“And how did they find out how well they like you, if you’re as much a homebody as that?” I said. “How does a girl who’s still impressed with a diamond cave, who’s chaperoned all the time and barely off her own family’s lands, come to the attention of the Rust Lords?”
She ducked her head. “There was a masquerade with my cousin. It was more of a romp than I am permitted to attend, lest I—”
“Lest you ruin your chances of a brilliant match,” said Sukey, very dryly. “We are aware of how these things work, though we don’t live them.”
Josine peered at her a bit anxiously. I think she had decided that Sukey was the nice one, and might have been rethinking her assessment. “There was a masquerade,” I prompted.
“My cousin feels sorry for me,” said Josine. “Felt sorry, at least. Now he feels guilty, I suppose. But he always thought it was a shame I wasn’t permitted out more. He remembers when we were children, how I was just as brave as he was and just as quick with a spell, and he doesn’t... he didn’t see any reason why they should treat me like an invalid.”
“But he does now?” said Sukey.
“I have a knack,” Josine said apologetically. “I... it’s something I know I can do, not something I know how to do, if that makes any sense. It just happens.”
“What just happens?”
“I put things right again,” she said.
Sukey and I looked at each other. “You reverse time?” Sukey asked, hiding her skepticism much better than I would have.
“No! I... they say you can’t put Humpty-Dumpty back together again,” said Josine. “About eggs and things? They teach it to children because it’s true, there’s no use crying over spilt milk and you can’t put Humpty-Dumpty back together again, because he’s an egg, and smashed eggs don’t work that way.”
I suppose Sukey was scowling in thought. I know I was. The word Josine was looking for was “entropy.” There were professors who came to Madame’s, as everyone came to Madame’s, and she insisted that they treat us, me and Sukey in particular but the others as well, as people, equals. For professors, treating someone as your equal means telling them at great length what you are figuring out, or what you might figure out soon, or what you think you’ve just figured out a minute ago if you didn’t get the math wrong. They soon found out that people who manage a whorehouse, not to mention the whores themselves, are very, very keen on not getting the math wrong.
And what one of them was figuring out was called entropy.
It was exactly what Josine was talking about, things falling apart, some things only happening one direction and not another. It was the Rust Lords’ greatest joy and their greatest power. And here Josine was saying she was able to reverse it, but they weren’t angry with her at all, and that didn’t make much sense to me.
While I was thinking all this, a plover walked across the cavern entrance, picking and pecking its little speckled brown head, as casual as a bird could be. Sukey frowned, and I did a quick spell to see through illusions and shifted shapes. It was really a plover, hatched and grown. Sukey and I looked at each other.
“Oh, a little bird,” said Josine. “Is it a fairy bird?”
I looked at her, astonished. I could not imagine that someone could say that and not make me want to take off my lovely, well-made boot and beat her with it. How twee would someone have to be to ask me to look at the sweet little fairy birdies when we were trying to shield her from some of the most deeply unpleasant forces of magic allowed within city gates? Not very twee, apparently, as Josine could manage to make it sound matter-of-fact.
“No, it’s just a plover,” I said. Josine nodded as though this was an ordinary occurrence. I got up from my dampish seat and watched the plover as it went.
“As you said,” said Sukey, sounding concerned, “just a plover.”
“And where do we find plovers?”
“Along the seashore,” said Josine with hearty good cheer.
I looked over my shoulder. Sukey did not look nearly so cheerful. “Along the... seashore,” she repeated.
The diamond cavern was damp, but we had not thought anything of that; the weather of the Underhill ways can be capricious and is certainly mysterious to the likes of us. But we both knew that there ought not to be a seashore or anything a plover could mistake for one within several miles of where we were standing.
I followed the plover. Sukey and Josine followed me. The plover was oblivious. I motioned them to wait when we got to the line where my protections from magical spying would give out, and I kept going.
Someone—or something—or the Underhill itself—had plunked an ocean down where we wanted to go.
Up until that moment, I had not been sure that we wanted to leave right away, and I was willing to stick around in the diamond cavern and talk to Josine some more about what, exactly, had happened at this masquerade ball she so foolishly attended, so that the Rust Lords would be interested in her. But the very minute I saw that misplaced ocean, I felt sure that we had to go, back to Madame’s and as soon as possible. I hurried back to Sukey and Josine. The plover, presumably, hurried on to whatever it is plovers find worth hurrying for.
“Unexpected ocean,” I said. I saw the whites of Josine’s eyes, and I was briefly amused that she seemed to think I had gone off my nut.
“Oh dear,” said Sukey faintly.
“We can’t stay.”
“Not if they’re handing out oceans without marking the spot first,” I agreed.
“I’ll stay with the—with Josine for a moment,” said Sukey.
“And I’ll call Jenny,” I said, finishing her thought. “All right.”
I took off my boots very carefully, button by button, and then my stockings. I handed them to Sukey along with my parasol. She accepted them with equanimity though Josine stared. Next I shimmied my petticoats from under my dress, until I had only dress and shift to contend with. This stopped Josine’s staring; she politely averted her gaze.
I left them standing there, Sukey folding up my petticoats with her customary tidiness. I hitched my skirts up under my arms and waded knee-deep into the misplaced sea. I had not gone wading or swimming in the lakes often since joining Madame’s staff, as it is not a thing a person of the class I now belong to will do.
But as a child I frolicked like a young otter with my poor cousins, so I knew how to stand steady in the currents, and I knew the different ways lakes could feel under my toes. I didn’t imagine seas were much different: there were the standard sandy bottoms, and the mossy rocky bottoms, and the pointy rocky bottoms, and the sucking muddy bottoms. All of the rocks and soil under water have been harassed and harried by water, and they feel it.
Here, I couldn’t feel individual rocks at all. It was unweathered stone, such as I would expect to find under my feet in a cave that had never touched the sea. It was not particularly comfortable to walk upon barefoot, and I was not as confident of my footing. So up to the knees would have to do.
Quietly, so that Josine couldn’t hear me, I called out to my colleague, my ally, my friend. And Jenny came.
Jenny had lived with me and Sukey and the others at Madame’s for four years. She and Madame found out quickly enough that she was a failure as a whore—like me and Sukey—but unlike me and Sukey, she had no talents for diplomacy, administration, or much in the way of organized spellcasting.
What Jenny did have, we discovered one day, was a strong affinity for shapeshifters. For reasons none of us could understand and Jenny couldn’t articulate, she loved the skinwalkers, and they loved her. With the rest of us, they were aloof and wary. Jenny may as well have been one of their furry babies for all the caution they showed her.
Two years ago, one of their number, Lisette, fell in love with a mortal man. She decided that she would spend her days on land with him, but to give him her sealskin to hold her to the bargain seemed an unfair burden to them both. She gave it to Jenny instead, not forever but to keep for awhile. Jenny spent her days in the wa
ters Underhill, frolicking with selkies who accepted her, if not as one of them, certainly as a dear friend and one who would help catch the strange fish who populated those waters.
What we all knew—what we never spoke a word of—was that every day Jenny lived Underhill changed her, made it harder for her to return home, and we didn’t know what she would do on the day when her selkie friend wanted her skin back. We had no earthly idea, nor an Underhill one. But as none of us, up to and including Madame, had any idea what Jenny would do in any case, no one tried to stop her.
The girl-seal nosed my leg playfully, and then her flippers flung her head back in one motion, and it was Jenny in a sealskin cloak, standing up in the water next to me.
“I wish you were here for love of me,” she said without preamble. “Hello, Lucy. What’s happened?”
I gave her a quick hug and explained as best I could.
Jenny sighed. “Can she swim?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” I said.
“Find out, will you? I’m not sure I can get you through to a point where you can find the thread to weave a door to Madame’s again without at least a bit of swimming.”
“What if she can’t?”
“Then I call some selkiekind to help her, and Madame is in debt to the skinwalkers for the sake of a little mortal client she’s never met.”
My heart sank. “I’ll ask her, but I can’t imagine where she’d have learned. I can’t imagine where she’d have been permitted to learn. It’s not the sort of thing her people—”
“I know,” said Jenny grimly.
I waded back to shore, feet slipping uncomfortably. I never quite lost my balance, but the hem of my dress got thoroughly soaked all the same. By then I was pretty sure the dress would be a complete loss, which was a shame. I was fond of that dress. But among the things I had learned from Madame was to set priorities.
I stripped my dress off, standing before them in my shift. Sukey winced and started to unbutton her own dress. “Can you swim?” I asked Josine.
“No,” she said.
Sukey looked at me.
“Madame will have to owe the selkiefolk a favor,” I said.
“Isn’t there another way?” asked Sukey.
I raised an eyebrow and let her think over the alternatives herself. Coming out of the Underhill ways at an unknown point might land us miles from the city, or universes from it, with no way of telling how to get back where we came from—if we even survived the trip. The most prominent tales of the children who are taken Underhill are the ones who simply live there, like Jenny, but no one talks of the ones who wander into another universe, and then another, and are never seen nor heard from after.
It is possible that the Fair Folk know how to track one of our own if she strays from this universe, but if so, they aren’t telling. Madame would have freed those ways to us if she could. Madame opens many paths. But that path is not open even to her.
And returning to Josine’s house, going out the way we came in, would put us in no better position with regard to the Rust Lords, and waiting for the sea to shift again might do us a deal more harm than good.
Sukey thought all this herself. “Well, then,” she said with a sigh. “Tell Jenny that our charge can’t swim, and let’s get on with it.”
Once again, Josine was more game than we had any business expecting of a young woman of her upbringing. She did not make any fuss about leaving her fine dress behind, nor about stepping forth in her shift to be bumped about by selkies. I suspected that the cave made her feel more as though she was indoors, somewhere private, but it may simply have been that she was uncommonly sensible.
Or uncommonly frightened by the Rust Lords.
I had not been swimming for quite some time, and Sukey was, I think, the same. The selkies were there to help Josine, but I was just as glad to have a nudge from time to time. I suppose we only swam for half an hour, perhaps less. It felt like much more. Then one of the selkies nudged me harder than their helpful bumps, and I hit bottom with my toes.
I stood up. The water was up past my waist, but calm. While Sukey and Josine waited, catching their breaths, I trod out the path for the gate that would take us back to Madame’s in safety. I have never seen something so welcoming as the closet on the landing of the back stairs that day. I made a mental note to send someone to sop up the extra water that spilled onto the second-best carpets as we crossed over, but for the moment I was content to sit on the soggy second-best carpet in my shift and laugh wearily and breathe with Sukey and Josine.
* * *
4. The Arts of Unearthly Pleasures
It would have been too much to ask that the Rust Lords avoid our establishment while we had Josine Valdecart within it. The Rust Lords, like all other lords of power who visit our city on the borderlands, know what they like. And like so many others, what they like best is exactly what we have.
It’s how we make our living.
We all know when the Rust Lords come through the door. We can hear them and feel them and smell them; we could even without Madame’s training. In less highly skilled atmospheres, a room will go quiet when one of the Rust Lords walks in. Here, we are too mannerly for that, and they appreciate it, though they themselves have no manners to speak of.
Their feet fall heavily on the carpet, and around them comes the smell of rust and of moldering leaves, which does not readily dissipate no matter how many jars of potpourri we set out and no matter how thoroughly we launder the things they touch. Their voices are not loud, but the creak of them carries. They are less vivid than the ordinary fairies, more veined and mottled than the likes of us, and they shine like a slick of oil on water.
The Rust Lords ought to be very popular among our local fairy population: anything that saps the power of cold iron is well-liked, even loved, in our trade. Nearly anything.
But the Rust Lords are not. Part of the problem, of course, is that they can’t completely destroy cold iron. Iron is an element. Binding it to other elements, in rust, does not make it disappear, and while smudging fairies with rusty dust is a great deal less dramatic than smiting them with swords, it turns out to be threatening all the same. And it turns out that raw destruction makes the deathless uncomfortable. I gather it hits too close to home.
In any case, we are as discreet as we can manage at segregating the Rust Lords from the ordinary clientele, and they visit but rarely and not in great numbers. Keeping them away from Josine would not, in theory, be difficult.
It was therefore with a sense of inevitability, though not a pleasant one, that I realized that unless we stayed in the landing closet forever, the door I’d opened from the Underhill ways took us directly past their section; and that, of course, some of them were in attendance.
“I smell them,” Josine whispered, shrinking back against the cream-and-straw wallpaper in her wet petticoat. Her hair had draggled down the back of her neck, and for the first time she looked like the fainting noble daisy I had expected her to be.
“We won’t let them get you,” I said. “We won’t, and Madame won’t. And this is Madame’s place.”
“Madame won’t like it if there’s trouble, though,” said Sukey.
“Shall we go back and get Jenny’s sealskin?” I asked.
Sukey frowned at me. “If she would give it. And if it wouldn’t make them suspicious, a seal flopping and flapping along the corridors. Even the born-selkies have more manners at Madame’s than that.”
I sighed. “Why is it that those without manners feel they can presume upon those with them? If we protested that they were rude, they would laugh and not pay us the least attention.”
It was fortunate then, or possibly a sign of a well-run house, that one of our girls, Therese, chose that moment to ascend the back stairs. Even among our girls, Therese is uncommonly sensible. She did not say a word at our half-clad, bedraggled state, merely blinked, and then greeted us in very cautious tones.
“We’re just out of the Underhill ways a
nd avoiding the Rust Lords,” I said, also quietly. “This is Miss Valdecart, a client we are protecting.”
“From the Rust Lords.”
“Yes.”
Therese looked us over carefully. “You’ll want something dry.”
“Ideally.”
“We can get you....” Therese hesitated.
“Do you work in the Rust Lords’ section?”
“She does,” said Sukey.
“When I’m called on,” said Therese. “Not always. But I have rooms. I have space.”
“Is there anywhere we can go from here that won’t be near their—”
Therese shook her head. “But I’ll run point.”
“They don’t want Lucy and me,” said Sukey. “It’s Josine they’re after. They might not even know we’re the ones protecting her.”
Therese winced. “I wouldn’t underestimate what the Rust Lords know.”
“All the same, if you have a choice between throwing her to them or us—”
“I understand,” said Therese. “Come on, then.”
She crept down the stairs and peered around the banister. I sighed, not sure what use this was going to be. The air was full of the smell of the Rust Lords. They were near. I would not be able to tell how near. Holding our sopping shifts out so as to avoid squelching, Sukey and Josine and I followed Therese down the stairs. Therese slipped down the hall, looking about her, and then motioned us to follow her into her room.
Happily for all of us, Therese was a bigger girl than any of us, though not as tall; we would never become ladies of fashion borrowing her clothes, but they would cover us decently enough for in Madame’s house, decently enough until we could get to our own things—or, in Josine’s case, to mine. In the quiet of Therese’s room, I started trying to think which of my dresses I liked least, which stockings I could part with. Generosity is a virtue, but in this house we try never to take virtue to extremes.
“The things you do,” said Therese, shaking her head at me. I looked a sight in her third-best dressing gown, with my hair in a long, wet braid, but I held myself proudly.
“Madame serves her customers. You know that.”
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