Thieftaker (22 page)

She ran a bar that catered to the few sorcerers who openly roamed the streets of Boston, and she found matches for men and women who despaired of ever finding love on their own. Janna made no secret of the fact that she was a conjurer, and those who paid for her services assumed that she used her powers to find matches for them. Ethan had once asked her if this was in fact true. Janna refused to answer.

She came from one of the islands of the Caribbean—Ethan didn’t know which one. She was orphaned at sea as a small girl and rescued by a ship that had sailed from Newport. Janna was African, and Ethan didn’t know how she managed to avoid being taken as a slave. He had heard rumors of a romance, years before, between Janna and a wealthy Newport shipbuilder who couldn’t marry her because of her race, but did provide for her so as to secure her freedom for the rest of her life. He didn’t know how much of this was true, but she had managed to remain free and eventually, after finding her way to Boston, to buy herself the tavern, such as it was. At some point, having no memory of her family name, she took the name Windcatcher. She claimed there was no significance to it; she just liked the way it sounded.

She sold the usual drinks in her tavern, as well as stews, meat, and bread—nothing compared with Kannice’s fare, but passable. But she also sold herbs and oils, rare stones and talismans, ancient texts about spellmaking and blades, incense, and spirits used in rituals. In short, anything that sorcerers might find useful for conjuring. Ethan usually fueled his spells with blood or leaves found here in the city. But on those few occasions when he needed something different, he always went to Janna.

Ethan followed Orange Street out past the pastures and fields, and overgrown paddocks that seemed to have been neglected for years. None of the houses out this way looked particularly sturdy, though few looked as fragile as Janna’s. Gulls sat atop the town gate in the distance, ghostly forms in the silvery mist, their cries echoing off stone and wood.

Janna’s tavern, the Fat Spider, stood at the corner of Orange and Castle Streets, within sight of Amory’s Stillhouse, and not far from where Anna had taken him the night before. The building always appeared to Ethan to be one strong gust of wind away from toppling over. It leaned heavily to one side and its roof sagged dangerously in the middle. The placard on her door read, “T. Windcatcher, Marriage Smith. Love is Magick.” Ethan laughed every time he saw it. Janna might as well have climbed on to the roof of her tavern and screamed “I’m a conjurer!” as loud as she could.

The Spider was warm within, and it smelled of woodsmoke and roasted fowl, clove and cinnamon. The stub of a single candle burned on the bar, but the place was empty. Ethan walked to the middle of the room and called Janna’s name. After a moment, he heard the scrape of a chair on the floor overhead, and slow footsteps leading to the top of the stairway.

“Who that?” a woman’s voice called.

“It’s Ethan Kaille, Janna.”

The woman muttered something that he couldn’t hear, though he could tell from her voice that she wasn’t happy he had come. Still, she descended the stairs, which creaked loudly with each step she took.

She wore a simple linen dress of ivory and a brown woolen shawl wrapped around her bony shoulders. Her skin was the color of dark rum; her hair, which she wore so short that it barely concealed her scalp, was as white as the moon on a winter night. She had a thin, wrinkled face, and dark eyes that were as alert and fierce as a hawk’s. As always, she carried a cup of Madeira wine; Ethan had never seen her without one.

“Kaille,” she said, scowling at the sight of him. “Thought you was a customer.”

“Sorry, Janna.”

Her expression didn’t change but she waved him toward the bar. “Well, you here, so you might as well sit an’ drink with me.”

She poured him a cup of Madeira, and then he followed her to the hearth, where a fire burned. They sat at a small table and Ethan sipped his wine, which Janna had watered quite a bit. He shouldn’t have been surprised. Given how much she drank, undiluted Madeira would have left her broke and soused.

“You come for a healin’ tonic?” she asked, sitting forward in her chair and eyeing his battered face.

Ethan chuckled, though once more he wished that he could have healed himself without raising the suspicions of Henry, Derne, and others. “No.”

“Who did that t’ you?”

“Who do you think?”

Her expression turned stony. “Sephira Pryce.”

Janna didn’t really like anybody. She tolerated Ethan because he was a conjurer, and she could be charming at times when her work demanded it. But she treated strangers with contempt, and wasn’t much nicer to people she knew. Aside from a scrawny black dog that occasionally came by her place, she had no friends that Ethan knew of. Still, there was no one in the world she hated more than Sephira Pryce. That she and Ethan shared this probably explained why she helped him with his work, despite knowing there was little profit in it for her.

Ethan wasn’t sure why she hated the Empress of the South End so much. He had no reason to think that the two had ever met, much less had dealings. A year or two before, Janna mentioned that Sephira had once cost her a substantial amount of money. Ethan never learned exactly what happened, but he knew that if he managed to convince Janna that she could hurt Pryce by helping him, she would tell him whatever he wanted to know, regardless of whether he paid her.

“She’s a wicked woman,” Janna said, shaking her head and sounding so bitter one might have thought that Sephira had beaten her.

“You’ll get no argument from me.”

Janna shook her head a second time and leaned back in her chair. “So, no healin’ tonic. You finally gonna let me fix you a love tonic for that woman o’ yours?”

Ethan shook his head, knowing that she meant Elli. “No, thank you.”

“Wouldn’ take much. Where there’s a past, th’ love is easier t’ coax back.”

“What I need is information, Janna.”

She dismissed him with a wave of her thin hand. “You always need information. There’s no coin in that for me.”

Usually this was where Ethan pulled out a few shillings and put them on Janna’s table. Already she was casting furtive looks his way. Ethan took another sip of wine and returned her stare.

“You’re right,” he said. “This time there’s no money. Maybe there will be if you’re able to help me, but I haven’t got any right now. Sephira took every coin I had.”

“Why she so mad at you all o’ sudden?”

“A rich man hired me, and she wanted the job for herself.”

Janna laughed delightedly, exposing sharp yellow teeth. “Good for you, Kaille!” She laughed some more, shaking her head slowly.

“I need your help, Janna. There’s a conjurer in the lanes who’s killed twice now: a young woman a few nights ago, and a little boy last fall.”

Her expression grew serious. “I heard talk o’ this.”

“What did you hear?”

“Not much. I heard o’ th’ killin’s. That’s all.”

“His latest victim was Jennifer Berson.”

“Her father’s th’ rich man?”

Ethan nodded, reached into his coat pocket, and pulled out the small bundle containing Jennifer’s brooch. “This is what was taken from her.”

Janna took the bundle and unwrapped it, whistling at the gem. “Nice,” she said. “Cut yourself, an’ put some blood on it.”

Ethan hesitated.

“I’m too old t’ be cuttin’ myself for your jobs.”

He did as she instructed.

Janna muttered something under her breath and an instant later, there was a small flash of blue light round the brooch. But that was all. The glow vanished as quickly as it had come. Ethan thought he glimpsed a pale blue figure standing off to the side, but by the time he turned to look, it had vanished. Janna stared at the gem for a moment, and then frowned.

“Nothin’,” she said, handing the brooch back to him. “You have somethin’ else?”

“No. But I saw her body. There wasn’t a mark on her. I knew that a conjuring had killed her, and so I tried a revealing spell.”

“And?”

He frowned. “And I didn’t learn anything. I thought the glow would pool at the spot where the spell struck her, and I thought it would reveal the color of the conjurer’s power, but…” He shook his head. “I suppose my spell didn’t work, or whoever killed her managed to conceal his conjuring.”

Janna sat forward once more. “Why? What did you see?”

“Her entire body glowed. The effect of the conjuring didn’t seem to be concentrated anywhere.”

Her dark eyes narrowed. “And what color did you see?”

“Silver, like starlight. There was really no color at all.”

“Damn,” Janna muttered. She sat back again, scratching her forehead.

“What is it, Janna?”

“This speller might o’ concealed th’ color o’ his power, but tha’s all. You saw just what you were supposed t’ see.”

“I don’t understand.”

“That ’cause you’re not thinkin’, Kaille. You’re assumin’ that she was killed by a spell.” Janna shook her head. “She wasn’t. She was killed
for
a spell.”

It made so much sense that Ethan’s first reaction was to be furious with himself for not realizing this on his own. His second was to be horrified.

Conjurers generally spoke of three kinds of casting. Elemental spells, the simplest, were fueled by one of the elements—fire, water, earth, even air. Living spells, which were more difficult and more potent, demanded blood or hair, leaves or bark—anything that came from a living creature or plant. All the conjurers Ethan knew relied exclusively on elemental and living spells.

But there was a third kind of conjuring, though some said it was merely a type of living spell taken to its most dangerous extreme: killing spells. Some called such conjurings sacrifice spells, but it was the same thing. A killing spell had to be fueled by the death of a living creature; any creature, though most powerfully by the death of a human. For a conjurer willing to take a human life there were few limits to what castings could accomplish. A living spell might draw a cup of water from the ground. A death spell could bring rainstorms to an entire countryside. A living spell could be used to murder a man. A killing spell could wipe out hundreds.

The real question, though, as Janna would have been the first to remind him, was not what
could
killing spells do, but what
had
they done in these two instances?

“This conjurer would have t’ be workin’ some mighty spells,” Janna said, breaking a lengthy silence. “Somebody’d notice.”

“You would think. You ever used a killing spell, Janna?”

“Killed a goat once. For a love spell, I think it was. Some wealthy man wanted a girl, an’ she didn’ wan’ him. Took all th’ power I’ve got.”

“Did it work?” Ethan asked.

Janna glared at him. “All my spells work.” After a moment, she gave a small jerk of her head, pointing at him with her chin. “What about you? You ever use a killin’ spell?”

Ethan shook his head. “No, never. I went a long time without conjuring at all—when I was a prisoner—and I’m not as accomplished at casting as I should be. To be honest, the more powerful conjurings scare me.”

“They should. Spellmakin’s nothin’ t’ play at.”

“Have you heard anything? You usually know what’s going on in the lanes, especially if there’s conjuring involved.”

She regarded him sourly. “You still not offering money?”

“I still don’t have any,” he said, chuckling. He quickly grew serious again. “You said it yourself, Janna. This conjurer would have to be casting some pretty potent spells. Dangerous ones, and not just for the people he’s killing. If you know anything, you need to tell me.”

It was like getting a street urchin to admit that he had stolen from a peddler. “It’s not much,” she said after a long time, sounding annoyed that he was making her tell. “Might not be anythin’ at all.”

“Let me be the judge of that.”

“It’s been a while now. This was back in the fall.”

“On Pope’s Day?” Ethan asked.

“Before then,” she said, clearly irritated by the interruption. “It was th’ day those two people got themselves hanged.”

“The Richardsons?”

“Yeah, that’s them. The ones who didn’ take care o’ their little ones.”

For close to a year, since their hanging in October, Ethan hadn’t given a thought to Ann and John Richardson. Now they had come up in conversation twice in two days. Odd. And perhaps important.

Janna pointed toward the southern end of the Fat Spider. “Their hangin’ was right over there,” she went on. “Right by th’ town gate. Big crowd came t’ watch. An’ that day, right in th’ middle o’ the hangin’ I felt a spell. A strong one,” she said, her brow wrinkling. “Stronger even than I can do. I’d bet everything I got that it was another killin’ spell. Nothin’ else feels like that.”

“And the victim?” Ethan asked.

“That’s just it,” Janna said, shaking her head. “They never found one. I didn’ tell anyone, ’cause I don’ need that kind o’ trouble, if you know what I mean. But so far as I know, they never found anyone.”

“Maybe it wasn’t a person.”

“Thought o’ that,” Janna said. “But a spell that strong…” She shrugged.

“So you think he’s killed three times, not two.”

“And tha’ means he’s cast three powerful spells. You find out wha’ those spells did, an’ you’ll find your speller.”

Ethan considered this. There had been times when he’d wondered if Janna wasn’t a bit mad, but there could be no disputing her logic in this instance. She was right; the spells were everything.

He drank a bit more of the watery Madeira, then placed his cup on the table and stood.

“Thank you, Janna,” he said. “Next time I come I’ll make sure to have a few shillings in my pocket.”

“You do that,” she said without a trace of humor.

He started for the door.

“Wait.” Janna stood, walked behind the bar, and stepped into a back room. Ethan peered into the small room, wondering what she wanted with him. When at last she reemerged, she carried a small cloth pouch, which she handed to him.

It was light, and held some sort of leaf, an herb of some kind, with a sharp, unpleasant smell.