Steampunk Hearts

by Jordan Reece

  This wasn’t how Arden imagined the life of a beast. The tracker smoothed back his long hair. It was neither curly nor straight, but rumpled into waves that were quite attractive. “There were big searches in snowfalls and rockfalls; there were little searches of women suspicious their men were cheating and the other way around, many searches for animals. I can track them, too. Sor and Sora Stythe lost their sheep twice a season. I didn’t count how many tracks I went on because it was life. A baker doesn’t count the loaves of bread he or she sells. A farrier doesn’t count the horseshoes. My role was to track since I was very young. My mother and brothers are very proud to have a tracker in the family. My brother Humber always comes with me on the searches to carry things; my brother Cusano and his wife mind my animals and house when I’m gone. My brother Seton and my mother stay with the family of the missing to make sure they eat and sleep. They care for their animals and babies. The only matter on the family’s plate is to worry. Seton never tells them not to worry. Anything can have happened and he is too wise to give them false hope. But he tells them that they will have an answer. It is the wondering that is the worst. All of us were scrabbles until it became known that I could track; a fluke of nature in my blood raised our circumstances tremendously.”

  “What does that mean? Scrabbles?” Arden asked.

  “Poor. Rough homes, rough land, rough food, rough trade. But everything changes for a tracker’s family. It is a position of honor. Now we don’t have to scratch the dirt for measly vegetables to sell at market, and have my mother clean homes. We work hard but live well instead of working hard and living poorly. My brothers all have fine homes now, and Cusano’s wife is the third daughter of the crier. She never would have looked twice at a scrabbles man, but the beloved older brother of a tracker? Oh, yes, she would look indeed. I hired a scrabbles girl to clean my mother’s home.”

  “No one asked about your mother,” Dieter muttered, his eyes drifting away to the shops.

  “She was bent and brittle at thirty; she is tall and strong at fifty,” the tracker said undaunted. “And she learned to read! Marched herself into school with the little children, put a shiny red apple on the master’s desk, and the master wouldn’t turn out the mother of a tracker. No, no, he just laughed when she apologized for being a few decades late for class and told her to take a seat in the back where the desks were biggest. Being learned had been a dream of hers since childhood, a dream most scrabbles never achieve because they have to work. Now she owns a shelf of books in which she takes great pride and gives reading lessons to any interested scrabbles in the evening so that they might be poor but not foolish. And no more three meals a day of dust porridge for her! She can afford the best meat at the butcher’s. Have you ever eaten dust porridge?”

  “Modest meals in the orphanage, but never anything called dust porridge,” Arden said.

  “An orphan. That is sad. One eats dust porridge when hungry, and finishes a bowl hungrier than when one started. I never dreamed that I would miss the taste of that, but I have to say, after I was stolen and brought here, I would welcome it.”

  “You will not go hungry on this search.”

  “A kind jailor is still a jailor, so don’t pat yourself overly much on the back. Once you get what you want of me, you’ll return me to that horrible old man and his horrible staff and I will go back to being their kicked, starved dog.”

  “Maybe if you wouldn’t try to escape so much, they would be better to you,” Dieter said. “Ever think about that?”

  “Stupid boy, if you were taken from your home and locked in a cage, would you accept this as your lot in life or try to get out? Ever think about that?” the tracker said in derision. “I want to go home, as you would. I am insulted to be treated this way. I showed my animals more respect than I have been shown low the Cascades.”

  “Arden belongs to the king for his penchant, as all penchants do, and I don’t see him complaining about having to work in the zoo,” Dieter needled. “He does what he is told to do. What about your unwilling searches? How many of those?”

  “Thirteen of them.” The tracker looked at Arden. “So your life is not your own either, eh? Pity. You’re just jailed outside the bars.”

  “I do not consider myself jailed,” Arden disagreed.

  “Yet you are confined. When you accept your bars, when you see them even in your dreams, when you stop seeing them altogether but trust they are still there, when your mind has shrunk to the space that encloses it, that is when you can be let out of your cage. Where will you go? Why would you go anywhere? This is where you belong, so here you stay. Perhaps for an orphan it does not feel so limiting. There is no mother with a Sevenday dinner and a cheery hearth fire for you. No siblings either? No. So you have no three big brothers coming up the stoop to see if you’re around for a card game, or a roof thatching after a storm.” He gazed at Arden with pity. “Thirteen unwilling searches, and this will be fourteen. In one of them I will strike it lucky and escape. I am not a dog or plaything for those who can afford me. In the pearls, the tracker belongs to all from scrabbles to high society.”

  “Someone will just reclaim you there,” Dieter said with assurance.

  “Hah! Let them try! I was only caught because I went low the Cascades in search of a boy who went missing. Desperate for a little adventuring and Dava was missing on purpose. But he didn’t say goodbye to his parents or leave a note on his pillow, just upped and vanished, and they wanted me to put their minds at ease. Humber and I reached an inn at the highest of the High Reaches and there I was set upon by Lord Zamin’s baboons. We fought, we fought hard, but we were grossly outnumbered. They dragged me away and left Humber bloody on the ground. Let Zamin send his baboons into the Cascades! It won’t end with a tracker recaptured but a pile of rocks over a pool of blood. The twists and turns in the mountains hide the pearls well even from dragon flyers, should Zamin send those for me next. I will never be bothered again. And I will have the criers of the pearls announce that no tracker will track low the Cascades ever again. Runaway goats, adventurous boys, people would rather wash their hands of them than lose their trackers. I will be back there soon enough. Fourteen, now, that is a lucky number.”

  “Lucky for us since we have a penchant to control you and unlucky for you,” Dieter clarified.

  “For Dagad’s sake, squire, stop taunting the beast,” Master Maraudi said. “Whatever has gotten into you? Come ride up here beside me.”

  “Can’t respect something that doesn’t respect its own work,” Dieter said, obeying the order. Then all was quiet save the clopping of the horses.

  Few lived upon Shattered Hill, and those that did had homes only at the gentle swell of its lowest points. In olden times, the Odri royal family had lived in the palace at its top, and fine apartments were beneath it for ambassadors and visiting courtiers. All of it had fallen in war over five hundred years ago, and the ground was charmed by the spell of a talented but vengeful green-growth penchant from Hav. No one could rebuild there, though some had tried periodically over the centuries.

  Arden had heard of Shattered Hill in his sporadic history lessons. The palace and surrounding buildings had literally shattered, collapsing the roofs and scattering great white stones of its walls everywhere. Parts of walls still stood here and there alongside the steep road they traveled, jutting up like fangs with their fallen comrades resting among weeds. Attempts at newer construction were more whole, but weeds had grown up the walls and were inexorably pulling them down. The penchant’s spell was still effective after all this time. The weeds could not be cut or untangled from the buildings; they could not be poisoned or vanished by another spell. Until the power gave off, if it ever did, this place would only ever be a monument to the old Havanath-Odri-Loria wars.

  To see this place was grand. Generations of royal children had once run through these overtaken gardens; courtiers in fine dress had swept down the walkways to now decrepit apartments. The search party rode up the hill, past the r
emnants of the palace and to a grassy field that stretched to the crest. The road stopped with a little pond. Wind waved the purple and gold tassel grass beyond it. Everything here was pretty but forlorn, forgotten but clinging to its memories.

  When the tracker rapped on the lock, Arden undid it. Don’t go far. Stepping down to the grass and looking hungrily after a startled rabbit that bolted away, the tracker breathed. Everyone else dismounted, Keth and Master Maraudi watching the tracker do his work as Dieter escorted the horses to the pond for a drink.

  Tracking was a strange business. The tracker at first stood very still except for the rise and fall of his chest. Then he turned east and ran ten steps to breathe there. Startled, Arden repeated his command not to go far. But it was not so far after all, and he hadn’t given a specific distance.

  After a minute of breathing, the tracker ran west thirty steps. Arden walked after him nervously. This creature was too bright, and his mind could create leeway with commands due to it.

  The tracker breathed there for several minutes and Arden called, “Why do you run?”

  “Because I’ve been locked up, Arden, and it feels good to stretch my legs,” the tracker said, giving a gentle answer to a question that was somewhat stupid in retrospect. He finished pulling in the western air and ran directly into the pond. Then he closed his eyes in pleasure as the water soaked into his trousers. He curled his toes in the mud, the water so clear that Arden could see straight through it.

  “Is that a no on east?” Master Maraudi asked in surprise. “You weren’t breathing that air for long. Lord Ques had a hunch that Lady Ques was running for Loria.”

  “His hunch was misguided. I haven’t narrowed down her scent anywhere else, but it is definitely not in the east,” the tracker said.

  Master Maraudi and Keth exchanged a look, and she said, “It cannot be Isle Zayre. It cannot be. I will never believe that. She must still be in Odri.”

  “But not Loria,” Master Maraudi said in quiet relief. “Thank Dagad on the highest cloud for that.” Keth looked much lighter at the news that the princess had not gone to the convent in Alisee.

  “South,” the tracker said, breathing in and out deeply. “She is a woman from Lighmoon, you said, yes, and that is the direction where her scent is most concentrated.” He stepped out of the pond, kicking water up on the shore, and returned to breathe the western air. Arden kept an eye on him as Keth and Master Maraudi discussed western locations to which Lady Ques could have fled. Her family kept a manor in the Steppes, one that the lady had always favored, but it made little sense for her to have gone there.

  They checked for the tracker’s location, deemed him far enough away not to overhear, and kept their voices hushed. The princess was still only referred to as she. She had abdicated her titles, so why would she take refuge in a royal home? Near the Steppes was an elderly great-aunt who would be sympathetic to her plight, yet Keth believed the great-aunt’s loyalty to the good face of the Crown and her sense of propriety would outweigh helping a defiant young woman escape an unwanted marriage. She would allow the great-niece to visit, but encourage her to return home, and privately send an emissary or letter to let the king know.

  So it wasn’t likely to be the Steppes. Also in the west were Odri’s innumerable fishing cities and villages, which started at the Bay of Bize below the High Reaches, and ran down all the way south to the Salts. Under the illusion of a holographie crystal, she could be taking shelter there in a rented room. It was a massive region in which to hide. Yet she hadn’t taken sufficient coin to last the rest of her life, or jewelry to pawn, and what would she do when her finances ran out? Take a position on a boat? She had no training. She was capable of tutoring in languages and history, her expertise vast in those subjects, yet the fishers did not prize education very much. Closer to the Salts, they were downright hostile to it. And a holographie crystal did not last indefinitely. In a fairly short period of time, its power would fade and she would be recognized.

  “Not Loria,” Master Maraudi mumbled again and again. “That made the most sense out of the choices she had.”

  “You smell,” the tracker called.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You smell, you and that funeral director at your side, and your zoo man with shuffle caked in his crack!” the tracker yelled. “All of you are interfering with her scent. Go stand by the horses and get out of my air. Have a snack or drown yourselves in the pond. Just go away. She has a troublesome scent to ferret out and I need a little time.”

  “Not Loria. You are sure about this?” Keth called as she and Master Maraudi rounded the pond.

  “Not Loria,” the tracker said. “There is nothing of her in the east. Well, shuffle man? Do you have shuffle in your ears as well? Shoo.”

  Arden retreated, but only halfway around the pond. He thought a very firm command into the tracker’s mind. Stay close to me. The tracker instantly headed north, but stopped at ten paces to breathe. Everyone waited as he went west and north, west and north again. Keth and Dieter got comfortable on rocks to have a meal; Master Maraudi trailed away to inspect the ruins of the palace.

  “How goes it?” Arden called after some time.

  “She left Lighmoon, and not in an easterly or southerly direction,” the tracker said. He was speaking to the sky. “Why is that, eh? With stolen jewels? Even in the Cascades, we would have thought to run east. Plenty of people in the border towns, in Loria, plenty of people who won’t ask for ownership papers. I’d go east. Richer country.” He glanced over his shoulder to Arden. “Aren’t you hungry? Are you that anxious to clap me back in my cage and hunt down a woman who makes no difference to you?”

  “Did she go to the fishers?” Dieter called. “Odri fishers? That would be straight west from here.”

  “I smell this scent from the west, yes, but it’s fleeting. The smell of a passage, not a settlement like Lighmoon is a settlement to her. But north too . . . Give me time to see if I can narrow it and then we’ll go on.”

  Arden watched the small fish swim in the water as he waited. This was a nice change of pace from working in the perindens. Tolaman had to be quite sour over Arden’s abandoned tasks, and there would be twice as much to do when Arden returned as the first lead’s revenge. Yet that was not a care for today. The sky was clear and the wind sweet, and he was standing upon a monument that would impress people should ever he have someone to tell.

  Grass swished and he looked over mildly to see which direction the tracker was going in now to sniff. Then he leaped away from the pond and shouted, “Hey!”

  The tracker was running away. The chain at his ankles shortened his strides, but he was going as fast as it allowed. Keth and Dieter looked up as Arden bolted after the beast, commands to stop flying through his mind. The tracker obeyed none of them. He did, however, slow just a smidgen and look over his shoulder.

  Arden was not in control of this animal. He wasn’t in control because the tracker was barely an animal at all. Sprinting through the tassel grass and leaping a rock, he narrowed the distance with his unfettered strides. The tracker’s breath was loud and ragged as he cut through the last of the field and made it into the trees.

  They grew thickly and with heavy canopies hanging down; vines snaked around their trunks and dripped from their branches, smothered boulders and twined around fallen logs. Choked out by leaves, what slim sunlight penetrated was dyed a deep green and did little to alleviate the shadows. Arden slipped between trees in pursuit of the tracker and for a moment panicked when he disappeared. Then he reappeared not thirty feet ahead, hands grasping a boulder as he heaved his bound legs over them.

  Stop, Arden thought. STOP.

  The tracker let out a shout as he vanished again. Arden ran on, swerving around the trees and rocks, batting his hands to part the hanging vines and cobwebs. Weeds had brought down a metal fence that had enclosed a carved stone slab. Someone had been buried here, presumably when the palace still stood. The engraved words had faded away and the
slab was cracked. Should there be more graves in these woods, nature was concealing them whole.

  Arden reached the boulder and heaved himself over it. The tracker had carved a shallow trench in the leaves and rocks of the ravine on the other side from sliding down it. At the bottom, he was on his side and kicking frantically. The chain connecting his ankles had gotten caught in the broken trunk of a tree. Standing unbalanced at the top of the ravine, Arden took one step and the ground gave. The world spun before his eyes and he fell.

  He tumbled to the bottom in a hailstorm of loosed rocks and plant debris. Vines were tangled around his legs. The tracker was wrestling fiercely with the chain. The wood cracked a little and he shouted in harsh glee. Pulling even more strongly, he grunted and jerked his head to get his hair out of his eyes. Arden yanked off the vines and scrambled to his feet just as the wood cracked all the way down to the base where it met the soil. The tracker prized out the chain and started to clamber upright. Diving for him, Arden wrapped his arm around the tracker’s thighs and took them both down to the earth. The tracker thrust himself over onto his back and kicked, but Arden only refastened his grip.

  STOP. STOP. STOP!

  He could see the expression in the tracker’s eyes change. His commands were making headway, but the degree was exceedingly small. His fingers curling into a fist, the tracker shouted, “I will not stop! I will go home, damn your Dagad and damn your jewel thief and damn you!” He threw his fist and nailed Arden in the throat, but the blow did not carry the full force with which it had started.

  STOP! STOP! STOP!

  They wrestled as Keth and Dieter shouted for them in the woods. Arden caught the tracker’s hands and pinned him down. The tracker thrashed like a fish and said, “Please. Please, Arden, I am begging you.” There were tears in his beautiful green eyes. “Just let me go.”