Jesper hastened his steps. He pushed through some loosened copper vetch and stepped onto the White Path. He prepared for the most casual near-sprint of his life, but before he could even begin, he was hamstrung by a frightened cry behind him.
Jesper whirled. Right at his back, feet clacking on the limestone, was one of his steam-powered wolves. But instead of ambling across the gravel and back into the forest, it went utterly mad, hoping forward and back, tail pinwheeling like a riled attack dog’s. It jumped forward, teeth bared; the air rent with a scream and the ugly sound of ripping fabric; the wolf danced away with a mangled petticoat in its gleaming jaws, only to drop it and lunge back in.
Scrygonfly forgotten, Jesper lunged after it, legs firing like pistons and hands out and ready for The Touch. The Words were loaded on the tip of his tongue when, five steps from the unknown Lady, the wolf rocked back and let out its thin, piping artificial howl. Jesper threw himself at the smithing, his hat flying off, his palm connecting with its burning head, speaking the Words and feeling the beast grow slack beneath him, but nine more of the things, equally crazed, burst onto the path from the trees.
Something wet rained onto him, and he prayed it was only leaked oil.
He stood and lunged again at the nearest wolf. It snorted steam and danced away, mocking him with its lolling, multijointed tongue. Jesper used the Words to speak a lasso and snare its uncrushable neck. It fell, yelping; he pulled it towards him, its steel body squealing across the limestone, before palming its head and speaking it silent.
“Oh, you brute, you horrid, horrid brute!”
Jesper’s anxiety flared up into full, burning horror. The maddened wolves had set themselves on none other than Princess Kanna, who was definitely not taking her customary afternoon nap, but was instead engaged in beating off her indestructible attackers with a small handbag.
She was unharmed, but her fine gown had been ripped to scandalizing shreds.
Jesper shoved into the thick of them, caring not a damn if they snapped at him and only thinking to cover the Princess’ shame. He tore off his tail coat and flung it over her. “Your Highness!”
And as suddenly as they had descended, the wolves bolted and vanished with a squeal and a hiss of steam.
Reddened and panting, the Princess curled up and pulled Jesper’s coat around her, the embroidered tails dragging in the dust. It still wasn’t enough. Under the remains of her gown, wholly half of her legs lay naked to the air. Face burning, he stammered something, stripped off his waistcoat, cringed and tried to further cover her. She feebly protested. He insisted.
He heard the sound of running feet, and a strong masculine voice crying, “Hallo!”
Jesper gasped, had no time to think, and flung himself over Princess Kanna to prevent anyone from seeing her exposed body.
Kellin, with Lady Zuhanna in tow, rounded a corner of the White Path. In a sudden hot moment, Jesper realized what they were seeing: a nearly-nude Princess, panting and flush, gown in savage ruins, with Jesper undressed, hatless, and pressing his body atop hers.
Lady Zuhanna’s hands flew to her mouth.
“This is not as you think!” Jesper cried.
Lady Zuhanna turned and ran.
Jesper cursed, shouted, railed in unnamed tongues as Kellin rushed forward and stripped off his own tail coat. Jesper’s ravings were joined by Kellin’s cruel tongue-lashing: “Have you gone mad? What in Heaven’s name are you trying to do? You could be executed for such indecency!”
Nearly in tears, the Princess interrupted. Breathless explanations were exchanged. Others in the Arboretum, alarmed by the cries, soon arrived on the scene. Gentlemen fell over themselves to help cover the Princess. Page boys were sent for another gown. Rumors ignited and went flying. And to the tittering onlookers, the smug, secret smile Princess Kanna gave Jesper before being led away was all the clarification they needed.
It cleared up some things for Jesper, too, and not at all in a way he would have liked.
Some hours later, after a forest-wide search, Jesper had his employees bring him all of his wolves for a thorough examination. Jesper inspected them in his greenhouse, alone. He’d tell the King that there had been a flaw in the engravings, causing the first wolf to both behave like the pack leader and persuade the others to engage in rough play with the wrong species.
He’d tell no-one, however, that alchemical analysis uncovered traces of six kinds of distillate—Summon, Wolf, Conglomerate, Mind-Read, Denude, and Goal-Disperse—and as Princess Kanna loved to boast, the only people with free access to distillate of any kind were those in the Royal House. But even if Jesper did tell someone, who would want to believe? The rumor of a forbidden daylight rendezvous was too outrageous to resist.
Jesper wrapped his lonely arms around a wolf and laid his head down upon its cool body. Lady Zuhanna would never consent to being courted now.
~ ~ ~
Jesper locked himself in his cottage and admitted no-one. His windows stayed dark and silent into the deepening evening and throughout the clicking night. The next morning, it was the same.
He did not eat or sleep. Perhaps he worked, but it was better to call it mourning: he designed ringaubles, over and over, each more ostentatious and impossible than the last. He wrote her name in the Power Tongue, and spoke it, so she would feel an anxious longing pull at her soul, without knowing why. It was the best he could do.
Two hours past sundown, on Lady Zuhanna’s last night at Holdt Castle, Jesper realized that this was not so.
He could do better. He was a Master Leafsmith, and in love, and at least one of these things was unstoppable.
~ ~ ~
The seeds were easy—in addition to those newly made, Jesper already had thousands, and three quick cycles in the Von Neumann Apparatus could multiply any of his stocks by nearly a hundred-fold. Stealing a ten-gallon barrel of Animus distillate should have been far more troublesome, but the door to the Royal Storeroom was left unguarded, and the tediously frequent repetitions of Princess Kanna’s name in the logbook hinted at why. The locked Storeroom door would’ve stymied most thieves, of course, but the lock’s secret inner workings were no match for Jesper’s Leafsmith sight and skill. With a few calculations and runes scratched into its brass plate, the lock opened of its own volition.
Once equipped, Jesper took the long way around to the Perennial Tower, his cartload of supplies tip-toeing behind. He stopped at the base of the structure, directly over a lone thread of submerged metal webbing. The empty night around him sung with crickets and sleepless clockwork. Though torches flickered on distant parapets, the nearby tower was dark. She would be sleeping.
A pity—she would have loved to see this.
Jesper beckoned to his cart. It stepped forward, and from it Jesper plucked a wind-up Ravenous. He set the greedy creature on the ground, and once it had eaten away the grass along with a good-sized hole in the soil, he locked its jaws and returned it to the cart. Then he lifted his nine-pound sack of indehiscent mechanacia seeds over the hole and poured.
He wrote the necessary containment runes in the freshly bared dirt.
Finally, Jesper positioned the cart above the hole and opened the tap on the distillate drum. In the Power Tongue, he said, “Grow.”
The seeds needed no urging. The distillate hit, the first roots plunged down, the web line was touched, and all Heaven and Hell broke free. The dirt blew apart with the force of it; clacking trees under snapping leaves under tinkling loads of flowers rose up to the stars in a plume of percussive, frenzied song. Glass petals and iron twigs rained down. Living crickets fled. Jesper stumbled back and fell right on his rear, mouth momentarily unable to close, wondering if ten entire gallons had been strictly necessary.
A light blazed in her room.
A bronze leaf the size of a mixing bowl crashed to the earth by his feet; he scooped it up as he stood and placed it over his top hat as a helmet. Before his nerves could fail him, he grasped a still-growing branch and climbed.
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He dodged rusted thorns, jagged edges of peeling bark, poison ivy covered in crushed glass. His hands grew black with oil; his soles grew scratched by the rough steel. The column of squealing life kept growing, reaching out vines to the Perennial Tower and anchoring them into the mortar, covering the windows and beyond with impenetrable brass clusters of fleur-de-lis.
Jesper reached the open window to her bedroom, hesitating, but even as he watched, a branch grew straight inside. He climbed along it and disembarked. The interior was bright with lamps. The bedclothes were pushed aside in a hasty awakening, though a cotton dressing gown was tossed over a nearby chaise lounge. The wardrobe door was cracked, and the comb from the dressing table had been knocked to the floor.
The room was empty.
“Lady Zuhanna?”
Jesper turned in a baffled circle. He wandered through an open doorway into a sitting room, untouched and immaculate. Other than her cousin, it seemed she’d had no visitors. “Lady Zuhanna?”
Jesper doubled back and entered the washroom. The signs of her were everywhere—balled-up towel on the floor, discarded stockings draped over a changing screen, hairpins scattered everywhere like Arboretum springs—but she was nowhere near. He went again to the sitting room and through a second doorway into an antechamber. The cuckoo clock read past midnight. Jesper did not understand.
He stepped out onto the balcony off the sitting room, but the ringauble was gone.
He placed his blackened hands on the railing and looked down. The distillate drum had emptied; the cart had skittered back, out of self-preservation. The tower of clicking, interlocking steel was taller than the one he stood in, wobbling perilously in the favonian breeze.
Useless.
Jesper pulled off his leaf helmet, set it carefully upon the railing, and descended the tower via the inside stone staircase. Outside, he paused by his soaring marvel, watching it whir and clack and expertly go nowhere.
The door behind him in the Perennial Tower opened, and a dozen castle guards came charging out. “Halt!”
Jesper turned to the forest and bolted, cursing his careless mooning, but perhaps he should have saved his breath for running. A pair of guards easily overtook him, and he went down, violently, onto the grass. They chained his wrists and hauled him to his feet. The rest caught up, and a gloved hand grabbed his jaw and forcefully raised his chin to let its owner get a look at his face.
“. . . Is that. . . Master Leafsmith?”
“How could you—did you—”
“What in Heaven’s holy name—”
They dragged him back to the Perennial Tower. Jesper hung his head. In the nearing castle, lights blazed up, and more guards stampeded closer. He was hit with a wave of polished armor and astonished inquiry, and the queries rose into an angry din of indistinct demands. There was no fighting against it. Jesper did not bother. By now, he had no honor left to defend.
The crowd around him suddenly quieted. Heads rose and turned, and the guards obediently pulled apart, like the sea at the nose of some great Leviathan. “I don’t give a care that my rooms are closer, next time, you fetch Father! Now where is the sniveling rat that has disturbed my rest?”
The last chagrined guard stepped aside. Princess Kanna, clad in a satin dressing gown, shoved past him. Her gaze fell on Jesper. Wrathful judgment blazed up in her eyes.
His idea, and only way out, made his crippled pride breathe its last. His heart numb with humiliation, he knelt in the wet grass at her feet. He removed his top hat and bent over until his forehead touched her tiger-skin slippers. “My sweet angel.”
The wrath on her face hesitated. “I. . . beg your pardon?”
Jesper let his tears fall into the soft fur, though they were not for the Princess; oh, not at all. “My sweet angel. My Princess. I beg you, forgive me. I have made an arrant fool of myself this night. I could hold back no more. I have been waiting too many long and lonely years, with too lonely and heavy a heart to keep silent for even one more day.”
“Keep silent?”
He lifted his head to be better heard over the uncomfortable shuffle of booted feet. The false confession was filth on his tongue. “My angel, have mercy. I stilled those wolves for you on the White Path, but had Hell itself besmirched your innocence, I would have done the same. Has my steady, cold demeanor not told all? I love you. I love you, and I cannot have you. So I try, endlessly, to pretend. But after yesterday, when I thought I’d lose you to my own faulty lupine smithing. . . to my own mistakes. . . .”
Her uncertainty melted, and her eyes opened wide in enlightened pleasure. “You. . . you try to pretend?”
The guards averted their eyes, shifted their weight, ashamed by his naked emotion. A few looked pained and nodded in knowing sympathy. Jesper could only plunge in deeper. “Of course! O Princess, have you never seen a looking glass? How can you bear your own beauty and power? The light of you consumes me. Your perfection is what I aspire to each time I sit before my drawing board. The whole of my Arboretum, sweet one, which so rightly bores you, is merely my feeble attempt to emulate. . . you.”
Princess Kanna grinned. She glanced down to retie the belt on her dressing gown, taking her time to fuss with the knot. “I thought so. I always knew there was something funny about you, Leafsmith. Did you really think you could fool me for much longer?”
“I did.”
She gestured in dismissal at the newly grown steel. “And this?”
“The strange consequences of my vanity. I have hid this thing for too dangerously long, and something ugly came over me. I planted this monstrosity, and I was going to ascend it and cut through the Perennial Tower to your rooms, but looking up at it, I realized what foolhardy thing I’d done, and I lost my nerve.”
The Princess nodded and combed her hair back with her fingers. “And my dumpy, thick-headed cousin?”
Jesper closed his eyes in pain, and the tears poured. “Only my misguided attempts to make you jealous, my angel.”
Princess Kanna laughed. “Well, I certainly hoped you’ve learned your lesson, Leafsmith.”
“That I am a fool?”
“And a rather pathetic one, at that. You are no different from any other man, after all. Guards, let him go. He did this out of love for me, which is laughable of course, but pitiable and understandable. Go to your wretched, hidden home, Leafsmith. Your shame, and what they will say about you in the halls of my castle, is satisfaction enough for me.” The guards removed the manacles and backed away. “You can clean up this frightful mess in the morning.”
Jesper nodded, not looking at her, and turned to go. He headed back towards the Arboretum and his lonely sanctuary, his cart following him at a respectful distance.
Once within the black embrace of the branches, he moved through the dark on the unnamed path. A handful of mechanical bats swooped by, the breeze from their silk wings icy on the last of his tears. From its place on the hill, the timekeeping oak rolled out a single great boom. Elsewhere, the Arboretum danced on, but the sounds felt rote and empty. These stones migrating across his path, those Nibblers mining a fallen tree for ingrown steel—this was not life. This was desperate, hollow artifice.
Jesper reached his cottage. A light he’d left burning shone through the slats in the shutters. He opened his door—there was no reason to ever lock it—and went inside.
He stepped in something that crunched.
“I am afraid that I have spilled quite a lot of your sugar,” said Lady Zuhanna.
Jesper’s breath left him.
“I thought that I could use a cup of tea while I waited for you,” she explained, blushing while turning round to face him, “and that you mightn’t mind since it would only be a few small tea leaves, but I couldn’t find any tea leaves at all in your entire kitchen, and the last place I decided to look was behind the sugar because at home that’s where Ethy keeps them, and I thought perhaps you might too. But then I knocked it over somehow, and then those things came from somewhere, and now th
e sugar’s crawling with them. Are they ants, or something mechanical? And where do you keep your broom? I’ve looked all over for that too.”
Jesper still could not speak, too overwhelmed by the simple fact of her standing in his secret sanctum. As if she belonged there. . . .
Lady Zuhanna nervously fiddled with a lacy appurtenance on her gown. “I’m quite sorry. Oh! How rude of me, to have you just standing there like that. Won’t you come in?”
Jesper groped behind him for the doorknob. He pulled the door shut and stepped in further, feet crunching over spilled sugar intermingled with fragile clockwork ants, but he didn’t care a damn about the ants. He cared that she wasn’t leaving, but rather, breathing faster at his approach. And he cared, most powerfully, that she leaned forward, oh so slightly, when he set his still-blackened hands on her arms.
She looked up at him, eyes wide as a frightened kitten’s. “I couldn’t sleep. I didn’t even get undressed; I just lay in the dark and thought and thought and thought, about the things Kanna said that did not fit together well, and about what Papa said when I showed him the ringauble you made, and I heard a frightful noise and lit a lamp and remembered what Goodman Kellin taught me—how to see where the steel comes up through the earth—and when I saw what was happening outside, I knew what it meant, and I ran down the stairs, and. . . and. . . but you weren’t. . . and then. . . .”
Jesper’s hands began to shake, or perhaps it was her who shook. He licked his lips and tried to speak, but the very breath stuck in his throat, even as Lady Zuhanna’s flush deepened.
“And—” The pitch of her voice rose as she spoke, growing ever more panicky and frightened. “I looked at the metal in the ground, and I said to myself if I were a Master Leafsmith and I lived over a web like this but in a secret place, I’d be where there was no metal at all, and I followed. . . that is. . . I wanted to. . . I mean, your cottage—” Her lower lip began to tremble. “I’m so sorry—I just thought—”
Ceaseless Steam: Steampunk Stories from Beneath Ceaseless Skies Online Magazine Page 10
