Iron Kin: A Novel of the Half-Light City (8 page)

“Perhaps if you share it with me, it will make it easier to determine if I can help?” I sounded calm at least. That’s one thing that years of being trained to be a properly behaved young lady does for you—teaches you to hide your feelings well. Though I was hoping for something closer to Lily’s intimidating silent stillness than the studied politeness of a well-bred human girl. I got the impression that Fen would eat well-bred human girls for breakfast. Break their hearts and step over the pieces.

Sainted earth
. There it was again. I didn’t care what he did to women’s hearts. Not in the slightest.

A few more steps and he paused, within arm’s reach of me. I couldn’t interpret the expression on his face; it was outwardly as calm as I was trying to pretend I was, but there was something strained in his eyes, making the dark circles and lines of fatigue suddenly more prominent.

“Forgive me,” he said. “I haven’t offered you a proper greeting this morning.” He held out his right hand and automatically I took it.

Our skin met with a faint buzz and suddenly Fen looked ten years younger, his eyes unshadowed, the strain in his face vanquished.

Startled, I pulled back, but his fingers tightened around mine, warm and strong. His eyes looked past me—or through me. One breath. Two. Then he seemed to come back to himself and stepped away with a shallow bow.

When he straightened, he looked tired again, though not as tired as he had.

The room seemed distant around me as I closed my fingers to my palm, feeling the warmth he’d imparted. “What,” I asked uncertainly, “was that?”

“That, Prentice DuCaine, was an answer.” And before I had time to think of the next logical question—like “To what?”—he bowed again, turned abruptly, and walked out of the room, leaving me wondering what in the name of hell’s fires had just happened.

It took a few minutes before I stopped gaping. By the time I regained my senses and ran to the door, Fen was nowhere to be seen.

I slammed the door savagely as the rage came flooding back.
Gods damn it!

Yet another man thinking I would just acquiesce to whatever he wanted.

He thought he could just swan in here, smile at me, do whatever it was he had come to do, and then swan out again?

No.

Enough was enough.

I was going to get some answers. And no man was going to stop me.

The hall bell started to chime as I looked around me, wondering if I had any money in my workroom. I froze. Blighted earth. Classes. I was late for Master Tien. And she was not a woman to cross.

But then again, right now neither was I.

I had worked myself nearly to the bone for the last year, striving to be chosen as a student delegate. And the Guild had decided that my hard work meant nothing.

Which meant, right now, that I was more than willing to let their rules mean nothing as well.

I had far more important things to do.

* * *

Anger carried me back to my room to change and find a purse and money. It burned hot as I waited for the hour to end and the bells that tolled the change of class to sound, wanting the halls to be crowded so that I wouldn’t be so noticeable. It had settled to a steady seethe by the time I went back downstairs and out onto the street to find a hackney. I had donned perfectly normal dark green day dress, but the gate guards knew me and looked at me strangely as I swept past them. They knew the Guild’s schedule as well as anybody. Most students would have the last of the morning classes to attend at this time. Still, I was a fourth-year and we were allowed a certain amount of freedom. Neither of them made a move to stop me.

I got the feeling, however, that my leaving the grounds would be reported in short order. All the more reason to find a hackney fast.

I marched briskly down the street, in the direction of the nearest underground station. I would prefer a hackney or ’cab ride over taking the train into the border boroughs, but if it came to a choice between making my getaway and taking the safest mode of transport, I would choose speed.

Luckily I didn’t have to make the choice. A hackney came trotting up behind me and stopped when I turned and signaled.

“The Swallow’s Heart,” I said to the driver, naming the tavern where Holly used to live and Fen still resided.

Bushy gray eyebrows shot skyward. “You sure that’s the place, Miss?”

“Yes,” I snapped, “I’m sure. And it’s prentice, not miss.”

He looked at me with uncertainty for a moment longer, then apparently decided that arguing with a metalmage might not be the smartest course of action. “If you insist,” he said and tightened his reins.

I said nothing, just gathered my skirts and climbed into the carriage.

Chapter Four

S
ASKIA

Rage
carried me all the way into Brightown—building again as the journey was held up several times by traffic snarls and other petty delays that normally wouldn’t bother me. The journey, which should have taken thirty minutes at most, took nearly a full hour. I let irritation burn away any nerves as I climbed out of the hackney and walked down a narrow, disreputable-looking alley to the rear entrance of the Swallow’s Heart. My temper only flared brighter when a tired-looking woman in a white apron opened the door in response to my loud knocking and gave me a knowing look when I asked for Fen.

“Bit early for him, dearie.” She looked me up and down again. Doubtless I wasn’t dressed the way that the kinds of women who visited men in these rooms were usually dressed. The Swallow was next door to the Dove’s Rest, the biggest brothel in the City. Not exactly reputable. My gloved hand tightened around my purse. If necessary I would offer the woman an incentive to give over the information. I wished for a moment that I could pull out my prentice chain, but it was hidden under the high neckline of the dress.

“The room?” I prompted. “He’s expecting me.”

The woman grunted. “Takes all sorts, I guess. That one never turns down a bit of company. Third floor, room right at the end of the hallway.” She paused for a moment as if expecting me to say something.

Instead I just nodded politely, bit back the stab of annoyance that her comment about Fen had evoked, and followed her directions.

The wooden staircase was nothing fancy but it was clean and polished. I’d never been in the back part of a tavern before. Actually, I had hardly ever been in the front part of a tavern on this side of town. The students at the Academy had a few favored taverns in Silvertown that sold cheap beer and didn’t mind the odd explosion. I was too busy with my studies to venture farther afield, even I’d been interested in the sorts of entertainment that Brightown offered.

I climbed the stairs, breathing rapidly from exertion as well as from my temper by the time I reached the last landing and followed the corridor down to a door that was bare of anything but a slightly tarnished-looking brass six. No nameplate gave any clue as to the identity of the room’s occupant, but the cook or whoever she had been had said the door at the end of the hall and this was as far as I was going. If she’d steered me wrong, then she would be the one to vent my temper on instead of Fen.

My knock was slightly less vigorous than it had been on the door downstairs, but it still sounded loud in the quiet of the hallway. If most of the people who lived here kept Fen’s sort of hours, I might have just woken half the floor. I braced myself for an angry head or two to appear in doorways.

Nothing.

I knocked more forcefully.

From beyond the door came an irritated grunt, followed by the sorts of noises that someone half asleep makes when crossing a room while trying to get dressed and bumping into things. I’d made enough of that sort of progress myself after long nights studying to recognize the sounds.

There was a slightly louder muffled curse, a brief tingle as a ward was lowered, and then the door cracked open about a foot.

“What?” Fen demanded. His dark hair stuck up in several directions and he needed a shave even more than he had earlier. His white linen shirt was wrinkled and untucked and for a moment I wasn’t entirely certain whether the dark trousers he wore were fastened, given he had one hand clutched at his hip. Then I recognized the gesture. The instinctive grasp for a weapon of a man used to carrying one.

He must have been deeply asleep not to arm himself as he woke, if that were the case.

He blinked bleary eyes, finally seeming to recognize me. “What the hell are you doing here?” He peered past me into the hallway. “Did Holly bring you? What time is it?”

“I brought myself,” I snapped. “And it’s nearly midday. Let me in.”

He frowned, his eyes squinting with the effort to wake up. He shook his head as though to clear it. “No. Respectable girls like you don’t come into my rooms.”

“You came into mine,” I retorted. “Let. Me. In.”

His gaze sharpened, the blurriness of the newly wakened disappearing. “Or what?”

“Or you’ll find out how much fuss a metalmage can make when she’s thwarted.”

“Veil save me from women,” he muttered, rubbing his stubbled chin. Then he shrugged. “Have it your way. But if your brothers ask, this was your idea. Don’t expect me to save your hide.”

“My hide is my own business,” I said, making a shooing gesture so that he finally opened the door wider and stepped back to let me enter.

His room was in hardly better shape than its owner. Clothes littered the floor, and books and other mysterious objects covered all available flat surfaces. A long shelf running the length of one wall held still more books and several bottles of brandy in various stages of consumption. Against the other wall, at the windowed end of the room, was a massive four-poster, its disheveled covers confirming that I’d woken Fen up.

It was the most decadent-looking bed I’d ever seen, a four-poster with dark wooden columns carved with sinuous figures and its surface covered in myriad layers of deep red fabric and pillows.

I pulled my gaze away with difficulty.

“What are you doing here?” Fen asked again. He moved past me, lifted a pile of clothing off a low chair, dumped the clothes on another pile near a basket that was already full of still more clothes, and gestured at the chair as if inviting me to sit. I remained where I was.

“I assure you, it’s clean,” he said. “It’s just the day my laundry is collected.”

I raised an eyebrow at this. An armoire that matched the bed stood against the wall opposite the foot of the bed. One of its doors was ajar, revealing a rack bulging with shirts and jackets. The man seemed to have more clothes than I did. Or more than I kept at my rooms at the Guild. Every time I returned to my room at my parents’ house, more new dresses of the type my mother approved of—like the pale pink one I’d worn last night—appeared in my wardrobe.

“From the looks of things it’s also the maid’s week off,” I said, a little more sharply than I’d intended.

Green eyes narrowed at me. “Not all of us have maids, sweetheart. Now, I was sleeping and I’d like to get back to that. So say what you came to say.”

“You’re mad at
me
?” I said incredulously. “You waltz into my rooms, act all mysterious, then disappear, and you think you get to be mad at me? Sorry, it’s the other way around.”

“Sorry if you wanted me to stick around a little longer, but I had other things to do.”

“Like sleeping? What happened to ‘I need less sleep than a human’?”

“Just because I need less doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy it when I can get it.” He tilted his head speculatively. “Like many other things. Is that what this is about? You thought I came to see you for something else? To lay flowers at your well-bred feet perhaps? And now your pride is irked?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said, fighting the urge to set something on fire. “I don’t care about flowers. Or you,” I added in rapid clarification. “I care about being treated like a convenience by men. A pretty thing who doesn’t need to be given information or allowed to participate. I have a right to know what you were doing when you came to see me. I am a person, not a thing, and I don’t care how you usually treat women, but it’s not how you’re going to treat me.”

There was more than a hint of anger in his gaze now. “I generally treat women how they deserve to be treated. If they’re nice to me, then I’m nice to them.”

“I hate to think what you consider nice.”

“Not waking me up to shriek at me is a good start.”

“I am not
shrieking
. Besides, I wouldn’t have had any cause to come anywhere near you at all if you hadn’t started this.” I stalked over to the chair and settled myself onto it, glaring up at him. “If you want to finish it, if you want me to go, then tell me why you came to see me. The truth. Don’t bother trying to charm your way out of this, Fen. I’m not in the mood to be charmed.”

I hoped I was telling the truth. True, I was in no mood to be sweet-talked out of my temper, but I had a horrible feeling that if any man could charm me, it might be this one. Despite his rumpled state he was still undeniably attractive. The room smelled like him too. Of male with a hint of brandy and something deep green and intriguing, which I assumed was his cologne.

He stared down at me. “I’m guessing you’re just as stubborn as your brothers, aren’t you?”

“Would it help if I told you that in our family I’m known as the stubborn one?” I said sweetly.

“I don’t see how it possibly could.” He scrubbed a hand over his stubbled chin, then grimaced. “Veil’s eyes, I need coffee.”

“Then talk fast and you can ring for some.”

“You’re not going to let this go, are you?”

“No. I’m staying right here until I get what I came for. The truth,” I added. I had no doubt he might try lying if he thought it would get rid of me. But I wasn’t going anywhere until I was convinced he had told me the whole story.

He said something under his breath that I didn’t quite catch. Fae, perhaps. I knew some of that language, but mostly technical things about metalworking and magery and enough to get me by with basic niceties and conversation. I didn’t think what Fen had just muttered fell into any of those categories.

“I can wait all day,” I said.

“Maybe I’ll leave, then,” he said.

“I’ll follow you.”

“How?”

“Well, for one thing, unless you’re planning to remove that chain—” I tried to keep the wince out of my voice as I looked at his wrist. The skin under the links looked both bruised and slightly swollen. Taking it off had to be a temptation. The fact that he kept it on meant he needed it. “I can probably track you anywhere you might run to.”

He looked both surprised and appalled. “You can track a single object amidst all the metal in this city?”

“If I try hard enough.” The effort would leave me drained and useless but he didn’t know that. “So why don’t you spare us both the trouble and just tell me?”

“You want the truth? So be it. You’re probably not going to like it.”

“Given a choice, I’d rather be informed and unhappy than ignorant and unhappy.”

“How about ignorant and happy?”

“Not likely. I’ve had quite enough of that lately. Stop stalling, Fen. Think of the coffee.”

“I’m trying not to.” He settled himself on the bed, rubbed his face again. He looked so tired for a moment that I was tempted to allow sympathy to override my good sense and let him off the hook. Instead I pressed my lips together so I couldn’t sabotage all the work I’d just put into getting him to this point and waited for him to start talking.

“All right,” he said. “I came to see you because I wanted to test a theory.”

Hardly enlightening. “What theory?”

“It doesn’t make any sense,” he said softly.

“Nor do you, right at this moment. What theory, Fen?”

He looked past me. “Last night. At the ball. Being around so many people in one room. That’s hard for me sometimes.”

“Because of your visions?”

“Yes. Sometimes I can keep things under control, but sometimes I can’t. More people makes it harder.”

That, at least, made sense to me. More people had to equal more potential futures for him to see. I didn’t know a lot about how the powers of a seer worked, but I knew those who seemed to have true sight tended to be Fae or Beast Kind. I’d never heard of a human seer. Though Fen was only partly human.

“So you were having a bad night?” That explained the brandy. “What does that have to do with me?”

“I told you, it doesn’t really make sense,” he said.

“And it won’t until you tell me.”

“When I helped you into the cab you weren’t wearing your gloves.” His eyes dropped to my hands, folded neatly in my lap.

“No. They were uncomfortable. What does that matter?”

His eyes suddenly looked a far wilder shade of green. Like a window into a dangerous place. “When I touched you, the visions went away.”

I couldn’t help it. For the second time this morning my mouth dropped open and I stared at him. “Excuse me?”

“When I took your hand, I couldn’t see anything—no visions at all. And it didn’t hurt anymore.” He added the last under his breath, his tone almost . . . wistful.

I ignored my pang of sympathy and focused on what he’d just told me. “But—”

“I told you it didn’t make sense. I thought it must have been a coincidence, but then last night something else happened and I decided I needed to know. That’s why I came to see you this morning. So I could touch you again.”

I didn’t know whether to ask him if it had worked first or ask him what had happened. My brain had half stuttered at the phrase “touch you again.”
Gather your wits, Saskia. He’s just a man.
My mother’s voice in my head came to my rescue. “Did it work?”

He nodded. “Yes.”

“If you touch me, your visions go away?”

“So far, yes.”

I wanted to suggest we try again just to confirm things, but I was reluctant to touch him. My mind tried to come to grips with the implications. “Do you see anything now?”