Witchmark

by C. L. Polk

  “I’d have to give up my life here. My work.”

  Grace looked all around my office. “There’s so much here to hold you, I see.”

  “They need me, Grace.”

  She turned her attention on me, the cords of her throat straining to hold back the full gale of her emotion. “I need you, Miles. I mourned you. I couldn’t stop dreaming you were a ghost, and you were alive this whole time. When I needed you.”

  “Me, or my obedience?”

  “My brother. Our family. I know you never saw eye to eye with Father, but you have leverage now.”

  I dragged my face back into a neutral expression, smoothing the surprised furrow of my brow. “I’m a department doctor in a veterans’ hospital with humble wages. Not leverage worth even mentioning.”

  “You raised at least five thousand in donations yesterday,” she pointed out.

  I let my eyes narrow. She cast a red herring in my path to keep me arguing about whether I had leverage or not. “Grace. What are you hiding from me?”

  She sipped her wine. “I was going to wait to tell you.”

  “After I’d accepted your renovation of my life? After I’d been properly buttered up? After I had another taste of the good life I left behind? Leverage, Grace. Against our father. That means power.”

  Grace turned her face toward the window.

  Nobody had power over my father. He was the head mage of the Queen’s Invisibles. He was the royal Chancellor. He answered to Queen Constantina and Crown Prince Severin, and even that was debatable.

  “I don’t have power over my father, unless I have something he needs.” I looked at my hands. “He’s sick, isn’t he.”

  She kept her face turned away. “I’m sorry. Maybe I should have told you right away.”

  A ribbon of pain unfurled in my chest. Foolish. I knew better. “So he doesn’t need me; he needs my talent. And you were going to buy it for him.”

  “He needs you, Miles. He misses you. When he received the cable reporting you missing, he was a force of nature.”

  “He’s still on the Security Council, is he? Or has his illness made him slow down?” Fury burned in my chest, and pain too. This was the price for regaining my sister: looking away from the cage she held in her hand.

  “Some days, he has to work from bed,” Grace said. “Other days, he can bear a carriage ride. He can’t Call, and we have a major Work at Frostnight.”

  “How long has he been sick?”

  “A year.” She dropped her shoulders. “It grew worse three weeks ago.”

  “You need to sing in winter?” I asked.

  “It’s a storm year, Miles. We have to manage it carefully. I’ve never sung winter in, and it’s a storm year, and Father is so sick.”

  A storm year. It made my stomach clench.

  Aeland’s weather was calm. Not too warm in summer. Cold but bearable in winter. Rain fell, but gently, and snow stayed long enough to be pretty before it melted in mild weather. But the common Aelander didn’t know their ideal climate was a continuous act of magic.

  Whirling cyclonic winds would devastate all but the sturdiest buildings. Incredible tantrums of rain and lightning would flood Aeland’s densely populated coasts and fertile river valleys if not for the Invisibles, who kept the weather pacified. Every year was hard work. But storm years were vicious, and demanded everything the Queen’s secret mages had.

  “He did it last year?”

  “Yes.”

  “What are the symptoms?” I wished I could take it back.

  “Chest pain, weakness, trouble breathing,” Grace said. “Sometimes rest eases it. On bad days, nothing does.”

  Could be anything, but it was nothing good. “And you’re not married, and you haven’t bonded anyone.”

  Grace closed her eyes. I knew what she saw, then.

  “If he dies too soon, will you become the Voice of the Invisibles?”

  The breath hissed out of her. She slumped in my folding guest chair. “I won’t have enough support.”

  “Who does?”

  “Sir Percy Stanley.”

  The delicate chowder turned to cement in my stomach. The antiwar polemicists had called the Laneeri War Sir Percy’s War, and as the Minister of Defense that accusation wasn’t far off. If Stanley hadn’t wanted the war, it wouldn’t have happened.

  I couldn’t see Grace with a poison vial, but I could see Sir Percy giving an order to be carried out.

  I reached across the desk. Grace seized my hand, twining her fingers through mine, and we sat beside cooling bowls of chowder. Shattered bits of teacup preyed on my mind. If I knew, could I prevent it? Did her fate in the tea leaves mean she’d lose her place?

  If Sir Percy became the Voice, none of the reforms my sister believed in would come to pass. Stanley used his firstborn son as a slave, a battery to enhance his storm-singing power. I had no doubt the marriage he had arranged for his son was an attempt to breed the proper talents back into the Stanley line.

  I liked Darcy. Friends I’d left behind depended on Grace’s rule. I wouldn’t leash myself to her cause, even if it was noble. But once Father died, she was out of time.

  I could give her time.

  “I’ll examine Father, but I have conditions,” I said.

  “Tell me what you need, and I’ll arrange it.”

  “It’s rather a list of demands.”

  “I’ll arrange it,” Grace said.

  Once she heard them she argued, but in the end I had my way.

  * * *

  “Keep the other bottle.” Grace closed the lid of the picnic basket on our dirty dishes. “I’ll see to everything you need.”

  I helped her into her coat and walked her down all the stairs to the lobby, mindful of the courtesy one was privileged to give a lady. Patients gazed at her, but her silver fox coat and the height of her fashion kept them from calling to her or trying to catch her eye. Everyone except Bill Pike, who’d left his bed to say goodbye to his wife and child. He stared at Grace with a burning anger lighting his face, his fists clenched, his lips moving as he muttered something under his breath.

  As we neared the doors, they opened. Mr. Hunter stepped inside and smiled as he caught sight of me. “Miles.”

  He held the door open for Mrs. Pike and her daughter, smiling a greeting. Bill stared at Tristan with fear-bright eyes, his mouth agape. He stumbled in his haste to get away.

  “What—?” I should go to him. Talk to him. But Bill fled in scuffling haste, and Grace would take my abandonment of her amiss. I settled back into my place between my sister and Tristan, who regarded each other with narrow-eyed dislike.

  “Miles, who is this?”

  I winced. “Grace, this is my … friend, Mr. Tristan Hunter.” Her hand tightened on the crook of my elbow and I blundered on. “Mr. Hunter, this is Dame Grace Hensley, Her Majesty’s Royal Knight.”

  Tristan swept off his hat and bowed. “How do you do?” The gesture was perfectly correct, but it was no gesture of courtesy.

  Grace stood with her feet and shoulders squared up to face him. She bristled with hostility. What on Earth—?

  Of course. She could see Tristan’s veiling magic.

  “Grace,” I said, gently. “Mr. Hunter is my friend.”

  She continued staring at him. “Indeed.”

  “Grace.” I flexed my bicep under her grip. “People are noticing.”

  She turned her chin away, remembering herself. “Excuse me. I should go.”

  She kissed my cheek, marking me with her pool-of-blood lipstick. She gave Tristan one more searching, hostile look and marched out of the hospital.

  Tristan watched her leave, staring at the door as it closed.

  I cleared my throat. “What are you doing here? I wasn’t expecting you until later.”

  He looked back at me, his attention riveted to the lip print on my cheek. “I have interrupted you with your—”

  I moved in close and kept my voice low. “My sister. It’s a secret.”
/>
  “Your … oh.” Tristan fiddled with the brim of his hat. “I was going to tell you my coachman Michael had an emergency, so we won’t have the carriage.”

  “Do you have a bicycle?”

  He nodded. “I bought it on the way here. But I have an appointment, so I’ll be late.”

  “Conveniently, I will also be late. Please collect me when you’re ready.”

  “I will.” He stood up straight, back to the tall and easy posture he had lost when Grace kissed me. A little flame leapt in my chest at the notion that Tristan had twinged at it.

  That made me a fool. “Do you have a lead on Nick?”

  “I’ve found a woman claiming to be a medium. She doesn’t receive clients until three.”

  I cocked my head. “Something to do with your quest?”

  He smiled at the old-fashioned word. “Yes.”

  “I hope you meet with success.”

  “Thank you.” He paused a moment, searching for something to say. “I look forward to dinner.”

  He inclined his head, blue eyes locked on me, then turned and left the hospital.

  * * *

  I did my rounds an hour late, and at the end of my shift I had the haunting task of choosing sixteen men to send home. Young and Old Gerald would go, so I wrote their names on a list titled Discharge. Bill went on the list marked Retain. The list of names on the Retain list grew faster than the Discharge lists.

  I added a fifth name to the Discharge list, spreading ink along my knuckle. I wasn’t going to get this finished today. Grace wasn’t going to arrange my trip to heal Father without him knowing in a single day, either. The letter I’d retrieved from Nick Elliot’s mail sat unopened on my desk, waiting for Tristan to arrive. I was more nervous about his arrival than I should have been, than I should have allowed myself to be. I knew what he was, and he wasn’t safe.

  A knock sounded at my door, and Robin’s silhouette stood framed in my door’s frosted glass.

  “Come in, Robin.”

  “Miles, I heard your boyhood friend donated five thousand dollars to the hospital.” She shut the door and leaned on it. “Enough money to refit two more operating rooms and all the staff to use them.”

  “Funny, I heard it was enough money to replace every bed in General Medicine with new, and pay five more nurses for three years.”

  The gap between her teeth showed. “Your sources are biased.”

  I set my pen down. “I want to ask you something.”

  She sat on the corner of my desk and took out her pouch to roll a gasper. “Go ahead.”

  I eyed the tobacco with longing. “Have you heard anything about the morgue needing to be sanitized or an emergency that meant we had to transport all the bodies for cremation?”

  Robin cocked her head. “I haven’t heard anything about an emergency.”

  I leaned back in my chair and bit my knuckle. “Let me have one of those.”

  “Forget it,” Robin said. “Only on bad days.”

  Robin was a tyrant, but I hated to think of wasting all her effort to help me quit. “I think someone deliberately destroyed Nick Elliot’s body so I couldn’t examine it. Bad enough?”

  “No.” She licked the glue on her paper and sealed a perfectly rolled cylinder. I couldn’t do better, even with my surgeon’s hands. “Why would anyone do that?”

  “To keep me from determining his cause of death as murder.”

  “Murder. He was poisoned?”

  “I don’t know. I never did the examination.”

  “He said he’d been murdered.” Robin looked up at the ceiling. “But his declaration’s the only reason to suspect anything.”

  And what I’d seen when I touched him, but I couldn’t tell Robin about that. “But then his body’s gone before I can find out what killed him.”

  “Tell the police?”

  “No body, no murder.”

  Robin’s mouth pinched up. “Miles. Leave it alone.”

  “Why should I?”

  “Because if you’re right, and it was murder, and someone disposed of his body … why wouldn’t they dispose of you, too?”

  Another shadow fell on my office door. Robin left her tobacco on the desk to open it.

  “Mr. Hunter.” She bowed.

  “Miss Thorpe.” Tristan bowed in return. “How are you?”

  “I’m well, thank you. Have you come to inquire about Nick Elliot?”

  “I am curious, I admit, but I’ve come on another matter.”

  I cleared my throat. “Mr. Hunter has … he’s asked me to dinner.”

  Robin’s eyebrows rose. “Really.” She turned back to Tristan and stared him down.

  “I promise to have him home by ten.”

  She smirked. “See that you do, Mr. Hunter.”

  She retrieved her tobacco pouch and stood expectantly before Tristan, who backed out of the doorway to let her through.

  He shut the door behind him. “She’ll gut me if I hurt you,” he said with a grin. “She didn’t even need to say it. You inspire a true friendship, Miles.”

  “She’s never met anyone who claims to call on me.”

  “I question the taste of every man and woman in this city.”

  My face grew hot. “How fares your investigation?”

  Tristan made a face. “The medium was a fraud, I regret to say.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He leaned against my desk and sighed. “At the rate I’m going, I’ll unmask every mountebank in Kingston trying to find out why you’re all still alive.”

  I blinked. “What?”

  “What’s this?” He picked up the letter to Nick Elliot. “You haven’t opened it.”

  “I was waiting for you. What do you mean, why we’re all still alive?”

  “I can’t believe you didn’t open it. You probably never went looking for New Year presents.”

  Not without Grace to lead the way. “I have willpower.”

  He laughed, softly. “I know.” Tristan turned the envelope over in his hands. “Good quality paper. Popular publisher?”

  I gestured at the penny novels on my shelves. “Those are all Gold and Key editions.”

  “And this is…” He took up my letter opener and slit the envelope. “Oh. Expensive envelope, cheap paper.”

  I sniffed the air. “Barrel printed.” But handwritten too; ink bled through the thin paper on bold strokes and dots.

  “Curious.” Tristan unfolded the letter. His eyebrows went up as he read the letter aloud:

  “Dear Sir: Thank you for your recent submission to Gold & Key, but your manuscript does not fulfill a need of this publisher. Good luck placing it elsewhere.”

  “Ouch. A form letter.”

  He moved the paper, inviting me to look. I leaned over his shoulder. Underneath the violet-black ink, in tidy blue script:

  Nick: If your editor doesn’t want this, I don’t want it either.

  The note was signed L.R.

  “Too personal a postscript for a stranger,” Tristan noted.

  “Doesn’t want what?” I asked. “Not a novel, if L.R. is talking about Nick’s editor at the newspaper not wanting it.”

  “Whatever it was, I think we had better go to the paper and ask.” Tristan tucked the letter back into the envelope. “Are you ready?”

  “Mr. Hunter.”

  He turned to face me, even though we barely had a handsbreadth of space between us. “Someday you’ll call me Tristan.”

  I swallowed. So close I could feel the energy radiating from him, the tension as he waited for my word. “I want you to teach me how to disguise my power.”

  “I shall. What else do you want to learn?”

  “I can’t see the power on anyone else unless I’m touching their skin.”

  “An excellent first lesson. Hold still.” He reached toward my face. “You have an eyelash. …”

  I stilled. Smooth fingers brushed my cheek, and a short, curved hair rested on the ridges of his index finger. “Did you wish
on these, as children?”

  My skin held the feeling of his finger, and its gentle ghost lingered, touching me again. I found my voice, but it was hoarse. “We did.”

  He held his hand closer to my mouth. “Don’t tell me what it is.”

  “What if I don’t know what to wish for?”

  He smiled. “A problem we never had as children. Be selfish with your wish, Miles. Blow.”

  He had once been a child. I tucked the thought away, and blew. My wish had no words, but it smelled of fennel. The eyelash puffed away and fell out of sight.

  “Well done.” Tristan made a loop of my scarf and draped it around my neck. I stood still for his attentions, because I was foolish. Reckless.

  I stepped back and buttoned my coat. “For making a wish?”

  “For being selfish with it.”

  Heat prickled my skin.

  He pulled out his gloves, adjusted his hat. “We’ll begin training after supper.”

  TEN

  W. 1703 Halston Street

  We passed through the hospital lobby and I had a feeling of being watched—the one that used to make me duck behind cover when I emerged from the surgery tent to have a smoke. Coming from … there.

  Tristan touched my shoulder. “Miles?”

  “That man, with the paper.” I took in every detail of his appearance, starting with his brand-new hat, his tidily waxed mustache, and ending at the cuffed legs of his trousers. Every stitch and crease said money. Too much money to be loitering in a veterans’ hospital.

  “What about him?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  The stranger walked out of the hospital with the paper tucked under his arm as I unchained my bicycle. He turned a corner and disappeared from sight as I pulled the chain loose.

  “That was the man?”

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s nothing.”

  “Maybe,” Tristan moved a little way up the fence and unchained a bicycle that had all the little touches that made it a rich man’s ride—handpainted scrollwork on the tubes and fenders, a fully enclosed chain case, a handsome double-sprung leather saddle and wheel locks—and waited for me to lead us into the street.

  Afternoon bicycle traffic in Kingston was hair-raising to anyone who wasn’t used to it. You join a draft of cyclists, and move up in the draft line until you’re the leader. There are subtle signs, etiquette, and customs to joining a draft we never think about until someone comes along to mess it up. Tristan fell in behind me, calling, “Halston and West Seventeenth.”