The Breaker Queen

by C. S. E. Cooney

  “Array me for war,” she murmured against his mouth. “My people are impervious to pain but not to beauty. If they hear a song, they must dance. If they see a sculpture, it freezes them in imitation. What will they do when they behold your work upon me, vivid and new as the dawn?”

  Elliot shuddered out a breath. He took the carmine pastel dangling from her fingers and dragged it in a thin, jagged line from her forehead to her chin, down her throat, down her sternum, to the belly. Then with a delicate arching of his thumbs, he smeared the oils into red wings across her breasts. Her neck became the neck of a firebird. Her belly its flaming tail.

  Nyx yelped, “Your work burns!” as the tingling of his artistry spread through her extremities. Purely mortal magic. The brand of genius, built up to bonfire radiance by years of study and practice and craft. Elliot’s smile flickered like the gold and yellow flames he was swirling over her shoulders. A different smile than any she had seen from him. Confident. Proud. Slightly coy. Almost a Gentry smile, that.

  Surges of exhilarated desire pulsed through her, in time with the now-audible booms from the attackers outside. He knew what he was doing to her, this boy. What his hands, delicate and deft, scalding and purposeful, were making of her flesh, both secret and exposed. Tongues of blue and green scalloped her eyes and cheeks. He was carful not to disturb the markings already there. Clever boy.

  Pausing a moment, Elliot looked into her eyes. His stained hands threaded through her braids. “Mistress,” he murmured, with that curling imp of a smile. “My work is done.”

  Nyx retorted, “Oh, no, it isn’t, Maestro!” and knocked him sideways onto the mattress, still atop him.

  They had so little time.

  PART THREE: UNVEILING

  When he opened his eyes, Gideon frowned down at him.

  “Alderwood.” Elliot’s throat was full of sour cobwebs. His left arm throbbed. He glanced down and saw five long gashes, scabbed over, running down his forearm, from elbow to wrist.

  “Howell,” said Gideon, forebodingly, “it is one thing for me to come to dinner wearing clay for an accouterment. It is quite another for you to smear the linens of a guest bedroom at Breaker House with oil pastels.” He fingered the sheets, his frown turning thoughtful. “Actually,” he added, “I like them better this way. Forget what I said. But you must rouse yourself. If you can. The house is in an uproar today, I’m afraid. The Desdemonster has cancelled her birthday party and decided to go to the coast of Southern Leressa to recover.”

  “Recover?” Elliot asked.

  “Oh, yes. You see. . .” Gideon paused. “There was a storm here last night. Didn’t you hear it?”

  “No,” Elliot confessed. “Well—yes. In my sleep. I think.”

  “Yes. A terrible storm. It didn’t wake you? Extraordinary. Well anyway. . .” Gideon wandered over to the window and looked out. The view encompassed the croquet lawn, and beyond that, the sheer drop from the edge of the Cliff Walk to the sea. “The electricity went out. Quite out. And one of the maids happened to be wandering about the dark. Who knows why? And she must have tripped and fallen down the stairs. The long and short of it is. . .She’s dead.”

  Elliot bolted out of bed. “What? Where did they. . .? Who was—which maid?” He began to throw on his clothes, whatever came to hand. His smock and trousers were nowhere to be found. He made do with his dinner clothes from the night before, pulling the smoking jacket on over his untucked, unbuttoned dress shirt.

  Gideon did not turn away from the window. “Does it matter?”

  “It matters, Gideon!” Elliot shouted. “I might have. . .She might be. . .”

  Gideon glanced over his shoulder. His face was pinched and tense, at odds with his casual drawl. His eyes were terrible with pity. Not, Elliot realized, for the maid. For him.

  Then he turned away again. “Mallister found her this morning. Had hysterics. Woke everyone else in the house. Except you, apparently. They are all very upset. They’ll be shutting the house down as soon as the police are through here.”

  “Gideon, her name!”

  “Sarah Shaw,” Gideon sighed. He shook his dark head, like a terrier coming in out of the rain. “You know, I didn’t even know she worked here? I saw Miss Shaw in a ballet called The Milkmaid’s Bargain five or six years ago. Everyone spoke of her as a dancer of great promise. Then she disappeared. I haven’t thought of her since. To think she was only twenty miles from Seafall all this time, working in my cousin’s summer cottage. Must’ve burnt out.”

  Elliot came to stand beside him. He put a hand on Gideon’s shoulder, which, had he not been so bone-weary, so empty, so grievous troubled, he would not have dared. Gideon did not invite touch. His muscles were rigid as headstones beneath Elliot’s hand. “You know that isn’t true. You know she must have gone through, like we did. And was forgotten.”

  Gideon’s eyes flashed darkly. Once, Elliot would have flinched away. He held steady, his fingers gripping that taut shoulder even tighter. “Sarah was caught in the Gentry war,” he said. “That was the storm last night. You know it. Was nothing—nobody—else found?”

  Gideon shook his head. “The. . .storm. . .broke the windows in the breakfast room. All is in disarray down there. And there were…bloody tracks. Feathers. Bits of fur and bone. Not human. Beasts, perhaps, seeking refuge from…”

  Elliot hunched his shoulders against the news. “I see.”

  “We must return to Seafall.” Now it was Gideon who grasped Elliot and shook him. “At once. There is no cure for this but work, Elliot.”

  “There is no cure, Gideon.”

  “Come. Pack your things. Where are your paints?”

  “I left them.”

  “Ah. We will remedy that back in Seafall. Your sketchbook?”

  The question fell like an ax blow. Elliot stared around the room, horrified. “I left that too!”

  Their eyes met again. Elliot stumbled, would have fallen to the floor, howling in bereavement, had not the door opened and Desdemona Mannering walked in. She wore a tan silk traveling suit with a hobble skirt. A large-brimmed picture hat, heavy with ostrich plumes and posies, sailed upon the black waves of her hair. Beneath its brim her eyes were deeply shadowed. She wore no makeup but a slash of red lipstick.

  Elliot remembered eating a strawberry. He remembered a robe of rose petals, melting. He remembered painting the Breaker Queen in all the colors of a firebird. He had not known the color red could break his heart. Desdemona kissed both his cheeks, pressing her powdered scent upon him.

  “Elliot, darling, I found your little notebook in the wreckage of the breakfast room. It must have fallen out of your pocket.” She raised her head to study his face. “Gracious, you look a fright. Well—don’t we all? But at least I don’t have paint in my hair.”

  “You never look a fright, Miss Mannering.” Elliot tried desperately not to snatch his sketchbook back from her fingers. But Desdemona, watching him closely, noted the anxiety that curled his hands to fists, the starving eagerness in his eyes. The corners of her mouth twitched up. He thought he saw her deciding to keep the notebook, claiming it as a finders keepers trophy, an homage, a birthday present.

  “I peeked, you know,” she told him.

  “Oh,” he said.

  After a merciless pause, she handed it over.

  “When I come back from Southern Leressa, Elliot, and we finish my portrait, I want to commission that triptych of yours. I think it should go in our dining room. It will entertain me endlessly through even the most tedious of Daddy’s dinners. It’s well to be reminded of a true hell in the midst of what only feels like one. Also,” she added thoughtfully, with a sideways twinkle at him, “there is always the hope of redemption via the excretions of fiend beetles. One could do worse than dwell on theologies over one’s crème brûlée.”

  Elliot flushed, stepping back from her smile. “You are very kind, Miss Mannering.”

  “I am not kind.” Desdemona tilted her head again, ever so slightly, so that t
he brim of her hat hid her face. “I’m a rapacious bitch. Ask my cousin.” She turned to Gideon. “Hello again, cousin. You told him about our little accident?”

  “I told him about Miss Shaw’s death, yes.”

  “A fitting birthday present, no? The corpse of a ballet dancer.” Desdemona began walking toward the door, pulling on a long pair of gloves. “I didn’t even know she was working for us. The last time I saw her was when Mother invited her to dine. Five years ago? She was so elegant. I had never seen a spine so straight. She drank only water, and ate only greens. A vegetarian, I remember. Ha! I never thought of her again until this morning. Her little pale face.”

  A careless wave of her hand, and Desdemona was gone. Elliot opened his sketchbook. The pages shook in his hands. Gideon left him then too, saying only, “Work, Howell. It’s the only cure.”

  ***

  “Elliot, do you want this one over here? It’s a rather isolated area, but the painting’s so large, I think it needs the space. And we can light it as it deserves. They’ll round the bend, expecting nothing but the snack table, and find a shrine instead.”

  Elliot followed Analise’s voice around the corner into a small alcove. She stood on a stepladder, hammer in one hand, pencil in the other, the front pouch of her canvas apron full of hooks, pins, nails, and hangers. A full-length portrait of “The Woman with the Moon in Her Mouth” leaned against the wall at her feet. It was not as blatantly sexual as “The Firebird,” nor as fiercely melancholy as “The Breaker Queen.” It was just a girl in a black dress and an apron, decanting wine from a dark bottle into a crystal container. But the wine she poured was the color of quicksilver, and instead of a mobcap, the glowing horns of a crescent moon were set upon her brow.

  “I love this one,” Analise said softly, watching his face from above. “If I look away for a moment, then look back, it’s like seeing it for the first time. I keep thinking I should turn it to the wall until I’m ready to hang it, or it’ll startle me into falling off my ladder. After all this work—to break my neck and miss your gallery opening! It wouldn’t do.”

  Elliot cleared his throat. He did not want to think about girls with broken necks. It had been a year almost to the day since the death of Sarah Shaw at Breaker House. “What were you thinking?” He pointed. “Just there?”

  “Yes. If you approve.”

  He squinted up. “I don’t know… A bit to the left maybe?” She slid her finger to the place. “No, no—too far! And a little higher. Please. Maybe three inches? Perfect. Thank you.”

  She made the mark with her pencil, then jammed the pencil behind her ear and dug for a nail.

  “Gideon will be stopping by,” Elliot said casually. “He volunteered to provide ‘spirituous liquors for this momentous occasion’ out of his own poor pocket.”

  Analise dropped the hammer. As Elliot scrambled to catch it, she clunked down the steps and reached for her jacket, slipping it on over her apron. “That’s my cue for a coffee break. I’ll just be down the street. Um. . .Fetch me when he’s gone, would you?”

  Elliot slipped the hammer into the empty loop on his tool belt. “How can you live next door to him and never speak?”

  “Many next door neighbors never speak to each other.” Analise pushed a bright green toque over her unruly hair. The pencil slipped from behind her ear and fell to the floor. “This is the city, remember, where even accidental eye-contact is impolite. I mean, it’s practically akin to ripping someone’s clothes off. The only reason I can look at you is because we’re both wilderness born. Me from farm country, you from the moors.”

  “Hail to thee, blithe sprites,” drawled Gideon’s voice from the propped-open storefront door. “I’ve boxes of booze in the trunk of a taxi. Come give me a hand before the teetotalers attack.”

  Analise shoved on a pair of dark sunshades. Not before Elliot saw the bitter hurt in her eyes. He swept her into a hug. “I’ll join you soon,” he said.

  Nodding, Analise slipped out the door, sidling past Gideon without touching him or looking at him, who in turn did not touch or look at her. But when she was gone, he was frozen in the doorway, like one of his own statues.

  “What have you brought me?” asked Elliot, strolling over.

  Gideon snapped upright, stepping through the door. “Oh, the lot. The more they drink, the freer they’ll be with their wallets, the richer you’ll be by night’s end. At least, that is how it’s supposed to work. Did you remember ice?”

  “I’m afraid not.” Elliot did not want to think about selling his paintings, but the money Desdemona had paid him for her birthday portrait and for “Banquet of the Breaker House Condemned” was almost out. He had not taught any classes last semester, too caught up in his work to concentrate on anything else. Rather than letting him go, the University chose to regard it as an informal sabbatical, though he had only been teaching for two years instead of the traditional seven. They had doubled his rent, however.

  “I’ll get the ice too, then,” Gideon offered. “I’ve done my own work for the day.” He glanced around quickly, his restless eyes taking in everything, lingering on nothing too long. “So this is where you disappeared to. This is your year, hanging on the walls.”

  “Yes,” said Elliot.

  “If it were me,” Gideon said, “I’d’ve set the whole pile of them ablaze. How do you bear it?”

  “You were right,” Elliot replied. “The cure’s in the work. Why would I destroy my own cure? To keep my wounds fresh? I am not so fond of bleeding out as some, Alderwood.”

  Gideon flinched. Barely. A flicker of eyelid. “Where did Ana go?” he asked abruptly.

  “Down the street for coffee.”

  “I could use a coffee.”

  “You hate coffee.”

  “Nevertheless, I will drink it today.”

  Elliot bent to pick up Analise’s fallen pencil. “You could leave her alone.”

  Gideon laughed, a sound like a dying crow. “Yes. And have done. For a year. But tonight is your gallery opening. Don’t you think we should all be friends again? I can bring her around. I’m terribly charming, you know.”

  “You’re not, really.”

  Gideon zapped him with his crooked half smile, and Elliot knew that if he smiled at Analise like that, plunking himself beside her in her booth, raising his shot of espresso like a doomed hero his flask of poison on the morning of his execution, downing it in a single gulp and strangling out his much belated apology as he pretended to die upon her table, Analise would crack, would laugh, would smack his arm and love him again. And tonight the three of them would lord it over the gallery, mingling with patrons but connected to each other as by an invisible golden cord, drunk on camaraderie, ignoring their battle scars.

  And in the morning, the troubles would start anew, because Gideon hadn’t truly changed.

  Elliot sighed from the floor, worrying the shaft of the pencil with his fingers. “She’s at Café Impedimenta. Just. . .be careful.”

  It was a stupid thing to say. Gideon did not dignify it with an answer, just turned and left.

  The floor was hard and cold, but Elliot remained there, staring at the pencil in his hands. If he wasn’t working, if he wasn’t constantly up and about, if he stayed still, he had a tendency to sit for hours, staring at nothing. A crack in the wall. A fleck of paint on the rim of the tin can where he kept his brushes. The lead tip of a pencil. His thoughts whited out and roared like radio static. It took colossal effort to wake in the mornings, to eat, to get moving.

  Footsteps in the doorway.

  “Did you forget something, Alderwood?” he asked, looking up. But it wasn’t Gideon.

  “Hello, boy.”

  ***

  The gallery that night was a great success. Every painting sold for its asking price, which Elliot had set impossibly high out of his deep reluctance to sell them.

  “Woman with the Moon in Her Mouth” went for auction, and sold for twenty-five thousand dollars to Mr. Charles “Chaz” Mal
lister, who outbid Miss Desdemona Mannering from spite, and then, at the end of the night, when she was spitting mad and ready to break her champagne flute over his head, turned the receipt for the painting over to her with a nasty smile and a, “Happy birthday, dear thing!”

  The artist himself was courteous to all his admirers, gallant with the ladies, gracious with the gentlemen, but he never once let go of the hand of the woman who stood beside him. His model, obviously. And more, judging by the invisible current that moved between them and sparked like lightning whenever their eyes met.

  She was a strange little thing. Tiny, dark, her braided hair dyed the weird blue-black of grackle feathers, her face tattooed like a carnie. She almost never smiled except when Elliot introduced her to his friend, the famous authoress, Analise Field. By that time, most of the guests had left, leaving their cake-crumby plates and sticky glassware on every shelf, table, and tuck of the gallery.

  “Ana!” The model let go of Elliot only long enough to take Analise’s hands in hers. “You are the writer, yes? Elliot Howell spoke of you. I read your book when I first came here. It helped me to understand the city. You write about it as an outlander. Like me. It is useful to see Seafall through your eyes. There is much I would ask you. Much I need to understand.”

  Analise laughed. “You’d’ve been better off with a travel guide than my dopey novel! But I’m happy to answer any questions. Seafall’s a bit sadistic to newcomers, I’m afraid. Sorry, I didn’t catch your name?”

  “Nyx,” said Elliot.

  “Nixie to my friends,” said Nyx.

  “Well, Nixie, I’m so glad to. . .I mean, Elliot never said, but. . .” Analise laughed again, and opened her arms. “Oh, may I just hug you? Since we’re both outlanders, and I’m already so fond of you. I can tell we’ll be friends. I’ve liked you since I met your paintings!”

  “We are friends,” said Nyx. “The friends of Elliot Howell are my friends. As were my foes his in my hour of darkness.” Her dark blue, very-dark, black-blue eyes met Elliot’s. They shared a smile. “But now I shall live by daylight.” Nyx touched her palm to her chest. “I have set my clock to his.”