Steampunk Hearts

by Jordan Reece

  “Arden!”

  Oh, no. He turned to Leefa, who had her skirts in hand as she hustled down the corridor. His impulse was to leap atop his horse and kick it to a canter, charge past her and out of the palace walls. But Dieter was still fighting with the buckle. Her eyes wide with interest, Leefa said, “Where are you going?” She dropped her skirts as she got to him and looked over their party. “Tell me quickly! I must get back to the kitchen before Mona notices.”

  “Just some perindens business,” Arden mumbled indifferently.

  Her gaze lingered on Keth and he swallowed hard on a madman’s scream. He had told Leefa that he preferred men and still she was sizing up the woman soldier like Keth was a threat to a relationship that didn’t even exist! But Keth was older, a woman in her late twenties or early thirties with a pleasant face more than a pretty one, and her hair was braided into a tail that barely graced her shoulders. Leefa didn’t find in her a challenger. Then Leefa noticed the cage behind Keth’s horse and her interest waned. “Off to pick up a nasty new creature, I see. How long will you be gone, Arden?”

  “Couple of days to get there, couple of days to get back, I should think,” Master Maraudi answered.

  “But you didn’t tell me!” Leefa pouted prettily at Arden, giving a little stamp with her foot just like the Halulus had.

  Again, Master Maraudi intervened. “’Cause he didn’t know until last night. Come along then, Dieter, that big, stupid bird isn’t going to deliver itself to the palace.” The boy jerked mightily and won the battle of the buckle. Then he was astride his humble mare in a flash. Arden was readying to mount when Leefa embraced him.

  None too soon, he was out of her clutches and in the saddle. Master Maraudi kicked his horse and led them out of the stables, Leefa following along and waving her kerchief until an enraged scream of her name sent her fleeing back to the kitchen.

  “Trouble talking to your girl, friend?” Dieter asked as they clip-clopped to the opening gates. “She’s a pretty one, that.”

  “Oh, that’s not Arden’s girl,” Master Maraudi called back.

  “Hugging him like she was his girl,” Dieter said. “Arms that tight and she’s not a stranger then, is she, sir?”

  “Those arms are tight around a different man every season, boy. Get yourself a little higher in position and they’ll be around you. Take it?”

  Dieter was quiet for a moment, and then he nodded. “Take it, sir. But she is a pretty one all the same.”

  “Yes. Yes, she is. Work hard and she could be yours. I don’t believe Arden will challenge you to a duel.”

  As the man seemed friendly enough, Arden asked a question. “How do you know so much about me, Master Maraudi?”

  “It’s my job to know. It’s my job to know everyone in this palace better than they know themselves. Thought I was just a courtyard guard, eh? A first floor stand-about with a sword? Good, good. That’s what you’re supposed to think. People say more to their equals than they do to their betters. They’ll bow and scrape to the Master-at-Arms, but not to me. Snakes in the grass, that’s what he made some of us soldiers in the ranks of guards, and staff working elsewhere. And I’m the head snake of all. So I know that our boy Dieter has that rare ability among the young to sew his trap shut when it counts. He’s picked up stories in his year and a day at the palace, yes, he has, but is he going to regale us with some merry tales today?”

  “No, sir,” Dieter said. “Don’t know what you’re talking about, sir, beg you kindly. Got nothing for tales but pub songs that everyone knows.”

  “Good lad. He and his little friends get deep in their cups playing handsies or footsies or whatever the Dagad-hell that High Reaches game is, and tongues start wagging, yes, they do. Wagging for giggles over handsies and ale. How the king farted during a proclamation; how the foreigner can’t stand her second son; and did you know that stuffed-shirt ambassador from Loria spends every night in the worst brothels shelling out his gold for toothless whores both male and female, glory holes, even dragons-”

  “No one would use a dragon for this!” Arden exclaimed in dismay as they passed through the gates and into the road that surrounded the palace. It was early yet and traffic was so light that they could ride their horses together. Master Maraudi turned left and they followed.

  “Yes! Yes, they would, and they do! How foul. So the little fellows get drunk and wag on all night long, but not Dieter, not Dieter, no. He just giggles and giggles, sings his songs and talks gobs and gobs about nothing, and doesn’t say a word that shouldn’t be said. What does he know but some dirty pub songs and stories that everyone has heard? Who is the most important person in the palace, penchant?”

  “The king,” Arden said promptly.

  “No, no. Oh, no. The most important person in the palace is Silence. In a palace, silence is everything. Whatever goes on, no one will ever know about it from Dieter’s lips. He gets a little extra coin every month to encourage this habit as he grows from boy to man. And they won’t hear it from Keth either. Not for the extra coin, but because she has honor. She has fifty times, a hundred times the stories of Dieter. That comes from posts on the third floor. Things people would kill to know; things the king would kill her for knowing. A guard can become part of the scenery, and secrets slip when only the wallpaper is watching. But Keth is the fourth generation of her family to be royal guards. To speak and shame herself is to also shame her pa and her pepaw and her pe-pe-paw before her. How is your pe-pe-paw, Keth? Gone to Dagad yet?”

  “No. He still wakes up at five like he did as a guard,” Keth said. “Ninety-seven years old and marches around his home with his cane to wake up his servant boy and get the day started.”

  “So we’re in silent company, you and I,” Master Maraudi said to Arden. “And you’ll be silent, too. Not for coin or honor, but because you have no one to tell but the birds in the trees and the cats in the dens. Dagad knows if I had to work with that first lead, I’d prefer the company of animals myself. And you’re stuck with him until he dies or quits since your penchant belongs to the king and you can’t leave.”

  “You’ve got no friends then?” Dieter asked.

  Arden was embarrassed to be asked that question so bluntly. He had had no friends since he left the orphanage; he had had no family since his mother died. He hated that night with Etto for giving him cause to dream of more.

  Garrulous Master Maraudi answered for him. “All of them in the perindens despise Arden for that penchant, and the only other one he talks to regularly is that girl he’s so desperate to escape. I’ve never seen so many men shrink in the corridors as when she’s around, that’s for sure and certain.”

  He laughed about grown men fleeing a beautiful woman. “But that is why I know all of you from top to bottom, and Kolfax and Leefa and that hapless Sprong of a nanny’s assistant. Every pair of boots or slippers in the palace passes unwittingly by snakes in the grass, even those in the perindens. The Master-at-Arms must know who can honor Silence and who cannot.”

  The roads were awakening with the day. Windows opened and shops were unlocked. Beggars appeared with rattle-cups, two getting into an argument about who could stand at the steps to an inn for well-heeled travelers. A guard came down the stairs and shooed them both away. They waited for him to go back inside and then returned, ducking down beneath the railing where he wouldn’t be able to see. Very few of the beggars paid heed to the search party. No one else did either. There was little interesting about an old, empty cage strung with cobwebs.

  A bell rang out on one street and laborers spilled out of apartments and into alleys. Rapid walks carried them away to the textile factories along the river, bobbin boys swinging their lunch pails. Women with ink-stained fingers went to a press. The mood was jubilant, for Sevenday was a half-day for the factories and the noon bell would free them.

  It was nearly a day’s ride to Brazia by the fastest road. Keth was quiet and pensive through the morning. To Arden’s perspective, she had the least env
iable task among the four of them. All he had to do was maintain control of a beast, an easy job with a cage and a penchant; she had to bargain with a princess yet had only the poorest of cards to play. Master Maraudi talked horses and Lighmoon entertainments with Dieter, their conversation interrupted as the horses passed a line of beggars. A mother was calling out plaintively for coin to help her son, who had no arms or legs, and when coins were not forthcoming, she blew hard into a very shrill whistle and called again. Arden winced at the whistling, as did everyone within hearing range. The boy was in a box at the mother’s side, his eyes dull and what little he had in body motionless. Dressed in swaddling clothes and blankets, he was propped up against the wall of a business.

  Dieter and Arden looked into the box with sympathy as they rode by, and the young squire put his hand into his pocket thoughtfully as if considering that he might donate a coin to the cup. Snorting, Master Maraudi said, “Not feeling too sorry for him, are you?”

  “Can’t help but feel sorry for a boy with no arms and no legs,” Dieter said. “But is this a beggar’s trick, sir? Is that your meaning? Should we not feel sorry for him?” He removed his hand from his pocket without withdrawing anything.

  “I’ll answer your questions with a question, squire. What would you do with a son who had no arms and no legs? Give me the first ideas to pop into your head.”

  “Teach him to draw pictures holding a pencil in his teeth and sell them,” Dieter said. “Proclaim him a holy relic and charge people in Loria to touch him or take away his hair and nail clippings. They like their holy relics. No! Carry him to the freak shows just over in Galvus. That isn’t so far away as Loria. There they got the Man-Woman, the Flippered Girl, the Bear Man. I saw those two summers ago. One copper gets you three freaks; two coppers get you seven and a glass of icy cold lemonade. You can pick what freaks you want to see. What my son lacked in body, he would make up for in purse. Better than life in a box as a beggar, eh, sir?”

  Master Maraudi flicked his hand at a man in rags who came out to the horses to plead for coin. The man looked like he was going to spit on the ground at being dismissed, but a finer horse and rider coming up drew him away. The whistle blew deafeningly behind them. When it trailed off, Master Maraudi said, “Listen and learn, squire, penchant. A boy without arms or legs is a boy of interest, because he is not like other boys. But what does that woman do with an interesting boy such as this? She sits on a street with him, holding a rattle-cup and blowing a whistle all day. At best, she’ll go home with a few coppers when she could be going home with silver. That should tell you something about the boy in the box she has there.”

  “He’s got his arms and legs,” Arden said when Dieter puzzled overlong on this.

  “Maybe he does, penchant,” Master Maraudi said. “Maybe he’s missing a foot or some fingers to frostbite. Maybe he was born with one normal arm and one half its size, or he burned one off in a forge being a clumsy apprentice. Would you give your hard-earned coppers to see that at a freak show, Dieter? Would you pick Frostbite Boy? Or Burned Boy?”

  “No, sir,” Dieter said. “Can see that kind of thing anywhere. Nothing special.”

  “Exactly. Nothing special. Which is why she’s making nothing special off him in her rattle-cup. Yes, be wary of where you drop your coin. Things are not always as they seem.” Having persuaded himself that this was the truth of the matter, Master Maraudi taught Dieter beggars’ tricks that he had seen while traveling through Loria, which had the art of such trickery mastered. Arden was neither included nor excluded from the conversation, and listened in happily until it ended. He was so famished for human company that to be allowed at its periphery was a giddy experience.

  They rode through all of Lighmoon, even passing the orphanage where Arden had lived for ten years. The ramshackle building had come apart a little more in the decade of his absence, strips of paint flaking away from the walls and the windows duller from never being washed. Behind the plank wall he heard the voices of children raised in shouts and laughter as they played in the yard. His daredevil friend Otas of long ago had always been in trouble for climbing up that wall and walking along its narrow top. Now Otas was somewhere out there in the world, a working man like Arden, but Arden could only picture him here as a scuffed-skin boy throwing out his arms in triumph as he came to the end of the forbidden wall, and then yelling as he fell off on the wrong side. Arden had laughed until he wept.

  He missed laughing like that. Those in the perindens resenting Arden’s penchant had no idea how he’d resented it himself for taking him away from the only home he had known after his mother died. He looked through the windows but could see nothing through the filth; his memories stirred of the shabby insides, the cots and cracked walls, the yellow stains on the ceiling. The state of the outside assured him that the inside was much the same as it had been. He wondered if the same matron was still there, and if she would remember him.

  Then they were past the orphanage and traveling down another Lighmoon street. Master Maraudi stopped at an inn for them to have a late lunch, and because it was a humble place, had Dieter stay with the horses to guard their belongings. A meal was sent out to him. Striking up a conversation with a married couple of traders at another table, Master Maraudi subtly steered it to gossip of the royals. Arden would not have thought anything of this before, but now he understood the deliberation in it. The man wanted to know what was being said, and who was saying it.

  There was nothing in the traders’ chat of Princess Briala except a bored comment about her wedding soon to come. The rest was snippy remarks that concerned the gross inequality of having Loria’s goods sold in Odri when Odri’s goods were not sold in Loria.

  So word had not gotten out yet, at least not to these traders. Arden listened in on the chat at other tables. All of it was inconsequential. If the princess could be caught and returned speedily, then as far as the populace knew, nothing at all had happened. That brought back his thoughts to unfortunate Keth, tasked with changing the course of a set mind, and also his unfamiliarity with the creature called the tracker. That part did not interest him very much. He had a penchant for animals, but that did not engender a great love of them. He had liked them more before they became his sole responsibility and reason for being. Yet they put money in his pouch, and he was pleased when Master Maraudi paid for their meal and he did not have to breach the ties.

  Then they were on the road again, coming to the end of the city and traveling past cultivated fields and farmhouses. In time those gave away too, and Master Maraudi turned them onto a side road called Clopsing that wound through the thin trees and rocky slides of uninhabited land. Three roads connected Lighmoon to Brazia, and to pass the time, Arden debated with himself why they were on this one. The best and shortest was the Noster, paved and guarded the entire way, but that had small tolls on either end and was always crowded. The worst was the Rambles, which was roughly cut through the hills and filled with the kinds of people who wanted to avoid being seen. Guards were dispatched there often in search of criminals. The longest of the routes was Clopsing, which their horses were trotting down steadily now. It added a couple of hours to their travel time, but it seemed to Arden that it was the least likely to arouse interest. Thrifty traders and poor travelers chose it, and pickpockets didn’t often lurk around its curves because it went so out of the way.

  Little Hav dragons were sitting in a tree along the road, screeching and flapping their wings as compatriots chased after bugs and battled over the ownership of branches. The tree was splotchy with singe marks and it reeked of shuffle. All of the dragons were battle golds, too common for the perindens and having a lifespan of a scant year. They killed each other long before second birthdays rolled around, even though they were capable of living up to five years. Dieter broke into laughter as a flying battle gold spontaneously combusted while chasing another one around. “Jest then now! Why do they do that, friend? You must have the reason.”

  “Dragons of several
breeds have two connected stomachs,” Arden said, raising his voice to be heard over the screeching. “One for food; one for fire. If they start to spurt fire but forget themselves and swallow it into the wrong stomach, they explode. All of them are stupid, but the blues and battle golds could be argued to be the worst. They lay the biggest clutches of eggs and that’s probably to compensate for so many of them not living to adulthood.”

  Dieter hadn’t listened to half of it. He was turned in the saddle, eagerly watching the dragons in the tree. Keth made a face at the racket and was moved to speak. “I never have cared for dragons. The noise and the smell. No disrespect intended, penchant.”

  “None taken. I don’t care for them either,” Arden said, and Master Maraudi chuckled at a penchant not liking the focus of his penchant.

  Battle golds weren’t even pretty to look at. Their scales were singed and gray, torn and missing altogether from fighting. The horses flicked their ears and tails in annoyance, Keth’s ready to spook as dragons lifted from a branch. Arden calmed it down with an unspoken command.

  “Must have been amazing to witness, the old dragon wars,” Dieter said wistfully. “Hav troops storming south with legions of these little fellows; Lorial regiments coming east with their bigger ones. They don’t use them anymore, no one. Why is that, Master Maraudi? Don’t you want one on your shoulder to help you out in a fight if someone were to attack the palace?” He ducked as a fighting clutch of battle golds flew over his head.

  “They’re very hard to train,” Master Maraudi said. “A horse, a dog, they have minds set for commands. A dragon? Not so much. They would be more likely to set the palace on fire than help me defend it. Unless you have a penchant to direct them, and our fellow Arden here has few his equal, they aren’t the best choice for warfare. So they are no longer used.”

  “Can you make them stop?” Dieter asked about the fighters. Arden reached into their minds. Find bugs. The battle stopped at once, and they soared in different directions to seek out worms and flies. Arden called one back and told Dieter to lift his hand. The dragon landed on his palm and sat there companionably before Arden directed it back to the tree.