Flights and Chimes and Mysterious Times (6 page)

W
HEN LORCAN ENTERED
the presence of the Lady, he did so proudly, his back straightened and shoulders squared by her trust. He had always been such a good son to her, a good servant.

His hands shook. He had wanted to resist the lure of the palace, his wish to return to her. The fleets needed inspecting, of course. War crept ever closer on the horizon, and the Empire of Clouds
would
triumph. He could sleep on his own dirigible as it sailed to the four corners of the island, a sooty jewel that was nonetheless the finest in the Empire’s crown. Put the airships all in order, stationed as flags with their crimson sails and
ready to set off at a word he would speak all too soon.

But he couldn’t stay away from the palace, not now that he’d returned after such a long time gone. A confection, it was, a wedding cake of stone. No one spoke to him as he strode up the wide, low staircase, through the front doors, along the red carpet, down a corridor large enough to house a thousand weary men.

A tiny metal creature bounded up to his ankles. Lorcan considered kicking it, but there was no need; he would save his strength for later. “Meet me in the tower, Trinket,” he said to the imp. It nodded and ran away much faster than it had come.

“Sir Lorcan has returned.” A footman bowed low, straightened again with his back against the open door. An arm, lost in the Last Great Battle, the last war fought by the Empire before these many years of peace that were near an end, was brass to the elbow.

Lorcan stepped inside. The polished floor reflected his fine suit, his loud footsteps. The room was richer than a feast, gold and velvet and glass. Tiny silver faeries hovered around stuttering flames in their crystal bulbs, as faeries are wont to do. The light flickered and licked at their wings, and Lorcan patted his pockets.

“Where is he?”

This time, it was Lorcan who bowed.

“Lady,” he said, standing straight once more. “You look well.” Oh, she was always a vision in blue, that deep shade of almost-midnight, as if she had torn down the sky to wear as silk. He had no doubt she could do just that if she wished. Several ladies-in-waiting giggled, clustered around the throne. Her dark hair was in ringlets today, shot through with jewels, snaking from beneath a tiny top hat crowned with feathers.

“Flatterer,” said the Lady with a smile.

A bowl of ripe apples with thin golden skins sat on a table beside her. For him, he knew. She was so kind, so thoughtful.

“Well, come closer, dearest, and tell me all about him. Is he upstairs? Have you already taken him to his room? Does he simply adore it? Of course he must, but I wish to meet him! Arabella!”

One of the young ladies rose, a chit of a thing with a face like soured milk. Fresh blooms sat in a vase on a table, and she moved toward them.

“Yes, Lady?”

“In the nursery, you will find the most perfect little boy. Not a hint of brass, not a gear in sight. Do fetch him and bring him to me.”

“Yes, Lady,” said Arabella.

Lorcan’s choices weighed heavy. Tangible things, one
in each hand. Letting the girl go would give him another five minutes, perhaps more if her feet moved as slowly as her brain.

“Stay,” he told her. She was nearly between himself and the Lady, and that was good. One step to the right . . .

Arabella blinked. So did the Lady. Only Lorcan knew what the slight thinning of those lips meant. Already she was considering ways to punish him for his insolence. Questioning her orders in front of another, why, that was simply not done.

“Do you wish to tell me something, Lorcan?” asked the Lady. She stood. Her shoes peeked from the hem of her gown. Heels clicked on the floor. “My dearest, you may tell me anything. You know this.”

Her skin was perfumed with stars, her eyes hard as flint.

“There has been . . . There has been a setback, Lady,” he said. “He was not right for you. Already I am looking for the perfect one, and he will be found, brought to you. I swear it.”

The girls had ceased their giggling. Arabella stood, frozen, one foot turned toward the door. She could have reached out to touch both Lorcan and the Lady, but of course she did not.

For one brief, hovering moment, the room was a held breath, broken only by the steel-flutter of faery wings, for they did not know or care. Lorcan met the Lady’s eyes.

And waited.

“I think,” she said, a hint of pink tongue darting out between her lips. “I think you are lying to me. Did you fail, Lorcan, dearest? Were you outwitted by a child? Or perhaps, perhaps you did not want to bring me my new son. Tell me why you are lying.”

He stepped backward. A mistake. That damnable fool of a mother had ruined
everything.
“I would never dare to do such a thing, Lady.”

The Lady’s head tilted, and a gloved hand reached as if to strike him, but it did not. Instead, the softest satin brushed gently over Lorcan’s cheek. “You were so young, once,” she mused. “So young and so innocent. You would sit at my feet and play with the automatons the metallurgists would make for you. You loved me then.”

A faery, perhaps blinded by the glow, flew into the lantern glass, and it rang through the room like a bell. “As I do still, Mother.”

He knew at once. The silly girls knew. Even the faeries seemed to know, for their wings stopped fluttering and they landed on the edges of things with soft
clunks.

The Lady’s mouth twisted. Sparks rained from her eyes to land, sizzling, on her dress. “You
dare
!” she screamed. “You dare call me that? YOU DARE, EVEN AS YOU LIE TO ME?”

The force of her blow snapped his neck back. She could not harm him, not badly, but she could make him wish he were dead.

He did wish it. One of her rings had caught him, and he felt the blood flow, burning, fiery, and turn to dry ash on his cheek. The girls stared, wordless, confused. One let out a nervous giggle.

The Lady waved her hand. The girl fell to the floor without time even for a final breath, a grimace frozen on her face.

In a swirl of midnight, the Lady stormed across the room. The faeries flew for cover, tucking themselves behind books on the shelves, flying up to perch on the great gas chandelier. Crystal shattered, skittering in razor-sharp diamonds across the floor. A priceless vase smashed to shards.

“I will fix it, Lady,” Lorcan said, loud over the curtains tearing. Light fell reluctantly into the room. The ladies-in-waiting, seizing their chance, ran from it, nearly bowling over the footman in their haste, leaving the dead one behind. “I will find you another. A better son.”

An apple missed him by an inch, slamming into a Tune-Turner behind. The enormous cone wobbled and fell with a deafening crash.

“I want the one I was promised. Why, the artist has already begun his portrait, but he can do only so much from a mere photograph. We must see the boy, and I have
suffered this foolishness long enough, Lorcan. Do you hear me? I do not want cats or butterflies or girls who must be wound up every morning! Do your duty, as all those who came before you did, and bring. Me. My. Son.”

Lorcan raised his chin. “He will be yours.”

“See to it. Oh and, Lorcan? I do think it’s time you called me Andrasta.”

So she was his mother no more. Lorcan bowed, stiffly, in place of speech. He would get the boy and she would forgive him. He would be her most trusted once again.

Oh, yes.

A
WINDUP GIRL. WHOEVER
heard of such a thing?

“You
look
real,” he said to her. Once, Mrs. Pond had taken him to a circus, where a pair of puppeteers had performed an elaborate act with marionettes on strings. The puppets’ faces had been shiny, wooden, plump lips painted a too-bright pink, eyes too wide, and even those were enough to haunt Jack’s dreams for weeks.

This girl had no strings.

Her eyes, though closed—he remembered the
click
—were lashed with what he was certain was real hair. Her fingers curled like proper hands. Jack bent down. Tiny hinges made knuckles below neatly trimmed fingernails.

Or rather, formed, because these would never grow. She had been built. In a workshop somewhere, perhaps. There would be a little box of teeth, another, larger, of eyeballs, drawers full of rivets and wires and long trunks of copper pipes for bones.

He poked her, pulled his finger away as if burned.

Experimentally, Jack touched his own arm, watched the flesh dent beneath and pop back into shape when he took his hand away.

He poked her again. Her . . . skin, for he could not think of a better word despite knowing a great many words, stayed smooth as a wall, a china plate.

That was
extremely
odd.

The key at her neck was shaped like a butterfly’s wing, with two large holes punched through the brass at the top and bottom. The edges dug into Jack’s thumb and forefinger as he gripped it.

Winding her up mustn’t be so very wrong, not if she was meant to be so. And there was no soul about to tell him off for messing with things as didn’t belong to him.

Slowly, he turned the key.

Nothing happened, not at first. One spin, two, three. He braced his feet on the soft wooden floorboards of the cage, cold toes curled inside wet socks. Seven, eight, nine.

On the tenth, her eyes snapped open, whizzing blue in
their sockets. Jack hopped back again, nearly tripping in his haste to get away from her suddenly, as if it hadn’t been him who’d brought her to life.

“Hello,” she said, voice just like a girl’s. Her lips moved, stiffly but no more so than Mother’s when she was talking to someone to whom she must be polite.

“You can talk,” said Jack.

“Hello.” She looked at him.

“Can you say anything else?”

“’Course I can. Can you?”

“Um,” said Jack. There were a thousand things he wanted to ask, just like at school when they were learning something interesting and the teachers kept the really good bits to themselves so Jack and his classmates would raise their hands. But there was no one else here, and Jack’s hands were by his sides, held there so he wouldn’t poke her again. That seemed wrong now. “I’m Jack. Do you have a name?”

“Hello”—she blinked, looking for all the world and people in it as if she were thinking—“Jack. I’m Beth. Beth Number Thirteen.”

Jack thought about this for a moment. “There are twelve more of you?”

“Somewhere. You’re very pink. And a little bit stupid.”

“That’s not very nice,” snapped Jack.

“I’m not very nice.” Beth folded her hands together. “But Dr. Snailwater says I am supposed to try. I’m sorry,” she said, not sounding particularly sorry at all.

“All right.”
Very pink.
She was the second person to say that.

“Were you trying to stay out of the rain, too? You didn’t do a very good job. You’re all wet, so perhaps you
are
stupid.
Dry as a bone, no rust be known,
” Beth singsonged.

“But I don’t rust in the rain.” A feeling of having eaten too many jellied eels curled itself in Jack’s belly, all squirm and slime. The empty streets.

“Don’t you? Gosh. Are all your metal parts on the inside, then?”

“I haven’t got any metal parts.” How very cold and wet he was came back to Jack with a
whoosh.
Cold and wet and Mrs. Pond was going to be so angry. “I was trying to get home, to Mayfair.”

Thunder rumbled. The birdcage shook. Beyond the park and lower than the sky, clouds gathered, a thick, swirling gray.

“You’ll want to be going that way, then,” said Beth, pointing. “’Round the lake. North.” It was the most human she’d seemed so far, her eyes half-closed, mouth pressed together, and she looked away to stare across the park. “Oh, look. The airships are flying.”

Jack followed her hand out to the horizon.

Not thunder at all. A tingle ran down his spine.

Brass grilles and clockwork girls and boats, boats sailing on the sky, great sheets hung from masts and holes for cannon fire.

“What . . . What are they?” he asked, not sure how he’d come to be sitting, knees pulled to his chest, the iron cage bars cold stripes at his back, as if another few steps would make the difference.

“The airships,” Beth said again.

They were coming closer.

•  •  •

Jack knew, the way folks might know a dream they couldn’t quite remember. Fuzzy on the surface, but the truth was there, deep down, running away from his efforts to grasp it.

And yet, at the same time, he didn’t know at all.

He trudged through the park beneath the dull, swishy roar of the airships, Beth at his side.

She walked like a normal person, a normal person who’d been kicked in the knee. Every other step was a funny little skip, but it hadn’t stopped her from insisting she come along so’s he wouldn’t get lost.

He didn’t want to say anything to her, not until he was certain. Already she thought he was stupid. Pink and stupid.

Jack kicked a pebble. At least he wasn’t a
toy.

Overhead, the ships split the sky apart. Three of them, all in a row, beasts coughing out huge lungfuls of black smoke from enormous bellies. The smoke curled to streamers, like crepe paper for mourning, and then dissolved, lost forever to the clouds. Craning, squinting, Jack saw the lines where one plank met the next, thinking they must’ve taken an entire forest’s worth of trees.