Winterspell (19 page)

Clara's attention returned to the one-eyed man. He stood sentinel a few paces away, arms folded.
One eye.
Though he couldn't have been more different from him, she thought of Godfather anyway. Her heart, betrayed as it was, ached for his arms about her, the cadence of his voice as he rattled off some ludicrous joke. An awful image—of Godfather trapped between worlds, stuck in some magical limbo from the Door
closing on him as he had tried to follow them—made her shudder, even as another part of her twinged with guilty satisfaction at the thought. Maybe he deserved such a fate, for contributing to her mother's death.

Even as she thought that, she didn't believe it. She looked at her hands for anchor. Misery, like a blade in her heart. Misery and fury and a horrible lack—a lack of Godfather, her life's one constant.

“He's not what you think he is, you know.”

Clara was gratified to see Nicholas flinch when she glared up at him. “Who are you talking about?”

“You know.” He tilted his bowl, drinking down the last of his soup. The one-eyed man was watching them; they talked in pieces, low, lips hardly moving. “Drosselmeyer. At court they called him the king's fool, and he went along with it. To lower people's expectations, I think. And I know he was the same to you—a foolish uncle you turned to when you felt like escaping from the world. But I know the real him, for good or ill.”

Rankled, she stiffened. “He's brilliant, and he loves me.”

“Yes,” he said quietly. “Whatever else I might say about him, I can't deny that you were everything to him.”

Oh, horrible, horrible lack.
Godfather.
She wanted to cry but refused to allow it.

“Clara,” Nicholas said, his eyes on her face, “he would never have lied to you about your mother if it hadn't been the absolute right thing to do. What good would it have done you to know the truth?”

“That doesn't change the fact that she would still be alive were it not for him.” She paused. “Were it not for you, too, come to think of it.”

“As if I could have done anything to save her, cursed as I was.”

“And you obviously angered someone mightily to earn such a fate,” she pressed on, pleased to have found an edge. “If you hadn't, Mother might still be alive.”

He had nothing to say to that.
As well he should not
, Clara thought, indignant and unsatisfied. Every time she spoke of her mother aloud, she felt newly bereft; it was no different here. She hugged herself, sick at heart
and struggling for a clarity of thought that wouldn't come. If Nicholas felt the sting of guilt, he certainly succeeded at hiding it. Tricky, this one, with that perpetually half-amused note in his voice. It reminded her of her father, strangely, or any of the politicians back home—never genuine, always putting on a show.

Discomfited, and as unlikely as it would be for her to find her father in such a public space, she searched the crowd for a familiar unkempt red head among all the others—blacks and whites, greens and pinks and blues. Dye was, apparently, in fashion. Beside her Nicholas scraped the sides of his bowl, his hair half over his face. He was humming a lilting tune under his breath, but his eyes were sharp on the phosphorescent panel hung on the wall opposite them. After a time Clara watched it too, mesmerized at the sequence of color and sound.

A scrolling pattern of stark blue letters read:
Curfew for Zarko now begins at ten o'clock. Anyone out of doors after curfew will be subject to relocation. Anyone in spike zones will be executed.

A bright sequence of song, color, and flashing lights:
Sugar! You want it, you need it, the fortunate bleed it. Fly high, feel your might! Smile wide, smile bright! Available in new, convenient capsule form—high-grade!—at your local lothouse.

Attention, Zarko residents.

An image formed of a woman in diamonds—a faery woman, with that elegant face and the long, pointed ears, though they were not as long as Borschalk's, nor as long as the others' throughout the marketplace.

Her face illuminated the panel Clara was watching, as well as countless others hanging from rooftops and the sides of bridges. They all displayed the same image, and that image silenced the crowd at once. A man beating a child pickpocket let him fall to the ground. The one-eyed man's stern face went slack—with wonder? With joy.

The woman on the panels smiled.

Nicholas froze, bowl halfway to his mouth.

Clara stiffened. She could drop her bowl and retrieve the daggers
from her boots in a matter of seconds if need be. “What is it?”

His body vibrated with energy, or maybe that was the marketplace itself; everything seemed suddenly fraught with tension.

“It's her,” he said, low. “It's
Anise
.”

“Something grave has come to my attention,” Anise said, her words like frost in the air, cool and light, “brought to me a short while ago by my officers on the perimeter.” She leaned closer. Was she Clara's age, or much older? Impossible to tell, but she was indisputably lovely. Long white braids slithered over a bare white shoulder. “We have fugitives in our midst.”

A low murmur rumbled through the watching crowd. People with suspicion in their eyes searched their neighbors' faces.

“Now, don't be alarmed. There's no need to be afraid.” Anise's voice floated above them, clear and distantly maternal, like a mother perfunctorily comforting her children. Curious blue eyes passed over the crowd. When they reached where Clara stood, Clara dropped her eyes to the ground. Could Anise see them? What was this power that gave her the ability to project such an image throughout the city?

“In fact, you should celebrate,” Anise said. “We're going to make this a game. My soldiers are already on the hunt, but our country is vast. Zarko residents, you are nearest their entry point. The fugitives are most likely among you at this very moment.”

Clara felt suddenly naked. She tensed, ready to run.

“We'll run if we have to,” Nicholas said under his breath.

Clara nodded, licked her lips. Was the one-eyed man watching them with renewed interest?

“If you help us track down these invaders,” Anise continued, “and deliver them to me—
alive
—you will be generously rewarded: brought to the capital, given rooms in Wahlkraft for an extended stay of luxury and caprice, hosted by myself.” A smile flickered across Anise's face, but Clara was familiar with such smiles. At home she saw them every day—false, mocking, barely restraining hatred. “The low will be brought high, the
enslaved made kings. Consider it a gift, even though you don't deserve it.”

The market throbbed with sudden, violent longing. In apparent ecstasy a woman darted toward the panel nearest her with outstretched arms, exclaiming thanks, before she was hurled impatiently to the ground by the crowd. She did not rise again.

Beside Clara, Nicholas was raging. “I will kill her.” He pounded his fist on his thigh. “Sinndrie witness it, I will tear her limb from limb.”

“Shut up,” Clara hissed. But no one paid them any mind. Why would they, with Anise talking?

Clara couldn't blame them. Anise's arms were draped in fur-edged silk. Her skin shimmered with iridescent powder, and silver dripped from her hair in glittering spools. When she breathed, the diamonds at her décolletage glinted in the light. When she smiled, it was with a certain . . .
sultriness
that Clara had never before seen, never even imagined.

Clara blushed, and looked away.

“We don't yet have much information on them, but we know there are two—a young man and a young woman, hardly more than children. But don't be deceived by their youth.” Anise glanced down, dragged her fingers across something unseen. “We managed to capture a single chromograph during their infiltration. Take a good look,
citizens
.” Her voice curled nastily on the word. “This is your quarry. And remember, I want them alive.”

Clara's mouth went dry as the image on the screen before her shifted from that of Anise to one of Nicholas and herself, hand in hand, crawling from the wreckage of the ruined train.

I
mmediately there was an uproar.

The crowd surged into motion, shoving and clawing one another in the frantic press toward the perimeter wall. Wordless excited cries echoed throughout the marketplace. Blue sparks from faery spears rained down from rooftops, and mocking faery laughter chimed even above the screams of the trampled.

Nicholas pulled Clara close, his arm around her shoulders, and together they maneuvered through the stinking, eager mob. Clara had never felt more exposed, more pinned down. She wished her hair were dirtier—they would find her red head in an instant; they would
find
her, and then what? Father would languish in this world, forgotten, and Felicity would be condemned to a hell of her own, with no explanation for why Clara had abandoned her.

A sob caught in the back of Clara's throat at the thought.

Overhead the glowing panels had resumed their previous sequence of curfew warnings and sugar advertisements. Anise had gone.

“I saw them!” a voice bellowed.

Clara turned back to see the one-eyed man waving his arms for attention, searching frantically through the crowd.

“The girl, she had red hair! They were right here. I served them!”

A wave of people converged on him, knocking him to the ground in a frenzy of reaching hands and breathless questions.

“What's wrong with them?” Clara gasped. It was all she could do hold on to Nicholas's arm as they fought their way through.

Nicholas laughed, an edge to it. “They love her. Don't you see?”

A strange sort of love, yes, she could see that—a fear and hatred overshadowed by obsession, by a need Clara didn't understand. It simmered in the air above the swarms of people; their eyes flashed with it. A need to please Anise? A need to survive. And then, Nicholas had said faeries could
charm
, whatever that meant.

Clara felt it too: a compulsion, an inexplicable yearning in her blood. Anise was the key to finding her father; that much was obvious.

But Anise was more than that—this sudden stirring within Clara was more than that. Anise's smile lodged in her mind, a snare glittering with jewels, and even the chaos of the crowd could not shake it.

* * *

They took shelter in an alleyway, a grimy, narrow slip of a thing lit by flickering lanterns.

Clara paced, strategizing, trying to shake off the mania of the marketplace. It was, by her rough calculations, late in the afternoon, but the storms overhead had already doused the city in darkness. They would be able to hide here, at least for a short while.

“We need to change,” she said. “Make ourselves look different. The whole city has seen our faces, our clothes. We're walking targets.”

“Zarko,” Nicholas said, quiet in the shadows as he peered down the alleyway. Figures raced by, shouting; the streets crawled with enthusiastic new bounty hunters. “That's what she called it.”

“So you don't know this city?”

“I told you, Clara. I don't know anything about this place now. I'm only guessing—I know as much as you do.”

“But you haven't ever heard of Zarko? It wasn't here before?”

“No.”

Clara turned away from him and closed her eyes; she knew it would do them no good if she went to pieces. But how could she possibly
concentrate on finding her father in the face of so much unknown, with so many people in pursuit of them?

After a moment she could speak again. “That panel said something about curfews, so whatever Zarko is, it's strictly regulated.”

“I also heard something about sugar. Although, I assume, not the sort you'd find in a kitchen.”

Clara had no response to that, so she withdrew one of her daggers and began sawing her skirts from her bodice—they were cumbersome anyway, and now they were an identifying mark. After dragging her palms across the ground, she smeared muck on herself, on her clothes, through her hair. Each movement across her tender skin tugged forth tears. She noticed with a start that her wounds—the burns from the snowstorm, the cuts from the loks—had healed more during the last hour or two than seemed normal. The observation rattled her. She wondered if she was hallucinating; her eyes spilled over at the thought, but she did not move to wipe her face.

Nicholas watched in silence.

“We'll rest here for a while,” she said. “It's getting dark. The shadows will hide us.”

“I agree.”

“We should find new clothes when we wake. And in the meantime let's disguise ourselves as thoroughly as possible.”

“I'll follow your impressive example, but I might stay away from the . . . whatever it is there on the ground that you've pasted over your front.”

“You'd do well to use it.” Her breath was thinning; she found it increasingly difficult to tamp down her building sobs. “People aren't likely to approach a man covered in waste. And you should disguise your metal bits as much as you can.”

Nicholas hesitated, and then began scraping muck onto his own face. The smell of them both made Clara want to gag, but there was a certain satisfaction in the stench. She deserved it, for this catastrophe, for the fate of her family.

“Clara,” Nicholas said quietly after a moment. He put a hand on her arm. “Slow down.”

She would not look at him. “After we're disguised, we can move more freely. Find some sort of information hub. A soldier's station, perhaps, or a place of commerce.”

“Clara.”

“Tell me everything you know.” She knew he could see her tears, and she did not care. “Everything you remember. I need to know, even if it no longer seems relevant.”

His face was solemn as he watched her. “We will find him, Clara.”