The Great Unravel, page 11
part #3 of Riddle in Ruby Series
He took her hands. “When we talked in the woods, you were right. I did not tell you the entire story. On the Thrift, after you escaped, I threw myself over the side. Rool was going to wear me down and either take me or kill me. As soon as the water closed over my head, I knew I was too weak to swim. I sank like a stone. So I changed. I gave myself gills.”
The frustration evaporated like mist with the dawn. “Like a fish?”
“That’s right. I landed on the bottom, and breathing with my new gills, I crawled, inch by inch, back to Philadelphi. But this is the danger. The shape you hold changes your mind as well. The beasts of the land are very different from us, and the ones from the water stranger still. When I changed into this half Gwath, half fish, I lost myself. I was gone. In my place”—he hesitated—“I don’t know if I could call them memories or even thinking, at least as you and I know it. Through some instinct, for home maybe, or to keep after you, I ended up on the shore, flopping on the sand. I choked out the water and drew air into my re-forming lungs, but it took me much longer to come back”—he touched his temple—“up here. I was gone for a long while, staring at the sea, staring at the sand, the me just draining out. The Da Rochas found me on the beach and took me in. I don’t know what would have happened if they hadn’t.”
He stared at her.
Ruby held on to his hands for dear life. How could she even want something like this? To change into some sea slug and die on the bottom of the ocean? But her crew needed her. “Go on.”
“With people, the process is more delicate, like using a razor instead of a club. But it is the same at its base. If I were teaching you changing at my own pace, we would spend months strengthening you in here”—he tapped her chest—“and in here”—he tapped her head—“before we would ever try a full transformation. To take on someone’s skin, you need to know them—how they think, how they feel, how they live.”
“But how do you know what they think?”
He blinked, pretending exasperation. “Only by using all the skills I’ve taught you all your waking life. You observe. You consider. You guess. You open yourself to the possibility of who they might be. How they are different from you. How they are the same as you.”
“But that’s so you can trick them.”
Gwath pursed his lips. “But before you can trick them—”
Something shifted in Ruby’s brain. “You have to know them. But if you know them too well—”
“If you believe too well that you are them—”
It fit. “That is where you lose yourself.”
Gwath smiled.
He knows what he is about.
The voice wasn’t Gwath’s. And Gwath’s expression hadn’t changed. The voice had come from somewhere else.
Up here.
Evie perched on an abandoned shelf, chin on brass paws, staring at her.
Ohhhhh, no, thought Ruby. That can’t be you. You can’t sneak into my thoughts.
Evie cocked her head, then rolled over to scratch her back on the wood. If you say so. Whether I’m talking to you or not, he knows what he’s about. You should listen to him. He’s trying to take you somewhere, to get you to see something.
“Ruby.”
Ruby blinked, then sighed. Whether Evie’s voice was real or not, she was right. What choice did Ruby have? It was simple. And insufferably hard. “What do you want me to do?”
Gwath glanced up at the otter, who seemed blissfully unaware of him, and then back at Ruby. “The old way to teach changing is harder, and stranger, but quicker. My grandmother taught me like this.” He moved the table away. He knocked three times on the door.
The door opened.
In walked her mother.
“No.”
“Ruby—” said Gwath.
“No. Get her out of here.”
Gwath and Marise exchanged a glance. Gwath put a hand on her arm. “Ruby—”
She shook his hand off. If she could have thrown him through the wall, she would have. They were standing there together as if it were the most natural thing in the world. “We are not a happy family after one moment in a courtyard. Marise, you solved whatever equation you had to with—with my fathers, but you and I? We are not done. We are not solved.” She gripped her fingers behind her back to keep her hands from shaking. She looked at her mother. “You need to go.”
“I—”
“She stays,” said Gwath. And he bulled on before Ruby could interrupt. “She has to. We need her for your training.”
For my training? How could Marise be necessary for her changing training? Unless— “No.”
You’re being a child.
She glanced up at Evie. What do you know about—
I know what you know. If Gwath says this is the only option, then this is the only option, and you are wasting valuable time by acting like a spoiled little girl. Do you want to help your friends? Do you want to save people from the Swede’s machine?
They were still staring at her.
Fury battled with need. Need won. “Fine,” said Ruby. “Teach me.”
Gwath sat mother and daughter down knee to knee in the hard-backed library chairs. Her mother stared at her, then looked away. Her blond hair half covered the fading yellow and purple bruise around her eye.
Ruby snorted. “You have to look at me, Marise.”
Gwath sank to the balls of his feet between them. He glanced at Ruby. “You have a deep understanding of this process, do you?”
“. . . no.”
“Then you should keep quiet, too, and focus on the task at hand.”
“Which is?”
Gwath turned his gaze to Marise. “Look at her.”
“I am.”
“No. I mean, truly look at her.” Gwath slipped out of Ruby’s peripheral vision until all she could see was Marise. “See her. Know her. The real Marise, not the person you’ve imagined. Not the story. More than simply your mother. Who is she? What does she want?”
Ruby’s mother blinked, then glanced at Gwath. “What?”
“Quiet, please, Marise. Ruby, what does she want?”
“I have no idea. I’m not in her head. Besides, she—”
Gwath took her hand. “Unloose your anger. Let slip your fear,” he said. “They are not useful now.”
He sounded like Edwina Corson. But that, too, felt familiar. Ruby rolled her eyes and tried to make her way to the kind of clear seeing that the reeve lieutenant had. So she looked at her mother. Forehead lined with worry. Hands stained by years of tinkercraft. Tiny tracks about the eyes. Underneath that, though, it was a familiar face. Ruby’s own. This was the curious part and the part that made her so angry. She kept anything tied to her mother behind a door in her heart, locked and barred with the stoutest steel.
So Ruby did what she had to. She unlocked it.
Marise Fermat had left Ruby when she was not even a year old and fled into the west, with never a note, never a contact, leaving behind only the strange schematic she had implanted in her daughter’s blood. Ruby would never have done that. So how could they have the same face?
“Why did you do it?” she asked.
Marise’s head jerked back as if she had been struck. She looked at Gwath. He shrugged. She closed her eyes and let out a low breath. “I—I had to protect the discovery.”
“And not me.” Ruby’s shoulders tightened.
Marise opened her eyes. There were no tears. The blue was stone, her jaw clenched. The words twisted out. “It was all I could think of. If they found me, they would take me. The same thing almost happened to Fermat. The crown took Isaac Newton, you know. One day just gone. Ruby, they would have had me doing chemystry for them in a hole so deep that I would never have seen the sun again.”
“So you left.” Ruby tried to keep herself open. Tried to keep herself calm.
“So I left.”
Something glassy and hard reared up in Ruby’s belly. “Except before you went, you decided to make by Providence certain your daughter would be hunted, too.”
Icy resignation stilled Marise’s voice. “Ruby. It was important. If something happened to me, the formula needed to be preserved.”
Hearing it so naked hit Ruby like a falling mast. “So you turned your girl into a thing. An artifice. A recipe. A discovery. Were you more comfortable with me then? When I was—what?—Science? Did you love me more?”
Horror flashed across Marise’s face. “Ruby—”
It was the horror that did it. For a moment, for the slightest moment, Ruby saw. Her mother wasn’t evil. She didn’t hate Ruby. Maybe she even loved Ruby in her own way. She had done a thing that she regretted, but she feared that if given the choice, she would do it again.
She did what she thought had to be done.
And Ruby had felt that.
The bottom opened up. Everything in Ruby that was Ruby rushed out through her toes, and the only thing remaining was Marise’s fear, Marise’s doubt, Marise’s choice.
Her mother was staring at her, hand over her mouth.
Ruby looked down at her hands, now stained and scarred with chemystry. She pulled a lock of hair down from her neck. It lay there, corn yellow against the rough, pale skin of the hand worn by a lifetime of experiment.
She glanced over to Gwath, whose eyes were shining.
“I did it,” she said. Her words were clipped, they came faster than usual, with a trace of ice. A kind of sureness washed through Ruby’s veins. She could change.
She. She was Marise. The world spun. She had been talking to her daughter just a moment ago, but where was Ruby? The woman in the other chair was a perfect painting of herself.
Of Marise.
Gwath—her love? her sweetheart?—took her by her shoulders and put his face right in front of hers. “Ruby. You are Ruby Teach.”
“But I’m not, Gwath. I’m Mar— Ow!” She looked down to see a brass otter, sapphire eyes whirling, teeth sunk into the meaty part of her hand. Ruby’s otter. Ruby’s hand.
“Ruby.” She was Ruby, not Marise. The otter let go. Her belly groaned. Her hands started shaking. The true Marise blurred in her vision, and she felt dizzy and tight all at the same time.
She blacked out.
When she came to, Ruby was on the floor, cradled in Gwath’s arms, her mother beside them.
Gwath smiled. “You can do it. But you see how it is, yes? It will not be easy.” He scratched between Evie’s ears, and she chirruped. “Your friends must keep watch over you. Tell them to keep an eye out for closets. Boltholes. Places you all can retreat to if they need to remind you or, worse, wake you.”
Invisible spikes poked through her eyes. “Can they help with this headache?”
Gwath smiled ruefully. “That is your own. Welcome to changing.”
Marise leaned forward, concern written on her face. “Ruby— I . . . cannot take back what I have done.”
“No. You cannot. But you could get me a cup of water.”
“I would ask that you consider what I have to say now, as—as one who has also been the target of forces beyond her control. Like you.” She waited.
Like her. Echoes of Marise’s guilt and helplessness and resolve still sat in Ruby like puddles after a storm. How could she not listen? She nodded.
Marise blinked, perhaps surprised. “All right. You have done much. You have seen much.” She reached out her hand. “This changing. The way your friends speak of you. I know you are a formidable girl. A formidable young woman. I would ask that you consider walking away. We could take you.”
“We?”
“Gwath and I.” Her eyes flicked over Ruby’s head to Gwath. “Wayland. Even Athena, and Henry and Cram. It is safe in the west. I have friends there. I could make you safe. You could be safe.”
It pained Ruby to look at her. She could not think of Marise as a monster anymore. She knew her. And right now Marise’s fire was banked; all that showed through was sorrow and regret.
Ruby did not shout. She tried to tell her the truth, as clearly as she knew how. “Marise, Swedenborg pulled those schematics from my blood.” She shook her head. “I have to try to help.”
“People will die.” Marise’s desperate certainty chilled Ruby to the marrow. “A rising? A revolution? People will die, Ruby. And I could not live with myself if one of those people was you.”
Ruby steadied a hand on the floor and pushed herself up. “Well, I had best not die then.” She tried for a smile, but it withered somewhere on its way to her mouth. “We need to go. They’ll be waiting.”
Marise looked as if she were going to say something more. But she ground her teeth and nodded.
Ruby reached out and touched the woman on the forearm. “Mother.”
Marise took Ruby’s hand for a moment. Then Ruby let go, and her mother did, too.
CHAPTER 14
CATHERINE: (Holding handkerchief to nose) Cornelius Thunderfatch?
THUNDERFATCH: The same. Please take this fish.
CATHERINE: It is heavy. And, oh, my, still alive. (Gathers self) Mr. Thunderfatch, I have come to beg of you a most remarkable undertaking.
THUNDERFATCH: Woman, if you can keep a handle on two of those for one hour, I’ll climb the very slopes of Mount Olympus to do your bidding.
CATHERINE: Done. Please hold my gloves. Ew. Actually, feel free to keep them.
—Marion Coatesworth-Hay,
A Most Tenacious Flame, Act II, Sc. iv
A hair-raising escape from Fort Scoria? Cram turned up his nose at such a thing. Convincing Ruby to leave behind her otter to distract the Bluestone Square reeves in their escape from the Warren? Piece of cherry pie. Slipping the notice of the same reeves at the café through a daring rooftop escape? Child’s play.
But this?
Cram took a pin from his mouth, and his face screwed up with worry as he eased it eternally carefully into the waist of the gorgeous ball gown.
“Ow, Cram!” said Lady Athena.
Not careful enough. “Sorry, milady.”
Lady Athena took the pin. “Here, let me do it. This is humiliating.”
Cram’s mistress rejiggered the corset for the umpteenth time, and Cram sat back on his heels and tried to get his bearings. Their first stop after their do-si-doing the Reeve had been a fancy shop in the center of UpTown. Just after they had sneaked in the back door, Griddle Van Huffridge had unearthed for Lady Athena the most beautiful frilled and ruffled confection of a dress and insisted she put it on.
It was pale blue, and it fit her perfectly. Almost perfectly.
Henry and Ferret had found themselves seats in the viewing area of the shop and were pretending to try to be helpful, while Greta helped Cram with the fitting. Ferret had found a dish of cashews somewhere.
“Flounce more,” said Ruby.
Athena glared. “A Boyle never flounces.”
“Yes, I understand, but you just don’t strike me as womanly standing that way.” Ruby’s face projected pure innocence, but Cram could see that underneath she was anything but. “That time you visited me down in the Smelted Grouse—”
“Saved you, you mean.”
“Well, technically it was Henry who saved us.”
“Quite right.” Henry popped a cashew.
“At any rate.” Ferret kept on. “You were quite flouncy then. You cooed and made faces and did all the lady things then. Now you look like a—”
“Don’t say it,” said Henry.
“—a depressed partridge.”
Athena tugged at the corset again.
“I wish, milord, that you would stop doing that,” said Cram.
“Milady,” said Greta.
They all stopped what they were doing. Cram dropped a thimble; it clinked on the marble floor. He didn’t know what to do. He thought about starting to sing. Or to stick Lady Athena with another pin. He cleared his throat. “Sorry, miss.”
“You should call him milady,” said Greta, around a smile that fair threatened to eat her face. “Start practicing now. Otherwise, you might make a mistake when you arrive at the party.”
Lady Athena wore her counting-to-ten face.
Cram looked for a place to hide.
Finally Lady Athena said, “Good idea.” Everyone started breathing again. Then she said, with infinite patience, “Greta, please help me understand, once again, why this little idea is an integral part of your strategy.”
Greta spat one of the pins into her hand and went after Athena’s hem. “Simple and brilliant is my plan. Reginald Shackleton, one of the most insufferable young dandies in Philadelphi, has an invitation to my father’s party. His family’s business is well known about town, and they are looked on favorably by the crown. Reginald will have no trouble navigating the curfew and the guard stations that are between us and Van Huffridge House. Ruby will, she has assured us, disguise herself perfectly as Reginald.” She delivered this last with a dubious look. “But Reginald will require an escort.”
Lady Athena looked queasy. “I could escort him as me, gallant fellow that I am and ever so comfortable with high society—”
Greta tsked. “I thought of that. It will never work. The party will be full of people who have spent much time in London, and you, however, as son of a noble—well, marginally noble—house in England and a onetime fiancé of the daughter of the host of the party would probably be recognized. We cannot have that.”
“Then why can I not just go as a servant, like these two chubs?” Lady Athena waved her hand at Henry and Cram.
“Because, milady, you need to be on the floor with the guests. There are some parts of the house where servants will be out of place. Besides”—she sneered—“Reggie will need a companion not only for appearance but for expediency. If Ruby truly does look like the insufferable fop, he will draw far too much attention from the legion of mothers attempting to marry their daughters into his august household.”
“—and you know that I hate this, and you wish to humiliate me.”
Greta smiled. “This is only a scrumptiously delightful side effect of the plan.”
Lady Athena took a few steps, the panniers swaying from side to side. The hoops were almost rectangular, and they stuck out of her waist like the walls of city hall. “I can’t move in this,” Athena said. “If we get into trouble—”
