Winterspell, page 22
“Him, and all the training you’ve beaten into me.” Clara crossed her arms. He was steadying her, though her skin was still cold to the touch. Had he noticed? “Was this your plan? To bring me here?”
“No. Never. This was the last thing I wanted for you.” He stepped closer, earnest. “I meant what I said in the stable, Clara. I want to keep you safe, take you far away from all of this. This war, and your father’s.”
She eyed the vial still in his hand. “What is that?”
“Ah. Yes.” His eyes flitted down her body, clinical. “I thought you might need it.”
“Why? What is it?”
“I told you, something to settle your stomach.”
“I don’t believe you.” She stepped back. “How am I to know it isn’t some concoction you’ve designed to drug me so you can drag me back to New York?”
He looked affronted. “I would never deceive you in such a way.”
She pounced. “Yet you would deceive me about what happened to Mother, and your part in it.”
“I did what I thought was best,” he said, low. “I’m sorry for your grief, but I won’t apologize for my actions.”
The conversation was rapidly devolving, but at least Clara’s mind was clearer. She could always count on him for that. She took a chance. “Why did you never tell me you were a mage?”
He frowned at his feet. “I’m hardly a mage anymore.”
“Oh, and I suppose that’s why you weren’t in fact able to open a Door between worlds and come find me?”
“I told you, my magic is weak now—”
“Unreliable, yes. I heard you.”
He kicked at the ground with one scuffed boot. “All those years of undoing faery magic took their toll on me. And did he even thank me?”
“I’ve no patience for your petulance. Anyway,” she said, baiting him, “I suppose it doesn’t matter that you didn’t tell me about mages. I’ve learned all about them from Nicholas. Mages, faeries, the war. Even dragons.”
Godfather’s face twisted bitterly. “And where is the good prince? Has he reclaimed his throne yet?”
“We’ve found a safe place to hide, for now. After that, where we go is our business.”
“Oh, I have a good idea where you’ll go.” He stepped closer, and the look on his face was suddenly so urgent that Clara felt alarmed. “Tell me, has your noble Nicholas said anything about the way your body is changing? Has he even noticed?”
That surprised her. “My body is the same as it was.” She told herself he deserved her lies.
“Is it?” Godfather pinned her in place with his gaze. “I think you’re lying. I wondered if it would ever manifest. Our training, all the physical strain, and nothing. Not until we fought the loks did I see any sign of it.”
“Sign of what?” But part of her knew—the deepest part of her mind, the part that had approached revelation and been too afraid to accept it.
“I’ve never seen the product of a mage and a human coupling,” Godfather said quietly. “I assume dear Nicholas has told you such things aren’t done. But I saw that train wreck, and I felt your power in the ballroom. I feel it even now. It’s crude, certainly. I couldn’t teach that part of you, for it never awoke—not in New York, not in any coherent fashion. In the ballroom, yes, I caught glimpses of it, possible signs. But here . . . here, it seems to be waking up with a vengeance.”
Clara stepped back from him. “What are you talking about?”
“Clara, Anise is now not the only half-breed in Cane. Your father is John Stole, yes, and he is a human. But your mother . . .” Godfather’s eyes softened, as they always did when he spoke of Hope Stole. “Your mother was a mage. Her blood runs in your veins. You have magic in you, Clara. And Cane is waking it up.”
24
In the aftermath of his words, a crash sounded from around the corner, answered by a peal of drunken laughter. Briefly Clara thought she would cry. Then she began to laugh along with the unseen merrymakers.
“You see,” Godfather began cautiously, as though she were the mad one, “long ago there was a rather sour young girl named Leska—”
Leska? So her mother had taken a new name for herself in New York, a new identity. Leska in Cane, Hope in New York. Had everything been a lie? Would she rescue her father to find him one of Godfather’s clockwork toys disguised with human skin?
“Are you going to sit here in the alleyway and tell me my mother’s life story?” Clara said incredulously. “All right. Yes. Let me find a comfortable seat. . . .”
Godfather was watching her as if the wrong word would make her combust. Perhaps he wasn’t too far off; Clara felt a bit like a spinning top teetering at the table’s edge.
“It’s true, love,” he said. “Leska was a mage once, a true Lady of the North. And a powerful one.”
Despite herself Clara burned with fascination at the idea of this Leska. A sour, powerful young girl. A Lady. Would her mother have looked the same here as she had in New York? Had she known she would someday leave Cane, meet a Beyond man, and have little Beyond children?
“What I don’t understand,” she said, forcing evenness into her voice, “is why you kept this information from me for so long. Along with you being a mage, along with the cause of her death. How could you do it?”
“First and foremost, always, to keep you safe,” he said firmly. “Second, it was your mother’s wish. Clara, she left here for a reason. She wanted a new life, and she certainly didn’t want her girls becoming caught up in a past rife with violence and treachery.”
“Spare me your poetry. To keep me safe, to please my mother—I’ll buy that, to a point.” She turned on him, fighting tears of astonishment. “But what about when Mother died, and Father buried himself in drink and Concordia, and Felicity came to me with nightmares, and I came to you? Even then you wouldn’t give me an explanation, allow me some peace?”
“Oh, it would have given you peace, eh?” Now Godfather laughed. “To know that your mother was a witch and had been killed by monsters? Yes, surely that would have quelled the nightmares.”
Clara turned away. She did not want him to see her face crumpling, or see her steal glances at her arms, where gooseflesh prickled like needles piercing her skin. Maybe this conversation was deluding her senses, but her skin seemed grayer than it had a moment before. She wanted to laugh, but she was now too exhausted for it—and, if she were honest, too frightened. What did it mean, to be a mage? And was she actually contemplating this as truth?
As she stared at her increasingly alien hands, a thought came to her with the weary weight of one revelation too many, the puzzle pieces of the past few days clicking into place.
“Anise had the mages here killed,” she said dully. “Or did it herself, I suppose.”
Godfather was so quiet, so unearthly still. “I had wondered as much.”
“She killed Mother, too. Didn’t she? Anise.”
“Not with her own hands, perhaps. But the loks obey her every command, as does Borschalk.” He seemed disgusted. “No, it was him, with his pack of beasts. Him, at her command.”
I could kill her for it. She thought of Nicholas, whispering of hate in the dark. She felt a sudden, passionate empathy for him. I could kill them all for it. The thought exploded through her, and the answering electric shock across her skin made her jump. She leaned hard against the wall, heaving.
Godfather held her up, murmured reassurances that came to her through a fog.
“You’ll massacre Karra’s handiwork,” she mumbled dizzily.
“What?”
In answer she laughed, gasping through the pain in her belly. She had heard of terrible sicknesses killing a person from the inside out, shutting down their organs, making them bleed out their orifices. Would this happen to her? She would bleed ice instead of blood.
“It has started, hasn’t it?” Godfather whispered. “You’ve felt the charge of it, like electricity. You’ve noticed the cold, the wind.”
She shook her head wearily against the wall. “I don’t know. . . .”
“You won’t be able to hide yourself forever here. Imagine—imagine if you suddenly saw a demon prancing down the streets of New York. Something feared, something unclean.”
“An abomination,” she choked out.
“Not that I think you are one—far from it, dear Clara—but others will. You’ll be torn apart. You’ll be used. Come back to New York with me. I can keep you safe, help you through it. And perhaps if you leave Cane, it will halt the change. You needn’t endure it. It could be painful.”
“No. No. I must find Father. . . .” Oh, it was surging through her, like someone had injected her with ice. “I have to help Nicholas.”
Godfather was beside himself. “Oh, yes? Help him do what, exactly? Rally the rebels? Reclaim his throne? Does he promise to help find your father? Clara and Nicholas, fighting for family and justice, side by side? Don’t be a fool, Clara. He is a politician. You should know what that means more than most. He will say anything to win your loyalty, and he is biding his time because he knows, Clara. He is waiting for your blood to change, for your abilities to manifest. And then he will use you.” He shook her gently. “He will bind you, and he will use you to fight.”
She could not hide a flicker of recognition at the word.
“He’s spoken of binding, has he?” He looked a bit sorry for her, and that was worst of all. “Lovely, diplomatic process. We help the humans, and the humans help us. But binding is a one-way street. The humans own us. We have no power over them. Nicholas used to be able to tell me what to do, and I’d have no choice but to do it. My blood would compel me.”
He would cut things open, Nicholas had said. And Drosselmeyer was bound to do it, as were the rest of the Seven. Could Godfather’s awful theory be true? No. Nicholas wouldn’t do that. Hadn’t he been kind to her? Hadn’t he held her as she’d recovered from her nightmare?
Her nightmare. Clara’s heart dropped, colder than her freezing skin. She had told him. She had told him of her blood turning to ice, and he had sat with her, patiently watching her face. For clues? For a sign that she did indeed have mage blood, as he so desperately hoped? And she was to go underground with him the next day. Trapped, like a patient being observed for signs of worsening disease.
Her head spun. She needed to get out of this cold. The skies were darkening, the trains howling.
“Come back with me.” Godfather took her hands in his. “I’ll keep you safe. We’ll wander the world. We’ll take Felicity with us. I promise you.”
She stared at him, uncertain. She could go with him, and he would keep her safe; he always had. But something kept her rooted—a desire to confront Nicholas herself? An unwillingness to abandon her father?
Maybe—and this was a startling thought—to see where the ice in her blood would take her.
A sudden sharp light shone down upon them from above. A fat-bellied flying apparatus, like a mechanical balloon, hovered there, whirring.
“You!” Another light, from the end of the alleyway, and three slender figures.
Faeries.
Godfather cursed. “They’ve found me.”
“They’ve been following you?”
“I did not have the happy distraction of a train crash to get me through the wall. Only my own two hands and patchy magic.” He waved at the approaching faeries. “Hello there!”
Clara grabbed his arm. “Are you mad?”
“Do you know, I think I might be. But I also love you, Clara.” He kissed her forehead, and his eye shone. “Think of that, and think of what I told you.”
“Godfather?” He was frightening her. “What are you doing?”
“And remember, light on your feet, stay two steps ahead of them.”
“Godfather, please don’t—”
“Run.”
He shoved her with one hand, and with the other he pulled a tiny clicking mechanism from his pocket. Clara recognized it as one of the failed experiments cluttering the shelves in his shop. Failed experiments with faery magic, that, as a mage, was not his to use.
He tossed the device at the faeries, and it exploded, spewing foul-smelling gas that set them coughing, and Clara, too. But it was enough of a diversion for her to slip past their grasping limbs—light on your feet, stay two steps ahead. Left, and another left, past the card tables where the sugared watched her progress with bleary disinterest. She heard the crack of faery spears behind her. Another explosion burst at her back, and cold was nipping at her heels—but the spear cracks overwhelmed everything else. She imagined them: nets of blue encircling Godfather, burning him.
She exited onto the main thoroughfare, remembering at the last moment that it would be best to appear unruffled. Stumbling to a stop, she dragged a shaking hand through her hair, made sure to display the band on her wrist. Bystanders stared at her, including a stern-looking pair of faery soldiers.
“Bad night,” she said, shrugging, and even when the faery soldiers hurried past her into the alleyway, spears at the ready, even when an explosion from behind her shook everything on the street, Clara continued on, past the muttering crowd and in the direction of Pascha House.
It was there, once through the grate and in the lonely passageway to the doxy quarters, that she allowed herself to relive the sound of Godfather’s screams echoing down the alleyway as she’d fled. The world fell away beneath her feet, and she sobbed there, alone in the dirt.
* * *
Nicholas found her. Hours later, maybe? Impossible to tell.
“Clara.” He cursed softly, helping her up. “What happened to you? Where did you go?” Quietly: “We’ve been frantic, Clara.”
She shrank from his touch as if she were back on the terrace, with Nicholas pressed against her and Pascha watching.
Nicholas released her at once. “It’s all right. I’m not touching you. I won’t touch you.” He peered closely at her. “Would you like to go to your bed?”
Bless him for not asking questions. There were many things Clara did not know in this moment—whom to trust, for example, and whom to believe, and what was happening to her still-churning insides—but she did know that she would not tell Nicholas about Godfather. Not that she had seen him, not what he had told her of binding. Not that he was most likely dead now.
“I would,” she said quietly, and Nicholas was true to his word. He did not touch her on the way to their room. He waved away Afa, Bo, and Karras, and when poor Glyn, looking beside herself with remorse, tried to apologize, Nicholas’s glare was enough to silence her.
Clara was grateful. She did not want to be grateful to him, to feel anything toward him but pragmatic distrust—at least not until she determined how much of what Godfather had said was true. Still, when Nicholas turned to leave their room, she sat up in surprise.
“Where are you going?”
“To the common room,” he said. “I thought you might like—”
“I wouldn’t.” She flushed, furious and confused, drowsy with grief. I can keep a closer watch on him if he’s in here. That was reasonable enough. “Please stay.”
His face was so tender in that moment, and when they both lay in their beds, he stretched out his hand into the space between them. An offer of comfort? An apology.
She took it gladly. Pragmatic distrust could wait, at least until morning.
25
They spent the next day preparing to leave, and most of it was spent in silence. Nicholas seemed to sense that Clara wanted it that way. A combination of nightmares—some about her bones being picked clean by a cold wind, and some about Godfather covered in ash—had kept her awake most of the night. It felt good to occupy her thoughts with mindless, menial tasks: packing food, cleaning her daggers, letting Karras—mournful that he would no longer get to dress her—fit her for traveling clothes.
Clara worked, letting the sounds of Afa and Bo’s arguing about whether or not Bo would accompany them wash over her. Bo insisted that Clara and Nicholas needed a proper guide, and few knew the underground better than she did. Bo knew a couple of the people they would be traveling with, but she still wouldn’t trust them, not with this. Afa, unmoved, declared it out of the question.
The two sisters left Clara and Nicholas alone together only once. Nicholas was sharpening his sword—Godfather’s sword, Clara reminded herself, with a pang of silent despair. After a few minutes of this, he put down the sword and whetting stone, and turned to her.
“I have to say it. I know you probably don’t want to talk about it, but if I don’t say something, I’ll tear myself to pieces.”
Despite herself Clara was touched by the earnestness of his expression. “All right,” she said carefully.
“Clara, I’m sorry.” He seemed ready to reach for her hands, but he stopped himself and knelt before her, tense and distraught. “You must know—please know—that I didn’t want to kiss you like that. I would never force you to kiss me or touch me, or do anything you didn’t want to. It was torment, pushing myself on you like that. I hated every second of it.”
He would not make her do anything she didn’t want to do. How fitting that he should proclaim such a thing after Godfather’s warning. But could she believe him?
“Every second?” Conflicted he may have been, but the care with which he had touched her, the intensity of his kisses, had hinted at genuine feeling. Knowing this left her both mildly affronted, that he could take pleasure from such a moment, and bizarrely gratified. The incongruity unsettled her. “Surely I’m not so repulsive.”
“I’m serious, Clara.”
“I know you are. And thank you.”
“I hope we can still be friends. I want . . . I’d like most sincerely for us to be friends, always.”
He was so somber, so awkwardly formal. It was a struggle for Clara to remain neutral. But of course she had to. Until she knew for certain that Godfather was wrong in his accusations, she would assume that he was right.
“Of course we’re still friends.” She touched Nicholas’s arm. “Don’t worry. I just . . . I had a hard time of it. I was frightened.”
