Mechanica (16 page)

I sighed. “I haven’t ridden in a long time,” I admitted. The Steps hired a carriage when they had to go out, so that they wouldn’t have to pay for horses or for the servants to keep them. I was too busy with their other chores, and anyway, their suitors usually came to them. But I remembered the horses from my childhood with such fondness. Once you get up to a good gallop, riding gives you an unmatchable feeling of freedom.

I had Jules, at least, whom I loved more than any person in my life right now. But . . . I’d forgotten again . . . Jules was gone. My dream that he’d come back to life had been just that.

Fin’s eyes narrowed. “You have a horse and don’t ride him? You have to know how wrong that is, Nick.”

I couldn’t bear for him to think ill of me. “I meant to say, I had one. He was . . . put down.”

It was utterly the wrong phrase, of course, for what had happened to Jules. Chastity’s boot crushing him, alone in my room, when he had only been trying to help me, trying to find me for some reason I still didn’t understand.

“I’m sorry.” Fin looked sorrier than most people would have. “I’ve never . . . one of my—one of the horses is getting very old. He was the first horse I rode as a boy. Someday we’ll have to . . . but I’ve never lost a horse yet. Oh, Nick, I’m sorry I said anything.”

“No, you’re right.” Though it was easier to look at him now, his beauty still startled me. “A horse should be ridden. They go so bored otherwise, and then they’re not fit enough to jump, and . . . even if I still had a horse, though, I’ve been so busy with my chores and the sewing—I make all their clothes—and the work I’m doing for my inventions, you know.”

Fin shook his head. “I don’t know how you do it all,” he said. “All these things. You’re amazing, Nick.”

I winced. I’d spent so long trying to make the world think I was unremarkable; I realized now that I needed people to think of me that way. If anyone really thought I was special, they would ask things of me, things I didn’t think I could give. Better if Stepmother thought me simple and stupid, and better if everyone else thought that too. Fin saying I was amazing threw off that balance inside me. There was space and darkness and color there now. There always had been, I supposed, but I had managed to ignore it.

I told myself that it was a thing to be proud of, that I worked so hard. “Thank you, Fin,” I said with my exhale, and my tongue lingered a little over his name, though I didn’t want it to.

But then I frowned. “You do about as much, I suppose,” I said. “You’re a manservant, and you care for the horses, obviously very well.” He grinned again at this and ducked his head, a few curls spilling into his eyes. “And you still make those sculptures. Oh, they’re gorgeous, Fin. They’re like life.”

He raised his eyebrows, his grin spreading, and then he slipped off the platform and jumped to the ground. I held back a small shriek—we were at least twelve feet up—but he landed in a fluid crouch, and his shirtsleeves were covered in a cracked film of powdered snow. I thought of how cold he must have been up there with me, with his coat spread under us.

A gentleman, I thought. It was a word I used to announce Chastity’s and Piety’s callers, but rarely thought of in its true meaning. A gentleman.

He vanished into the shed and came back a few seconds later, bearing something small and brown. He loped over to the tree, climbing with only one hand and his feet as he carried it with him.

I smiled at him as he settled down gracefully next to me. Was there anything he didn’t do easily?

He gave me the sculpture he held.

It was a horse, a gorgeous roan, moving through some unseen wind—or no, standing still, with wind streaming back through its mane and tail and the longer hair toward its fetlocks and hooves. It was almost exactly the same size Jules had been. Its bright eyes did not hold Jules’s life or intelligence, but through Fin’s artistry, they almost seemed to.

“I knew this one was yours. I don’t know how,” Fin said, laughing a little, “but I did. I thought you’d like the horse best, much as you admired the Forest Queen back at Market.”

“Oh, I do. I do like this one best.” He couldn’t know how perfect it was. There was no way he could know.

“But the Forest Queen,” I said, recalling the questions I’d wanted to ask him, “these are really her ruins?”

“We’re in them right now,” Fin said, touching his hand to the platform under us. “Imagine that. These trees, right here, are where Silviana built her haven for . . . for anyone who needed her help.”

I looked around, trying to picture the ruined tree houses at the height of their glory. “I always loved her,” I said, hoping to keep him talking.

He hardly needed the encouragement. “I did, too,” he said with a smile. “She isn’t a popular figure up at the palace, you know; well, at least not with the court. Most versions of the tale make the king—it was King Dougray III back then, one of the worst in a long line of tyrants leading right up to today”—a muscle in his jaw twitched—“into a buffoon, if not an outright villain, and you can see why that’s a dangerous story to tell.” He looked at me. “It’s actually banned, you know. Her story. You can’t find it in print.”

That detail shocked me for a moment. But I’d never read anything about the Forest Queen in our library, and it did sound like something the king would do. . . . 

“The servants like to tell it, though,” he said, “perhaps even more these last few years. Ever since those laws against Faerie came in, you see.”

I was surprised he hadn’t said
since the
quarantine,
the way Fitz or the Steps might have done; but then, Fin had given me rhodopis berries. I was starting to see where his sympathies lay.

His voice had grown a touch deeper and faster as he spoke about Silviana, and now it sped forward again. “She did a remarkable thing, Nick: she saw a wrong and made it right. She kept the people of Esting from suffering. It didn’t last, I know, and Dougray thought he’d bested her in the end, but . . . Well. The tree houses are ruins, but they’re still here, aren’t they?”

I nodded, looking around again, loving the place even more than I had last night.

“They’re still here!” Fin cried. “And people still tell her story. The servants at the palace; people all over the country. The Forest Queen is one of Esting’s heroines, for goodness sake. Like the Wolfspeaker, or Ebony and the Gnomes, but—but
real
.”

“She was always one of my favorites,” I said quietly. Pleased as I was that I’d learned more about the Forest Queen, I was a little stunned by the power of Fin’s love for her. “Still,” I added, “wouldn’t she be a dangerous subject for a sculptor like yourself? Rebellious, since her story can’t even be printed?”

The hardness in Fin’s eyes was replaced by his customary good humor, and he shot me a crooked grin. “Not rebellious at all,” he said, as if the very notion were shocking. “Silviana represents the best of Esting. She was brave enough to do what was right, no matter what the law said.
That’s
patriotism. Not following a tyrant lord, but dissenting, and putting real action behind your dissent.”

“The way you tell it,” I said, amused, “you nearly make me want to dissent, myself.”

He laughed. “I imagine it’s clear,” he said ruefully, “that I’ve debated on this subject before.”

“I had an inkling,” I replied. We both smiled; but even though I knew he was laughing at himself, in truth I had to admire his passion.

“In any case,” Fin went on, “maybe I’ll sculpt another Silviana, since you love her, too. But this chap,” he touched the nose of the horse I still held, “he might as well have spoken to me, and told me he was yours.”

I looked down, still smiling, but the sculpture’s resemblance to a certain other small equine form sent a tremor through me. Remembering Jules, it hurt to hold this heavy, inanimate horse in my hands. But it was beautiful, and Fin had made it, and now he had given it to me. I imagined him with his brush, lost in concentration, his eyes crinkled at the edges from squinting at his work instead of from smiling, his dark skin and hair lit by the steady glow of a gaslight—I supposed candles flickered too much to be of use to artists.

“It’s wonderful, Fin,” I said finally. “It would sell for so much at Market, though. Why would you give it to me?”

His answer was better than I’d even hoped. “I like you, Nick. I wanted to give you something.” He smiled again, but there was some sadness, some hardness behind it that I didn’t know how to place. “It’s not charity, if you’re worried about that. I know you and Caro are the same that way.”

I blushed, but stood my ground. “I want to get things on my own merit,” I said. “Is there anything wrong with that?”

He shook his head. “Of course not. I suppose I could have used a little more of it in my own upbringing.”

I imagined his childhood, the illegitimate son of a noble father, how the servant children must have teased him and told him it all came too easily to him.

“But, Nick—what if someone you knew, someone you loved . . . someone in your family . . . really needed it? Would you take . . . help . . . for their sake, so they could get what they needed?” His smile had vanished. “Wouldn’t it be selfish not to?”

I remembered Mother, who died of a Fey disease that only Fey medicine could have cured, illegal medicine Father refused even to look for. “I would have taken help for my mother before she died. Anything that would have made her well again. But the kind of sickness she had . . .” I shook my head. “The only help was lovesbane, and it was already outlawed here.”

Fin nodded. “People still get Fey’s croup, and they almost always die now. With enough money, though, one can still buy lovesbane—through less-than-legitimate means.” He spat out the last few words; I supposed “less than legitimate” was a phrase that had been applied to him a few times too many.

“The Night Market? They sell lovesbane there?” I had heard Fitz mention the illegal-goods market that opened at midnight, once a week, in Esting City and changed its location every time. It was his father’s pet project to shut it down, but no one from the court had found it yet—or if they had, they weren’t speaking up.

“Any kind of Fey goods, Nick, almost anything you could have gotten before the quarantine. The price is exorbitant, but”—his face darkened in an angry flush—“if you have the money, and the knowledge of whom to ask, you can . . . It’s a curable disease, you know. Or it was.”

“I know.” Why were we talking about the disease that killed Mother? I didn’t want to, and it certainly didn’t seem as if he wanted to, either.

“If I—if I had any power, really, the first thing I’d do is make lovesbane legal again,” Fin said. There was real passion in his voice, real anger. “All the Fey goods, for that matter. It’s wrong, the way it’s done now. Wrong.”

I remembered Caro refusing charity at Market and how sensitive both she and Fin had seemed on the subject of her lack of money. I remembered what she’d said about her mother. “That’s what Caro’s mother has, isn’t it? That’s what’s making her sick.”

“Yes.” Fin shook his head. “She’s had it for months now, a slow, lingering case. It will kill her. Not quickly, so Caro pretends it’s not true. But it will kill her, unless she gets the lovesbane.”

“Like it killed Queen Nerali.”

Fin looked up at me, and something in his face had changed. “Yet it was lovesbane, too, that killed the Queen.”

I considered this: lovesbane, both a poison and a cure. It had been the first Fey import to be outlawed in Esting, and it became the symbol for the whole quarantine. There wouldn’t be an Exposition this year were it not for those laws and the demand for Estinger technology to replace the magic we’d lost.

“But could we afford it, Fin? Even if she’d let us help her, could we?”

“I could.” Fin spoke quietly, and I could tell I shouldn’t ask him how.

“Well.” I flashed to an image of Mother’s funeral, the itchy black dress that was too tight on me because Father had given my old measurements to the dressmaker, the long lines of strangers telling me they were sorry. “You have to help her, then, Fin. Anything is better than—well. Yes. You have to help her.”

Fin pressed his gloved hand over mine. “I know.”

His hand was warm, and suddenly I didn’t have anything else to say, but it seemed all right this time.

We sat side by side, quiet, our hands slipped together. Until it grew late and I had to go home.

I
WALKED
back through the forest quickly, every once in a while touching Fin’s sculpture where it lay in one of my coat’s roomy pockets. I found myself lingering over the image I’d conjured of Fin sculpting the horse, sketching from life first, perhaps, then working through prototypes, molding parts, making the cast for this piece, pouring the metal and waiting and unmolding, polishing, and finally painting. I pictured his hands holding a paintbrush.

I’d come to the edge of the forest. I touched the horse’s nose once more, smiling, and hurried across the clearing to the cellar window.

I slipped in with no trouble this time, my coat barely catching on the window’s rough wooden edge. Enough times in and out this way, I thought, and I would wear it smooth . . . so long as the Steps didn’t find me out again. I could only guess what they might do if they discovered the studio again. But I was sure that the ombrossus oil would work, at least for a while. After the Exposition, who knew if I would even need it anymore? I could have a patron, and enough commissions to rent a room in the city, away from them, and I could start the long journey of saving enough money to oust the Steps from my parents’ house once and for all.