The brick wall was battered and patched, made ancient by abuse.
“I don’t hate her, not like some do, though she’s done a right job of botching the kingdom, hasn’t she? I know many a man who’s starved these past few months, all because the army disbanded without providing so much as a copper.”
“How long did you serve?” she asked.
“Too damn long,” he snapped, then shook his head. “See, I was a boy at an academy here in Mercia when my notice came. Fourteen years old. This was back when the Wasters started their firebombing runs—those fast airships, infernals up top.”
Back when Solomon Garret invented the buzzer. Back when one of those same attacking airships went down atop my village. The fire. The screams and klaxons of blood. Octavia forced away the scar of memory and focused on Devin Stout.
“I had a week to go home and kiss my mother, sell my horse, and off I went to be a good soldier.” He lifted his face mask enough to spit into the dead weeds along the pitted stone wall. “Good soldier. I was too good. And this is what happened last year.” He pointed to his melted face. The shadows cast deep lines into the visible skin. “I don’t blame Evandia for all of that. Her generals? Her Daggers? The Wasters? Yes. Evandia, she has all the mind of a child, anyway.”
“Mrs. Stout has said much the same,” Octavia murmured.
“From their childhood acquaintance? I do wish I could talk to dear old Mum. Get the real stories. She used to say she lived in Mercia as a child. An understatement, that.” He looked toward the palace and shook his head.
Octavia found her opportunity. “What about you? Were you raised here in Mercia?” she asked Rivka.
The young woman eyed a passing steam car. “Yes, up in the towers.”
“Rivka here scarcely walked on street level until she came down to the bakery,” Mr. Stout cut in. “Always up on those catwalks and tramways on high.” He gestured toward the built-up sprawl to the east.
“How did you come to be down here?” Octavia asked.
Rivka looked at Octavia and Mr. Stout and back at the sidewalk. Something terrible happened. It carried in the girl’s anxiety, in the sorrow that suddenly slowed her heart and created physical constriction in her chest.
“Here.” Mr. Stout motioned them to stop. A metal door led inside the grounds; the surface was dented like the ocean in a storm, with some gunshot holes for good measure. A small window, more of a slit really, showed the movement of a shadow on the other side. Mr. Stout flashed a gilly coin. Octavia had provided him with three for this mission. A few coins from Mrs. Stout remained tucked away in Octavia’s brassiere.
“Devin,” growled the shadow on the far side.
“Thom.”
“See you’re out walking the rabbit. Who’s the new bird? Bit too pretty for you, eh?”
Octavia bristled and opened her mouth to tell the man what was what. A soft elbow jabbed her side. Rivka met her eye with a quick shake of her head.
“Yeah. We’re needing to walk in the gardens. Rabbit needs to eat greens.” He flicked the coin through the gap.
“Shiny. Walk is fine, Devin, but don’t make any messes now.”
“Never.”
“Well, if you do make a mess, wait a few minutes, at least. My watch’s nearly up.” The gate cracked open.
Like that, they were inside the palace. Stone buildings flanked the walkway. They were mere feet from the street, but already it felt quieter. Mr. Stout led the way around outbuildings weathered in gray and black.
Octavia’s gloved fingers brushed the crackled stones. “I thought the infernal attack destroyed the entire palace.”
“It did, except the vault.”
“These buildings look five hundred years old.”
�
�That’s Mercia for you. Factory exhaust, most likely. Think on what it does to the lungs. Actually, you probably do. Now hush. Be a good servant girl.”
She bit her lip to contain her annoyance.
Ten, fifteen minutes passed. Other servants shuffled past. Octavia tensed at each passerby but no one paid them any heed. Mr. Stout slipped a coin to another passing guard, the man acknowledging them with a tip of his hat as he walked on. It was fascinating and disturbing, the access this man still had. But if he was a Dagger, maybe they think he still is one. Maybe he is.
That thought chilled her. What if this was a trap? He could have spoken to anyone when he was out this afternoon. She cast a glance at Rivka. The girl was no tenser than before. If she knew something was going to happen, surely she’d give Octavia some warning.
Oh, Alonzo. You were so right to warn me against this. I have no idea what I’ve become enmeshed in.
Octavia smelled the moisture of the palace garden as they rounded a bend. She smiled, relieved to be in the presence of greenery, and then she stopped cold. “What is this, Lady?” she whispered.
The garden was alive, but not. Common trees she knew from the country looked like twisted, stunted things, like people constricted with lockjaw. Pine needles and leaves dangled, green yet limp. Lower plants fared no better. Flowers had no energy to bloom—petals slumped partially open as if asleep. She stooped to touch the soil. It was appropriately moist. Was this caused by a lack of sun? Factory toxins?
“It’s been like this as long as I’ve been coming here,” Mr. Stout hissed. “Now come.”
She scurried to catch up with him. Foot stones flaked and crackled underfoot, as if heavy machinery had driven along this way, which was quite impossible due to the narrowness of the path. Intermittent glowstone lamps cast spooky light and showed that bushes were trimmed, leaves were raked, and other basic care was attended to. The garden’s condition wasn’t for lack of love and effort. I’d certainly want to dig into this needy plot of land. That longing for the academy’s gardens, for her own cottage, swept over her again and she forced it away.
