Venturess Read online

  “Well, I can’t fault the service, Nick,” Caro said with a sigh, sitting down at my table as the caterpillars pulled the mostly empty breakfast tray over to her, “even if it is a bit insistent at times.” She turned toward Runner, who seemed to be trying to trickle under the table like water. “Now. What on earth are you doing here, Miss Harkington?”

  Runner’s and my noises of disbelief came out in unison, although hers was the louder.

  “You know who Runner is?” I asked. “Do you know who she works for?”

  Runner was up and making for the exit even as I asked the question, more than fast enough to earn her name.

  But this was an inventor’s shop; I pushed a lever on the wall just to my side, locking the front door before she got to it. Runner pulled at my elaborate brass door handle with considerable strength in her little arms, but it wouldn’t budge.

  I hated causing the girl any panic. “Look,” I said. “It’s only that I don’t want any of my, ah, trade secrets getting out to my rivals. So if you could just tell me which one of them sent you to spy on me, I would be most appreciative.”

  Runner pressed her lips together hard and shook her head. I turned to Caro. “Just tell me who she is.”

  Caro looked at us both with sympathy. “I don’t know her exactly, or the name Runner, but I know she’s a Harkington just by looking at her,” she said. “One of the minor noble families living at the palace. All of them have those eyes and that chin, you see? And I also happen to know that one of their young girls ran off three months ago. Now,” she said in her sweetest voice, turning to the increasingly fidgety Runner, “you wouldn’t have any idea who that was, would you?”

  Runner’s apparently distinctive chin trembled, and it looked as if she was about to burst into tears. At the last minute she swallowed them, took a deep breath, and spilled out more words on its exhale than I would have thought lungs her size could contain: that she’d run away, yes, that she was Purity Harkington, yes, that she had run off in the first place only because her widowed mother had a new beau whom she didn’t like at all—​he was always bothering her and her mother never believed it—​so she figured she could take care of herself, and the Big Lad was mean but at least he was better than her mother’s beau, and she wanted to make her own way and someday become an inventor and a princess like Miss Mechanica, except she’d invent useful things like cannons and guns instead of teapots, and she’d come to the shop only because she couldn’t help it, couldn’t help looking in and dreaming, even though her dream was a better one than Miss Mechanica’s was.

  At the end of such a fascinating speech I found that my arms were crossed tightly and my lips were pursed. I sympathized with the girl’s ambitions, although I certainly didn’t appreciate the way she characterized my work, and her story about running away made me so sad, I was afraid to show it on my face.

  But Caro was smiling, and she bent down to put a reassuring hand on the girl’s arm. “Well, now, Miss Runner,” she said, “because I think you like that name better, don’t you?”

  Runner nodded.

  “This beau you mentioned. That would be Lord Whiting, is that right?”

  The girl flinched at the sound of the name. She regarded Caro fearfully, then nodded again, more slowly this time.

  Caro’s voice and her body language stayed as gentle as could be, but she and I shared a look that spoke a whole world of outrage.

  “Runner, Lord Whiting’s gone,” Caro said. “He bothered another girl, and she told my cousin Jamie, who’s the head of the palace guards. Lord Whiting’s in prison, way up in the north.”

  Runner’s face crumpled, and she buried it in Caro’s shoulder. Caro began to stroke her hair, very softly. “If you come back to the palace with me today, and come back to your mama who’s been worried sick about you, then I don’t doubt Miss Lampton here would be willing to teach you a few tricks of her trade”—​Caro gave me a look that wasn’t quite a wink—​“so long as you stop saying mean things about what she does.”

  Runner glanced around the workshop, and her eyes widened with longing when she heard Jules’s metallic snuffling noises as he moved about in his stable . . . but then something closed up in her face, and she shook her head reluctantly.

  “Can’t go back,” she said. “Mama loves Lord Whiting. She called me a liar.” Her voice was quiet now, with none of the bold insouciance she’d had before.

  Caro and I exchanged another look.

  “Oh, darling,” said Caro, with all the force and warmth of someone who’s a mother to every lonesome soul she meets, “I’ll make well and sure she does believe you, and if she doesn’t . . . if she doesn’t, you can stay with my family. Nick and I will help you, won’t we?”

  They both looked up at me.

  I nodded, at a loss for words. How did Caro know so exactly how to care for everyone who needed her? It came as naturally to her as the beat of her heart.

  “Of course,” I said. I had only to look in Runner’s eyes to know the truth of her story, to know she wasn’t any kind of spy at all, just a girl with tragedy behind her. I had been a girl like that once . . . and Caro had helped me too.

  What a blessing my friend was. I felt overwhelmed with how much I loved her.

  “I’m in charge of a whole lot of people at the palace, you know,” Caro said. “I’m only sorry I didn’t know before you ran away. I might have—” She stopped, anger and protectiveness mixing with regret in her eyes.

  I found myself walking across the workshop to take the girl’s hands in mine. “I’ll teach you whatever you’d like to learn, Runner.” Then, remembering how I had felt about charity at the times when I’d needed it most, I added, “So long as you help me around here sometimes, of course. Bookkeeping and tidying and things like that.”

  Runner grinned and raised an eyebrow, a little of her edge returning. “I thought you had machines to do the tidying, miss?”

  There were more faces in the window now; my first customers were waiting outside. The Exposition would be long and busy, and I needed every sale I could get. I bustled Caro and her new charge out the back door with a few more sinnum buns in their hands and with the promise that Runner could come back as soon as she liked. Finally, and somewhat reluctantly, I changed into the blue day dress I’d worn for last year’s Exposition; with the new outfit Jules had made so badly torn, it was the most suitable option I had.

  When I finally opened the door, a flood of customers poured in. The next two hours sped by as I rang up purchases and noted down special orders and helped people try out all the different contraptions.

  Brethren priests wandered in and out of the shop once in a while too. Solemn and silent, they moved slowly, but I always had the impression that something deep inside of them was coiled and ready to spring. They never bought anything, and my buzzers hid themselves in the rafters whenever a black-robed man walked through the door.

  But nearly everyone else who came to my shop was friendly, cheerful, and eager to spend money, and I could only feel surprised and grateful that they had it to spend. Maybe business was looking up again after all.

  I kept so busy that I didn’t even notice the trumpets announcing Fin’s speech, which he’d lobbied so hard to be allowed to make today.

  I missed its beginning, too, as I rang up a customer who had for some unfathomable reason purchased seven of my cuckoo clocks.

  I asked my next customer to wait a moment, explaining that I was eager to hear the Heir. She looked at me knowingly, but I ignored her.

  “. . . No one feels the pain of our history with Faerie more than my family does, more than I do,” Fin was saying. Copper speakers like the ones in the ballroom amplified his voice all over Esting City, and his words fairly rang in my little shop. “I lost my own mother, my brother—​and you lost your queen, and the prince who ought truly to have been Heir, your next king—”

  I heard the faintest tremble in his husky voice, the smallest hitch. I closed my eyes in sympathy a
nd wished that I could send him strength from where I stood.

  “Both of them, lost to Fey assassins. But I must ask myself, and I must ask each of you: Will we judge an entire nation on the works of a few, no matter how horrible those works may be?”

  All of Esting loved Fin, our shining young prince, with the light of conviction always burning in his dark eyes, pouring out in his passionate and eloquent speeches. Many more commoners than nobles agreed with his views on Faerie, much to his father’s frustration. And of course they loved Fin even more now that he was the hero of Esting’s favorite romance. I was grateful that at least I could stay in my shop during his speech, away from the crowd’s demanding eyes, though I received more and more curious glances from customers as the moments wore on.

  “Would we have the citizens of Faerie judge us on the way a fraction of our own people have treated them?” Fin demanded now.

  That was good, I thought—​that was something it would be hard for them to get around. All you have to do to make them see, Fin always said, is hold up a mirror.

  The customer asked me for a kettle in the display behind my register, and I missed Fin’s next few statements while I rustled brown paper and twine, took the woman’s coins, and thanked her for her business. Perhaps I should hire a shop assistant, as Lord Alming had often suggested—​

  A gunshot stopped my thoughts.

  ✷

  A moment of perfect silence. Silence in my shop, in the streets, in the square, silence blossoming out of the projection horns that had carried Fin’s speech to everyone in Esting City, that had amplified the gunshot as his words stopped.

  That silence lasted only half a heartbeat, half the tick of one second on my perfectly synchronized clocks, but it lanced through me like a spear.

  Then screams.

  I was running before I knew what I was about.

  “You’ll be safe here,” I said to the wide-eyed patrons who had flattened themselves to the walls or the floor or whatever other protective barrier was closest to them. “The door locks, and it’s strong.” And before I’d even finished the sentence I was in the stable. I leaped up onto Jules and we dashed into the street, surging toward the square against the panicked current of people running away.

  I had a sense of machinery around me, large and small—​all the wonders of this year’s Exposition, none of which were important enough even to notice anymore. I felt the giant presence of a military airship lurking in the sky, its black bulk looming above me like the weight of guilt, like the weight of despair.

  I already knew who had been shot. Fin would have said something else, some instruction for safety, some word of rallying or comfort or leadership, if he could have.

  I was grateful, perhaps for the first time ever, for the nature of my fame in Esting: As soon as the crowds saw me, they parted, and as I dismounted I saw a guard I vaguely recognized take hold of Jules. One huge man even lifted me up onto the stage.

  The Heir’s lady love, come to mourn her beloved.

  Fin lay on the wooden floor behind the podium. I could see his knee-high black boots and military trousers with their pale gray stripe, his legs splayed awkwardly.

  It had been perhaps a minute since the shot. I felt a tear through my heart, a certainty that I was too late. I had only enough time to think that there had never been anything I could do to help him, and then I was behind the podium and I saw him moving, struggling in a pool of blood but moving, and I cried out and pressed myself down next to my dear friend, my beloved in all the ways that mattered because I loved him as much as anyone I knew.

  Fin gripped my arm with one cold, ashen hand. “Nick,” he said, his lips pale, “don’t believe it, don’t believe it . . .”

  Then a doctor was there, a Su chirurgienne with her bag and gloves and steel mask, and there were guards holding a stretcher, and they were going to carry him away from me.

  “We will take care of him, my lady,” the doctor said tersely, prying Fin’s trembling hand from my forearm. “He is not going to die. Let us take him now.”

  But I couldn’t let them go without me. “No,” I said. “You have to let me stay with him. I—​I am his fiancée.”

  It was the first time I’d ever said the words, or even hinted that they were true.

  I gathered all the authority inside me and pushed it into my voice, willing myself to stop shaking. “I am the Heiress Apparent, and I will remain with the Heir.”

  TOO late I heard the echo of my words and realized that the mouthpiece on the podium had carried them all through Esting City. Everyone at the Exposition had heard from my own lips what I had always refused to say: that Fin and I were going to marry.

  But that didn’t matter now, with Fin bleeding out and weak, being carried away by doctors and guards who cared more about his royalty than his humanity. He needed a friend with him. At whatever cost it might come, that friend would be me.

  The next few hours were harrowing in a way I’d never known before. I stayed with Fin through all of it, the sweeping rush to the palace via a hidden trapdoor beneath the Exposition stage, through the honeycomb of servants’ passages, up into a small chamber of white marble, lit with bright gaslights that were magnified in a hundred precise and garish mirrors, each one of them reflecting the gory hole in his shoulder, his drained, sunken-looking face.

  I watched, stunned, as a clearly Fey painkiller was poured into Fin’s wound and dribbled into his slack mouth, something silvery blue that seemed to be made of liquid and smoke at the same time, something that made me cripplingly dizzy with one breath of its strange fumes. Fey potions, here? Used on the prince himself, whose mother and brother had both died from such concoctions?

  But I, of all people, had nothing against Fey magic. I was grateful for the obvious relief the stuff gave Fin. His grip relaxed when it had been tight with pain only moments before. I kept holding his hand as the chirurgienne dug into his flesh and pulled out shard after shard of a bullet that, she explained, had been designed to shatter into pieces inside him.

  When finally the bloody work was done, I remained at his side. A steaming compress of familiar Esting herbs was applied to the wound, a white linen bandage wrapped all around his shoulder and upper torso. He was carried—​still magically, blessedly asleep—​to his own suite and placed on his wide canopy bed, limp as a doll.

  The attendants who laid him down looked at me cautiously. I was sitting next to him, still holding his hand. I’d released it only long enough for them to remove his shirt before the chirurgie, and I was not about to let go again any time soon.

  “Would you, ah, like me to call for a chaperone, miss?” one maid asked.

  I stared at her. “What?”

  “Well, to . . . to preserve my lady’s reputation,” she stammered. “Not that I mean it’s in question, of course, my lady, begging your pardon,” she added very quickly, bobbing a deferent little curtsy on just about every word.

  “My reputation?” I felt a surge of anger, almost overwhelming, and it was only the realization that I was gripping Fin’s hand much too hard that forced me to calm myself down.

  “I have no family who could suffer from such a blow,” I said in as courtly a tone as I could manage, “and I hardly fear for my honor with my fiancé”—​I flung the word at her, I couldn’t help it—​“in such a condition as he is.”

  The maid blushed. “Of course, my lady,” she said quickly. She backed out of the room, curtsying with every other step. The other attendants fled after her.

  I turned back to Fin, who was starting to stir, his brow furrowing slightly, his lips moving just a little. They were dry and cracked. There was a crystal jug on a small table near the bed, but I couldn’t reach it without letting go of his hand, and that wasn’t something I was willing to do yet. Not before he woke up.

  “All right,” I said, leaning back in my velvet seat. “You can come out now if you like.”

  I felt a fluttering pressure in my breast pocket, and as I looked dow
n, my copperwork butterfly emerged, stretching its thin wings. Two dragonflies crawled from my pockets a moment later, and three glow bugs quickly joined them.

  “Would you get some water for Fin, please?” I asked, nodding toward the table.

  Together four of the insects alighted on the jug, two on the handle and two on the base, and counterbalancing each other, they tipped it forward so that iced water poured smoothly into a waiting goblet. After they set down the jug, they gripped the edges of the cup’s lip and lifted it slowly, laboriously, into the air, then brought it to me.

  They’d known to the last drop how much weight they could carry together. They used tools. They made calculations. They looked like simple clockwork bugs from the outside—​well, not simple, but at least straightforward in concept and purpose—​but inside of each of them there was a tiny soldered-shut box, barely larger than the head of a pin, containing an even tinier pinch of Ashes, taken from one of the hundreds of samples my mother had kept in carefully labeled drawers, one for each species.

  I shivered. As grateful as I was for the insects, their lives were always tied to my mother’s death. They weren’t a gift from her, but an inheritance; I had them because I didn’t have her. The way she’d left them for me, left her whole workshop hidden away with magic that only I could see through, was her last challenge: Could I continue her legacy?

  Well, I had. I was a more famous inventor than she’d ever been. I often thought of her strict lessons, her standards that had always seemed impossibly high, and I wished I could show her what I’d done with her buzzers now. Either my mother or I had placed the Ashes inside each insect’s lifeless clockwork belly, pressed a hand over it, and made a wish for it to live.

  And now they were thinking, planning, working together, and bringing me a perfectly calculated glass of cool water so I could moisten the lips of my unconscious friend.

  They were alive. I couldn’t think of them as anything else, no matter what my mother had written in her journals, no matter how many times Lord Alming told me evasively that Ashes were just a Fey illusion and not to concern myself with their origins.