Weather Witch (27 page)

He was not sure which to be more offended by, the one revealing his middle name to the world or the one that claimed a “faithful reproduction of a murderer’s image.”

He motioned to Jonathan with his chin. The same chin now covered in an unappealing scruff. If he’d had access to a proper razor and strap he’d do the thing himself, bringing his face back to a proper cleanliness instead of allowing his sideburns to crawl toward his chin.

Jonathan frowned, running his hand across his own stubble, pulling thumb and forefinger together at the end of his jaw in a thoughtful gesture before striding forward to the bar.

Rowen blinked. Then, throwing his shoulders back, he followed, standing at Jonathan’s side.

“A bit of your house ale for my friend and me,” Jonathan requested of the flat-faced man behind the bar. He pulled out a coin and tapped its edge on the wood.

The man swept the coin into his meaty palm and filled two tankards, setting them down with a clank before the two younger men.

Jonathan took a long sip of his ale. “Any news of import?”

Rowen nearly spit his ale out when the bartender hooked a thumb in the direction of the posters.

“Riders came through here this morning, putting those up and asking questions. Two fellows, one of decent breeding, are on the run. Seems the ugly one”—he pointed to the image of Rowen—”shot a man of higher rank.” The bartender leaned across the bar, saying, “Probably told he was ugly as the south end of a north-facing mule.” He nodded, lips pursed in a smug smile.

Jonathan laughed. “He is one ugly bastard.”

Rowen’s face colored at the comment.

The bartender pulled away, laughing, and said, “And in my opinion a man should never be shot for speaking the truth.”

“True, true,” Jonathan agreed.

They drank the rest of their ales in silence, Rowen pouting and Jonathan occasionally chuckling to himself.

“What precisely was your intention—going in there and asking for news once you’d seen we are
it
?” Rowen hissed as they left. “We
are
the news, Jonathan!”

Jonathan snorted. “No. No we are not. Some other poor bastards are—and one of them is quite the ugly brute.” He reached up and tweaked the tip of Rowen’s nose. “Be thankful you’re a handsome beast, you ladykiller, you. No one would dare imagine you and that man on the flyer are one and the same.”

With a laugh, he mounted his horse, nodded to Rowen, and nudged Silver into a trot.

Holgate

Even though her Making Tank placed her higher up in the tower with a small barred window overlooking the wall and the water of the lake beyond, none of it interested her today.

“What does it look like?” The voice beyond the wall, introduced as Caleb, asked.

Jordan jerked upright from where she slouched, dozing in the scant and slanting sunlight. Caleb’s voice echoed in her ears. “What does
what
look like?”

“The outside—the sun, the sky, the valley … any bit of it.”

“Do you not see it when you are taken for Making?”

He laughed, the sound sharp and cutting. “No. The Maker knows how I miss it—the outside, so he keeps it from me. I have not seen the sky in…” There was a long pause as Caleb thought. “Nineteen months, three weeks, and … two days.”

“So long…”

“I refuse to be numbered among his success stories,” he hissed. “I will not let him break me.”

“You are not a Witch either?” Jordan asked, turning around and scooting as close to the hole in the wall as she could get.

Laughter roiled up again, but this time it was heartfelt. “If I have my way, the Maker will never know what I truly am. I will always control who truly knows the truth of me.”

Jordan nodded and rolled up to a standing position, crossing the small space between wall and window in only a few short strides. With a new appreciation for the world outside her window, she described the scene with all the vividness and detail she could muster.

*   *   *

The Maker summoned Jordan to the laboratory early that day. The Wardens growled and shoved her inside, closing the door behind her. She pitched forward, catching herself inches from falling against a table’s edge. Straightening, she brushed her hands down the front of her dress to neaten it. It was more out of habit now, she realized, than need. Her dress was irrepressibly filthy and the last things to right the damage were her own grubby fingers. She looked at her fingernails and the dirt always edging beneath them. She hooked a nail beneath another and did her best to clean away the offensive grime, but shortly gave up. Some battles were no longer worth fighting. Besides, when they realized she was innocent surely they’d give her a proper bath and a new dress to return home in.

If they realized she was innocent. Her fingers flew to the pin still nestled in the deep folds of fabric at her elbow and she traced the edges of its shape with one hesitant fingertip. The metal was cool to the touch and smooth as silk.

Rowen’s heart.

Her own heart beat a little faster at the thought.

Or maybe it was the strangeness of her surroundings.

It seemed odd that the Wardens would leave her here, in the Maker’s main laboratory, unattended. In the dark.

Waiting for the man who would only bring her more pain.

She stood perfectly still, her eyes roving the poorly lit space, her finger and thumb stroking the heart pinned to her sleeve.

Alone in the chamber, her eyes widened at the noise of something tapping softly near the room’s dim corner, like fingers on glass. She eased her way toward the noise, her eyes wide and round to better pull in the little bit of light that showed from the resting stormlights. The room’s walls were lined with long wooden countertops covered in jars, fat or fluted glass tubes, sturdy-looking beakers, and oddly shaped bottles and boxes. Some were stoppered with cork, others with rubber or metal, and disturbingly few bore labels she understood.

In a small cask a thick fluid moved, bubbles rising so frequently they sizzled through the murky liquid. She paused there a moment, watching the viscous liquid until a bubble reached its top, pierced the skin, and snapped open, belching out a smell that reminded Jordan of the docks in summer. Wrinkling her nose against the briny scent, she moved on. Her fingers skimmed the counter’s edges, her chains rustling between her wrists, a reminder of her imprisonment even while she explored the dim space independently.

She paused before a ghostly shape nested deep in a dusty cubbyhole and squinted, forcing her eyes to adjust and define the curve of the bulbous thing so white it nearly glowed from the cabinet’s recess. She gasped, recognizing it. Two black eye sockets peered blindly back at her, the skull leering out at her—its smile broad and amiable. Cheerful in a frighteningly alien way.

Her fingers tightened on the counter’s edge.

She had only seen a drawing of a skull in a book sitting open in one of the more questionable stores in the Below, and only once. Still … this was smaller than she expected. Her own head was a bit bigger, of that she was quite sure. She rolled her lower lip between her teeth and eased back and away.

The cask’s bubbling intensified and Jordan raised an eyebrow, her gaze drifting back toward it. On the counter a bottle shivered and another trembled, walking forward on its round glass edge. Jordan backed up farther. All the jars and bottles with liquid in them—all the containers that had contents able to slosh—sloshed and quivered and danced below the little grinning skull—a child’s skull, Jordan realized—like anxious living things.

Like anxious living things with a secret to tell.

She reached out, wrapped a shaking hand around the skull, and, cradling it in hand, pulled it out of the dark pit it had been condemned to.

The bottles and flasks all stopped their chattering at once. The silence that descended was somehow more disturbing than the clattering noise of a moment before.

There was no sound in the chamber now except for Jordan’s breathing and the strange and ceaseless tapping that sounded from the chamber’s still unexplored corner.

She held the skull so its eye sockets were level with her own wide eyes and she peered into them, wondering what color the eyes had once been. Had they been ringed with thick lashes—was this a boy or a girl who’d lost his or her head? Slowly she turned the skull, pausing again. Jordan drew down a deep breath.

There was magick here—magick that was dark and dirty and disappointing. And had absolutely nothing to do with her.

The goose bumps on her arms raising the fine hairs there seemed to insist this magick wanted to have more than a little to do with her—regardless of her own wishes.

She tried to force her hands to stop their trembling but that only intensified the rattling that shook her straight to her bones. With all the care she could muster, she set the skull back in its cubby and stepped away once more.

Dread uncurled in her stomach, but Jordan headed toward the noise, her feet pulling her body, unbidden, forward. The child’s skull was behind her, and the blackness nestling around it felt just as heavy as the darkness cloaking the corner before her.

Light slipped like quicksilver across the domed surface of a large bell jar. The tapping sound grew louder, more frantic, and she saw a flicker of movement behind the glass’s surface. She drew nearer and the sound intensified, the tapping becoming a soft drumbeat as a dozen pairs of wings—of all shapes and patterns, colors and sizes—beat against the glass in protest of being confined.

Butterflies flew in a controlled panic, wings stroking the glass.

Jordan’s hand flew to the pendant at her neck.

Light blared in the chamber and she stumbled back.

“They’re beautiful, aren’t they?” The Maker’s voice scraped down her spine and Jordan swung around to face him, her chain swinging between her wrists.

She was as free as the butterflies in the bell jar. She could move, but not far enough to mean anything.

The Maker strolled across the floor and flicked a finger against the jar, sending the butterflies into a full-blown panic, their wings clattering en masse against the opposite wall. “Did you know their wings seem to have similarities to the stormcells?”

Jordan shook her head, mute in his presence.

“They build and hold power in their wings thanks to sunlight the way Witches pull storms into themselves. Some believe they bring sunlight—that’s why they’ve been nicknamed sunseekers—that they have a symbiotic relationship with the sun itself, calling to it the way your kind calls to darkness and storms.” He looked her up and down. “Nothing to say?” He frowned. “That is so very frustrating—talking at someone instead of
to
someone. You should speak freely, Jordan.”

She looked down, focusing on the spot she knew her feet were hiding beneath the hem of her dress. “
My
kind calls to nothing.
My
kind is Grounded.”

“You’re just like the rest of them,” he said, disappointment clear in his softening tone. “You resent me. You resent this gift I am giving you—this freedom from being Grounded. Do you know what I would give to no longer be Grounded?” His hand dropped forward and he snagged her chain, yanking her forward.

“Let us begin then,” he said, placing her in the chair and pulling the buckles tight across her wrists. “I do not hold your words against you, Jordan. You should speak freely,” he insisted, his mouth so close to her ear as he cinched the final strap that all she heard was the rasp of his words. “Yes, Jordan, if thoughts or words well up in you, you should always speak freely. Or, better yet—
scream
.”

On the Road from Philadelphia

It was Rowen who suggested he stand guard at the river’s edge, letting the horses drink from the shallowest part of the water. “Perhaps we should head directly to Holgate. When Jordan is cleared of these charges, she will need someone to bring her home.”

Jonathan kept his head down, settling Silver’s mane with the brush he’d wisely packed into the saddlebags. “That is a good point, young sir. And as good a direction to head as any.” He tugged at Silver’s ear and the horse flicked it and whinnied good-naturedly. “You could be Miss Jordan’s escort—if not her hero,” Jonathan teased.

“I’m only hero material if your cousin Frederick includes me in his fiction,” Rowen mused darkly.

“There is more hero to you than I think you’ve ever imagined,” Jonathan said, pausing in Silver’s grooming to look across the horse’s back to Rowen. “I tend to believe, if you will indulge me a moment, that a man can never be disproven of heroism unless he fails when pushed to perform. Untested, who knows? You,
friend
”—the word choice was not lost on Rowen—”have only now begun to be pushed. To be tested. Your potential is yet unglimpsed. There is the stuff of legends within you. Of that I am sure.”

Rowen looked away. “So we head to Holgate.”

“Yes. And you consider that you might yet be Miss Jordan’s hero. She is a damsel in distress. What is more worthy a hero’s task than to be a knight in shining armor for a damsel?”

Rowen laughed. Rudely.

Jonathan was not amused. “Consider that you might be the happily ever after to her currently tragic tale.”

Rowen mumbled something devoid of commitment and said, “You read too much fiction.” He cleared his throat. “Perhaps. If I am to be her hero—the happily ever after to her currently tragic tale—then I must say you are a good part of that story. This madness is all made more bearable by the assistance of a fine friend such as yourself. A fine friend is just as important as a fine woman in having a true happily ever after.”

Jonathan snorted. “You might disagree with your current sentiment if you spend more time with Miss Jordan. Unchaperoned.”

Rowen blinked and then burst out laughing. “Perhaps!”

They didn’t hear, see, or smell it until it was on top of Jonathan, its broad flipper hands catching his head and twisting his neck with a crunch so loud Silver bolted as Jonathan crumpled to the ground, the Merrow sinking down with him.