The Clockwork Crown (19 page)

The horse knows where it's going more than I ever would.

Sometime in the early hours of the night, they entered the mountains. The cold caused her to hunker lower, the heat of her own breath in brief clouds against her face. King Kethan's body didn't carry warmth, yet his presence was a solid comfort. Every so often, Leaf ducked into view, chittering as he made a grand loop. All around them were rocks, snow, and desolation. This was a place paved and stripped by decades of war. They passed valleys where fortifications stood as frosted ruins, and more where feeble campfires illuminated the night in brief flashes. Men stared, agape.

Mr. Drury once told me that Caskentia always blames the Waste. He was right. These soldiers probably think this horse is some monstrosity from the Dallows. They would be right, too, in a way.

The factory exhaust of Mercia was left behind. Stars sparkled with fierce clarity made even fiercer by the intensifying cold.

At last, heeding the call of her bladder and sore muscles, Octavia forced the mare to a stop. Her attempt to dismount resulted in her falling almost face first onto the ground. Her numb hands punched through wrist-­deep snow. The sensation made her gasp with shock, but at the same time she was relieved to feel anything at all. She had known too many boys who lost extremities due to exposure at the northern pass.
This change in my body must be helping me to tolerate the temperature, like a tree surviving the winter.

Still, the very human part of her was nauseous with cold. Her teeth chattered with violence. Suddenly her coat sleeves fell forward over her arms. The gorgeous green coat had split in half. Where the King had leaned against her, the fabric had dissolved to powder. She rubbed her fingers together. The gloves had disintegrated in patches.

“Octavia?” King Kethan landed beside her with grace. His nose and hands had blackened with cold, but the skin beneath already burbled with regeneration.

She stood, tottering as she shook free of the mangled coat. The horse pawed at the earth, clearly anxious to move on. A slow tendril of vine crawled around a fetlock and hoof and into the snow. The vine pulsed, like a person's neck as they craned to drink water. She shivered, this time not from the cold.

“Privacy,” she said, and stumbled for the shelter of a nearby rock. She still had enough wits to know she should be leery of mountain lions and pitfalls, though her ability to react to such threats would have been laughable.

After a few minutes, she shifted her skirts back into place. The friction against her gloves was enough to tear the fabric. She shook the useless remnants from her fingers. In the glow of starlight against snow, she saw her hands for the first time in hours. Exhausted, overwhelmed, she screamed.

Octavia's fingers were gloved in bark. The joints still moved, though stiffly. Was that from cold, or was it a permanent thing?
Will I have trouble twisting open my jars? Holding a pen? What will Alonzo think?
Horror, pity, fear—­she couldn't blame him for any of those reactions, not when she felt the same. A sob quaked through her chest.

“Octavia.” King Kethan was there in a matter of seconds, his knife unsheathed. He saw her hands, extended in front of her, and stopped. His expression was harder to read. A few steps more and he sheathed the blade and took her hands in his. She fought against the pull into his song. He faced the palm up, lightly touching the backs of her knuckles, taking in the texture.

“Do you have feeling?”

“It's not . . . it's not from the cold, it . . .”

“I see what it is,” he said gently. “Had this begun before you ventured to the vault?”

“Yes.” The word formed a harsh cloud.

“I wondered, when a medician of all ­people was the one to open the vault, when such a horse arrived in answer to prayer.” He stepped back, pressing a fist to his chest as he bowed his head. “My Lady.”

“Wait. No. You're the King. I don't deserve respect like that, I—­”

“Do you not realize what you are? Octavia Leander, of the North Country, you are the true vessel, the one who is meant to carry the Lady's seed. You are the Tree's true heir.”

Her chest shuddered. A dozen denials flared in her mind, all of them pointless. “What more do you know? What haven't you told me?”

“Let us ride.”

It was a relief to hide her hands in the horse's leafy mane again.
If I can't see it, it's not happening. It's not real.
Without any guidance from Octavia, the horse wheeled about to resume its eastward gallop.

“I have spent decades pondering the enigmatic nature of the Tree and my condition.” King Kethan's voice rattled against her ear. “The fact that seeds can bring back the dead is well chronicled. 'Tis my belief, though, that this is not meant to be a permanent resurrection.”

“Everything is finite,” she said, echoing his earlier words.

“The ultimate purpose of the seed is to create a new Tree. The Lady's powers are fading. She cannot hide from humanity any longer. She has likely dragged on these past fifty years, past endurance, with these wars and my essence weighing on her all the more.”

“But why am I changing when I don't have the seed yet?”

“Your blood has always connected with the Lady, has it not?”

Bloodletting.
Every medician felt the pain, that sensation that their arm would burst lest drops of their blood met the ground. A few seedlings would immediately sprout from the watered earth. Octavia had been stunned when her blood recently caused the Lady's own blessed pampria to sprout, and then there was everything that happened in the Waster camp—­her blood and the branch creating a full tree, and the combination of blood and Royal-­Tea forming an army of vines in her defense.

“You're saying this is something innate inside me, a part of being a medician?” She tried to calm herself with deep breaths. “As if I'm the perfect fertile ground, water, and climate for the seed to grow?”

“The connection is there. This must be another facet.”

“What happens if there is no seed available? What happens if the seed
is
available?”

“I know not.”

Will my bare feet touch the ground in these coming days and I'll suddenly sink in roots, as the horse did? Will I be able to move afterward?

She had been quiet for several miles when King Kethan's hand squeezed her waist. “I am sorry. I know my commiserations are inadequate, and yet . . .”

“You probably understand what I'm enduring more than anyone.” She clenched his hand for a moment as she thought on his delight when he tasted the flatbread and the beer.

If I become the Tree, will I taste water and dirt through my roots? Plants know saltiness in the soil, but what of sweetness? Never again to know the true flavor of chocolate or maple or to have turbinado sugar melt upon my tongue. Because I won't have a tongue.

The selfishness of the thought bothered her. The inability to eat seemed so minor compared to the holy powers of the Lady's Tree, but it was so very
human
.

The landscape passed by in blurs of white and gray and cold. Deep snow had fallen, and recently, but the horse did not hesitate. Octavia's feet carved trenches in the snow as the mare plowed through. She dozed at long intervals to awaken with a start, Kethan holding her securely in the saddle. The sun glinted in the distance. They made few stops. King Kethan's clothes drifted around him in soft tatters, his body blackened beneath. His pack was gone, the straps giving way at some point. Half the clothing, food, and water, lost. More than half, really, because as they rode her satchel had been the easiest place from which to grab food. Octavia cursed for not thinking of the danger to his pack before, but it would have rotted away even if she had tied it to the saddlebag. The saddle itself was gone. Sometime during the ride, the leather rotted through and had been replaced by a seat of wood, moss, and vine stirrups. The transition had been so subtle she had not even noticed until they dismounted. The enchantments on her medician gear, satchel included, still held for now, though she was glad she had packed extra clothing as a precaution.

Thank the Lady,
she thought out of habit, then felt a turn of disgust. Miss Percival's betrayal stung, but this turn by the Lady hurt far worse
.

Will Alonzo even know what happened to me? Or will it seem to him that I left his mother's house, left a body behind in a bakery, and vanished?

By evening they glimpsed flatness beyond the Pinnacles. Clouds crept in to steal the starlight. The mare's hooves clattered into the hills. Ice crusted the gray stone fortifications of Caskentia's final encampment. There were buildings and tents, the most bodies they had encountered since leaving Mercia.
My skills are even stronger if I can detect their songs at such a distance.

With a start she jerked her hands from the reins long enough to touch the top of her head. The headband was gone, blown off somewhere in the pass.

D
AYLIGHT FOUND THEM IN
the Waste.

The yellow plains stretched out to the dull gray of the horizon. Snow hid in shadows and dips. Compared to the Pinnacles, it was warmer here in the place of her childhood nightmares, but still cold enough to kill.
The Waste.
A place described as a living hell. Dry, due to the rain shadow of the Pinnacles; cursed by Caskentia, so the Wasters claimed, to make the dry soil all the more infertile. Oh, how everyone used to make a mockery of that curse—­“the only curse is their lack of farming skill!”

To think it had been real all along, and Mercia's blight all the worse.

Their horse abandoned the road and leaped over gullies—­no, not gullies, abandoned trenches. A downed airship lay in a black scar. Ribs of framework jutted into the sky. Not far away lay another airship. The conflagration had been so intense that the metal had collapsed inward.

Hydrogen.
An older model, likely an older crash.
Exhausted as she was, she didn't even flash back to the conflagration that seared her childhood.

Strange holes punched into the dirt, as if oversize gophers had been at work. The pits ranged from five feet to twenty feet in diameter, each round.

“Wyrms,” King Kethan said by her ear.

Another native peril of the Waste—­creatures that burrowed through the earth and swallowed entire ranches—­entire troop divisions—­whole. She had known other children in her old village who had been threatened at bedtime, “Go right to sleep or the wyrms will get you.” Octavia had always thought that threat was excessively cruel.

Southern Caskentia had been the sort of wilderness that inspired the soul. The Dallows was the sort where you wondered how you would die, with the sad awareness that no one would find your bones.

And yet ­people settled here, determined to make new lives for themselves. A sinuous line of smoke curled into the evening sky. Octavia reined up. A settlement at last.

“I still don't see the Tree or any new mountains in the distance. We're out of food and almost out of water.” She dismounted, holding on to the gnarled wooden lines of the horse to keep her upright.

“Any homes closer to the Pinnacles were likely obliterated by Caskentia.”

Octavia nodded. “We have to take the risk of asking for hospitality. Maybe, if we're lucky, they won't shoot us.” She granted him a quick glance as he hopped down. His current clothes draped in mere tatters. His long hair hid his face as he turned away. “I've worked in the wards, Grandfather. I've seen it all.”

“That does not mean I wish to be seen in such a way by my granddaughter.”

This kindness—­this willingness to love—­is why ­people loved this man in turn. It's why Mrs. Stout still guards her memories of him with such tender ferocity.

Octavia pulled out spare clothes for him that she had brought for this reason; she still had a gown for herself, just in case. She dug deeper in her satchel and found an old pair of black gloves from Rivka. The sight of her skin in broad daylight forced her to swallow down hot bile. She jerked the covering over her hands, aching to call out to the Lady. Instead, she seethed.

Octavia looked to the dome of the sky; it seemed strangely larger here. Leaf was nowhere in sight, nor anything else in flight. Trees had been scarce, and what they had passed had been bent and twisted, like men who had spent twenty years hauling coal by a yoke.

“Horse,” she said, holding the thickened muzzle between her hands. The muscle beneath had not started to rot—­perhaps due to movement, cold, or the strange nature of its magic. “I avoided a name for you, thinking that I might spare you. Shows what a bunch of superstitious tosh that was. I'm sorry.” Grief weighed on her chest. “You need to wait for us, out of sight, and come when I call.”

“Ridemeridemerideme?”
The query returned for the first time in days.

“We will ride again, but the Lady knows all about the dangers of starvation and dehydration. You won't have fulfilled your duty if I arrive dead.”
Or so I think.

The horse seemed to consider this, and walked away.

Octavia and King Kethan staggered through limp grass over a small rise. She studied him. He looked ill, but not dead. Their time in the warmer weather of the Waste had allowed his skin to recover from frostbite.

A ranch sprawled out before them. Brown fields consisted of tidy furrows, corrals beyond. She was puzzled by how the smoke directly rose from a hill, and it was only as they drew close that she realized it was a sod house. The nearby barn was likewise carved into the Waste itself. Yellow-­gray grass furred the roofs. To a far side was a dirt road, one of the few they had seen that day.

Tall poles with bells were spaced out along the fringe of the field. With no other trees about, they truly stood out.