Agent of the Crown

by Melissa McShane

  Three days after that, Telaine woke with a headache and the remnants of a bad dream echoing behind her eyes. She hadn’t slept well since the trial, having isolated herself in the palace so she wouldn’t have to face all those people who hated her now. Maybe she should leave Aurilien until the scandal had faded away. The seaside resort in Eskandel she’d contemplated the day all this had been set in motion was appealing.

  She rubbed her temples, then the bridge of her nose. No, tempting as that was, she’d been away from her family for so long the idea of leaving again made her heart hurt along with her head. She’d have to ride out the storm and see what remained when it passed.

  She dressed wearily and opened her bedroom door on her nightmarish sitting room. All that pink. She hated pink. It was a frivolous, detestable color. The Princess had loved pink. She massaged her temples and closed her eyes. Blue, that was a nice color, sapphire blue like the butterflies she’d once seen in Veribold. Sapphire blue and gold, and light-colored wood, ash or maple. She opened her eyes and looked around. Well, why shouldn’t she have a sitting room she actually wanted to sit in?

  There was a palace decorator, a thin, timid woman who blossomed when she heard what Telaine had in mind. Telaine suspected she didn’t have a lot to do most days. She supervised the installation of a wallpaper patterned subtly in pale gold over the pink and white paint and a hardwood floor with a thick golden-brown rug from Eskandel. Telaine chose curtains to coordinate with it, and elegant ash chairs and a long sofa upholstered in sapphire blue to replace the awful overstuffed and over-gilded furniture. The palace carpenters replaced the ugly pink mantel with one of blonde wood that had been rubbed and polished until it glowed.

  The process left Telaine invigorated. She energetically decimated the Princess’s wardrobe and asked Posy, still doing duty as her maid, to dispose of the unwanted dresses and gowns and boxes and boxes of shoes. She had trouble imagining who might want them. A theater company? A nouveau riche family with lots of daughters? At any rate, they were no longer her problem.

  She threw away most of her cosmetics and beauty tools, emptied half the drawers in her dressing table, then went out and bought more Deviser’s tools and supplies and put them in the newly available space. Seeing them ranged neatly in what had once belonged to the Princess made her feel triumphant. Cutting her alter ego out of her life hadn’t left a hole; it had given Telaine North Hunter space to finally breathe.

  But there came a day when she reclined on the sofa in her sitting room and realized she was bored. She didn’t miss the Princess’s “friends,” but they’d made up her entire social circle outside her family, and she didn’t realize how much she’d depended on their invitations for her activities. She couldn’t throw a party herself, and she didn’t like going out because it still hurt to be snubbed in public. She was tired of reading, she was tired of walking in the gardens, and she was tired of having nothing to do.

  She sighed and left her room. Perhaps she should go into the city and look for employment. Would Mistress Wright see it as a benefit or a drawback to have it known a Princess was working for her?

  Jessamy was kicking his heels in the drawing room. “I’m bored,” he announced.

  “So am I,” Telaine said. “We can be bored together.”

  Jessamy sat up and glanced around. “Or we can do something else,” he said. “Are you an actual Deviser?”

  Telaine raised her eyebrows at him. “You mean, do I have the ability, or do I have the certificate? Yes, on both counts.”

  “Oh.” He looked around again, then whispered, “You want to help me with a project?”

  “Did you become a Deviser when I wasn’t looking?”

  “Don’t tease, Lainie, I’m serious. Come see.”

  He led her through the palace to the Royal Library. Telaine had been inside many times, was familiar with the three stories of shelves and the soft carpets that silenced the room, but Jessamy took her to a door she’d seen but never opened. She tried not to laugh at Jessamy’s exaggerated whispers and gestures for silence; they were funny, but she knew Jessamy had gotten into trouble more than once for exploring in the library. Grandmama had strict rules about who was allowed into her domain, and where.

  Unlike the rest of the Library, these stairs were uncarpeted and looked old. They were probably part of the original rooms Grandmama had appropriated for the Library almost fifty years ago. Telaine couldn’t imagine anyone using them. Anyone but Jessamy, that is. They climbed four stories’ worth of stairs, which left Telaine breathing heavily. It wasn’t as tall as Willow North’s tower, but it had to be close. “Jess, is this really worth it? What exactly are you showing me?”

  “I found this a couple of months ago, right after Wintersmeet. It was cold and wet and boring outside,” he said stubbornly, as if expecting her to criticize his disobedience.

  “So what is it?”

  “Just wait. I want you to see it before I say anything.” He pushed open a door at the top of the stairs. The hall beyond was little more than bare, unfinished wood, with a door standing ajar to the left. Jessamy passed it and went down the hall, which made a left turn not quite at right angles. Telaine followed him until he came to a door that looked like all the others. Jessamy grinned at her. “You’re going to be amazed,” he whispered.

  He opened the door and waved her in. Telaine stopped a few steps inside the door and gasped. Her mouth hanging open, she took a few steps and then stopped again. “Jessamy, this is incredible,” she whispered.

  She stood before a giant chandelier, taller by far than she was and big enough around that she and Jessamy, linking hands, could circle it only if they also had Jessamy’s brothers Edward and Mark along. It lay tilted on its side, the massive chain coiled next to it still threaded through the ring on the ceiling from which it had hung. Scatterings of white dusted the floorboards beneath it, something Telaine took for bird droppings until she realized they were flakes of wax. The candle arms still bore most of the wax stubs they had contained when it had been pulled up for the last time.

  Telaine climbed onto it and found its arms sturdy enough to support her weight without bending. From that vantage point she could see where the floor had been filled in around the chandelier when it was hoisted and stowed for the last time. Even the winch and the stay-rods were still there.

  “I’ve been chipping out the wax,” Jessamy said, “but it takes a long time.”

  “You want to light this again. Turn it into a Device.”

  “Wouldn’t you?”

  “I’m agreeing with you. It’s outstanding. Have you spoken to Grandmama?”

  Jessamy scowled. “She’d just say no. Besides, I’d rather it was a surprise.”

  “More surprise to us if we put all that work in and it turns out she doesn’t want a chandelier.”

  “But—”

  “Slow down, apprentice. Give me a moment to think.” Jessamy glowed in the light of the word “apprentice.” Telaine mulled it over. “All right. I’m going to ask Uncle to help us with this. He might know how long the chandelier’s been up here…maybe Grandmama doesn’t even know about it. And then you and I, my boy, are going to make some light.”

  With her uncle’s approval, Telaine and Jessamy began work. Her uncle’s approval was so unqualified she wondered if Julia had told him about her failed love life, and if he too believed she needed something to distract herself. She didn’t care. For the first time since denouncing the Baron, she felt joy. Everything else in her life was ambiguous, but you were either a Deviser or you were not, and there was no third ground.

  She had to invent a Device before they could even start, a heating tool to melt the remaining wax away. Digging old candle out might have appealed to Jessamy, but even now that she wasn’t the Princess Telaine didn’t like getting things under her nails.

  She found a strong source three attics away, which saved them trying to haul things up and down the stairs without Grandmama seeing them, and using her earth-mover-
honed skills she transported it to the chandelier room. She and Jessamy took turns melting wax and washing the brass, something Telaine insisted on when she saw how dirty she was after the first hour.

  Later, she went into the city and bought shirts, trousers, and good work boots. Putting them on for the first time gave her a pang of sorrow, but only a little one. Lainie Bricker needed to disappear as much as the Princess did.

  Days passed. Telaine fell into what she hoped was a pattern and not a rut. Most mornings she’d steal away, sometimes with Jessamy and sometimes not, to work on the chandelier. They’d managed to keep their activity a secret from everyone except Uncle, even Julia, whose friendly prying into Telaine’s business took some work to avoid.

  It took six days to clean out the wax and another day for Telaine, crawling over the chandelier to examine it from all angles, to come up with a plan for converting it into a Device. The hollows where the candles went would hold motive forces; she would invent a Device that would plug into those hollows, connect to the motive force, and glow. They would be easy to replace and provide plenty of light for years to come, and if the motive forces died, well, the source to imbue them was right there.

  Afternoons she spent with Julia and Emma Telaine, playing with the baby, watching her roll from her back to her stomach and try to crawl. Much as she loved her cousin and her namesake, this was the time of day when she was most likely to become homesick, for as much as she was beginning to find peace, she couldn’t stop thinking of Longbourne as home. She thought of Eleanor, mourning her sons; thought of pregnant Blythe, whose child would grow up not knowing its father; thought of Ben, and cut those thoughts off ruthlessly before they could start her crying again. When she caught Julia looking at her oddly, she exerted herself to play and talk and laugh, and if it wasn’t completely natural, at least it also wasn’t forced.

  In the evenings, she spent time with her family, or sometimes attended a dance or a concert. There weren’t many of these; it still hurt to be snubbed. She subtly led Evan Kirkpatrick to understand she wasn’t interested in him. It seemed she had learned some things from the Princess that weren’t poisoned.

  Lainie Bricker had been a familiar face at the artificers’ yards; now Telaine went under her own name and saw little difference in how she was treated, though one or two craftsmen tried to cheat her now they knew she was royalty.

  She explained what she wanted for the chandelier to a woman named Ellen who specialized in working brass, and together they came up with a design for a hollow brass “sphere” shaped like an eggplant, where the narrower end connected with the Device to make the wider end glow. It took several tries to get it right, Telaine experimenting on the Devices in a corner of Ellen’s workshop while Ellen worked the brass. She had the idle thought one morning, I’d like to have my own workshop like this, and a memory of the forge and watching Ben work came to her so strongly that she had to lay down her tools and squeeze her eyes shut until the dizziness passed.

  Finally the day came when the artisan touched the narrow end of the sphere to the surface of Telaine’s Device, and they watched the sphere go from deep red through golden yellow to a brilliant but soft white light, while remaining cool to the touch.

  “Nice work, Lainie,” the artisan said. Telaine had given up everything of Lainie Bricker but the name. Well, it had been Telaine’s name first.

  “Yours was the hard part, Ellen.”

  “Not with all those gears and skinny wires it wasn’t. How many of these do you want?” Telaine named a figure. Ellen whistled. “That’s going to take a while. I can do batches of twenty if you want. Let you go on working ’stead of waiting on me.”

  “Thanks, Ellen. I owe you.”

  “You do indeed. I take cash.”

  Telaine lugged a box of Devices and the first batch of spheres up to the attic and taught Jessamy to imbue his first motive forces. He was so excited he almost glowed brighter than the spheres. “You keep doing that,” Telaine said, “while I put together this last thing. Remember, it’s impossible to over-imbue a motive force; they just stop taking in energy. So better to take too long than too short a time.”

  The “last thing” she was putting together was the Device that turned the whole chandelier on or off. Telaine had come up with a Device that was a simple switch with only two settings. She’d embedded an identical Device at the top of the chandelier, out of sight from the ground. Turning the switch to ‘off’ caused the Device on the chandelier to shift the motive forces enough out of alignment that the spheres wouldn’t glow. If for some reason Grandmama wanted to leave the chandelier burning all night long, she had that option.

  “All right. That’s done. I think we can start installing these things without blinding ourselves. Just don’t lose this, or kick it, or step on it, or something,” she warned, waving the control Device in Jessamy’s face. He snatched it away from her, mock-snarling, but put it carefully on a windowsill out of the way.

  It didn’t take long to install the first twenty spheres. Jessamy had the honor of testing the control switch. A tiny segment of the chandelier lit up. They cheered, silently, not sure how far their voices would carry, or what Grandmama would do if she heard ghostly voices in her rafters.

  Now the work went faster. Telaine would collect their day’s batch of twenty and return to install them; the rest of the morning she spent in her sitting room, building more of the tiny Devices. It was almost as tedious as repairing the weapons had been. Jessamy was allowed to watch but not help; he took it well, saying he was already closer to real Devisery than anyone else his age.

  Her sitting room became scattered with spare parts and tools, after she decided to set up her shop there rather than her dressing room. The work went faster, but although she had more work space, she still chafed at the limitations imposed by her supply shortage. Every day they turned on the chandelier, and every day the glow spread farther, and yet Telaine wished it might go faster still. She was impatient, all the time, as if she were waiting for something but didn’t know what.

  A week after installing the first spheres, Telaine balanced a couple of boxes on her hip while she fumbled at the attic door. If she’d left anything behind, she’d…well, she’d just have to make another trip, wouldn’t she, because it wasn’t as if these Devices would build themselves.

  She regretted going to Julia’s luncheon party yesterday, since it had cut into her Devisery time and now she had only fifteen Devices and twenty spheres that needed them. Then she felt guilty about that regret. Julia had gone to extra effort to invite only people who didn’t hate the Princess, and Telaine had enjoyed herself for once. Even so, she was impatient at being behind schedule, even if it was a schedule she’d created for herself.

  She set the box of spheres in the corner and spread out a handkerchief on the floor to assemble the Devices on. Jessamy could start installing them when he got there. He had turned out to be an excellent apprentice. She ought to see about formalizing their relationship. No, she ought to see about formalizing a certificate in her own name, and then take on an official apprentice. The cheerful idea made the growing heat in the attic more bearable.

  She hooked a wire to a screw and tightened both down, set the Device aside and started on the next.

  “Hi,” Jessamy said, shutting the door behind him. “It’s warm up here, don’t you think? It’s going to be uncomfortable in late summer.”

  “That’s why we’re going to finish this before then,” Telaine said. She was feeling sticky now, despite not having exerted herself much. She set the completed Device to one side and stood. “I want to install the ones on the underside. They’re the hardest to reach and I feel like I’ve been putting them off too long. Here, see if you can get around there.”

  The two of them squirmed into position under the chandelier until Jessamy was able to tap a Device into a hollow and seat the sphere Telaine handed him without it falling out. “You sure we can’t just roll it over?” he complained.

 
“It weighs hundreds of pounds. There’s no way,” Telaine said, panting. Sweat trickled down her neck. She’d have to bathe after this. “I think you can do this by yourself. I’m going to finish the Devices.”

  Jessamy grumbled, but wormed his way around to the next less-accessible spot. A few more years—hah, maybe a few more months—and he’d be too tall to fit under the chandelier. Well, she could do it if she had to, but that was the point of having an apprentice, you had someone to crawl under things on your behalf.

  She started on the second Device and discovered two of the parts were misaligned. She tried to free them with her fingers, applied the miniature wrench with some force, and the tool snapped in her hand. She cursed. “Jess!” she called out. He grunted. “I need you to fetch me a replacement for this from my rooms.”

  “Why don’t you go?”

  “Because it’s the apprentice’s job to run errands. Unless you’d rather keep on with what you’re doing.”

  Jessamy shot out from under the chandelier. So some of those grunts had been for show. “What should I get?” he asked. She described where the tool was, gave him the broken one for reference, and sent him on his way. Then she rolled up her sleeves and took his place. No sense wasting time waiting.

  As soon as she was under the chandelier, Telaine wondered why she hadn’t gone after the new wrench herself. There wasn’t much room, and although she knew the chandelier was immobile—had to be, with all the climbing on it she’d done—she still had the feeling if she breathed wrong, it would roll over and crush her. She couldn’t even work quickly without risking dropping pieces that would break or, worse, roll out of her reach and require her to scramble out again.

  She pushed her hair out of her eyes. Maybe she should stop and braid it. She tapped in one more Device, seated one more sphere, and slid sideways to the next area, which wasn’t so claustrophobic.

  She’d begun to wonder what was taking Jessamy so long when she heard him coming across the other attics. “Sorry about that. I got caught by Julia and then I had to take the long way around to avoid Grandmama. She wants to see you, by the way.”