6.

25^TH SEVENMONTH, 277 A.U.

THE STONE SCALES, CORMA

Erasmus Pardon was standing in front of the small shaving mirror propped on his chest of drawers when he heard a small, insistent cough.

Rowena hovered in the doorway, a hand clamped at the small of her back. The two long ribbons of her corset’s stays waved disobediently behind her. “I, um.” She smiled ruefully. “I need help? And there’s nobody else here, so. . .”

He had been finishing his cravat, but as Rowena’s need seemed to have left her poised at the edge of indecency, Erasmus abandoned it over one shoulder. “Turn about.”

She obeyed. He frowned down at the line of hook-and-eye clasps that formed the corset running over her underslip, working them closed from bottom to top before cinching the runaway ribbons. It was scarcely the first time he’d been asked to wrestle such a device into service. There had been Leyah, and even Rare, on a few occasions. Neither had trembled with such fretful energy, though.

“Nervous?”

“S’pose. Excited, too.” Rowena put a hand to the doorframe, rocking a bit in the heeled dress boots Anselm had purchased. “Is that, um . . .” She glanced over her shoulder. “Is that all, then?”

“As long as there isn’t an over-corset, yes.”

“Master Meteron said I’d disappear turning sideways if I had any more cinching-up.”

“He’s not wrong.”

The girl turned, smoothing down her slip’s cream-colored silk. Though it wasn’t meant to be seen, it boasted near as much lace and ribbon as the gown itself. Erasmus had long been absent from any social event’s invitation roll, but he remembered enough of their details to be certain of that much.

Rowena had already pinned up her hair with clasps limned in mother-of-pearl and gold. They gleamed against her mass of dark hair, less unruly than Erasmus was accustomed to. She wore a little powder but seemed otherwise unpainted, which met with his grudging approval. He would have words enough for Anselm once they had a moment out of Rowena’s earshot. Cluttering up the argument with sartorial complaints was beside any practical point. And yet—

It had not yet been a year since Erasmus first laid eyes on the scrawny, bruised guttersnipe girl, boldly silencing a pub full of Westgate Bridge’s most unflappable regulars by interrupting the Alchemist’s supper. He marveled at how much only a few months had done.

Some things had not changed, of course. Her rough beginnings would always be written on her hands, crossed with pale scars, and the break in her left eyebrow where a little pink line showed how a guard had opened her face up against the grating of Reverend Chalmers’s cell. She could hide the first with her gloves and the second with a bit of painting, but the street would always linger on her tongue. It was coated with the rushed slang of Oldtemple and Blackbottom End, weighted with vowels dropped like puddled iron. But Rowena held herself with a certain stubborn pride, too—something an order of magnitude greater than the audacity he’d seen in her that first night at the Abbey. Something earned. It fitted her better than any gown.

“You look lovely,” he said, his voice catching. He turned back to the shaving glass and his neglected cravat.

Rowena looked down at herself, twisting and swishing the underskirt with evident pleasure. “S’nice, en’t it? Just the first bit, though. The rest of the dress is—”

“Anselm’s coach will arrive soon. Best finish up, girl.”

Erasmus felt Rowena’s gaze strafing his back—and something else pressing at him, too. A peeking-in she must have imagined was coy, but was really more akin to throwing the shutters open on a bedroom at noon. “If there’s something you want to know,” he murmured over the knot in his hands, “you’d be better served to ask aloud.”

He saw her studying him in the mirror. Sometimes, the temptation to . . . visit . . . was too much for her. The connection they’d forged in a desperate moment after his fall from the Cathedral had somehow never broken. Having pushed her way through his barred doors once, she assumed they’d never be properly shut again. Curiosity awakened by some oddment, Rowena would reach for his mind, try to touch it—try to ask without words things she couldn’t quite say.

You were the same way, once, he reminded himself.

Erasmus Pardon had been nearly eight years old when he finally determined why his head was always filled with the clamor of other people’s thoughts and fears, a discovery that transformed a terrifying childhood spent as far from other people as could be managed into an entirely different kind of isolation. What had been his curse became his crutch. Never a talkative child—indeed, so silent and distant most of the people in his boyhood home of Long Meadow had assumed him dull-witted—he became all but mute, giving up the inefficiencies of speech. If it was hard to find the right words to say, he needn’t bother searching them out. He would reach, and the shorthand of mind-to-mind would translate for him.

Small wonder that Rowena, who had discovered that cold night atop the Old Cathedral that she could do in his mind what he had done for decades in the minds of others, found it hard to resist the same temptation.

“I didn’t have a question,” she answered hastily. “I wanted you to know that you look . . . Well. Saying it seemed so odd, so—”

His cravat finally tamed, Erasmus swept his dress coat up from the rack. “Rude?” he suggested.

Rowena pulled a face. “No. For being a mindreader, you’re a lousy judge of intentions.”

He grunted, shrugging into the coat. Rowena’s hand touched his sleeve.

“I was going to say you actually look quite handsome.”

Erasmus arched an eyebrow. “Well.”

“Well?”

“You’ve terrible taste in men.”

“Be-arrr. . .”

“There are worse problems, I suppose.”

Rowena gave his shoulder a clout that stung more for the boniness of her knuckles than the strength of the blow.

“Arse.”

A knock echoed up the stairway from the Stone Scales’s front door.

“Oh, pissbuckets,” Rowena gasped.

Erasmus hooked his cane off the coat rack, scowling. “Put on the last of your dress and see if you can scrub clean your tongue. We won’t be at this party long if you can’t dress up what comes out of your mouth.” Then he assayed the stairs to the back room, teeth gritted, telling his screaming right knee it would have to register its complaints another time.

“Dog-wanker! Fuckwit! Turd blossom!” Rowena taunted, laughing, from the room above.

Anselm stood just inside the shop door, tucking the key back into his wallet. He nodded toward the stairs.

“Having a row already?”

“Just clearing the verbal mechanism.”

They assessed each other in a quick sweep—tailed coats and brocade vests and pocket chains. Anselm Meteron had been born to such style. Erasmus felt more like an actual bear kitted out for a circus.

He consulted his inner pockets, taking a superfluous inventory for pipe and reading spectacles and a cache of chemical conveniences his hosts might be less than pleased to have on their premises. “Tuck the alley piece strapped to your arm closer to the wrist,” he told Anselm. “It’s bunching the sleeve near the elbow.”

Anselm unbuttoned his coat sleeve and made the adjustment. “God’s balls, you’d think I’d just signed my first campaigning license.”

“No one without our experience would have noticed.”

“And the Rolands might have finally hired better security. They’ve learned a lot since ’63.”

Haven’t we all? Erasmus thought. He didn’t share the thought aloud, or even reach out with it. With Anselm, he rarely needed to. They shared a look, and it was a whole conversation, Anselm’s pat on his arm its punctuation.

“All right,” Rowena’s voice called from the stairs. “I’m coming down, but someone ought to stand at the bottom to catch me when I trip and break my face.”

Anselm smirked at Erasmus, who rolled his eyes in response, waving him on. “Go rescue the girl.”

From his vantage point, all Erasmus could see was Anselm waiting at the end of the stair rail, his face—always ten years too young, a lie taken for granted in a life of deceptions—turned upward. His expression shifted, the whetted edge of his knife-smile turning. It was a look that would have earned another man the drubbing of his life, had Erasmus caught him using it on Rowena.

“God’s balls, cricket. There was a girl under that grime after all!”

She stepped to the landing, dressed in cartridge pleats of emerald green and a bustled hem that showed a provocative helping of calf. She put out her elbow, though at too steep an angle, as if she might jab it up into Anselm’s throat any moment. Not an altogether bad plan, Erasmus supposed.

Anselm took the proffered arm and levered it down through his own. “Ready, Bear?”

“God help us all,” Erasmus muttered.

He opened the door and let his companions usher themselves out and down the street to where the carriage had been forced to park, lacking proper clearance so deep in the highstreets of Westgate Bridge. He closed the shop door, turned the key, and set, at the top and bottom of its frame, resting just inside the jamb, two alchemical spheres. He’d come up with them some months before, and only used them when he knew the shop would be empty a long while. They’d never been tried in a moment of need, but his laboratory tests had never yet lied to him. They had proven the little devices quite the match for even the most unlikely intruder.

Anselm Meteron’s carriage driver and footman snapped to attention as soon as Master Meteron emerged round the bend with Rowena on his arm and the Old Bear coming up behind. After handing Rowena up to the carriage box like the proper lady she hoped very much to be taken for, they were off, filling the street with the clamor of chimes and clattering gear-works.

Inside the carriage, Meteron flicked a look at his old friend and smirked. “Didn’t you wear that suit at a ball fifteen years ago?”

“More than likely. I don’t own another.”

“Huh.”

“What?” the Old Bear growled, wringing the head of his cane rather like a neck.

“Surprised it still fits.”

“I am just full of surprises,” the old man muttered.

As they rode to the Greatduke’s villa at the far east of Corma proper, Anselm chattering amiably at his friend, poking and winking at the Old Bear’s expense, Rowena enjoyed not being noticed by her companions. She was afraid of what they might see, if they really looked. My gloves are too long and they’re sliding down my arms, but I can’t take them off or everyone’ll see my hands. I should have chosen the ones that stop at the wrist. Why did I have to get all fancy? Stupid, stupid . . .

After a half-hour’s journey, the city parted like an opening zipper, the jagged teeth of towering buildings falling away to either side. Rowena caught sight of the Rolands’ mansion, and in the same moment lost her breath.

Rowena had been alive long enough to know folk seemed in the habit of debating how to measure what a man was made of—what made him important or grand or what-have-you. It wasn’t money; it was esteem. It wasn’t esteem; it was grace. It wasn’t grace; it was propriety. It wasn’t propriety; it was connections. Sometimes, when folk in the Abbey really got down into their cups, they’d decide it wasn’t any of these things because it all came down to clockworks and carriages and caskets full of clink.

Rowena might have chosen any of a dozen different measures. In each of them, Greatduke Jonathan Roland would have fared a damn sight better than anyone had a right to.

Staring past the carriage’s drawn sash, Rowena took the measure of Greatduke Roland in units of courtly guests, and glimmering decorations, and rows of courtesy carriages fetching the most honored guests from their homes at his expense.

Seeing this villa broke the spell Master Meteron’s carriage had cast. It was not that his carriage—appointed all in brass and mirrors and gilt details—was anything shabby. But it was a singular thing, and the Greatduke’s estate was ringed with that carriage’s perfect mates, drawn by stolid, steaming fore-engines or stamping clockwork beasts, built not just into the shapes of horses, but all kinds of fanciful designs. Ostriches and rhinoceroses, unicorns and griffons, tigers and wolves, and, yes, even one with a brace of bears done all in shining silver. They looked like polar bears, lumbering along with unhurried dignity.

The greatness of the Greatduke surged like the tide. When the footman opened the carriage door and ushered Rowena gently down, it closed upon her, swallowing her whole.

She didn’t even realize until the Alchemist’s hand rested on her shoulder, a handkerchief secreted in his palm, that she had begun to cry.

Wordless, Rowena stole her fingers through his, drawing the handkerchief from his weathered hand. She touched it to her eyes, hoping she hadn’t made a ruin of her powder or the little tracing of kohl she’d dared to try out. She knew so little about how to wear it in the first place, she stood next to no chance of repairing it.

Rowena felt the Old Bear’s voice in her mind.

Are you well?

I’m fine. I think. It’s just . . . It’s so pretty and I’m just . . .

He squeezed her shoulder. Master Meteron took her arm again.

“Are you ready for this, cricket?” he whispered.

Rowena blinked. There was a line drawn between his eyebrows. It took a moment for her to realize that he wasn’t upset at her dithering. He was worried.

She sniffed and stowed the Old Bear’s handkerchief in the bosom of her dress.

“Lead the way, Master Meteron.”

He did, the Alchemist following a few paces after. Rowena struggled to keep her eyes from darting around and snapping up the thousand reminders great and small that this was not where she belonged.

“Tonight,” Anselm said, looking forward and nodding at a tall, wasp-waisted woman with a pale, powdered face, the veritable twin of the many strangers milling all around, “you’d best not call me that.”

“If I can’t call you Master Meteron, what should I call you?”

He shrugged in his one-shouldered way. “Uncle Anselm. Most people know I had a sister, and a niece. They don’t know that was Rare.”

Rowena detected a hitch in his tone that she might have missed if a certain, shadowy voice inside her had not known what to listen for. It was a presence that knew Meteron far better than she did, and it was at least as uncomfortable as she was in the swirls and eddies of the Roland mansion.

“All right,” Rowena said. She smiled. So what if that smile was her own affectation? She’d need it here. All the polished, pretty faces, all the gilded grins, and she hadn’t yet seen the first button on the Great-duke’s jacket. She’d need a great deal more theater to make it through the night.

And so it began. Anselm Meteron introduced her to the curious, the kind, and the clearly dissembling. In less than a quarter-hour, his confidence made the words “This is my niece, Rowena” seem nearly true. Even Rowena could have believed it.

Meteron was a guest at the ball, but he was more its master than anyone else gracing its halls. If the Greatduke and his Greatduchess had descended from their rooms above the spacious gathering halls and parlors and wine rooms, they hadn’t made themselves known. The ball abhorred that social vacuum, snatching Meteron up eagerly as its replacement host. Notoriety and grace and the devil’s own wit made it easy for him to hold court. Standing so close to his ambient social heat, Rowena caught herself wishing she really was his niece.

Before long, he turned her out onto one of the several dance floors, teaching her the paces of the minuet. More than a few very eligible-looking young women lingered at the periphery, feigning disinterest badly. They kept well supplied with iced cordials and glared at Rowena over the lace of their fans. In only a fraction of the night, Rowena had gone from terror at being noticed to reveling in the power Master Meteron had granted her. It teased out her wickedest smile, which he must have noticed. He leaned close, murmuring in her ear during her next close and turn.

“Tell me which of these vultures watching you with such envy is wealthiest. I’ll give you a clue: you can’t tell by the dress.”

Rowena flicked her gaze over to them, scanning up and down. “’Course you can’t,” she sniffed. “You can get really nice dresses on credit, if you’re keen to. Jewelry, too.”

“And therefore?”

“Gloves and hairpins prove it best,” she whispered. “Nobody lends gloves because they get all soiled holding hands in dances or picking up refreshments. And nobody just drops their fancy borrowed choker and doesn’t notice. But hairpins fall out all the time.” She pointed her chin toward a curvaceous woman in an ecru gown chased with rose and ivy patterns. Her ginger hair was a confection of jewel-studded clips and curl-pins. “She’s probably got a couple thousand sovereigns poking out of her head, and they drop out all the time. You have to be a special kind of rich not to care about shedding sovereigns like hairs in a brush.”

“Very good. That’s the Greatduchess Avergnon—the new Lady Avergnon, I should say. Her great-aunt did her the favor of dying in her sleep back in Threemonth and leaving a surprisingly vague will behind. She’s very eager to consolidate her position with a suitable match.”

“You?” Rowena suggested impishly.

He snorted. “She might like my money but not its rate of exchange with her reputation.” Another step, turn, pass. “Try the same game again, cricket, but with the gentlemen. Tell me what to look for.”

“Pocket chronometers—ones without yellowed faceplates. And what the buttons on their waistcoats are made of.”

Meteron’s laugh showed his teeth for one, unguarded moment. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you had spent your life casting for wealth at the gentry’s balls.”

“More like on the streets.”

“Well. Over there are two ministers from the Governor’s cabinet and a visiting dignitary from Iberon. Shall we introduce you?”

Rowena blinked. “Um . . .”

He took her arm and winked. “Be as confident talking to them as you are talking about their clothes and you’ll do better than most, cricket.”

Somewhere in that blur of niceties, Rowena lost track of the Old Bear. It was two hours after their arrival when it dawned on her she hadn’t spotted him in a long while. Master Meteron was engaged in prolonged repartee with a socialite lady—some cousin or in-law or something of the Governor, Rowena remembered overhearing—and though she’d been afraid to move beyond his orbit, a different gravitation pulled at her. It started with simple curiosity, but soon it grew into guilt, and something a little like fear.

Rowena peeled away from Meteron, hugging the edges of conversations and scanning the room for her Old Bear with an eye for crowds she’d honed years before. Her knack for sorting out the bustle of a space served her well, and after only ten minutes of what must have looked like wandering to anyone else, her careful system led her to a terrace with an open set of glass and iron doors. She knew the shape of him, silhouetted against the moon. It was past Reason how often she’d slipped from her bedroom above the Stone Scales to look for him in the dark of night. She would always find him, if not in his bed, then stretched out in the driftwood chair by the kitchen stove, reading by the light of a clockwork lamp.

She knew the cast of his shoulders turned against the wheel of hard thinking. One hand cradled his pipe, gesturing, leaning into the balcony railing. He looked over the crowds and the lights of the distant city, a curl of smoke rising around him.

Still a dozen paces off, Rowena smelled the sweetness of marjoram and fennel, the damp earth of burning tobacco. She smiled. And then, she frowned, considering his hand in motion once more.

Gesturing?

Yes. There was no hope of hearing him from where Rowena stood, but the Alchemist gave every appearance of carrying on a conversation with someone who wasn’t there. Her desire to creep up behind him and surprise him with a pinch faded, replaced with a memory of the collapsing library of his mind when they were atop the Old Cathedral months before, the destruction everywhere—what was left behind.

And who she had found in it.

Rowena, the voice in her own mind chided gently. Don’t.

Rowena ignored it. She’d become good at that, especially in the Old Bear’s presence. She’d had to. She’d seen the look in his eyes as he’d tried to keep Leyah with him even a moment longer. To know that they had lost each other again, finally and for their own good, only to find a piece of her so close . . .

Rowena moved toward the Old Bear on the terrace, ransacking her brain for the right words to ask impossible questions—or she would have, if things handn’t gone very wrong. The terrace lay off the top of a staircase, frequented by scurrying serving staff and footmen. Rowena might have heard the butler coming if the roar of repartee from a hundred voices and the chamber orchestras woven in among them had not chewed up sounds more than an arm’s reach away. As it was, just as she’d crossed the tiles that linked that narrowing piece of the hall to the uppermost landing, a portly server bearing two trays of vinas barreled around from Rowena’s left. They collided, and he slammed the wind out of her without spilling a single glass.

She staggered, hunting for her balance. Her heels found the edge of a slick marble stair, instead. Rowena’s yelp disappeared in the buzz of the partygoers. She tumbled down four stairs, a tangle of skirt hems and petticoats and scrabbling feet—

An unfamiliar pair of arms snapped her up from the edge of the fifth stair.

Rowena’s hair had fallen half out of the combs previously pinning it back. Through a tumble-down skein of waves and curls, she stared at a boy of about her age.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Ehm,” Rowena answered. Her flush could’ve set the lace collar of her gown afire.

She’d meant to say, “I’m fine,” but hadn’t quite gotten her breath or her bearings. The boy had been climbing up the stairs just as she’d made her unexpected trip down them. He’d staggered back against the sculpted rail, stopping her from carrying them both down to the bottom.

“Here.” He levered Rowena onto her feet and stepped back.

“Thanks,” she said. Rowena looked back to the top of the stairs, but the serving man had gone, probably scurried off to act as if someone else had knocked a guest down the stairs and killed her. “Stupid butler clobbered me good there.”

The boy’s head tilted curiously. Rowena cringed. Eejit.

“I mean, rather, thank you,” she corrected, sanding down the sharper street corners of her accent. “I’m afraid I’m a little . . . um . . . out of sorts.” She pawed at her hair, trying to sort it into something proper and purposeful. That only made her feel stupider, so she dropped a tidy curtsy, hoping that was the gesture being saved from a broken neck called for.

A bite of pain in her left ankle sent her teetering back to the rail.

The boy reached out to steady her. Rowena waved him off.

“S’nothing. I think I might’ve just cranked up—turned, I mean, my ankle. Bugger . . .”

She winced again, this time from the pain as much as her tongue.

“Here,” the boy said, slipping round to take her left arm. “Going down will be easier than coming back up. There’s a garden below. Not many people are there.”

For a moment, Rowena considered refusing the boy’s arm. She remembered Master Meteron somewhere above, holding court with a press of hangers-on. He would notice she’d gone, eventually. And then there was the Old Bear, alone on the terrace, far enough off not to have witnessed her tumble, and—perhaps—less alone than he seemed.

She met the boy’s eyes, meaning to give him her apologies. He smiled again.

“All right,” Rowena answered.

All the way down, she leaned into him, wondering who he was, and if there was a proper way to ask without sounding like an idiot, given she was already hanging on his arm. Something in his gait seemed off. A limp, maybe? She glanced back up the staircase. As they rounded a bend in the stair to the courtyard below, the angle afforded her another view of the terrace. She saw the Old Bear’s backside, holding up the weight of some unseen world, and something else, too. Another figure moving onto the terrace.

The moon was high and full, painting the scene silver.

Somehow, the cut and gather of the woman’s gown around her pregnant belly were lovelier than the svelte, swaying ladies in the hall beyond, cinched up tight in corsets or puffed out with crinoline cages. As she came into view, the Old Bear straightened, leaving his pipe on the railing. Then he did something Rowena had never seen him do before.

He bowed, and when the stranger lifted her ungloved hand, he kissed it with perfect solemnity.

Rowena had to turn her head back toward her feet to keep from missing a step and tumbling all over again.

It seemed the Alchemist was having a meeting of his own.