The rabbit had formed itself out of a puddle? I wondered if I could have gotten Miss Josine Valdecart angry about my brother’s lungrot. Surely that would have been worth more than an ice rabbit dripping away to nothing. A cousin bleeding out in the nighttime streets, a friend hunched with the bonetwist…and this girl’s power restored lapine idols. Not even false gods. False rabbits.
I am among them so much, the rich and the powerful, that sometimes I forget how angry they make me.
Or perhaps it’s that I am one of them so much, these days.
I turned my eyes to Madame’s face. She had been silently examining Josine. Josine, all honor to her, returned the favor.
“How did they find out it was you?”
“They took one of the servants,” said Josine. “They had knives, rusty knives but sharp, and they snatched one of the pages as if out of the air, and they cut a line in his flesh, a killing line if I hadn’t been there. If I hadn’t intervened.”
And my thought of my cousin had not been premature. She had done it, had stopped a rusty blade from spilling a young life into the night, whether it was on grimy cobblestones or marble tiles. I could be content that I had helped her swim. She was what she was, and not a little rag doll with powers.
“They will want you always,” said Madame. “If you do not find a way to guard against them, they will pursue you. They love to destroy, and you make it possible for them to destroy again and again. If you are in their power, they can cut that page’s throat again and again. You understand? They need not find something new to smash until they have wrung all the joy out of one toy, if you are with them. You must not let them take you.”
“Lady, I know it.”
“Do you?”
It was time for me to speak. “Madame, she was brave in the Underhill Ways. She cannot swim, but she let the selkies take her, and she tried to help them with her own upkeep, her own…upbearing. She has courage, Madame. She does her best.”
“As do you, faithful Lucy,” said Madame.
“I try.”
Sukey said, “Madame, we fear that they have caught her scent in the building. There was not much room for Lucy to draw her gate in the new water Underhill. We came in very near the rooms they use, and it was a near thing for Josine to stay hidden from them. We may not have much time.”
Madame drew herself up. “Am I mistress of this place, or is some other? For I tell you truly, it has no lord.”
“You are,” said Sukey, “but the Rust Lords have no respect for persons.”
“They have respect for powers,” said Madame. “We will get her through this safely.”
We all nodded; if Madame said it, it must be so—not because she was omnipotent, but because she had a sense of her own limitations, even when they were far beyond ours.
“One thing more,” I said. “Miss Valdecart—Josine—has a housekeeper with a message for you. She wants you to know that the daughters of the ones who sewed for you last time are ready.”
Madame looked thoughtful. “Are they. That is welcome news indeed.”
“Madame, what are you—what did she mean?”
She smiled at me. “In good time, my flower. Now. Miss Valdecart. I want you to listen carefully. I can help you now and have that be the end of it,” said Madame. “If the Rust Lords come for you next week, it will not be my concern, but my price will be one you can pay over the next few months. That cost will be measured in silver.”
“Or?” Josine prompted.
“Or you may choose what these women before you have chosen,” said Madame. “Loyalty. I stand by my people, as they can attest. My powers, my skills, my connections, are theirs to draw upon. Lucy and Sukey knew that I would accept their debt to the selkies for your rescue. They considered whether it would be the best solution. But they did not have to consult me, and they did not fear my wrath for it. Because we trust each other.”
Even after all these years, I felt a warm glow on hearing her say it. Sukey reached over and squeezed my hand.
“I don’t know you,” said Josine. “But I have gotten to know these women a bit this afternoon. And if they trust you, I think I will.”
I did not dare to look at Sukey, for she would be sniveling, and I did not want to snivel myself. Instead I looked out in the hall, where there was a little fluttering sound.
There was a plover. I tipped my head to consider it. We did not customarily have plovers in the house; while we cater to a wide range of tastes and interests, birding is not, alas, on offer; not, at least, of the traditional sort. I have a few ideas what a gentleman who asked Sukey to assign him a girl who was a real birder might get, but they did not seem terribly relevant to the actual plover at hand.
“Madame,” I said softly, “we have a problem.” She turned to me, and I indicated the bird. “They’re moving the waters of the Underhill again.”
“That will not do,” she said, so quietly we all had to strain to hear her.
“What do they want?” said Sukey fearfully. “Why would they—they could beach selkies that way, or drown other fae. Surely they don’t want their cousins to organize against them.”
“They’re betting we don’t want anybody organized against us as well,” I said.
Everyone looked at me curiously. “Why would they?” asked Sukey.
I jerked my head towards Josine. “We’ve got her. And they want her. All this is to draw her out.”
“I should have gone to them immediately,” said Josine.
Madame favored her with one of the coldest looks I’ve seen in my time in the house. “If you thought that, you should never have entered my service.”
Josine bowed her head. “No, you’re right. I won’t surrender to them. I put myself in your hands; direct me, and I will fight.”
Madame smiled. I think she had missed her time as a general, all these years. I had no idea how much that time would come again.
6. The Locks Without Keys
I was not sure leaving Madame’s house was the best idea, but the Rust Lords were still there. It would wreck the business if they remained, and Josine was having none of that. I think Madame was relieved that she did not have to present it as the first test of Josine’s professed loyalty, though of course it could also have been the first test of Madame’s.
We went down to the cellars, down where the river ran little channels under the building for receiving goods or, from time to time, for customers who preferred even more discretion than a scarf or a domino or a spell could provide. It smelled dank down there, but Madame’s stevedores and bouncers were as loyal as the rest of us, keeping out armies of mice as well as more human invaders. We had arranged for a boat—nothing so elegant as a gondola, I’m afraid; they were all in service—and were waiting for it to come back from the errand on which it had previously been sent. And they came.
There were four of them, and they wore rusty black cloaks with the dye coming off in streaks. Their faces, too, were streaked, with red-orange veins like leaves on their white surfaces. They might have been beautiful if they had not been so horrible.
The rust smell almost did not hit me in time, with the watery smell of the canal next to me. I whirled and shoved Sukey and Josine behind me. “Don’t,” I said. “She’s one of ours. You will regret it.”
“We spend remarkably little time on regrets,” said one of them. His voice was like a shrieking hinge.
“Just come to us,” said another. His voice was much deeper, something falling into a very dark pit. “Make no trouble for the others.”
“She won’t,” I said when Josine didn’t say anything.
The first one raised a hand, and behind us I heard our boat splintering in the water. The rower had the good sense to swim the other direction, and they didn’t do anything I could hear to him as the splashes
retreated towards the river proper.
The protective amulet around my neck crumbled to dust. From the gasp I heard behind me, I could tell that Sukey’s had as well. They didn’t waste time bouncing spells off to see what our amulets could handle, they went straight to the source.
So I did, too. With a few quick gestures and a yank of power from the river, I cut off their access to the Underhill. Which usually makes magic beings weak and angry, sometimes furious enough to try things that won’t work, and then I have them.
The Rust Lords didn’t blink. One of them smiled, or tried smiling; with the cracks of his face it was impossible to say that he’d succeeded. There was a creak in the stone path beneath us and a stabbing pain in my right arm. Though I knew I should not look down, I did.
My arm had shriveled. I was like an old woman who had had an apoplexy so many years past that the muscles in her bad arm were gone beyond redemption. In a moment it happened.
“We will have her,” said the one with the voice like falling. “We will. You need only choose whether we will have you as well.”
I gritted my teeth. “I’m afraid that’s the only way it happens.”
“Afraid,” said one who had not spoken before. “Good. You should be afraid.”
And I was, oh, I was. His voice was not like the others. It was an ordinary man’s, a light tenor, the sort of voice you would meet at a costume party. The sort of voice that could convince you that the cracked rust lines were only a grotesque mask, until it was too late. And I was afraid indeed, for the ones who had sent me to Madame’s alone and wounded, all those years ago, had sounded just like him.
But I knew more now than I did then. I cast an unbreakable binding on one of them. I could feel it clicking into success, and a gurgling howl came from his frozen throat. Sukey behind me whimpered and fell, and I could feel the rest of my body failing. I would not be able to get another. It would not be enough. I was withering, dying of old age. I tried to reach for the river’s soothing magic, and I could not scrabble together enough of a grasp on it.
Madame would not be pleased.
And then I felt myself cooled, straightened, and the Rust Lord with the light tenor voice laughed in pure malicious delight.
“I knew you would not be able to resist it,” he said. “Not selfless Miss Valdecart, properly brought up, so refined. You could not let another die for you, and certainly not in that way.”
I was too busy gasping air into my rejuvenated lungs to retort. Josine merely said, “No. I could not.”
“Take your place with us, then. We can do it again, and we will, unless you come.”
I dared a look back. Sukey too was gasping, flexing her smooth hands convulsively. Josine cocked her head to the side like a little plover.
“I would,” she said, “if I thought I would be your limit. But you, my lords, are as my dear mother has taught me of all men: you must limit yourselves.”
“That is the one thing we will not do,” said the screeching one. He raised his hand again, and I flinched. It shamed me. I darted a look at Josine and started to draw the threads together to freeze another of them eternally. Josine shook her head at me, barely perceptibly. I held the spell in abeyance.
“But you must,” Josine was saying, in tones that implied she was urging them to try one of the fairy cucumber sandwiches at a daring and risqué afternoon tea salon. “You have wanted to bring me into your company since you met me. I am your opposite number, and oh, you do enjoy what I can do, don’t you? More than the talents of the girls of this house? You just love being able to smash the same thing to bits over and over again.”
“Lady,” said the tenor, “we do.”
“But I do not love it, do you see? I do not love it in the least. And while you could crumble my associates and me, while you could turn us to dust in a thought, I do not think you can keep me alive against my will.”
I could not say anything. Sukey managed only to whisper Josine’s name.
“But I do not want to die,” she continued, still sounding as though she was discussing sandwiches. “No, I do not think that would suit me. And I do not think it would suit you. So we must find some better solution, do you not think, my lords?”
“How I wish you had been a little common bitch,” said the tenor.
Josine smiled. “So do I, for then I might know better how to put a knife in your eye when you were sleeping, and might have the bravery to do it. But I am not. I am me. And here is what I propose:
“You will have my services for one afternoon a month. One. It will last from high noon to sunset. You will not manipulate me to cause hurt to anything that feels, man nor fey nor beast. And in return, I will…do my trick for you.”
“One afternoon is not much.”
“Also,” Josine continued, as though the tenor had not spoken, “when Madame Lumiere rises against the lords of this city, your powers will be at her disposal. When the rich and the powerful need to come to rot and ruin, you will help them along the way.”
The tenor sounded interested. “Will such a thing come soon?”
“It will.”
“How do you know such things?”
I spoke then. “We know.”
“And you will permit us to…have our place in this?”
Josine and I looked at each other. She held a hand out to me, and I grasped it. Together we said, “We will.”
“Then it is done,” said the tenor. “One month from now at high noon, we will return for you.”
“To Madame’s front parlor,” said Josine. “I will be waiting.”
No one moved. After a moment, Sukey coughed and said, “Lucy. They will want releasing.”
Sheepishly, I pulled the spells back. The Rust Lords glared at me. They gathered themselves and stalked away, clichés of offended dignity, until we could see them no more along the river’s dark underground banks.
I looked Josine and Sukey over carefully. They appeared to be intact. “That was good thinking,” I said. “I don’t know how we would have saved you else, and we had promised. Madame had promised. It was a foolish mistake. I apologize.”
“They owed her more respect; I see that,” said Josine. “She is still Madame. I will keep learning from her. I have already started.”
“You have done our lady a service, and she will not forget it,” said Sukey. “You will find that loyalty to her runs both ways.”
“And to me,” I said, a bit gruffly.
Josine hugged me. I let her. Even with an unrusted heart of steel, there are times when it is best to give people their heads on such things. “I was glad to do it,” she said, “with all you’ve done for me today.”
“There is the rest of the season to think of,” I said. “And we must tell Madame the new arrangements. Josine will be the one to tell.”
“I think you should,” said Josine. “You are used to her ways.”
“Oh, dear child,” sighed Sukey. “No one is used to Madame’s ways. You just grow used to being unused to them.”
Of course you know the rest, how we took down the glittering lords of the city and freed the Wild Hunt. You know the chaos that ensued after, and the détente that only came when Madame retired. And you know, of course, what happened to Josine Valdecart, though she was Josine Surleau by then.
And now perhaps you do not think, as you may have done, that we were fools to bring the Rust Lords in, that there can have been no reason for it. There was reason. There was the revolution, true enough, but also there was one young woman. And it is in matters of one young woman where Madame’s skills have always been at their best.
And Sukey’s, and Josine’s, and mine after her.
THE HOLLOW OF THE THREE HILLS, by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Taken from Twice-Told Tales.
In those strange ol
d times, when fantastic dreams and madmen’s reveries were realized among the actual circumstances of life, two persons met together at an appointed hour and place. One was a lady, graceful in form and fair of feature, though pale and troubled, and smitten with an untimely blight in what should have been the fullest bloom of her years; the other was an ancient and meanly-dressed woman, of ill-favored aspect, and so withered, shrunken, and decrepit, that even the space since she began to decay must have exceeded the ordinary term of human existence. In the spot where they encountered, no mortal could observe them. Three little hills stood near each other, and down in the midst of them sunk a hollow basin, almost mathematically circular, two or three hundred feet in breadth, and of such depth that a stately cedar might but just be visible above the sides. Dwarf pines were numerous upon the hills, and partly fringed the outer verge of the intermediate hollow, within which there was nothing but the brown grass of October, and here and there a tree trunk that had fallen long ago, and lay mouldering with no green successor from its roots. One of these masses of decaying wood, formerly a majestic oak, rested close beside a pool of green and sluggish water at the bottom of the basin. Such scenes as this (so gray tradition tells) were once the resort of the Power of Evil and his plighted subjects; and here, at midnight or on the dim verge of evening, they were said to stand round the mantling pool, disturbing its putrid waters in the performance of an impious baptismal rite. The chill beauty of an autumnal sunset was now gilding the three hill-tops, whence a paler tint stole down their sides into the hollow.
“Here is our pleasant meeting come to pass,” said the aged crone, “according as thou hast desired. Say quickly what thou wouldst have of me, for there is but a short hour that we may tarry here.”
As the old withered woman spoke, a smile glimmered on her countenance, like lamplight on the wall of a sepulchre. The lady trembled, and cast her eyes upward to the verge of the basin, as if meditating to return with her purpose unaccomplished. But it was not so ordained.
The Witch and Warlock MEGAPACK ®: 25 Tales of Magic-Users Page 59
