repast. ‘That even the scales?’
She stared at it evenly, as if to read gold through the leather. ‘More to it than ochres and argents. You certain you know what you’re asking?’
‘Enlighten me.’
She weighed over the request like I’d asked for possession of her eldest son. Then she shrugged with something bordering on annoyance and started speaking. ‘Take ten thousand babies, put them in a cage.’
‘I’m not going to do that.’
‘Watch them for ten years, maybe twelve. Watch them until the one half starts to bleed, and the other half starts to look at the first. One of those children, maybe one of those children, they’ll start doing things the rest of them can’t.’
‘What do you do with the rejects?’
Mazzie was good at ignoring me. ‘You take that child, you show her how to focus what she has. Teach her what you were taught, maybe give her books from people that learned something and wrote it down before they died. But it ain’t like being a cobbler, first come the leather, then you hammer in the nails.’ She shook her head. ‘There’s a reason they call it the Art – you got to have the feel, you understand?’
‘I’m following along.’
‘Everybody who does it, they’ve got a different way of doing it, depends on how their mind runs. Some folk like to build things, force a working onto a blade or a jewel or a clock. Some folk can listen to things that no one else hears but are always right about what they say. Some folk force the world into things that it isn’t, coils of fire streaming from their fingers, cool the air till it’s thick as ice. Some folk get caught looking up into the night when the moon’s still fresh, wonder what’s looking back at them.’
The conversation had turned a bit dark, in my estimation, though you wouldn’t have known it from Mazzie’s grin. ‘They the ones that end up being trouble. They stop looking at you when they speak, have trouble remembering the two of you is human, and the things they’ve been looking at ain’t. Back in Miradin we used to put the ones that forgot beneath a wall of stone, weigh it down till there wasn’t nothing left. Here they burn them.’ She shrugged. ‘Not their fault, really – they just doing what comes natural. Everybody’s got a knack.’
‘What’s your knack, Mazzie?’
She smiled but didn’t answer. ‘Point being, the road is crooked. Some of the paths end in a coffin. Some of the paths end in worse places. You’d best be sure of what you’re asking from me, before you go ahead and ask it.’
‘That was a nice speech,’ I said. ‘But you left something out of it.’
‘Yeah?’
‘That one child in the ten thousand, that girl who can do things the others can’t – if you don’t teach her to control what she has she’ll burn her brain into mush, be left staring at the walls. I’m well aware of the dangers posed by the Art. If I had my way I’d reach inside the boy and strip the spark right from his soul, leave him just the same as the rest of us. Barring that, the least I can do is make sure he doesn’t go mad before his fifteenth name day.’
‘Seems like maybe you know more about this than you let on.’
I could have told her that the man who’d all but raised me had been the greatest practitioner in the Empire, and the girl I’d grown up beside had become perhaps the most evil. ‘I’ve picked up a piece here and there.’
‘How old is your boy?’
‘Thirteen? Fourteen, maybe.’
‘Awfully old to just be starting.’
‘Then we ought not waste time.’
She never seemed to blink. I’m sure she did, sometimes, but try as I might I couldn’t catch her. ‘I’d need to give him a look first.’
‘I didn’t take this for a correspondence school.’
‘What’s his name?’
‘Wren.’
‘Tell Wren to come see me in four days’ time. Tell him to wear this on his arm,’ she said, pulling out a feathered charm from somewhere on her person and sliding it over. ‘And folk won’t bother him.’
‘You got so much pull around here, Mazzie?’
She stretched back her lips. You might have called it a smile, if you were being careless. ‘Enough.’
I put the charm into my satchel. ‘I’ll tell him.’
It was miserable in that fucking hut, our smoke and the fumes from her stove thickening the air. Still, I was seated, and so tired from the summer and the walk that I lingered despite the obvious conclusion of our conversation.
She looked at me cross-eyed over her cup of muddy tea. ‘Death hangs around you thick as flies on shit.’
By the Lost One, it never fails – you can’t spend five minutes with one of these two-copper soothsayers without getting an earful of dark augury and grim forewarning. ‘I thought you said you don’t give out samples. Sounds like you’ve been rolling the bones for me.’
‘Don’t need the bones to see what you are. Your victims swirl around you and scream in your ear, cursing at you day and night.’
‘Funny – with all that noise I sleep like a baby.’
She smiled like she’d won a bet. ‘No, you don’t.’
‘Maybe not, but I take a lot of uppers.’ I tapped the purse on the table. ‘You’ll get another one of these every month. You teach him the basics – how to focus his mind, a few simple charms, not to bake his brain by drawing in too much. And leave out all the nonsense you do for the look-sees. He comes home chanting gibberish or trying to sacrifice any of our chickens and his mother will have my hide.’
She didn’t say anything to that, not for a little while, just stared at me. Then she shoved the coin back over in my direction. ‘I haven’t promised you anything,’ she said. ‘You come back and see me after I’ve talked to the boy. I’ll give you my decision then.’
I pocketed the money pouch and stood. ‘I’m counting the hours.’
There were ways back to the Earl that didn’t require me to swing past the Queen’s Palace. I should have taken one. I wasn’t planning on a visit – as far as I was concerned I was done with the Montgomerys. I’d told her father that. I’d been telling myself the same.
I could see the crowd about a block away, a small knot of people, growing fast. A handful of hoax had a loose cordon bottling up the mouth of the alley. At some point they’d figure out whose child they had lying under a sheet, and once they did the ice would be down here double-time, but it hadn’t happened yet. The ranking officer was a fiend for the dice, in my pocket on top of what I spread around to his bosses, and I gave him a nod and he let me through without saying anything.
There was no reason to look. I knew what was under there, had known since I’d seen the herd, known since I’d left her room the night before. I looked anyway.
You think, being strangled, how bad could that be? Hold your breath for a while, the lights go dim. But it’s not like that at all. Calloused hands around the soft of your neck, the beaming eyes of a man willing you to death, trying to scream and failing. The white rings around Rhaine’s sky blues were punctured, blossoms of blood leaking in. A thick patch of her scarlet hair had been torn out, either in the struggle or afterward, as a trophy. Her nose was broken back into her face. Her throat was discolored, green and black.
I threw the sheet over her and moved to stand, but the heat, I say the heat, set me back on one knee. The guards turned away, embarrassed at my weakness and not wanting to cause offense. They knew who buttered their bread. I pulled myself back to my feet, managing to make it out of sight before reaching for the vial of breath I had in my satchel. I was very proud of my restraint.
18
There is a corner of every man’s soul that would prefer him dead. That whispers poison in his ear in the still hours of the evening, puts spurs to his side when he stands atop a ledge. For the weak and the misbegotten, the suggestion alone proves sufficient, and the unfortunate runs himself a hot bath and adds his life-blood to it, or
