INTERLUDE
AS PETRA STOPPED SPEAKING, her eyes came to land, confidently, heavily, on Antony Masseter.
Masseter met Petra’s gaze with his single bright green eye.
For a moment, the only sounds were the crackling of Sorcha’s fire and the drumming of the rain on the roof. Then Mr. Haypotten made a brusque noise. “I say, now, it’s getting quite late. Who’ll finish the toasted cheese, before we all go our separate ways for the night?”
No one answered. Everyone’s eyes were on either the young woman on the sofa or the peddler facing her from his chair opposite the hearth.
Then Masseter reached up to his firelit face. With one hand, he stretched the flesh away from his eye. The rest of his face twisted as with the other hand he reached in, took hold of his bulging right eyeball, and delicately pulled it out of the socket.
Or at least, that’s how it looked, and if Petra had been a different sort of person, she might have gasped in horror. But she wasn’t a different sort of person, and she merely watched with an expression of something like disdain as Masseter tossed a clear, curved bit of glass, colorless except in one circular space where it was tinted with golden green, onto the floor between them. Jessamy snarled in protest as it shattered not far from Maisie, though the girl herself didn’t so much as flinch.
Then the peddler flipped the patch up onto his forehead to reveal a gleaming silver hammered-metal orb with a laquered iris of the same cornflower blue as the eye that had worn the false lens. The blue-enameled metal contracted around the pupil as if to adjust to the light in the room.
Petra looked down at a shard that had slid across the floor to rest at her feet. Without standing, she reached out her left heel and ground the yellow-green colored glass to powder.
Masseter chuckled, and it might’ve sounded genuine enough to anyone who wasn’t also able to see the brittle coldness in the blue eye that had been hidden under the green.
“Petra,” he said. “Short for Petronella, I think. But I would never have recognized you, Nell, not if you hadn’t tipped your hand with all your little machinations. You changed your hair.”
“I’m also fifteen years older,” she said. “Sometimes time just passes normally, a pattern you seem to have forgotten. You, of course, look exactly the same.”
The peddler crossed one ankle over his knee. “What do you want?”
Petra’s disdain sharpened into anger. “You didn’t keep your word. You lied.”
“I lie when I need to.” His face hardened. “And when I feel like it.”
“You lied,” Petra repeated, “and you let my town die. There’s nothing left there but rooftops.”
“Saved you, didn’t I?” he asked, baring his teeth. “That’s something.”
“No. I was willing. I had made up my mind to be a sacrifice if that’s what was needed to save the town. You stopped me,” she snarled. “You didn’t save me, you stopped me. You promised me you could save my home. And then you didn’t. Did you lie about knowing how to stop the flood, too?”
“Of course I did,” Masseter retorted. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
“So condescending.” Petra shook her head. “Just because you’ve popped in and out of a dozen lifetimes doesn’t mean you’ve lived a dozen of them.”
He grinned. “Perhaps not, but I am something of an expert on time and how it passes. And I’ve endured about as much as I plan to endure of whatever this is, so I’ll ask again. What is it you want from me?”
“Give me back the bone.”
The peddler shook his head. “No.”
“You took it from me under false pretenses. You took it in a lie.”
“But I took it, and I’ll keep it. Your anger is . . . understandable. And impressive. But it matters far, far less to me than the consequences if I don’t manage to finish what I’ve started. Your bone is part of that, and it has properties I need.”
He reached into a pocket and took something out: a hunk of metal about the size of a palm. The filigreed box, bought for an eye in the hollow-way and fitted with a paper keyway taken from a homicidal room in a house that could not be mapped, containing rods and dials and gears and valves designed by a fire-reckoner and assembled by a maker of reliquaries.
The peddler undid a catch on the side and opened the box. “It’s there, you see?” he said softly, holding it up for her. “Along with the adit-gate from Fellwool House and John Ustion’s fierekenia mechanism, all nestled into the hollow-ware man’s coffret, which cost me dearly, but I had precious few options by that point.”
“You stole my great-grandfather’s device?” Sorcha demanded. Then, more shocked still, “And you finished it?”
“I had to, when it became clear he wouldn’t,” Masseter snapped. “A dozen artificiers I set to work on the problem. None of them would sell to me after Lung sent me on my way, but I knew none would be able to resist the challenge. A dozen artificiers, a dozen secret tries, eleven total failures. Only Ustion’s came close, and then he walked away from it. So I took it, yes. He never knew, so don’t bother staring at me like that, and it sounds like your mother was just as happy to find it gone.”
“But how did you finish it?” Sorcha persisted. “You’re not fire-savvy.”
“No, but I
