Witchmark

by C. L. Polk

  An Amaranthine had visited the legendary painter Briantine in his studio, disrobed, and asked him to paint her. Briantine had picked up his brush and fallen into an ecstatic haze he described as the best hours of his life. He’d awakened to an empty studio. The painting had vanished, paid for with a sack of oak leaves turned to solid gold. He toiled for years trying to recapture her on canvas until he finally put his eyes out. His failures rest in the Royal Gallery, considered masterpieces.

  Stories about the Amaranthines had a lot of endings like that.

  “Forgive me. Please.” I wanted to touch him, glide my fingers over the planes of his face, and to even think of such a thing made my nerves jangle at the impertinence. “I didn’t know your kind were real.”

  “We are.” His power rubbed gentle ripples over my scalp, down my back, over my skin. “Once my kind and yours were true friends.”

  I wanted to be his friend. I wanted him to smile at me. I wanted—

  My knees hit the floor. His life was so vibrant. Health and power radiated from him, welcoming as a hearth fire. I could kneel here and bask in it all day. I wanted him to want something of me, so I could do exactly as he asked—

  I shut my eyes. “Stop.”

  I snatched my hand away, eyes clamped shut. I had no grave dirt, no copper, none of the herbs that protected against them. In this tiny space he could touch me again and make me his creature. He could make me his slave and make me love servitude. I scrambled backward, falling against the corner of my filing cabinet.

  “I apologize,” he said. “But you see why I aimed to keep it secret.”

  His voice. I flung out one hand, eyes still screwed shut.

  “Don’t touch me.” I demanded. I begged. I hoped he would laugh and ignore me.

  “I will not bespell you again.”

  Amaranthines had no choice but to speak the truth, so they lied with honest words. I could see no hole in the statement to wiggle through.

  “Please, Miles. I am sorry.” That resonance was gone from his voice, the power that could leave me rapt to hear it once more. This was why Briantine had never painted another model again, why he couldn’t stop, why he ended his torment.

  I hadn’t lasted five seconds.

  “I didn’t think you could break my veiling spell, and I hoped…” He faltered. “It doesn’t matter. It’s safe. You can look.”

  I kept my eyes shut.

  “Miles, please.”

  There was no command in it, no enchantment. He sounded regretful.

  I opened my eyes.

  He appeared mortal again, merely handsome. It was a relief. I could have wept. “You will never bespell me again?”

  “I don’t want you as my thrall. I won’t enchant you and leave you broken.”

  Sincere-sounding, but the words had too much room to twist. “That’s not a promise I can accept.”

  “I might have to use magic on you. To teach you, or protect you, or simply to amuse. I can’t promise to never use magic on you, but this I swear: I do not want you as my minion.”

  I saw the hole. “Do you need me as your minion, despite your wishes?”

  “No.”

  I could trust his answer, though I shouldn’t trust him. The Amaranthines used to walk the world with us, amused by us, if we were fortunate enough to be amusing. Then they’d left the world to guard the dead, and no one could agree on why. Some said it was a punishment for troubling mortals so. Others claimed they had taken the place of the gods, who had abandoned us to chance. More said they had never been real at all and were just made-up stories to explain what we now understood as mental unreason, or more rudely put, madness.

  But Mr. Hunter was real. I could have offended him, and then my life would be worth nothing. I could be offending him right now. I bowed my head. “I apologize.”

  “Please don’t—” He helped me to my feet. “Don’t defer to me. Don’t behave as if I’m more of an authority, or infallible, or whatever the stories tell you I ought to be.”

  “But you’re—”

  “Vain,” Mr. Hunter said. “Prideful, arrogant, easily bored, prone to mischief. And there’s about as much naked honesty as I can stand. Let’s find Nick Elliot’s flat.”

  SEVEN

  W. 1455 Wellston Street

  I held my tongue all through the ride up to Wellston and West 14th. Fashionable tailors and dressmakers kept their shops on Wellston, their plate-glass windows dark for the evening. Horse-drawn vehicles dotted the streets, delivering laundry, groceries, and evening mail. Once we left his fine coach I kept two paces behind Mr. Hunter, whose unbuttoned overcoat flared in the wind. Dead leaves skipped over the smooth black road. He paused between apple trees on the median and let bicyclists struggling against the headwind pass. All those people passed him with no idea who walked in their midst, that the good-looking man in the fine coat and the anachronistic plait was a legend.

  The legend scanned the doors parked discreetly between shops, the entrances to apartments above. I punched my hands deeper into my pockets and waited for his decision.

  “Straight out the door and into the street,” he mused. “I’d do that, in a panic.” He turned eastward into the wind’s face and chose his destination, a brick building hosting a Martin & Gold bookseller on its first floor.

  Mr. Hunter stood on the black and white tiles spelling out 1455 and tried a black iron key in the lock.

  I surveyed the street. “You think it’s this one?”

  The lock tumbled open. He held the door for me with a little grin. We stood shoulder to shoulder, reading the names on the brass-doored mailboxes mounted on the wall.

  “Elliot.” I laid my finger on the engraved plate. “Three-oh-one.”

  The stairs groaned under our feet, and I had another surprise—the worn carpet running down the hallways was covered in pink roses.

  He took two steps and turned back, peering at me. “What is it?”

  “I’ve seen this place before.”

  “Do you know someone who lived here?”

  “No. It was when … when he died.” I couldn’t talk about this in the open.

  He patted my shoulder. “I understand.”

  I wanted to lean into it. I wanted to flinch away. Instead I asked, “Is that supposed to happen?”

  He cocked his head. “Yes. Don’t you know?”

  It had been ages since witches had claimed to guide the dead. “I don’t.”

  “I think so. But let’s find three-oh-one.”

  “Right.” Act like you belong here, Miles. I squared my shoulders, prepared to smile at anyone we met.

  A woman in a velvet coat met us on the landing, and we stepped aside to let her pass. She stole a look over her shoulder at Mr. Hunter, my surplus Service coat beneath notice. A snatch of music played on the second floor—someone with a violin, not a wireless or a phonograph.

  He paused to listen. “They’re quite good.”

  “Morbid subject matter, sir.”

  He flicked a dissatisfied glance at me. “What do you mean?”

  “It’s the last aria from The Revenge of Lucus.”

  The violin’s voice rose in attack, the sharply played notes bitter laughter as Lucus watched the bewitched underlings of his enemy Corian rise up and stab their king-general to death. I shivered.

  Mr. Hunter climbed the stairs to the third floor. “Lucus the Justice Bringer?”

  “Lucus the Destroyer,” I corrected. “Lucus the Witch-King.”

  “The Witch-King,” he scoffed. “What of Lucus’s rule? Forty years of law reform, the tradition of education for girls as well as boys—”

  “Pardon me, sir, but can you do evil and erase it by doing good with the result?” I asked. “Lucus brought reform, but he bought it with blood.”

  The look he turned on me was skeptical. “So the good he did … was evil?”

  “No,” I said. “It’s complicated. Here’s three-oh-one.”

  Mr. Hunter tried a brass key to match the batt
ered keyplate. I scanned the hall. Someone would come out and see us breaking into their neighbor’s flat.

  “No luck?”

  “It has to be one of these—ah.”

  The door swung open to reveal a small but tidy kitchen, the window above the sink nearly obscured by shelves holding potted herbs. I slipped inside after him and shut the door, snapping the lock back into place.

  He stood in the center of the kitchen, eyeing a collection of expensive, aether-powered gadgets. “What do you think of those?”

  A floorboard creaked under my foot. Mr. Hunter smiled at my wince. “Sir? Er, my general opinion?”

  He waved at the gadgets. “I mean, what does it say about Nick Elliot, having all those?”

  I set my medical bag on the baking board and unwound my scarf. “He had money. A cookit, a fast kettle, a mixer, and a coffee-burper? They’re expensive.” I drew closer, brushing the sleeve of my coat against his. “Maybe he worked for the company. These are all from Sunlight Appliances.”

  “None of them are connected to the power plate,” he observed. “What do you make of that?”

  “There’s only the one plate,” I said. “This place is too old to be full aether.”

  He nodded to the coin box on the wall. “What else?”

  I looked around. What was out of place, what was wrong? What did I see?

  A tidy kitchen with expensive gadgets. A window full of green herbs, screening the room from the unglamorous view of the back alley. Everything clean …

  Everything put away.

  “He said there was poison in the tea,” I said. “Where’s the teacup? Where’s the teapot?”

  He opened a cupboard. A plain whiteware teapot sat in its place, next to a sugar bowl and tea-tins. Every hook held a white teacup hanging from its handle.

  I shivered, the implication crawling up my back. “Someone was here. They cleaned up after murdering him.”

  “You have the right mind for this, Doctor.”

  The compliment left me feeling an elated warmth. “Thank you, sir.”

  He sighed.

  “Mr. Hunter,” I corrected.

  His pained look persisted. “I’m exactly the same person you knew, Doctor. Nothing about me has changed.”

  “But you’re—”

  “Foolish,” he said. “Socially clumsy. I’m still rather ignorant of your world. Impatient.”

  “Are you going to rattle off your faults at me every time I remember you’re a legend?”

  He snorted. “I’ll fall off the pedestal sooner or later, if I let you keep me up there. I need you to forget.”

  “How can I forget?” I came perilously close to laughing, the kind of laughter you can’t stop. “How can I forget you’re—”

  “I am not a story, Doctor.” The shoulders of my coat crumpled in his grip. He startled and let go, smoothing them back into place. “I want to go back to how we were before. Friends. Or becoming so.”

  “We can become friends.” Friends, with an Amaranthine. I was a fool.

  “Call me Tristan,” he said.

  My pulse thumped in my ears. “It’s not proper.”

  “Miles,” he said. Warmth spread across my chest. He leaned closer. Too handsome, and his face was only half of the truth. “I want to call you so. Will you forbid me?”

  I shifted back and bumped into the baking board. “No.”

  “Miles.” The word made my insides leap. “Say it. Call me Tristan.”

  My lips tingled. My tongue tapped at the back of my teeth. Tristan.

  “Mr. Hunter,” I said.

  “Stubborn.” One side of his mouth curled up. Cool air rushed into the place where he stood. “There might be more to learn, even though the tea things have been cleaned up.”

  “Let me look at the teapot.” I needed to do something to come back to normal. “If it hasn’t been scrubbed clean, I’ll need it.”

  Tristan reached for the door as I did, and our hands collided.

  “Rather close quarters in here.” He set the teapot on the counter. “What do you want with the teapot?”

  “I can test it for arsenic.”

  “That’s what he died of?”

  “It’s my best guess. He held on long enough to get to the hospital. Arsenic tastes slightly sweet. You’d miss it in tea.” I lifted the lid and smiled at what I found inside. The interior was dark from years of brewing, the patina undisturbed by scrubbing.

  “Here’s our first piece of evidence.” I set the teapot next to my medical bag.

  “Excellent. Help me search the rest.” He moved into the dining room, shuffling aside to let me in. A table for six stood draped in a crocheted lace tablecloth. I put my hand on a delicately stitched fan-tailed bird, found another in a slightly different pose, a third near to the second.

  Tristan leaned against the back of a lyre-backed chair, tracing a path along the cloth’s peaked netting. “What is it?”

  “Expensive, is what it is,” I said. “You can’t make crochet lace on a machine. It has to be done by hand.” I touched the five birds I’d found. “Every single one is different, and they’re not arranged on a grid to a pattern.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “I once stared at a tablecloth like this one at mealtimes,” I said.

  I had kept my eyes down while Father used suppers to praise his precocious daughter and recount my failures—of the day, of the week, of the year, those disappointments never left to scab over and heal. I fought the tears I couldn’t shed by counting the fan-tailed birds on Mother’s favorite tablecloth. Grace would be a Storm-Singer; I was a Secondary, destined to become my sister’s thrall.

  “Miles,” Tristan touched my shoulder. “What does the tablecloth tell you?”

  I shrugged. “It might not mean anything. Regarding his death, I mean.”

  “But it tells you something about Nick. Why does he have this tablecloth?”

  “He didn’t buy it. Too expensive. It’s from his mother,” I said. “She probably made these for extra money.”

  “How do you know?”

  “The kitchen.” I waved in its direction. “Expensive gadgets and cheap whiteware. A rich man would have porcelain and a housekeeper, even if the servant didn’t live in.”

  “So, a poor man come to fortune is poisoned. This is the beginning of his story. Let’s find out the rest.”

  * * *

  Nick Elliot’s front room boasted a view of a brick wall and a record collection. The trumpetlike flare of a phonograph’s horn pointed to an easy chair, a pedestal ashtray resting beside it. Another aether meter mounted on the wall provided power for a wireless.

  “He enjoyed music.”

  “Enough to endure the wireless,” I agreed.

  “Hate the stuff. It’s a midge buzzing in your ears and the taste of copper on your tongue,” Tristan said.

  I shuddered in visceral sympathy. “Aether runs on copper wires. Maybe that’s why.” I opened the hall closet. “He lived alone. The other bedroom’s a study, and no women’s things in here.”

  “Miles,” Tristan laughed. “I’m surprised at you.”

  I studied five pairs of men’s shoes on the floor of the closet, my face hot. Mr. Elliot could have preferred the company of men. He was at the age where tolerance of the practice would start fraying, but the pressure to marry was not yet unbearable. “You have a point.”

  “But I think you’re right. Nothing is paired. The furniture in here isn’t arranged to suit a pair. His bedroom…” Tristan turned the faceted glass knob. “Oh. He had a lover.”

  A pale rose silk dressing gown swung next to a heavier bronze and green brocade, both hanging from hooks on the door. Tristan closed the door again.

  “One room at a time. What’s this?” He lifted a photo album from the coffee table. “Newspaper clippings.”

  I pawed through overcoat pockets and found a press license. “He was a newspaperman.”

  “I think he wrote about gardening.”


  “Gardening?” I came over to peer at the pages. Tristan turned the page to a newspaper photo of a tiny garden of flowers dancing at the feet of a concrete Summer Maiden.

  I covered my mouth. “He was Mr. Greenthumbs.”

  “The lovely garden of the week?”

  East Kingston competed every week for the honor of their six-foot-square plots being named in the Star. My landlady had won once, and the clipping sat framed in her front hall.

  Mrs. Bass would mourn Mr. Greenthumbs.

  “Nick Elliot wrote one of the most popular columns in the city. Who would want to kill him?”

  “Perhaps someone knew his secret,” Tristan said.

  “But they could report him. He’d never pass the tests. He’d be in an asylum before you could blink. Why murder?”

  “Rivalry at work? Trouble in the family?”

  “His lover? Someone managed to slip poison into his tea, and then clean up—Mr. Hunter.” I groped for his sleeve. “He was alone when he had his tea. The murderer wouldn’t let him run out into the street. Did you see anyone when you stopped—”

  Tristan lifted a finger to his lips.

  The floorboards in the apartment hallway creaked. A key slid into the front door lock.

  Tristan clamped one hand over my mouth and dragged me into the corner.

  EIGHT

  Illusion

  “Nick?”

  A woman entered. Sunk, we were sunk. She’d scream when she saw us, call the police. Could we explain?

  She walked into the front room. “Nick?”

  She didn’t react to us at all.

  She shrugged out of a fur-trimmed cocoon of a coat and flung it over the sofa. “Don’t tell me you’re sick, Nicholas Alva Elliot, and you need someone to wait on you.”

  Tristan kept his hand on my mouth, one arm wrapped tight around my ribs. Don’t speak. Don’t move, those hands said, his fennel-scented breaths calm against my ear.

  She stripped off slim black leather gloves, and her fashionably short hair curled around prominent cheekbones. Bottle-black hair, by the slight blue sheen of it, making her pale skin seem even milkier. She wore wide-legged charcoal trousers, a cream silk shirt, a slate-and-silver striped tie.

  The woman crossed the front room and opened the bedroom door. “Nick?”