Winterspell, page 23
“I don’t blame you. I was frightened too. If I’d had to—if it had escalated—” He shook his head. “I’m not sure I could have done it, no matter the danger. I could not have lived with myself.”
“I believe you,” she said quietly.
He gathered her hands in his, grave. “I’d never lie to you.”
She shivered. She was loath to let go of his hands, and even when she did, he remained there looking up at her. She had never seen his face so open.
“Do you really mean that?” she asked.
The question hung between them, tugging and wary.
But then Bo entered the room, crowing her triumph—she would indeed be joining them, and Afa would be increasing her daily intake of honeywine to cope with the situation, but who cared about grumpy old Afa?—and the unanswered question dissolved like a sigh, and was gone.
* * *
At dusk they left for Krezentia House, and Clara felt the most comfortable she had yet felt since arriving in Cane, despite the journey that awaited them. Instead of a tattered gown or gossamer doxy garments, she now wore dark breeches, fur-lined gloves and cloak, and a utilitarian tunic, each artfully tattered by Karras so as not to attract attention. Best of all, she had been reunited with her boots and daggers. The weight of the blades at her thigh and in her heels gave her a renewed strength, even when she had to say good-bye to Afa and leave the relative safety of Pascha House behind.
“This time tomorrow,” Bo said cheerily, her bag of decommissioned kambots and other scrap parts swinging at her hip, “we’ll be north and south of here at the same time. You see? North because we’re traveling north, but south because we’ll be underground.” She chucked Nicholas on the arm. “And you might’ve thought our brains had gone to mush in your absence, Your Highness.”
“Well,” he said soberly, “perhaps not all your brains, but certainly some.”
Bo punched him, and Clara forced a laugh she did not feel. Her thoughts were too scrambled to feel anything but uneasiness. Every look Nicholas threw her, each word he said, she interpreted through a new veil of suspicion. It was maddening, for outwardly he had done nothing to warrant such misgivings.
She ignored the twinge of disquiet in her heart and the icy tumult of her blood and followed Bo and Nicholas to Krezentia House as automatically as any faery mechanik might. She would think of saving her family and empty her mind of everything else, as though her mind were a sieve designed for one purpose and no other. It wouldn’t matter then if Nicholas tried to use her, or if she metamorphosed into an ungodly, half-frozen creature right here in front of them, or that Godfather had died, most likely in agony. She would keep going ever onward and ignore everything else but that. Onward, forward, home.
Tonight would mark the end of her fourth full day in Cane, which meant that by now one full day would have passed at home. Onward, forward, home. Onward, forward, home. It would be her new credo.
If her companions noticed the change in her, they said nothing. They met with their fellow travelers, loitering in various locations around Krezentia House: Erik, sour-faced and the apparent leader; Igritt, with the face of a boar; two brothers, young Herschel and even younger Jurian. There was not much time for greetings there at the house’s back wall, which fell beside a bridged ditch full of human-shaped debris. Erik and Bo exchanged a few words and slapped hands, Jurian seemed beside himself at the sight of Nicholas, and Clara could have sworn she saw Igritt self-consciously smoothing down her hair.
Erik led them through a narrow passageway beneath Krezentia House, and then—thanks to a doxy who admitted them wordlessly with a nod to Erik, whose eyes lingered on Nicholas in a way that made Clara more than a little nervous—through an even narrower path in the sewers below Krezentia House. Darkness fell over them. Bo distributed tiny lights she had fashioned out of stripped kambot wiring and repurposed kambot eyes, to be worn about the head and turned on and off with a tiny knobbed switch. Finally they opened a hidden grate in the slime-covered wall of the sewer and entered the narrowest passageway yet. The way was not tall enough to stand, so they crawled across oily stone, through a trickle of dark sludge.
It was here, where the rank black walls seemed to whisper to the rank black water, where indeed the entire world seemed black and shivering as the seven of them made a cautious, cramped chain in the darkness, that Nicholas finally asked Clara if something was wrong.
For it was here that Clara first heard the voice.
It said her name.
26
It was an unidentifiable voice—neither feminine nor masculine, but light, thin, somehow artificial.
Clara . . .
She jumped and hit her head on the low ceiling. Clumsily she switched on her light, yanked it off her head, and thrust it into the darkness behind her.
“Watch that light, girl,” Erik growled. “Get it out of my face.”
She shone it past him, past everyone, into the gloom. “Who’s there?”
“Clara?” Nicholas, behind her.
She whirled, bringing the light with her. Nicholas looked concerned. Past him Bo crouched, her own tiny dagger held at the ready.
“What is it?” she whispered, fierce. “You hear something?”
With everyone watching her, doubt flooded Clara. “I don’t know. I could have sworn I heard someone else, behind us.”
“Someone at Krezentia House could have noticed us,” Igritt said. “Perhaps your doxy friend, Erik—”
Erik frowned, irritable. “She wouldn’t. Trust me. If anything, we lingered too long on the street.”
“Shike. I’ll go check.” And then Bo was gone, tearing back down the tunnel, insect-like, toward the main sewer.
Nicholas put a hand on Clara’s. “What was it? What did you hear?”
“I don’t know. I thought I heard someone say my name. But perhaps . . .” And then she stopped, because it was happening again—the surge of inner coldness, the electric vitality singing through her limbs. This time it frightened her not because she did not know what it was but because she did. If Godfather had not found her, by now she would most likely have confided in Nicholas—who, if Godfather was to be believed, would be only too glad to listen.
Flustered, she pulled away from Nicholas’s touch and saw his hurt at her withdrawal, though he masked it quickly.
“Perhaps?” he prompted.
“Perhaps it was the sound of our movement in the water.” She made a face, examining her sludge-crusted fingers. “If you can call it that.”
Nicholas smiled, but Clara wasn’t sure she believed it. She hid her face—his eyes were too searching, too curious—and when Bo returned with nothing to report, everyone continued on. Erik grumbled under his breath, seditious complaints of which Clara heard only pieces—she suspected no one else could hear more of his muttering than a dull line of sound amid the dripping of the tunnel—but she heard enough. He did not trust her.
She would have to be careful with him.
She had no claim of sovereignty to fall back on, not even a claim of citizenship. No doubt Erik would be watching her, and the others might be too—watching her, waiting for her to make a mistake. It had been too easy with them until now; they had asked her no questions, required no pledge of fealty. Clara didn’t blame them for their mistrust. In their place she would certainly be suspicious of some stranger claiming to be from another world—especially if that stranger were, as she was, in a position of relative power at the side of a prince.
Nicholas turned to her, his headlight throwing strange flares across her vision.
“All right?” he whispered.
Clara nodded in answer, and he smiled an encouraging smile that lightened her heart and elevated her mood despite herself. She found herself digging her fingers into the muck, to resist reaching out to touch him.
She would have to be careful with all of them.
* * *
The second time Clara heard the voice say her name, they had stopped at an unexpected dead end. They had been traveling for just over a day now, according to punctilious Erik’s timekeeping using a pocketwatch he carried in his jacket. It had been an excruciating day of too much crawling through stifling passageways, and too little rest—but, thankfully, a day free of incident.
Bo, who seemed to take it as a personal offense that her map had turned out to be inaccurate, sat with Erik and Igritt discussing alternate routes, and Jurian settled down close to Nicholas. “What do you think?” he said eagerly. “Cave-in, maybe?”
Nicholas, face smudged with sweat and muck and the last dripping bits of Karras’s disguising paint, took a swig from his canteen. “I can’t say.”
“They say the tunnels’ve been here since before the war. People dug ’em so they could hide underground if their village got attacked, or so they could escape to a safer one.”
“Really?” Nicholas looked terribly sad. “I never knew about that.”
Oblivious, Jurian puffed up his chest. “They’ve been helpful since you left, Your Highness. For illegal supplies, the sugar black market, hiding from faeries. But there’s been lots of cave-ins over the years. People who made these weren’t engineers or anything, you know. They were just people.”
Clara half-listened, letting her eyes wander down the tunnel walls as far as her headlight would illuminate. Now that they had left Kafflock far behind, the walls had changed from black faery metal and piping to stone and tightly packed earth, but an occasional creeping iron tendril or a hard, bubbled mass of half-formed machinery reminded Clara that they were, none of them, as safe as at first it might appear. Surely some faery up above knew of the tunnels’ existence; a careless citizen might have let it slip, or buckled under the pain of interrogation.
She was letting her thoughts get away from her.
She closed her eyes, breathing in the stale, chill air. How many people had died here, in cave-ins or ambushes or simply after getting lost?
How many two-blooded almost-mages had died screaming down here because their blood wouldn’t stop sharpening and buzzing and scorching them with cold? How many of them had died trying to claw the thousand tiny knives from their veins?
Oh, but wait. That’s right. There had never been any two-blooded almost-mages. Not until now. Should Clara feel honored?
She was certainly feeling hysterical.
“Your Highness, may I ask a question?” That was large-eyed, frightened-looking Herschel. Clara knew it even without looking because it was the first time he had spoken.
“Of course, Herschel.” How good of Nicholas, remembering his name, saying it with such polite interest. How consummate a politician he was.
“Why . . . That is, how . . . I mean, I’m sorry, but . . . why is there metal in your skin?”
Clara tensed; Bo and Erik stopped arguing about routes and glanced over.
“A good question, Herschel.” Nicholas’s voice was even, his smile steady, but this was a crucial moment, wasn’t it? What would they think when he told them? Honestly, Clara was surprised it had taken this long for the question to arise. Maybe it had been at Afa’s tactful request. “Please, whatever you do, don’t ask the prince about his mechanized parts. He’s so self-conscious about them.”
“To put it as simply as possible,” Nicholas said, “they are remnants of the war. They’re what kept me away from you for so long. But you don’t need to be afraid of them.” To demonstrate he flicked the plate on his wrist. It made a dull, clipped sound. “Dead. And Clara helped kill them. She freed me from them, in fact, freed me from their curse. And after we’ve rid our kingdom of its enemies, and I have time to concentrate on such superficial things, I’ll have them removed.”
Well. That was an abbreviated and not entirely accurate summary of that night in the ballroom, and Clara had a good idea of what Godfather would say about being omitted from the tale, but these people didn’t need to know that.
Jurian and Herschel gazed at her, newly impressed. “Is that true, Lady Clara?”
“Lady?” she said, rather rudely.
They were nonplussed. “Is that not the right title?”
“I have no title.”
“Lady Clara,” Nicholas said, winking at her, “is perfect.” Then he took her hand, his metal-capped thumb grazing her palm, and that was when she heard it:
Clara.
Was it nearer this time? Did absolutely no one else hear it? God help her, she was unraveling.
She smiled at eager, stupid, ignorant Herschel and Jurian. “Fine,” she said tightly. “That’s just fine. ‘Lady’ it is.”
She would pretend that she heard nothing. She would pretend that her body was not diving down into untold arctic temperatures.
Nicholas rubbed her hands between his, blew on their entwined fingers to warm them. Smiled—too brightly, considering. “Chilly down here, isn’t it?”
She shrugged and pulled away. “Maybe for coddled princes.”
The others laughed. Bo, exultant, flourished the map in front of them to show off the new route, and they went on.
Clara counted in her head: Five days now. One day, six hours at home.
Onward, forward, home.
* * *
Whenever they stopped to sleep during that cramped dark time in the tunnels, when most moments were the same as the last and Jurian and Bo’s attempts at humor grated upon the last frayed inches of Clara’s nerves—and, it would seem, Erik’s as well, for he was always grousing—Nicholas would settle close to Clara. Sometimes, in the narrower stretches of the tunnel, he was so close that she could have stretched out her fingers and touched him.
She could have, but she didn’t.
Instead she stared at the ceiling she couldn’t see and thought of where her father might be, and what Felicity might be doing—if she was afraid for Clara, or furious with her for leaving with no explanation, or afraid for herself. What would Patricia Plum and Dr. Victor be doing to pass the time?
Six days here; one day, twelve hours at home. Seven days. Eight. Two days at home. She marked the passage of time with unraveling patience, awaiting each of Erik’s announcements as though they were priceless gifts. So many long hours of this close darkness, of fitful bouts of sleep with Nicholas on one side and Bo on the other. Crawling through muck. Eating tough, dried meat and stale bread. Standing, when it was possible—a blessed change of posture that allowed them the chance to stretch aching muscles. Talking to one another in hushed tones, as if any sound louder than that would travel down the tunnel and fetch a waiting danger.
So many long hours of knocking into Nicholas, of their fingers scraping against each other in the dark, of the weight of his quiet gaze upon her, at once welcome and unsettling. She could not make up her mind about him, but her body, it seemed, had decided. It wanted those moments of accidental touch. It wanted more than that—intention, connection, to close the space between them.
She ignored such urges with no small effort. Remember Godfather, she reminded herself. Remember what he told you. And she did, her thoughts a mess of conflict.
Meanwhile, Nicholas contended with a constant barrage of questions. What would happen next, and what was his strategy for reclaiming the throne? What would happen to them? To the kingdom? Did His Highness truly think he could save everyone?
“It would be dishonest to say I know the kingdom will be saved,” he said, slowly, once, when they had stopped to eat, “but I believe it will be.” And then, when he had met each of their gazes—hungry, skeptical, reverent—Clara had noticed their shoulders straightening, their faces softening. Even sour Erik, even solemn Igritt.
“I know the capital,” he had said, “and I know Wahlkraft. And I know Anise. Better than anyone left alive in Cane, I know her. For eighteen years I fought her.” He had given them a grim, resolute smile. “I’m confident we can fight her.”
Clara could have sworn his eyes flickered over to her at those words. The look chilled her. What did he expect of her? What would he demand?
She nibbled at her strip of dried meat and said nothing.
* * *
The third time Clara heard the voice, it was the afternoon of their fifth day in the tunnels, and her ninth in Cane. And this time, the voice said something different:
Soon.
She paused at the tunnel mouth; so did Nicholas, beside her. There was a dimly lit space ahead, less cramped than the tunnel had been. Hub 7, their halfway point.
“Did you hear that?” he said, frowning.
Exhausted, worn thin by anxiety and cold, Clara could have cried; she could have kissed him. Mostly, though, she was careful. “Hear what?”
Nicholas looked disturbed. A flicker of something crossed his face. He flinched, as if suddenly chilled. “Did you say something?”
“I said, ‘Hear what?’ ”
“No, before that.”
She gestured vaguely, shrugging. “It was probably Bo.”
Lies, and more lies. Clara had done nothing but lie to him since seeing Godfather. Desperate to confide in him, a twinge of caution nevertheless held her back. She climbed out of the tunnel into Hub 7 and stumbled, for the stretching of her muscles brought with them a fresh surge of cold that nearly sent her doubling over.
Nicholas caught her by her arms, keeping her upright. “Careful, Lady.”
She smiled, screaming inside. “Thank you, Your Highness.”
It had become a joke since the conversation with Jurian and Herschel. A terrible, terrible joke. For Godfather had called her mother a Lady of the North, hadn’t he? Lady Leska, powerful mage. Did Nicholas know? Did he know?
The handful of refugees in Hub 7—common people, merchants, used-up doxies, children, escaped slaves—watched them enter the room, some curious, others frighteningly expressionless. Piles of crude machinery cobbled together from spare faery parts lined the space, along with racks of supplies and a dimly lit chromocast broadcasting a fuzzy image of advertisements and district notices. There were pallets on the floor, threadbare underthings hung to dry, people eating and sleeping. A mother and her children; a father and his father. Even here in Cane there were these common threads, these familiar scraps of humanity—families and pillows, cookware and laundry. Clara felt tears come to her eyes.
