by Cat Hellisen
“Yes,” says Carien. She is herding Yew toward the door.
He smiles at her manoeuvres, and lets himself be guided out. “It was a pleasure to have finally met you,” he says to me. “And you.” He gives Jannik a wide grin that is lazy and predatory, like a sphynx biding its time before it begins a hunt.
“Dreadful man,” Carien says, after the servants have taken him from her and led him out, and the clatter of the coach wheels against the gravel has faded. She, like Yew before her, is not looking at me.
Jannik stays very still, his head raised, and stares back. I can just see the faint white edges of his third eyelids, threatening to sweep across and blank all expression from his face, but he does not let it happen. He watches her undisguised, his night-sky eyes challenging her forest-green ones.
“I’m so glad you chose to come,” she says.
Jannik and I both smile – small secret smiles that are gone as soon as thought. “It was my pleasure,” he says.
I am about to take my leave of them both, when Carien stops me, resting one hand lightly against my wrist. “I received an invitation,” she says.
I raise one brow, waiting. My stomach is churning, I had not expected a meeting with Yew, and that on top of my plan to abandon Jannik to this house is making me ill. I press on hand lightly against my stomach, as if I could knead the bubble of anxiety away.
“I wondered if you knew anything about it.”
“What kind of invitation?” I pretend confusion so easily. Even were Carien higher than a Hob-kite, I do not think she would be able to unspin the truth. My lies have become part of me.
“From House Guyin, requesting that Garret and I join them at dinner.”
“How odd.” I frown. “I had heard nothing of this.”
“But you speak with them?” She presses on, her fingers clutching now, the little daggers of her nails tearing at me through her silk gloves. She talks of Harun and Isidro as if they were still together; perhaps she truly does not know anything of what has happened. I feel some of my confidence in this scheme falter. “You are the only ones who have.”
“Perhaps it is to do with Garret’s proposal,” I say.
Carien drops her hand, releasing me. “Ah. Guyin should know that there is nothing he can say that will bend my husband on this. He is adamant.”
I press my lips together, and breathe in once, sharply. “Guyin has more to lose. Desperate men can be persuasive.”
“Desperate men can be dangerous.”
“That too.” I step out of her reach. “Will you go, then?” I ask it lightly, as if it barely matters. “After all, they’re hardly acceptable table mates.”
Carien keeps her head still, looking through me, past my layers of lies. “It’s not up to me,” she says. “You know that.”
“Of course.” I dip my head. “Let me know when you’re done with him.” It is with a great strength of will I do not look to Jannik, wish him well, wish him goodbye.
On the way back to Harun, I stop at one of the few legal scriv merchants, and in that dusty place, sharp with the smell of magic, I buy myself a tiny pouch of scriven and pretend that little skip of my heart was fear and not want.
* * *
Eline’s answer is waiting in the silver letter tray at House Guyin by the time I return. I tap the wax seal with one finger, and wonder why Harun hasn’t bothered to open it.
“Do you want me to?” I ask.
“Stop that.” He whisks it from my hand. “I’m not afraid of it, Pelim.”
“Oh?” We are both afraid. We need Eline out of his home if Jannik is to have any chance of searching the house for Isidro.
Harun scowls back at me and snaps the wax. Red shards fall with a soft clatter, only noticeable because we are so quiet. The paper crackles.
“And?”
A grim smile pulls at the corners of Harun’s mouth. “Get ready,” he tells me. “We have Eline.”
* * *
“Stop pacing,” Harun says.
I pause and look out at the gardens. Master Gillcrook has found Harun a team of gardeners who have somehow managed to rake and clip the vast mess of the Guyin House wilderness into presentable shape. The moonlight falls cold and blue over the neat lawns. Stars glitter faintly. The nights are warming now and that fat oppressive heat is coming in from the deserts. Owls call to each other.
It’s not them I want to hear. I strain my inner ear for some small thing that will link me to Jannik, but he has shut himself off completely. He said our connection would be weak at best, but I didn’t expect him to be using all of his defences to keep me out, on top of the distance between us. “I hate waiting,” I say to my reflection in the tall dark glass of the doors.
“And you think I like it any better?” Harun says from behind me, where he has seemingly grafted himself into his chair. “And not even a teaspoon of wine left that isn’t earmarked for my bloody guests.”
“What would you do with that anyway?”
“Medicinal purposes.” He sighs and shifts, the material creaking. “I’m not as bad as Jannik paints me.”
“Really.”
“I threw away everything I had to be with him.”
“Everything?” I look over my shoulder at the newly cleaned room. It is filled with heirloom furniture, priceless glass and art. Fewer pieces than when we first met, to be sure. But still a fortune. “How you must have suffered.”
“Not this.” He waves at the room. “I will not be recognized as the heir.”
“They have no other sons,” I say. “They will recognize you, and you know it.” I swing my skirts round and face him. “Is that why you’ve made no official commitment? Because you hope to still gather some maiden from an eligible House and spawn little Guyins to fulfil your obligations?”
“And if I don’t – what then?” He bares his teeth. “My lineage ends. Two brothers, and not one of them made it past puberty. Is it my fault then that the yoke falls on my neck?”
“And is it Isidro’s?”
Harun’s mouth thins. “Don’t bring your Pelimburg morality in here. I know the worth of it.”
I stiffen, my palms gone damp and itchy. I have not forgotten what Harun said to me, after the fever of his scriv Vision.
“At least my brothers died of natural causes,” he says.
“As did mine.” My laughter is hollow in the darkened room. “A more natural death than you could ever imagine.”
“You sacrificed him.”
“To the sea,” I reply.
“A sea witch.”
“And what would you say the difference is?” I walk toward him, my silk skirts sighing and hushing as if they know what is to come. “There are things out there we do not understand - although we like to pretend to. Do you think our ancestors had the Hobs and beasts with wild magic killed merely because they were an inconvenience?”
“Explain.”
I sigh. “What are we but a false set of laws laid over a wild land? We hope to tame it, but what we can’t tame we destroy. The Lammers are not as important and powerful as we like to believe. There are other magics waiting to take our place.” I think of my recent conversation with Yew – it’s true, the Lammers fear. And what they fear, they destroy. It is our way.
“You sound like a tea shop revolutionary,” he says with a sneer.
“And maybe I am, or maybe I used to be, or maybe I was almost one.”
“You talk in riddles.”
“Better than talking in rhymes.” A sharp pain kicks across my breast, and I gasp.
“What is it?” Harun is on his feet, our sniping forgotten.
“I – I do not know.” Desperately, I reach out to the connection I’ve forged, and come up against nothing but swirling darkness. Bloody Jannik, he was supposed to let me know what was going on. The hurt intensifies, a jackal under my skin, scrabbling for freedom. “Gris damn him!”
Jannik’s hold on his house must slip because I am thrust from Harun’s now-immaculate rooms into a
place that is dark and cold and deep. An underground room, the walls dank. I can smell the mustiness of mould and old urine and sweat. I can feel the flickering heat of iron. Something cries in the blackness, a sound like a feral cat screaming at a rival. Eline, says Jannik’s voice in my head, as clear as if he were right beside me. Underground, there’s a – cellar, Isidro - Then the scene is gone.
“Felicita.”
I am on my hands and knees, gasping. Harun has gone down on one knee to help me up. I let him take my hand.
“What did you see?”
“I’m not sure.” Certainly, whatever is happening now, Jannik is sitting for no portrait. Fear eclipses me, makes my breathing ragged. It is real. It is real. “He’s definitely underground–”
“Isidro?”
I shake my head. “It was too fast – a blur.” I take a deep breath and pull my hand out of his. “I’m fine, thank you.” But I’m not, not really. Ghost pains linger across my chest. The scratches of a wild animal. “I need to move.”
“You?”
I take the little pouch from my pocket and hold it out, and say nothing. He will understand why I didn’t tell him what I decided to do if anything should have happened to Jannik. Or he won’t. It’s not my problem. He has a dinner to attend, after all.
Harun half snarls at me. “Was this your damn plan? To go roaring into House Eline like a tornado? This isn’t Pelimburg, Felicita. You kill a single person in his household, you’ll be tried and executed.”
“So what exactly would you suggest?”
“I cancel this farce of a dinner, and we both go in to collect our property, and leave.”
“Ah, and Garret it going to hand them over when we ask, consider it all a huge misunderstanding? How fortunate for us he’s so reasonable.”
“I’ll think of something.” Harun shakes his head. He knows that they will never listen to him, that Garret will never even admit that he has Isidro. He will laugh off our accusations, calls us insane. Jannik and Isidro will turn up months from now, disfigured and dead.
“Trust me,” I tell Harun. And I need his trust to bolster my own. I need to believe that I can do this. Oh, I see this going very well, Owen says. At least this time you can’t destroy half a city and murder your own flesh and blood. I suppose it would have been foolish to expect that the voice in my head would have any faith in me. I almost laugh. And then I take that voice and I lock it away. In that safe space that Jannik taught me to make, in my memory of my room in the Pelimburg tower, I turn Owen’s words into a silver hairpin with a jewelled green leaf. All my memories from those last days in Pelimburg are centred on that hairpin, and I remember every coil and tarnished whorl. I can almost feel the weight of it.
Keep quiet, I say.
Owen is silent, silver.
In my mental room is a little jewellery box filled with childish hairpins I outgrew years ago, and the new hairpin joins them. I lock it with a glass key, then crush the key under my heel. Specks of powder-fine glass are ground into the carpet, and lost.
There. Jannik would be proud.
I’m proud.
I can do this.
“Harun,” I say, newly calm, with a force inside me hot and strong as iron. “I leave in a moment.” I gather my velvet night cloak from the stand.
“It’s a foolish idea.”
“I am not walking in there unarmed.” My voice is firm. “And if it makes you feel better, I promise that I will not use it unless I’m pushed into the very worst of circumstances.” I think. I’m sure. After all, I’ve managed to go this long without any. I tuck the pouch carefully into a pocket hidden deep in the many folds of my dress skirt, clasp it tightly, then make myself let go. “I’ll bring them back,” I promise him.
THE LARK
Harun walks me to the small private coach I’ve hired and helps me in. “Take them to your apartments, and I’ll send Master Gillcrook with news when it’s safe to move.” He is doing what I’m doing – talking as if the deed is done, that it is going to be as simple as walking into a garden and twisting a leaf from a branch.
My coachman already knows what we plan to do. We have had to bring a number of the servants into our confidence, but Sallow has proven himself a man of worth many times, with a closed mouth and sharp mind.
“I don’t like that you’re putting yourself in danger, ma’am,” Sallow tells me when we draw up on a side street that leads to the close where House Eline’s manor commands the top of the circle. “I could go for you–”
“And if you were caught, Master Sallow? What then? I can talk my way out of a misunderstanding. You would lose your hands sooner than the sharif could shout, ‘Thief!’”
And I have a plan. Now that I have the scriv in hand, that old need is rising in me. It would be so easy. Not to kill anyone – but to hold the air silent. I could be a ghost in their house. There is a reason House Pelim is one of the four Great Houses. We are of the finest War-Singers in Oreyn, and even though I am untrained, I can do this little magic. I’ve done it before; only that time I was sneaking out of a house rather than into it.
I itch. I want the taste of scriv in the back of my throat, the subtle and vicious power that comes with it to flow through me.
The last time I took scriv, I betrayed an entire city.
If so, let this be the time I make up for it. Back then I could save no one, it seems, but me. This time will be different.
The knot in the black ribbon is tight. Cursing under my breath, I pick at it with my nails in the darkness before finally one edge of the ribbon works loose enough for me to pinch it between index and thumb fingernail. The pouch opens, spilling the sharp scent of scriv into the night air, perfuming it with the headiness of bitter-citrus groves.
A night bird screams and the sound is followed by the yowl of fighting cats. A dog launches into a volley of echoing barks, determined to drown out the sound of the cats. I pause, my hands shaking. It’s no guard dog from House Eline; I’m still too far from the Manor. I take a large pinch of scriv and inhale it like snuff, the way Hobs in the tea-shops take their ‘ink sometimes. It slams into the back of my head, tearing into my mind like a sea-storm through fishing boats. I gasp and grab onto the seat to steady myself. After a moment, I am almost used to the so-long-denied sensation. Working quickly, I tie the pouch closed, and with a deep breath to centre my magic, I wrap myself in silence and exit my coach.
There. And now to shift the way light refracts off me. It has been so long, So long, but I slip back into my magic with the ease of a fish returned to water.
Silenced, I am a thing of shadows. How many other War-Singers have done this in their time? No one mentions it, but I cannot have been the first to think to use my power for something so underhanded. It would make a House extremely rich, were they to know every secret of their enemies.
The front door of the manor house looms in the darkness, and I make my way up the low steps. No lights are lit in the front windows, and the servants are relaxing in this respite from their masters. The glass lock presents little problem. It takes a moment’s probing with the air at tiny cogs and wheels, and then the gears click and the door swings open silently in welcome.
I almost laugh. I forgot how easy everything is when I have scriv in me. It makes me feel invincible. The rooms and hallways are shadowed, and I can hear, just faintly, the sounds of talk in the kitchens and rooms below. There must be a stair leading downward. I follow the hum of conversations and find a small back stairwell, grimy and narrow, that leads to the servants’ areas. While I doubt that this is the stair Garret takes to his personal torture chamber, it will do.
The steps are worn in the centre, dipped like cupped palms. The boards creak, but the sound is kept in my little bubble of space. Even so I tread cautiously, always watching for the servants and holding my silence all around me. I pass the kitchen. It’s warmly lit. Servants are drinking tea and laughing and talking, playing at a mockery of their lord and lady, freed from the need to run at the bec
k and call of their masters for the next few hours.
They cannot see me. I am nothing more than a passing darkness.
The stairs go farther down, to the sub-basements and the wine stores. With my chest thrumming from the scriv, I open door after door, leading through cold stores and pantries. Of the vampires, there is no sign. Nothing catches at my heart, pulling me where I need to go. It worries me. I know Jannik can keep himself locked up in this house-thing, but this feels blacker, colder and dead. Like someone scooped out a part of my brain, but I’m still walking around and talking, only vaguely aware that something is missing.
“Damn it all, Jannik. Where are you?” I whisper, pausing at the end of a room filled with musty crates covered with tarps. From the earth-sharp smell, there must be potatoes under the coverings. I sit precariously on the corner of one of the crates and close my eyes. The little room that is my safe space inside my mind is still standing, but it’s of no use to me now. I want access to Jannik. I feel for him, breathe slower and slower, hoping that something will echo inside me.
Nothing.
And then a flicker, like a memory of my own heartbeat. He’s close.
I push myself up from the crate. My eyes are tight and watery. “You’re not going to cry now,” I say. “You’re going to find him.” How long before Harun’s dinner runs dry and his unwelcome guests depart? And surely Garret will realize it is no coincidence that he has been invited to the Guyin home only days after he has claimed ownership of Isidro.
I haven’t all night to sit here in the dark wishing for the door to show itself. The time has come for destruction. Grimly, I take another pinch of scriv. It’s more than enough to send my head spinning and I wince. It hurts to take this much, especially now that I’m unused to the drug. Gathering my silence, I spread my little bubble, pushing it wider and wider until it encompasses as much space as I can manage. I hope it will be enough. Unfortunately, I can do nothing to keep in all the noise of my next act. Here’s hoping the servants will think it nothing more than a collapsing mine tunnel. After all, my poor dead Riona didn’t so much as blink an eyelid when the ground shook beneath her feet.
