Wayfarer: A Tale of Beauty and Madness (Tales of Beauty and Madness) (6 page)

What the boots
wanted
was surefoot charm with water resistance and refraction built in. The lookgrabbing charm was an afterthought, but it wouldn’t mind tagging along.

Nice and easy, Ell.

Carefully scattered pebbles of colorless glass under the boots twitched. Gold-glowing symbols, hair-fine and delicate, crawled through the leather, inside and out—Ellie dipped a finger inside the well of each boot to make sure it would take. They spread out, a puddle on the plinth’s surface, and the broken glass became tiny jewels.

There was a flash, a soundless thunder, and the music halted. Ellie took her hands away, flicking her fingers as stray golden sparks crackled. The ring was dark, only a shimmer in its depths as the stone hummed a low note of satisfaction.

The boots were taller now, an elegant sweet curve that would mold to the calf, cut away sharply behind the knee. The toes were squarer, and even the heels were subtly altered, lower and also curved, balancing them beautifully. The broken glass, glinting, had smoothed itself up the charm lines as if heated and spun out in delicate fibers. The threads formed symbols and tiny scenes—a spiderweb spinning itself, a filigree horse leaping, a Mithraic sunburst, flowing and melding as the charm caught the interest of its viewers.

Her heart was a rabbit, frantic inside a cage of ribs.
Oh, no.

It was a beautiful piece of work. Her shoulders came up defensively, waiting for a scream of rage and a stunning blow—probably to the back of her head, but maybe a kick, who knew? The Strep was good at striking where you least expected. A goddamn genius.

There was a tinkling crash.

Marguerite, whey-faced, stood next to a wooden rack full of sylph-ether bottles. One lay broken on the floor, curls of silvery vapor rising, seeking eddy and flow in the sea of Potential around them. Tiny silver flames winked into being, whispering their chiming little cries.

“
Idiot!
” Laurissa flared, and Rita shrank back, her big dark eyes filling with tears. The tiny flames cast an odd white directionless light, and they strengthened, scenting anger.

No. Not anger. Pure rage.

The moment stretched out, and Ellie was suddenly dead certain the sylphire would latch onto Laurissa and start working in, feeding on the sudden shock of finding your own flesh alive with crunching, nipping flame. Smoke rising as if Laurissa was a faust, a dæmon’s inhabitation filling her with burning.

How did she die? Well, Officer, there was sylph-ether, and she got careless, and—

The Sigiled charmer snapped a spike-edged catchword and the flames winked out, crying like tiny crystalline children. She spent the next fifteen minutes ranting—
stupid little bitch, clumsy brat, I should have left you on the street to starve
—at poor Rita, who huddled colorless and shaking, her round cheeks wet and her chubby fingers rubbing at her arm where Laurissa’s talons had dug in. The Strep forgot all about Ellie, who crept back to the wall near the door and forced herself to watch every moment, silently willing Rita to look at her instead of at the Strep’s crimson, contorted face.

The new girl never did, but not taking her gaze away was the least Ellie could do. Because there was no way that bottle, charmed into the rack, could have fallen out by itself.

Maybe, just maybe, Rita might turn out to be okay.

I
T USED TO BE THAT
E
LLIE COULD CREEP AROUND AT
night far more regularly, especially when Dad wasn’t home. The Strep’s boyfriends used to keep her occupied, and sometimes she was even relatively calm after one of them had spent the night. Judging by the sounds filtering out of whatever bedroom she used—never the master suite, Dad was absent and love-blind, but not
stupid
—no wonder she was worn out on those occasions.

Now, though, the boyfriends didn’t come by nearly as often. Good for them. But it also made it harder to slip out and around.

Ellie slid through the house in an old pair of threadbare ballet flats, her hair scraped back into a small ponytail—it used to be a lot longer, but the Strep hated looking at it. So hacked short was how it was, getting in her face and being stupidly unmanageable.

Just like the rest of her. Ugly, clumsy, shabby, cringing.

She flattened herself against the wall—here the servants’ hallway made a T, the walls probably about as old as New Haven itself and made of cold stone, not dressed with wainscoting past the angle that someone coming out of the bedrooms would see. This place was a heap, and honestly, if she survived the Strep and ever owned the house free and clear, Ellie had a plan for dynamiting it into hell.

Like all plans, the first step was the most difficult.

Stop. Listen.

Little creaks as the whole pile settled, timbers breathing as a chill spring night dropped fine misty rain over the city. The invisible sound of the draft down the bedroom hallway, as familiar as her own breath. Her pulse, a steady metronome inside her ears and wrists. The scrape of her jeans against the wall as her body kept itself upright, making the hundreds of tiny little adjustments necessary to stay stuck to a whirling earth.

The first time she’d fully understood that the planet was round and hurtling through space, she’d been terrified. Now she was just unsurprised. Of course nothing could be steady. Of course it all had to spin. It just made sense.

A soft scrape. A padding. Not the Strep—when Laurissa was ghosting around at night, you could smell the
Noixame
on her, trailing scarves of sicksweet perfume waving like kelp beds, just looking to wrap around and pull an unwary swimmer down.

No, this was a heavier tread, a sloppy shuffling.

Ellie peeked around the corner. The same peach sweater—did she ever take it
off
, even to wash it? The same frayed brown plaid skirt, as well. Ruby would be rolling her eyes so hard right now.

I didn’t even Babchat. Homework is going to be dire.

Floating ghostly down the hall, the blur of peach and lank dishwater hair hesitated at the door to the room where Ellie was
supposed
to sleep. One soft round hand lifted as if to knock, Ellie slid around the corner silent as a suppressive charm, and by the time Rita had decided
not
to knock and slid the door open with a noiselessness that implied some practice with such a maneuver Ellie had already halved the distance between them.

She slid through the door just before it closed and put her finger to her lips as Rita stumbled toward the bed, a squeak of surprise loud in the hush.

Both girls froze, staring at each other. Rita’s mouth was a loose wet O of surprise. Ellie popped the silencer charm off her fingers, and the immediate deadening of the air around them—not that it needed much help, nobody breathed in this frosty pink room with ribbons on the untouched comforter—was a little gratifying.

“We can talk,” Ellie whispered. “But not too loud.”

“You’re a
charmer
,” Rita whispered back, kind of like she would whisper
you’re a cannibal
or
you’re a minotaur
.

“Born that way.” She couldn’t help herself. It was a Ruby sort of crack, the sort of thing she’d just flip into the air and it would sound great. But immediately, she felt a sharp bite of guilt. “Look, I’m sorry. You didn’t have to distract her. Thanks.”

“You . . .” Rita’s soft hands fluttered. Now that Ellie was closer, she could see the shapes under the skin, the high cheekbones and pointed jaw. She could have been pretty, if she wasn’t so blurred. Her hair wasn’t greasy, it was just really fine, and the cut did nothing for her. It wasn’t even really a cut at all, just hacked off at a weird angle, as if she’d done it herself a while ago.

Her eyes were really extraordinary too. Big, and dark, and pretty, thickly lashed. She would really be something when she lost the baby fat.

That’s not baby fat
, a deep voice whispered, and gooseflesh broke out over her entire body. Rita looked so . . . the only word Ellie could come up with was
insubstantial
. Like all that pudge wasn’t really weight that could hold her down.

She shoved the thought away, and it went quietly. No need to borrow trouble, right? They stared at each other for a long time. Finally, Ellie held out her hand, tentatively. “Look,” she whispered. “I’m your friend. If you want.”

Rita shrank back. She said nothing, her mouth working like a fish’s for a loose, wet moment. Those gorgeous dark eyes rolled, and Ellie’s hand dropped back to her side.

You should know better, Ell. There’s no such thing as friends in this house.

Still, she tried again. The girl had dumped the bottle out of the rack, and got bit pretty hard for it. “Look . . . you didn’t have to do that. I’m grateful. If we’re together . . . look, she can’t hurt us. . . .”

It was the wrong thing to say. Of course the Strep could hurt them, she could hurt them
plenty
, and thinking Rita didn’t know it was stupid. She could
see
the walls going up just by the change in the other girl’s expression, and there was nothing to say to fix her stupid mistake because Rita was already moving.

She brushed past Ellie like a burning wind, and Ell had time to think
that’s weird, she doesn’t even smell right
before the door opened—

—and Rita slammed it,
hard
, a sharp biting sound that broke the silencer and was sure to wake Laurissa up. Which meant Ellie had to move, and
now
. She did, just barely making it into the servants’ hall before the Strep’s bedroom door cracked, a dangerous golden slice of light falling out, cutting off the rest of the house. Ellie peeked around the corner, unable to look away, unable to breathe until the slice narrowed and the master suite’s door closed with a soft deadly snick.

Her entire body trembled. She was wet with sweat, and good luck sleeping tonight, even though exhaustion weighed on her like lead.

So much for allies, or friends, or anything else.

Bitch.

Z
IGZAGGING
S
OUTHKING
S
TREET WAS AT ITS LIVELIEST
on weekends. You couldn’t park anywhere near, even on Highclere, which meant Ruby did her bargain hunting elsewhere when school wasn’t in. That was just fine, anyway, since Ellie didn’t want either of her friends seeing what she did when she could escape the four-spired house on Perrault Street on a Saturday. There was a list of chores as long as her arm to come back to, no doubt . . . but she could steal a little time.

Girls of a certain social strata didn’t ride the bus in New Haven. Which was why she was always careful. For one thing, she never wore her school blazer, even if it was old and ratty enough to be secondhand. And never, ever a white button-down with a rounded turndown collar, since that was a dead giveaway. No maryjanes, no jangles of silver on her feet, no ultra-thin headbands holding her hair back.

Instead, it was a sloppy gray-washed T-shirt under a jacket she’d traded a spinning gemcharm to a lizard-skinned jack for, a rough denim thing splattered with paint and with a faint odor of burning clinging to its creases. Jeans frayed at the knees, and a pair of battered trainers she’d done outside chores in for years, pinching her toes but still reasonably held together with dull gray tougher-than-titon-skin charmbind tape. She couldn’t do anything about the ring. Leaving it anywhere inside the house wasn’t a good idea.

Laurissa sometimes stared hungrily at the star sapphire, though it kept itself dull and dead in her presence. It always had. It was far more active nowadays, though, and sooner or later something was bound to happen.

Anyway, Ellie turned the stone toward her palm before she caught the bus at Perrault and 42nd, so that only the silver band showed. It could have been any metal, really, and she was safe enough.

The bus lurched and swayed all the way up 42nd to Grimmskel, and then lumbered toward Deerskin Station. It was stuffed with cabbage-reeking jacks—feathered and furred, those born twisted by Potential into odd shapes, full of anger and confined to the lowest-paying jobs—and a shapeless mass of non-charmers, some smelling of alcohol and some of nicotine, all of desperation.

Often Ellie wondered if she gave off the same invisible aroma.

She hopped off the lumbering silver beetle of a bus at Deerskin and set off for Southking without incident, which was a blessing. The first few times, she’d been terrified one of the jacks was going to eat her. There’d been a scuffle at the back of the bus, and a baby screaming, too.

Before they’d moved to New Haven, Ellie had foggy memories of things discussed in hushed tones, adults dropping their voices when they noticed a child was present. It took her a short while to figure out that if you shut up and didn’t ask questions, they would drop other hints. Especially because of Dad’s work—he knew, often enough, the stories that hadn’t made it into the papers and tabloids.

Stories about jacks with a taste for charmer flesh, or charismatic Twists who gathered more than one gang of the dispossessed and allowed criminal hungers free rein inside the blight of the core. There were other dangers, especially for young Potential-carrying girls. Lots and
lots
of them.

Money and connections bought safety, and that safety came with a hedge of restrictions. Only an idiot wouldn’t draw the conclusion that the restrictions wouldn’t be there if there wasn’t a high chance of something going awfully, terribly wrong.

Her usual spot on Southking, right next to what used to be a small bodega and was now a red-curtained shop called Alterative Boutique, as if that wasn’t a name that would give anyone the shivers, was taken by another scruffy charmer in a long blue denim coat hawking popcharms and eyegrabbers, so she headed against the flow of traffic, uphill.

The hawkers and buskers were out in full force today, a press of tattered velvet, denim, and cheap glinting metal, singing their sell-songs.

“
Pret
-ty silver,
buy
some
sweet
silver,
Miss
?” Shaking a fistful of chiming, thread-thin charmsilver bangles.

Waving a blood-red flower as big as a fist. “
Pe
-onies for a
pen
ny, three days
guar
anteed!”

A jack with a high gray bone crest on the back of his head snapped his long spidery fingers, his nails clicking in time to his cry of “
Buy
some fresh
goff
charms, two for a
cre
dit!”

On the corner of Southking and Bastir, where the latter curved north toward the market part of town, there was a young man playing a violin, his shock of russet hair under the bright spring sunshine matching the red in his coat, clashing with his yellow jeans. The bow trembled as he drew it across the strings, a small charm to make the music audible further away resonating within varnished wood and catgut. A delightful little shiver went through her as she passed, the charm’s simplicity and power perfectly married to its function. Nice work. Except there was a brittle undertone to the music that made her think of sharp teeth and beady eyes, a nasty smell like wet fur, so she hurried past.

Further up, there was a space—a bodega’s brick wall, covered with an intaglio of graffiti. Nothing that looked likely to give her any trouble, but Ellie still spent a few moments leaning against the wall, her felt hat pulled down low to hide her hair and shade her eyes. When nobody moved to shove her along, she shook her fingers out. The sapphire was a comforting warmth against her palm, and she began searching the faces passing by.

Non-charmers with net shopping bags, jacks with feathers or fur or other odd mutations, carrying backpacks or canvas slings. All with sneaking sidelong glances, credits changing hands in corners, kept down low out of the sightline. You couldn’t quite get
everything
on Southking, not the way you could in Shake’s Alley or nearer the core where the Twists and black charmers, half-Twisted themselves, sold nasty, expensive, brutal charms for poison, death, curse.

But you could get a lot.

No formal or informal apprenticeship or she’d be producing in a workroom and selling in an atelier. No membership in a charm-clan, producing work under a clan’s sigil even if she wasn’t powerful enough to have a personal one. She obviously didn’t have any sort of license either, or she’d be in a tent over on Rampion or in the Market District proper. It was clear she was too young to have her Potential settled, so any charm she gave might have an unpredictable side-effect, but it was likely to be cheap as well as powerful. There were some valuable things unsettled Potential could do, even if some of the High Charm Calculus equations went into a tangle of weird inconstant values as soon as someone whose Potential wasn’t settled enough worked at them. The intersection of math and magic was never static; it kept responding to every breath of chance and Potential.

Still, you had to at least have been exposed to Calc before your Potential settled. It inoculated you a little bit against Twisting.

A lean, short jack, bone spurs on his cheeks slicing out through the suppurating, too-thin skin on his stretched face, grinned and slunk a little closer. His laboriously multicolored jacket marked him as one of the Simmerside Tops; that particular jack gang was pushing into Southking on weekends to take a cut from those too weak to resist—or those who didn’t want trouble.

The edge of Ellie’s Potential sparked, a hard sharp dart of light describing the arc of her personal space.
Back off, bottom-feeder.
“Cryboy.”

“Bluegirl.” The weeping fluid on his cheeks, where the bone rubbed through, glistened. He’d called her a number of things, trying to make her twitch, before finally settling. Now on Southking, she was slightly known. “You been gone a while.”

“Busy.”
And you’re not getting any protection money from me. Mithrus, you’re a sucking hole.

“This is a nice spot. Really nice.” Another smirk. What would it be like to have your cheekbones cut that way, to feel the proof of mutation on your face? Every time you looked in the mirror, to be reminded of a difference you couldn’t hide?

Not like the Strep. Nobody saw through
her
, at least nobody over eighteen.

Ellie’s fingers tensed. The rest of her stayed loose, her heart skipping along a little too quickly, but that was okay. It wouldn’t show. Not to
him
, anyway. She’d popped a dartcharm at him the first time he tried to squeeze her for a credit or two, and proved she had enough Potential to give him serious trouble if he pushed harder. Since then he’d just hung around, like a jackal.

As long as Ellie kept him where she could see him, in the middle of a daylight crowd, there wasn’t much he would do. If he caught her near dark, or alone in a lonely place, well, that would be different. “Thanks for the compliment. Now run along, jack. You’re blocking my sunshine.”

“Sure thing,
charmer girl
.” He spat it like the jack insult it was, all hot air and halfway to Twist. Ellie restrained the urge to roll her eyes. Instead, she just watched him drift away along the tideline of the crowd.

Business picked up after that. A steady stream of memorycharms to kids her age, two credits a pop. System flushes inscribed on cheap brass discs to get feyhemp or milqueweed out of their bodies before the public schools did another round of quick-release blister testing, five credits. One skinny, rumple-haired, middle-aged woman who handed over a fistful of crumpled paper credits and walked away with a small colorless glass vial of charged sylph-ether Ellie had taken the risk of stealing. The woman’s hurrying became an almost-drunken stagger as she vanished, probably running back to her doss where a lamp and a few lumps of tarry poppy extract waited.

Charged sylph-ether gave an extra kick to the poppy tar’s high; the woman wasn’t far enough along the curve of addiction to start burning it with whatever taper was to hand.

Ellie almost left after that one. Ice and vagrant’s tears were hardcore addictions, but they left Potential alone. Feyhemp could burn you for a little while, and milqueleaf made you stupid. Charmweed could addict you if you didn’t have Potential; if you did it would just give you a lethargic hangover. But poppy tar fucked you
right
up
, and burned any Potential you might have out of you.

As much as she hated High Charm Calc, there was no way Ellie would do anything to irrevocably damage her ability to work with Potential. It was, after all, her only ticket out of Perrault Street. She ran it over and over in her head and came up with the same thing each time. Good luck getting an apprenticeship if a Sigiled charmer dropped a hint that you were unstable or lazy, and good luck getting into a charm-clan when your stepmother was a stranger in town who had made no friends with her avid social climbing.

Most high-powered charmers liked a bit of friendly rivalry, but there were those that took it too far. Funny how nobody seemed to think that maybe Laurissa wasn’t a nice person at home, considering how she jostled and elbowed for clients so hard.

That was adults for you. They didn’t think about you until you turned old enough, unless they wanted something. Even Dad hadn’t thought very hard about Laurissa, or maybe she charmed him right into forgetting everything but her. Who knew?

Even Mother Hel seemed to think everything was just peachy now. Or she was too busy to keep an eye out for Strep-related bruises.

In any case, the only escape possible was saving up, getting into Ebermerle College, and keeping her head attached in the process.

An afternoon’s steady work got her a ringing-empty head and a pocket full of crumpled credits, as well as a gnawing belly. It took physical energy to control and contain Potential, especially when you had to be extra careful of it slopping over the sides of the charm and sparking into chaos.

Still, nobody’d had any complaints about her work so far. Stealing the sylph-ether had been an inspired choice, and she was already planning how to grab more. Today had been a good day; being careful until she learned enough to plan for everything had paid off. She’d almost doubled her stash, and all it had taken was a little forethought.

Her gaze flicked through the crowds, and she calculated her exit stroll. She’d learned, after having been chased by Cryboy and his gang of low-level jacks one afternoon, not to shout that she was going anywhere in particular. And
especially
not to relax.

It was just like being at home, really.

She was halfway to Highclere and the beginning of her circuitous route toward the bus station that would let her catch the 151 to Perrault when someone shouted behind her.

“Hey!”

Every inch of Ellie’s skin tingled. She didn’t stop to wonder if the shout was for her—when your Potential sparked like that, it was best to move first and ask questions later. She didn’t know if it was Cryboy pounding the pavement after her, except it wasn’t like him to yell unless he was pushing his prey toward his fellow bottom-feeders.

So she took off in the last direction a pursuer would expect—a three-quarter turn to her left, darting across Southking’s four lanes. Brakes screeched, someone laid on the horn, but on a Saturday afternoon everything was crowded enough around here to mean she wouldn’t get squashed under someone’s imported hunk of gas-burning junk
or
a straining pedicab.

“
Wait!
” whoever it was yelled, but Ellie had no intention of making it any easier on him. She jagged down an alley she’d scoped out a long time ago, scrambling for a fire escape hanging on rust-eaten screws. It shuddered and yawed alarmingly, but it held her all the way to the top, and she streaked across the roof of the warehouse that was now Beaman’s Emporium—shampoo only half a credit per bottle, if you didn’t mind the risk of your hair turning into seaweed, and smokes two per packet if you didn’t mind them being cut with whatever some jack in some Eastron factory had to hand that day—and clattered down the stairs on the opposite side.

A stitch grabbed her side with sharpclaw fingers, and her entire midriff seized up. She found herself on hands and knees in the Emporium parking lot, staring at pointed glitters of broken glass and a few foil-bright candy wrappers. To her right loomed a huge junker, a rust-colored Porsline truck that had to be almost as ancient as the Reeve itself. To her left was a plain of weed-cracked, open pavement, but there wasn’t a single thing moving on its broad, bumpy back.