Fire Wizard

by Patty Jansen

  “That is, if the palace hasn’t been looted,” Greetje said.

  Johanna hoped not, and the signs were good. The only one who would have looted the palace would be Alexandre.

  She did wonder why he didn’t live in the palace, especially because, since there was such a shortage of housing, it seemed silly to leave such a large building vacant.

  The day after, Auguste LaFontaine came back to the house. Johanna didn’t see him come in, but Koby told her that he was upstairs when Johanna came back from the markets. She had been trying to buy some fabric because a couple more days of feeling weird and sometimes near fainting convinced her that Koby was probably right, and she intended to ask Nellie to make a dress for her. Except she had come back empty-handed, because everyone had bought all available fabric for the winter.

  Voices drifted through the house from the hall when she came into the kitchen. The conversation didn’t sound friendly. Koby put her finger to her lips.

  Johanna quietly sneaked up the stairs to the point where the steps switched back in the other direction and she would be in view of the people in the hall.

  An arrogant-sounding voice said, “I’ve given you enough time to think about it. I don’t want to talk or negotiate about it again. You either sign that agreement and lead a happy life or you don’t and we’ll take your business from you when you’re dead.”

  Father said, “You’ll get it anyway. This document is an instrument of blackmail.”

  “You dare to be rude to me? You, an old man with no friends and no children?”

  Johanna cringed. Father, we don’t have time for this.

  “I’ve thought about your proposition, and I do not want to accept it. I understood that this choice was up to me.”

  “Do you really choose to let your business die through a lack of ships?”

  “I’ll replace the ship. I’ll carry on. If, when the time comes, I have not located any of my or my former wife’s family, I will pick a loyal employee and give the company to him.”

  The man made sputtering noises. “Yes, well, don’t ask for our help ever again.”

  “I never asked for help in the first place. I listened to your proposal because I thought it might work, but I’ve decided that it won’t.”

  “Well then,” Auguste scoffed. “Well . . . good luck. Because you’ll need it.”

  There were footsteps in the hall. The door opened and slammed shut.

  Johanna ran up the stairs. Father stood in the hallway, bolting the front door. He turned around and smiled when his eyes met Johanna’s.

  “Why did you do that, Father?”

  “Because I’m not going to crawl at their feet anymore. Having you here means that I don’t have to do that. I was never much at ease with the idea of taking such a young woman as wife either, and it would have been a terrible thing for all concerned.”

  “Oh, Father.” She hugged him.

  She liked how he was proud and didn’t give in to pressure—had he ever given in to pressure in his life?—but it would draw attention from Alexandre. He might investigate or keep a close eye on Father, because Father was supposed to be widowed, lonely and unhappy. If he was none of those things, it would arouse suspicion.

  This meant that any action against Alexandre would have to come sooner rather than later.

  Chapter 13

  * * *

  AT NIGHT, Johanna worried. Their group was small and disorganised, and had no magicians. Alexandre controlled the guards, of which there were fewer than before, but still more than enough to wipe their entire group off the world. The Church followers weren’t ready for a conflict and it seemed that they were headed for one.

  She sat in the kitchen until everyone else had gone to bed, listening to the wind whistle around the corners and gutters.

  She should go to sleep, but in the past few days she had slept so much that she wasn’t tired. But it was getting cold in this kitchen, so she picked up the candle and carried it upstairs. Roald lay on his stomach, his face squished in the pillow and turned to her. His breathing was soft and regular.

  She pulled her dress over her head and lifted her underdress to look at her pale body in the mirror. The skin over her breasts was tight and the tissue underneath felt like a bag filled with beans. It was sore at the slightest touch of her fingertips. They seemed larger. Definitely more filled. She slid her hand over her stomach and then puffed it out to make it seem more round.

  By the Triune, it was an unfortunate thing to happen right now. And scary, too. Maybe Greetje was all upbeat about it, but Mother had died while carrying a brother or sister for her. Father had told her that when it became clear that Mother was expecting Johanna, she had signed her will, mainly to, in the event of her death, keep the Aroden family from claiming a part of the Brouwer Company.

  Johanna should go and see a lawyer.

  Maybe.

  Maybe in a day or two, it would all prove to be a false alarm and she would have worried for nothing. Or hoped for nothing, she didn’t know which.

  They had a revolution to fight and a tyrant to drive from the city. There was no time for sickness and babies.

  She let the nightdress fall and climbed into bed. Then she blew out the candle.

  In the darkness, Roald said, “You were looking at yourself.”

  She hadn’t realised he was awake.

  He slid a hand over her side and up to her breast.

  “Ow.”

  He withdrew. “That hurts?”

  “Yes. It’s nothing to do with you. It’s just . . . sore.” She thought for a while, and then decided what the heck. “Roald, I think I’m having a child.”

  He took quite a while to process that. She expected questions about how that worked, but then she remembered that he had read books about human anatomy and probably knew better than anyone how that worked.

  “Like the cows,” he said in a matter-of-fact way.

  “I suppose.” She was a bit miffed to be compared with a cow, but if that made him happy . . .

  “I used to have to get up at night and check on the cows when they were calving. Sometimes there was one where the calf was stuck, and I’d have to put my hand in and push it right. It was messy. The calf used to come out covered in a blue-white sac, with blood and water. Like that?”

  “Well . . .” Thanks, Roald, for the detail I didn’t need to know. “I suppose so.” By the Triune, now she felt ill again.

  “That’s all right.” He sounded very confident. “I can help.” He slid his hand down her side and between her legs. “It comes out here.”

  “Thank you, Roald, but—oh!” That whole area was sensitive, in a good way.

  “Does that hurt, too?”

  “No. It feels . . . good.”

  “Do you want me to look at you?”

  “Well, I . . .” She wasn’t sure. Didn’t they always say to be really careful in the beginning? But then, didn’t she want this to be a false alarm? Maybe she was just panicking and felt this way because her bleeding was really late. Maybe it would get the bleeding started. She lifted her leg over him.

  Normally, she would be a bit sore when he went inside her, but this time, the waves of pleasure hit her almost straight away, and twice more immediately afterwards. When he finished and she lay in the warm hollow against his body, the entire bottom half of her body was throbbing and glowing. There was no doubt left in her mind that she was with child.

  This became even more clear the next morning when she ate two healthy slices of Koby’s bread and then had to run outside to empty her stomach. No one saw her do that—it was a terrible thing because people went hungry in town, and the bread was very good.

  It had snowed overnight and Johanna used her wooden shoe to push snow over the patch so that hopefully no one would notice. But when she was inside, of course, she felt hungry again. She didn’t dare eat, but that made her feel even sicker and she vomited again, in the washbowl upstairs, because there wasn’t anywhere else to do it. She s
tood there, awkwardly holding the porcelain washbowl with a smelly puddle of brown in the bottom, wondering how to discreetly get rid of it, when Nellie came in.

  “Oh, oh, Mistress Johanna. Give that to me and go to bed. You need lots of rest in your condition.”

  Johanna protested weakly that she was hungry but Nellie wouldn’t have a bar of it, and so she lay in bed again, sick and hungry, her whole body throbbing.

  This was the bed where her mother had lain in the same condition, the bed where Johanna had been born and where, two years later, her mother had died while carrying a brother or sister. Unless something dramatic happened and they could defeat Alexandre, Johanna might do most of those same things here.

  Johanna tried some water, but that came back out straight away, so she got dressed and went downstairs and convinced Koby that she needed something to eat that wasn’t bread because her stomach didn’t like it. Koby gave her some cheese and that made her feel much better.

  So much better, in fact, that she went back to worrying about how to deal with the fact that the band of Church followers would soon face Alexandre and they were nowhere near ready.

  Failing a magician, they needed all the people they could recruit to the cause, and something needed to be done about this soon.

  In the afternoon, when Nellie would let her leave the house, she went to see the cheese seller Leo at the markets, but found the market place infested with guards. They walked between the stalls looking at produce, looking at people, talking to people. They were mostly traitors: Saarlander men in the employ of the occupying force. They wore blue uniforms, some with shiny buttons, but most of the jackets looked a little the worse for wear. Johanna wondered where they had come from and who had worn them previously.

  A couple stood around a man who was said to have stolen an apple. He was crying about not having enough to eat and having lost everything and the guards threatened to take off his shirt and beat him.

  Really, they would do that?

  In Saardam, they’d risen above such barbaric processes long ago. That just went to show that the veneer of civilisation is thin, one of the things Master Deim loved to say.

  Johanna very much wanted to tell those arrogant young men in their new suits that this wasn’t how Saarlanders treated each other, but had to keep walking because she couldn’t afford to get involved. They might recognise her. They would report her to Alexandre or Octavio Nieland.

  Leo was at the usual table with his cheeses. Not as many as before the fires, Johanna noticed. He raised his eyebrows at Johanna and made all sorts of hand gestures that probably meant that she had better not talk about anything that she didn’t want anyone else to hear. So she told him that she was interested in buying a horse.

  His face cleared up. “Oh, you must have heard about the horse that I bought from a group of travellers.”

  “I was going to put a bid on that horse,” said the farmer in the next stall.

  “No, I,” said the stallholder across the aisle.

  About ten people said they were interested in the horse, and Leo was trying to tell everyone where they could view this horse, when a guard turned up.

  He stopped at Leo’s stall and asked him a question that Johanna couldn’t hear. Leo replied something about having found the horse wandering around.

  “If it’s found to be an escaped coach horse, you will be charged with theft.”

  “I didn’t steal anything. I bought it, fair and square.”

  “The horse trade is not your normal business.”

  “Then am I not allowed to earn some extra money and help a fellow out?”

  Johanna rounded to corner of the aisle and stopped, heart thudding. The voices of Leo and the guard drifted on the wind, but she couldn’t figure out what they said.

  “That particular low-life of a man does that all the time,” a merchant wife said to Johanna, while jerking her head in the direction of the guard. “Joined this tyrant as soon as he started calling for local volunteers. He was always a funny character, but I never thought he’d betray us.”

  “I always said he would,” added another stallholder. “He’s a weaselly little man who likes to pretend he’s more than he is, grovelling for this tyrant and Octavio Nieland.”

  Johanna managed to get them to tell her where Leo’s warehouse was and then she continued on her way.

  Chapter 14

  * * *

  BEFORE JOHANNA had left the markets, there was a to-do at the mayor’s house. While she had talked to Leo, more people had gathered in front of the house, kept away from the steps that led up to the front door by a handful of guards.

  The door to the house and a third guard came out, holding a trumpet with blue tassels. Some people cheered, others called out, holding out their hands like beggars.

  The man stopped right in front of the railing at the top of the steps and faced the crowd. He put the trumpet to his mouth and played a fanfare, loud and clear. The sound echoed over the square

  The door opened again and a man dressed in blue appeared on the top of the steps. Blue cape, blue trousers, blue jacket and a white shirt with excessive ruffles. He was thin and wore his honey-coloured hair in a ponytail that stuck out from under his wide-brimmed hat. His boots were of the thick-soled type that made the wearer appear taller, black and polished with shiny buckles.

  While he stood at the top of the stairs surveying the crowd, another two men came out of the door, each carrying one end of a box that looked like a travel chest. They manoeuvred this thing down the stairs and set it on the ground before the line of people.

  The man in blue, whom Johanna had never seen but assumed was Alexandre Trebuchet, came down the stairs in an effortless glide.

  The people in the queue called out to him.

  “Please, lord, help an old woman.”

  “Please, lord, my children are sick and we have no house.”

  “Please, we need wood for the fire.”

  Alexandre simply walked past them without looking, his chin in the air, ignoring all their calls. A couple of men followed him, all dressed in finery. One of those men was Octavio Nieland. He and another man went to the box and stood next to it, crossing their arms over their chests. A lot of people in that line were looking at the box with wide eyes.

  Johanna pulled the hood of the cloak further over her face and retreated further into the nearby stall. It sold eggs and pears, dried beans and flour. She hoped no one would recognise her.

  Alexandre and his men walked along the perimeter of the markets past the boarded up weigh house and the makeshift replacement, past the ruins of the house on the corner, to the empty block where the church had stood.

  One of the men produced a roll of paper, which he unrolled and held up for Alexandre to see.

  “It be bad news, what that man is doing,” said the stallholder, a short woman whose well-fed appearance showed no signs of hardship.

  “I assume he’s rebuilding the church?”

  “That, he is,” a man said, presumably her husband. “I’ve not seen the plans myself, but I hear from my cousin who is a carpenter that it’s quite a monstrous thing he’s building. That other man over there is Charles DeLuc from Burovia.” Johanna presumed that he meant the dark-haired man who was pointing at the plans. “He’s known for designing ridiculously expensive buildings.”

  The farmer in the next stall laughed. “That thing will take so much stone, the ground is too soft for it. It will sink sideways before they ever get to put the roof on it.”

  A few others agreed with this and went on to debate whether the new church would be more elaborate than the old church; and since that church had been made of wood, it had to be.

  Johanna asked, “Do any of you know what that thing is they’re building in the harbour?”

  “No, lady, not a clue, but they’re working hard at it. There’s a full team of men turning up there every morning. They get every single brick the brickmakers can produce that we haven’t already managed to get
. He’s using his own men to build it and they don’t come into town and don’t talk to anyone else.”

  “I think it’s some kind of oven for making bricks,” another man said.

  “I think it’s for building ships,” said the farmer. “Why else would they build it in that place?”

  Johanna was reminded of the strange activities going on at the Guentherite Brotherhood’s farm. The hole in the ground and the black rock that was taken out. And the stranger activities at the Abbott’s summer residence.

  She asked, “Have you seen any ships bringing in iron?”

  There were headshakes at this. “Why iron?”

  “We saw similar strange things being built all along the river. Mostly there are monks of the Guentherite order involved. They dig holes in the ground, take out black rock and make iron. No one knows why.”

  The stallholder’s wife said, “There were some monks here in autumn, but they left a few weeks ago. We thought it was to do with their church. People were saying that the Belaman Church got angry with the Church of the Triune and the Holy Father said that the Church of the Triune broke church teachings and banished them.”

  “Yeah, I heard that, too,” said the man in the next stall.

  That part of the rumours was true. The Belaman Church encouraged magic. Were they going to take their ghosts, black rock and iron into Saardam? Were they performing necromancy?

  She shivered.

  All the construction works along the river were part of a plan. She wondered what had gone wrong at the Abbot’s summer residence and how much that had delayed their construction. Something evil was being created and should be stopped. Alexandre should not build a church here, in the place where she used to come most days for the Shepherd Romulus’ service. Where the wooden pews told her their stories, and where on most mornings, the Shepherd could be seen teaching children and giving poor families food and clothing.

  Alexandre and his party had walked around the bare and muddy building site and come back to the house, where Octavio and the other man still stood on either side of the chest.