Winterspell, page 40
Above her another cry sounded.
Clara turned and saw her father falling. The net holding him had vanished.
“No,” she said calmly, and though fear gripped her heart, though the human in her urged her to run, the Lady in her whispered, “Softly,” so she cupped her hands and let magic loose from her fingertips. It skipped across the winds and gathered below her father in a gentle curve of shimmering air. He fell into it, was cradled by it, and was eased down onto the walkway.
Only then did she run to him, and it felt so strange to see him like this—to touch his ravaged face and feel the familiar stubble under her hands—that tears filled her eyes. Exhaustion overtook her, and though he was the one unconscious and barely breathing, she longed to wake him up, ask him to hold her and tell her everything would be all right.
As if he had heard her, his eyes fluttered open.
“Father,” she whispered, stroking his cheek. “You’re safe now. I’m here.”
“Clara?”
She nodded, unable to speak. His brow creased.
“You’ve . . . changed.” His eyes fluttered once more and fell closed, but he was still breathing—whole and breathing and the most handsome thing Clara had ever seen. She bent and kissed his cheek, so glad, she burst out laughing.
Behind her something gurgled.
She knew at once what it was, what she would see when she turned. She gathered herself into a hard knot of resolve, of unfeeling, and turned.
Anise was pinned there, below the parapets at the opposite end of the walkway, caught on the serpent gargoyle’s long coiling tail. It had impaled her, soaking her in blue.
Clara approached her with a strange sense of calm. She knelt between the parapets and forced herself to look.
“You . . .” Anise’s voice was full of blood. Her eyes were vague and fading, and her body kept twitching, death pulling on the strings of her limbs. “You are . . .”
“What?” Clara took her hand. She had nothing to fear from Anise now; despite her resolve to remain unmoved, pity flooded through her, and a whole lifetime of what if. “What am I?”
“A Lady.” Anise coughed. Her fingers tightened around Clara’s, and at this last, her face was soft. “A Lady of the North.”
Then she was still. Her limp body sank farther down on the sharp stone with an awful sound that made Clara turn away—but everywhere she looked was a chromocast, the image of herself and Anise’s body shining down from the skies.
“You’ve done it!” A cry erupted in her ear. With a high-pitched whine her headset flickered back to life.
Clara winced, pulled it away from her ear. “Bo?”
“Clara, everyone saw. Everyone.” Bo’s voice was ecstatic, peppered with whoops she couldn’t contain.
“What do you mean, everyone?”
“The chromos, they showed the whole damn thing! Through the entire city, probably through the entire kingdom, knowing Anise. She would’ve wanted everyone to see you die, don’t you think?”
Clara blinked, coming back to the world, and looked around. She heard the triumphant cries of the surviving mages from the smoking ruins of the city far below, echoed by Bo in her ear. She wondered if the whole country truly had seen her duel with Anise, if similar celebrations were taking place in the choked streets of Zarko and the opulent ones of Kafflock. What were the faeries thinking, left leaderless at their posts and in the heaps of faded party trimmings at the Summer Palace? Some would be afraid; many would be angry. Perhaps a few, the ones with any sense, would be relieved.
The wind was gentle, the ground had stilled, and the castle towers no longer shifted and writhed. The air was quiet, where moments before it had been laced with Anise’s chaos. Above, the clouds were fading as abruptly as the net imprisoning John Stole had disappeared. In place of clouds now shone countless stars, their configurations foreign to Clara, and a fat, luminous moon that bathed the city in a cooling glow.
“The storm,” came Bo’s voice, thick with wonder. “The storm is leaving.”
Clara turned back to Anise’s lifeless body. Even now her slender limbs held the poise of a dancer’s. “No. The storm is already gone.”
Then a voice spoke quietly in her ear, cutting through Bo’s. “Clara? Are you there?”
Her hand flew to her headset. “Nicholas? I’m here. I’m—” She could hardly speak for her relief. “Where are you?”
“Outside Wahlkraft, near the front doors. We were forced outside. We had to keep fighting. . . .”
Bo had fallen silent. Clara glanced at her father; he was breathing and safe. She hurried to the tower.
“What’s wrong?” Clara asked.
“Come quickly,” Nicholas whispered, and Clara knew, as she flew down the stairs, what she would find.
* * *
A small crowd had gathered at Wahlkraft’s immense black doors, composed of mages—bloodied, battered, and significantly fewer than had entered the capital—and faeries, held at spearpoint by a grim-faced Prince’s Army. The faeries left standing were terribly mutilated, for the parts of them that Anise had made were gone, leaving open wounds behind; some would obviously not survive for much longer. They looked lost, frightened, grotesque, and Clara pitied them. On the periphery, lurking in the shadows, humans watched suspiciously.
Nicholas turned as Clara ran out of the castle and down the steps. They were pockmarked with the holes of the magic that had been there, and now was suddenly not.
A figure lay behind where Nicholas stood, and Clara’s breath caught in a snare of heartbreak.
“He saved me.” Nicholas’s voice was strange, his eyes bright. His clothes were tattered and bloody, and he leaned hard on a shattered pillar, but Clara could see that most of Anise’s curse had left him. A few stubborn pieces remained, tiny and glinting. It did not surprise Clara—such terrific hate, she supposed, left permanent scars.
“Clara, I’m so sorry,” Nicholas said, catching her hand. “He was wild. He fought like . . . I didn’t ask him to, but he saved me.”
“I asked him to,” Clara said, and she moved gently past him to kneel on the hard ground. Blood stained her clothes silver, but she did not care. “Hello, Godfather.”
His eye was calm and open, the other a lump of knotted skin where Anise’s curse had hit him. The metal was gone.
Even now his face lit up to see her. He fumbled for her hand.
“My Clara.” His breath was tight and irregular. “Is it done? Am I done now?”
The words seized Clara’s throat with tears. She thought of the days when she had not visited, and wished suddenly, fiercely, that she had gone every day, always. So many years in service, alone in that cavernous shop, and for what?
“For you,” he whispered, a sigh on the air. He had always been able to read her. “For you, Clara.”
She couldn’t breathe in anything but choked gulps. He was slipping, he was leaving her. She pressed all her love for him into his hand, willed him to feel the immensity of it. “Yes. You’re done now, Godfather. You’ve finished.”
He smiled, sagging back onto the ground. His free hand waved her close.
“Here,” he said, and she leaned down and kissed his cheek. Her hair fell against his face, shielding them so when he whispered his last words to her, his final instructions, she alone could hear. When she rose to her feet, she wasn’t sure whether to smile or cry, so she did both, holding tight to the Godfather-shaped place in her heart.
Nicholas watched her curiously. “What is it? What did he say?”
“He told me I should leave him be and get on with it.” It was a lie, but a harmless one.
“Get on with what?”
“Pledging fealty to the new king.”
Clara knelt before him but kept her eyes on his. Something bittersweet twinged deep in her heart as she saw the troubled look on his face. She longed to go to him, make sure he was truly well. She wanted to let herself cry about Godfather, about Anise, and kiss Nicholas for the first time with both of them wholly themselves. No curses, no confusion. She wanted, most of all, to collapse and rest and hear the story he had promised he would tell—the story of him and her mother, and everything that had happened here before.
But instead she knelt, and the others began kneeling behind her. She heard the soft shuffles of the mages first, and then, brokenly, the faeries. A bloody-eared human girl in broken chains smiled shyly and gave a clumsy curtsy.
Nicholas straightened. Something fell away from him, leaving a newness in its place, raw and heavy and ready. He stepped past Clara to address the crowd; his fingers brushed her shoulder, and warmth rippled tiredly through her.
“Friends,” he began, “and enemies. Both are one and the same now. Or they must be, if we are to save the land that belongs to us all. We are three peoples, but we have one home, and it needs our help to save it.”
It was a beginning.
47
It will take many years to rebuild,” Nicholas said. “The kingdom is in chaos.”
Clara nodded, arms crossed over her chest. It was the only thing holding her up. They stood on the walkway where she had fought Anise. The storm had long since dissipated; the evening sky was clear and cold. It had been almost two days since she’d led the attack on Erstadt, two days of tending to wounds and mourning the dead, of establishing a makeshift hospital and clearing what rubble they could from the streets. They had worked without cease, and Clara’s body was stiff with strain, but this was only the beginning. There was so much more to do—a ludicrous amount, in fact—and the enormity of the task Nicholas had before him made Clara tired even to think about.
He stood beside her, cloaked, the sleeves of his tunic rolled up to his elbows. He looked industrious and worn-out, beautiful in his solemnity. She longed to draw her to him, to tuck them both away into a quiet spot to rest, but she held herself back and gazed at the horizon, ordering her thoughts.
“Anise’s magic linked everything,” Clara said. “The chromocasts, the trains. And now that it’s gone . . .”
“Communicating with the districts is the most important thing.” Nicholas began pacing, his brow furrowed with the sort of clear concentration Clara had never seen him wear. The look suited him, though it left her feeling newly shy in his presence. So much of what she had known about him was now gone; so little of her childhood statue remained. “They need to know there’s nothing to fear. Although, with no way of sending them news . . .”
“Fighting has undoubtedly broken out,” Clara added. “Any economic structure will have collapsed. Not to mention the physical structure of things—the trains, the buildings . . .”
“The walls keeping Mira’s Ring closed off from the rest of the country. The walls separating districts from one another.” Nicholas sighed. “The sugar addicts, may Zoya be kind to them.”
“People will be uncertain, confused. Anise’s soldiers will try to keep order—”
“And they will have trouble doing so, with the fear on the streets. They will be afraid themselves.”
Nicholas paused at the parapet above where Anise had died. Her body had been removed from the gargoyle just below, but blue remained on the stone, a dark stain. He stared at it thoughtfully. “The magic surrounding Rieden will have to be removed. Easy travel and communication to and from the capital is essential to reestablishing order.”
“The mages won’t like that,” Clara pointed out. “Many of them may view this lull as tenuous at best. They may think that another faery will rise up in Anise’s place, rally her people to war once again.”
“And those mages we freed from the sugar cellar downstairs . . .”
“They may harbor bitterness toward the faeries more than anyone, considering Anise’s treatment of them, and try to stir up discontent among the mages. They may not want peace, and they will not be alone.”
Nicholas chuckled ruefully. “Well. Doesn’t that sound like tremendous fun?”
Clara looked out over the ruined city.
Smoke still rose from fires that had started in the battle. The air smelled of ash and singed metal and blood, and probably would for some time. But up here, where the sky was clear, Clara could see for a long distance. The towers of the capital were misshapen and deformed but still somehow grand. There was potential there for spectacular reconstruction. Past the city walls loomed Rieden, tangled and dark, and beyond that, the thinnest hint of moonlit tundra—Rosche, and everything that lay beyond. And somewhere, she knew, remembering Bo’s map, were wildlands that Anise had not yet touched, where untold scores of mages, humans, or faeries might have scratched out secret lives for themselves in the aftermath of the war.
“Not fun, no,” she admitted. “But possible? Absolutely.”
Nicholas said nothing as he watched her. Icy breezes drifted past them, and Clara breathed them in deeply, hoping they would wash away her heartache. It didn’t work.
“Walk with me?” Nicholas said softly, holding out his arm. She took it, shivering even in the bulk of Godfather’s greatcoat. She had not let them burn it with his body; it held his scent, his laughter and strangeness.
Together they walked down the tower stairs.
“Your father seems to be recovering nicely.” Nicholas’s voice was light and pleasant, a politician’s conversational tone, and it almost fooled her.
“Yes, except for the occasional outbursts when he wakes up and demands to know where he is, and to talk to Chief Greeley, and to summon George for some brandy this instant.”
“Who is George?”
“Our butler.”
Nicholas chuckled. “Fortunate that we found enough medicine in the laboratories to keep him sedated.”
The laboratories where you cut open faeries. The words hung in the air, unsaid, but Nicholas’s drawn face said it louder than words could have done. The wounds he had suffered went beyond the physical, and Clara wondered if they would ever heal—or if they even should.
“How will you explain everything to him, before he returns home?”
Before he returns home. Clara’s heart twisted. Oh, Nicholas. “I don’t think he saw enough of anything, or understood enough of what he saw, for it to be a problem. He’ll no doubt wake up with a nasty hangover and wonder why he’s cut up. I’ll tell him he was drunk and fell through a window and be done with it.”
Nicholas guided her into the throne room, where the floor gaped like a great mouth. They turned into a side corridor hung with ruined tapestries and portraits with blacked-out faces.
“You’ll have to smash a window to make that story convincing,” Nicholas said.
“There are plenty, back at the mansion.” She thought of her family’s home in shambles, of Patricia Plum and Dr. Victor and Godfather’s empty shop, and of all the other broken things waiting for her that would have filled her with dread not long ago. Now she felt only an adamant determination.
They paused near the end of a long corridor at a shattered set of doors. Beyond them was a suite of once grand rooms, now black with filth. A canopied bed. A wardrobe strewn with spiderwebs.
“My parents’ suite,” Nicholas said drily. “Anise certainly didn’t do much with it.”
Clara walked into the room and fingered the bed’s ruined hangings. “She hated it here. She preferred the Summer Palace.”
Nicholas had followed her. His presence was warm and solid behind her, and Clara closed her eyes to memorize the feel of it. “Why do you think that is?” he asked.
“I think she was fully aware of what she had done. To Cane, to its people, and to the land itself. I think she was afraid, and being here—at the seat of her power—reminded her of it.”
“You understood her.”
Clara opened her eyes and turned back to him. His nearness was intoxicating. In the wake of everything, in this room full of memory, it both thrilled and steadied her. “I know what it feels like,” she said carefully, “to want control, to want revenge and power, at any cost. To have your world shape you into something you’d rather not be and not know how to fix it.”
“You were very alike, the two of you.”
“In some ways, yes. Not so in others.” She paused and ran her fingers along the ruined bedcovers. She had tucked Anise away into a secret part of herself, to be taken out and examined in safe moments; she even wanted to tell Nicholas about it, but now was not the time.
After a moment of watching her, Nicholas turned away. “You’re leaving, aren’t you?”
Hearing it out loud was so final, so frightening, that she considered denying it. “Yes. I am. The day after tomorrow, Father and I will leave for home.”
“For New York. To right the wrongs there.”
His voice was so quiet. But Clara was resolute. “To make things right.”
“I suppose I could keep you here. I could order you to stay, and your blood would compel you to obey me.”
She turned, indignant, power swirling automatically at her fingertips. “You won’t do that. You said you wouldn’t.”
“No.” He turned back to her, his face resigned. “I won’t. You aren’t mine to control. And besides, it wouldn’t be very princely of me, would it?”
“Indeed, it would be utterly villainous.”
His sad smile turned rakish. “Wicked, even.”
Clara approached him slowly. “I never will be, you know. Yours to control.” It felt strange to say it, to know it. The ghost of that night, of listening to him betray her, lingered in her heart—it would take some time to fade completely. But his face was tender as he reached for her, and the answering pull in her heart outweighed her fear.
“And thank all the gods, everywhere, in all the worlds, for that.” He drew her close. “I like my women with backbone.”
She punched his arm. “Your women?”
“Well, woman. Singular.”
“I’m not your woman.” Though it was a startlingly enticing thought. His woman. Certainly that wasn’t a thought any self-respecting Lady would have.
“No. You’re no one’s woman.” He kissed her fingers, and then her palms. “But you would be a magnificent queen.”
