This was Foulk, working for Morvengarde, trying to figure out how to break his orbit and waiting for the right moment to strike amid all the strange loops of his life. But late at night he tortured himself with questions. How many rotations, then, would it take? How many revolutions, how many spheres and rivers washing over him, how many perfect shuffles of spacetime, to return to where he started and who he had been?
And then, several things happened at more or less the same time.
Things one and two: Foulk failed an assignment, and he got Seleucia Deacon killed. That is a tale in itself, but the most amazing thing about it might’ve been that it did not get Foulk killed in response.
When he got over his shock, Foulk realized he’d likely been spared only because the one other person on Morvengarde’s staff who could reckon with time as well as he could had been Deacon herself. After that, he decided it was time to stop putting off going back for Jacinda. After all, he’d unexpectedly been given a second chance after a terrible mistake. There wouldn’t be another of those, and if he died before he hadn’t at least tried to fix that first horrible error he’d made, everything else he’d done, all those other dreadful choices, would be for naught.
He decided to begin the reckoning he’d been planning for years.
The next thing to happen was that Seleucia Deacon’s sister, Aniline, inherited her stock and became Morvengarde’s new junior partner. It was Aniline who appeared before Foulk one day in the wilds of Georgia to present his next assignment. And at the same time, she gave him a gift.
“I am Grandmaster Secondaria now,” she said without preamble. “And although I would gladly see your head on a pike, you are still of some value to this company. Therefore, I bring you a present of goodwill.” And Aniline Deacon opened a box and showed him a very beautiful enameled flower in the shape of a yellow-and-red firework. “I heard from my sister that you like dahlias,” the new Deacon whispered as she lifted the brooch from its wrappings.
Foulk had never so much as looked at another dahlia since leaving Jacinda in her garden the night she had vanished, so this could only be a reference to that incident, and meant for wounding. Sure enough, Aniline Deacon smiled and stabbed him over the heart as she pinned it on his vest. Then she gave him his next assignment, and then she vanished.
This is the last one, Foulk decided as he unbuttoned his shirt and pressed a handkerchief to the wound. This mission, and no more, and then I will do what I must. But he also knew he could not fail in this one. Aniline wanted him killed. If he didn’t deliver on the job Morvengarde had set, nothing would save him, and if he died, his childhood sweetheart would stay dead too.
The assignment took him to Missouri, in another era that was not his own. And there, very much to his shock, he met a girl who was so like Jacinda that Foulk stumbled in his resolve. But in the end, he knew she was just one more sacrifice to be made so that he could undo it all.
And then, the unthinkable happened. Foulk failed a second time. Worse still, the device—the device that made everything possible—was broken.
There were no others in existence, as far as Deacon and Morvengarde knew. Seleucia had been the keeper of the only other similar mechanism in the company’s possession, and it had been destroyed when she had been killed.
But once again, the merchants did not kill Foulk, because Aniline didn’t have her sister’s head for reckonings. They couldn’t kill him. He was the only time-reckoner they had, and he was the only one with a true understanding of the device that had been lost. So instead of taking his life, they tasked him with rebuilding the mechanism, no matter how long it took, no matter how difficult the task.
And so he began.
Again the years spiraled.
And then, one day, the rain began to fall.
INTERLUDE
“THIS INN . . .” He rubbed the space between his eyes, hard. “It’s like the old days. The days before I could shut out the patterns. Because the one I can’t unsee—the one that drowns all the rest—that’s the one that’s everywhere here. It’s everywhere,” he said savagely, glaring around the room as if they were all to blame. “Even without the loupe, the weyward lumination in this room is so bright, I can barely stand it. You . . . you blaze. Each of you. Each of you is a reliquary, and I can’t take the glare.” He took a halting pair of steps toward the fireplace. Amalgam lurched out of the chair between Reever and Negret, and Masseter dropped into it. With a shaking hand, he raised his glass to throw back the last of his drink.
Each of them? Maisie tore her eyes from the peddler and looked at the others, trying to see what he saw. Then she remembered the secrets she’d glimpsed herself, and it didn’t seem so shocking a thing to say. Then she realized what he’d actually said, and she looked down at her hands. The cards Tesserian had passed her during Masseter’s tale, the king of allsorts and the knave of gnomons as well as the queens of paquets, penny-farthings, and secateurs, all drifted, forgotten, to the floor.
“Oh, yes,” Masseter said softly, looking down at the girl sitting not far from his feet. “You especially, my dancing friend. And I think the others have seen it, even if you haven’t. Certainly Tesserian there has, with his structures that won’t fall until he grants them leave to
