Grizelda

by Margaret Taylor

  “Only yesterday was a total disaster, that’s all,” she said.

  “Ah.” Geddy scratched his nose, as if searching for something tactful to say next. “Jamin’s furious with you, you know.”

  That came as a surprise. “Why?”

  “He thinks it was your fault Toby stayed back. You talked him into it somehow.”

  “No, I stayed back because he did– Oh, argh!” She got up and started walking around the room in frustration. “This is so complicated!”

  “Which brings me to my next point,” Geddy said. “I’m furious with you, too.”

  “What, you think I should have gone to Salinaca, too?” she shot at him.

  “You’re not safe here.” Geddy stood up on his can. “You never were, but now people will be after you. The goblin’s election will be on New Year’s Day, and if Miner Nelin wins, there’ll be no safe haven for you. Nowhere.”

  “People are dying up there! Why should I be safe and cozy in Salinaca when maybe there’s something I can do about it here?”

  “I don’t want you to get hurt, Grizelda.”

  “I don’t want to talk about this anymore!” She put her hand up. She started pacing again, unable to look at him.

  Finally she stopped. Ratriders were made out of magic, maybe they would understand. There certainly wasn’t anybody else she could tell.

  “Geddy, Toby found out I’m a witch.”

  “You really are a witch?” He was surprised, yes, but she thought she saw a flaring out of something else. A keen interest, as if he was doing research for his book about ogre customs.

  “I can’t do much,” she said. “I can turn invisible when the light’s bad and I can make these stupid little paper toys.” She turned and flopped herself down, cross-legged, on the mattress. “It was so stupid the way I got caught. The girls all knew, see. But they loved them. I got careless and I was making this paper doll in the middle of the day and … a customer walked in on me. She took one look and walked right back out again. Three days later the gendarmes came for me in the middle of the night.” Her head was bowed.

  “You should hold on to that magic, Griz. It’s precious.”

  She looked at him.

  “I think the ratriders are losing it. That’s my theory I keep talking about. Something happened when we followed you into the city. Iron stopped hurting us, and salt’s probably soon to follow. We turned mortal and…” Geddy grimaced, trying to find the words. “Fey aren’t supposed to feel human things. You know, grief and, well, … love. It’s scary. About the only magic we can do anymore is skleining. So keep all the magic you can.”

  It was a little while before Grizelda spoke. “I had no idea.”

  Geddy sat there on the can, embarrassed now.

  “Would … would you like me to make you a paper thing?”

  She reached under her mattress. Then, with a sick feeling, she realized that only hours before she’d thrown all her folding paper into the Lonnes sewers. She started searching harder, desperately. Maybe she’d missed a piece and it was still stuck in the back…

  Before she found anything, Geddy spoke. “Not as much as I would like to extract a promise from you not to be involved in any more of the Underground’s activities.”

  He couldn’t. They were her purpose now, the Underground. Those dozen or so kids and what they could do had been occupying all her waking thoughts for weeks. To give up resisting the government, the Committees…

  “Just for the time being,” he said, when he saw her look. “All hell will have broken loose up there by now, so you should wait until things calm down. Wait to see how the election goes. Then … maybe.”

  He didn’t seem pleased about even that small concession, that maybe she could return when it was safer. She thought about it. She didn’t want to leave.

  “Corvain’s been oppressed for two hundred and eleven years,” she said. “I suppose it can wait for another week or two.”

  Though he admitted it to nobody, Calding was terrified. Those next few days after the breakout, he spent most of his time walking through the halls hardly aware of the world around him, with a sense that if he ever stopped moving something black that hovered just out of sight would catch up to him. His job hung by a thread. More than his job. There had to be something he could do.

  When he should have been coming up with a solution, he could not help returning over and over again to the dreadful tax of the Auks. The great black birds … the platform … blood… The revolution was supposed to have put an end to all of that. So why did he feel like feathered wings were constantly just behind him?

  Eventually, though, he returned to his office.

  “I’ve come to a decision, Mr. Bavar.”

  He closed the door behind him and turned to face the little man who had been Warden Mant’s secretary and was now his own. Bavar squeaked at the sudden entrance and dropped his pen. Calding waited until he had retrieved it from under the desk.

  “This latest incident has revealed glaring inadequacies in the prison system. Glaring. I’ve…” He trailed off and put a hand to his throat, a gesture that was fast becoming habitual since the breakout. “I’ve decided to liquidate the contents of the cells and start over from the ground up.”

  There was a silence. When Calding looked over to see what was the matter, he caught Bavar staring at him, openmouthed. The secretary quickly snatched it shut again.

  “You’re going to kill them all?” he said.

  “Don’t call it killing. Liquidate.” Even in here he could not seem to sit still. He moved restlessly about the room, poking into drawers, picking up a big glass paperweight and examining it. “I want you to write up a general memo to all the officers, all the staff…”

  “Sir?”

  “What?”

  Bavar hesitated. “Well, if we send out a memo, there’s a good chance word will get out.”

  “Well, it would hardly do to send out a press release, would it?”

  There was another silence.

  “Now what?” Calding snapped. He couldn’t concentrate, his temper was frayed to the limit. If there was anybody of all the staff at Promontory he could lash out at, it was the secretary. Yet when there should have been fear in Bavar’s face, there was something else, almost a challenge.

  “Using all these people as bait?”

  Calding planted his hands on the edge of the secretary’s desk and stood over him. “Is there a problem, Mr. Bavar?”

  “No, sir,” Bavar said quietly.

  A few days passed and Grizelda had nothing to do with the Lonnes Underground. It was so strange to have only her work at the laundry to attend to. She fell into a routine centered around the bell to start work, bell for lunch, bell to stop and go home. Always she kept her head down, avoiding the attention of the goblins. For the most part they left her alone.

  She got occasional communiqués from the ratriders, who still went to the meetings. Word of the breakout had gotten out to the public, and the Committees had ordered a heavy search out for those responsible. The Underground was scattered, keeping low. Toby had gone deeper into hiding, hardly ever straying from Jamin’s flat. Times weren’t great for the Underground, but still, she longed to be with them.

  One morning she noticed a sign tacked up outside the cafeteria, on top of all the red and green election posters. By the time she got to it, it looked slightly the worse for wear, having been pawed at by dozens of goblin hands, leaving trailing, grayish marks on the surface. One of the corners was curling up where the tack had fallen out, obscuring the text. She pushed it back.

  Announcement: Chairman Grendel will

  engage Miner Nelin in a political debate

  this Sunday, Dec. 31.

  This message by pronouncement

  of the Council of Foremen.

  A goblin passing by sneered at her. “Chairman’s last stand, don’t you think, Ogreface?”

  She turned around and glared at him. Apparently he still remembered she was dangerou
s, because he backed off.

  It was so hard, this waiting. She got so frustrated at the hours of repetitive work at the laundry, and she wanted to snap at Crome, but she didn’t dare break the fragile stalemate that had sprung up between them since the morning when he changed the color of his band. So she held her tongue.

  Sooner or later it was going to drive her nuts.

  One day, she packed up at the end of work, fuming as usual. As soon as she went outside, something pounced onto her head from above.

  “Does it always take you so long to get out here?”

  She yelped and flailed at it, then she saw it was only a bat. Apollo, to be exact, with Laricia on his back. She kept up the fluttering inches from her head.

  “What? I just–”

  “Never mind!” said Laricia. “What matters is what just happened topside!”

  Grizelda lowered her hands.

  “The warden of Promontory is going to kill all of the prisoners. Somebody got a hold of a memo–”

  “What?”

  “It’s in the newspaper. The Undergrounders are holding an emergency meeting. Come on!” She turned as if to lead the way.

  “Wait!” Grizelda said.

  Laricia circled back to her, though from her expression it was clear she was impatient.

  “I promised Geddy I wouldn’t go to any more of the meetings.”

  “Geddy’ll be there. I’ll vouch for you to him.” A note of urgency crept into Laricia’s voice, which was normally so calm. “This is important!”

  To Laricia, it seemed, it would be that simple. She’d simply speak to Geddy and everything would be fine. Grizelda wasn’t sure it would be that easy. But what if there really was going to be a mass execution? She had to be there, for the Undergrounders.

  In the end, she decided to go.

  Life in the goblin city had been playing tricks on her sense of time again, for though it was the end of the workday down there, on the surface it was right around noon. She winced as she stepped out of the storm drain into the alley behind Rue de Calle. She’d forgotten how bright it could be, that sun pounding down from right overhead. Dogs barked. In her haste to get to the surface, she’d neglected to put on her headscarf, but now she regretted it. It was the middle of the day; someone might see her. Appalled at the risk she was taking, she bustled into the Trebuchet basement as quickly as possible.

  Inside, the Undergrounders were sitting on crates huddled in a close circle, looking stricken. Solander held a newspaper.

  “Grizelda!” Geddy shouted when she came in, but Laricia cut across him.

  “It’s my fault, Geddy, I made her come in. Now, what have we got?”

  As Grizelda took a place in the circle, Laricia flew up to join the other three ratriders who had come to the meeting: Geddy, Tunya, and Kricker. They were perched on top of a tall stack of boxes situated so they could read over Solander’s shoulder. Toby had risked coming out of hiding to come to the meeting, too. He sat opposite her in the circle, looking ominous. Fortunately, she didn’t have to decide what to say to him, because just then Solander laid the newspaper down flat on the makeshift table.

  “Promontory administration is secretly planning a mass execution of its prisoners on the first of January,” she read, pointing at a column. “Right here.”

  “And look who they’re saying is the warden,” Jamin told her. “Some guy named Calding. The word is that the old guy was incompetent, but this one isn’t. I think that’s why there were guards that night.”

  That made sense to Grizelda. “But is it true?” she asked.

  Solander shook her head. “That’s what we’ve been trying to figure out – This is one of the rebel presses, if you’re wondering why they’re covering it,” she added, as an aside. “One of their people got a hold of an internal Promontory memo. It gives the gendarmes detailed instructions on how they’re going to do the execution. The Clarinet doesn’t usually make stuff up.”

  “I think it’s a trap,” said Katarin.

  The suddenness of her pronouncement made them all look at her. She was a little flustered, but she went on.

  “They know there’s somebody out there who wants these prisoners freed, right? They think we’re going to come back for more. This way, they set a time limit. If we’re going to do it, we have to do it in the next week or so. They’ll just watch out for us.” She tapped the paper. “I mean, look at the timing. This has got to be in response to the breakout.”

  “Maybe they just decided it’s too dangerous to keep the prisoners alive anymore,” said Stevry.

  “That sounds like a challenge to me!” said Toby.

  He stood up, and his fists were clenched. Grizelda bit her lip and looked away.

  “If they want us to come, let’s come!” He looked around at them fiercely.

  Katarin began, “Bourgeois, there’s going to be loads more guards than last time–”

  “We’ll be extra careful–”

  “–they’re sure to know about the holes by now–”

  “–we’ll find deeper holes–”

  “You can’t go in there!” she finished in exasperation.

  Toby turned to the rest of them. “Yeah, maybe it is a trap. Can we really just leave them there when we know we could do something about it? Seems to me that’s what the sorcerers did.”

  Grizelda was feeling more and more humiliated by the second.

  “Yeah, this time we have to,” said Katarin.

  “I agree with her,” said Mitchell.

  But Solander said, “I don’t want to go, but Toby has a point.”

  “Yeah, he does.” Jamin rubbed his forehead. “It’s a bad idea. We ought to wait until things cool down. But people are definitely going to die, and are we going to sit here if we know we can do something about it?” He looked at Stevry.

  “Stevry, you haven’t said anything yet.”

  “I’d go if I thought we could pull it off,” Stevry said. “I’m not so sure we can.”

  Jamin turned around so he could face the ratriders behind him. “What about you?”

  “No,” said Laricia. “I can’t speak for the rest of my fliers, but I say it would be a hideous risk. Grizelda, I should never have brought you here. I didn’t know the details.”

  “No,” said Geddy.

  But Kricker met Jamin’s look fiercely. “If you decide you’re going to go, I’ll go with you.”

  Then Tunya, to all of their surprise, said, “I’ll go, too.” Kricker seemed the most shocked of anyone in the room.

  “It looks like we’re about evenly split,” said Jamin. “I was afraid of this. Grizelda.”

  Grizelda was suddenly acutely aware that all eyes had turned on her.

  “This project was your baby. You decide.”

  Why did it have to come down to her? She looked around at all of the Undergrounders, Toby on the one side, Geddy on the other. Obviously she wasn’t good enough for this job; look what had happened the first time they’d tried to break prisoners out of Promontory. And they thought she was some kind of a leader!

  But how many people were going to die on New Year’s Day if she didn’t do anything?

  “We’re going in,” she said.

  Chapter 26

  Organizing a second breakout right after the first one turned out to be a more difficult undertaking than Grizelda had realized. It was true that they did not have to start completely from scratch. A lot of their supplies and a little of their money from the first breakout were left over and could be reused. But the problem of safety kept coming back to them. She and the Undergrounders spent hours pouring over Laricia’s maps, seeking out entrances to the cells that were deep enough and small enough that the guards would overlook them.

  Would they be deep enough? Would they be small enough? That last week was a miserable time for her. It didn’t help that they had half as much time to plan as before. Grizelda left the laundry earlier and came back later at night than ever before. She was so exhausted she star
ted nodding off at work. But she had to go through with it. She was a witch. Toby didn’t like her – but why didn’t he tell on her? – but he didn’t like her, and he was right not to. No matter what Geddy said about keeping the magic. Maybe, if she did something good for Corvain, she could make it okay.

  But what if they all got killed on the breakout that was her idea in the first place?

  Jamin had decided on a policy of splitting up even more than last time, to help them keep from being caught. The Undergrounders would travel in pairs and each come to the cells by a different entrance. The ratriders would run communication between them. Much to Grizelda’s dismay, the Undergrounders paired her with Toby because somebody had gotten the idea that they worked well together. She kept quiet because she knew if she objected, she would have to explain why.

  They decided to set the date of the breakout for New Year’s Eve, the latest that was possible. It would give them the greatest amount of time to get their plan in place. For Grizelda, this added a kink: she was going to have to skip the debates. She figured she would be able to manage it, though. After all, hadn’t she slipped out of the Union Hall once before, the day the pig iron prices caused a riot?

  The morning of the breakout, she woke up surprisingly calm. She’d expected to be as full of jitters as the last time. Second thoughts about the new Warden and worries about the safety of the Undergrounders and the ratriders. But no. It was too late. She had no choice in the matter anymore, so worrying had no point. It was as if whatever happened after tonight didn’t matter. On a certain level, this fatalism frightened her a lot, but she wouldn’t let her fear come to the surface. She spent that day drowned in a strange clarity. Like somebody walking up to the firing squad?

  When evening came, all the goblins gathered in the square to file into the Union Hall. Grizelda joined the crowd and passed under the great stone arch and into the hall with the rest of them.