She peered at her surroundings. At first everything was blurry then resolved into multiples. Three or four of the same chair, three or four of the same table, and so forth. The place smelled of sawdust.
Cade was talking to some man. It took too much effort to concentrate on what was being said. It came to her as a jumble, like another language. There were three of the man. She thought she might recognize him, but she couldn’t place him just now. And, there was three of Cade. Three of Cade stripping out of his clothes. She watched in fascination as coat and vest came off. Since it was three of everything, it was coats and vests.
Off came his shirts, and there were the fine shoulders and chest . . . chests . . . she had seen before when he’d been at practice in the mill. Off came his trousers and undergarments. This was a new view, with three of everything. She could not say if this was a very nice dream vision or something really happening, but she was quite enjoying it. Cade, she thought, was well proportioned in every way—threefold!
All too soon he started to dress again. He had some final words with the other man, and the man left. Karigan started to slip into oblivion again, until she felt someone’s hand on her. She grabbed and caught Cade’s wrist. His real wrist, not an illusory one. Cade yelped.
“You’re awake,” he said a heartbeat later.
“Am I?”
“We need to get you into something dry. Jax pulled out this nightshirt for you.”
Karigan blinked trying to see it clearly. Cade reached to start unbuttoning her shirt. She slapped his hand away.
“I can do it.” Just speaking took great effort, so she wasn’t sure she really could. “Turn around.”
Cade obediently crossed the room to the stove, all three of him turning his backs on her. She struggled with buttons, fighting the darkness that tried to reabsorb her. What was wrong with her? She didn’t feel hurt or injured, rather the opposite. Just drifty, floaty, sort of happy. She also knew this was somehow all very wrong, and yet it did not perturb her like it should have.
She’d have asked Cade about what was happening, but it was hard when she was concentrating on peeling off wet garb. Once she had succeeded, she pulled on the oversized nightshirt.
“Done,” she murmured, the tide of darkness pulling her in.
Cade collected her wet clothes.
“Brooch,” she said urgently, reaching after him. She fell out of the bed. “Brooch.”
Cade lifted her back into bed, and the last things she remembered was him pinning her brooch to her borrowed nightshirt and drawing a blanket over her. Already drifting away, she wondered if it would have been so bad to let him undress her.
• • •
Blurred images of people coming and going, sibilant voices working themselves into her mind, interfered with her rest. At one point, she saw Yates sitting at the foot of her bed drawing. He was clear, unblurred. There was only one of him.
“Why don’t you ever show me your pictures?” she asked him.
“Karigan?” It was not Yates who spoke her name, but Cade.
“Yates never shows me what he is drawing,” she complained.
Cade drew his eyebrows together, perplexed.
Darkness came again, and when next she was aware, someone’s face hovered close to hers, one of the eyes greatly oversized. Karigan shrieked and shrank away.
“Miss Goodgrave,” said Mirriam, dropping her monocle, “is that any way to say hello?”
Mirriam? Karigan squinted. The woman was blurred, but at least Karigan was not seeing in threes.
“It is time for you to snap out of it, young lady,” Mirriam said. “Time is slipping by and the world will not wait for you to wake up.”
LOST IN HISTORY
“It is hard,” Karigan said. “Everything is fuzzy.” But Mirriam’s words about time running out set off a clangor of alarm bells in her mind. Unbidden she saw the captain’s script before her eyes: The longer you linger, the faster we spin apart.
“We shall start easily, one thing at a time,” Mirriam replied. “Try to sit up.”
Karigan did so. Her surroundings did not spin so much as lurch. She gripped the side of the bed, feeling like she was going to spill out of it.
“What happened to me? Have I been sick?”
“Not precisely,” Mirriam replied. “You received a large dose of morphia.”
“How—?” Then Karigan remembered the professor giving her a hug back in the old mill, and the stab of a needle in her arm.
“I believe some poor judgment was involved. How do you feel now?”
“Tired. Like I want to sleep for the rest of my life. Weak. Everything is blurry.”
“Not surprising,” Mirriam replied. “Morphia is a heavy soporific.”
“The professor didn’t want me to . . .” Karigan trailed off, not knowing what Mirriam knew.
“Leave?” Mirriam provided. “It appears he feared the consequences of your abrupt departure.”
That I’d give the opposition away. But, Karigan thought, there was a more basic fear at work—he feared change. He had spent his adult life preserving what was old, and though she had come from the past, he had feared what she could do to his present. Was that it? He feared any change wrought by her return to her own time?
“Where is he?” Karigan demanded. She would straighten him out, and take him to task for the morphia. She felt that she should be angry, very angry, but the medicine had dulled even that.
“Let us see if we can get your feet on the floor,” Mirriam said, pulling the blanket off.
Karigan shivered with the layer of warmth removed, but she obediently swung her legs over the side of the bed, keeping her eyes closed to stave off the terrible swooning sensation when she moved. Closing her eyes was peaceful, and she started drifting, fading.
“Miss Goodgrave!” Mirriam’s tart voice was as good as a slap across the face, and Karigan opened her eyes, her surroundings just as much a blur as before.
“Where am I?” The texture of the floor beneath her feet was of rough wood. She appeared to be in a one room cottage, very small, but tidy.
“This is the home of Jaxon Booth, a friend of Mr. Harlowe’s. I believe you know him by the name of Jax.”
Yes, Karigan thought. The man in the old slave market.
“He is a carpenter this side of the river.”
River. A flash of memory, of being cold and wet and floating, washed over Karigan. “Mirriam, you have to tell me how I got here and what has happened. Nothing makes sense.”
“I am sure it does not. First, try taking a little water, and if that stays down, we shall try some of Mr. Booth’s porridge.”
Mirriam handed Karigan a tall glass of water—not the fine crystal of the professor’s house, but she did not care. She realized she was terribly parched and started drinking it all down.
“Slowly,” Mirriam said. “You don’t want to bring it back up, do you?”
When Karigan finished, desperate as she was to hear what Mirriam had to tell her about how she had gotten here, she was more desperate to use the privy. Mirriam helped her rise.
“Keep steady on your feet, Miss Goodgrave, for I have not the strength to pick you up off the floor and no one else is here to help.”
Karigan staggered like a drunkard, but did not fall. When presented with a door, she reached for the handle but missed the mark and rapped her knuckles on the wall. Mirriam helped guide her hand on the second try. When she had the door open, she stared. Light filtered through a curtained window and fell upon what was essentially a sitting place with a hole and a lid. No porcelain with fancy decoration, no lever to pull to swirl away the unmentionable in a wash of water.
“Not the professor’s house, is it,” she murmured.
“This is how most of the empire’s citizens live,” Mirriam said. “Many not even this well.”
> Karigan nodded, and was immediately sorry she did so when it sent the room spinning around her. She closed her eyes and held herself steady in the doorway. She did not tell Mirriam that this type of privy was what she’d been accustomed to before coming to the professor’s.
She was able to do what she needed without assistance or falling down the hole or taking a nap, though she was powerfully drawn toward sleep. Afterward, Mirriam helped her back to the bed. The blurred vision not only made her balance unwieldy, but also disturbed her stomach, so when Mirriam offered her a simple porridge, she wanted only to decline and curl up in bed.
“If you do not eat,” Mirriam told her, “you will only weaken further. Also, I will not tell you how you came to be here, or anything else that may be of interest to you.”
Karigan gamely took the bowl of porridge. If it came spewing back up, Mirriam would have only herself to blame.
Mirriam pulled a stool over and waited to ensure Karigan had eaten at least two spoonfuls of porridge before she started.
“I was wondering where to begin,” she said, “but I guess beginning at the beginning makes sense. At some point last night—we guess around eleven hour—Arhys snuck out of the house and went to the Inspectors.”
Karigan dropped her spoon into the bowl with a clatter. “She what?”
“Oh, that spoiled girl. I warned the professor many times he was turning her into a little monster, I did, but he wouldn’t listen. He was too soft-hearted, treating her like one of those porcelain dolls he was always giving her. She was apparently so upset at him for her punishment after the atlas incident that she went to the Inspectors and told them the professor had secrets, and secret places into which he could disappear.”
“Mirriam . . .” There was no way to ask the housekeeper without being direct, even if it led to revealing some of those very secrets. “How much do you know?”
“A good deal and quite a bit more since I’ve spoken with Mr. Harlowe.”
“Do you know why the professor took a special interest in Arhys?”
“Yes. I suspected something of the kind, and Mr. Harlowe confirmed it. He felt he needed to confide in Mr. Booth and me if we were to risk ourselves helping the two of you. Frankly, I was already in deep enough to be hanged without a trial.”
“Which opposition group were you, er, involved in?”
“Mr. Harlowe’s, of course. Child, the professor’s group would not pay me a whit of attention. I am a housekeeper so far beneath their notice that I’m not even on par with being a flea on one of their pedigreed dogs. But the professor trusted me with a few of his secrets. I was something of a confidant. He needed someone in the house he could trust totally.”
So, like Cade, she’d been playing both sides. “Did he or Mr. Harlowe tell you about me?” Karigan asked.
Mirriam snorted. “I knew you were no Goodgrave, or any relation of the professor’s from the start. I knew he was sheltering you, but I had no idea why. Just another foundling he took in maybe, and you were peculiar enough that I thought you might have actually been from a madhouse.”
Karigan raised an eyebrow.
“What Mr. Harlowe told me about you explained the peculiarities, though it has not been so easy an explanation to accept. Yes, I know what the brooch you are wearing means, and that you are from . . . the past.”
Karigan’s hand flew to her brooch. She’d forgotten it was there. It was comforting to touch its familiar contours.
“Your porridge, Miss Goodgrave,” Mirriam reminded her. “It will get cold, and I will tell you no more unless you eat.”
Karigan dipped her spoon into the porridge, trying to keep as still as possible to avoid upsetting her stomach even more. She did not know why Mirriam continued to call her Miss Goodgrave when she knew it to be incorrect, but perhaps it was difficult to change old habits.
Mirriam told her how Inspectors had raided the professor’s house after Arhys had gone to them.
“Poor old Grott,” she said. “You and the professor had already disappeared into the mill, and he would not permit the Inspectors in without the professor’s leave. They took him outside and beat him. Beat him horribly. He was an old man, but they had to punish him for standing up to them.”
“Is he—?”
Mirriam looked weary and haunted. “They just let him die there in the yard. They would not let us help him.”
Karigan set her bowl aside. She hadn’t eaten but a few spoonfuls. How could she eat while Mirriam told her such dreadful things? Mirriam did not scold her or stop telling her story. She related how the Inspectors started searching the house, tearing it apart, giving special attention to the library and questioning the staff.
“They took Lorine away.”
“Lorine? Why?” Karigan instantly feared for the former slave. What terrible interrogations might the Inspectors put her through?
“They informed us they planned to send Arhys to Gossham,” Mirriam replied. “We—Mr. Harlowe and I—don’t know why, except that it is possible they somehow learned of her lineage. If that is the case, we don’t know how. At any rate, they took Lorine to be her governess, someone familiar to care for her and handle her. No doubt those Inspectors found Arhys to be, shall we say, trying.” At this last she emitted a dark chuckle then added, “They were about to question me when the fire started.”
Fire. Karigan racked her brain, trying to remember something about fire. Floating in it. The images were dreamlike, vague. Perhaps they really were from a dream.
“The Inspectors became very distracted and most left,” Mirriam said. “I used that distraction to escape.”
“Escape?”
“To a safe place, naturally. And this is where your story, and Mr. Harlowe’s, and the professor’s, come in.” Mirriam appeared to know that part of it from Cade, who had found Karigan already unconscious on the mill floor just after the professor had drugged her. “They’d begun to argue,” Mirriam said. “Argue about you and what the professor had done, but they were interrupted by another team of Inspectors trying to break in to the mill.”
She described how the professor had led Cade to a secret escape route out through the tailrace tunnel. “Mr. Harlowe carried you all the way.”
The heat stoked to furnace proportions in Karigan. He’d carried her? All the way? She remembered something of tunnels but nothing of being carried.
“There was a boat stashed at the outlet,” Mirriam continued, explaining how they’d been washed into the river when the mill exploded.
“The mill exploded?” Karigan said. “How?”
“The professor, the fool of a man, must have decided his artifacts were too precious to come into the hands of the emperor, so he chose to destroy them first. He lit the mill on fire, and black powder finished it off.”
Karigan gaped at Mirriam, unable to believe the professor would do such a thing to the old objects he so loved. “Where is he? The professor? Do the Inspectors have him?” If they did, it would be only a matter of time before they forced him to spill his secrets.
“Oh, dear girl.” Mirriam reached for Karigan’s hands. “The old fool died in the fire.”
“Gods.” Karigan reeled, and it wasn’t just the result of what the morphia had done to her. Her hands shook, and Mirriam squeezed them.
“Yes, it is a shock.”
Of course the professor died in the fire, Karigan thought. He would not have burned his artifacts and then gone on himself. They’d given him meaning, a touchstone to the past. He’d been their guardian, and he had failed.
“Gods,” she murmured again.
“He never understood,” Mirriam mused, “that we did not need the past for us to create a new, better future. He got lost in the history, I think.”
Karigan saw him clearly in her mind, the professor with his wolfish features, wearing his dapper tweed. She remembered him showing he
r his artifacts, the pride with which he regarded them. She remembered him inundating her with questions about what various objects were for, what they did. He had not really been her uncle, and he’d betrayed her in the end, but she’d grown very fond of him almost as if he really were her uncle. A sometimes distant, mercurial uncle, but he’d protected, sheltered her, even trusted her with many of his secrets. It was hard to balance that with the man who had tried to force her to stay in Mill City against her will. Except . . .
He had redeemed himself, really, by allowing Cade to carry her out so she might survive and try to reach her home. The professor must have known she would try.
But by then, it was, by his own measure, all over.
She tried not to think of what might have become of her if the Inspectors had not come for him, if there’d been no fire. Would she still be his captive? She did not wish to remember him that way.
“Miss Goodgrave?” Mirriam asked in a surprisingly gentle voice.
Karigan sniffed and rubbed away tears. The morphia hadn’t cut the pain of his loss.
“Do not grieve overmuch,” Mirriam said. “He chose his path, and he took several Inspectors and Enforcers with him in the conflagration. They will not be so easy to replace.”
Karigan only half heard, through the combined haze of grief and morphia, Mirriam finish the tale of how Cade had brought her down the river in a rowboat and finally to Jax’s place. Her thinking grew ever more cloudy, and when she started to slide away into blissful nothingness, Mirriam shook her.
“Not now. We must ready you for Mr. Harlowe’s return.”
“Where is he?”
“Preparing to do what the professor never could.”
MILL NUMBER FIVE
Cade and Jax entered the silent mill lugging tool boxes, both of them disguised in nondescript work clothes. It was, at least, a disguise for Cade, if not so much for Jax, who was a carpenter. It was odd seeing the two hundred looms still and silent, the metallic exoskeletons of machines in their perfect rows, all threaded, with finished cloth wound around the rollers. No belts and pulleys whirred in endless cycles, no turbine churned in the depths beneath the mill, no slaves tended the machines.
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