Weather Witch (22 page)

“Does it matter?” the Tester asked. “It’s a Witch that is testing its bounds. I’ll have none of it.”

Philadelphia

“I did not expect—”

“—so many people, young sir?” Jonathan asked, eyeing the crowd that had gathered on the edge of the meadow. “You are quite the curiosity. You have always been more focused on friends than fighting.”

A touch of fog still crawled along their ankles, swirling away to create a far stranger atmosphere than Rowen had hoped for.

“I do have a reputation for throwing parties more frequently than punches…”

Men raised their arms when they saw him—and a few aimed rude gestures in his direction, too. “Seems like a nearly fair mix,” Rowen muttered, pushing his heels in the horse’s sides to urge it forward onto the site of the duel.

Edward stood across the meadow with a few of his closest followers, watching Rowen and Jonathan ride in. He nodded sharply at his fellow duelist, his eyes sharp and hard as flint.

“He wants to kill me,” Rowen noted, returning the nod.

“I daresay that is the goal of this particular exercise, sir.”

“Thank you, Jonathan, very reassuring. May we yet recall I suggested
first blood
?”

“Sir. Do remember that shooting a man is a reasonably simple act merely requiring a steady hand, a clear eye, and—in most cases—some premeditation. You are quite capable in this regard. You are also no slouch with a sword. I have seen you fence quite well.”

“You have also seen me fence quite poorly.”

Jonathan cleared his throat. “This too is true. But I feel that today your skill and luck will meet and yield the opportunity you so need. Be steady, be strong. Be brave. And kill the obnoxious prick for what he said about Miss Jordan’s parentage and morality.”

Rowen blinked at him and nodded, smiling grimly. “I shall endeavor to do just that.”

Rowen slid from his saddle and grabbed both sets of reins as Jonathan dismounted more carefully, his hands quickly going to the saddlebags. He withdrew the pistol box and looked at Rowen, his eyes bright. “We will wait until the last moment possible to load. The air is quite sticky and we do not want a misfire.”

Kenneth appeared, a bit worse for wear as a result of the wildness of the night before. “I shall wish you good luck and sharp aim now, Rowen,” he said, reaching out to shake his friend’s hand. He paused, though, switching something from one hand to the other.

Rowen raised an eyebrow.

“Oh. Yes. I have been asked to hold the money,” Kenneth explained.

“The money?”

“Yes.” Kenneth cleared his throat and looked away a moment. “Yes, it seems this is quite the event to place a wager on.”

“Indeed?”

Kenneth nodded.

“And how are the odds?” Rowen asked, the words coming slowly.

“Nearly equal,” Kenneth assured.

“Nearly?”

Kenneth’s gaze flicked to Rowen’s and then away again. “A few more betting against you than for you, but that is how these things go…” Before Rowen could say another word Kenneth flung up his hand and, waving to someone across the meadow whom Rowen had not seen wave first, jogged away.

Jonathan was beside him. “They are betting on you,” he said.

“And betting against me,” Rowen added.

“Do not worry about your naysayers—or your supporters. Now is not the time for worry at all,” Jonathan said, brushing Rowen’s shoulders as if he were brushing them clean before a grand entrance to a ball.

Rowen took the pistol, a grave look on his face. “Remember what I asked. If I need to be finished—”

“I will not hesitate if the time comes,” Jonathan assured.

“Excellent.” Rowen walked to the meadow’s center, boots rustling through the small blue flowers. “Forget-me-nots,” he muttered. The dew slicked his boots, bringing them to a gloss so high the sun sparked across their detailing and glittered across his belt and buckle. The scabbard whispered against his hip, flashing like an automaton’s tail, flicking back and forth with each stride he took.

He paused before his opponent, his pistol’s muzzle in the air, and they both weighed each other: their manner and motivation, the sharpness of their eyes and attitudes.

A third man joined them, by his outfit a judge of one of the outlying circuit courts. “I am Lord Michaelson. I will tell you when to stop, when to turn, and when to shoot. And if there is a need, I will tell you when to switch to sabers.” He glanced at them both solemnly. “I will be the sole determiner of the match’s outcome and my word will be taken as law. Are we quite clear?”

“Quite,” Rowen agreed.

“As clear as a stormlight crystal,” Lord Edward added.

“Then turn your backs to each other and prepare to pace off. You will stride in time to my count. You will go to a distance of ten paces and await the command to turn and fire. At that point, turn, take aim, and discharge your weapon.” He paused briefly before saying, “You may pace off.”

They measured the distance stride by stride and when Rowen heard the count of ten, he stopped in the dewy grass and waited for the next command.

“You may turn and—”

BOOM!

Rowen felt the ball cut past him, his hair stirring in its wake as he brought down his pistol’s muzzle and fired. The blast rocked the pistol in his hand and he stood, silent and awash in the blowback of gunpowder and spark, stunned as the other man dropped to the ground.

Rowen stared, his jaw hanging loose, as men scrambled to kneel or crouch beside his fallen opponent. Rowen was already stumbling back as the judge crossed the distance to Lord Edward, leaned over, and reached out a tentative hand to touch the fallen man’s neck.

Jonathan was beside Rowen. “Sir, it is time to depart.” He took Rowen’s hand in his to gently remove the pistol from his grasp.

Rowen nodded dully as the judge rose and announced, “We have a victor—Rowen Burchette.”

And then Rowen and Jonathan ran to the horses, mounting and speeding away from the scene of the crime—for crime was what it was even in the meadow just beyond the city limits—their lives ruined and nothing but a black mark and whatever was in their stuffed saddlebags to their names.

Holgate

Bran set down his pen, hearing someone again knocking at his door. Standing by the corner of his desk, Meg peered up at him from beneath a tumble of platinum curls, pausing as she rearranged his loose papers. Recognizing one particular sheet, he fought the impulse to snatch it away, recalling that Meggie could not yet read and that was the main reason she was allowed to shuffle her way through his often grim writings. Once she began to make out his scrawling words she would be kept from this task as well. And likely still be too young to help amidst the horrors of the laboratory and tower top …

The pounding came once more, this time followed by an insistent voice saying, “Good Maker … The boys, they say … Please come to the door, good sir.”

He pushed back his chair and reached forward to pat Meggie’s head. “Let them lie,” he instructed with a glance to the remaining papers. “Relax for a moment,” he added. He watched as she ambled obediently away before he opened the peephole in his door and found himself face-to-face with the gigantic watchman from the other evening.

The man looked down, eyes shifting and shining with nerves. “There’s another something here for you, good Maker. Something the boys say wants to be in your keeping. I say, leave it lie, but they tell me it won’t. Not still at least. Never have seen the like of it, they say…”

The door groaned open and Bran saw a burlap bag hanging at arm’s length from the man’s boulder-sized fist.

“Won’t stay in the ground, they say.” The bag trembled in his huge outstretched hand, his knuckles clenched and white. “
Ashes to ashes and dust to dust
for all but this one, it seems. But mind, sir, is clean as such things can be. White as snow. Picked to perfection as if it lay in the desert a solid year. Though seems to me it’s been not yet a month … It’s not natural.”

“Quit your muttering and hand the blasted thing to me.”

“Aye, sir—as you wish, sir.” He ducked his head and thrust the bag into Bran’s chest, backing away hurriedly and only nodding a brief bow before he spun on his heel and loped down the hallway.

Bran stepped back into the library, hands wrapped round the thing in the bag. It was not heavy—maybe the weight of a bowl, with a dome like a bowl’s bottom … Not large, either, he realized, locking the door back and striding to his desk.

He set the bag down on the slanting face of his desk, catching it as it tried to roll away. Hands resting on either side of the thing in the bag, he shifted the fabric away from what it contained, revealing the white curve of bone.

His hands dropped away from it as the fabric settled and he realized what the object was that had set the burly guard to trembling.

Empty eye sockets peered at him from a child’s hollow skull.

Sybil.

The water in the horn cup on his desk rippled and splashed and Bran was torn between the small horror in his hands and the weird way of the nearest water.

The sound of small feet on the wooden floor stirred Bran to action and he jerked the burlap back over the impossibly clean skull, tucking the bag’s ends away to hide the cruel proof of his most recent failure.

Philadelphia

Chloe stood before the Council, her head raised, her hands clasped before her, a chain hanging between the manacles connecting her wrists. The bandana that usually kept her hair from her face had never been returned once they all had examined the absence of her ear. In some places they had begun identifying people by printing their fingers—or so she had heard. But here some ideas came into existence more slowly and some—much faster. As the Council members shuffled their papers, she took a moment to marvel at the hall she stood in.

A mosaic floor showing the subjugation of the natives was underfoot. “Suitably so,” one Councilman was rumored to have said when the mural was nearing completion. She shifted, trying to move her feet off the image of a native whose face was being pressed into the dirt by the foot of a colonist declaring, “A Place for All.”

But her movement attracted attention and there was a whirring and popping noise as two tall automatons took a heavy-footed step forward. They watched her, glass eyes sparkling and yet somehow still dead. She focused her attention on one of them, noting how between the joints of the heavy white flesh that seemed so much like porcelain she could glimpse the clockwork underneath. Gears hummed, wheels and belts shifting and moving to make each giant doll appear a clumsy mimicry of life. In the center of their bare and genderless chests was a single shining crystal. A stormcell.

She glanced from the stormcell of the nearest to its vacant eyes. The last burst of power a Weather Witch had was said to fall into such things, infusing them with eternal light. Just as the Reanimator had mentioned Lady Astraea’s soul being trapped in whichever stormlight’s crystal was nearest her body at the moment of her death.

What was that like, she wondered, to be trapped for all eternity in crystal? Did you remember things? Could you see the outside world? Or were you simply a power source to be siphoned by automatons and stormlights? Did you, at death, become nothing but someone else’s battery?

Perhaps there was no Heaven or Hell, she mused. Only a crystal cage.

Or … Her eyes saw a twinkle of light—like a sudden spark—flare in the crystal of the nearest automaton. Or perhaps that
was
Hell …

She shuddered.

The men at the Council’s long table were staring at her, Lord Stevenson still noticeably absent, as was her own Lord Astraea. “Are you quite well?” one asked, though from his tone she knew he did not care—he was merely speaking the words. Following proper societal protocol.

She hated that. Especially bound as she was. Innocent as she was. Punish her for any wrong she had done and punish her appropriately—that was well and good. But this?

“No,” she said, her voice carrying to fill the room. “I feel quite ill. About these proceedings and the way such things might damage a woman’s reputation.”

“Well,” he said, picking up one sheet of paper and holding it to a light for better inspection. “You need not suffer such indignities for long.”

Chloe let out a breath she felt she’d been holding for days, her eyes wide and thankful, her hands clasped in victory now instead of prayer.

“You, Chloe Erendell, previously of both House Kruse and Astraea, have been found guilty.”

The word shot through her like the burn of a bullet and she reeled, stumbling backward. “Guilty?” she whispered, disbelief hanging from her lips with the most horrifying word she had ever heard applied to herself.

“Guilty of manslaughter, three cases on behalf of the Kruses, and guilty of inciting a Weather Witch–related incident on behalf of the Astraeas.”

“It is not…” She was staring straight ahead but seeing nothing. “Not … possible…” The words sounded as soft as her head felt. Her brain had become a pudding in her skull, thick, useless, and overcooked.

“The penalty for such crimes is death.”

She fell to her knees and bent at her waist, her cheek to the cold, hard floor as water poured from her eyes. “I did nothing…”

But the Councilman continued. “We sentence you, Chloe Erendell, to be hanged by the neck until dead on Wednesday hence. May God have mercy on your soul.” He snapped down the gavel. “This Council and court is hereby adjourned.”

The automatons moved in, awkward hands curling under her arms, their broad tails counterbalancing as they hauled her back to her unsteady feet.

There, in a puddle of her tears, was the native crushed beneath the other man’s boot. They had been cheek to cheek and eye to eye. Her sobbing renewed as they half hauled and half pushed her back to the most narrow of the Council’s hallways and down the winding staircase full of tilting stone stairs until they came to the cell where she would wait out the last bit of her life.

In dampness.