Molly sat on the bed. The sinking mattress made her tilt and when she righted herself to face him, they were touching at the knees. His clothes were plain as ever—black coat and breeches, white shirt and stockings—and the lack of ornamentation made him fashionably grave. He was much as she remembered, though he did look older. Several years might have passed, to judge by the finely wrought lines around his eyes and the new kind of weight—a density or depth—that gave his wiry frame both elegance and strength. He was smoak instead of ordinary wood. He had hardened.
Molly leapt and hit him, covering his face and ears with hot, furious slaps. She kicked the candle out. He ducked but didn’t attempt to catch her hands; she pounded with her fists on his shoulders and his crown. His hair was smacked askew. She was hurting him, she knew it, and she would have kept going, maybe till he tumbled off the stool and she could kick him, but a quick sharp pain above her knee backed her up.
He had cut her with a knife. She landed on the bed again, huffing through the hair that had fallen around her mouth. She hiked her skirt, bared her knee, and touched the wound through her stocking. It was short and horizontal, just deep enough to bleed.
Nicholas hadn’t stood and Molly hadn’t heard a flint, but he had managed in the pause to reignite the candle—yet another of his mysteries and likely meant to vex her. Perhaps he’d hidden a living ember in a tin. She refused to look amazed, at least about the flame.
Nicholas fixed his hair and straightened out his coat. Red welts marked his face and he was swelling at the ear, and yet he didn’t touch the places she had struck or seem surprised. He looked at her with love and held the knife where she could see it.
“My happiness at finding you alive is unrequited.” Nicholas smiled weakly, like a child feigning courage. Molly stared to let him know that she could batter him again, even if it meant jumping toward the blade.
“You have questions,” he began.
“How are you alive? What have you done to Tom?”
“I’ll tell you. Please be patient.”
“No!” she said and tensed as if to stand again, defiant.
Nicholas flicked the knife above his knee to catch her eye. He cut his own leg, mirroring her wound. He didn’t wince. He didn’t explain. The gesture’s chilling strangeness made her watch very hard.
“I could tell you nothing at all,” he said, “and still your reappearance in the city would destroy me. But once you know the facts, you won’t tell a soul and you will choose, of your own free will, to leave forever.”
He handkerchiefed his cut with calm, delicate fingers and the candle flame stilled, growing steady in its light.
“I knew that you would come as soon as you read the letter,” he said.
“You said to ride for Liberty.”
“I banked on your rebellion. I prepared either way—unpredictability was ever in your nature—but your flight toward Grayport was vastly more likely.”
“You said my reappearance—”
“Listen, Molly. Listen. I have answers by the bushel. I watched you leave Root. You were a little less than graceful, jumping from the window, but you left in good time. I’m sorry about your horse. At least you saw a winterbear in all its fearsome glory.”
She pressed the wound above her knee. Blood slithered through her fingers, mingling with the blood from the mare’s severed neck, and then the memory and the smell made her cut sting worse.
“I paid William Shepherd to keep you here until I finished my work in Root,” Nicholas said.
Feeble old Shepherd. Oh, she’d been a fool!
“He is an honorable man,” Nicholas assured her. “I told the truth, as it happens: that my sister was running from trouble, and that for her sake, as well as for my own, it was imperative to keep her safe until I arrived. He was eager to assist. If not for my persuasion, he would not have taken payment.”
Words and words—what was he saying? Truth, William Shepherd, payment and persuasion. What did it matter? He was here and he was talking like her brother, like her too familiar, undead, infuriating brother, and the one thing she needed him to clarify was how.
“I killed you,” Molly said.
He raised the blade like a finger to his lips and said, “Shush. I will tell you how we came from Grayport to this. Whatever your emotions, I encourage you to rein them. Tom Orange has a much sharper blade to his throat.”
“Tell me what you’ve done.”
Nicholas laughed and wiped his face, amused by her contrariness but grimacing—in anger?—when his hand touched a spot above his eye where she had struck him. The knife was on his thigh now, close enough to snatch.
“In Grayport,” he said, “we were desperate. We were poor. Would you believe that I was terrified? I did my best to hide it, from the onset of the sickness I endured aboard the Cleaver to the first cold night we hid inside the church. We were victims in a city full of predators and strangers. You remember the pickpocket.”
Molly watched him closely. Did he know the man was dead?
“I found him easily,” Nicholas said, “the night he stole your locket. He was a coward, easily pinched, and I was struck to think the two of us had seemed an easy target. Never in our lives had we been so common, marked by common criminals and bent to common work. We belonged in higher spheres, and I resolved to make it happen. I knew of Kofi Baa from the Customs House. I knew his business and his wealth—they were no great secret—and I knew that he could lift us if his will were so inclined. I paid to have him attacked and played the selfless hero. My injuries were bought: a sensible investment.”
“How could you?” Molly said, recalling Kofi’s smile and his deep, melodious laugh. “After what he did for us!”
“Before what he did for us. I chose not to tell you—did you really not suspect?—because I knew you wouldn’t approve, however great the gain.”
“It’s terrible,” she said.
“How?” Nicholas asked. “I never did the man a single stroke of harm. He rewarded me with trust and benefited vastly. Then his colleagues and friends were benefiting, too. I dealt with business woes to start, mostly trade laws and customs, but soon their needs diversified. With every problem solved, my reputation grew. People asked for arbitration. For avoidance of scandal. For extrication from legal, marital, and ethical dilemmas. I helped them as I could and they were satisfied to pay. But everything was built upon my ironclad success. There were problems, now and then, that even I could not resolve, and one can never let the rabble question the magician. So what does the magician do? He makes his own illusions.”
The candle guttered out, sending up a fine, smoky ribbon in the moonlight. Molly’s thoughts weren’t in rhythm with the words he was speaking. She would start to comprehend but then her memory would stutter—back to Grayport, to sitting in the office while he worked, then to waking up tonight and finding him beside her.
“How do you control a blackmailer?” Nicholas continued. “Create one. How do you safeguard a secret? Know it. Whatever is required may be summoned or invented. Put simply, I devised my own worth among my clients. The truest self-reliance generates itself. My work was not so different from the tactics and deceptions we devised for Mrs. Wickware.”
“It’s criminal,” she blurted, feeling stupid as she said it.
“Criminal.” He laughed, sounding casual and warm. “I built the cages, in they went, and I provided them the key. All they lost was money. Each of them could spare it. I hope you aren’t aghast that I meddled with the law. These are men’s laws, malleable and thin: made to bend. They are not the laws of nature. Not the laws of life.”
There was just enough moonlight to see him on the stool. She focused on his leg, first the blood and then the knife.
“We didn’t sail three thousand miles to shiver, and starve, and be the browbeaten victims of the bright new world. We came to be strong. We came to be more. And what other option did we have?” Nicholas asked, leaning forward so his eye, only one, caught the moon. “Think of the bread riot in Umber. Did you not support the wretches who demanded something more? You and I stole apples on the morning we arrived. Then we needed something better, so I took that, too.”
“But then we had enough,” she said. “A home and means to live.”
“Had you known what I was doing—and I wonder how much voluntary blindness dimmed your sight—what would you have done? Confessed to Kofi Baa? Consigned us to a destitute existence or to jail?”
Molly leaned forward, closer to his knee. The moonlight fell upon her own cheek now—cold, white light reminding her of winter, of the Grayport snow she’d eventually adored, of the chocolate she used to sip after shopping in the market. She remembered being happy that she made Kofi happy, and she couldn’t bear the thought of causing him to glower.
Nicholas paused to think, comfortable but stern. He let his question dissipate. She played the timid listener.
“I had such a wealth of work,” he said, “I had to hire help: desperate men and women who were squandering their gifts. You could say I had a staff of hand-picked talent. I gave them work by proxy—very few knew my name—and any caught or compromised were freed, again by proxy, or compelled to hold their tongues. One of my earliest and most reliable employees was the pickpocket. His name was Mr. Crutch: a middling thief who lacked direction when I found him and persuaded him to broaden his ambition. Marry threats of danger to the promise of reward, and any man alive will listen very closely. It was he who attacked Kofi Baa and wounded me, with great care, according to my instructions. I used him often that year.”
“And do you know what you created?” Molly yelled to crack his calm. “Your friend became a Maimer!”
“Molly, you amaze me. I had thought you more astute. Did you think it a coincidence, an accident of fate, that your Maimer was a man who used to visit me in Grayport?”
Molly shrank back, out of the moonlight into the dark. She seemed to spiral and descend, as on the night she’d given birth after swallowing the potion, and she understood that yes, she had known for several minutes now—had sensed it in the slush coldly rolling in her center.
“I learned of it in Grayport, but not the full truth,” he said. “The second Maimer that night—the man whose nose you smashed before escaping up the road—was apparently ashamed to tell me what had happened. He told me they were ambushed by the sheriff and a posse, and that Mr. Crutch was dead before he reached Root. Had I learned a young woman had bested them, ridden off blind, and captured Mr. Crutch singlehanded, I would have known at once my sister was alive.”
Molly whispered with a quarter of her breath, “Tell me why.”
“I’m afraid the Maimers’ origin is lusterless,” he said. “An enterprise that blossomed more than I expected. Many individuals who came to me for help used private couriers to deliver important letters. They were a treasure trove of secrets—personal, professional, and highly confidential. I resolved to offer the city’s only safe delivery. All I had to do was thin the competition. As you know,” he said, “the shortest route between Grayport and Liberty is the road through the forest, and messages were sent despite the perils. If well-paid couriers were not dissuaded by wildcats, bears, and ordinary brigands, what would prompt terror? Shadow men with knives. It is one thing to risk money or belongings, quite another risking the most cherished parts of ourselves. I wish I knew whoever first called them Maimers. They became an instant legend. It was more than I had hoped.
“Once news of the earliest victims reached Grayport, only the bravest couriers would travel on the road. Naturally they charged exorbitant rates, and I targeted the first such man who ventured out. The Maimers blinded him, preventing him from any future rides, and with the information gleaned from one of the letters he’d been carrying, I ruined a prominent trader with evidence of smuggling. People in Grayport grew nervous in the extreme about sending confidential messages. Soon they came to me, the man who solved their problems.
“I offered the swiftest, craftiest couriers: men in my employ. People paid handsomely for guaranteed delivery. I couldn’t freely use the information in the letters—any evidence that I had read them would destroy my reputation—but I learned a great deal of cumulative value. The Maimers were instructed to attack random travelers to remove all suspicion that their motive was the mail. I owned the road and no one knew it.”
The mattress was a sinkhole, cavernously deep. Molly touched her face and patterned it with blood. It smelled of old fear, sickly as a leech. The room was slick with gore, stuffed with tongues and ears and organs, and her head began to swim.
“You’re a fiend,” she said. “Evil.”
“I have intellect and will and opportunities to thrive. Should I not embrace my powers? Flourish in the wild?”
“Do you not have a heart for everyone you’ve hurt?”
“I do not,” Nicholas said, as if he’d thought about the question many times, many ways. “If I once had sympathy for others, I don’t remember losing it. I know I loved our mother—I was shattered when she died, but even then I had the instinct to partially conceal it. And I love you and Frances from a time, long ago, before the openhearted part of me withdrew and disappeared. Why it left me is a mystery. I cannot say I miss it. My love for you and Frances brought only pain.”
He shrank as if the whole of him had atrophied and closed. His shoulders hunched forward and his spine seemed to slacken. When he spoke again, his voice was neither confident nor wise, but neither was it feeble. It was open. It was young.
“All my life,” he said, “I have been beaten down by sickness, and circumstance, and the brutishness of those who deemed themselves stronger. Our father was determined to enfeeble and control me. When we broke Mrs. Wickware, I saw another way. When we finally left home, the world spread before us. And when we first arrived in Grayport—when sickness, circumstance, and commonplace brutes threatened us again—I refused to buckle under. I might have given in to terror and despair. Instead, I took control to shield myself from harm. I’d have shielded you, too—how emphatically I tried!—had you not struggled free and wounded me yourself.”
Molly wobbled to her feet, making Nicholas raise the knife and look at her severely, but all she did was cross the room and stand before the stove. It was three small steps but she was desperate for the distance.
He stood and said, “Have you never done harm to satisfy your needs? Have you never cut a path over someone else’s life?”
“What have I done?” Molly asked, turning around to face him. “How can you suggest—”
“Your refusal to behave led to Frances’s expulsion. We defied Mrs. Wickware and ground her to a pulp, but then you wavered and suggested it was I who lacked compassion. Did you not choose freely when we sailed away from Umber, knowing full well the dangers that awaited? Yet you pouted and complained while I fought to make it work, until at last you opposed me, openly and cruelly. Did you hesitate in trusting John Summer with our secrets? We had safety and prosperity. We finally had a home. What if someone had learned precisely who we were? Think of how a cunning individual could pin us. John Summer understood our delicate position and he used it—did you know?—when he came to me and forced me to consent to your engagement. How could I be certain that he wouldn’t press for more? I sent him north and made sure he never reached Burn. Still your pregnancy remained,” he said, swallowing to overcome a frailty in his voice. “Unmarried, unemployed—you were wholly unprepared. I offered a solution and beseeched you to accept it. You defied me and rejected it, forcing me to carry out the necessary acts.”
She lunged for his knife. Nicholas stepped aside, much faster than she would have thought him capable of moving. He tripped her as she passed and held her face against the window.
“You killed her,” Molly said, her tears a moony blur, “and meant to kill me.”
“No,” Nicholas said.
He grabbed the hair behind her head and forced her backward to the stove, and then he kept her there and faced her with the knife below her chin.
“I left the pistol on the table, knowing you would see it. I hoped that you would find the gun loaded and refuse it, even if you blamed me, even if you hated me. If only we could pass that night without a shot, the worst would be behind us and we might return to Grayport—broken but together, possibly to heal. Perhaps, given time—”
“I know I didn’t miss.”
“A ball of wax,” Nicholas said, “that vaporized when fired. Not that your attempt didn’t pierce me to the core. Still, I would have saved you if you hadn’t washed away. I searched the creek for miles looking for your body, and eventually despaired. How did you come to Root?”
She sniffed the blubbery mess escaping from her nose and said, “The waters flowed together.”
“Ah,” Nicholas said. “It’s remarkable you floated so far and yet survived. There is more life in you, dear sister, than even I believed.” He lowered the knife and returned to the stool, choosing not to sit and speaking, with the moonlight haloing his ears, like a person who had memorized a noteworthy dream. “I returned to Grayport, holding to the tale that you had gone to live with relatives. I embellished the lie by saying I had sent you off for safety, that my efforts in the city—in particular my well-known defiance of the Maimers—had opened us to threats. How quickly people praised my extraordinary sacrifice. How little they suspected what my sacrifice had been.”
Molly knelt beside the bed, unable to stand or answer. Nicholas turned his back to her and looked out the window at the forest, talking so his words made frost upon the glass.
He said, “This week a man in my employ tried to blackmail me. When his plan was uncovered, he attempted to escape. He was followed and shot, only to be saved by a sudden band of travelers. I hastened here to the inn to silence him myself. He appeared to die of his gunshot wound, an end that might have been questioned if the doctor coming from Root had been allowed to examine the body. The doctor was deterred. I was spending the night in this very room—a simple traveler, paying for his bed—when Sheriff Pitt and Tom Orange arrived with their remarkable news. It was grievous, losing all four Maimers in one swoop. If your town grew courageous, I could also lose the road. I followed Tom and Pitt the following day to take their measure—to discover what boldness might develop in the future.
“Imagine my astoundment! I was so shocked with joy at finding you alive, I nearly cried your name on entering the tavern. I blended with the crowd to see what I could learn. Eventually I spoke to Abigail Knox. She was very forthcoming, even with a stranger, on the subject of the woman who’d embraced Tom Orange. ‘Her,’ she said. She spoke to me at length with little prompting. Your past remained a mystery to everyone in Root—to everyone, she said, except Tom Orange.
“I was just about to leave, but what a spectacle ensued! Tom’s uncle shouting insults for everyone to hear, and Tom and Sheriff Pitt publicly at odds. The sheriff seemed of small concern, satisfied to bluster. Oh, but Tom. Fiery Tom, full of tempest and conviction. How to draw you off from such a formidable companion? Once I learned more, it was easier than fate.
“I paid a boy to deliver your letter, waited for you to leave, and visited Lemuel Carver at his house. Again I told the truth. ‘I am Molly’s brother,’ I said. ‘I mean to steal her from the Orange.’ He let me in at once—I might have been John Lumen himself, such a thrill was in his face—and when I asked him for a drink, he turned to find a bottle. I struck him on the skull with a smoakwood stick. I cannot think the world will weep at his demise. He was far enough along before I ever came to Root. One could smell the putrefaction of a man approaching death.
“But a man without friends might have lain there for days. I needed him found,” Nicholas said. “I broke a lantern in his home, waited near the woods until the flames began to spread, and then departed while the neighbors hurried out to find him and arrest the man most likely to have killed him.”
Molly had passed through heat, like a seething of her blood, and shriveled now within, mummified with horror. The stove had almost cooled, the last log depleted to a black, withered husk. Molly wobbled on her knees and bumped her head against the iron, thinking of the stick that had cracked Lem’s skull. She remembered Lem’s tears when he spoke about his wife. She smelled the ashes and imagined Root pulsing from the flames.
“The murder will occupy the town until I see you on your way,” Nicholas said. “I could have killed Tom and blamed it on Lem, but keeping Tom alive gives me power over you. Unless I’m very much mistaken and you don’t care a whit—”
Molly stood in Tom’s defense on cold, deadened feet, choked by dual urges to confirm it or deny it.
“As I hoped,” Nicholas said. “Understand, throughout it all, I have never aimed to hurt you. That was the effect, not the motive of my actions. I did everything I could to shelter you from harm. Now I offer you a choice I should have offered during your pregnancy—a choice I failed to give because I didn’t want to lose you. Come with me to Grayport, board a ship to Bruntland, and sail away from Floria to live again with Frances. She is living independently with money I have sent and will continue to provide. Our father will not find you.”
The dark leapt alive at the sound of Frances’s name, brightening the stark gray sea in Molly’s mind. Oh! but even lighted, how it flooded around her head, terrible and vast. Back to Bruntland—it would drown her.
“I offer you the freedom and the life you always craved,” he said. “Do whatever you will. Marry whomever you choose. Ask for anything you wish and I will happily provide it. But you must board the ship. You must not defy me. I have given Tom Orange word of your departure and will see that he is freed and restored to good standing. But if either of you speaks or works against me, now or later, Tom’s life, as well as yours, is immediately forfeit.”
“You would kill me after all?”
“I hope to see you live. As I said, returning you to Frances was a choice I should have offered you before. I have learned from my mistake. Have you learned from your own?”
“I never made a mistake!” she cried. “I never asked for any of this! I would have stayed with Tom and had a home, if you had let me!”
“Tell me truthfully, Molly—how have you fared in Root? More importantly,” he said, “how has Root fared with you? Has the tavern benefited from your presence? Has Tom Orange? Or have you rained complication onto everyone you’ve met? How sincerely do you care about your home, or Tom, or anyone in Root if your immediate impulse was to abandon them all to keep yourself from danger?”
“I never meant to hurt them,” Molly said, and clutched her chest.
“Sail away. Start fresh. Revel in your freedom. You have done so before with wonderful success. It is a quality of yours: a marvelous facility to wriggle out, adapt, and bloom without light. You have never been the smartest or the strongest,” Nicholas said, “but there is a Mollyness in you that nothing stunts or changes. You are as thoroughly yourself as in the hour you were born, and that is beautiful and rare. Take it with you. Take it home.”
His knife had vanished into his sleeve. He opened his arms, defenseless, daring her to push him out the window or embrace him.
“Everything I’ve done in Root was meant to save us both. I offer you escape, the very treasure you pursued tonight. Accepting it,” he said, “is merely following your nature.”