by D. K. Fields
Before taking her leave, she gave Jenkins a message to take to the Assembly so that the Torn Galdensuttir would know where to find them.
‘Will I see you at the Wayward story?’ the constable asked.
‘I’ll be there but…’
‘But I shouldn’t see you.’
‘Not this time, Jenkins.’
‘After all this, I hope?’
Cora waited until Jenkins’s blue coat had passed out of sight, back into the square, then turned and headed in the other direction.
*
She reached the tailor’s on time. The pavement outside the shop was empty. Not of people – there were plenty passing on the street, plenty stopping to look at the clothes in the window. But it was empty of the person she wanted to see, the person she’d sent the message via the pennysheet lad. She looked up and down the street. She waited, watching the tailor’s from the other side of the road. Watched everyone who climbed down from a gig, everyone who climbed into one, those who went in or out of the adjoining shops.
There was no sign of him.
The Poet’s bells chimed another quarter hour. They were louder somehow, though she was no closer to the Seat, as if the Poet himself was trying to tell her to give it up. As the noise of the last peal quietened, she decided to listen to the Poet’s advice and turned from the tailor’s shop, heading back the way she’d come.
‘You thinking I need a new coat?’ Serus was behind her, staring over at the tailor’s.
It took her a second or two to find her voice. ‘Well, that coat is pretty old.’
‘It’s a classic of its kind.’
He ran a hand down his arm and Cora’s skin prickled, as if she were touching the soft slipdog hide, feeling the firmness of his body beneath it.
‘Just like its owner,’ she said, walking over to him, but not too close. She still didn’t know how he felt about her, but then he closed the gap between them, and she felt it would be all right.
‘All the way back to Fenest, you never once tried to speak to me,’ he said.
‘I figured you needed some time to be angry.’
‘I did.’
‘And now?’ Cora asked.
‘Now I’m wondering what we’re doing here. You could have come to my place, Cora.’
‘Not until after the election.’
He frowned. ‘You still think your sister’s in danger, even with that dart thrower being… Well, with him staying in Perlanse, shall we say.’
‘None of us are safe until after the election, Serus, but I couldn’t wait until then.’ She stepped close, and she could smell the metal of the plates built into his flesh.
‘We’ve waited too long already,’ he said.
Cora took his hand and led him across the street to the tailor’s.
‘Where are we going, Cora? Really?’
‘I trust you, Serus,’ she said, looking him square in the eye. ‘Do you trust me?’
‘With every bone in my body – the metal and the parts I was born with.’
‘Then don’t worry.’
There were two men behind the counter, so similar looking, despite their age difference, that they had to be related. They both looked up from their work when she and Serus entered, but as soon as Cora held up the key, their gazes fell back to the cloth they were cutting.
‘There’s a curtain next to the sink,’ the older of the two said. ‘Door’s behind it.’
Cora thanked him and headed for the back of the shop, Serus close behind her, but not close enough. She wanted to have his skin pressed against hers, and she knew he felt the same. The feeling stretched between them like a lightning strike.
She pushed aside the heavy green curtain, and there was the door – narrow, low, but the key worked, just as it always did when following Beulah’s map of secret routes. This one in particular was special: it led to a whorehouse, a decent one, so Beulah promised.
‘Cora, where in the Audience’s name are we going?’
‘Somewhere with clean sheets. You and I are too old to roll around in alleyways.’
‘I like the sound of that.’
She kissed him, and it was all she could do not to tear his clothes off there and then. But from the corner of her eye, she saw the younger of the two tailors was craning his neck to see what they were up to. An elbow in the ribs from the older man made the younger snap back to attention, but it was time to get going. She and Serus wouldn’t have long, and she was determined to make the most of it.
Cora opened the door and lit the lamp from the supplies left there. Then she headed down the stairs, Serus close behind her, his hand on her back, just where she imagined his lockport was on his body. At last, she would be able to see every inch of him, new and old.
Thirty
The day of the Wayward story, Cora woke to the sound of rain. As she lay in bed under the eaves of the safe house, she listened to the water striking the roof. How fitting that on the day of a story whose Hook was a giant painting, the Lazy Painter was listening, and sending his rain to show it. Surely this was a sign of favour for the Wayward story? Whether it would make it any easier to get the ’teller of that story to their venue, Cora wasn’t so sure.
Rain, and heavy rain by the sound of it, tended to make everything more chaotic in Fenest. Tempers frayed, journeys across the city took longer as more gigs and coaches were on the road, and potholes became swimming pools. At least the cutpurses tended to stay home. The thieves of Fenest were a fair-weather bunch, their stories favouring the Devotee and her love of the sun. But it wasn’t thieving that Cora was worried about. It was getting Ruth inside Easterton Coach Station and in front of the voters without a knife finding its way into her back, her throat, between her ribs.
Cora threw back the bedcovers. Such dreams had plagued her all night. Ruth had fallen, again and again, into Cora’s arms, and the warmth of her sister’s blood pouring over her had woken her so often that Cora felt she’d barely slept at all. By the time she went to bed tonight, it would be all over, one way or another. The Wayward story told. And then? Only the Audience knew, and they were keeping their cards close to their chest.
There was a knock on the door – not the door to her room but the one that led to the stairs, on the other side of the landing. She checked the time: not yet eight. The visitor was earlier than expected, but that was no bad thing, given the rain. As Cora crossed the landing, she could smell tornstone.
Galdensuttir, the Torn who worked with Wayward Chambers Arrani, was soaked. As Cora led him to the small sitting room, water dripped from the Torn’s glass mouthpiece onto the floor.
‘Is good to feel this,’ Galdensuttir said, patting the water on his cheek. ‘In Fenest, your air is too thin, but your rain – it leaves no trace but the cold. In the Tear, the Painter sends fire from the sky.’ Galdensuttir’s finger ran along a deep scar that bit into his cheek, and Cora thought of the Torn election story, the girl Aris who bred beetles. ‘I do not need to hide from rain here,’ Galdensuttir said, ‘so I walk in it. I get wet!’ He laughed, making the tornstone in his mouthpiece flare, and the room was filled with the sulphuric smell. ‘But I do not come to tell you of rain.’
‘You’ve got word from Arrani, about where Ruth needs to be?’
‘I have.’
‘Let me fetch her,’ Cora said. ‘Make yourself comfortable.’
With a heavy sigh and a wet thwump of his soaked canvas tunic, the Torn threw himself into an armchair. Cora crossed the landing to the room Ruth shared with Nullan.
For a second, she was back in their childhood home, standing outside her older sister’s door after Ruth had left Fenest, wondering if she would ever see Ruth again. Cora remembered many such moments, wanting to go in to see her sister’s things: her angry Seminary notes, her clothes left on the floor, her unwashed glasses. Nothing special, yet all made precious by Ruth’s absence. Her mother had told the maid to clean the room, but Cora had screamed that she mustn’t – so unusual an outburst that her f
ather had intervened, talked her mother down. That was unusual too.
Now, on the landing of the lodging house on the day of the Wayward story, Cora put her hand to Ruth’s door and remembered doing the same thirty years before. But back then she had never been able to open the door. She’d lain down beside it and stayed there, night and day, for a week. By then, her mother’s impatience with Cora and anger with Ruth won out. The maid was finally sent in. Her father died that night.
Cora knocked on the door.
It was Nullan who opened it. Cora could see, over the Casker’s shoulder, Ruth asleep in bed.
‘Great weather for it,’ Nullan said, and managed half a smile.
‘Glad to see Ruth didn’t do her memory testing all night.’
Nullan glanced behind her. ‘She said she’d done as much as she could. Like the rest of us. Is that tornstone I can smell?’
‘Galdensuttir’s here,’ Cora said.
Nullan was already turning away to wake Ruth. There was no going back from this moment. It had begun.
*
Ruth and Nullan took chairs beside the Torn. Cora stood under the small skylight in the roof to watch the rain.
‘First,’ Galdensuttir said, ‘let me say this: I am sorry you have to tell your story at the place of the coaches. It is… a poor draw for the Wayward.’
‘This weather doesn’t help,’ Ruth said. ‘I remember Easterton Coach Station having little in the way of shelter.’ She looked to Cora who nodded in confirmation.
‘When it was first mentioned as a venue,’ Nullan said, ‘Electoral Affairs said they’d put up tents.’
‘Fitting for the Wayward,’ Cora said.
‘And for Fenestiran voters,’ Ruth said. ‘It’ll make people think about the camps outside the south gate, finally see that the suffering is already here, on their doorstep.’
‘My fear,’ the Torn said, ‘is that the rain will annoy the voters. The rain drips on them and their fine Audience robes.’
Nullan pinched between her eyes. ‘That’s why the head herders were petitioning for somewhere else. Anywhere else!’
‘That didn’t seem to go too well,’ Cora said. ‘Why am I not surprised?’
‘Because the Assembly is still controlled by the Perlish,’ Nullan said, ‘and the Perlish help the Seeders, and the Seeders—’
‘The Seeders want walls,’ Ruth said. ‘Morton very likely had a hand in the venue choice for the Wayward.’
At this, the Torn inclined his head. ‘From what I have heard in the Assembly, this is so. The open nature of the site – this, too, is deliberate. To make you more vulnerable, Mistress Gorderheim. But Chambers Arrani, he fought hard to find a different venue. He still supports his storyteller. He wants no other. He told me this himself.’
‘What about the head herders?’ Cora said.
‘Arrani has not spoken to these traitors since the Bird House. He gives me this to give to you, Mistress Gorderheim, to prove his trust.’
From another part of his tunic, Galdensuttir pulled out what looked to Cora like a short, thin stick. Ruth gasped, and the Torn handed it to her. Nullan craned forwards to see what it was. Ruth’s fingers closed around the stick – which had to be more than that, given the look on her sister’s face – but whatever it might be, this wasn’t the time to find out.
‘Chambers Arrani will meet his storyteller in the small tent that stands for this purpose only,’ the Torn said. ‘I come to tell you it will be red, the canvas – the only one of its kind there.’
‘Do you know where it’ll be,’ Cora asked, ‘this red tent?’
‘Electoral Affairs, they say the red tent will stand between the garbing pavilion and the Commission box.’
Nullan exhaled deeply. ‘So you’ll be right in the heart of the danger, Ruth.’
‘Not much to be done about that,’ Ruth said. ‘Storytellers always meet with their Chambers just before the story. You know that better than anyone, Nullan, and we can’t risk doing things in a way that will upset the Commission.’
‘Or draw more attention to you than is necessary, Mistress Gorderheim,’ the Torn said.
Cora stared at the raindrops snaking their way down the glass, each finding their own path. ‘Will the Commission open any extra gates into the coach station?’ she asked the Torn.
He shook his head, and a small puff of tornstone left his mouthpiece. ‘There will be one way in and out only – the main gate. All will enter there. Including the storyteller.’
‘And the place within the coach station where I’m to tell the story?’ Ruth said.
‘It is… an unusual choice,’ Galdensuttir said slowly. ‘Though perhaps not, given the venue. I do not like it. Chambers Arrani, he does not like it either.’
Ruth and Nullan exchanged a glance.
‘I think you’d better put us out of our misery here,’ Cora said, looking back at the raindrops again, the way they moved. A plan was forming in her head.
‘Electoral Affairs say the Wayward storyteller must stand on the roof of a coach to tell her story. They have put it in place, I am told, in front of the voters’ seats. All others with wheels will be moved away, to the edges of the coach station. But this storyteller’s coach will remain in the open.’
‘A coach.’ Ruth ran her hands over her shorn hair. Not even she could have anticipated such a thing. ‘The risks—’
‘Thank you, Galdensuttir,’ Cora said, striding over to shake the Torn’s scarred hand.
Galdensuttir looked briefly confused at this abrupt end to the conversation, as did Ruth and Nullan, but then the Torn shrugged and stood to leave.
‘Let me walk you to the stairs,’ Ruth said, and escorted the Torn from the sitting room, thanking him for his service to the Wayward cause on the way.
Nullan watched them go. ‘She wants to talk to the Torn privately about Arrani.’
‘There’s something between Ruth and the Chambers, isn’t there?’ Cora asked.
‘Good to know you’re not completely blind to romance, Cora.’ Nullan gave her a shrewd look. ‘What happened between you and Serus when we got back to Fenest? He seems good-hearted, kind. I saw the way you—’
‘That thing Galdensuttir gave Ruth – the stick. You know what it is?’
Nullan gave the briefest of nods, but that was all. Cora guessed the token from Arrani was something to do with Nicholas.
‘Perhaps we’ll hear about it in the story,’ Cora said. She shut the door to the sitting room, making sure they were alone for what she was about to say. ‘Nullan, I need you to do something for Ruth, and you’re not going to like it.’ Cora licked her lips, took a breath, took another one.
Nullan perched on the arm of a chair. ‘Well, come on. Out with it, Cora.’
What she had to ask Nullan, it wasn’t an easy thing to say, but it was the only way. Since the Torn had mentioned the place Ruth was to meet Arrani, Cora had gone round and round in circles trying to think of other options, but she’d always come back to this.
‘The venue for the story being Easterton Coach Station,’ Cora said, ‘it’s not going to be easy for Ruth to get to the top of that coach safely.’
‘You think Tannir will be waiting for us?’
‘We have to plan for that, which is why we need something to throw him off the scent.’
Nullan fiddled with one of the piercings in her eyebrow. ‘You make him sound like a bloodhound, Cora.’
‘He’s not that clever, but he is persistent, I’ll give him that. This is his last chance to replace Ruth. We know from what happened at the Water Gardens that he’s not afraid to get his own hands bloody. We need a diversion.’
‘Have something distract him while Ruth sneaks in somewhere out of sight?’ Nullan said.
‘Someone needs to distract him. Someone who could be mistaken for the real target.’
Nullan’s hand fell away from her face, and she looked up at Cora. Looked up because she was shorter. She was thinner, too. The same build as Ruth, and w
ith her piercings taken out, her inkings covered, she could be the decoy. And from the look on Nullan’s face, she knew it.
‘It’ll be dangerous,’ Cora said.
‘I know.’
‘We’ll do our best to protect you, but you need to know the chances—’
‘I know, Cora. Nicholas died for this election, and at the Water Gardens we nearly lost another storyteller. You don’t need to tell me this is dangerous.’ Nullan all but spat that last word. Then she sighed and opened the door to the landing. ‘Guess I’d better find something suitably Wayward to wear and get dressed.’
‘But you are dressed,’ said Ruth, coming back to the sitting room in time to catch Nullan’s last words.
‘I…’
‘Nullan?’ Ruth said. ‘What’s going on?’
Cora made to speak, but Nullan cut her off.
‘I’ll tell her. Get yourself ready. We ought to be leaving soon – the rain.’
Thirty-One
For a day when an election story was being told, the streets were quiet. Five stories had been told so far, and each time, Fenest had all but ground to a halt, thanks to the number of gigs and coaches making their way to the story sites. Then there were the multitudes on foot who would never get a place in the limited public gallery, but who wanted to be nearby to feel the atmosphere, tell their friends and neighbours they were there, in the presence of an election storyteller. More likely, four streets away from that storyteller, but still, close enough for a story of their own.
But this morning, it was different. As Cora, Ruth and Nullan splashed through the puddled alleys between the lodging house and the venue for the Wayward story, Cora blamed the rain as well as the place they were headed: Easterton Coach Station. There could hardly be a more different venue to the other story sites. Tithe Hall and First Wall hadn’t been as fancy as the Water Gardens or Z’anderzi’s Kantina, but they’d had their own kind of charm and interest. Patron’s Mount, where the Caskers had told their story, right at the start of the election, had the benefit of a raised position over the city, and the sun had shone, of course. People had brought picnics, she remembered. Easterton Coach Station was a muddy pit full of wheeled contraptions, as well as the bad-tempered men and women who drove them, and it stank of horses.
