Corsets & Clockwork

by Trish Telep

  The only thing that banished these fears was the Imperial Tonic I took daily along with the rest of my regiment. The Emperor, who was a great inventor, had developed it to protect us from magical incursion. And while we soldiers jested with one another about sylph sickness and pixie infestations, we all knew that as long as we took the Imperial Tonic daily and adhered to the Scriptures of Science we were safe.

  It was not so in the Forest that reached its knotted fingers toward our walls. In its depths hid all manner of Unnatural beings, and the depravity and danger they posed to us mortals was a constant threat to New London's safety. It had been this way since the Arrival, when Saint Tesla's Grand Experiment accidentally transported so many of us from Old London.

  Though we could never return to the place from which we came, His Most Scientific Majesty reminded us that we were the vanguard of a glorious new Age of Enlightenment for this benighted land, that we alone had been given a grand opportunity to force magic and all its irrational power into the service of progress.

  And if I woke in the night from vivid dreams of the Forest beyond New London's walls, if I dreamed of a life wild and howling under the tangled branches, I fervently whispered the Boolean Doctrine or the Litany of Evolution as revealed by Saint Darwin until I became calm. I was the Emperor's man, after all.

  What then did I have to fear?

  Athena would teach me soon enough.

  I knew of the Princess Royal, of course. I saw her often at a distance, sitting in a window seat, her nose deep in a book while the other nobles played bridge or gossiped. I saw her at various functions speaking at length with Scholars of the newly founded University of New London. Her father's courtiers looked on with barely concealed sneers. While they fluttered about like perfumed and bejeweled peacocks, she stood apart, a drab peahen proud of her drabness. I felt a grudging kinship with her at those times. She was the only person I had ever seen besides myself who could be surrounded by people and yet still be so terribly alone.

  When I was assigned to her during the Imperial Manticore Hunt then, I wasn't overjoyed, but neither was I indignant as many of my regiment would have been. We waited in the Tower courtyard for the Huntsman and his hounds to arrive. I was mesmerized by the leashed werehounds as they came--their knowing, malevolent eyes, the white brushes of their tails, the way they crouched when their master passed them. Something about them made me shudder and turn away.

  And then I was looking straight into the Princess Royal's eyes. She regarded me steadily, gravely, her gray gaze more piercing than any pike or bayonet in the Imperial arsenal. She rode astride, much to everyone's horror, and was dressed in a plain but perfectly serviceable habit, devoid of lace or jewels or the plumed tricorns those around her favored. Her dark gold hair was pulled back severely and bound up in a white snood. Despite her unfashionableness, she looked every inch the Empress she was destined to be. And then I realized why.

  She knew who and what she was. She had no need to compete or dissemble. And I envied it of her sorely.

  "This is Corporal Garrett Reed, Your Highness," my Captain said, gesturing me forward. "He will serve as your escort on the Hunt."

  "Corporal." She nodded.

  "Your Highness," I said. I lowered my eyes so as not to have to meet her gaze. There was something unnerving in the way she looked at me, as if she knew things about me that even I didn't know. As if she knew my worst fear. My stomach tied itself in intricate knots.

  The Captain left us then to introduce the other nobles to their escorts.

  "I expect you to stay as far from me as your duty will in good conscience permit," she said. Her gloved hands tightened on the reins. "I have no need of escorts, and no desire for them, either. I intend to continue my studies of the denizens of this Forest. You may find it dreary in comparison to the excitement of the Hunt you will surely miss."

  "I am at your service, Highness," I murmured.

  "Hmph." She turned her mount away from me then and rode out behind the others.

  I followed at what I hoped was a respectful distance, far enough to honor her request, close enough should danger arise. I would be lying if I said her disregard didn't sting, but it was no more than I expected.

  We passed down through the winding streets of New London, and the greenish cloud drifting from the newly built Refinery dulled the glitter of our cavalcade. The Emperor's Refiners had recently developed a new energy source called myth that was mined far to the north and brought here for refining. Using myth to heat homes and keep everlanterns lit throughout the City would save many from the madness and enchantment suffered so often by those who gathered wood in the magic-laden Forest. The Refinery had also spawned a multitude of new inventions, among them the myth-powered, iron-clad wyvern the Emperor rode. People lined the streets, and the women threw hothouse roses or embroidered kerchiefs, which were soon shredded beneath the wyvern's iron claws.

  I ignored those thrown to me.

  In the Fey Market, gray sylphs flitted back and forth in their cages, careful of touching the nevered bars that kept their destructive magic from infecting their human captors. I swallowed the sudden, strange feeling that rose in my throat when one sylph shivered mournfully into dust, and I whispered a prayer to Saint Newton instead. I saw something in Athena's face sag; I would have sworn a tear glittered at the corner of her eye. She dashed at her eyes with a gloved hand, and then her face became stone.

  Apothecary shop assistants distributed broadsheets advertising sirensong syrup to aid with coughs or nulling powders to extricate parasitic pixies. Over the River Vaunting, the Night Emporium spanned the entire bridge, its brothels, gin palaces, and gambling establishments crouching between haberdasheries, millineries, and antiquities shops. I glanced at Athena through it all, trying to gauge her reaction to the silk bolts spun from shadowspider webs, the fascinators and hair combs bedecked with the plumes of feathered serpents. But after that one moment, her expression never wavered.

  My comrade-in-arms, Bastian, rode in close, nodding his head in her direction.

  "Minding the mad witch, are we?" he asked. His round face was open and empty as the moon.

  "You ought to show a little more respect," I said. I sat taller, using my height as yet another way of embarrassing him into silence.

  "It's only what everyone thinks, Garrett," he said. "Besides, she can't hear us anyway."

  He gestured toward the Princess. We had passed through the City gates, and the Forest raised its thick, twisted tangle against us. Princess Athena had sent her horse ambling under its eaves off the main track and away from the rest of the party.

  "Saint Darwin and all his apes," I muttered under my breath. The Forest was filled with evil, irrational, mindcorrupting magic. Anything could happen to her, and I would be held responsible. And yet, I felt a twinge of uncertainty. Should I do as she bid and leave her to her studies? The Emperor expected us to stay on the track, to let the Huntsman do his work.

  But if something happened to the Princess Royal on my watch ...

  Bastian laughed.

  I spurred my horse forward as Athena disappeared through the trees, trying to ignore the crash of the iron wyvern's claws or the feeling that I was somehow betraying my orders by following the Princess.

  "Your Highness!" I called after her. The Forest swallowed my voice. Yet it opened before me, leading me down its overgrown avenues. I glimpsed her ahead--here, the feathered fetlock of her mare, there the white curve of her snood against a dark-clad shoulder. She passed through light and shade like a dream, a ghost of herself. And where she passed, the Unnaturals of the Forest followed.

  Filled with light, the sylphs came, dancing through the summer leaves, dayborn fireflies. Their wings whispered and chimed like little silver bells, so very different from their caged cousins in the market. When I looked up, white faces peered at me out of the mottled trunks of sycamores and dark faces frowned from the hemlocks and pines. I whispered Saint Darwin's Litany of Evolution as a dryad peeled hers
elf away from the bark of her tree and followed the princess.

  They were all around me--sylphs and sprites, gnomes and hobs, and many others for which I had no name. I tried to remember that the Imperial Tonic protected me, that I wouldn't be enchanted by anything, but I couldn't help my uneasiness. Just when I realized I'd become more engrossed in looking at the sylphs than seeking my charge, I saw the Princess's mare wandering riderless, grazing along a tiny stream. I spurred my gelding toward the clearing ahead, my heart crowding my throat.

  I found the Princess seated on a mossy stump surrounded by toadstools.

  And Unnaturals of every kind and description.

  "Princess!" I shouted.

  Some of the Unnaturals slunk away, but others hissed and bristled, their colors changing from soft pastels to angry vibrancy.

  She looked up at me with eyes like ice. "Stop," she said.

  "But, Your Highness, you're in great danger! You must ..."

  She transferred the quill and book she held to one hand. She held up the other for silence.

  "On the contrary, Corporal," she said at last. "It is you who are in grave danger. Now go back the way you came and let us be."

  I stared at her for a moment, trying to discern if the worst had already happened, if she had already been bespelled, and wondering how it could be. Did she not also drink the tonic her father had developed to protect us? Then my gaze wandered, drawn by the rustle of a leaf, and I saw what she meant. Little, taunting faces thrust out of the vines and branches. Little hands held darts that glimmered with poison in the morning light. If I so much as moved, I had no doubt the pixie army would turn me into a human pincushion in short order. I also had no doubt their darts were deadly.

  I straightened my spine. "You know I cannot do that, Your Highness. Your father, the Emperor ..."

  She laughed then. She looked me full in the face and laughed. The sound of it caused the angry colors of the sylphs to fade, and soon all the Unnaturals were giggling with her, too. She laughed so hard that the book fell to the ground next to her foot, and tears streamed down her face. I thought for a moment she would fall off the stump.

  "The Emperor," she finally said when she could catch her breath. "You know, every time someone addresses him that way, it's all I can do not to burst into laughter. And right now, I can't be bothered to care!"

  I could do nothing but stare. Perhaps Bastian was right, after all. Perhaps she was a mad witch.

  "Oh, I am most certainly a witch," she said, as if I'd spoken aloud. "But I'm not mad."

  I gaped at her.

  She pulled the book she'd dropped back up into her lap. "Truthfully, I think I'm the only sane person left in this world. Aside from you all, of course," she said to the Unnaturals at her feet. The Scriptures of Science dictated that I should be repulsed by the Unnaturals and the threat to rationality they represented, but here I was--fascinated by the color chasing over their faces and through their wings. And their expressions! So rich, so varied, so full of life in ways I'd never imagined in that dull Tower ...

  I shook my head. I shouldn't be thinking these thoughts. The Unnatural magic was corroding my logic. How was that possible?

  I focused on the Princess. "I don't know what you mean," I said coldly.

  "Let me ask you this, Corporal. What do you remember before coming to the Tower?"

  I blanched and looked down at my gloves. How had she been able to pinpoint the one worry that gnawed most constantly at my heart? I wished that I had just obeyed her and gone back the way I'd come. I didn't want to know where this was leading.

  "That's about what I thought."

  I glanced at her. "Your Highness, I hardly think my past ..."

  But she cut me short with something she held up in her hand. It glimmered darkly--a tiny, all-too-familiar vial held between her thumb and forefinger.

  The Unnaturals around her drew back, muttering.

  "What is this, Corporal Reed?" she asked.

  "Imperial Tonic, Your Highness. But I fail to see ..."

  She glared me into silence. "And you take this every day, yes?"

  "Yes, Your Highness."

  She sighed. "Oh, stop that nonsense. My name is Athena."

  I'm sure my eyes went round as dinner plates at that. What royal in her right mind would permit--nay, demand--a lowly guard like me to use her familiar name? But I swallowed and nodded.

  "I stopped taking this eight years ago," she said. "And when I did, I realized a few things. Or remembered them, I should say. First, I remembered where we came from--the real London. I remembered that my father was nothing more than an astonishingly well-read butcher from Cheapside who liked to invent things when he wasn't killing them. He had always fancied himself a man of science, and he seized power in the chaos that ensued after the Arrival. I don't know entirely how he did it--I have my theories--but the main point is that my father's power comes at a great price--the lives of the Elementals whose world we've stolen."

  Sylphs, pixies, and dryads all nodded around her.

  My lower jaw very nearly hit my pommel.

  "You are mad," I gasped.

  "Oh, yes?" she asked. She got up from her stump, and stalked toward me, stepping over the toadstool ring as if it had no power at all. "Who are you really, Corporal Reed? Why are you so afraid of your past and yet you can remember none of it? And if these beings, these ... Unnaturals, as you so rudely call them, are so evil, why are we both still alive?"

  She stood just at my knee, and I looked into her furious face. Her eyes flashed like icy lightning, and a hectic glow spread across her cheekbones. Little sylphs flitted to and fro around her head in a chiming halo. She was, in that moment, the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen. I forgot everything but that, lost in amazement at how much could change in the span of a few hours. She was absolutely bewitching, but not at all in the way I'd been taught to expect.

  "Corporal Reed?" I finally heard her say. "Are you even listening to me?"

  I could see quite clearly that she knew what I'd been thinking. I coughed, feeling suddenly constricted by my uniform. "Ahem. Yes. You were saying, Your Highness?"

  "Stop taking the tonic," she said. "It's a potion meant to make you biddable and forgetful. When you do, you'll see who is truly mad, I promise you."

  I opened my mouth in what I was sure would be a weak retort, but the only sound that came was that of a distant braying.

  The horns of the Hunt.

  The werehounds bayed, a ghostly howling that set my spine shivering. They had cornered their quarry.

  Athena's face instantly changed. It was as though someone had slammed the shutter over her inner light. Panic was all I saw in her face as she called to her mare.

  "The Manticore is in danger!" she said over her shoulder. "We must hurry!"

  "But Your Highness ... Athena," I said, "isn't that why we're here? To kill the Manticore?"

  "I didn't truly think he'd be able to find her!" she said as she climbed into the saddle. "She's very powerful--she should have been able to hide. Something is very wrong!"

  The lights in the trees dimmed all around me. The sylphs, colorful and laughing only a moment ago, dimmed to dusty browns and grays. Dryads slunk away like slices of shadow. There was a restless fear and sorrow that I inhaled with each breath.

  "What will happen if she's killed?" I shouted at Athena's back, as she urged the mare forward. If the angry mutters and gestures were any indication, none of us would fare well.

  "They will all ultimately die without her magic. Her power feeds theirs, from what I understand. If they can, they will try to stop that from happening. That's why we must go!" she called over her shoulder, slowing her mare enough that I could hear.

  Then she spurred her mount onward, and I was racing my own horse just to keep up. As she galloped, ducking branches, her snood came unbound and fluttered to the ground like a wounded dove. Her hair uncoiled in a long curl behind her. I followed it like a golden semaphore through the trees, avoiding the
Unnaturals--Elementals, she'd called them--that flowed alongside through the undergrowth and between the trees above.

  The Emperor's wyvern had cornered the Manticore. The monster shrank from the Emperor's mechanical mount, weeping tears of blood in her fear. The Huntsman affixed a strange gauntlet to his hand, a weapon so powerful that its numbing chill froze everyone around it. The Elementals fell back from that miasma of icy horror, but it slowed many of the smaller ones, such that they were unfortunate enough to be snatched up by observant courtiers and stuffed hurriedly into their saddle panniers. A new pet, a little extra money at market didn't hurt.

  I caught myself feeling sorry for them and gritted my teeth. I shouldn't be sorry for them at all. I vowed silently to drink another vial of tonic as soon as we returned to the Tower.

  If we returned.

  The Manticore begged for mercy in her silver voice, even as the Huntsman advanced on her.

  The Emperor ignored her and gestured that the Huntsman should finish the job. "Bring me its heart, if you can," he said.

  The Huntsman, eerily hooded like an executioner, nodded.

  I watched the Emperor on his wyvern and couldn't help but wonder. Much about him suggested what his daughter had said. He had a craggy nose that looked as though it had been broken, and his eyes were narrow and hard. He was not a big man; in fact, he seemed pinched somehow at the edges, as though something ate at him from the inside out. Still, he had the charisma of a leader, the sharp command of someone destined to rule. Was he really only a butcher, as his daughter had said? Was everything I'd been taught a lie?

  And then Athena edged her mare forward, her unbound hair causing the ladies-in-waiting to chatter and giggle. Some looked sidelong at me in amazement, and it occurred to me that they assumed we had been engaged in some sort of dalliance. I sat as tall as possible, looking neither right nor left, and hoping my face was stone.

  "Father!" Athena called, as the Huntsman readied his knife. "I beg you to spare this creature's life."

  A hush so deep descended that a single falling leaf seemed to crash into the Forest floor. Even the Manticore dared not breathe as she waited on the Emperor's reply.