Mechanica (3 page)

I’d never asked quite that question before, so I knew I had won.

“Two hundred years ago,” she began, “we discovered it. The Heir commissioned a ship and crew to find him a worthy bride, and they set out to voyage over the world. Nowhere in Nordsk or the Sudlands had they found a lady who met his exacting standards, and he held fast to the belief that the perfect wife waited for him in some as-yet-uncharted country.

“They sailed for months, Captain Brand and his crew of brave men and women—women were allowed at sea then, you know.” Mother’s eyes sparked. “At last, after months of empty, desolate ocean, they sighted land, a tall mountain rising up from the waves, its peak lost in a haze of sky.

“They set toward it at once, and they drew up on a beach of coarse blue sand. They anchored the
Bridegroom
and took the longboats ashore, and the first thing they did was plant Esting’s flag in the ground.

“Beyond the beach, a lush jungle stretched out on either side of them. They had discovered not a small volcanic island as they’d first thought, but a whole new continent.”

“Faerie.” I sighed the word and settled deeper into my pillow.

Mother nodded. “They set off through the jungle, not knowing what they would find. It took weeks to hack through the dense vegetation, and their naturalist, Lady . . . ?” She trailed off, eyeing me expectantly.

“Lady Candery!” I answered—easy to remember, because the lady in question shared her name with our housekeeper. This was part of our unspoken agreement too, Mother’s and mine: she would tell me a story at bedtime, and I would prove how much I remembered from my lessons.

“Yes, Lady Candery. She recorded as many of the new plant species as she could, though she was bound to miss some, for they were all new to us. Do you remember any that she discovered?”

I nodded eagerly. I was always eager—almost desperate—to please Mother, to impress her. “Lovesbane, shade-blossom, Candery’s bounty . . . um . . . silver orchid . . .”

“Good.” She offered me a small, rare smile like a gemstone. “And after more than a month of struggling through the jungle, they finally came to its end. What did they find?”

“They found a road.”

“And they followed that road for a night and a day, until they came to the Fey capital, to the tall, spiraling palace carved from the same gold-veined blue stone that made up the sand on the beaches.”

Father came in then—he listened to the end of Mother’s stories whenever he was home. She liked us to keep the beginnings to ourselves.

“And when they arrived in the court?” he asked, slipping his arm around Mother’s shoulders and pushing his other hand back through his thick blond hair.

“They drove the flag into the floor in the courtroom, too,” I replied, a recitation from the official state history books he’d brought me after his last trip. “They knew the Heir would find no bride there, only savages.”

Father nodded. “And how did they know that?”

An easy question to my young self; the answer had been in that same history book. “The Fey are not truly people. They do not look or act like civilized men. The Lord made them to serve us and made us to care for them.”

Mother stroked back a stray lock of my brown hair. “You’ve learned your new books’ lessons well, sweeting. So Captain Brand and his crew claimed Faerie as a colony of Esting.”

“And we have lived in peaceful dominion over them ever since.” Father ended the story.

Mother looked up at Father for a long moment. She stroked my hair again, and though it seemed as if she wanted to speak, she said nothing.

Father dimmed my lamp, and they left the room.

“Those history books are wrong about at least one thing,” Mother told me over tea the next day. She’d come up from the workshop for a little air, she said, and a little respite. I knew that respite for her meant a lesson for me, but I didn’t mind. I always wished Mother would spend more time teaching me, not less.

Mr. Candery had told me to meet her in the library, and there he brought us a pot of clary-bush tea and thin sandwiches layered with radish and white goat’s butter. I crunched happily through the sandwiches and drank the strong, colorless tea, relishing the warmth and energy it gave me. These days, Father was always complaining about the expensive Fey imports Mother insisted on keeping stocked in our kitchens. After their last argument about it, she’d stopped ordering Fey wines or dried fruits, but I was grateful that we still had the clary-bush. It was always my favorite tea: floral and sharp, at once a courtier’s handkerchief and a knight’s armor.

“What are the books wrong about?” I asked, tucking into another sandwich. Thin radish, sweet butter, speckles of salt. An unladylike swig of clear tea.

Mother usually paused to think before answering any of my questions, but this time her response was immediate. “Esting’s dominion over Faerie is
not
peaceful.” She spoke even more forcefully than usual. “There are rumors of—look at me, Nicolette, when I’m talking to you.”

I glanced up guiltily. “I’m sorry, Mother.” I’d been watching the painted fish on the inside of my teacup as they flitted through their china world, making tiny ripples and bubbles in the tea. Another Fey treasure, this tea set, one that Father had paid dearly for when he and Mother were still courting. He never liked to see that tea set himself anymore, but it was special to us, to Mother and me.

To prove I’d been listening, I added, “There’s talk of something, you said?” I had not yet begun to fathom that when Mother and Father disagreed about something, it meant that at least one of them had to be wrong; it had only recently occurred to me that they fought more often than they did anything else.

Mother’s lips pursed. “The Fey have grown selfish with their magic, they say,” she said. “They’re not nearly so willing to give it to us as they used to be. I imagine they’ve begun to realize how valuable it is here, much as people like your father have tried to hide that fact from them. They’re not
animal
s
,
for the Lord’s sake. They can think. And if they keep thinking, it won’t shock me or anyone else with a brain if they decide to rebel.”

People like your father
. . . She’d always called him William before, even to me. To hear her say “your father” seemed distancing in a way that frightened me, in a way that I didn’t like to think about.

“But can you still use magic, Mother? Can you still make the buzzers?”

It was the name I’d used as a toddler for Mother’s mechanical insects, the ones that Father sold all up and down the continent, and that for years had been the height of style in the Estinger court. My methods for fixing them had improved rapidly in the last months, and I was longing for the day when Mother would decide I was ready to start building my own. I was convinced that day couldn’t be too far off. But if she stopped making them entirely . . .

I’d always loved magic. It was just another tool, really, like coal power; it simply wasn’t fully understood here. But I couldn’t believe that it was as bad as Father’s books seemed to suggest, and as some Estingers seemed to think it was.

I looked at Mother pleadingly.

“Oh, don’t worry, darling,” she said. “It would take much more than high prices to stop me.”

She gestured casually toward Mr. Candery, who was conducting a pair of wheeled feather dusters around the bookshelves and mantel with small flicks of his elegant fingers. She’d been making more and more helpmeets for him lately, things that made his duties around the house easier. Mother’s inventions and Fey magic—it was hard for me to imagine one without the other. “You might not always mention my new, ah, ideas to your father, though.” She spoke as if she were joking, but there was something haughty, almost angry, in the way she smiled. She’d said “your father” again too.

I didn’t like to think what that kind of smile meant. I’d never seen anything like it on her face before.

Father returned from his trip to the Sudlands a few weeks later, his trunks still full of Mother’s insects and oddities.

“I sold barely a dozen, though the trade in mechanics was the busiest I’d ever seen it,” he said. “People don’t like magic the way they used to.”

“Nonsense,” said Mother. “This country thrives on magic.” She looked at him sharply. “So does this family.”

Father grumbled and looked down; there was not much he could say to that. The house, Lampton Manor, was his family’s, but he—and I—both knew well enough that Mother’s inventions were what afforded us our wealthy lifestyle. It was even Mother’s workshop, rumbling away under us, that heated our fireplaces and kept the household running with only Mr. Candery and a part-time maid serving us.

But then Father changed tactics. “There were Brethren everywhere in Esting City,” he said. “The square was crawling with them. They were carrying banners, holding signs, preaching to the crowds. Saying magic was against the Lord’s glory, against man’s endeavor. Saying that the specks’ tricks had made Estingers lazy and stupid, unable to do anything for ourselves. That we’ll be sitting ducks when they turn against us.”

Mother sucked in her breath at
specks
and
tricks,
and I knew enough to be shocked by Father’s words myself, even if the sudden, feverish light in his eyes hadn’t frightened me already.
Specks
was the worst Estinger word for the Fey, referencing their heavily blue-freckled skin, and to call magic
tricks
was an insult to the honesty of anyone who used it.

I waited for Mother to raise her voice, to ask whether Father was calling her a trickster. But she didn’t; for a long while, she didn’t speak at all. Then her face seemed to open up, like curtains, and what I saw behind her eyes was immensely sad.

“You used to love it too,” she said. “What happened?”

Father kept looking at the floor. Finally, his voice measured and carefully neutral, he said, “Sometimes one finds one is wrong.”

He stalked past us into the sitting room, where he stayed for the rest of the afternoon.

His next trip was only to Esting City for a few days, but when he came back, he said things were worse yet. There were rumors of an uprising in Faerie, and Fey brigands were attacking Estinger military and trade ships alike.

But it was not until the year I turned nine that I understood what the tensions with Faerie truly meant. That spring, Mother came home from one of her very rare social calls earlier than expected, her face ash-gray and sober. She called Father and me into the library, and Mr. Candery, too. Our housekeeper stood deferentially at the edge of the sofa where Father and I settled ourselves. Each of us tried, in our ways, to pretend patience while we waited for Mother to collect herself and give us her news. I fidgeted with my skirts; Father bit his nails. Only Mr. Candery’s composure seemed unruffled—he stood there as quiet and stable as ever.

“The Queen has been poisoned,” Mother said. “She is dead.”

“Poisoned?” Father pulled his hand away from his mouth. A dot of blood grew on his ragged thumbnail. “With what?”

Mother looked at Mr. Candery, her eyes soft; I had rarely seen them softer. “Lovesbane. Her doctor gave her too much.”

It was an herb that grew only in Faerie. Its medicinal properties were their own kind of magic, and it was the only cure for Fey’s croup, a disease that had come back with Faerie’s first explorers. Queen Nerali had been abed with the croup for months; a Fey doctor had been imported to treat her.

But if one takes too much lovesbane, it becomes a deadly poison.

Father shook his head. “I knew no good could come from Faerie,” he said.

Mother stood. “No good?” she demanded. “And what of my work, then? What of the money you bring in selling my insects?”

Something she didn’t say hung in the air too: what of Mr. Candery?

Father stood as well. They eyed each other, neither willing to concede.

Finally, he spoke. “Well, what will happen now?” His voice was flat, cool; he was speaking of the Queen’s death, not our family’s future.

Mother nodded, though not in agreement. “He’s banished the Fey,” she said. “King Corsin. He’s banished all of them. They have to leave in a fortnight.” Her gaze ticked for a moment toward Mr. Candery, then back to Father. “The part-Fey may remain. Mr. Candery will have two weeks’ leave to stay with his mother, to say goodbye.”

Father had all but applauded when Mother spoke of the banishment. Now he turned toward our housekeeper and frowned. “He can say his goodbyes in a day or less,” he said. “That parent of his lives in Esting City, not two hours’ ride from here.”

“Mr. Candery says ‘Mother,’” my own mother retorted, “so it is only right that we do the same.”

Father gave her the kind of look that suggested what he wanted to say in reply was not fit for my ears.

Mother looked to me now. “I want to give them some time together,” she said. “He’ll likely never see her again.”

“None of us will see any of them again, Lord willing,” Father muttered. “Not in Esting, at least.”

“William.” Mother’s voice was nearly a whisper now, but full of warning. She looked at me again, and so did Father.

He shrugged, stood up, and left the room.

Mother stared after him for a moment, all softness gone from her expression. Then she stormed out too, and a moment later, I heard the cellar door slam open and shut.

I never liked to see my parents argue; of course not, no child does. But I thought this was something worse, something of a different kind, than I had ever seen before.

Neither Mother nor Father returned to the library, though I waited there for them.

It was Mr. Candery who stroked my hair, and told me it was all right, and took me to my room. He gave me a book of old poetry to read and told me not to worry.

Our housekeeper came back from his goodbyes two weeks later, as quiet as ever. I wanted to ask him about it, but our friendship had never been founded on pressing questions—or on any kind of conversation at all, really.

So when he returned, I waited for him at the servants’ entrance, silently regarded him as he hung up his hat and coat, and then reached up—he was still so much taller than I, though I was nearly nine and starting to grow faster—and took his hand.