He hesitated, considering the shocked girl closely. “You have a worden and some sort of ferly on you too. Other knacks, other kinds of savvy you might not discover for years. Possibly the magic of that-which-remains.” A flicker of regret crossed his expression, mingled with surprise; Masseter was not accustomed to feeling anything remotely like sorrow. “I would need the loupe to be certain.” It was in his pocket, but he did not reach for it.
Maisie began to protest that she didn’t understand, then realized that she did. Not everything, not by a long shot . . . but as she looked from the peddler to the castle, she thought perhaps she had an idea.
“I’m sorry,” Masseter said, but the coldness had returned to his face and voice, and the girl turned instead to Tesserian, who managed a hesitant pat on her shoulder that didn’t much help. Jessamy, still sitting at Maisie’s side on the floor, shot a look of fury up at the chapman and tugged the girl into her arms. But there was nothing to say, because she could see the truth as clearly as Masseter: this was a child bound for the roads. Strange things would find her, even if she didn’t go seeking them. She would stumble into them, just as she’d stumbled into this inn.
Meanwhile, Masseter turned to look thoughtfully at the Haypottens. “When you open your home and your place of business to roamers, other roamers will find it, each one tracking more of the dust of the old roads across your threshold. That sort of thing isn’t so easily swept back out the door. It lingers. It clings to you, much like the residue of the uncanny fires built by the conflagrationeer who tends your hearth.” He glanced grimly at Amalgam, who had backed up close to the corner table where Sangwin still sat. “The extraordinary calls to the extraordinary, doesn’t it? So I suppose it isn’t so strange that this house would see its share of creatures like us passing through.” He threw out his arms to encompass the entire room. “But this many? This varied? And everyone pretending studiously to be human, even the ones who so obviously aren’t. Why?” He nodded at Maisie again. “For her sake? Surely not. This isn’t coincidence, all this weyward light in one place, and it isn’t accident.”
He pivoted slowly, meeting each of the fourteen pairs of staring eyes until his gaze fell on Petra, who, at some point during his tale, had perched against the riverward window where Sangwin had been smoking the night before.
“Me?” Petra grinned. She straightened and returned to her original seat on the sofa beside Sullivan. “Surely you’re not suggesting I can control the rains and waters, Mr. Masseter.”
“Maybe not,” he said softly. “But you have controlled the telling, these last two days. Why?”
Petra shook her head as she sat, so that the dragonfly at her temple sent tiny flickers of reflected firelight around the room. “I believe these stories were Mr. Amalgam’s idea.”
“Maybe, or maybe we’ll find that the two of you had a conversation earlier, perhaps at a meal, when the old traditions of storytelling came up. Perhaps you expressed that delightful, infectious curiosity of yours. Perhaps that’s how he came to suggest it. But certainly since then, you’ve stepped in now and again to call forth certain tales. Not every time, not with every storyteller. But more than once. And,” he added with a humorless chuckle, “I can’t help but notice that, when you have, the tales that come forward out of your conjuring are tales of peddlers and men with one eye. Again: not an accident. Not a coincidence.” The expression in his own eye chilled further, even as the rest of his face curved in a smile. “I know who you are. I know your name, and I know what story you’re going to tell. If you tell the truth. You might as well just come out with it, beginning, if you please, with: How?”
The room held its breath. Some waited to hear the explanation for what they themselves had also sensed; others waited to see how this final act they’d been anticipating would play out at last. Three prepared grimly for battle; one prayed her hands would remain her own as she wrapped her arms tighter around the girl she held. One brushed fingers across the back of Petra’s neck: I am here, beside you, for whatever good it’s worth.
Petra herself leaned forward on the sofa, propping her elbows on her knees and looking thoughtfully over her interlaced hands at Masseter. “You know how. You said it yourself. There sometimes come moments when the patterns of time and chance and the endless moving pieces—people, stories, floodwaters—come into a particular configuration in which otherwise unbreakable loops can change. You didn’t call the phenomenon by its name, but it has one.”
“Kairos,” Masseter said, his voice trailing into a hiss.
“Yes.” Petra smiled thinly. “Kairos. The right moment for undertaking a particular action. And, as you have told us, the moment of kairos can be calculated, with the right sort of reckoning.”
“That sort of reckoning is—”
