David reached out a hand. “No, it’s true. I had my troubles, but those days are past.”
Raven gave him a tense sort of smile, and cracked her knuckles. “So, if I was to shake you, you’re telling me Carnival wouldn’t come spilling out of your every orifice, pocket, and shoe?”
David realised that everyone in the room was looking at them, at him in particular — the conversation had died down. It was the Carnival that allowed him to lie with such conviction. David lifted his arms. “If you’d like to, but I must warn you, I’m heavier than I look.”
Raven laughed. “I’m sure you are.” She studied him with eyes as dark as thunderheads. “You’re certainly a charmer, so was your father. Don’t look so surprised. I knew many Engineers and Confluents when I still visited Mirrlees, before it started to drown. I was sorry to hear he died.”
“He didn’t die. He was murdered.”
“And I am sorry for that.” She clapped her hands. “Now, what are you drinking?”
They were all a little drunk by the time Mother Graine arrived, alone. She walked straight over to David, ignoring Margaret as she did. Not that Margaret seemed to mind; she was having an animated conversation with another pilot. And she was smiling.
David thought Mother Graine looked harried, weary, as though she had already had a night of drinking. Raven drained her glass the moment Mother Graine appeared. Then Raven slid an arm over her sister’s shoulder, and pulled Kara away.
“There’s something we must talk about,” Raven said, leaving him alone with the Mother of the Sky. His head buzzing with drink, and some rather lewd memories of Cadell's; he felt his cheeks flush.
“Raven is so brave,” Mother Graine said, watching after the pilots. “It is a hard thing to lose your craft, to have it die. Many don’t survive that loss.”
“What? The Matilda Ray is dead? I'd heard-”
“The Matilda was old when Raven took her as pilot. Though she should have had another twenty years in her, she died not long after the Grand Defeat; an infection of the lungs, I believe. Raven hasn’t left Drift since.”
David thought of that, ten years alone. David thought Margaret would know at least a portion of that loneliness. He guessed he did, too. “People are torn from our lives,” he said. “Loves snatched away.”
Mother Graine patted his arm. “We’ve had our share of that, you and I. The dead far outweigh the living in our lives.” She sighed, looked around her pointedly. “I can’t talk here, and there are things that must be said. Things that only you and I can discuss.”
“I agree,” David said. “We need to talk, and you need to let us go. We've a long way to go.”
“Yes, I understand that. The Engine waits and you fear it as much as you desire it.” She touched his arm, and David felt his nerves react in a way that he’d thought was lost to him; or perhaps he had never really known, it seemed so foreign. The Engine wasn't the only thing that he feared and desired.
Mother Graine said, “I understand a lot of things about you. Come with me for a while, I promise people won’t mind, I have a bit of influence here.” She flashed him a smile, and David’s throat tightened, he knew at once, in that moment, he couldn’t deny her anything. Plans for an early night fell away; besides, he doubted she could stop him, or even hurt him.
The strength, Cadell’s strength, bloomed inside him. And he felt at last that he understood the true possibility of their binding.
“Where do you want to go?” he asked her.
They left the Caress together, the reception still going strong, and already beginning to look like it was going to get messy. Out in the night, David couldn't tell if it was cold, but he guessed it had to be. Mist was rising from the lake (a lake in the sky, that still struck him as so wonderfully odd). People gathered around small fires on the outskirts of the city, guards, he guessed, though they did their best to pretend that neither he nor Graine were there. Graine held his hand, and her grip was warm. She didn’t seem to mind the cold.
They walked for about twenty minutes in silence along an increasingly narrow path. The houses thinned out around them, the forest thickened and the stars grew bright. They reached an edge of Stone, and a viewing platform.
“Is this where you push me off?” David asked.
“Don’t spoil another night, Cadell,” Graine said. “Please.”
He gripped the rail to steady himself and an image struck him suddenly, a memory that was not his own: of a third moon rising above a dark and shivering city of stone, and a sea of ice rising and drowning the world, and he could see faces, eyes staring, faces in the ice and they were frozen, but not dead.
“David?” Graine reached out a hand. David stepped away from her. “A memory, something vivid and cruel. I saw — I don't know what I saw.” Graine nodded. “Sorry, I didn't mean to call him out of you.” David turned his back to her. “He's getting stronger,” he said, and looked over the edge, into the dark.
Drift moved in a rough circle over Shale, though its circumference had shrunk with the coming of the Roil, as though where that darkness was the mechanisms of the city feared to go. What the city might do once (if) the Roil enclosed the entire world was uncertain. But then, life in a city in the sky was full of uncertainties. For all that Drift’s residents claimed sovereignty of the air, there was much they did not know. For one, was the city capable of eternal flight, or would its engines one day run down and the city fall from the sky?
David felt as though he were falling now.
He turned and looked back at the city, he could just make out the balcony, and the party. Fireworks were being lit. More memories came unbidden, of ancient wars of a vast darkness, crawling, crawling towards towers higher than mountains. He thought, Enough! Enough!
Graine gestured at the sky. “The Roil's iron ships, they'll attack us. We've held ourselves apart from the troubles below for so long, but it was all for nothing. Ah, but the world isn’t as it was,” Graine said.
“The world never is as it was,” David said. “That’s the nature of the world.” “We should understand that better than anyone.” Graine touched his face.
“After all, you are the embodiment of change.”
“Seeing you, I’m beginning to understand that better than I could have thought,” David said. “Now, please tell me why you brought me here.”
“You were never going to be clear of Hardacre before the Old Men came. My spies could tell me that much. Buchan and Whig, they were dithering so, when they should have been more certain, more… commanding. As they were when they ran Chapman. Hardacre's politics are complicated, I guess. And my actions are with precedent. I've once freed you before, long ago. Is it too much for you to remember?
Though the touch of the earth stabbed at my feet, I went down to your prison and let you out.”
And David realised that she was addressing Cadell. Perhaps she had been addressing him all along. He felt Cadell rise a little within him, as though all the Carnival in the world couldn’t keep the Old Man suppressed. It was like drowning, and here, with this strange woman, he let himself drown. David nodded. “It was a mistake.”
Graine sighed. “One never knows until one fails. And it wasn’t a mistake to free you, just the others.”
“If I remember, forty people died as a result of that freedom.”
“What did it matter? So many had died already.”
David blinked, felt Cadell slide away, as though banished by the memory of that long-ago freedom. “Why didn’t you just throw us into prison the moment we arrived?”
Graine gestured at the city around them. “You do not see it? This is Drift. The city in the sky, you cannot run from here unless I say so. Where is your airship? What Aerokin do you pilot? I did not want to frighten you unduly. The frontal approach, that struck me as too dangerous, not for you, nor for your warrior-guardian woman, but for my people. How many of my kind would die before Margaret was overcome? How many could you kill?
“And do not tell me that you didn’t expect some sort of assault on your arrival,” she said.
“I might have.”
“Yes, well, for the first time you were greeted with open arms here. Coercion isn’t necessarily the best solution. And it worked. Still, sometimes it’s required.”
She held his hand. “Let me take you back to the Caress, to my rooms. We have so much to discuss, you've need of strategy now. Old Men hunt you, the Roil hunts you, but I've a way that you can be done with it, and in Tearwin Meet before the week is out.”
David let her lead him away from the edge.
In her rooms, they did far less talking than David had been led to expect. Her lips pressed hard against his. He felt no resistance, just an answering hunger, and this so unlike anything he had known before. It consumed him,
