The Unnaturalists (4 page)

But the driver just shakes his head and disappears back down the metal stairs.

“Not a word about the box,” Father whispers to us.

The Wad and I both nod and follow him outside. Trees rustle their flaming robes along the road. We’re in the Forest. Instinctively, I make the sign against irrationality to protect myself from pixie infestation. It’s all I can do, since we’ve had no time to don nullsuits, if Father and Charles even remembered to bring them. Most young ladies my age would be terrified if they found themselves so unshielded on a Forest road that’s likely teeming with Unnaturals.

But not me. I look around in unabashed wonder at the sun in the
autumn leaves, the endless march of trees. I’m more interested in what sort of sylphids inhabit this stretch of road than in the three men with yellowing lace cravats and rusty-looking swords advancing on us.

They’re perhaps the most pitiful excuse for highwaymen I’ve ever seen, except that I’ve never seen a highwayman in the flesh before. When ground travel between New London and Scientia became nearly impossible due to the Creeping Waste, most of the brigands disappeared or took to the skies. But now they’re here, looking hungry and, if anything, bored.

“We’ll have your valuables now,” says a man with a ratty wig and bad teeth I can see even from here.

Father coughs. “We have no valuables to speak of, sir. But our purses are yours.”

The highwayman frowns. He gestures with his rusty blade toward the carriage, and one of his men climbs inside.

“A strongbox, boss!” the man says as he backs out of the carriage.

I look from Father to the Wad to the driver. All of them stand still, barely daring to breathe, like Museum specimens caught in a paralytic field.

“Bring it out,” the boss says.

I move forward. “Touch that box and we’ll all die!” I shout. I have no idea whether it’s true or not, but it has the desired effect.

Everyone looks around. Father’s mouth forms a tiny
o
. The Wad’s eyes narrow.

The brigand snarls at me and moves again toward the box.

“I mean it!” I say. “If you want us all to die in a blaze of etheric energy, by all means, continue.” I make myself look as tall as I can and fold my arms across my chest.

The boss glares at me, and his lackey looks back and forth between us, trying to figure out what to do.

A voice comes from the trees.

“She doesn’t jest, highwayman.”

Several people step out, thin and stocky, boys, men, and a few girls. All I can see in the gathering gloom are their patched coats, their fur-lined bandoliers. The girls in their checkered headbands hang back. The chicken feather on one old granny’s hat licks the dusk like a white tongue.

Tinkers.

I know of them, of course. I’ve seen them from afar in the markets, selling their mechanical wares from bright-painted wagons. But I’ve never been allowed to do more than watch them covertly from a distance. Aunt Minta always sends the maid to buy from them. For while their wares are reliable, they themselves are not. Or so Aunt Minta says. She’s sure they all carry pixie infestations or sylphid sickness, though I’ve reminded her often enough that they must pass under the wards of the City gates before they can enter. The wards should clean them of any such contamination.

But Aunt Minta always sniffs and reminds me that she knows more than I do. “After all,” she says, “if they weren’t all heretics, why would they have been sent beyond the walls in the first place?”

Effie Lindler used to tease me unmercifully that I was of Tinker descent because of my pig cheeks and cat eyes. (Which was part of why I was immensely if secretly gleeful when the kobold at Miss Marmalade’s turned her into a cow.) As I watch the Tinkers come closer, though, I really don’t think I look anything like them. My hair is auburn and my eyes are hazel, after all, while the Tinkers are mostly dark-haired and dark-eyed.

One of them—a boy with unforgivably mussed hair who looks to be around thirteen or fourteen—casually loads a blow pipe with feathered darts. The older Tinker who spoke catches and releases chains that chime in his palm. Others withdraw curved daggers or strange throwing instruments from the pockets of their coats. Even the granny has a wicked little blade in her hands.

Most City people hate the Tinkers, but their stealth and facility for making whatever they need out of virtually anything are reasons for all but the strongest or most foolish to leave them alone. There is often talk of ousting them from the derelict trainyard, but it never comes to anything. In the past, Tinkers were Culled to help fill the Refineries, but I’m fairly certain that doesn’t happen anymore.

The Wad’s lip curls as he looks at them, but I’m merely curious. Almost everything I know about them is hearsay. I wonder how they see themselves. I wonder how they see us.

The highwaymen understand they’re outnumbered. The leader spits into the dirt. He and his men melt into the scrub along the abandoned tracks.

But that leaves us with a new problem.

I move closer to the stairs. I don’t want to put myself in the way of that leader and his chain or the boy with the blowpipe, but someone has to stop them.

The leader laughs at me, however.

“We know what’s in the box, little lady. We saw your men take it. We reckon the Cityfolk are more than welcome to the Waste, if you’re really bent on taking it there.”

I struggle to keep my face composed. I was only bluffing about something being in the box. Is he bluffing along with me or is he serious? I can’t imagine the latter at all. It’s first of all impossible.
No one can get near the Waste without dissolving into black sand. And, though that strongbox is nevered beyond all reason, I’ve been told that nothing can hold the Waste. Nothing. Surely it must be the former. Surely he’s bluffing along with me, just so he and his people can scare the highwaymen and take what they want for themselves. Isn’t he?

My Father’s face hardens. He clears his throat to lecture the man, but the Tinker leader is having none of it.

“No need, Pedant. Unlike those other fools, we really do just want your purses. As payment for your rescue.”

“Rescue?” the Wad splutters. “This is a rescue?”

“I don’t think you want us to call it anything else,” the leader says, tossing the chain from hand to hand.

Charles’s face looks darker than the dusk, if that’s possible. He steps forward, whispering words I don’t understand. His hand lifts. What is he doing? I recall warnings from Scripture.
Ye shall know them by their gifts
. If such a thing wasn’t utter heresy, I would almost think he’s about to throw curses at the Tinkers. That, too, is impossible. I’m beginning to wonder if anything can happen. That is a frightening thought indeed.

And then Charles melts to the ground, a feathered dart sticking up over his collar. The boy lowers the pipe from his lips. I can’t help but match his wicked grin, though I smother it quickly, because Father is sputtering in shock. I’m not sure he even noticed Charles until he slid to the ground.

The boy slips the pipe back into his patched coat and comes closer. He takes a few coins out of the driver’s purse. He stoops to take Charles’s. After he takes Father’s, Father kneels next to Charles, checking his breathing.

The boy stands in front of me. I glimpse dark eyes under even darker tousled hair. I hold my purse out toward him, and he undoes the strings with a deft twist of his fingers.

As soon as the purse strings fall open, regret sours my mouth like preservative acid. Nestled amid the coins is my little jade toad, the only thing left that belonged to my mother. Father gave it to me when I was five, as a reminder of the mother I never knew. There are no portraits of her, only this, a thing she carried with her for luck just as I carry it now. I wish fiercely that I had never gotten in the habit of carrying it with me everywhere. I’m not really a sentimental sort of girl, but it’s the one thing (aside from books and the displays I’ve made at the Museum) that I hold dear.

Its carnelian eyes wink at me and I want to snatch it away as the boy inspects it.

“I wouldn’t take coin from a lady,” he says. “But I’ll have this toad here for my troubles, if it’s all the same to you.” His eyes meet mine. I catch a glint of gold in all that dark. I’m taller than him and I do my best to seem as formidable as possible.

“It isn’t,” I say through gritted teeth. I see the leader and his chain out of the corner of my eye, the way some of the other men point their weapons so casually in our direction.

“Good,” the boy says. He plucks the toad from its small nest of coins.

“Syrus!” the leader calls.

The boy grins at me and returns to the Tinkers before I can do more than splutter my protests.

Then, Syrus and his people melt away into the Forest. Charles sits up with Father’s help, clapping a hand to his swelling neck. His tongue is mercifully too thick to talk.

At last, we climb back into the carriage—bereft of all, it seems, but our box and whatever it contains. I shake my head again at what the Tinker leader said. Impossible. Nothing can contain the Waste.

Two resolutions fill my mind as the carriage crawls back into the city.

I will have that toad back.

And I will find out what is in that box.

C
HAPTER
4

A
s the carriage departed, Syrus’s clan gathered round to see his haul. They exclaimed over the coins and his cousin Raine announced proudly that this was dowry enough for her to marry her sweetheart for certain.

Syrus laughed. “Who said I was giving any of it to you?”

Raine slapped him on the head and stomped away, pouting.

Rubbing his crown, Syrus gave everything over to Granny Reed, as she would distribute the wealth among her clan as she saw fit. Granny touched the toad with her forefinger and frowned at her grandson. “You shouldn’t have taken that, boy,” she said.

“Why not?” he asked. “Bring a good price in the hexshops, I’ll bet.”

“We don’t deal in this sort of thing no more. Best get rid of it quick,” she said. “It’ll bring bad trouble, if you don’t.”

“What do you mean,
Nainai
?” Syrus asked.

Granny smiled at him, her wooden dentures almost invisible in the dark. “You get to Gather tonight, for starters,” she said. Gathering Night came before Market Day. Some unlucky soul was chosen to gather whatever he could find of value in the Forest to take to the City markets the next day.

Syrus’s shoulders slumped, but he knew better than to complain out loud. He’d really hoped to be rewarded for bringing in such loot—getting to sleep a full night closest to the potbelly stove, for instance. Instead, he’d now be up until the wee hours, digging in the cold forest loam for night-blooming phosphors, midnight morels, whatever he could find that the Tinkers could sell.

While it was true that he was one of the best Gatherers, it certainly wasn’t something he enjoyed doing in the cold.

Granny rounded up everyone else, including the still-pouting Raine. They said quiet farewells before they disappeared back down the road toward the trainyard. Tonight, he knew there’d be roasted apples and dancing. Granny would probably tell one of her clan stories by the light of the stove as everyone bedded down for sleep. A story of the World Before or how the Manticore stole the Emperor’s Heart or . . . maybe even the story of how Granny had found him floating in the river, which Syrus thought was the best story of all. He kicked at a white pebble and sent it skittering off into the dark.

Then he sighed. Best get started. Perhaps if he hurried he could get back early.

He sang a soft calling song in the old language and soon Truffler appeared. The hob’s nose was the real reason Syrus was such a good Gatherer. He could sniff out the best mushrooms from miles away.

Syrus trudged along, complaining to himself about the dew-dampness, the necessity of wandering mostly in the dark, the possible things that might eat him without anyone knowing what had happened to him. “When you’re wailing ’cause I’m nowhere to be found,” he grumbled to his absent Granny, “then you’ll change your tune about sending me off at night.”

Truffler turned and made a hissing noise to silence him. The hairy little hob alternately walked or crawled over the ground, his giant nostrils flaring like a bellows. Sometimes he resembled a dog or pig, but was never clearly one thing or the other. Often, though, the outline of his big nose was all Syrus could see of him in the dark.